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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He was thanked in affectionate terms; the force which he asked
was voted; and large supplies were granted with little
difficulty. But when the Ways and Means were taken into
consideration, symptoms of discontent began to appear. Eighteen
months before, when the Commons had been employed in settling the
Civil List, many members had shown a very natural disposition to
complain of the amount of the salaries and fees received by
official men. Keen speeches had been made, and, what was much
less usual, had been printed; there had been much excitement out
of doors; but nothing had been done. The subject was now revived.
A report made by the Commissioners who had been appointed in the
preceding year to examine the public accounts disclosed some
facts which excited indignation, and others which raised grave
suspicion. The House seemed fully determined to make an extensive
reform; and, in truth, nothing could have averted such a reform
except the folly and violence of the reformers. That they should
have been angry is indeed not strange. The enormous gains, direct
and indirect, of the servants of the public went on increasing,
while the gains of every body else were diminishing. Rents were
falling; trade was languishing; every man who lived either on
what his ancestors had left him or on the fruits of his own
industry was forced to retrench. The placeman alone throve amidst
the general distress. "Look," cried the incensed squires, "at the
Comptroller of the Customs. Ten years ago, he walked, and we
rode. Our incomes have been curtailed; his salary has been
doubled; we have sold our horses; he has bought them; and now we
go on foot, and are splashed by his coach and six." Lowther
vainly endeavoured to stand up against the storm. He was heard
with little favour by the country gentlemen who had not long
before looked up to him as one of their leaders. He had left them;
he had become a courtier; he had two good places, one in the
Treasury, the other in the household. He had recently received
from the King's own hand a gratuity of two thousand guineas.147
It seemed perfectly natural that he should defend abuses by which
he profited. The taunts and reproaches with which he was assailed
were insupportable to his sensitive nature. He lost his head,
almost fainted away on the floor of the House, and talked about
righting himself in another place.148 Unfortunately no member
rose at this conjuncture to propose that the civil establishment
of the kingdom should be carefully revised, that sinecures should
be abolished, that exorbitant official incomes should be reduced,
and that no servant of the State should be allowed to exact,
under any pretence, any thing beyond his known and lawful
remuneration. In this way it would have been possible to diminish
the public burdens, and at the same time to increase the
efficiency of every public department. But unfortunately those
who were loudest in clamouring against the prevailing abuses were
utterly destitute of the qualities necessary for the work of
reform. On the twelfth of December, some foolish man, whose name
has not come down to us, moved that no person employed in any
civil office, the Speaker, Judges and Ambassadors excepted,
should receive more than five hundred pounds a year; and this
motion was not only carried, but carried without one dissentient
voice.149

Those who were most interested in opposing it doubtless saw that
opposition would, at that moment, only irritate the majority, and
reserved themselves for a more favourable time. The more
favourable time soon came. No man of common sense could, when his
blood had cooled, remember without shame that he had voted for a
resolution which made no distinction between sinecurists and
laborious public servants, between clerks employed in copying
letters and ministers on whose wisdom and integrity the fate of
the nation might depend. The salary of the Doorkeeper of the
Excise Office had been, by a scandalous job, raised to five
hundred a year. It ought to have been reduced to fifty. On the
other hand, the services of a Secretary of State who was well
qualified for his post would have been cheap at five thousand. If
the resolution of the Commons bad been carried into effect, both
the salary which ought not to have exceeded fifty pounds, and the
salary which might without impropriety have amounted to five
thousand, would have been fixed at five hundred. Such absurdity
must have shocked even the roughest and plainest foxhunter in the
House. A reaction took place; and when, after an interval of a
few weeks, it was proposed to insert in a bill of supply a clause
in conformity with the resolution of the twelfth of December, the
Noes were loud; the Speaker was of opinion that they had it; the
Ayes did not venture to dispute his opinion; the senseless plan
which had been approved without a division was rejected without a
division; and the subject was not again mentioned. Thus a
grievance so scandalous that none of those who profited by it
dared to defend it was perpetuated merely by the imbecility and
intemperance of those who attacked it.150

Early in the Session the Treaty of Limerick became the subject of
a grave and earnest discussion. The Commons, in the exercise of
that supreme power which the English legislature possessed over
all the dependencies of England, sent up to the Lords a bill
providing that no person should sit in the Irish Parliament,
should hold any Irish office, civil, military or ecclesiastical,
or should practise law or medicine in Ireland, till he had taken
the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and subscribed the
Declaration against Transubstantiation. The Lords were not more
inclined than the Commons to favour the Irish. No peer was
disposed to entrust Roman Catholics with political power. Nay, it
seems that no peer objected to the principle of the absurd and
cruel rule which excluded Roman Catholics from the liberal
professions. But it was thought that this rule, though
unobjectionable in principle, would, if adopted without some
exceptions, be a breach of a positive compact. Their Lordships
called for the Treaty of Limerick, ordered it to be read at the
table, and proceeded to consider whether the law framed by the
Lower House was consistent with the engagements into which the
government had entered. One discrepancy was noticed. It was
stipulated by the second civil article, that every person
actually residing in any fortress occupied by an Irish garrison,
should be permitted, on taking the Oath of Allegiance, to resume
any calling which he had exercised before the Revolution. It
would, beyond all doubt, have been a violation of this covenant
to require that a lawyer or a physician, who had been within the
walls of Limerick during the siege, should take the Oath of
Supremacy and subscribe the Declaration against
Transubstantiation, before he could receive fees. Holt was
consulted, and was directed to prepare clauses in conformity with
the terms of the capitulation.

The bill, as amended by Holt, was sent back to the Commons. They
at first rejected the amendment, and demanded a conference. The
conference was granted. Rochester, in the Painted Chamber,
delivered to the managers of the Lower House a copy of the Treaty
of Limerick, and earnestly represented the importance of
preserving the public faith inviolate. This appeal was one which
no honest man, though inflamed by national and religious
animosity, could resist. The Commons reconsidered the subject,
and, after hearing the Treaty read, agreed, with some slight
modifications, to what the Lords had proposed.151

The bill became a law. It attracted, at the time, little notice,
but was, after the lapse of several generations, the subject of a
very acrimonious controversy. Many of us can well remember how
strongly the public mind was stirred, in the days of George the
Third and George the Fourth, by the question whether Roman
Catholics should be permitted to sit in Parliament. It may be
doubted whether any dispute has produced stranger perversions of
history. The whole past was falsified for the sake of the
present. All the great events of three centuries long appeared to
us distorted and discoloured by a mist sprung from our own
theories and our own passions. Some friends of religious liberty,
not content with the advantage which they possessed in the fair
conflict of reason with reason, weakened their case by
maintaining that the law which excluded Irish Roman Catholics
from Parliament was inconsistent with the civil Treaty of
Limerick. The First article of that Treaty, it was said,
guaranteed to the Irish Roman Catholic such privileges in the
exercise of his religion as he had enjoyed in the time of Charles
the Second. In the time of Charles the Second no test excluded
Roman Catholics from the Irish Parliament. Such a test could not
therefore, it was argued, be imposed without a breach of public
faith. In the year 1828, especially, this argument was put
forward in the House of Commons as if it had been the main
strength of a cause which stood in need of no such support. The
champions of Protestant ascendency were well pleased to see the
debate diverted from a political question about which they were
in the wrong, to a historical question about which they were in
the right. They had no difficulty in proving that the first
article, as understood by all the contracting parties, meant only
that the Roman Catholic worship should be tolerated as in time
past. That article was drawn up by Ginkell; and, just before he
drew it up, he had declared that he would rather try the chance
of arms than consent that Irish Papists should be capable of
holding civil and military offices, of exercising liberal
professions, and of becoming members of municipal corporations.
How is it possible to believe that he would, of his own accord,
have promised that the House of Lords and the House of Commons
should be open to men to whom he would not open a guild of
skinners or a guild of cordwainers? How, again, is it possible to
believe that the English Peers would, while professing the most
punctilious respect for public faith, while lecturing the Commons
on the duty of observing public faith, while taking counsel with
the most learned and upright jurist of the age as to the best
mode of maintaining public faith, have committed a flagrant
violation of public faith and that not a single lord should have
been so honest or so factious as to protest against an act of
monstrous perfidy aggravated by hypocrisy? Or, if we could
believe this, how can we believe that no voice would have been
raised in any part of the world against such wickedness; that the
Court of Saint Germains and the Court of Versailles would have
remained profoundly silent; that no Irish exile, no English
malecontent, would have uttered a murmur; that not a word of
invective or sarcasm on so inviting a subject would have been
found in the whole compass of the Jacobite literature; and that
it would have been reserved for politicians of the nineteenth
century to discover that a treaty made in the seventeenth century
had, a few weeks after it had been signed, been outrageously
violated in the sight of all Europe?152

On the same day on which the Commons read for the first time the
bill which subjected Ireland to the absolute dominion of the
Protestant minority, they took into consideration another matter
of high importance. Throughout the country, but especially in the
capital, in the seaports and in the manufacturing towns, the
minds of men were greatly excited on the subject of the trade
with the East Indies; a fierce paper war had during some time
been raging; and several grave questions, both constitutional and
commercial, had been raised, which the legislature only could
decide.

It has often been repeated, and ought never to be forgotten, that
our polity differs widely from those politics which have, during
the last eighty years, been methodically constructed, digested
into articles, and ratified by constituent assemblies. It grew up
in a rude age. It is not to be found entire in any formal
instrument. All along the line which separates the functions of
the prince from those of the legislator there was long a disputed
territory. Encroachments were perpetually committed, and, if not
very outrageous, were often tolerated. Trespass, merely as
trespass, was commonly suffered to pass unresented. It was only
when the trespass produced some positive damage that the
aggrieved party stood on his right, and demanded that the
frontier should be set out by metes and bounds, and that the
landmarks should thenceforward be punctiliously respected.

Many of those points which had occasioned the most violent
disputes between our Sovereigns and their Parliaments had been
finally decided by the Bill of Rights. But one question, scarcely
less important than any of the questions which had been set at
rest for ever, was still undetermined. Indeed, that question was
never, as far as can now be ascertained, even mentioned in the
Convention. The King had undoubtedly, by the ancient laws of the
realm, large powers for the regulation of trade; but the ablest
judge would have found it difficult to say what was the precise
extent of those powers. It was universally acknowledged that it
belonged to the King to prescribe weights and measures, and to
coin money; that no fair or market could be held without
authority from him; that no ship could unload in any bay or
estuary which he had not declared to be a port. In addition to
his undoubted right to grant special commercial privileges to
particular places, he long claimed a right to grant special
commercial privileges to particular societies and to particular
individuals; and our ancestors, as usual, did not think it worth
their while to dispute this claim, till it produced serious
inconvenience. At length, in the reign of Elizabeth, the power of
creating monopolies began to be grossly abused; and, as soon as
it began to be grossly abused, it began to be questioned. The
Queen wisely declined a conflict with a House of Commons backed
by the whole nation. She frankly acknowledged that there was
reason for complaint; she cancelled the patents which had excited
the public clamours; and her people, delighted by this
concession, and by the gracious manner in which it had been made,
did not require from her an express renunciation of the disputed
prerogative.

The discontents which her wisdom had appeased were revived by the
dishonest and pusillanimous policy which her successor called
Kingcraft. He readily granted oppressive patents of monopoly.
When he needed the help of his Parliament, he as readily annulled
them. As soon as the Parliament had ceased to sit, his Great Seal
was put to instruments more odious than those which he had
recently cancelled. At length that excellent House of Commons
which met in 1623 determined to apply a strong remedy to the
evil. The King was forced to give his assent to a law which
declared monopolies established by royal authority to be null and
void. Some exceptions, however, were made, and, unfortunately,
were not very clearly defined. It was especially provided that
every Society of Merchants which had been instituted for the
purpose of carrying on any trade should retain all its legal
privileges.153 The question whether a monopoly granted by the
Crown to such a company were or were not a legal privilege was
left unsettled, and continued to exercise, during many years, the
ingenuity of lawyers.154 The nation, however, relieved at once
from a multitude of impositions and vexations which were
painfully felt every day at every fireside, was in no humour to
dispute the validity of the charters under which a few companies
to London traded with distant parts of the world.

Of these companies by far the most important was that which had
been, on the last day of the sixteenth century, incorporated by
Queen Elizabeth under the name of the Governor and Company of
Merchants of London trading to the East Indies. When this
celebrated body began to exist, the Mogul monarchy was at the
zenith of power and glory. Akbar, the ablest and best of the
princes of the House of Tamerlane, had just been borne, full of
years and honours, to a mausoleum surpassing in magnificence any
that Europe could show. He had bequeathed to his posterity an
empire containing more than twenty times the population and
yielding more than twenty times the revenue of the England
which, under our great Queen, held a foremost place among
European powers. It is curious and interesting to consider how
little the two countries, destined to be one day so closely
connected, were then known to each other. The most enlightened
Englishmen looked on India with ignorant admiration. The most
enlightened natives of India were scarcely aware that England
existed. Our ancestors had a dim notion of endless bazaars,
swarming with buyers and sellers, and blazing with cloth of gold,
with variegated silks and with precious stones; of treasuries
where diamonds were piled in heaps and sequins in mountains; of
palaces, compared with which Whitehall and Hampton Court were
hovels; of armies ten times as numerous as that which they had
seen assembled at Tilbury to repel the Armada. On the other hand,
it was probably not known to one of the statesmen in the Durbar
of Agra that there was near the setting sun a great city of
infidels, called London, where a woman reigned, and that she had
given to an association of Frank merchants the exclusive
privilege of freighting ships from her dominions to the Indian
seas. That this association would one day rule all India, from
the ocean to the everlasting snow, would reduce to profound
obedience great provinces which had never submitted to Akbar's
authority, would send Lieutenant Governors to preside in his
capital, and would dole out a monthly pension to his heir, would
have seemed to the wisest of European or of Oriental politicians
as impossible as that inhabitants of our globe should found an
empire in Venus or Jupiter.

Three generations passed away; and still nothing indicated that
the East India Company would ever become a great Asiatic
potentate. The Mogul empire, though undermined by internal causes
of decay, and tottering to its fall, still presented to distant
nations the appearance of undiminished prosperity and vigour.
Aurengzebe, who, in the same month in which Oliver Cromwell died,
assumed the magnificent title of Conqueror of the World,
continued to reign till Anne had been long on the English throne.
He was the sovereign of a larger territory than had obeyed any of
his predecessors. His name was great in the farthest regions of
the West. Here he had been made by Dryden the hero of a tragedy
which would alone suffice to show how little the English of that
age knew about the vast empire which their grandchildren were to
conquer and to govern. The poet's Mussulman princes make love in
the style of Amadis, preach about the death of Socrates, and
embellish their discourse with allusions to the mythological
stories of Ovid. The Brahminical metempyschosis is represented as
an article of the Mussulman creed; and the Mussulman Sultanas
burn themselves with their husbands after the Brahminical
fashion. This drama, once rapturously applauded by crowded
theatres, and known by heart to fine gentlemen and fine ladies,
is now forgotten. But one noble passage still lives, and is
repeated by thousands who know not whence it comes.155

Though nothing yet indicated the high political destiny of the
East India Company, that body had a great sway in the City of
London. The offices, which stood on a very small part of the
ground which the present offices cover, had escaped the ravages
of the fire. The India House of those days was a building of
timber and plaster, rich with the quaint carving and lattice-work
of the Elizabethan age. Above the windows was a painting which
represented a fleet of merchantmen tossing on the waves. The
whole edifice was surmounted by a colossal wooden seaman, who,
from between two dolphins, looked down on the crowds of
Leadenhall Street.156 In this abode, narrow and humble indeed
when compared with the vast labyrinth of passages and chambers
which now bears the same name, the Company enjoyed, during the
greater part of the reign of Charles the Second, a prosperity to
which the history of trade scarcely furnishes any parallel, and
which excited the wonder, the cupidity and the envious animosity
of the whole capital. Wealth and luxury were then rapidly
increasing. The taste for the spices, the tissues and the jewels
of the East became stronger day by day. Tea, which, at the time
when Monk brought the army of Scotland to London, had been handed
round to be stared at and just touched with the lips, as a great
rarity from China, was, eight years later, a regular article of
import, and was soon consumed in such quantities that financiers
began to consider it as a fit subject for taxation. The progress
which was making in the art of war had created an unprecedented
demand for the ingredients of which gunpowder is compounded. It
was calculated that all Europe would hardly produce in a year
saltpetre enough for the siege of one town fortified on the
principles of Vauban.157 But for the supplies from India, it was
said, the English government would be unable to equip a fleet
without digging up the cellars of London in order to collect the
nitrous particles from the walls.158 Before the Restoration
scarcely one ship from the Thames had ever visited the Delta of
the Ganges. But, during the twenty-three years which followed the
Restoration, the value of the annual imports from that rich and
populous district increased from eight thousand pounds to three
hundred thousand.

The gains of the body which had the exclusive possession of this
fast growing trade were almost incredible. The capital which had
been actually paid up did not exceed three hundred and seventy
thousand pounds; but the Company could, without difficulty,
borrow money at six per cent., and the borrowed money, thrown
into the trade, produced, it was rumoured, thirty per cent. The
profits were such that, in 1676, every proprietor received as a
bonus a quantity of stock equal to that which he held. On the
capital, thus doubled, were paid, during five years, dividends
amounting on an average to twenty per cent. annually. There had
been a time when a hundred pounds of the stock could be purchased
for sixty. Even in 1664 the price in the market was only seventy.
But in 1677 the price had risen to two hundred and forty-five; in
1681 it was three hundred; it subsequently rose to three hundred
and sixty; and it is said that some sales were effected at five
hundred.159

The enormous gains of the Indian trade might perhaps have excited
little murmuring if they had been distributed among numerous
proprietors. But while the value of the stock went on increasing,
the number of stockholders went on diminishing. At the tithe when
the prosperity of the Company reached the highest point, the
management was entirely in the hands of a few merchants of
enormous wealth. A proprietor then had a vote for every five
hundred pounds of stock that stood in his name. It is asserted in
the pamphlets of that age that five persons had a sixth part, and
fourteen persons a third part of the votes.160 More than one
fortunate speculator was said to derive an annual income of ten
thousand pounds from the monopoly; and one great man was pointed
out on the Royal Exchange as having, by judicious or lucky
purchases of stock, created in no long time an estate of twenty
thousand a year. This commercial grandee, who in wealth and in
the influence which attends wealth vied with the greatest nobles
of his time, was Sir Josiah Child. There were those who still
remembered him an apprentice, sweeping one of the counting houses
of the City. But from a humble position his abilities had raised
him rapidly to opulence, power and fame. At the time of the
Restoration he was highly considered in the mercantile world.
Soon after that event he published his thoughts on the philosophy
of trade. His speculations were not always sound; but they were
the speculations of an ingenious and reflecting man. Into
whatever errors he may occasionally have fallen as a theorist, it
is certain that, as a practical man of business, he had few
equals. Almost as soon as he became a member of the committee
which directed the affairs of the Company, his ascendency was
felt. Soon many of the most important posts, both in Leadenhall
Street and in the factories of Bombay and Bengal, were filled by
his kinsmen and creatures. His riches, though expended with
ostentatious profusion, continued to increase and multiply. He
obtained a baronetcy; he purchased a stately seat at Wanstead;
and there he laid out immense sums in excavating fishponds, and
in planting whole square miles of barren land with walnut trees.
He married his daughter to the eldest son of the Duke of
Beaufort, and paid down with her a portion of fifty thousand
pounds.161