The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 4

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Those whom he had lectured withdrew full of resentment. The
imputation which he had thrown on them was unjust. They had a
strong feeling of love and reverence for the land from which they
sprang, and looked with confidence for redress to the supreme
Parliament. Several of them went to London for the purpose of
vindicating themselves and of accusing the Lord Lieutenant. They
were favoured with a long and attentive audience, both by the
Lords and by the Commons, and were requested to put the substance
of what had been said into writing. The humble language of the
petitioners, and their protestations that they had never intended
to violate the Poynings statute, or to dispute the paramount
authority of England, effaced the impression which Sidney's
accusations had made. Both Houses addressed the King on the state
of Ireland. They censured no delinquent by name; but they
expressed an opinion that there had been gross maladministration,
that the public had been plundered, and that Roman Catholics had
been treated with unjustifiable tenderness. William in reply
promised that what was amiss should be corrected. His friend
Sidney was soon recalled, and consoled for the loss of the
viceregal dignity with the lucrative place of Master of the
Ordnance. The government of Ireland was for a time entrusted to
Lords justices, among whom Sir Henry Capel, a zealous Whig, very
little disposed to show indulgence to Papists, had the foremost
place.

The prorogation drew nigh; and still the fate of the Triennial
Bill was uncertain. Some of the ablest ministers thought the bill
a good one; and, even had they thought it a bad one, they would
probably have tried to dissuade their master from rejecting it.
It was impossible, however, to remove from his mind the
impression that a concession on this point would seriously impair
his authority. Not relying on the judgment of his ordinary
advisers, he sent Portland to ask the opinion of Sir William
Temple. Temple had made a retreat for himself at a place called
Moor Park, in the neighbourhood of Farnham. The country round his
dwelling was almost a wilderness. His amusement during some years
had been to create in the waste what those Dutch burgomasters
among whom he had passed some of the best years of his life,
would have considered as a paradise. His hermitage had been
occasionally honoured by the presence of the King, who had from a
boy known and esteemed the author of the Triple Alliance, and who
was well pleased to find, among the heath and furze of the wilds
of Surrey, a spot which seemed to be part of Holland, a straight
canal, a terrace, rows of clipped trees, and rectangular beds of
flowers and potherbs.

Portland now repaired to this secluded abode and consulted the
oracle. Temple was decidedly of opinion that the bill ought to
pass. He was apprehensive that the reasons which led him to form
this opinion might not be fully and correctly reported to the
King by Portland, who was indeed as brave a soldier and as trusty
a friend as ever lived, whose natural abilities were not
inconsiderable, and who, in some departments of business, had
great experience, but who was very imperfectly acquainted with
the history and constitution of England. As the state of Sir
William's health made it impossible for him to go himself to
Kensington, he determined to send his secretary thither. The
secretary was a poor scholar of four or five and twenty, under
whose plain garb and ungainly deportment were concealed some of
the choicest gifts that have ever been bestowed on any of the
children of men; rare powers of observation, brilliant wit,
grotesque invention, humour of the most austere flavour, yet
exquisitely delicious, eloquence singularly pure, manly and
perspicuous. This young man was named Jonathan Swift. He was born
in Ireland, but would have thought himself insulted if he had
been called an Irishman. He was of unmixed English blood, and,
through life, regarded the aboriginal population of the island in
which he first drew breath as an alien and a servile caste. He
had in the late reign kept terms at the University of Dublin, but
had been distinguished there only by his irregularities, and had
with difficulty obtained his degree. At the time of the
Revolution, he had, with many thousands of his fellow colonists,
taken refuge in the mother country from the violence of
Tyrconnel, and had thought himself fortunate in being able to
obtain shelter at Moor Park.405 For that shelter, however, he had
to pay a heavy price. He was thought to be sufficiently
remunerated for his services with twenty pounds a year and his
board. He dined at the second table. Sometimes, indeed, when
better company was not to be had, he was honoured by being
invited to play at cards with his patron; and on such occasions
Sir William was so generous as to give his antagonist a little
silver to begin with.406 The humble student would not have dared
to raise his eyes to a lady of family; but, when he had become a
clergyman, he began, after the fashion of the clergymen of that
generation, to make love to a pretty waitingmaid who was the
chief ornament of the servants' hall, and whose name is
inseparably associated with his in a sad and mysterious history.

Swift many years later confessed some part of what he felt when
he found himself on his way to Court. His spirit had been bowed
down, and might seem to have been broken, by calamities and
humiliations. The language which he was in the habit of holding
to his patron, as far as we can judge from the specimens which
still remain, was that of a lacquey, or rather of a beggar.407 A
sharp word or a cold look of the master sufficed to make the
servant miserable during several days.408 But this tameness was
merely the tameness with which a tiger, caught, caged and
starved, submits to the keeper who brings him food. The humble
menial was at heart the haughtiest, the most aspiring, the most
vindictive, the most despotic of men. And now at length a great,
a boundless prospect was opening before him. To William he was
already slightly known. At Moor Park the King had sometimes, when
his host was confined by gout to an easy chair, been attended by
the secretary about the grounds. His Majesty had condescended to
teach his companion the Dutch way of cutting and eating
asparagus, and had graciously asked whether Mr. Swift would like
to have a captain's commission in a cavalry regiment. But now for
the first time the young man was to stand in the royal presence
as a counsellor. He was admitted into the closet, delivered a
letter from Temple, and explained and enforced the arguments
which that letter contained, concisely, but doubtless with
clearness and ability. There was, he said, no reason to think
that short Parliaments would be more disposed than long
Parliaments to encroach on the just prerogatives of the Crown. In
fact the Parliament which had, in the preceding generation, waged
war against a king, led him captive, sent him to the prison, to
the bar, to the scaffold, was known in our annals as emphatically
the Long Parliament. Never would such disasters have befallen the
monarchy but for the fatal law which secured that assembly from
dissolution.409 There was, it must be owned, a flaw in this
reasoning which a man less shrewd than William might easily
detect. That one restriction of the royal prerogative had been
mischievous did not prove that another restriction would be
salutary. It by no means followed because one sovereign had been
ruined by being unable to get rid of a hostile Parliament that
another sovereign might not be ruined by being forced to part
with a friendly Parliament. To the great mortification of the
ambassador, his arguments failed to shake the King's resolution.
On the fourteenth of March the Commons were summoned to the Upper
House; the title of the Triennial Bill was read; and it was
announced, after the ancient form, that the King and Queen would
take the matter into their consideration. The Parliament was then
prorogued.

Soon after the prorogation William set out for the Continent. It
was necessary that, before his departure, he should make some
important changes. He was resolved not to discard Nottingham, on
whose integrity, a virtue rare among English statesmen, he placed
a well founded reliance. Yet, if Nottingham remained Secretary of
State, it was impossible to employ Russell at sea. Russell,
though much mortified, was induced to accept a lucrative post in
the household; and two naval officers of great note in their
profession, Killegrew and Delaval, were placed at the Board of
Admiralty and entrusted with the command of the Channel Fleet.410
These arrangements caused much murmuring among the Whigs; for
Killegrew and Delaval were certainly Tories, and were by many
suspected of being Jacobites. But other promotions which took place at the same
time proved that the King wished to bear himself evenly between the hostile
factions. Nottingham had, during a year, been the sole Secretary of State. He
was now joined with a colleague in whose
society he must have felt himself very ill at ease, John
Trenchard. Trenchard belonged to the extreme section of the Whig
party. He was a Taunton man, animated by that spirit which had,
during two generations, peculiarly distinguished Taunton. He had,
in the days of Popeburnings and of Protestant flails, been one of
the renowned Green Riband Club; he had been an active member of
several stormy Parliaments; he had brought in the first Exclusion
Bill; he had been deeply concerned in the plots formed by the
chiefs of the opposition; he had fled to the Continent; he had
been long an exile; and he had been excepted by name from the
general pardon of 1686. Though his life had been passed in
turmoil, his temper was naturally calm; but he was closely
connected with a set of men whose passions were far fiercer than
his own. He had married the sister of Hugh Speke, one of the
falsest and most malignant of the libellers who brought disgrace
on the cause of constitutional freedom. Aaron Smith, the
solicitor of the Treasury, a man in whom the fanatic and the
pettifogger were strangely united, possessed too much influence
over the new Secretary, with whom he had, ten years before,
discussed plans of rebellion at the Rose. Why Trenchard was
selected in preference to many men of higher rank and greater
ability for a post of the first dignity and importance, it is
difficult to say. It seems however that, though he bore the title
and drew the salary of Secretary of State, he was not trusted
with any of the graver secrets of State, and that he was little
more than a superintendent of police, charged to look after the
printers of unlicensed books, the pastors of nonjuring
congregations, and the haunters of treason taverns.411

Another Whig of far higher character was called at the same time
to a far higher place in the administration. The Great Seal had
now been four years in commission. Since Maynard's retirement,
the constitution of the Court of Chancery had commanded little
respect. Trevor, who was the First Commissioner, wanted neither
parts nor learning; but his integrity was with good reason
suspected; and the duties which, as Speaker of the House of
Commons, he had to perform during four or five months in the
busiest part of every year, made it impossible for him to be an
efficient judge in equity. Every suitor complained that he had to
wait a most unreasonable time for a judgment, and that, when at
length a judgment had been pronounced, it was very likely to be
reversed on appeal. Meanwhile there was no efficient minister of
justice, no great functionary to whom it especially belonged to
advise the King touching the appointment of judges, of Counsel
for the Crown, of Justices of the Peace.412 It was known that
William was sensible of the inconvenience of this state of
things; and, during several months, there had been flying rumours
that a Lord Keeper or a Lord Chancellor would soon be
appointed.413 The name most frequently mentioned was that of
Nottingham. But the same reasons which had prevented him from
accepting the Great Seal in 1689 had, since that year, rather
gained than lost strength. William at length fixed his choice on
Somers.

Somers was only in his forty-second year; and five years had not
elapsed since, on the great day of the trial of the Bishops, his
powers had first been made known to the world. From that time his
fame had been steadily and rapidly rising. Neither in forensic
nor in parliamentary eloquence had he any superior. The
consistency of his public conduct had gained for him the entire
confidence of the Whigs; and the urbanity of his manners had
conciliated the Tories. It was not without great reluctance that
he consented to quit an assembly over which he exercised an
immense influence for an assembly where it would be necessary for
him to sit in silence. He had been but a short time in great
practice. His savings were small. Not having the means of
supporting a hereditary title, he must, if he accepted the high
dignity which was offered to him, preside during some years in
the Upper House without taking part in the debates. The opinion
of others, however, was that he would be more useful as head of
the law than as head of the Whig party in the Commons. He was
sent for to Kensington, and called into the Council Chamber.
Caermarthen spoke in the name of the King. "Sir John," he said,
"it is necessary for the public service that you should take this
charge upon you; and I have it in command from His Majesty to say
that he can admit of no excuse." Somers submitted. The seal was
delivered to him, with a patent which entitled him to a pension
of two thousand a year from the day on which he should quit his
office; and he was immediately sworn in a Privy Councillor and
Lord Keeper.414

The Gazette which announced these changes in the administration,
announced also the King's departure. He set out for Holland on
the twenty-fourth of March.

He left orders that the Estates of Scotland should, after a
recess of more than two years and a half, be again called
together. Hamilton, who had lived many months in retirement, had,
since the fall of Melville, been reconciled to the Court, and now
consented to quit his retreat, and to occupy Holyrood House as
Lord High Commissioner. It was necessary that one of the
Secretaries of State for Scotland should be in attendance on the
King. The Master of Stair had therefore gone to the Continent.
His colleague, Johnstone, was chief manager for the Crown at
Edinburgh, and was charged to correspond regularly with
Carstairs, who never quitted William.415

It might naturally have been expected that the session would be
turbulent. The Parliament was that very Parliament which had in
1689 passed, by overwhelming majorities, all the most violent
resolutions which Montgomery and his club could frame, which had
refused supplies, which had proscribed the ministers of the
Crown, which had closed the Courts of justice, which had seemed
bent on turning Scotland into an oligarchical republic. In 1690
the Estates had been in a better temper. Yet, even in 1690, they
had, when the ecclesiastical polity of the realm was under
consideration, paid little deference to what was well known to be
the royal wish. They had abolished patronage; they had sanctioned
the rabbling of the episcopal clergy; they had refused to pass a
Toleration Act. It seemed likely that they would still be found
unmanageable when questions touching religion came before them;
and such questions it was unfortunately necessary to bring
forward. William had, during the recess, attempted to persuade
the General Assembly of the Church to receive into communion such
of the old curates as should subscribe the Confession of Faith
and should submit to the government of Synods. But the attempt
had failed; and the Assembly had consequently been dissolved by
the Lord Commissioner. Unhappily, the Act which established the
Presbyterian polity had not defined the extent of the power which
was to be exercised by the Sovereign over the Spiritual Courts.
No sooner therefore had the dissolution been announced than the
Moderator requested permission to speak. He was told that he was
now merely a private person. As a private person he requested a
hearing, and protested, in the name of his brethren, against the
royal mandate. The right, he said, of the office bearers of the
Church to meet and deliberate touching her interests was derived
from her Divine Head, and was not dependent on the pleasure of
the temporal magistrate. His brethren stood up, and by an
approving murmur signified their concurrence in what their
President had said. Before they retired they fixed a day for
their next meeting.416 It was indeed a very distant day; and when
it came neither minister nor elder attended;for even the boldest
members shrank from a complete rupture with the civil power. But,
though there was not open war between the Church and the
Government, they were estranged from each other, jealous of each
other, and afraid of each other. No progress had been made
towards a reconciliation when the Estates met; and which side the
Estates would take might well be doubted.

But the proceedings of this strange Parliament, in almost every
one of its sessions, falsified all the predictions of
politicians. It had once been the most unmanageable of senates.
It was now the most obsequious. Yet the old men had again met in
the old hall. There were all the most noisy agitators of the
club, with the exception of Montgomery, who was dying of want and
of a broken heart in a garret far from his native land. There was
the canting Ross and the perfidious Annandale. There was Sir
Patrick Hume, lately created a peer, and henceforth to be called
Lord Polwarth, but still as eloquent as when his interminable
declamations and dissertations ruined the expedition of Argyle.
But the whole spirit of the assembly had undergone a change. The
members listened with profound respect to the royal letter, and
returned an answer in reverential and affectionate language. An
extraordinary aid of a hundred and fourteen thousand pounds
sterling was granted to the Crown. Severe laws were enacted
against the Jacobites. The legislation on ecclesiastical matters
was as Erastian as William himself could have desired. An Act was
passed requiring all ministers of the Established Church to swear
fealty to their Majesties, and directing the General Assembly to
receive into communion those Episcopalian ministers, not yet
deprived, who should declare that they conformed to the
Presbyterian doctrine and discipline.417 Nay, the Estates carried
adulation so far as to make it their humble request to the King
that he would be pleased to confer a Scotch peerage on his
favourite Portland. This was indeed their chief petition. They
did not ask for redress of a single grievance. They contented
themselves with hinting in general terms that there were abuses
which required correction, and with referring the King for fuller
information to his own Ministers, the Lord High Commissioner and
the Secretary of State.418

There was one subject on which it may seem strange that even the
most servile of Scottish Parliaments should have kept silence.
More than a year had elapsed since the massacre of Glencoe; and
it might have been expected that the whole assembly, peers,
commissioners of shires, commissioners of burghs, would with one
voice have demanded a strict investigation into that great crime.
It is certain, however, that no motion for investigation was
made. The state of the Gaelic clans was indeed taken into
consideration. A law was passed for the more effectual
suppressing of depredations and outrages beyond the Highland
line; and in that law was inserted a special proviso reserving to
Mac Callum More his hereditary jurisdiction. But it does not
appear, either from the public records of the proceedings of the
Estates, or from those private letters in which Johnstone
regularly gave Carstairs an account of what had passed, that any
speaker made any allusion to the fate of Mac Ian and his
kinsmen.419 The only explanation of this extraordinary silence
seems to be that the public men who were assembled in the capital
of Scotland knew little and cared little about the fate of a
thieving tribe of Celts. The injured clan, bowed down by fear of
the allpowerful Campbells, and little accustomed to resort to the
constituted authorities of the kingdom for protection or redress,
presented no petition to the Estates. The story of the butchery
had been told at coffeehouses, but had been told in different
ways. Very recently, one or two books, in which the facts were
but too truly related, had come forth from the secret presses of
London. But those books were not publicly exposed to sale. They
bore the name of no responsible author. The Jacobite writers
were, as a class, savagely malignant and utterly regardless of
truth. Since the Macdonalds did not complain, a prudent man might
naturally be unwilling to incur the displeasure of the King, of
the ministers, and of the most powerful family in Scotland, by
bringing forward an accusation grounded on nothing but reports
wandering from mouth to mouth, or pamphlets which no licenser had
approved, to which no author had put his name, and which no
bookseller ventured to place in his shop-window. But whether this
be or be not the true solution, it is certain that the Estates
separated quietly after a session of two months, during which, as
far as can now be discovered, the name of Glencoe was not once
uttered in the Parliament House.

CHAPTER XX

State of the Court of Saint Germains--Feeling of the Jacobites;
Compounders and Noncompounders--Change of Ministry at Saint
Germains; Middleton--New Declaration put forth by James--Effect
of the new Declaration--French Preparations for the Campaign;
Institution of the Order of Saint Lewis--Middleton's Account of
Versailles--William's Preparations for the Campaign--Lewis takes
the Field--Lewis returns to Versailles--Manoeuvres of Luxemburg--
Battle of Landen--Miscarriage of the Smyrna Fleet--Excitement in
London--Jacobite Libels; William Anderton--Writings and Artifices
of the Jacobites--Conduct of Caermarthen--Now Charter granted to
the East India Company--Return of William to England; Military
Successes of France--Distress of France--A Ministry necessary to
Parliamentary Government--The First Ministry gradually formed--
Sunderland--Sunderland advises the King to give the Preference to
the Whigs--Reasons for preferring the Whigs--Chiefs of the Whig
Party; Russell--Somers--Montague--Wharton--Chiefs of the Tory
Party; Harley--Foley--Howe--Meeting of Parliament--Debates about
the Naval Miscarriages--Russell First Lord of the Admiralty;
Retirement of Nottingham--Shrewsbury refuses Office--Debates
about the Trade with India--Bill for the Regulation of Trials in
Cases of Treason--Triennial Bill--Place Bill--Bill for the
Naturalisation of Foreign Protestants--Supply--Ways and Means;
Lottery Loan--The Bank of England--Prorogation of Parliament;
Ministerial Arrangements; Shrewsbury Secretary of State--New
Titles bestowed--French Plan of War; English Plan of War--
Expedition against Brest--Naval Operations in the Mediterranean--
War by Land--Complaints of Trenchard's Administration--The
Lancashire Prosecutions--Meeting of the Parliament; Death of
Tillotson--Tenison Archbishop of Canterbury; Debates on the
Lancashire Prosecutions--Place Bill--Bill for the Regulation of
Trials in Cases of Treason; the Triennial Bill passed--Death of
Mary--Funeral of Mary--Greenwich Hospital founded

IT is now time to relate the events which, since the battle of La
Hogue, had taken place at Saint Germains.

James, after seeing the fleet which was to have convoyed him back
to his kingdom burned down to the water edge, had returned in no
good humour to his abode near Paris. Misfortune generally made
him devout after his own fashion; and he now starved himself and
flogged himself till his spiritual guides were forced to
interfere.420

It is difficult to conceive a duller place than Saint Germains was
when he held his Court there; and yet there was scarcely in all
Europe a residence more enviably situated than that which the
generous Lewis had assigned to his suppliants. The woods were
magnificent, the air clear and salubrious, the prospects
extensive and cheerful. No charm of rural life was wanting; and
the towers of the most superb city of the Continent were visible
in the distance. The royal apartments were richly adorned with
tapestry and marquetry, vases of silver and mirrors in gilded
frames. A pension of more than forty thousand pounds sterling was
annually paid to James from the French Treasury. He had a guard
of honour composed of some of the finest soldiers in Europe. If
he wished to amuse himself with field sports, he had at his
command an establishment far more sumptuous than that which had
belonged to him when he was at the head of a great kingdom, an
army of huntsmen and fowlers, a vast arsenal of guns, spears,
buglehorns and tents, miles of network, staghounds, foxhounds,
harriers, packs for the boar and packs for the wolf, gerfalcons
for the heron and haggards for the wild duck. His presence
chamber and his antechamber were in outward show as splendid as
when he was at Whitehall. He was still surrounded by blue ribands
and white staves. But over the mansion and the domain brooded a
constant gloom, the effect, partly of bitter regrets and of
deferred hopes, but chiefly of the abject superstition which had
taken complete possession of his own mind, and which was affected
by almost all those who aspired to his favour. His palace wore
the aspect of a monastery. There were three places of worship
within the spacious pile. Thirty or forty ecclesiastics were
lodged in the building; and their apartments were eyed with envy
by noblemen and gentlemen who had followed the fortunes of their
Sovereign, and who thought it hard that, when there was so much
room under his roof, they should be forced to sleep in the
garrets of the neighbouring town. Among the murmurers was the
brilliant Anthony Hamilton. He has left us a sketch of the life
of Saint Germains, a slight sketch indeed, but not unworthy of
the artist to whom we owe the most highly finished and vividly
coloured picture of the English Court in the days when the
English Court was gayest. He complains that existence was one
round of religious exercises; that, in order to live in peace, it
was necessary to pass half the day in devotion or in the outward
show of devotion; that, if he tried to dissipate his melancholy
by breathing the fresh air of that noble terrace which looks down
on the valley of the Seine, he was driven away by the clamour of
a Jesuit who had got hold of some unfortunate Protestant
royalists from England, and was proving to them that no heretic
could go to heaven. In general, Hamilton said, men suffering
under a common calamity have a strong fellow feeling and are
disposed to render good offices to each other. But it was not so
at Saint Germains. There all was discord, jealousy, bitterness of
spirit. Malignity was concealed under the show of friendship and
of piety. All the saints of the royal household were praying for
each other and backbiting each other from morning, to night. Here
and there in the throng of hypocrites might be remarked a man too
highspirited to dissemble. But such a man, however advantageously
he might have made himself known elsewhere, was certain to be
treated with disdain by the inmates of that sullen abode.421