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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A few hours after the examination of Bates, Wharton reported to
the Commons what had passed in the Exchequer Chamber. The
indignation was general and vehement. "You now understand," said
Wharton, "why obstructions have been thrown in our way at every
step, why we have had to wring out truth drop by drop, why His
Majesty's name has been artfully used to prevent us from going
into an inquiry which has brought nothing to light but what is to
His Majesty's honour. Can we think it strange that our
difficulties should have been great, when we consider the power,
the dexterity, the experience of him who was secretly thwarting
us? It is time for us to prove signally to the world that it is
impossible for any criminal to double so cunningly that we cannot
track him, or to climb so high that we cannot reach him. Never
was there a more flagitious instance of corruption. Never was
there an offender who had less claim to indulgence. The
obligations which the Duke of Leeds has to his country are of no
common kind. One great debt we generously cancelled; but the
manner in which our generosity has been requited forces us to
remember that he was long ago impeached for receiving money from
France. How can we be safe while a man proved to be venal has
access to the royal ear? Our best laid enterprises have been
defeated. Our inmost counsels have been betrayed. And what wonder
is it? Can we doubt that, together with this home trade in
charters, a profitable foreign trade in secrets is carried on?
Can we doubt that he who sells us to one another will, for a good
price, sell us all to the common enemy?" Wharton concluded by
moving that Leeds should be impeached of high crimes and
misdemeanours.582

Leeds had many friends and dependents in the House of Commons;
but they could say little. Wharton's motion was carried without a
division; and he was ordered to go to the bar of the Lords, and
there, in the name of the Commons of England, to impeach the
Duke. But, before this order could be obeyed, it was announced
that His Grace was at the door and requested an audience.

While Wharton had been making his report to the Commons, Leeds
had been haranguing the Lords. He denied with the most solemn
asseverations that he had taken any money for himself. But he
acknowledged, and indeed almost boasted, that he had abetted
Bates in getting money from the Company, and seemed to think that
this was a service which any man in power might be reasonably
expected to render to a friend. Too many persons, indeed, in that
age made a most absurd and pernicious distinction between a
minister who used his influence to obtain presents for himself
and a minister who used his influence to obtain presents for his
dependents. The former was corrupt; the latter was merely
goodnatured. Leeds proceeded to tell with great complacency a
story about himself, which would, in our days, drive a public
man, not only out of office, but out of the society of gentlemen.
"When I was Treasurer, in King Charles's time, my Lords, the
excise was to be farmed. There were several bidders. Harry
Savile, for whom I had a great value, informed me that they had
asked for his interest with me, and begged me to tell them that
he had done his best for them. 'What!' said I; 'tell them all so,
when only one can have the farm?' 'No matter;' said Harry: 'tell
them all so; and the one who gets the farm will think that he
owes it to me.' The gentlemen came. I said to every one of them
separately, 'Sir, you are much obliged to Mr. Savile;' 'Sir, Mr.
Savile has been much your friend.' In the end Harry got a
handsome present; and I wished him good luck with it. I was his
shadow then. I am Mr. Bates's shadow now."

The Duke had hardly related this anecdote, so strikingly
illustrative of the state of political morality in that
generation, when it was whispered to him that a motion to impeach
him had been made in the House of Commons. He hastened thither;
but, before he arrived, the question had been put and carried.
Nevertheless he pressed for admittance; and he was admitted. A
chair, according to ancient usage, was placed for him within the
bar; and he was informed that the House was ready to hear him.

He spoke, but with less tact and judgment than usual. He
magnified his own public services. But for him, he said, there
would have been no House of Commons to impeach him; a boast so
extravagant that it naturally made his hearers unwilling to allow
him the praise which his conduct at the time of the Revolution
really deserved. As to the charge against him he said little more
than that he was innocent, that there had long been a malicious
design to ruin him, that he would not go into particulars, that
the facts which had been proved would bear two constructions, and
that of the two constructions the most favourable ought in
candour to be adopted. He withdrew, after praying the House to
reconsider the vote which had just been passed, or, if that could
not be, to let him have speedy justice.

His friends felt that his speech was no defence, and did not
attempt to rescind the resolution which had been carried just
before he was heard. Wharton, with a large following, went up to
the Lords, and informed them that the Commons had resolved to
impeach the Duke. A committee of managers was appointed to draw
up the articles and to prepare the evidence.583

The articles were speedily drawn; but to the chain of evidence
one link appeared to be wanting. That link Robart, if he had been
severely examined and confronted with other witnesses, would in
all probability have been forced to supply. He was summoned to
the bar of the Commons. A messenger went with the summons to the
house of the Duke of Leeds, and was there informed that the Swiss
was not within, that he had been three days absent, and that
where he was the porter could not tell. The Lords immediately
presented an address to the King, requesting him to give orders
that the ports might be stopped and the fugitive arrested. But
Robart was already in Holland on his way to his native mountains.

The flight of this man made it impossible for the Commons to
proceed. They vehemently accused Leeds of having sent away the
witness who alone could furnish legal proof of that which was
already established by moral proof. Leeds, now at ease as to the
event of the impeachment, gave himself the airs of an injured
man. "My Lords," he said, "the conduct of the Commons is without
precedent. They impeach me of a high crime; they promise to prove
it; then they find that they have not the means of proving it;
and they revile me for not supplying them with the means. Surely
they ought not to have brought a charge like this, without well
considering whether they had or had not evidence sufficient to
support it. If Robart's testimony be, as they now say,
indispensable, why did they not send for him and hear his story
before they made up their minds? They may thank their own
intemperance, their own precipitancy, for his disappearance. He
is a foreigner; he is timid; he hears that a transaction in which
he has been concerned has been pronounced by the House of Commons
to be highly criminal, that his master is impeached, that his
friend Bates is in prison, that his own turn is coming. He
naturally takes fright; he escapes to his own country; and, from
what I know of him, I will venture to predict that it will be
long before he trusts himself again within reach of the Speaker's
warrant. But what is that to me? Am I to lie all my life under
the stigma of an accusation like this, merely because the
violence of my accusers has scared their own witness out of
England? I demand an immediate trial. I move your Lordships to
resolve that, unless the Commons shall proceed before the end of
the session, the impeachment shall be dismissed." A few friendly
voices cried out "Well moved." But the Peers were generally
unwilling to take a step which would have been in the highest
degree offensive to the Lower House, and to the great body of
those whom that House represented. The Duke's motion fell to the
ground; and a few hours later the Parliament was prorogued.584

The impeachment was never revived. The evidence which would
warrant a formal verdict of guilty was not forthcoming; and a
formal verdict of guilty would hardly have answered Wharton's
purpose better than the informal verdict of guilty which the
whole nation had already pronounced. The work was done. The Whigs
were dominant. Leeds was no longer chief minister, was indeed no
longer a minister at all. William, from respect probably for the
memory of the beloved wife whom he had lately lost, and to whom
Leeds had shown peculiar attachment, avoided every thing that
could look like harshness. The fallen statesman was suffered to
retain during a considerable time the title of Lord President,
and to walk on public occasions between the Great Seal and the
Privy Seal. But he was told that he would do well not to show
himself at Council; the business and the patronage even of the
department of which he was the nominal head passed into other
hands; and the place which he ostensibly filled was considered in
political circles as really vacant.585

He hastened into the country, and hid himself there, during some
months, from the public eye. When the Parliament met again,
however, he emerged from his retreat. Though he was well stricken
in years and cruelly tortured by disease, his ambition was still
as ardent as ever. With indefatigable energy he began a third
time to climb, as he flattered himself, towards that dizzy
pinnacle which he had twice reached, and from which he had twice
fallen. He took a prominent part in debate; but, though his
eloquence and knowledge always secured to him the attention of
his hearers, he was never again, even when the Tory party was in
power, admitted to the smallest share in the direction of
affairs.

There was one great humiliation which he could not be spared.
William was about to take the command of the army in the
Netherlands; and it was necessary that, before he sailed, he
should determine by whom the government should be administered
during his absence. Hitherto Mary had acted as his vicegerent
when he was out of England; but she was gone. He therefore
delegated his authority to seven Lords Justices, Tenison,
Archbishop of Canterbury, Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal,
Pembroke, Keeper of the Privy Seal, Devonshire, Lord Steward,
Dorset, Lord Chamberlain, Shrewsbury, Secretary of State, and
Godolphin, First Commissioner of the Treasury. It is easy to
judge from this list of names which way the balance of power was
now leaning. Godolphin alone of the seven was a Tory. The Lord
President, still second in rank, and a few days before first in
power, of the great lay dignitaries of the realm, was passed
over; and the omission was universally regarded as an official
announcement of his disgrace.586

There were some who wondered that the Princess of Denmark was not
appointed Regent. The reconciliation, which had been begun while
Mary was dying, had since her death been, in external show at
least, completed. This was one of those occasions on which
Sunderland was peculiarly qualified to be useful. He was
admirably fitted to manage a personal negotiation, to soften
resentment, to soothe wounded pride, to select, among all the
objects of human desire, the very bait which was most likely to
allure the mind with which he was dealing. On this occasion his
task was not difficult. He had two excellent assistants,
Marlborough in the household of Anne, and Somers in the cabinet
of William.

Marlborough was now as desirous to support the government as he
had once been to subvert it. The death of Mary had produced a
complete change in all his schemes. There was one event to which
he looked forward with the most intense longing, the accession of
the Princess to the English throne. It was certain that, on the
day on which she began to reign, he would be in her Court all
that Buckingham had been in the Court of James the First.
Marlborough too must have been conscious of powers of a very
different order from those which Buckingham had possessed, of a
genius for politics not inferior to that of Richelieu, of a
genius for war not inferior to that of Turenne. Perhaps the
disgraced General, in obscurity and inaction, anticipated the day
when his power to help and hurt in Europe would be equal to that
of her mightiest princes, when he would be servilely flattered
and courted by Caesar on one side and by Lewis the Great on the
other, and when every year would add another hundred thousand
pounds to the largest fortune that had ever been accumulated by
any English subject. All this might be if Mrs. Morley were Queen.
But that Mr. Freeman should ever see Mrs. Morley Queen had till
lately been not very probable. Mary's life was a much better life
than his, and quite as good a life as her sister's. That William
would have issue seemed unlikely. But it was generally expected
that he would soon die. His widow might marry again, and might
leave children who would succeed her. In these circumstances
Marlborough might well think that he had very little interest in
maintaining that settlement of the Crown which had been made by
the Convention. Nothing was so likely to serve his purpose as
confusion, civil war, another revolution, another abdication,
another vacancy of the throne. Perhaps the nation, incensed
against William, yet not reconciled to James, and distracted
between hatred of foreigners and hatred of Jesuits, might prefer
both to the Dutch King and to the Popish King one who was at once
a native of our country and a member of our Church. That this was
the real explanation of Marlborough's dark and complicated plots
was, as we have seen, firmly believed by some of the most zealous
Jacobites, and is in the highest degree probable. It is certain
that during several years he had spared no efforts to inflame the
army and the nation against the government. But all was now
changed. Mary was gone. By the Bill of Rights the Crown was
entailed on Anne after the death of William. The death of William
could not be far distant. Indeed all the physicians who attended
him wondered that he was still alive; and, when the risks of war
were added to the risks of disease, the probability seemed to be
that in a few months he would be in his grave. Marlborough saw
that it would now be madness to throw every thing into disorder
and to put every thing to hazard. He had done his best to shake
the throne while it seemed unlikely that Anne would ever mount it
except by violent means. But he did his best to fix it firmly, as
soon as it became highly probably that she would soon be called
to fill it in the regular course of nature and of law.

The Princess was easily induced by the Churchills to write to the
King a submissive and affectionate letter of condolence. The
King, who was never much inclined to engage in a commerce of
insincere compliments, and who was still in the first agonies of
his grief, showed little disposition to meet her advances. But
Somers, who felt that every thing was at stake, went to
Kensington, and made his way into the royal closet.

William was sitting there, so deeply sunk in melancholy that he
did not seem to perceive that any person had entered the room.
The Lord Keeper, after a respectful pause, broke silence, and,
doubtless with all that cautious delicacy which was
characteristic of him, and which eminently qualified him to touch
the sore places of the mind without hurting them, implored His
Majesty to be reconciled to the Princess. "Do what you will,"
said William; "I can think of no business." Thus authorised, the
mediators speedily concluded a treaty.587 Anne came to
Kensington, and was graciously received; she was lodged in Saint
James's Palace; a guard of honour was again placed at her door;
and the Gazettes again, after a long interval, announced that
foreign ministers had had the honour of being presented to
her.588 The Churchills were again permitted to dwell under the
royal roof. But William did not at first include them in the
peace which he had made with their mistress. Marlborough remained
excluded from military and political employment; and it was not
without much difficulty that he was admitted into the circle at
Kensington, and permitted to kiss the royal hand.589 The feeling
with which he was regarded by the King explains why Anne was not
appointed Regent. The Regency of Anne would have been the Regency
of Marlborough; and it is not strange that a man whom it was not
thought safe to entrust with any office in the State or the army
should not have been entrusted with the whole government of the
kingdom.

Had Marlborough been of a proud and vindictive nature he might
have been provoked into raising another quarrel in the royal
family, and into forming new cabals in the army. But all his
passions, except ambition and avarice, were under strict
regulation. He was destitute alike of the sentiment of gratitude
and of the sentiment of revenge. He had conspired against the
government while it was loading him with favours. He now
supported it, though it requited his support with contumely. He
perfectly understood his own interest; he had perfect command of
his temper; he endured decorously the hardships of his present
situation, and contented himself by looking forward to a
reversion which would amply repay him for a few years of
patience. He did not indeed cease to correspond with the Court of
Saint Germains; but the correspondence gradually became more and
more slack, and seems, on his part, to have been made up of vague
professions and trifling excuses.

The event which had changed all Marlborough's views had filled
the minds of fiercer and more pertinacious politicians with wild
hopes and atrocious projects.

During the two years and a half which followed the execution of
Grandval, no serious design had been formed against the life of
William. Some hotheaded malecontents had indeed laid schemes for
kidnapping or murdering him; but those schemes were not, while
his wife lived, countenanced by her father. James did not feel,
and, to do him justice, was not such a hypocrite as to pretend to
feel, any scruple about removing his enemies by those means which
he had justly thought base and wicked when employed by his
enemies against himself. If any such scruple had arisen in his
mind, there was no want, under his roof, of casuists willing and
competent to soothe his conscience with sophisms such as had
corrupted the far nobler natures of Anthony Babington and Everard
Digby. To question the lawfulness of assassination, in cases
where assassination might promote the interests of the Church,
was to question the authority of the most illustrious Jesuits, of
Bellarmine and Suarez, of Molina and Mariana; nay, it was to
rebel against the Chair of Saint Peter. One Pope had walked in
procession at the head of his cardinals, had proclaimed a
jubilee, had ordered the guns of Saint Angelo to be fired, in
honour of the perfidious butchery in which Coligni had perished.
Another Pope had in a solemn allocution hymned the murder of
Henry the Third of France in rapturous language borrowed from the
ode of the prophet Habakkuk, and had extolled the murderer above
Phinehas and Judith.590 William was regarded at Saint Germains as
a monster compared with whom Coligni and Henry the Third were
saints. Nevertheless James, during some years, refused to
sanction any attempt on his nephew's person. The reasons which he
assigned for his refusal have come down to us, as he wrote them
with his own hand. He did not affect to think that assassination
was a sin which ought to be held in horror by a Christian, or a
villany unworthy of a gentleman; he merely said that the
difficulties were great, and that he would not push his friends
on extreme danger when it would not be in his power to second
them effectually.591 In truth, while Mary lived, it might well be
doubted whether the murder of her husband would really be a
service to the Jacobite cause. By his death the government would
lose indeed the strength derived from his eminent personal
qualities, but would at the same time be relieved from the load
of his personal unpopularity. His whole power would at once
devolve on his widow; and the nation would probably rally round
her with enthusiasm. If her political abilities were not equal to
his, she had not his repulsive manners, his foreign
pronunciation, his partiality for every thing Dutch and for every
thing Calvinistic. Many, who had thought her culpably wanting in
filial piety, would be of opinion that now at least she was
absolved from all duty to a father stained with the blood of her
husband. The whole machinery of the administration would continue
to work without that interruption which ordinarily followed a
demise of the Crown. There would be no dissolution of the
Parliament, no suspension of the customs and excise; commissions
would retain their force; and all that James would have gained by
the fall of his enemy would have been a barren revenge.

The death of the Queen changed every thing. If a dagger or a
bullet should now reach the heart of William, it was probable
that there would instantly be general anarchy. The Parliament and
the Privy Council would cease to exist. The authority of
ministers and judges would expire with him from whom it was
derived. It might seem not improbable that at such a moment a
restoration might be effected without a blow.

Scarcely therefore had Mary been laid in the grave when restless
and unprincipled men began to plot in earnest against the life of
William. Foremost among these men in parts, in courage and in
energy was Robert Charnock. He had been liberally educated, and
had, in the late reign, been a fellow of Magdalene College,
Oxford. Alone in that great society he had betrayed the common
cause, had consented to be the tool of the High Commission, had
publicly apostatized from the Church of England, and, while his
college was a Popish seminary, had held the office of Vice
President. The Revolution came, and altered at once the whole
course of his life. Driven from the quiet cloister and the old
grove of oaks on the bank of the Cherwell, he sought haunts of a
very different kind. During several years he led the perilous and
agitated life of a conspirator, passed and repassed on secret
errands between England and France, changed his lodgings in
London often, and was known at different coffeehouses by
different names. His services had been requited with a captain's
commission signed by the banished King.

With Charnock was closely connected George Porter, an adventurer
who called himself a Roman Catholic and a Royalist, but who was
in truth destitute of all religious and of all political
principle. Porter's friends could not deny that he was a rake and
a coxcomb, that he drank, that he swore, that he told extravagant
lies about his amours, and that he had been convicted of
manslaughter for a stab given in a brawl at the playhouse. His
enemies affirmed that he was addicted to nauseous and horrible
kinds of debauchery, and that he procured the means of indulging
his infamous tastes by cheating and marauding; that he was one of
a gang of clippers; that he sometimes got on horseback late in
the evening and stole out in disguise, and that, when he returned
from these mysterious excursions, his appearance justified the
suspicion that he had been doing business on Hounslow Heath or
Finchley Common.592

Cardell Goodman, popularly called Scum Goodman, a knave more
abandoned, if possible, than Porter, was in the plot. Goodman had
been on the stage, had been kept, like some much greater men, by
the Duchess of Cleveland, had been taken into her house, had been
loaded by her with gifts, and had requited her by bribing an
Italian quack to poison two of her children. As the poison had
not been administered, Goodman could be prosecuted only for a
misdemeanour. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to a ruinous
fine. He had since distinguished himself as one of the first
forgers of bank notes.593

Sir William Parkyns, a wealthy knight bred to the law, who had
been conspicuous among the Tories in the days of the Exclusion
Bill, was one of the most important members of the confederacy.
He bore a much fairer character than most of his accomplices; but
in one respect he was more culpable than any of them. For he had,
in order to retain a lucrative office which he held in the Court
of Chancery, sworn allegiance to the Prince against whose life he
now conspired.

The design was imparted to Sir John Fenwick, celebrated on
account of the cowardly insult which he had offered to the
deceased Queen. Fenwick, if his own assertion is to be trusted,
was willing to join in an insurrection, but recoiled from the
thought of assassination, and showed so much of what was in his
mind as sufficed to make him an object of suspicion to his less
scrupulous associates. He kept their secret, however, as strictly
as if he had wished them success.