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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The Savoy was another place of the same kind, smaller indeed, and
less renowned, but inhabited by a not less lawless population. An
unfortunate tailor, who ventured to go thither for the purpose of
demanding payment of a debt, was set upon by the whole mob of
cheats, ruffians and courtesans. He offered to give a full
discharge to his debtor and a treat to the rabble, but in vain.
He had violated their franchises; and this crime was not to be
pardoned. He was knocked down, stripped, tarred, feathered. A
rope was tied round his waist. He was dragged naked up and down
the streets amidst yells of "A bailiff! A bailiff!" Finally he
was compelled to kneel down and to curse his father and mother.
Having performed this ceremony he was permitted,--and the
permission was blamed by many of the Savoyards,--to limp home
without a rag upon him.789 The Bog of Allen, the passes of the
Grampians, were not more unsafe than this small knot of lanes,
surrounded by the mansions of the greatest nobles of a
flourishing and enlightened kingdom.

At length, in 1697, a bill for abolishing the franchises of these
places passed both Houses, and received the royal assent. The
Alsatians and Savoyards were furious. Anonymous letters,
containing menaces of assassination, were received by members of
Parliament who had made themselves conspicuous by the zeal with
which they had supported the bill; but such threats only
strengthened the general conviction that it was high time to
destroy these nests of knaves and ruffians. A fortnight's grace
was allowed; and it was made known that, when that time had
expired, the vermin who had been the curse of London would be
unearthed and hunted without mercy. There was a tumultuous flight
to Ireland, to France, to the Colonies, to vaults and garrets in
less notorious parts of the capital; and when, on the prescribed
day, the Sheriff's officers ventured to cross the boundary, they
found those streets where, a few weeks before, the cry of "A
writ!" would have drawn together a thousand raging bullies and
vixens, as quiet as the cloister of a cathedral.790

On the sixteenth of April, the King closed the session with a
speech, in which he returned warm and well merited thanks to the
Houses for the firmness and wisdom which had rescued the nation
from commercial and financial difficulties unprecedented in our
history. Before he set out for the Continent, he conferred some
new honours, and made some new ministerial arrangements. Every
member of the Whig junto was distinguished by some conspicuous
mark of royal favour. Somers delivered up the seal, of which he
was Keeper; he received it back again with the higher title of
Chancellor, and was immediately commanded to affix it to a
patent, by which he was created Baron Somers of Evesham.791
Russell became Earl of Orford and Viscount Barfleur. No English
title had ever before been taken from a place of battle lying
within a foreign territory. But the precedent then set has been
repeatedly followed; and the names of Saint Vincent, Trafalgar,
Camperdown, and Douro are now borne by the successors of great
commanders. Russell seems to have accepted his earldom, after his
fashion, not only without gratitude, but grumblingly, and as if
some great wrong had been done him. What was a coronet to him? He
had no child to inherit it. The only distinction which he should
have prized was the garter; and the garter had been given to
Portland. Of course, such things were for the Dutch; and it was
strange presumption in an Englishman, though he might have won a
victory which had saved the State, to expect that his pretensions
would be considered till all the Mynheers about the palace had
been served.792

Wharton, still retaining his place of Comptroller of the
Household, obtained the lucrative office of Chief Justice in
Eyre, South of Trent; and his brother, Godwin Wharton, was made a
Lord of the Admiralty.793

Though the resignation of Godolphin had been accepted in
October, no new commission of Treasury was issued till after the
prorogation. Who should be First Commissioner was a question long
and fiercely disputed. For Montague's faults had made him many
enemies, and his merits many more, Dull formalists sneered at him
as a wit and poet, who, no doubt, showed quick parts in debate,
but who had already been raised far higher than his services
merited or than his brain would bear. It would be absurd to place
such a young coxcomb, merely because he could talk fluently and
cleverly, in an office on which the wellbeing of the kingdom
depended. Surely Sir Stephen Fox was, of all the Lords of the
Treasury, the fittest to be at the head of the Board. He was an
elderly man, grave, experienced, exact, laborious; and he had
never made a verse in his life. The King hesitated during a
considerable time between the two candidates; but time was all in
Montague's favour; for, from the first to the last day of the
session, his fame was constantly rising. The voice of the House
of Commons and of the City loudly designated him as preeminently
qualified to be the chief minister of finance. At length Sir
Stephen Fox withdrew from the competition, though not with a very
good grace. He wished it to be notified in the London Gazette
that the place of First Lord had been offered to him, and
declined by him. Such a notification would have been an affront
to Montague; and Montague, flushed with prosperity and glory, was
not in a mood to put up with affronts. The dispute was
compromised. Montague became First Lord of the Treasury; and the
vacant seat at the Board was filled by Sir Thomas Littleton, one
of the ablest and most consistent Whigs in the House of Commons.
But, from tenderness to Fox, these promotions were not announced
in the Gazette.794

Dorset resigned the office of Chamberlain, but not in ill humour,
and retired loaded with marks of royal favour. He was succeeded
by Sunderland, who was also appointed one of the Lords Justices,
not without much murmuring from various quarters.795 To the
Tories Sunderland was an object of unmixed detestation. Some of
the Whig leaders had been unable to resist his insinuating
address; and others were grateful for the services which he had
lately rendered to the party. But the leaders could not restrain
their followers. Plain men, who were zealous for civil liberty
and for the Protestant religion, who were beyond the range of
Sunderland's irresistible fascination, and who knew that he had
sate in the High Commission, concurred in the Declaration of
Indulgence, borne witness against the Seven Bishops, and received
the host from a Popish priest, could not, without indignation and
shame, see him standing, with the staff in his hand, close to the
throne. Still more monstrous was it that such a man should be
entrusted with the administration of the government during the
absence of the Sovereign. William did not understand these
feelings. Sunderland was able; he was useful; he was unprincipled
indeed; but so were all the English politicians of the generation
which had learned, under the sullen tyranny of the Saints, to
disbelieve in virtue, and which had, during the wild jubilee of
the Restoration, been utterly dissolved in vice. He was a fair
specimen of his class, a little worse, perhaps, than Leeds or
Godolphin, and about as bad as Russell or Marlborough. Why he was
to be hunted from the herd the King could not imagine.

Notwithstanding the discontent which was caused by Sunderland's
elevation, England was, during this summer, perfectly quiet and
in excellent temper. All but the fanatical Jacobites were elated
by the rapid revival of trade and by the near prospect of peace.
Nor were Ireland and Scotland less tranquil.

In Ireland nothing deserving to be minutely related had taken
place since Sidney had ceased to be Lord Lieutenant. The
government had suffered the colonists to domineer unchecked over
the native population; and the colonists had in return been
profoundly obsequious to the government. The proceedings of the
local legislature which sate at Dublin had been in no respect
more important or more interesting than the proceedings of the
Assembly of Barbadoes. Perhaps the most momentous event in the
parliamentary history of Ireland at this time was a dispute
between the two Houses which was caused by a collision between
the coach of the Speaker and the coach of the Chancellor. There
were, indeed, factions, but factions which sprang merely from
personal pretensions and animosities. The names of Whig and Tory
had been carried across Saint George's Channel, but had in the
passage lost all their meaning. A man who was called a Tory at
Dublin would have passed at Westminster for as stanch a Whig as
Wharton. The highest Churchmen in Ireland abhorred and dreaded
Popery so much that they were disposed to consider every
Protestant as a brother. They remembered the tyranny of James,
the robberies, the burnings, the confiscations, the brass money,
the Act of Attainder, with bitter resentment. They honoured
William as their deliverer and preserver. Nay, they could not
help feeling a certain respect even for the memory of Cromwell;
for, whatever else he might have been, he had been the champion
and the avenger of their race. Between the divisions of England,
therefore, and the divisions of Ireland, there was scarcely any
thing in common. In England there were two parties, of the same
race and religion, contending with each other. In Ireland there
were two castes, of different races and religions, one trampling
on the other.

Scotland too was quiet. The harvest of the last year had indeed
been scanty; and there was consequently much suffering. But the
spirit of the nation was buoyed up by wild hopes, destined to end
in cruel disappointment. A magnificent daydream of wealth and
empire so completely occupied the minds of men that they hardly
felt the present distress. How that dream originated, and by how
terrible an awakening it was broken, will be related hereafter.

In the autumn of 1696 the Estates of Scotland met at Edinburgh.
The attendance was thin; and the session lasted only five weeks.
A supply amounting to little more than a hundred thousand pounds
sterling was voted. Two Acts for the securing of the government
were passed. One of those Acts required all persons in public
trust to sign an Association similar to the Association which had
been so generally subscribed in the south of the island. The
other Act provided that the Parliament of Scotland should not be
dissolved by the death of the King. But by far the most important
event of this short session was the passing of the Act for the
settling of Schools. By this memorable law it was, in the Scotch
phrase, statuted and ordained that every parish in the realm
should provide a commodious schoolhouse and should pay a moderate
stipend to a schoolmaster. The effect could not be immediately
felt. But, before one generation had passed away, it began to be
evident that the common people of Scotland were superior in
intelligence to the common people of any other country in Europe.
To whatever land the Scotchman might wander, to whatever calling
he might betake himself, in America or in India, in trade or in
war, the advantage which he derived from his early training
raised him above his competitors. If he was taken into a
warehouse as a porter, he soon became foreman. If he enlisted in
the army, he soon became a serjeant. Scotland, meanwhile, in
spite of the barrenness of her soil and the severity of her
climate, made such progress in agriculture, in manufactures, in
commerce, in letters, in science, in all that constitutes
civilisation, as the Old World had never seen equalled, and as
even the New World has scarcely seen surpassed.

This wonderful change is to be attributed, not indeed solely, but
principally, to the national system of education. But to the men
by whom that system was established posterity owes no gratitude.
They knew not what they were doing. They were the unconscious
instruments of enlightening the understandings and humanising the
hearts of millions. But their own understandings were as dark and
their own hearts as obdurate as those of the Familiars of the
Inquisition at Lisbon. In the very month in which the Act for the
settling of Schools
was touched with the sceptre, the rulers of the Church and State
in Scotland began to carry on with vigour two persecutions worthy
of the tenth century, a persecution of witches and a persecution
of infidels. A crowd of wretches, guilty only of being old and
miserable, were accused of trafficking with the devil. The Privy
Council was not ashamed to issue a Commission for the trial of
twenty-two of these poor creatures.796 The shops of the
booksellers of Edinburgh were strictly searched for heretical
works. Impious books, among which the sages of the Presbytery
ranked Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, were strictly
suppressed.797 But the destruction of mere paper and sheepskin
would not satisfy the bigots. Their hatred required victims who
could feel, and was not appeased till they had perpetrated a
crime such as has never since polluted the island.

A student of eighteen, named Thomas Aikenhead, whose habits were
studious and whose morals were irreproachable, had, in the course
of his reading, met with some of the ordinary arguments against
the Bible. He fancied that he had lighted on a mine of wisdom
which had been hidden from the rest of mankind, and, with the
conceit from which half educated lads of quick parts are seldom
free, proclaimed his discoveries to four or five of his
companions. Trinity in unity, he said, was as much a
contradiction as a square circle. Ezra was the author of the
Pentateuch. The Apocalypse was an allegorical book about the
philosopher's stone. Moses had learned magic in Egypt.
Christianity was a delusion which would not last till the year
1800. For this wild talk, of which, in all probability, he would
himself have been ashamed long before he was five and twenty, he
was prosecuted by the Lord Advocate. The Lord Advocate was that
James Stewart who had been so often a Whig and so often a
Jacobite that it is difficult to keep an account of his
apostasies. He was now a Whig for the third if not for the fourth
time. Aikenhead might undoubtedly have been, by the law of
Scotland, punished with imprisonment till he should retract his
errors and do penance before the congregation of his parish; and
every man of sense and humanity would have thought this a
sufficient punishment for the prate of a forward boy. But
Stewart, as cruel as he was base, called for blood. There was
among the Scottish statutes one which made it a capital crime to
revile or curse the Supreme Being or any person of the Trinity.
Nothing that Aikenhead had said could, without the most violent
straining, be brought within the scope of this statute. But the
Lord Advocate exerted all his subtlety. The poor youth at the bar
had no counsel. He was altogether unable to do justice to his own
cause. He was convicted, and sentenced to be hanged and buried at
the foot of the gallows. It was in vain that he with tears
abjured his errors and begged piteously for mercy. Some of those
who saw him in his dungeon believed that his recantation was
sincere; and indeed it is by no means improbable that in him, as
in many other pretenders to philosophy who imagine that they have
completely emancipated themselves from the religion of their
childhood, the near prospect of death may have produced an entire
change of sentiment. He petitioned the Privy Council that, if his
life could not be spared, he might be allowed a short respite to
make his peace with the God whom he had offended. Some of the
Councillors were for granting this small indulgence. Others
thought that it ought not to be granted unless the ministers of
Edinburgh would intercede. The two parties were evenly balanced;
and the question was decided against the prisoner by the casting
vote of the Chancellor. The Chancellor was a man who has been
often mentioned in the course of this history, and never
mentioned with honour. He was that Sir Patrick Hume whose
disputatious and factious temper had brought ruin on the
expedition of Argyle, and had caused not a little annoyance to
the government of William. In the Club which had braved the King
and domineered over the Parliament there had been no more noisy
republican. But a title and a place had produced a wonderful
conversion. Sir Patrick was now Lord Polwarth; he had the custody
of the Great Seal of Scotland; he presided in the Privy Council;
and thus he had it in his power to do the worst action of his bad
life.

It remained to be seen how the clergy of Edinburgh would act.
That divines should be deaf to the entreaties of a penitent who
asks, not for pardon, but for a little more time to receive their
instructions and to pray to Heaven for the mercy which cannot be
extended to him on earth, seems almost incredible. Yet so it was.
The ministers demanded, not only the poor boy's death, but his
speedy death, though it should be his eternal death. Even from
their pulpits they cried out for cutting him off. It is probable
that their real reason for refusing him a respite of a few days
was their apprehension that the circumstances of his case might
be reported at Kensington, and that the King, who, while reciting
the Coronation Oath, had declared from the throne that he would
not be a persecutor, might send down positive orders that the
sentence should not be executed. Aikenhead was hanged between
Edinburgh and Leith. He professed deep repentance, and suffered
with the Bible in his hand. The people of Edinburgh, though
assuredly not disposed to think lightly of his offence, were
moved to compassion by his youth, by his penitence, and by the
cruel haste with which he was hurried out of the world. It seems
that there was some apprehension of a rescue; for a strong body
of fusileers was under arms to support the civil power. The
preachers who were the boy's murderers crowded round him at the
gallows, and, while he was struggling in the last agony, insulted
Heaven with prayers more blasphemous than any thing that he had
ever uttered. Wodrow has told no blacker story of Dundee.798

On the whole, the British islands had not, during ten years, been
so free from internal troubles as when William, at the close of
April 1697, set out for the Continent. The war in the Netherlands
was a little, and but a little, less languid than in the
preceding year. The French generals opened the campaign by taking
the small town of Aeth. They then meditated a far more important
conquest. They made a sudden push for Brussels, and would
probably have succeeded in their design but for the activity of
William. He was encamped on ground which lies within sight of the
Lion of Waterloo, when he received, late in the evening,
intelligence that the capital of the Netherlands was in danger.
He instantly put his forces in motion, marched all night, and,
having traversed the field destined to acquire, a hundred and
eighteen years later, a terrible renown, and threaded the long
defiles of the Forest of Soignies, he was at ten in the morning
on the spot from which Brussels had been bombarded two years
before, and would, if he had been only three hours later, have
been bombarded again. Here he surrounded himself with
entrenchments which the enemy did not venture to attack. This was
the most important military event which, during that summer, took
place in the Low Countries. In both camps there was an
unwillingness to run any great risk on the eve of a general
pacification.

Lewis had, early in the spring, for the first time during his
long reign, spontaneously offered equitable and honourable
conditions to his foes. He had declared himself willing to
relinquish the conquests which he had made in the course of the
war, to cede Lorraine to its own Duke, to give back Luxemburg to
Spain, to give back Strasburg to the Empire and to acknowledge
the existing government of England.799

Those who remembered the great woes which his faithless and
merciless ambition had brought on Europe might well suspect that
this unwonted moderation was not to be ascribed to sentiments of
justice or humanity. But, whatever might be his motive for
proposing such terms, it was plainly the interest and the duty of
the Confederacy to accept them. For there was little hope indeed
of wringing from him by war concessions larger than those which
he now tendered as the price of peace. The most sanguine of his
enemies could hardly expect a long series of campaigns as
successful as the campaign of 1695. Yet in a long series of
campaigns, as successful as that of 1695, the allies would hardly
be able to retake all that he now professed himself ready to
restore. William, who took, as usual, a clear and statesmanlike
view of the whole situation, now gave his voice as decidedly for
concluding peace as he had in former years given it for
vigorously prosecuting the war; and he was backed by the public
opinion both of England and of Holland. But, unhappily, just at
the time when the two powers which alone, among the members of
the coalition, had manfully done their duty in the long struggle,
were beginning to rejoice in the near prospect of repose, some of
those governments which had never furnished their full
contingents, which had never been ready in time, which had been
constantly sending excuses in return for subsidies, began to
raise difficulties such as seemed likely to make the miseries of
Europe eternal.

Spain had, as William, in the bitterness of his spirit, wrote to
Heinsius, contributed nothing to the common cause but
rodomontades. She had made no vigorous effort even to defend her
own territories against invasion. She would have lost Flanders
and Brabant but for the English and Dutch armies. She would have
lost Catalonia but for the English and Dutch fleets. The Milanese
she had saved, not by arms, but by concluding, in spite of the
remonstrances of the English and Dutch governments, an
ignominious treaty of neutrality. She had not a ship of war able
to weather a gale. She had not a regiment that was not ill paid
and ill disciplined, ragged and famished. Yet repeatedly, within
the last two years, she had treated both William and the States
General with an impertinence which showed that she was altogether
ignorant of her place among states. She now became punctilious,
demanded from Lewis concessions which the events of the war gave
her no right to expect, and seemed to think it hard that allies,
whom she was constantly treating with indignity, were not willing
to lavish their blood and treasure for her during eight years
more.

The conduct of Spain is to be attributed merely to arrogance and
folly. But the unwillingness of the Emperor to consent even to
the fairest terms of accommodation was the effect of selfish
ambition. The Catholic King was childless; he was sickly; his
life was not worth three years' purchase; and when he died, his
dominions would be left to be struggled for by a crowd of
competitors. Both the House of Austria and the House of Bourbon
had claims to that immense heritage. It was plainly for the
interest of the House of Austria that the important day, come
when it might, should find a great European coalition in arms
against the House of Bourbon. The object of the Emperor therefore
was that the war should continue to be carried on, as it had
hitherto been carried on, at a light charge to him and a heavy
charge to England and Holland, not till just conditions of peace
could be obtained, but simply till the King of Spain should die.
"The ministers of the Emperor," William wrote to Heinsius, "ought
to be ashamed of their conduct. It is intolerable that a
government which is doing every thing in its power to make the
negotiations fail, should contribute nothing to the common
defence."800

It is not strange that in such circumstances the work of
pacification should have made little progress. International law,
like other law, has its chicanery, its subtle pleadings, its
technical forms, which may too easily be so employed as to make
its substance inefficient. Those litigants therefore who did not
wish the litigation to come to a speedy close had no difficulty
in interposing delays. There was a long dispute about the place
where the conferences should be held. The Emperor proposed Aix la
Chapelle. The French objected, and proposed the Hague. Then the
Emperor objected in his turn. At last it was arranged that the
ministers of the Allied Powers should meet at the Hague, and that
the French plenipotentiaries should take up their abode five
miles off at Delft.801 To Delft accordingly repaired Harlay, a
man of distinguished wit and good breeding, sprung from one of
the great families of the robe; Crecy, a shrewd, patient and
laborious diplomatist; and Cailleres, who, though he was named
only third in the credentials, was much better informed than
either of his colleagues touching all the points which were
likely to be debated.802 At the Hague were the Earl of Pembroke
and Edward, Viscount Villiers, who represented England. Prior
accompanied them with the rank of Secretary. At the head of the
Imperial Legation was Count Kaunitz; at the head of the Spanish
Legation was Don Francisco Bernardo de Quiros; the ministers of
inferior rank it would be tedious to enumerate.803