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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It is a remarkable proof of his selfknowledge that, from the
moment at which he began to distinguish himself in public life,
he ceased to be a versifier. It does not appear that, after he
became a Lord of the Treasury, he ever wrote a couplet, with the
exception of a few well turned lines inscribed on a set of
toasting glasses which were sacred to the most renowned Whig
beauties of his time. He wisely determined to derive from the
poetry of others a glory which he never would have derived from
his own. As a patron of genius and learning he ranks with his two
illustrious friends, Dorset and Somers. His munificence fully
equalled theirs; and, though he was inferior to them in delicacy
of taste, he succeeded in associating his name inseparably with
some names which will last as long as our language.

Yet it must be acknowledged that Montague, with admirable parts
and with many claims on the gratitude of his country, had great
faults, and unhappily faults not of the noblest kind. His head
was not strong enough to bear without giddiness the speed of his
ascent and the height of his position. He became offensively
arrogant and vain. He was too often cold to his old friends, and
ostentatious in displaying his new riches. Above all, he was
insatiably greedy of praise, and liked it best when it was of the
coarsest and rankest quality. But, in 1693, these faults were
less offensive than they became a few years later.

With Russell, Somers and Montague, was closely connected, during
a quarter of a century a fourth Whig, who in character bore
little resemblance to any of them. This was Thomas Wharton,
eldest son of Philip Lord Wharton. Thomas Wharton has been
repeatedly mentioned in the course of this narrative. But it is
now time to describe him more fully. He was in his forty-seventh
year, but was still a young man in constitution, in appearance
and in manners. Those who hated him most heartily,--and no man
was hated more heartily,--admitted that his natural parts were
excellent, and that he was equally qualified for debate and for
action. The history of his mind deserves notice; for it was the
history of many thousands of minds. His rank and abilities made
him so conspicuous that in him we are able to trace distinctly
the origin and progress of a moral taint which was epidemic among
his contemporaries.

He was born in the days of the Covenant, and was the heir of a
covenanted house. His father was renowned as a distributor of
Calvinistic tracts, and a patron of Calvinistic divines. The
boy's first years were past amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank
hair, upturned eyes, nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours
long. Plays and poems, hunting and dancing, were proscribed by
the austere discipline of his saintly family. The fruits of this
education became visible, when, from the sullen mansion of
Puritan parents, the hotblooded, quickwitted young patrician
emerged into the gay and voluptuous London of the Restoration.
The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the dissoluteness of
the emancipated precisian. He early acquired and retained to the
last the reputation of being the greatest rake in England. Of
wine indeed he never became the slave; and he used it chiefly for
the purpose of making himself the master of his associates. But
to the end of his long life the wives and daughters of his
nearest friends were not safe from his licentious plots. The
ribaldry of his conversation moved astonishment even in that age.
To the religion of his country he offered, in the mere wantonness
of impiety, insults too foul to be described. His mendacity and
his effrontery passed into proverbs. Of all the liars of his time
he was the most deliberate, the most inventive and the most
circumstantial. What shame meant he did not seem to understand.
No reproaches, even when pointed and barbed with the sharpest
wit, appeared to give him pain. Great satirists, animated by a
deadly personal aversion, exhausted all their strength in attacks
upon him. They assailed him with keen invective; they assailed
him with still keener irony; but they found that neither
invective nor irony could move him to any thing but an unforced
smile and a goodhumoured curse; and they at length threw down the
lash, acknowledging that it was impossible to make him feel.
That, with such vices, he should have played a great part in
life, should have carried numerous elections against the most
formidable opposition by his personal popularity, should have had
a large following in Parliament, should have risen to the highest
offices of the State, seems extraordinary. But he lived in times
when faction was almost a madness; and he possessed in an eminent
degree the qualities of the leader of a faction. There was a
single tie which he respected. The falsest of mankind in all
relations but one, he was the truest of Whigs. The religious
tenets of his family he had early renounced with contempt; but to
the politics of his family he stedfastly adhered through all the
temptations and dangers of half a century. In small things and in
great his devotion to his party constantly appeared. He had the
finest stud in England; and his delight was to win plates from
Tories. Sometimes when, in a distant county, it was fully
expected that the horse of a High Church squire would be first on
the course, down came, on the very eve of the race, Wharton's
Careless, who had ceased to run at Newmarket merely for want of
competitors, or Wharton's Gelding, for whom Lewis the Fourteenth
had in vain offered a thousand pistoles. A man whose mere sport
was of this description was not likely to be easily beaten in any
serious contest. Such a master of the whole art of electioneering
England had never seen. Buckinghamshire was his own especial
province; and there he ruled without a rival. But he extended his
care over the Whig interest in Yorkshire, Cumberland,
Westmoreland, Wiltshire. Sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty,
members of Parliament were named by him. As a canvasser he was
irresistible. He never forgot a face that he had once seen. Nay,
in the towns in which he wished to establish an interest, he
remembered, not only the voters, but their families. His
opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the
affability of his deportment, and owned, that it was impossible
to contend against a great man who called the shoemaker by his
Christian name, who was sure that the butcher's daughter must be
growing a fine girl, and who was anxious to know whether the
blacksmith's youngest boy was breeched. By such arts as these he
made himself so popular that his journeys to the Buckinghamshire
Quarter Sessions resembled royal progresses. The bells of every
parish through which he passed were rung, and flowers were
strewed along the road. It was commonly believed that, in the
course of his life, he expended on his parliamentary interest not
less than eighty thousand pounds, a sum which, when compared with
the value of estates, must be considered as equivalent to more
than three hundred thousand pounds in our time.

But the chief service which Wharton rendered to the Whig party
was that of bringing in recruits from the young aristocracy. He
was quite as dexterous a canvasser among the embroidered coats at
the Saint James's Coffeehouse as among the leathern aprons at
Wycombe and Aylesbury. He had his eye on every boy of quality who
came of age; and it was not easy for such a boy to resist the
arts of a noble, eloquent and wealthy flatterer, who united
juvenile vivacity to profound art and long experience of the gay
world. It mattered not what the novice preferred, gallantry or
field sports, the dicebox or the bottle. Wharton soon found out
the master passion, offered sympathy, advice and assistance, and,
while seeming to be only the minister of his disciple's
pleasures, made sure of his disciple's vote.

The party to whose interests Wharton, with such spirit and
constancy, devoted his time, his fortune, his talents, his very
vices, judged him, as was natural, far too leniently. He was
widely known by the very undeserved appellation of Honest Tom.
Some pious men, Burnet, for example, and Addison, averted their
eyes from the scandal which he gave, and spoke of him, not indeed
with esteem, yet with goodwill. A most ingenious and accomplished
Whig, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the
Characteristics, described Wharton as the most mysterious of
human beings, as a strange compound of best and worst, of private
depravity and public virtue, and owned himself unable to
understand how a man utterly without principle in every thing but
politics should in politics be as true as steel. But that which,
in the judgment of one faction, more than half redeemed all
Wharton's faults, seemed to the other faction to aggravate them
all. The opinion which the Tories entertained of him is expressed
in a single line written after his death by the ablest man of
that party; "He was the most universal villain that ever I
knew."480 Wharton's political adversaries thirsted for his blood,
and repeatedly tried to shed it. Had he not been a man of
imperturbable temper, dauntless courage and consummate skill in
fence, his life would have been a short one. But neither anger
nor danger ever deprived him of his presence of mind; he was an
incomparable swordsman; and he had a peculiar way of disarming
opponents which moved the envy of all the duellists of his time.
His friends said that he had never given a challenge, that he had
never refused one, that he had never taken a life, and yet that
he had never fought without having his antagonist's life at his
mercy.481

The four men who have been described resembled each other so
little that it may be thought strange that they should ever have
been able to act in concert. They did, however, act in the
closest concert during many years. They more than once rose and
more than once fell together. But their union lasted till it was
dissolved by death. Little as some of them may have deserved
esteem, none of them can be accused of having been false to his
brethren of the Junto.

While the great body of the Whigs was, under these able chiefs,
arraying itself in order resembling that of a regular army, the
Tories were in a state of an ill drilled and ill officered
militia. They were numerous; and they were zealous; but they can
hardly be said to have had, at this time, any chief in the House
of Commons. The name of Seymour had once been great among them,
and had not quite lost its influence. But, since he had been at
the Board of Treasury, he had disgusted them by vehemently
defending all that he had himself, when out of place, vehemently
attacked. They had once looked up to the Speaker, Trevor; but his
greediness, impudence and venality were now so notorious that all
respectable gentlemen, of all shades of opinion, were ashamed to
see him in the chair. Of the old Tory members Sir Christopher
Musgrave alone had much weight. Indeed the real leaders of the
party were two or three men bred in principles diametrically
opposed to Toryism, men who had carried Whiggism to the verge of
republicanism, and who had been considered not merely as Low
Churchmen, but as more than half Presbyterians. Of these men the
most eminent were two great Herefordshire squires, Robert Harley
and Paul Foley.

The space which Robert Harley fills in the history of three
reigns, his elevation, his fall, the influence which, at a great
crisis, he exercised on the politics of all Europe, the close
intimacy in which he lived with some of the greatest wits and
poets of his time, and the frequent recurrence of his name in the
works of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Prior, must always make him
an object of interest. Yet the man himself was of all men the
least interesting. There is indeed a whimsical contrast between
the very ordinary qualities of his mind and the very
extraordinary vicissitudes of his fortune.

He was the heir of a Puritan family. His father, Sir Edward
Harley, had been conspicuous among the patriots of the Long
parliament, had commanded a regiment under Essex, had, after the
Restoration, been an active opponent of the Court, had supported
the Exclusion Bill, had harboured dissenting preachers, had
frequented meetinghouses, and had made himself so obnoxious to
the ruling powers that at the time of the Western Insurrection,
he had been placed under arrest, and his house had been searched
for arms. When the Dutch army was marching from Torbay towards
London, he and his eldest son Robert declared for the Prince of
Orange and a free Parliament, raised a large body of horse, took
possession of Worcester, and evinced their zeal against Popery by
publicly breaking to pieces, in the High Street of that city, a
piece of sculpture which to rigid precisians seemed idolatrous.
Soon after the Convention became a Parliament, Robert Harley was
sent up to Westminster as member for a Cornish borough. His
conduct was such as might have been expected from his birth and
education. He was a Whig, and indeed an intolerant and vindictive
Whig. Nothing would satisfy him but a general proscription of the
Tories. His name appears in the list of those members who voted
for the Sacheverell clause; and, at the general election which
took place in the spring of 1690, the party which he had
persecuted made great exertions to keep him out of the House of
Commons. A cry was raised that the Harleys were mortal enemies of
the Church; and this cry produced so much effect that it was with
difficulty that any of them could obtain a seat. Such was the
commencement of the public life of a man whose name, a quarter of
a century later, was inseparably coupled with the High Church in
the acclamations of Jacobite mobs.482

Soon, however, it began to be observed that in every division
Harley was in the company of those gentlemen who held his
political opinions in abhorrence; nor was this strange; for he
affected the character of a Whig of the old pattern; and before
the Revolution it had always been supposed that a Whig was a
person who watched with jealousy every exertion of the
prerogative, who was slow to loose the strings of the public
purse, and who was extreme to mark the faults of the ministers of
the Crown. Such a Whig Harley still professed to be. He did not
admit that the recent change of dynasty had made any change in
the duties of a representative of the people. The new government
ought to be observed as suspiciously, checked as severely, and
supplied as sparingly as the old one. Acting on these principles
he necessarily found himself acting with men whose principles
were diametrically opposed to his. He liked to thwart the King;
they liked to thwart the usurper; the consequence was that,
whenever there was an opportunity of thwarting William, the
Roundhead stayed in the House or went into the lobby in company
with the whole crowd of Cavaliers.

Soon Harley acquired the authority of a leader among those with
whom, notwithstanding wide differences of opinion, he ordinarily
voted. His influence in Parliament was indeed altogether out of
proportion to his abilities. His intellect was both small and
slow. He was unable to take a large view of any subject. He never
acquired the art of expressing himself in public with fluency and
perspicuity. To the end of his life he remained a tedious,
hesitating and confused speaker.483

He had none of the external graces of an orator. His countenance
was heavy, his figure mean and somewhat deformed, and his
gestures uncouth. Yet he was heard with respect. For, such as his
mind was, it had been assiduously cultivated. His youth had been
studious; and to the last he continued to love books and the
society of men of genius and learning. Indeed he aspired to the
character of a wit and a poet, and occasionally employed hours
which should have been very differently spent in composing verses
more execrable than the bellman's.484 His time however was not
always so absurdly wasted. He had that sort of industry and that
sort of exactness which would have made him a respectable
antiquary or King at Arms. His taste led him to plod among old
records; and in that age it was only by plodding among old
records that any man could obtain an accurate and extensive
knowledge of the law of Parliament. Having few rivals in this
laborious and unattractive pursuit, he soon began to be regarded
as an oracle on questions of form and privilege. His moral
character added not a little to his influence. He had indeed
great vices; but they were not of a scandalous kind. He was not
to be corrupted by money. His private life was regular. No
illicit amour was imputed to him even by satirists. Gambling he
held in aversion; and it was said that he never passed White's,
then the favourite haunt of noble sharpers and dupes, without an
exclamation of anger. His practice of flustering himself daily
with claret was hardly considered as a fault by his
contemporaries. His knowledge, his gravity and his independent
position gained for him the ear of the House; and even his bad
speaking was, in some sense, an advantage to him. For people are
very loth to admit that the same man can unite very different
kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what
is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be
profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that
Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master
of political science. Montague was a brilliant rhetorician, and,
therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the
driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a
superficial, prating pretender. But from the absence of show in
Harley's discourses many people inferred that there must be much
substance; and he was pronounced to be a deep read, deep thinking
gentleman, not a fine talker, but fitter to direct affairs of
state than all the fine talkers in the world. This character he
long supported with that cunning which is frequently found in
company with ambitious and unquiet mediocrity. He constantly had,
even with his best friends, an air of mystery and reserve which
seemed to indicate that he knew some momentous secret, and that
his mind was labouring with some vast design. In this way he got
and long kept a high reputation for wisdom. It was not till that
reputation had made him an Earl, a Knight of the Garter, Lord
High Treasurer of England, and master of the fate of Europe, that
his admirers began to find out that he was really a dull
puzzleheaded man.485

Soon after the general election of 1690, Harley, generally voting
with the Tories, began to turn Tory. The change was so gradual as
to be almost imperceptible; but was not the less real. He early
began to hold the Tory doctrine that England ought to confine
herself to a maritime war. He early felt the true Tory antipathy
to Dutchmen and to moneyed men. The antipathy to Dissenters,
which was necessary to the completeness of the character, came
much later. At length the transformation was complete; and the
old haunter of conventicles became an intolerant High Churchman.
Yet to the last the traces of his early breeding would now and
then show themselves; and, while he acted after the fashion of
Laud, he sometimes wrote in the style of Praise God Barebones.486

Of Paul Foley we know comparatively little. His history, up to a
certain point, greatly resembles that of Harley: but he appears
to have been superior to Harley both in parts and in elevation of
character. He was the son of Thomas Foley, a new man, but a. man
of great merit, who, having begun life with nothing, had created
a noble estate by ironworks, and who was renowned for his
spotless integrity and his munificent charity. The Foleys were,
like their neighbours the Harleys, Whigs and Puritans. Thomas
Foley lived on terms of close intimacy with Baxter, in whose
writings he is mentioned with warm eulogy. The opinions and the
attachments of Paul Foley were at first those of his family. But
be, like Harley, became, merely from the vehemence of his
Whiggism, an ally of the Tories, and might, perhaps, like Harley,
have been completely metamorphosed into a Tory, if the process of
transmutation had not been interrupted by death. Foley's
abilities were highly respectable, and had been improved by
education. He was so wealthy that it was unnecessary for him to
follow the law as a profession; but he had studied it carefully
as a science. His morals were without stain; and the greatest
fault which could be imputed to him was that he paraded his
independence and disinterestedness too ostentatiously, and was so
much afraid of being thought to fawn that he was always growling.

Another convert ought to be mentioned. Howe, lately the most
virulent of the Whigs, had been, by the loss of his place, turned
into one of the most virulent of the Tories. The deserter brought
to the party which he had joined no weight of character, no
capacity or semblance of capacity for great affairs, but much
parliamentary ability of a low kind, much spite and much
impudence. No speaker of that time seems to have had, in such
large measure, both the power and the inclination to give pain.

The assistance of these men was most welcome to the Tory party;
but it was impossible that they could, as yet, exercise over that
party the entire authority of leaders. For they still called
themselves Whigs, and generally vindicated their Tory votes by
arguments grounded on Whig principles.487

From this view of the state of parties in the House of Commons,
it seems clear that Sunderland had good reason for recommending
that the administration should be entrusted to the Whigs. The
King, however, hesitated long before he could bring himself to
quit that neutral position which he had long occupied between the
contending parties. If one of those parties was disposed to
question his title, the other was on principle hostile to his
prerogative. He still remembered with bitterness the unreasonable
and vindictive conduct of the Convention Parliament at the close
of 1689 and the beginning of 16go; and he shrank from the thought
of being entirely in the hands of the men who had obstructed the
Bill of Indemnity, who had voted for the Sacheverell clause, who
had tried to prevent him from taking the command of his army in
Ireland, and who had called him an ungrateful tyrant merely
because he would not be their slave and their hangman. He had
once, by a bold and unexpected effort, freed himself from their
yoke; and he was not inclined to put it on his neck again. He
personally disliked Wharton and Russell. He thought highly of the
capacity of Caermarthen, of the integrity of Nottingham, of the
diligence and financial skill of Godolphin. It was only by slow
degrees that the arguments of Sunderland, backed by the force of
circumstances, overcame all objections.

On the seventh of November 1693 the Parliament met; and the
conflict of parties instantly began. William from the throne
pressed on the Houses the necessity of making a great exertion to
arrest the progress of France on the Continent. During the last
campaign, he said, she had, on every point, had a superiority of
force; and it had therefore been found impossible to cope with
her. His allies had promised to increase their armies; and he
trusted that the Commons would enable him to do the same.488

The Commons at their next sitting took the King's speech into
consideration. The miscarriage of the Smyrna fleet was the chief
subject of discussion. The cry for inquiry was universal: but it
was evident that the two parties raised that cry for very
different reasons. Montague spoke the sense of the Whigs. He
declared that the disasters of the summer could not, in his
opinion, be explained by the ignorance and imbecility of those
who had charge of the naval administration. There must have been
treason. It was impossible to believe that Lewis, when he sent
his Brest squadron to the Straits of Gibraltar, and left the
whole coast of his kingdom from Dunkirk to Bayonne unprotected,
had trusted merely to chance. He must have been well assured that
his fleet would meet with a vast booty under a feeble convoy. As
there had been treachery in some quarters, there had been
incapacity in others. The State was ill served. And then the
orator pronounced a warm panegyric on his friend Somers. "Would
that all men in power would follow the example of my Lord Keeper!
If all patronage were bestowed as judiciously and disinterestedly
as his, we should not see the public offices filled with men who
draw salaries and perform no duties." It was moved and carried
unanimously, that the Commons would support their Majesties, and
would forthwith proceed to investigate the cause of the disaster
in the Bay of Lagos.489 The Lords of the Admiralty were directed
to produce a great mass of documentary evidence. The King sent
down copies of the examinations taken before the Committee of
Council which Mary had appointed to inquire into the grievances
of the Turkey merchants. The Turkey merchants themselves were
called in and interrogated. Rooke, though too ill to stand or
speak, was brought in a chair to the bar, and there delivered in
a narrative of his proceedings. The Whigs soon thought that
sufficient ground had been laid for a vote condemning the naval
administration, and moved a resolution attributing the
miscarriage of the Smyrna fleet to notorious and treacherous
mismanagement. That there had been mismanagement could not be
disputed; but that there had been foul play had certainly not
been proved. The Tories proposed that the word "treacherous" should be omitted.
A division took place; and the Whigs carried
their point by a hundred and forty votes to a hundred and three.
Wharton was a teller for the majority.490