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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This bold stroke placed Montague's fortune, in the lower sense of
the word, out of hazard, but increased the animosity of his
enemies and cooled the zeal of his adherents. In a letter written
by one of his colleagues, Secretary Vernon, on the day after the
appointment, the Auditorship is described as at once a safe and
lucrative place. "But I thought," Vernon proceeds, "Mr. Montague
was too aspiring to stoop to any thing below the height he was
in, and that he least considered profit." This feeling was no
doubt shared by many of the friends of the ministry. It was plain
that Montague was preparing a retreat for himself. This flinching
of the captain, just on the eve of a perilous campaign, naturally
disheartened the whole army. It deserves to be remarked that,
more than eighty years later, another great parliamentary leader
was placed in a very similar situation. The younger William Pitt
held in 1784 the same offices which Montague had held in 1698.
Pitt was pressed in 1784 by political difficulties not less than
those with which Montague had contended in 1698. Pitt was also in
1784 a much poorer man than Montague in 1698. Pitt, in 1784, like
Montage in 1698, had at his own absolute disposal a lucrative
sinecure place in the Exchequer. Pitt gave away the office which
would have made him an opulent man, and gave it away in such a
manner as at once to reward unfortunate merit, and to relieve the
country from a burden. For this disinterestedness he was repaid
by the enthusiastic applause of his followers, by the enforced
respect of his opponents, and by the confidence which, through
all the vicissitudes of a chequered and at length disastrous
career, the great body of Englishmen reposed in his public spirit
and in his personal integrity. In the intellectual qualities of a
statesman Montague was probably not inferior to Pitt. But the
magnanimity, the dauntless courage, the contempt for riches and
for baubles, to which, more than to any intellectual quality,
Pitt owed his long ascendency, were wanting to Montague.

The faults of Montague were great; but his punishment was cruel.
It was indeed a punishment which must have been more bitter than
the bitterness of death to a man whose vanity was exquisitely
sensitive, and who had been spoiled by early and rapid success
and by constant prosperity. Before the new Parliament had been a
month sitting it was plain that his empire was at an end. He
spoke with the old eloquence; but his speeches no longer called
forth the old response. Whatever he proposed was maliciously
scrutinised. The success of his budget of the preceding year had
surpassed all expectation. The two millions which he had
undertaken to find had been raised with a rapidity which seemed
magical. Yet for bringing the riches of the City, in an
unprecedented flood, to overflow the Exchequer he was reviled as
if his scheme had failed more ludicrously than the Tory Land
Bank. Emboldened by his unpopularity, the Old East India Company
presented a petition praying that the General Society Act, which
his influence and eloquence had induced the late Parliament to
pass, might be extensively modified. Howe took the matter up. It
was moved that leave should be given to bring in a bill according
to the prayer of the petition; the motion was carried by a
hundred and seventy-five votes to a hundred and forty-eight; and
the whole question of the trade with the Eastern seas was
reopened. The bill was brought in, but was, with great difficulty
and by a very small majority, thrown out on the second reading.17
On other financial questions Montague, so lately the oracle of
the Committee of Supply, was now heard with malevolent distrust.
If his enemies were unable to detect any flaw in his reasonings
and calculations, they could at least whisper that Mr. Montague
was very cunning, that it was not easy to track him, but that it
might be taken for granted that for whatever he did he had some
sinister motive, and that the safest course was to negative
whatever he proposed. Though that House of Commons was economical
even to a vice, the majority preferred paying high interest to
paying low interest, solely because the plan for raising money at
low interest had been framed by him. In a despatch from the Dutch
embassy the States General were informed that many of the votes
of that session which had caused astonishment out of doors were
to be ascribed to nothing but to the bitter envy which the
ability and fame of Montague had excited. It was not without a
hard struggle and a sharp pang that the first Englishman who has
held that high position which has now been long called the
Leadership of the House of Commons submitted to be deposed. But
he was set upon with cowardly malignity by whole rows of small
men none of whom singly would have dared to look him in the face.
A contemporary pamphleteer compared him to an owl in the sunshine
pursued and pecked to death by flights of tiny birds. On one
occasion he was irritated into uttering an oath. Then there was
a cry of Order; and he was threatened with the Serjeant and the
Tower. On another occasion he was moved even to shedding tears of
rage and vexation, tears which only moved the mockery of his low
minded and bad hearted foes.

If a minister were now to find himself thus situated in a House
of Commons which had just been elected, and from which it would
therefore be idle to appeal to the electors, he would instantly
resign his office, and his adversaries would take his place. The
change would be most advantageous to the public, even if we
suppose his successor to be both less virtuous and less able than
himself. For it is much better for the country to have a bad
ministry than to have no ministry at all, and there would be no
ministry at all if the executive departments were filled by men
whom the representatives of the people took every opportunity of
thwarting and insulting. That an unprincipled man should be
followed by a majority of the House of Commons is no doubt an
evil. But, when this is the case, he will nowhere be so harmless
as at the head of affairs. As he already possesses the power to
do boundless mischief, it is desirable to give him a strong
motive to abstain from doing mischief; and such a motive he has
from the moment that he is entrusted with the administration.
Office of itself does much to equalise politicians. It by no
means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high
characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.
In power the most patriotic and most enlightened statesman finds
that he must disappoint the expectations of his admirers; that,
if he effects any good, he must effect it by compromise; that he
must relinquish many favourite schemes; that he must bear with
many abuses. On the other hand, power turns the very vices of the
most worthless adventurer, his selfish ambition, his sordid
cupidity, his vanity, his cowardice, into a sort of public
spirit. The most greedy and cruel wrecker that ever put up false
lights to lure mariners to their destruction will do his best to
preserve a ship from going to pieces on the rocks, if he is taken
on board of her and made pilot; and so the most profligate
Chancellor of the Exchequer most wish that trade may flourish,
that the revenue may come in well, and that he may be able to
take taxes off instead of putting them on. The most profligate
First Lord of the Admiralty must wish to receive news of a
victory like that of the Nile rather than of a mutiny like that
at the Nore. There is, therefore, a limit to the evil which is to
be apprehended from the worst ministry that is likely ever to
exist in England. But to the evil of having no ministry, to the
evil of having a House of Commons permanently at war with the
executive government, there is absolutely no limit. This was
signally proved in 1699 and 1700. Had the statesmen of the junto,
as soon as they had ascertained the temper of the new Parliament,
acted as statesmen similarly situated would now act, great
calamities would have been averted. The chiefs of the opposition
must then have been called upon to form a government. With the
power of the late ministry the responsibility of the late
ministry would have been transferred to them; and that
responsibility would at once have sobered them. The orator whose
eloquence had been the delight of the Country party would have
had to exert his ingenuity on a new set of topics. There would
have been an end of his invectives against courtiers and
placemen, of piteous meanings about the intolerable weight of the
land tax, of his boasts that the militia of Kent and Sussex,
without the help of a single regular soldier, would turn the
conquerors of Landen to the right about. He would himself have
been a courtier; he would himself have been a placeman; he would
have known that he should be held accountable for all the misery
which a national bankruptcy or a French invasion might produce;
and, instead of labouring to get up a clamour for the reduction
of imposts, and the disbanding of regiments, he would have
employed all his talents and influence for the purpose of
obtaining from Parliament the means of supporting public credit,
and of putting the country in a good posture of defence.
Meanwhile the statesmen who were out might have watched the new
men, might have checked them when they were wrong, might have
come to their help when, by doing right, they had raised a mutiny
in their own absurd and perverse faction. In this way Montague
and Somers might, in opposition, have been really far more
powerful than they could be while they filled the highest posts
in the executive government and were outvoted every day in the
House of Commons. Their retirement would have mitigated envy;
their abilities would have been missed and regretted; their
unpopularity would have passed to their successors, who would
have grievously disappointed vulgar expectation, and would have
been under the necessity of eating their own words in every
debate. The league between the Tories and the discontented Whigs
would have been dissolved; and it is probable that, in a session
or two, the public voice would have loudly demanded the recall of
the best Keeper of the Great Seal, and of the best First Lord of
the Treasury, the oldest man living could remember.

But these lessons, the fruits of the experience of five
generations, had never been taught to the politicians of the
seventeenth century. Notions imbibed before the Revolution still
kept possession of the public mind. Not even Somers, the foremost
man of his age in civil wisdom, thought it strange that one party
should be in possession of the executive administration while the
other predominated in the legislature. Thus, at the beginning of
1699, there ceased to be a ministry; and years elapsed before the
servants of the Crown and the representatives of the people were
again joined in an union as harmonious as that which had existed
from the general election of 1695 to the general election of
1698. The anarchy lasted, with some short intervals of
composedness, till the general election of 1765. No portion of
our parliamentary history is less pleasing or more instructive.
It will be seen that the House of Commons became altogether
ungovernable, abused its gigantic power with unjust and insolent
caprice, browbeat King and Lords, the Courts of Common Law and
the Constituent bodies, violated rights guaranteed by the Great
Charter, and at length made itself so odious that the people were
glad to take shelter, under the protection of the throne and of
the hereditary aristocracy, from the tyranny of the assembly
which had been chosen by themselves.

The evil which had brought on so much discredit on representative
institutions was of gradual though of rapid growth, and did not,
in the first session of the Parliament of 1698, take the most
alarming form. The lead of the House of Commons had, however,
entirely passed away from Montague, who was still the first
minister of finance, to the chiefs of the turbulent and
discordant opposition. Among those chiefs the most powerful was
Harley, who, while almost constantly acting with the Tories and
High Churchmen, continued to use, on occasions cunningly
selected, the political and religious phraseology which he had
learned in his youth among the Roundheads. He thus, while high in
the esteem of the country gentlemen and even of his hereditary
enemies, the country parsons, retained a portion of the favour
with which he and his ancestors had long been regarded by Whigs
and Nonconformists. He was therefore peculiarly well qualified to
act as mediator between the two sections of the majority.

The bill for the disbanding of the army passed with little
opposition through the House till it reached the last stage.
Then, at length, a stand was made, but in vain. Vernon wrote the
next day to Shrewsbury that the ministers had had a division
which they need not be ashamed of; for that they had mustered a
hundred and fifty-four against two hundred and twenty-one. Such a
division would not be considered as matter of boast by a
Secretary of State in our time.

The bill went up to the House of Lords, where it was regarded
with no great favour. But this was not one of those occasions on
which the House of Lords can act effectually as a check on the
popular branch of the legislature. No good would have been done
by rejecting the bill for disbanding the troops, unless the King
could have been furnished with the means of maintaining them; and
with such means he could be furnished only by the House of
Commons. Somers, in a speech of which both the eloquence and the
wisdom were greatly admired, placed the question in the true
light. He set forth strongly the dangers to which the jealousy
and parsimony of the representatives of the people exposed the
country. But any thing, he said, was better than that the King
and the Peers should engage, without hope of success, in an
acrimonious conflict with the Commons. Tankerville spoke with his
usual ability on the same side. Nottingham and the other Tories
remained silent; and the bill passed without a division.

By this time the King's strong understanding had mastered, as it
seldom failed, after a struggle, to master, his rebellious
temper. He had made up his mind to fulfil his great mission to
the end. It was with no common pain that he admitted it to be
necessary for him to give his assent to the disbanding bill. But
in this case it would have been worse than useless to resort to
his veto. For, if the bill had been rejected, the army would have
been dissolved, and he would have been left without even the
seven thousand men whom the Commons were willing to allow him. He
determined, therefore, to comply with the wish of his people, and
at the same time to give them a weighty and serious but friendly
admonition. Never had he succeeded better in suppressing the
outward signs of his emotions than on the day on which he carried
this determination into effect. The public mind was much excited.
The crowds in the parks and streets were immense. The Jacobites
came in troops, hoping to enjoy the pleasure of reading shame and
rage on the face of him whom they most hated and dreaded. The
hope was disappointed. The Prussian Minister, a discerning
observer, free from the passions which distracted English
society, accompanied the royal procession from St. James's Palace
to Westminster Hall. He well knew how bitterly William had been
mortified, and was astonished to see him present himself to the
public gaze with a serene and cheerful aspect.

The speech delivered from the throne was much admired; and the
correspondent of the States General acknowledged that he
despaired of exhibiting in a French translation the graces of
style which distinguished the original. Indeed that weighty,
simple and dignified eloquence which becomes the lips of a
sovereign was seldom wanting in any composition of which the plan
was furnished by William and the language by Somers. The King
informed the Lords and Commons that he had come down to pass
their bill as soon as it was ready for him. He could not indeed
but think that they had carried the reduction of the army to a
dangerous extent. He could not but feel that they had treated him
unkindly in requiring him to part with those guards who had come
over with him to deliver England, and who had since been near him
on every field of battle. But it was his fixed opinion that
nothing could be so pernicious to the State as that he should be
regarded by his people with distrust, distrust of which he had
not expected to be the object after what he had endeavoured,
ventured, and acted, to restore and to secure their liberties. He
had now, he said, told the Houses plainly the reason, the only
reason, which had induced him to pass their bill; and it was his
duty to tell them plainly, in discharge of his high trust, and in
order that none might hold him accountable for the evils which he
had vainly endeavoured to avert, that, in his judgment, the
nation was left too much exposed.

When the Commons had returned to their chamber, and the King's
speech had been read from the chair, Howe attempted to raise a
storm. A gross insult had been offered to the House. The King
ought to be asked who had put such words into his mouth. But the
spiteful agitator found no support. The majority were so much
pleased with the King for promptly passing the bill that they
were not disposed to quarrel with him for frankly declaring that
he disliked it. It was resolved without a division that an
address should be presented, thanking him for his gracious speech
and for his ready compliance with the wishes of his people, and
assuring him that his grateful Commons would never forget the
great things which he had done for the country, would never give
him cause to think them unkind or undutiful, and would, on all
occasions, stand by him against all enemies.

Just at this juncture tidings arrived which might well raise
misgivings in the minds of those who had voted for reducing the
national means of defence. The Electoral Prince of Bavaria was no
more. The Gazette which announced that the Disbanding Bill had
received the royal assent informed the public that he was
dangerously ill at Brussels. The next Gazette contained the news
of his death. Only a few weeks had elapsed since all who were
anxious for the peace of the world had learned with joy that he
had been named heir to the Spanish throne. That the boy just
entering upon life with such hopes should die, while the wretched
Charles, long ago half dead, continued to creep about between his
bedroom and his chapel, was an event for which, notwithstanding
the proverbial uncertainty of life, the minds of men were
altogether unprepared. A peaceful solution of the great question
now seemed impossible. France and Austria were left confronting
each other. Within a month the whole Continent might be in arms.
Pious men saw in this stroke, so sudden and so terrible, the
plain signs of the divine displeasure. God had a controversy with
the nations. Nine years of fire, of slaughter and of famine had
not been sufficient to reclaim a guilty world; and a second and
more severe chastisement was at hand. Others muttered that the
event which all good men lamented was to be ascribed to
unprincipled ambition. It would indeed have been strange if, in
that age, so important a death, happening at so critical a
moment, had not been imputed to poison. The father of the
deceased Prince loudly accused the Court of Vienna; and the
imputation, though not supported by the slightest evidence, was,
during some time, believed by the vulgar.

The politicians at the Dutch embassy imagined that now at length
the parliament would listen to reason. It seemed that even the
country gentlemen must begin to contemplate the probability of an
alarming crisis. The merchants of the Royal Exchange, much better
acquainted than the country gentlemen with foreign lands, and
much more accustomed than the country gentlemen to take large
views, were in great agitation. Nobody could mistake the beat of
that wonderful pulse which had recently begun, and has during
five generations continued, to indicate the variations of the
body politic. When Littleton was chosen speaker, the stocks rose.
When it was resolved that the army should be reduced to seven
thousand men, the stocks fell. When the death of the Electoral
Prince was known, they fell still lower. The subscriptions to a
new loan, which the Commons had, from mere spite to Montague,
determined to raise on conditions of which he disapproved, came
in very slowly. The signs of a reaction of feeling were
discernible both in and out of Parliament. Many men are alarmists
by constitution. Trenchard and Howe had frightened most men by
writing and talking about the danger to which liberty and
property would be exposed if the government were allowed to keep
a large body of Janissaries in pay. The danger had ceased to
exist; and those people who must always be afraid of something,
as they could no longer be afraid of a standing army, began to be
afraid of the French King. There was a turn in the tide of public
opinion; and no part of statesmanship is more important than the
art of taking the tide of public opinion at the turn. On more
than one occasion William showed himself a master of that art.
But, on the present occasion, a sentiment, in itself amiable and
respectable, led him to commit the greatest mistake of his whole
life. Had he at this conjuncture again earnestly pressed on the
Houses the importance of providing for the defence of the
kingdom, and asked of them an additional number of English
troops, it is not improbable that he might have carried his
point; it is certain that, if he had failed, there would have
been nothing ignominious in his failure. Unhappily, instead of
raising a great public question, on which he was in the right, on
which he had a good chance of succeeding, and on which he might
have been defeated without any loss of dignity, he chose to raise
a personal question, on which he was in the wrong, on which,
right or wrong, he was sure to be beaten, and on which he could
not be beaten without being degraded. Instead of pressing for
more English regiments, he exerted all his influence to obtain
for the Dutch guards permission to remain in the island.

The first trial of strength was in the Upper House. A resolution
was moved there to the effect that the Lords would gladly concur
in any plan that could be suggested for retaining the services of
the Dutch brigade. The motion was carried by fifty-four votes to
thirty-eight. But a protest was entered, and was signed by all
the minority. It is remarkable that Devonshire was, and that
Marlborough was not, one of the Dissentients. Marlborough had
formerly made himself conspicuous by the keenness and pertinacity
with which he had attacked the Dutch. But he had now made his
peace with the Court, and was in the receipt of a large salary
from the civil list. He was in the House on that day; and
therefore, if he voted, must have voted with the majority. The
Cavendishes had generally been strenuous supporters of the King
and the junto. But on the subject of the foreign troops
Hartington in one House and his father in the other were
intractable.

This vote of the Lords caused much murmuring among the Commons.
It was said to be most unparliamentary to pass a bill one week,
and the next week to pass a resolution condemning that bill. It
was true that the bill had been passed before the death of the
Electoral Prince was known in London. But that unhappy event,
though it might be a good reason for increasing the English army,
could be no reason for departing from the principle that the
English army should consist of Englishmen. A gentleman who
despised the vulgar clamour against professional soldiers, who
held the doctrine of Somers's Balancing Letter, and who was
prepared to vote for twenty or even thirty thousand men, might
yet well ask why any of those men should be foreigners. Were our
countrymen naturally inferior to men of other races in any of the
qualities which, under proper training, make excellent soldiers?
That assuredly was not the opinion of the Prince who had, at the
head of Ormond's Life Guards, driven the French household troops,
till, then invincible, back over the ruins of Neerwinden, and
whose eagle eye and applauding voice had followed Cutts's
grenadiers up the glacis of Namur. Bitter spirited malecontents
muttered that, since there was no honourable service which could
not be as well performed by the natives of the realm as by alien
mercenaries, it might well be suspected that the King wanted his
alien mercenaries for some service not honourable. If it were
necessary to repel a French invasion or to put down an Irish
insurrection, the Blues and the Buffs would stand by him to the
death. But, if his object were to govern in defiance of the votes
of his Parliament and of the cry of his people, he might well
apprehend that English swords and muskets would, at the crisis,
fail him, as they had failed his father in law, and might well
wish to surround himself with men who were not of our blood, who
had no reverence for our laws, and no sympathy with our feelings.
Such imputations could find credit with no body superior in
intelligence to those clownish squires who with difficulty
managed to spell out Dyer's Letter over their ale. Men of sense
and temper admitted that William had never shown any disposition
to violate the solemn compact which he had made with the nation,
and that, even if he were depraved enough to think of destroying
the constitution by military violence, he was not imbecile enough
to imagine that the Dutch brigade, or five such brigades, would
suffice for his purpose. But such men, while they fully acquitted
him of the design attributed to him by factious malignity, could
not acquit him of a partiality which it was natural that he
should feel, but which it would have been wise in him to hide,
and with which it was impossible that his subjects should
sympathise. He ought to have known that nothing is more offensive
to free and proud nations than the sight of foreign uniforms and
standards. Though not much conversant with books, he must have
been acquainted with the chief events in the history of his own
illustrious House; and he could hardly have been ignorant that
his great grandfather had commenced a long and glorious struggle
against despotism by exciting the States General of Ghent to
demand that all Spanish troops should be withdrawn from the
Netherlands. The final parting between the tyrant and the future
deliverer was not an event to be forgotten by any of the race of
Nassau. "It was the States, Sir," said the Prince of Orange.
Philip seized his wrist with a convulsive grasp, and exclaimed,
"Not the States, but you, you, you."

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