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

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 5

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The speech appeared to be well received; and during a short time
William flattered himself that the great fault, as he considered
it, of the preceding session would be repaired, that the army
would be augmented, and that he should be able, at the important
conjuncture which was approaching, to speak to foreign powers in
tones of authority, and especially to keep France steady to her
engagements. The Whigs of the junto, better acquainted with the
temper of the country and of the new House of Commons, pronounced
it impossible to carry a vote for a land force of more than ten
thousand men. Ten thousand men would probably be obtained if His
Majesty would authorise his servants to ask in his name for that
number, and to declare that with a smaller number he could not
answer for the public safety. William, firmly convinced that
twenty thousand would be too few, refused to make or empower
others to make a proposition which seemed to him absurd and
disgraceful. Thus, at a moment at which it was peculiarly
desirable that all who bore a part in the executive
administration should act cordially together, there was serious
dissension between him and his ablest councillors. For that
dissension neither he nor they can be severely blamed. They were
differently situated, and necessarily saw the same objects from
different points of view. He, as was natural, considered the
question chiefly as an European question. They, as was natural,
considered it chiefly as an English question. They had found the
antipathy to a standing army insurmountably strong even in the
late Parliament, a Parliament disposed to place large confidence
in them and in their master. In the new Parliament that
antipathy amounted almost to a mania. That liberty, law,
property, could never be secured while the Sovereign had a large
body of regular troops at his command in time of peace, and that
of all regular troops foreign troops were the most to be dreaded,
had, during the recent elections, been repeated in every town
hall and market place, and scrawled upon every dead wall. The
reductions of the preceding year, it was said, even if they had
been honestly carved into effect, would not have been sufficient;
and they had not been honestly carried into effect. On this
subject the ministers pronounced the temper of the Commons to be
such that, if any person high in office were to ask for what His
Majesty thought necessary, there would assuredly be a violent
explosion; the majority would probably be provoked into
disbanding all that remained of the army; and the kingdom would
be left without a single soldier. William, however, could not be
brought to believe that the case was so hopeless. He listened too
easily to some secret adviser, Sunderland was probably the man,
who accused Montague and Somers of cowardice and insincerity.
They had, it was whispered in the royal ear, a majority, whenever
they really wanted one. They were bent upon placing their friend
Littleton in the Speaker's chair; and they had carried their
point triumphantly. They would carry as triumphantly a vote for a
respectable military establishment if the honour of their master
and the safety of their country were as dear to them as the petty
interests of their own faction. It was to no purpose that the
King was told, what was nevertheless perfectly true, that not one
half of the members who had voted for Littleton, could, by any
art or eloquence, be induced to vote for an augmentation of the
land force. While he was urging his ministers to stand up
manfully against the popular prejudice, and while they were
respectfully representing to him that by so standing up they
should only make that prejudice stronger and more noxious, the
day came which the Commons had fixed for taking the royal speech
into consideration. The House resolved itself into a Committee.
The great question was instantly raised; What provision should be
made for the defence of the realm? It was naturally expected that
the confidential advisers of the Crown would propose something.
As they remained silent, Harley took the lead which properly
belonged to them, and moved that the army should not exceed seven
thousand men. Sir Charles Sedley suggested ten thousand. Vernon,
who was present, was of opinion that this number would have been
carved if it had been proposed by one who was known to speak on
behalf of the King. But few members cared to support an amendment
which was certain to be less pleasing to their constituents, and
did not appear to be more pleasing to the Court, than the
original motion. Harley's resolution passed the Committee. On the
morrow it was reported and approved. The House also resolved that
all the seven thousand men who were to be retained should be
natural born English subjects. Other votes were carried without a
single division either in the Committee or when the mace was on
the table.

The King's indignation and vexation were extreme. He was angry
with the opposition, with the ministers, with all England. The
nation seemed to him to be under a judicial infatuation, blind to
dangers which his sagacity perceived to be real, near and
formidable, and morbidly apprehensive of dangers which his
conscience told him were no dangers at all. The perverse
islanders were willing to trust every thing that was most
precious to them, their independence, their property, their laws,
their religion, to the moderation and good faith of France, to
the winds and the waves, to the steadiness and expertness of
battalions of ploughmen commanded by squires; and yet they were
afraid to trust him with the means of protecting them lest he
should use those means for the destruction of the liberties which
he had saved from extreme peril, which he had fenced with new
securities, which he had defended with the hazard of his life,
and which from the day of his accession he had never once
violated. He was attached, and not without reason, to the Blue
Dutch Foot Guards. That brigade had served under him for many
years, and had been eminently distinguished by courage,
discipline and fidelity. In December 1688 that brigade had been
the first in his army to enter the English capital, and had been
entrusted with the important duty of occupying Whitehall and
guarding the person of James. Eighteen months later, that brigade
had been the first to plunge into the waters of the Boyne. Nor
had the conduct of these veteran soldiers been less exemplary in
their quarters than in the field. The vote which required the
King to discard them merely because they were what he himself was
seemed to him a personal affront. All these vexations and
scandals he imagined that his ministers might have averted, if
they had been more solicitous for his honour and for the success
of his great schemes of policy, and less solicitous about their
own popularity. They, on the other hand, continued to assure him,
and, as far as can now be judged, to assure him with perfect
truth, that it was altogether out of their power to effect what
he wished. Something they might perhaps be able to do. Many
members of the House of Commons had said in private that seven
thousand men was too small a number. If His Majesty would let it
be understood that he should consider those who should vote for
ten thousand as having done him good service, there might be
hopes. But there could be no hope if gentlemen found that by
voting for ten thousand they should please nobody, that they
should be held up to the counties and towns which they
represented as turncoats and slaves for going so far to meet his
wishes, and that they should be at the same time frowned upon at
Kensington for not going farther. The King was not to be moved.
He had been too great to sink into littleness without a struggle.
He had been the soul of two great coalitions, the dread of
France, the hope of all oppressed nations. And was he to be
degraded into a mere puppet of the Harleys and the Hooves, a
petty prince who could neither help nor hurt, a less formidable
enemy and less valuable ally than the Elector of Brandenburg or
the Duke of Savoy? His spirit, quite as arbitrary and as
impatient of control as that of any of his predecessors, Stuart,
Tudor or Plantagenet, swelled high against this ignominious
bondage. It was well known at Versailles that he was cruelly
mortified and incensed; and, during a short time, a strange hope
was cherished there that, in the heat of his resentment, he might
be induced to imitate his uncles, Charles and James, to conclude
another treaty of Dover, and to sell himself into vassalage for a
subsidy which might make him independent of his niggardly and
mutinous Parliament. Such a subsidy, it was thought, might be
disguised under the name of a compensation for the little
principality of Orange, which Lewis had long been desirous to
purchase even at a fancy price. A despatch was drawn up
containing a paragraph by which Tallard was to be apprised of his
master's views, and instructed not to hazard any distinct
proposition, but to try the effect of cautious and delicate
insinuations, and, if possible, to draw William on to speak
first. This paragraph was, on second thoughts, cancelled; but
that it should ever have been written must be considered a most
significant circumstance.

It may with confidence be affirmed that William would never have
stooped to be the pensioner of France; but it was with difficulty
that he was, at this conjuncture, dissuaded from throwing up the
government of England. When first he threw out hints about
retiring to the Continent, his ministers imagined that he was
only trying to frighten them into making a desperate effort to
obtain for him an efficient army. But they soon saw reason to
believe that he was in earnest. That he was in earnest, indeed,
can hardly be doubted. For, in a confidential letter to Heinsius,
whom he could have no motive for deceiving, he intimated his
intention very clearly. "I foresee," he writes, "that I shall be
driven to take an extreme course, and that I shall see you again
in Holland sooner than I had imagined."16 In fact he had resolved
to go down to the Lords, to send for the Commons, and to make his
last speech from the throne. That speech he actually prepared and
had it translated. He meant to tell his hearers that he had come
to England to rescue their religion and their liberties; that,
for that end, he had been under the necessity of waging a long
and cruel war; that the war had, by the blessing of God, ended in
an honourable and advantageous peace; and that the nation might
now be tranquil and happy, if only those precautions were adopted
which he had on the first day of the session recommended as
essential to the public security. Since, however, the Estates of
the Realm thought fit to slight his advice, and to expose
themselves to the imminent risk of ruin, he would not be the
witness of calamities which he had not caused and which he could
not avert. He must therefore request the Houses to present to him
a bill providing for the government of the realm; he would pass
that bill, and withdraw from a post in which he could no longer
be useful, but he should always take a deep interest in the
welfare of England; and, if what he foreboded should come to
pass, if in some day of danger she should again need his
services, his life should be hazarded as freely as ever in her
defence.

When the King showed his speech to the Chancellor, that wise
minister forgot for a moment his habitual self-command. "This is
extravagance, Sir," he said: "this is madness. I implore your
Majesty, for the sake of your own honour, not to say to anybody
else what you have said to me." He argued the matter during two
hours, and no doubt lucidly and forcibly. William listened
patiently; but his purpose remained unchanged.

The alarm of the ministers seems to have been increased by
finding that the King's intention had been confided to
Marlborough, the very last man to whom such a secret would have
been imparted unless William had really made up his mind to
abdicate in favour of the Princess of Denmark. Somers had another
audience, and again began to expostulate. But William cut him
short. "We shall not agree, my Lord; my mind is made up." "Then,
Sir," said Somers, "I have to request that I may be excused from
assisting as Chancellor at the fatal act which Your Majesty
meditates. It was from my King that I received this seal; and I
beg that he will take it from me while he is still my King."

In these circumstances the ministers, though with scarcely the
faintest hope of success, determined to try what they could do to
meet the King's wishes. A select Committee had been appointed by
the House of Commons to frame a bill for the disbanding of all
the troops above seven thousand. A motion was made by one of the
Court party that this Committee should be instructed to
reconsider the number of men. Vernon acquitted himself well in
the debate. Montague spoke with even more than his wonted ability
and energy, but in vain. So far was he from being able to rally
round him such a majority as that which had supported him in the
preceding Parliament, that he could not count on the support even
of the placemen who sate at the same executive board with him.
Thomas Pelham, who had, only a few months before, been made a
Lord of the Treasury, tried to answer him. "I own," said Pelham,
"that last year I thought a large land force necessary; this year
I think such a force unnecessary; but I deny that I have been
guilty of any inconsistency. Last year the great question of the
Spanish succession was unsettled, and there was serious danger of
a general war. That question has now been settled in the best
possible way; and we may look forward to many years of peace." A
Whig of still greater note and authority, the Marquess of
Hartington, separated himself on this occasion from the junto.
The current was irresistible. At last the voices of those who
tried to speak for the Instruction were drowned by clamour. When
the question was put, there was a great shout of No, and the
minority submitted. To divide would have been merely to have
exposed their weakness.

By this time it became clear that the relations between the
executive government and the Parliament were again what they had
been before the year 1695. The history of our polity at this time
is closely connected with the history of one man. Hitherto
Montague's career had been more splendidly and uninterruptedly
successful than that of any member of the House of Commons, since
the House of Commons had begun to exist. And now fortune had
turned. By the Tories he had long been hated as a Whig; and the
rapidity of his rise, the brilliancy of his fame, and the
unvarying good luck which seemed to attend him, had made many
Whigs his enemies. He was absurdly compared to the upstart
favourites of a former age, Carr and Villiers, men whom he
resembled in nothing but in the speed with which he had mounted
from a humble to a lofty position. They had, without rendering
any service to the State, without showing any capacity for the
conduct of great affairs, been elevated to the highest dignities,
in spite of the murmurs of the whole nation, by the mere
partiality of the Sovereign. Montague owed every thing to his own
merit and to the public opinion of his merit. With his master he
appears to have had very little intercourse, and none that was
not official. He was in truth a living monument of what the
Revolution had done for the Country. The Revolution had found him
a young student in a cell by the Cam, poring on the diagrams
which illustrated the newly discovered laws of centripetal and
centrifugal force, writing little copies of verses, and indulging
visions of parsonages with rich glebes, and of closes in old
cathedral towns had developed in him new talents; had held out
to him the hope of prizes of a very different sort from a rectory
or a prebend. His eloquence had gained for him the ear of the
legislature. His skill in fiscal and commercial affairs had won
for him the confidence of the City. During four years he had been
the undisputed leader of the majority of the House of Commons;
and every one of those years he had made memorable by great
parliamentary victories, and by great public services. It should
seem that his success ought to have been gratifying to the
nation, and especially to that assembly of which he was the chief
ornament, of which indeed he might be called the creature. The
representatives of the people ought to have been well pleased to
find that their approbation could, in the new order of things, do
for the man whom they delighted to honour all that the mightiest
of the Tudors could do for Leicester, or the most arbitrary of
the Stuarts for Strafford. But, strange to say, the Commons soon
began to regard with an evil eve that greatness which was their
own work. The fault indeed was partly Montague's. With all his
ability, he had not the wisdom to avert, by suavity and
moderation, that curse, the inseparable concomitant of prosperity
and glory, which the ancients personified under the name of
Nemesis. His head, strong for all the purposes of debate and
arithmetical calculation, was weak against the intoxicating
influence of success and fame. He became proud even to insolence.
Old companions, who, a very few years before, had punned and
rhymed with him in garrets, had dined with him at cheap
ordinaries, had sate with him in the pit, and had lent him some
silver to pay his seamstress's bill, hardly knew their friend
Charles in the great man who could not forget for one moment that
he was First Lord of the Treasury, that he was Chancellor of the
Exchequer, that he had been a Regent of the kingdom, that he had
founded the Bank of England and the new East India Company, that
he had restored the currency, that he had invented the Exchequer
Bills, that he had planned the General Mortgage, and that he had
been pronounced, by a solemn vote of the Commons, to have
deserved all the favours which he had received from the Crown. It
was said that admiration of himself and contempt of others were
indicated by all his gestures and written in all the lines of his
face. The very way in which the little jackanapes, as the hostile
pamphleteers loved to call him, strutted through the lobby,
making the most of his small figure, rising on his toe, and
perking up his chin, made him enemies. Rash and arrogant sayings
were imputed to him, and perhaps invented for him. He was accused
of boasting that there was nothing that he could not carry
through the House of Commons, that he could turn the majority
round his finger. A crowd of libellers assailed him with much
more than political hatred. Boundless rapacity and corruption
were laid to his charge. He was represented as selling all the
places in the revenue department for three years' purchase. The
opprobrious nickname of Filcher was fastened on him. His luxury,
it was said, was not less inordinate than his avarice. There was
indeed an attempt made at this time to raise against the leading
Whig politicians and their allies, the great moneyed men of the
City, a cry much resembling the cry which, seventy or eighty
years later, was raised against the English Nabobs. Great wealth,
suddenly acquired, is not often enjoyed with moderation, dignity
and good taste. It is therefore not impossible that there may
have been some small foundation for the extravagant stories with
which malecontent pamphleteers amused the leisure of malecontent
squires. In such stories Montague played a conspicuous part. He
contrived, it was said, to be at once as rich as Croesus and as
riotous as Mark Antony. His stud and his cellar were beyond all
price. His very lacqueys turned up their noses at claret. He and
his confederates were described as spending the immense sums of
which they had plundered the public in banquets of four courses,
such as Lucullus might have eaten in the Hall of Apollo. A supper
for twelve Whigs, enriched by jobs, grants, bribes, lucky
purchases and lucky sales of stock, was cheap at eighty pounds.
At the end of every course all the fine linen on the table was
changed. Those who saw the pyramids of choice wild fowl imagined
that the entertainment had been prepared for fifty epicures at
the least. Only six birds' nests from the Nicobar islands were to
be had in London; and all the six, bought at an enormous price,
were smoking in soup on the board. These fables were destitute
alike of probability and of evidence. But Grub Street could
devise no fable injurious to Montague which was not certain to
find credence in more than half the manor houses and vicarages of
England.

It may seem strange that a man who loved literature passionately,
and rewarded literary merit munificently, should have been more
savagely reviled both in prose and verse than almost any other
politician in our history. But there is really no cause for
wonder. A powerful, liberal and discerning protector of genius
is very likely to be mentioned with honour long after his death,
but is very likely also to be most brutally libelled during his
life. In every age there will be twenty bad writers for one good
one; and every bad writer will think himself a good one. A ruler
who neglects all men of letters alike does not wound the self
love of any man of letters. But a ruler who shows favour to the
few men of letters who deserve it inflicts on the many the
miseries of disappointed hope, of affronted pride, of jealousy
cruel as the grave. All the rage of a multitude of authors,
irritated at once by the sting of want and by the sting of
vanity, is directed against the unfortunate patron. It is true
that the thanks and eulogies of those whom he has befriended will
be remembered when the invectives of those whom he has neglected
are forgotten. But in his own time the obloquy will probably make
as much noise and find as much credit as the panegyric. The name
of Maecenas has been made immortal by Horace and Virgil, and is
popularly used to designate an accomplished statesman, who lives
in close intimacy with the greatest poets and wits of his time,
and heaps benefits on them with the most delicate generosity. But
it may well be suspected that, if the verses of Alpinus and
Fannius, of Bavius and Maevius, had come down to us, we might see
Maecenas represented as the most niggardly and tasteless of human
beings, nay as a man who, on system, neglected and persecuted all
intellectual superiority. It is certain that Montague was thus
represented by contemporary scribblers. They told the world in
essays, in letters, in dialogues, in ballads, that he would do
nothing for anybody without being paid either in money or in some
vile services; that he not only never rewarded merit, but hated
it whenever he saw it; that he practised the meanest arts for the
purpose of depressing it; that those whom he protected and
enriched were not men of ability and virtue, but wretches
distinguished only by their sycophancy and their low
debaucheries. And this was said of the man who made the fortune
of Joseph Addison, and of Isaac Newton.

Nothing had done more to diminish the influence of Montague in
the House of Commons than a step which he had taken a few weeks
before the meeting of the Parliament. It would seem that the
result of the general election had made him uneasy, and that he
had looked anxiously round him for some harbour in which he might
take refuge from the storms which seemed to be gathering. While
his thoughts were thus employed, he learned that the Auditorship
of the Exchequer had suddenly become vacant. The Auditorship was
held for life. The duties were formal and easy. The gains were
uncertain; for they rose and fell with the public expenditure;
but they could hardly, in time of peace, and under the most
economical administration, be less than four thousand pounds a
year, and were likely, in time of war, to be more than double of
that sum. Montague marked this great office for his own. He could
not indeed take it, while he continued to be in charge of the
public purse. For it would have been indecent, and perhaps
illegal, that he should audit his own accounts. He therefore
selected his brother Christopher, whom he had lately made a
Commissioner of the Excise, to keep the place for him. There was,
as may easily be supposed, no want of powerful and noble
competitors for such a prize. Leeds had, more than twenty years
before, obtained from Charles the Second a patent granting the
reversion to Caermarthen. Godolphin, it was said, pleaded a
promise made by William. But Montague maintained, and was, it
seems, right in maintaining, that both the patent of Charles and
the promise of William had been given under a mistake, and that
the right of appointing the Auditor belonged, not to the Crown,
but to the Board of Treasury. He carried his point with
characteristic audacity and celerity. The news of the vacancy
reached London on a Sunday. On the Tuesday the new Auditor was
sworn in. The ministers were amazed. Even the Chancellor, with
whom Montague was on terms of intimate friendship, had not been
consulted. Godolphin devoured his ill temper. Caermarthen ordered
out his wonderful yacht, and hastened to complain to the King,
who was then at Loo. But what had been done could not be undone.

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