The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 5

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The History of England from the Accession of James the Second

by Thomas Babington Macaulay

Volume V

(Chapters XXIII-XXV)

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH VOLUME.

I HAVE thought it right to publish that portion of the
continuation of the "History of England" which was fairly
transcribed and revised by Lord Macaulay. It is given to the
world precisely as it was left: no connecting link has been
added; no reference verified; no authority sought for or
examined. It would indeed have been possible, with the help I
might have obtained from his friends, to have supplied much that
is wanting; but I preferred, and I believe the public will
prefer, that the last thoughts of the great mind passed away from
among us should be preserved sacred from any touch but his own.
Besides the revised manuscript, a few pages containing the first
rough sketch of the last two months of William's reign are all
that is left. From this I have with some difficulty deciphered
the account of the death of William. No attempt has been made to
join it on to the preceding part, or to supply the corrections
which would have been given by the improving hand of the author.
But, imperfect as it must be, I believe it will be received with
pleasure and interest as a fit conclusion to the life of his
great hero.

I will only add my grateful thanks for the kind advice and
assistance given me by his most dear and valued friends, Dean
Milman and Mr. Ellis.

CHAPTER XXIII

Standing Armies--Sunderland--Lord Spencer--Controversy touching
Standing Armies--Meeting of Parliament--The King's Speech well
received; Debate on a Peace Establishment--Sunderland attacked--
The Nation averse to a Standing Army--Mutiny Act; the Navy Acts
concerning High Treason--Earl of Clancarty--Ways and Means;
Rights of the Sovereign in reference to Crown Lands--Proceedings
in Parliament on Grants of Crown Lands--Montague accused of
Peculation--Bill of Pains and Penalties against Duncombe--
Dissension between the houses--Commercial Questions--Irish
Manufactures--East India Companies--Fire at Whitehall--Visit of
the Czar--Portland's Embassy to France--The Spanish Succession--
The Count of Tallard's Embassy--Newmarket Meeting: the insecure
State of the Roads--Further Negotiations relating to the Spanish
Succession--The King goes to Holland--Portland returns from his
Embassy--William is reconciled to Marlborough

THE rejoicings, by which London, on the second of December 1697,
celebrated the return of peace and prosperity, continued till
long after midnight. On the following morning the Parliament met;
and one of the most laborious sessions of that age commenced.

Among the questions which it was necessary that the Houses should
speedily decide, one stood forth preeminent in interest and
importance. Even in the first transports of joy with which the
bearer of the treaty of Ryswick had been welcomed to England, men
had eagerly and anxiously asked one another what was to be done
with that army which had been formed in Ireland and Belgium, which
had learned, in many hard campaigns, to obey and to conquer, and
which now consisted of eighty-seven thousand excellent soldiers.
Was any part of this great force to be retained in the service of
the State? And, if any part, what part? The last two kings had,
without the consent of the legislature, maintained military
establishments in time of peace. But that they had done this in
violation of the fundamental laws of England was acknowledged by
all jurists, and had been expressly affirmed in the Bill of
Rights. It was therefore impossible for William, now that the
country was threatened by no foreign and no domestic enemy, to
keep up even a single battalion without the sanction of the
Estates of the Realm; and it might well be doubted whether such a
sanction would be given.

It is not easy for us to see this question in the light in which
it appeared to our ancestors.

No man of sense has, in our days, or in the days of our fathers,
seriously maintained that our island could be safe without an
army. And, even if our island were perfectly secure from attack,
an army would still be indispensably necessary to us. The growth
of the empire has left us no choice. The regions which we have
colonized or conquered since the accession of the House of
Hanover contain a population exceeding twenty-fold that which the
House of Stuart governed. There are now more English soldiers on
the other side of the tropic of Cancer in time of peace than
Cromwell had under his command in time of war. All the troops of
Charles II. would not have been sufficient to garrison the posts
which we now occupy in the Mediterranean Sea alone. The regiments
which defend the remote dependencies of the Crown cannot be duly
recruited and relieved, unless a force far larger than that which
James collected in the camp at Hounslow for the purpose of
overawing his capital be constantly kept up within the kingdom.
The old national antipathy to permanent military establishments,
an antipathy which was once reasonable and salutary, but which
lasted some time after it had become unreasonable and noxious,
has gradually yielded to the irresistible force of circumstances.
We have made the discovery, that an army may be so constituted as
to be in the highest degree efficient against an enemy, and yet
obsequious to the civil magistrate. We have long ceased to
apprehend danger to law and to freedom from the license of
troops, and from the ambition of victorious generals. An alarmist
who should now talk such language, as was common five generations
ago, who should call for the entire disbanding of the land force;
of the realm, and who should gravely predict that the warriors of
Inkerman and Delhi would depose the Queen, dissolve the
Parliament, and plunder the Bank, would be regarded as fit only
for a cell in Saint Luke's. But before the Revolution our
ancestors had known a standing army only as an instrument of
lawless power. Judging by their own experience, they thought it
impossible that such an army should exist without danger to the
rights both of the Crown and of the people. One class of
politicians was never weary of repeating that an Apostolic
Church, a loyal gentry, an ancient nobility, a sainted King, had
been foully outraged by the Joyces and the Prides; another class
recounted the atrocities committed by the Lambs of Kirke, and by
the Beelzebubs and Lucifers of Dundee; and both classes, agreeing
in scarcely any thing else, were disposcd to agree in aversion to
the red coats.

While such was the feeling of the nation, the King was, both as a
statesman and as a general, most unwilling to see that superb body
of troops which he had formed with infinite difficulty broken up
and dispersed. But, as to this matter, he could not absolutely
rely on the support of his ministers; nor could his ministers
absolutely rely on the support of that parliamentary majority
whose attachment had enabled them to confront enemies abroad and
to crush traitors at home, to restore a debased currency, and to
fix public credit on deep and solid foundations.

The difficulties of the King's situation are to be, in part at
least, attributed to an error which he had committed in the
preceding spring. The Gazette which announced that Sunderland been
appointed Chamberlain of the Royal Household, sworn of the Privy
Council, and named one of the Lords Justices who were to
administer the government during the summer had caused great
uneasiness among plain men who remembered all the windings and
doublings of his long career. In truth, his countrymen were unjust
to him. For they thought him, not only an unprincipled and
faithless politician, which he was, but a deadly enemy of the
liberties of the nation, which he was not. What he wanted was
simply to be safe, rich and great. To these objects he had been
constant through all the vicissitudes of his life. For these
objects he had passed from Church to Church and from faction to
faction, had joined the most turbulent of oppositions without any
zeal for freedom, and had served the most arbitrary of monarchs
without any zeal for monarchy; had voted for the Exclusion Bill
without being a Protestant, and had adored the Host without being
a Papist; had sold his country at once to both the great parties
which divided the Continent; had taken money from France, and had
sent intelligence to Holland. As far, however, as he could be said
to have any opinions, his opinions were Whiggish. Since his return
from exile, his influence had been generally exerted in favour of
the Whig party. It was by his counsel that the Great Seal had been
entrusted to Somers, that Nottingham had been sacrificed to
Russell, and that Montague had been preferred to Fox. It was by
his dexterous management that the Princess Anne had been detached
from the opposition, and that Godolphin had been removed from the
head of the hoard of Treasury. The party which Sunderland had done
so much to serve now held a new pledge for his fidelity. His only
son, Charles Lord Spencer, was just entering on public life. The
precocious maturity of the young man's intellectual and moral
character had excited hopes which were not destined to be
realized. His knowledge of ancient literature, and his skill in
imitating the styles of the masters of Roman eloquence, were
applauded by veteran scholars. The sedateness of his deportment
and the apparent regularity of his life delighted austere
moralists. He was known indeed to have one expensive taste; but it
was a taste of the most respectable kind. He loved books, and was
bent or forming the most magnificent private library in England.
While other heirs of noble houses were inspecting patterns of
steinkirks and sword knots, dangling after actresses, or betting
on fighting cocks, he was in pursuit of the Mentz editions of
Tully's Offices, of the Parmesan Statius, and of the inestimable
Virgin of Zarottus.1 It was natural that high expectations should
be formed of the virtue and wisdom of a youth whose very luxury
and prodigality had a grave and erudite air, and that even
discerning men should be unable to detect the vices which were
hidden under that show of premature sobriety.

Spencer was a Whig, unhappily for the Whig party, which, before
the unhonoured and unlamented close of his life, was more than
once brought to the verge of ruin by his violent temper and his
crooked politics. His Whiggism differed widely from that of his
father. It was not a languid, speculative, preference of one
theory of government to another, but a fierce and dominant
passion. Unfortunately, though an ardent, it was at the same time
a corrupt and degenerate, Whiggism; a Whiggism so narrow and
oligarchical as to be little, if at all, preferable to the worst
forms of Toryism. The young lord's imagination had been
fascinated by those swelling sentiments of liberty which abound
in the Latin poets and orators; and he, like those poets and
orators, meant by liberty something very different from the only
liberty which is of importance to the happiness of mankind. Like
them, he could see no danger to liberty except from kings. A
commonwealth, oppressed and pillaged by such men as Opimius and
Verres, was free, because it had no king. A member of the Grand
Council of Venice, who passed his whole life under tutelage and
in fear, who could not travel where he chose, or visit whom he
chose, or invest his property as he chose, whose path was beset
with spies, who saw at the corners of the streets the mouth of
bronze gaping for anonymous accusations against him, and whom the
Inquisitors of State could, at any moment, and for any or no
reason, arrest, torture, fling into the Grand Canal, was free,
because he had no king. To curtail, for the benefit of a small
privileged class, prerogatives which the Sovereign possesses and
ought to possess for the benefit of the whole nation, was the
object on which Spencer's heart was set. During many years he was
restrained by older and wiser men; and it was not till those whom
he had early been accustomed to respect had passed away, and till
he was himself at the head of affairs, that he openly attempted
to obtain for the hereditary nobility a precarious and invidious
ascendency in the State, at the expense both of the Commons and
of the Throne.

In 1695, Spencer had taken his seat in the House of Commons as
member for Tiverton, and had, during two sessions, conducted
himself as a steady and zealous Whig.

The party to which he had attached himself might perhaps have
reasonably considered him as a hostage sufficient to ensure the
good faith of his father; for the Earl was approaching that time
of life at which even the most ambitious and rapacious men
generally toil rather for their children than for themselves. But
the distrust which Sunderland inspired was such as no guarantee
could quiet. Many fancied that he was,--with what object they
never took the trouble to inquire,--employing the same arts which
had ruined James for the purpose of ruining William. Each prince
had had his weak side. One was too much a Papist, and the other
too much a soldier, for such a nation as this. The same
intriguing sycophant who had encouraged the Papist in one fatal
error was now encouraging the soldier in another. It might well
be apprehended that, under the influence of this evil counsellor,
the nephew might alienate as many hearts by trying to make
England a military country as the uncle had alienated by trying
to make her a Roman Catholic country.

The parliamentary conflict on the great question of a standing
army was preceded by a literary conflict. In the autumn of 1697
began a controversy of no common interest and importance. The
press was now free. An exciting and momentous political question
could be fairly discussed. Those who held uncourtly opinions
could express those opinions without resorting to illegal
expedients and employing the agency of desperate men. The
consequence was that the dispute was carried on, though with
sufficient keenness, yet, on the whole, with a decency which
would have been thought extraordinary in the days of the
censorship.

On this occasion the Tories, though they felt strongly, wrote but
little. The paper war was almost entirely carried on between two
sections of the Whig party. The combatants on both sides were
generally anonymous. But it was well known that one of the
foremost champions of the malecontent Whigs was John Trenchard,
son of the late Secretary of State. Preeminent among the
ministerial Whigs was one in whom admirable vigour and quickness
of intellect were united to a not less admirable moderation and
urbanity, one who looked on the history of past ages with the eye
of a practical statesman, and on the events which were passing
before him with the eye of a philosophical historian. It was not
necessary for him to name himself. He could be none but Somers.

The pamphleteers who recommended the immediate and entire
disbanding of the army had an easy task. If they were
embarrassed, it was only by the abundance of the matter from
which they had to make their selection. On their side were
claptraps and historical commonplaces without number, the
authority of a crowd of illustrious names, all the prejudices,
all the traditions, of both the parties in the state. These
writers laid it down as a fundamental principle of political
science that a standing army and a free constitution could not
exist together. What, they asked, had destroyed the noble
commonwealths of Greece? What had enslaved the mighty Roman
people? What had turned the Italian republics of the middle ages
into lordships and duchies? How was it that so many of the
kingdoms of modern Europe had been transformed from limited into
absolute monarchies? The States General of France, the Cortes of
Castile, the Grand Justiciary of Arragon, what had been fatal to
them all? History was ransacked for instances of adventurers who,
by the help of mercenary troops, had subjugated free nations or
deposed legitimate princes; and such instances were easily found.
Much was said about Pisistratus, Timophanes, Dionysius,
Agathocles, Marius and Sylla, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar,
Carthage besieged by her own mercenaries, Rome put up to auction
by her own Praetorian cohorts, Sultan Osman butchered by his own
Janissaries, Lewis Sforza sold into captivity by his own
Switzers. But the favourite instance was taken from the recent
history of our own land. Thousands still living had seen the
great usurper, who, strong in the power of the sword, had
triumphed over both royalty and freedom. The Tories were reminded
that his soldiers had guarded the scaffold before the Banqueting
House. The Whigs were reminded that those same soldiers had taken
the mace from the table of the House of Commons. From such evils,
it was said, no country could be secure which was cursed with a
standing army. And what were the advantages which could be set
off against such evils? Invasion was the bugbear with which the
Court tried to frighten the nation. But we were not children to
be scared by nursery tales. We were at peace; and, even in time
of war, an enemy who should attempt to invade us would probably
be intercepted by our fleet, and would assuredly, if he reached
our shores, be repelled by our militia. Some people indeed talked
as if a militia could achieve nothing great. But that base
doctrine was refuted by all ancient and all modern history. What
was the Lacedaemonian phalanx in the best days of Lacedaemon?
What was, the Roman legion in the best days of Rome? What were
the armies which conquered at Cressy, at Poitiers, at Agincourt,
at Halidon, or at Flodden? What was that mighty array which
Elizabeth reviewed at Tilbury? In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries Englishmen who did not live by the trade of
war had made war with success and glory. Were the English of the
seventeenth century so degenerate that they could not be trusted
to play the men for their own homesteads and parish churches?

For such reasons as these the disbanding of the forces was
strongly recommended. Parliament, it was said, might perhaps,
from respect and tenderness for the person of His Majesty, permit
him to have guards enough to escort his coach and to pace the
rounds before his palace. But this was the very utmost that it
would be right to concede. The defence of the realm ought to be
confided to the sailors and the militia. Even the Tower ought to
have no garrison except the trainbands of the Tower Hamlets.

It must be evident to every intelligent and dispassionate man
that these declaimers contradicted themselves. If an army
composed of regular troops really was far more efficient than an
army composed of husbandmen taken from the plough and burghers
taken from the counter, how could the country be safe with no
defenders but husbandmen and burghers, when a great prince, who
was our nearest neighbour, who had a few months before been our
enemy, and who might, in a few months, be our enemy again, kept
up not less than a hundred and fifty thousand regular troops? If,
on the other hand, the spirit of the English people was such that
they would, with little or no training, encounter and defeat the
most formidable array of veterans from the continent, was it not
absurd to apprehend that such a people could be reduced to
slavery by a few regiments of their own countrymen? But our
ancestors were generally so much blinded by prejudice that this
inconsistency passed unnoticed. They were secure where they ought
to have been wary, and timorous where they might well have been
secure. They were not shocked by hearing the same man maintain,
in the same breath, that, if twenty thousand professional
soldiers were kept up, the liberty and property of millions of
Englishmen would be at the mercy of the Crown, and yet that those
millions of Englishmen, fighting for liberty and property, would
speedily annihilate an invading army composed of fifty or sixty
thousand of the conquerors of Steinkirk and Landen. Whoever
denied the former proposition was called a tool of the Court.
Whoever denied the latter was accused of insulting and slandering
the nation.

Somers was too wise to oppose himself directly to the strong
current of popular feeling. With rare dexterity he took the tone,
not of an advocate, but of a judge. The danger which seemed so
terrible to many honest friends of liberty he did not venture to
pronounce altogether visionary. But he reminded his countrymen
that a choice between dangers was sometimes all that was left to
the wisest of mankind. No lawgiver had ever been able to devise a
perfect and immortal form of government. Perils lay thick on the
right and on the left; and to keep far from one evil was to draw
near to another. That which, considered merely with reference to
the internal polity of England, might be, to a certain extent,
objectionable, might be absolutely essential to her rank among
European Powers, and even to her independence. All that a
statesman could do in such a case was to weigh inconveniences
against each other, and carefully to observe which way the scale
leaned. The evil of having regular soldiers, and the evil of not
having them, Somers set forth and compared in a little treatise,
which was once widely renowned as the Balancing Letter, and which
was admitted, even by the malecontents, to be an able and
plausible composition. He well knew that mere names exercise a
mighty influence on the public mind; that the most perfect
tribunal which a legislator could construct would be unpopular if
it were called the Star Chamber; that the most judicious tax
which a financier could devise would excite murmurs if it were
called the Shipmoney; and that the words Standing Army then had
to English ears a sound as unpleasing as either Shipmoney or Star
Chamber. He declared therefore that he abhorred the thought of a
standing army. What he recommended was, not a standing, but a
temporary army, an army of which Parliament would annually fix
the number, an army for which Parliament would annually frame a
military code, an army which would cease to exist as soon as
either the Lords or the Commons should think that its services
were not needed. From such an army surely the danger to public
liberty could not by wise men be thought serious. On the other
hand, the danger to which the kingdom would be exposed if all the
troops were disbanded was such as might well disturb the firmest
mind. Suppose a war with the greatest power in Christendom to
break out suddenly, and to find us without one battalion of
regular infantry, without one squadron of regular cavalry; what
disasters might we not reasonably apprehend? It was idle to say
that a descent could not take place without ample notice, and
that we should have time to raise and discipline a great force.
An absolute prince, whose orders, given in profound secresy, were
promptly obeyed at once by his captains on the Rhine and on the
Scheld, and by his admirals in the Bay of Biscay and in the
Mediterranean, might be ready to strike a blow long before we
were prepared to parry it. We might be appalled by learning that
ships from widely remote parts, and troops from widely remote
garrisons, had assembled at a single point within sight of our
coast. To trust to our fleet was to trust to the winds and the
waves. The breeze which was favourable to the invader might
prevent our men of war from standing out to sea. Only nine years
ago this had actually happened. The Protestant wind, before which
the Dutch armament had run full sail down the Channel, had driven
King James's navy back into the Thames. It must then be
acknowledged to be not improbable that the enemy might land. And,
if he landed, what would he find? An open country; a rich
country; provisions everywhere; not a river but which could be
forded; no natural fastnesses such as protect the fertile plains
of Italy; no artificial fastnesses such as, at every step, impede
the progress of a conqueror in the Netherlands. Every thing must
then be staked on the steadiness of the militia; and it was
pernicious flattery to represent the militia as equal to a
conflict in the field with veterans whose whole life had been a
preparation for the day of battle. The instances which it was the
fashion to cite of the great achievements of soldiers taken from
the threshing floor and the shopboard were fit only for a
schoolboy's theme. Somers, who had studied ancient literature
like a man,--a rare thing in his time,--said that those instances
refuted the doctrine which they were meant to prove. He disposed
of much idle declamation about the Lacedaemonians by saying, most
concisely, correctly and happily, that the Lacedaemonian
commonwealth really was a standing army which threatened all the
rest of Greece. In fact, the Spartan had no calling except war.
Of arts, sciences and letters he was ignorant. The labour of the
spade and of the loom, and the petty gains of trade, he
contemptuously abandoned to men of a lower caste. His whole
existence from childhood to old age was one long military
training. Meanwhile the Athenian, the Corinthian, the Argive,
the Theban, gave his chief attention to his oliveyard or his
vineyard, his warehouse or his workshop, and took up his shield
and spear only for short terms and at long intervals. The
difference therefore between a Lacedaemonian phalanx and any
other phalanx was long as great as the difference between a
regiment of the French household troops and a regiment of the
London trainbands. Lacedaemon consequently continued to be
dominant in Greece till other states began to employ regular
troops. Then her supremacy was at an end. She was great while she
was a standing army among militias. She fell when she had to
contend with other standing armies. The lesson which is really to
be learned from her ascendency and from her decline is this, that
the occasional soldier is no match for the professional soldier.2

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