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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At Oxford he was received with great pomp, complimented in a
Latin oration, presented with some of the most beautiful
productions of the Academic press, entertained with music, and
invited to a sumptuous feast in the Sheldonian theatre. He
departed in a few hours, pleading as an excuse for the shortness
of his stay that he had seen the colleges before, and that this
was a visit, not of curiosity, but of kindness. As it was well
known that he did not love the Oxonians and was not loved by
them, his haste gave occasion to some idle rumours which found
credit with the vulgar. It was said that he hurried away without
tasting the costly banquet which had been provided for him,
because he had been warned by an anonymous letter, that, if he
ate or drank in the theatre, he was a dead man. But it is
difficult to believe that a Prince who could scarcely be induced,
by the most earnest entreaties of his friends, to take the most
common precautions against assassins of whose designs he had
trustworthy evidence, would have been scared by so silly a hoax;
and it is quite certain that the stages of his progress had been
marked, and that he remained at Oxford as long as was compatible
with arrangements previously made.620

He was welcomed back to his capital by a splendid show, which had
been prepared at great cost during his absence. Sidney, now Earl
of Romney and Master of the Ordnance, had determined to astonish
London by an exhibition which had never been seen in England on
so large a scale. The whole skill of the pyrotechnists of his
department was employed to produce a display of fireworks which
might vie with any that had been seen in the gardens of
Versailles or on the great tank at the Hague. Saint James's
Square was selected as the place for the spectacle. All the
stately mansions on the northern, eastern and western sides were
crowded with people of fashion. The King appeared at a window of
Romney's drawing room. The Princess of Denmark, her husband and
her court occupied a neighbouring house. The whole diplomatic
body assembled at the dwelling of the minister of the United
Provinces. A huge pyramid of flame in the centre of the area
threw out brilliant cascades which were seen by hundreds of
thousands who crowded the neighbouring streets and parks. The
States General were informed by their correspondent that, great
as the multitude was, the night had passed without the slightest
disturbance.621

By this time the elections were almost completed. In every part
of the country it had been manifest that the constituent bodies
were generally zealous for the King and for the war. The City of
London, which had returned four Tories in 1690, returned four
Whigs in 1695. Of the proceedings at Westminster an account more
than usually circumstantial has come down to us. In 1690 the
electors, disgusted by the Sacheverell Clause, had returned two
Tories. In 1695, as soon as it was known that a new Parliament
was likely to be called, a meeting was held, at which it was
resolved that a deputation should be sent with an invitation to
two Commissioners of the Treasury, Charles Montague and Sir
Stephen Fox. Sir Walter Clarges stood on the Tory interest. On
the day of nomination near five thousand electors paraded the
streets on horseback. They were divided into three bands; and at
the head of each band rode one of the candidates. It was easy to
estimate at a glance the comparative strength of the parties. For
the cavalcade which followed Clarges was the least numerous of
the three; and it was well known that the followers of Montague
would vote for Fox, and the followers of Fox for Montague. The
business of the day was interrupted by loud clamours. The Whigs
cried shame on the Jacobite candidate who wished to make the
English go to mass, eat frogs and wear wooden shoes. The Tories
hooted the two placemen who were raising great estates out of the
plunder of the poor overburdened nation. From words the incensed
factions proceeded to blows; and there was a riot which was with
some difficulty quelled. The High Bailiff then walked round the
three companies of horsemen, and pronounced, on the view, that
Montague and Fox were duly elected. A poll was demanded. The
Tories exerted themselves strenuously. Neither money nor ink was
spared. Clarges disbursed two thousand pounds in a few hours, a
great outlay in times when the average income of a member of
Parliament was not estimated at more than eight hundred a year.
In the course of the night which followed the nomination,
broadsides filled with invectives against the two courtly
upstarts who had raised themselves by knavery from poverty and
obscurity to opulence and power were scattered all over the
capital. The Bishop of London canvassed openly against the
government; for the interference of peers in elections had not
yet been declared by the Commons to be a breach of privilege. But
all was vain. Clarges was at the bottom of the poll without hope
of rising. He withdrew; and Montague was carried on the shoulders
of an immense multitude from Westminster Abbey to his office at
Whitehall.622

The same feeling exhibited itself in many other places. The
freeholders of Cumberland instructed their representatives to
support the King, and to vote whatever supplies might be
necessary for the purpose of carrying on the war with vigour; and
this example was followed by several counties and towns.623
Russell did not arrive in England till after the writs had gone
out. But he had only to choose for what place he would sit. His
popularity was immense; for his villanies were secret, and his
public services were universally known. He had won the battle of
La Hogue. He had commanded two years in the Mediterranean. He had
there shut up the French fleets in the harbour of Toulon, and had
stopped and turned back the French armies in Catalonia. He had
taken many vessels, and among them two ships of the line; and he
had not, during his long absence in a remote sea, lost a single
vessel either by war or by weather. He had made the red cross of
Saint George an object of terror to all the princes and
commonwealths of Italy. The effect of his successes was that
embassies were on their way from Florence, Genoa and Venice, with
tardy congratulations to William on his accession. Russell's
merits, artfully magnified by the Whigs, made such an impression
that he was returned to Parliament not only by Portsmouth where
his official situation gave him great influence, and by
Cambridgeshire where his private property was considerable, but
also by Middlesex. This last distinction, indeed, he owed chiefly
to the name which he bore. Before his arrival in England it had
been generally thought that two Tories would be returned for the
metropolitan county. Somers and Shrewsbury were of opinion that
the only way to avert such a misfortune was to conjure with the
name of the most virtuous of all the martyrs of English liberty.
They entreated Lady Russell to suffer her eldest son, a boy of
fifteen, who was about to commence his studies at Cambridge, to
be put in nomination. He must, they said, drop, for one day, his
new title of Marquess of Tavistock, and call himself Lord
Russell. There will be no expense. There will be no contest.
Thousands of gentlemen on horseback will escort him to the
hustings; nobody will dare to stand against him; and he will not
only come in himself, but bring in another Whig. The widowed
mother, in a letter written with all the excellent sense and
feeling which distinguished her, refused to sacrifice her son to
her party. His education, she said, would be interrupted; his
head would be turned; his triumph would be his undoing. Just at
this conjuncture the Admiral arrived. He made his appearance
before the freeholders of Middlesex assembled on the top of
Hampstead Hill, and was returned without opposition.624

Meanwhile several noted malecontents received marks of public
disapprobation. John Knight, the most factious and insolent of
those Jacobites who had dishonestly sworn fealty to King William
in order to qualify themselves to sit in Parliament, ceased to
represent the great city of Bristol. Exeter, the capital of the
west, was violently agitated. It had been long supposed that the
ability, the eloquence, the experience, the ample fortune, the
noble descent of Seymour would make it impossible to unseat him.
But his moral character, which had never stood very high, had,
during the last three or four years, been constantly sinking. He
had been virulent in opposition till he had got a place. While he
had a place he had defended the most unpopular acts of the
government. As soon as he was out of place, he had again been
virulent in opposition.

His saltpetre contract had left a deep stain on his personal
honour. Two candidates were therefore brought forward against
him; and a contest, the longest and fiercest of that age, fixed
the attention of the whole kingdom, and was watched with interest
even by foreign governments. The poll was open five weeks. The
expense on both sides was enormous. The freemen of Exeter, who,
while the election lasted, fared sumptuously every day, were by
no means impatient for the termination of their luxurious
carnival. They ate and drank heartily; they turned out every
evening with good cudgels to fight for Mother Church or for King
William; but the votes came in very slowly. It was not till the
eve of the meeting of Parliament that the return was made.
Seymour was defeated, to his bitter mortification, and was forced
to take refuge in the small borough of Totness.625

It is remarkable that, at this election as at the preceding
election, John Hampden failed to obtain a seat. He had, since he
ceased to be a member of Parliament, been brooding over his evil
fate and his indelible shame, and occasionally venting his spleen
in bitter pamphlets against the government. When the Whigs had
become predominant at the Court and in the House of Commons, when
Nottingham had retired, when Caermarthen had been impeached,
Hampden, it should seem, again conceived the hope that he might
play a great part in public life. But the leaders of his party,
apparently, did not wish for an ally of so acrimonious and
turbulent a spirit. He found himself still excluded from the
House of Commons. He led, during a few months, a miserable life,
sometimes trying to forget his cares among the wellbred gamblers
and frail beauties who filled the drawingroom of the Duchess of
Mazarine, and sometimes sunk in religious melancholy. The thought
of suicide often rose in his mind. Soon there was a vacancy in
the representation of Buckinghamshire, the county which had
repeatedly sent himself and his progenitors to Parliament; and he
expected that he should, by the help of Wharton, whose dominion
over the Buckinghamshire Whigs was absolute, be returned without
difficulty. Wharton, however, gave his interest to another
candidate. This was a final blow. The town was agitated by the
news that John Hampden had cut his throat, that he had survived
his wound a few hours, that he had professed deep penitence for
his sins, had requested the prayers of Burnet, and had sent a
solemn warning to the Duchess of Mazarine. A coroner's jury found
a verdict of insanity. The wretched man had entered on life with
the fairest prospects. He bore a name which was more than noble.
He was heir to an ample estate and to a patrimony much more
precious, the confidence and attachment of hundreds of thousands
of his countrymen. His own abilities were considerable, and had
been carefully cultivated. Unhappily ambition and party spirit
impelled him to place himself in a situation full of danger. To
that danger his fortitude proved unequal. He stooped to
supplications which saved him and dishonoured him. From that
moment, he never knew peace of mind. His temper became perverse;
and his understanding was perverted by his temper. He tried to
find relief in devotion and in revenge, in fashionable
dissipation and in political turmoil. But the dark shade never
passed away from his mind, till, in the twelfth year of his
humiliation, his unhappy life was terminated by an unhappy
death.626

The result of the general election proved that William had chosen
a fortunate moment for dissolving. The slumber of new members was
about a hundred and sixty; and most of these were known to be
thoroughly well affected to the government.627

It was of the highest importance that the House of Commons
should, at that moment, be disposed to cooperate cordially with
the King. For it was absolutely necessary to apply a remedy to an
internal evil which had by slow degrees grown to a fearful
magnitude. The silver coin, which was then the standard coin of
the realm, was in a state at which the boldest and most
enlightened statesmen stood aghast.628

Till the reign of Charles the Second our coin had been struck by
a process as old as the thirteenth century. Edward the First had
invited hither skilful artists from Florence, which, in his time,
was to London what London, in the time of William the Third, was
to Moscow. During many generations, the instruments which were
then introduced into our mint continued to be employed with
little alteration. The metal was divided with shears, and
afterwards shaped and stamped by the hammer. In these operations
much was left to the hand and eye of the workman. It necessarily
happened that some pieces contained a little more and some a
little less than the just quantity of silver; few pieces were
exactly round; and the rims were not marked. It was therefore in
the course of years discovered that to clip the coin was one of
the easiest and most profitable kinds of fraud. In the reign of
Elizabeth it had been thought necessary to enact that the clipper
should be, as the coiner had long been, liable to the penalties
of high treason.629 The practice of paring down money, however,
was far too lucrative to be so checked; and, about the time of
the Restoration, people began to observe that a large proportion
of the crowns, halfcrowns and shillings which were passing from
hand to hand had undergone some slight mutilation.

That was a time fruitful of experiments and inventions in all the
departments of science. A great improvement in the mode of
shaping and striking the coin was suggested. A mill, which to a
great extent superseded the human hand, was set up in the Tower
of London. This mill was worked by horses, and would doubtless be
considered by modern engineers as a rude and feeble machine. The
pieces which it produced, however, were among the best in Europe.
It was not easy to counterfeit them; and, as their shape was
exactly circular, and their edges were inscribed with a legend,
clipping was not to be apprehended.630 The hammered coins and the
milled coins were current together. They were received without
distinction in public, and consequently in private, payments. The
financiers of that age seem to have expected that the new money,
which was excellent, would soon displace the old money which was
much impaired. Yet any man of plain understanding might have
known that, when the State treats perfect coin and light coin as
of equal value, the perfect coin will not drive the light coin
out of circulation, but will itself be driven out. A clipped
crown, on English ground, went as far in the payment of a tax or
a debt as a milled crown. But the milled crown, as soon as it had
been flung into the crucible or carried across the Channel,
became much more valuable than the clipped crown. It might
therefore have been predicted, as confidently as any thing can be
predicted which depends on the human will, that the inferior
pieces would remain in the only market in which they could fetch
the same price as the superior pieces, and that the superior
pieces would take some form or fly to some place in which some
advantage could be derived from their superiority.631

The politicians of that age, however, generally overlooked these
very obvious considerations. They marvelled exceedingly that
every body should be so perverse as to use light money in
preference to good money. In other words, they marvelled that
nobody chose to pay twelve ounces of silver when ten would serve
the turn. The horse in the Tower still paced his rounds. Fresh
waggon loads of choice money still came forth from the mill; and
still they vanished as fast as they appeared. Great masses were
melted down; great masses exported; great masses hoarded; but
scarcely one new piece was to be found in the till of a shop, or
in the leathern bag which the farmer carried home from the cattle
fair. In the receipts and payments of the Exchequer the milled
money did not exceed ten shillings in a hundred pounds. A writer
of that age mentions the case of a merchant who, in a sum of
thirty-five pounds, received only a single halfcrown in milled
silver. Meanwhile the shears of the clippers were constantly at
work. The comers too multiplied and prospered; for the worse the
current money became the more easily it was imitated. During more
than thirty years this evil had gone on increasing. At first it
had been disregarded; but it had at length become an
insupportable curse to the country. It was to no purpose that the
rigorous laws against coining and clipping were rigorously
executed. At every session that was held at the Old Bailey
terrible examples were made. Hurdles, with four, five, six
wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating the money of
the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill. On one
morning seven men were hanged and a woman burned for clipping;
But all was vain. The gains were such as to lawless spirits
seemed more than proportioned to the risks. Some clippers were
said to have made great fortunes. One in particular offered six
thousand pounds for a pardon. His bribe was indeed rejected; but
the fame of his riches did much to counteract the effect which
the spectacle of his death was designed to produce.632 Nay the
severity of the punishment gave encouragement to the crime. For
the practice of clipping, pernicious as it was, did not excite in
the common mind a detestation resembling that with which men
regard murder, arson, robbery, nay, even theft. The injury done
by the whole body of clippers to the whole society was indeed
immense; but each particular act of clipping was a trifle. To
pass a halfcrown, after paring a pennyworth of silver from it,
seemed a minute, an almost imperceptible, fault. Even while the
nation was crying out most loudly under the distress which the
state of the currency had produced, every individual who was
capitally punished for contributing to bring the currency into
that state had the general sympathy on his side. Constables were
unwilling to arrest the offenders. Justices were unwilling to
commit. Witnesses were unwilling to tell the whole truth. Juries
were unwilling to pronounce the word Guilty. It was vain to tell
the common people that the mutilators of the coin were causing
far more misery than all the highwaymen and housebreakers in the
island. For, great as the aggregate of the evil was, only an
infinitesimal part of that evil was brought home to the
individual malefactor. There was, therefore, a general conspiracy
to prevent the law from taking its course. The convictions,
numerous as they might seem, were few indeed when compared with
the offences; and the offenders who were convicted looked on
themselves as murdered men, and were firm in the belief that
their sin, if sin it were, was as venial as that of a schoolboy
who goes nutting in the wood of a neighbour. All the eloquence of
the ordinary could seldom induce them to conform to the wholesome
usage of acknowledging in their dying speeches the enormity of
their wickedness.633

The evil proceeded with constantly accelerating velocity. At
length in the autumn of 1695 it could hardly be said that the
country possessed, for practical purposes, any measure of the
value of commodities. It was a mere chance whether what was
called a shilling was really tenpence, sixpence or a groat. The
results of some experiments which were tried at that time deserve
to be mentioned. The officers of the Exchequer weighed fifty-
seven thousand two hundred pounds of hammered money which had
recently been paid in. The weight ought to have been above two
hundred and twenty thousand ounces. It proved to be under one
hundred and fourteen thousand ounces.634 Three eminent London
goldsmiths were invited to send a hundred pounds each in current
silver to be tried by the balance. Three hundred pounds ought to
have weighed about twelve hundred ounces. The actual weight
proved to be six hundred and twenty-four ounces. The same test
was applied in various parts of the kingdom. It was found that a
hundred pounds, which should have weighed about four hundred
ounces, did actually weigh at Bristol two hundred and forty
ounces, at Cambridge two hundred and three, at Exeter one hundred
and eighty, and at Oxford only one hundred and sixteen.635 There
were, indeed, some northern districts into which the clipped
money had only begun to find its way. An honest Quaker, who lived
in one of these districts, recorded, in some notes which are
still extant, the amazement with which, when he travelled
southward, shopkeepers and innkeepers stared at the broad and
heavy halfcrowns with which he paid his way. They asked whence
he came, and where such money was to be found. The guinea which
he purchased for twenty-two shillings at Lancaster bore a
different value at every stage of his journey. When he reached
London it was worth thirty shillings, and would indeed have been
worth more had not the government fixed that rate as the highest
at which gold should be received in the payment of taxes.636

The evils produced by this state of the currency were not such as
have generally been thought worthy to occupy a prominent place in
history. Yet it may well be doubted whether all the misery which
had been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a
century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad
judges, was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad
crowns and bad shillings. Those events which furnish the best
themes for pathetic or indignant eloquence are not always those
which most affect the happiness of the great body of the people.
The misgovernment of Charles and James, gross as it had been, had
not prevented the common business of life from going steadily and
prosperously on. While the honour and independence of the State
were sold to a foreign power, while chartered rights were
invaded, while fundamental laws were violated, hundreds of
thousands of quiet, honest and industrious families laboured and
traded, ate their meals and lay down to rest, in comfort and
security. Whether Whigs or Tories, Protestants or Jesuits were
uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to market; the grocer
weighed out his currants; the draper measured out his broadcloth;
the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the towns;
the harvest home was celebrated as joyously as ever in the
hamlets; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple
juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of
crockery glowed in the furnaces of the Trent; and the barrows of
coal rolled fast along the timber railways of the Tyne. But when
the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged, all
trade, all industry, were smitten as with a palsy. The evil was
felt daily and hourly in almost every place and by almost every
class, in the dairy and on the threshing floor, by the anvil and
by the loom, on the billows of the ocean and in the depths of the
mine. Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every
counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The workman
and his employer had a quarrel as regularly as the Saturday came
round. On a fair day or a market day the clamours, the
reproaches, the taunts, the curses, were incessant; and it was
well if no booth was overturned and no head broken.637 No
merchant would contract to deliver goods without making some
stipulation about the quality of the coin in which he was to be
paid. Even men of business were often bewildered by the confusion
into which all pecuniary transactions were thrown. The simple and
the careless were pillaged without mercy by extortioners whose
demands grew even more rapidly than the money shrank. The price
of the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose
fast. The labourer found that the bit of metal which when he
received it was called a shilling would hardly, when he wanted to
purchase a pot of beer or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as
sixpence. Where artisans of more than usual intelligence were
collected together in great numbers, as in the dockyard at
Chatham, they were able to make their complaints heard and to
obtain some redress.638 But the ignorant and helpless peasant was
cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by
tale and another which would take it only by weight. Yet his
sufferings hardly exceeded those of the unfortunate race of
authors. Of the way in which obscure writers were treated we may
easily a judgment from the letters, still extant, of Dryden to
his bookseller Tonson. One day Tonson sends forty brass
shillings, to say nothing of clipped money. Another day he pays a
debt with pieces so bad that none of them will go. The great poet
sends them all back, and demands in their place guineas at
twenty-nine shillings each. "I expect," he says in one letter,
"good silver, not such as I have had formerly." "If you have any
silver that will go," he says in another letter, "my wife will be
glad of it. I lost thirty shillings or more by the last payment
of fifty pounds." These complaints and demands, which have been
preserved from destruction only by the eminence of the writer,
are doubtless merely a fair sample of the correspondence which
filled all the mail bags of England during several months.