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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In all the countries which were united against France the news of
the fall of Namur was received with joy; but here the exultation
was greatest. During several generations our ancestors had
achieved nothing considerable by land against foreign enemies. We
had indeed occasionally furnished to our allies small bands of
auxiliaries who had well maintained the honour of the nation. But
from the day on which the two brave Talbots, father and son, had
perished in the vain attempt to reconquer Guienne, till the
Revolution, there had been on the Continent no campaign in which
Englishmen had borne a principal part. At length our ancestors
had again, after an interval of near two centuries and a half,
begun to dispute with the warriors of France the palm of military
prowess. The struggle had been hard. The genius of Luxemburg and
the consummate discipline of the household troops of Lewis had
pervailed in two great battles; but the event of those battles
had been long doubtful; the victory had been dearly purchased,
and the victor had gained little more than the honour of
remaining master of the field of slaughter. Meanwhile he was
himself training his adversaries. The recruits who survived his
severe tuition speedily became veterans. Steinkirk and Landen had
formed the volunteers who followed Cutts through the palisades of
Namur. The judgment of all the great warriors whom all the
nations of Western Europe had sent to the confluence of the
Sambre and the Meuse was that the English subaltern was inferior
to no subaltern and the English private soldier to no private
soldier in Christendom. The English officers of higher rank were
thought hardly worthy to command such an army. Cutts, indeed, had
distinguished himself by his intrepidity. But those who most
admired him acknowledged that he had neither the capacity nor the
science necessary to a general.

The joy of the conquerors was heightened by the recollection of
the discomfiture which they had suffered, three years before, on
the same spot, and of the insolence with which their enemy had
then triumphed over them. They now triumphed in their turn. The
Dutch struck medals. The Spaniards sang Te Deums. Many poems,
serious and sportive, appeared, of which one only has lived.
Prior burlesqued, with admirable spirit and pleasantry, the
bombastic verses in which Boileau had celebrated the first taking
of Namur. The two odes, printed side by side, were read with
delight in London; and the critics at Will's pronounced that, in
wit as in arms, England had been victorious.

The fall of Namur was the great military event of this year. The
Turkish war still kept a large part of the forces of the Emperor
employed in indecisive operations on the Danube. Nothing
deserving to be mentioned took place either in Piedmont or on the
Rhine. In Catalonia the Spaniards obtained some slight
advantages, advantages due to their English and Dutch allies, who
seem to have done all that could be done to help a nation never
much disposed to help itself. The maritime superiority of England
and Holland was now fully established. During the whole year
Russell was the undisputed master of the Mediterranean, passed
and repassed between Spain and Italy, bombarded Palamos, spread
terror along the whole shore of Provence, and kept the French
fleet imprisoned in the harbour of Toulon. Meanwhile Berkeley was
the undisputed master of the Channel, sailed to and fro in sight
of the coasts of Artois, Picardy, Normandy and Brittany, threw
shells into Saint Maloes, Calais and Dunkirk, and burned
Granville to the ground. The navy of Lewis, which, five years
before, had been the most formidable in Europe, which had ranged
the British seas unopposed from the Downs to the Land's End,
which had anchored in Torbay and had laid Teignmouth in ashes,
now gave no sign of existence except by pillaging merchantmen
which were unprovided with convoy. In this lucrative war the
French privateers were, towards the close of the summer, very
successful. Several vessels laden with sugar from Barbadoes were
captured. The losses of the unfortunate East India Company,
already surrounded by difficulties and impoverished by boundless
prodigality in corruption, were enormous. Five large ships
returning from the Eastern seas, with cargoes of which the value
was popularly estimated at a million, fell into the hands of the
enemy. These misfortunes produced some murmuring on the Royal
Exchange. But, on the whole, the temper of the capital and of the
nation was better than it had been during some years.

Meanwhile events which no preceding historian has condescended to
mention, but which were of far greater importance than the
achievements of William's army or of Russell's fleet, were taking
place in London. A great experiment was making. A great
revolution was in progress. Newspapers had made their appearance.

While the Licensing Act was in force there was no newspaper in
England except the London Gazette, which was edited by a clerk in
the office of the Secretary of State, and which contained nothing
but what the Secretary of State wished the nation to know. There
were indeed many periodical papers; but none of those papers
could be called a newspaper. Welwood, a zealous Whig, published a
journal called the Observator; but his Observator, like the
Observator which Lestrange had formerly edited, contained, not
the news, but merely dissertations on politics. A crazy
bookseller, named John Dunton, published the Athenian Mercury;
but the Athenian Mercury merely discussed questions of natural
philosophy, of casuistry and of gallantry. A fellow of the Royal
Society, named John Houghton, published what he called a
Collection for the Improvement of Industry and Trade. But his
Collection contained little more than the prices of stocks,
explanations of the modes of doing business in the City, puffs of
new projects, and advertisements of books, quack medicines,
chocolate, spa water, civet cats, surgeons wanting ships, valets
wanting masters and ladies wanting husbands. If ever he printed
any political news, he transcribed it from the Gazette. The
Gazette was so partial and so meagre a chronicle of events that,
though it had no competitors, it had but a small circulation.
Only eight thousand copies were printed, much less than one to
each parish in the kingdom. In truth a person who had studied the
history of his own time only in the Gazette would have been
ignorant of many events of the highest importance. He would, for
example, have known nothing about the Court Martial on
Torrington, the Lancashire Trials, the burning of the Bishop of
Salisbury's Pastoral Letter or the impeachment of the Duke of
Leeds. But the deficiencies of the Gazette were to a certain
extent supplied in London by the coffeehouses, and in the country
by the newsletters.

On the third of May 1695 the law which had subjected the press to
a censorship expired. Within a fortnight, a stanch old Whig,
named Harris, who had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill,
attempted to set up a newspaper entitled Intelligence Domestic
and Foreign, and who had been speedily forced to relinquish that
design, announced that the Intelligence Domestic and Foreign,
suppressed fourteen years before by tyranny, would again appear.
Ten days after the first number of the Intelligence Domestic and
Foreign was printed the first number of the English Courant. Then
came the Packet Boat from Holland and Flanders, the Pegasus, the
London Newsletter, the London Post, the Flying Post, the Old
Postmaster, the Postboy and the Postman. The history of the
newspapers of England from that time to the present day is a most
interesting and instructive part of the history of the country.
At first they were small and meanlooking. Even the Postboy and
the Postman, which seem to have been the best conducted and the
most prosperous, were wretchedly printed on scraps of dingy paper
such as would not now be thought good enough for street ballads.
Only two numbers came out in a week, and a number contained
little more matter than may be found in a single column of a
daily paper of our time. What is now called a leading article
seldom appeared, except when there was a scarcity of
intelligence, when the Dutch mails were detained by the west
wind, when the Rapparees were quiet in the Bog of Allen, when no
stage coach had been stopped by highwaymen, when no nonjuring
congregation had been dispersed by constables, when no ambassador
had made his entry with a long train of coaches and six, when no
lord or poet had been buried in the Abbey, and when consequently
it was difficult to fill up four scanty pages. Yet the leading
articles, though inserted, as it should seem, only in the absence
of more attractive matter, are by no means contemptibly written.

It is a remarkable fact that the infant newspapers were all on
the side of King William and the Revolution. This fact may be
partly explained by the circumstance that the editors were, at
first, on their good behaviour. It was by no means clear that
their trade was not in itself illegal. The printing of newspapers
was certainly not prohibited by any statute. But, towards the
close of the reign of Charles the Second, the judges had
pronounced that it was a misdemeanour at common law to publish
political intelligence without the King's license. It is true
that the judges who laid down this doctrine were removable at the
royal pleasure and were eager on all occasions to exalt the royal
prerogative. How the question, if it were again raised, would be
decided by Holt and Treby was doubtful; and the effect of the
doubt was to make the ministers of the Crown indulgent and to
make the journalists cautious. On neither side was there a wish
to bring the question of right to issue. The government therefore
connived at the publication of the newspapers; and the conductors
of the newspapers carefully abstained from publishing any thing
that could provoke or alarm the government. It is true that, in
one of the earliest numbers of one of the new journals, a
paragraph appeared which seemed intended to convey an insinuation
that the Princess Anne did not sincerely rejoice at the fall of
Namur. But the printer made haste to atone for his fault by the
most submissive apologies. During a considerable time the
unofficial gazettes, though much more garrulous and amusing than
the official gazette, were scarcely less courtly. Whoever
examines them will find that the King is always mentioned with
profound respect. About the debates and divisions of the two
Houses a reverential silence is preserved. There is much
invective; but it is almost all directed against the Jacobites
and the French. It seems certain that the government of William
gained not a little by the substitution of these printed
newspapers, composed under constant dread of the Attorney
General, for the old newsletters, which were written with
unbounded license.616

The pamphleteers were under less restraint than the journalists;
yet no person who has studied with attention the political
controversies of that time can have failed to perceive that the
libels on William's person and government were decidedly less
coarse and rancorous during the latter half of his reign than
during the earlier half. And the reason evidently is that the
press, which had been fettered during the earlier half of his
reign, was free during the latter half. While the censorship
existed, no tract blaming, even in the most temperate and
decorous language, the conduct of any public department, was
likely to be printed with the approbation of the licenser. To
print such a tract without the approbation of the licenser was
illegal. In general, therefore, the respectable and moderate
opponents of the Court, not being able to publish in the manner
prescribed by law, and not thinking it right or safe to publish
in a manner prohibited by law, held their peace, and left the
business of criticizing the administration to two classes of men,
fanatical nonjurors who sincerely thought that the Prince of
Orange was entitled to as little charity or courtesy as the
Prince of Darkness, and Grub Street hacks, coarseminded,
badhearted and foulmouthed. Thus there was scarcely a single man
of judgment, temper and integrity among the many who were in the
habit of writing against the government. Indeed the habit of
writing against the government had, of itself, an unfavourable
effect on the character. For whoever was in the habit of writing
against the government was in the habit of breaking the law; and
the habit of breaking even an unreasonable law tends to make men
altogether lawless. However absurd a tariff may be, a smuggler is
but too likely to be a knave and a ruffian. How ever oppressive a
game law may be, the transition is but too easy from a poacher to
a murderer. And so, though little indeed can be said in favour of
the statutes which imposed restraints on literature, there was
much risk that a man who was constantly violating those statutes
would not be a man of high honour and rigid uprightness. An
author who was determined to print, and could not obtain the
sanction of the licenser, must employ the services of needy and
desperate outcasts, who, hunted by the peace officers, and forced
to assume every week new aliases and new disguises, hid their
paper and their types in those dens of vice which are the pest
and the shame of great capitals. Such wretches as these he must
bribe to keep his secret and to run the chance of having their
backs flayed and their ears clipped in his stead. A man stooping
to such companions and to such expedients could hardly retain
unimpaired the delicacy of his sense of what was right and
becoming. The emancipation of the press produced a great and
salutary change. The best and wisest men in the ranks of the
opposition now assumed an office which had hitherto been
abandoned to the unprincipled or the hotheaded. Tracts against
the government were written in a style not misbecoming statesmen
and gentlemen; and even the compositions of the lower and fiercer
class of malecontents became somewhat less brutal and less ribald
than in the days of the licensers.

Some weak men had imagined that religion and morality stood in
need of the protection of the licenser. The event signally proved
that they were in error. In truth the censorship had scarcely put
any restraint on licentiousness or profaneness. The Paradise Lost
had narrowly escaped mutilation; for the Paradise Lost was the
work of a man whose politics were hateful to the ruling powers.
But Etherege's She Would If She Could, Wycherley's Country Wife,
Dryden's Translations from the Fourth Book of Lucretius, obtained
the Imprimatur without difficulty; for Dryden, Etherege and
Wycherley were courtiers. From the day on which the emancipation
of our literature was accomplished, the purification of our
literature began. That purification was effected, not by the
intervention of senates or magistrates, but by the opinion of the
great body of educated Englishmen, before whom good and evil were
set, and who were left free to make their choice. During a
hundred and sixty years the liberty of our press has been
constantly becoming more and more entire; and during those
hundred and sixty years the restraint imposed on writers by the
general feeling of readers has been constantly becoming more and
more strict. At length even that class of works in which it was
formerly thought that a voluptuous imagination was privileged to
disport itself, love songs, comedies, novels, have become more
decorous than the sermons of the seventeenth century. At this day
foreigners, who dare not print a word reflecting on the
government under which they live, are at a loss to understand how
it happens that the freest press in Europe is the most prudish.

On the tenth of October, the King, leaving his army in winter
quarters, arrived in England, and was received with unwonted
enthusiasm. During his passage through the capital to his palace,
the bells of every church were ringing, and every street was
lighted up. It was late before he made his way through the
shouting crowds to Kensington. But, late as it was, a council was
instantly held. An important point was to be decided. Should the
House of Commons be permitted to sit again, or should there be an
immediate dissolution? The King would probably have been willing
to keep that House to the end of his reign. But this was not in
his power. The Triennial Act had fixed the twenty-fifth of March
as the latest day of the existence of the Parliament. If
therefore there were not a general election in 1695, there must
be a general election in 1696; and who could say what might be
the state of the country in 1696? There might be an unfortunate
campaign. There might be, indeed there was but too good reason to
believe that there would be, a terrible commercial crisis. In
either case, it was probable that there would be much ill humour.
The campaign of 1695 had been brilliant; the nation was in an
excellent temper; and William wisely determined to seize the
fortunate moment. Two proclamations were immediately published.
One of them announced, in the ordinary form, that His Majesty had
determined to dissolve the old Parliament and had ordered writs
to be issued for a new Parliament. The other proclamation was
unprecedented. It signified the royal pleasure to be that every
regiment quartered in a place where an election was to be held
should march out of that place the day before the nomination, and
should not return till the people had made their choice. From
this order, which was generally considered as indicating a
laudable respect for popular rights, the garrisons of fortified
towns and castles were necessarily excepted.

But, though William carefully abstained from disgusting the
constituent bodies by any thing that could look like coercion or
intimidation, he did not disdain to influence their votes by
milder means. He resolved to spend the six weeks of the general
election in showing himself to the people of many districts which
he had never yet visited. He hoped to acquire in this way a
popularity which might have a considerable effect on the returns.
He therefore forced himself to behave with a graciousness and
affability in which he was too often deficient; and the
consequence was that he received, at every stage of his progress,
marks of the good will of his subjects. Before he set out he paid
a visit in form to his sister in law, and was much pleased with
his reception. The Duke of Gloucester, only six years old, with a
little musket on his shoulder, came to meet his uncle, and
presented arms. "I am learning my drill," the child said, "that I
may help you to beat the French." The King laughed much, and, a
few days later, rewarded the young soldier with the Garter.617

On the seventeenth of October William went to Newmarket, now a
place rather of business than of pleasure, but, in the autumns of
the seventeenth century, the gayest and most luxurious spot in
the island. It was not unusual for the whole Court and Cabinet to
go down to the meetings. Jewellers and milliners, players and
fiddlers, venal wits and venal beauties followed in crowds. The
streets were made impassable by coaches and six. In the places of
public resort peers flirted with maids of honour; and officers of
the Life Guards, all plumes and gold lace, jostled professors in
trencher caps and black gowns. For the neighbouring University of
Cambridge always sent her highest functionaries with loyal
addresses, and selected her ablest theologians to preach before
the Sovereign and his splendid retinue. In the wild days of the
Restoration, indeed, the most learned and eloquent divine might
fail to draw a fashionable audience, particularly if Buckingham
announced his intention of holding forth; for sometimes His Grace
would enliven the dulness of a Sunday morning by addressing to
the bevy of fine gentlemen and fine ladies a ribald exhortation
which he called a sermon. But the Court of William was more
decent; and the Academic dignitaries were treated with marked
respect. With lords and ladies from Saint James's and Soho, and
with doctors from Trinity College and King's College, were
mingled the provincial aristocracy, foxhunting squires and their
rosycheeked daughters, who had come in queerlooking family
coaches drawn by carthorses from the remotest parishes of three
or four counties to see their Sovereign. The heath was fringed by
a wild gipsylike camp of vast extent. For the hope of being able
to feed on the leavings of many sumptuous tables, and to pick up
some of the guineas and crowns which the spendthrifts of London
were throwing about, attracted thousands of peasants from a
circle of many miles.618

William, after holding his court a few days at this joyous place,
and receiving the homage of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and
Suffolk, proceeded to Althorpe. It seems strange that he should,
in the course of what was really a canvassing tour, have honoured
with such a mark of favour a man so generally distrusted and
hated as Sunderland. But the people were determined to be
pleased. All Northamptonshire crowded to kiss the royal hand in
that fine gallery which had been embellished by the pencil of
Vandyke and made classical by the muse of Waller; and the Earl
tried to conciliate his neighbours by feasting them at eight
tables, all blazing with plate. From Althorpe the King proceeded
to Stamford. The Earl of Exeter, whose princely seat was, and
still is, one of the great sights of England, had never taken the
oaths, and had, in order to avoid an interview which must have
been disagreeable, found some pretext for going up to London, but
had left directions that the illustrious guest should be received
with fitting hospitality. William was fond of architecture and of
gardening; and his nobles could not flatter him more than by
asking his opinion about the improvement of their country seats.
At a time when he had many cares pressing on his mind he took a
great interest in the building of Castle Howard; and a wooden
model of that edifice, the finest specimen of a vicious style,
was sent to Kensington for his inspection. We cannot therefore
wonder that he should have seen Burleigh with delight. He was
indeed not content with one view, but rose early on the
following morning for the purpose of examining the building a
second time. From Stamford he went on to Lincoln, where he was
greeted by the clergy in full canonicals, by the magistrates in
scarlet robes, and by a multitude of baronets, knights and
esquires, from all parts of the immense plain which lies between
the Trent and the German Ocean. After attending divine service in
the magnificent cathedral, he took his departure, and journeyed
eastward. On the frontier of Nottinghamshire the Lord Lieutenant
of the county, John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, with a great
following, met the royal carriages and escorted them to his seat
at Welbeck, a mansion surrounded by gigantic oaks which scarcely
seem older now than on the day when that splendid procession
passed under their shade. The house in which William was then,
during a few hours, a guest, passed long after his death, by
female descents, from the Holleses to the Harleys, and from the
Harleys to the Bentincks, and now contains the originals of those
singularly interesting letters which passed between him and his
trusty friend and servant Portland. At Welbeck the grandees of
the north were assembled. The Lord Mayor of York came thither
with a train of magistrates, and the Archbishop of York with a
train of divines. William hunted several times in that forest,
the finest in the kingdom, which in old times gave shelter to
Robin Hood and Little John, and which is now portioned out into
the princely domains of Welbeck, Thoresby, Clumber and Worksop.
Four hundred gentlemen on horseback partook of his sport. The
Nottinghamshire squires were delighted to hear him say at table,
after a noble stag chase, that he hoped that this was not the
last run which he should have with them, and that he must hire a
hunting box among their delightful woods. He then turned
southward. He was entertained during one day by the Earl of
Stamford at Bradgate, the place where Lady Jane Grey sate alone
reading the last words of Socrates while the deer was flying
through the park followed by the whirlwind of hounds and hunters.
On the morrow the Lord Brook welcomed his Sovereign to Warwick
Castle, the finest of those fortresses of the middle ages which
have been turned into peaceful dwellings. Guy's Tower was
illuminated. A hundred and twenty gallons of punch were drunk to
His Majesty's health; and a mighty pile of faggots blazed in the
middle of the spacious court overhung by ruins green with the ivy
of centuries. The next morning the King, accompanied by a
multitude of Warwickshire gentlemen on horseback, proceeded
towards the borders of Gloucestershire. He deviated from his
route to dine with Shrewsbury at a secluded mansion in the Wolds,
and in the evening went on to Burford. The whole population of
Burford met him, and entreated him to accept a small token of
their love. Burford was then renowned for its saddles. One
inhabitant of the town, in particular, was said by the English to
be the best saddler in Europe. Two of his masterpieces were
respectfully offered to William, who received them with much
grace, and ordered them to be especially reserved for his own
use.619