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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On the basis proposed by France William was willing to negotiate;
and, when, in June 1699, he left Kensington to pass the summer at
Loo, the terms of the treaty known as the Second Treaty of
Partition were very nearly adjusted. The great object now was to
obtain the consent of the Emperor. That consent, it should seem,
ought to have been readily and even eagerly given. Had it been
given, it might perhaps have saved Christendom from a war of
eleven years. But the policy of Austria was, at that time,
strangely dilatory and irresolute. It was in vain that William
and Heinsius represented the importance of every hour. "The
Emperor's ministers go on dawdling," so the King wrote to
Heinsius, "not because there is any difficulty about the matter,
not because they mean to reject the terms, but solely because
they are people who can make up their minds to nothing." While
the negotiation at Vienna was thus drawn out into endless length,
evil tidings came from Madrid.

Spain and her King had long been sunk so low that it seemed
impossible for him to sink lower. Yet the political maladies of
the monarchy and the physical maladies of the monarch went on
growing, and exhibited every day some new and frightful symptom.
Since the death of the Bavarian Prince, the Court had been
divided between the Austrian faction, of which the Queen and the
leading ministers Oropesa and Melgar were the chiefs, and the
French faction, of which the most important member was Cardinal
Portocarrero, Archbishop of Toledo. At length an event which, as
far as can now be judged, was not the effect of a deeply
meditated plan, and was altogether unconnected with the disputes
about the succession, gave the advantage to the adherents of
France. The government, having committed the great error of
undertaking to supply Madrid with food, committed the still
greater error of neglecting to perform what it had undertaken.
The price of bread doubled. Complaints were made to the
magistrates, and were heard with the indolent apathy
characteristic of the Spanish administration from the highest to
the lowest grade. Then the populace rose, attacked the house of
Oropesa, poured by thousands into the great court of the palace,
and insisted on seeing the King. The Queen appeared in a balcony,
and told the rioters that His Majesty was asleep. Then the
multitude set up a roar of fury. "It is false; we do not believe
you. We will see him." "He has slept too long," said one
threatening voice; "and it is high time that he should wake." The
Queen retired weeping; and the wretched being on whose dominions
the sun never set tottered to the window, bowed as he had never
bowed before, muttered some gracious promises, waved a
handkerchief in the air, bowed again, and withdrew. Oropesa,
afraid of being torn to pieces, retired to his country seat.
Melgar made some show of resistance, garrisoned his house, and
menaced the rabble with a shower of grenades, but was soon forced
to go after Oropesa; and the supreme power passed to
Portocarrero.

Portocarrero was one of a race of men of whom we, happily for us,
have seen very little, but whose influence has been the curse of
Roman Catholic countries. He was, like Sixtus the Fourth and
Alexander the Sixth, a politician made out of an impious priest.
Such politicians are generally worse than the worst of the laity,
more merciless than any ruffian that can be found in camps, more
dishonest than any pettifogger who haunts the tribunals. The
sanctity of their profession has an unsanctifying influence on
them. The lessons of the nursery, the habits of boyhood and of
early youth, leave in the minds of the great majority of avowed
infidels some traces of religion, which, in seasons of mourning
and of sickness, become plainly discernible. But it is scarcely
possible that any such trace should remain in the mind of the
hypocrite who, during many years, is constantly going through
what he considers as the mummery of preaching, saying mass,
baptizing, shriving. When an ecclesiastic of this sort mixes in
the contests of men of the world, he is indeed much to be dreaded
as an enemy, but still more to be dreaded as an ally. From the
pulpit where he daily employs his eloquence to embellish what he
regards as fables, from the altar whence he daily looks down with
secret scorn on the prostrate dupes who believe that he can turn
a drop of wine into blood, from the confessional where he daily
studies with cold and scientific attention the morbid anatomy of
guilty consciences, he brings to courts some talents which may
move the envy of the more cunning and unscrupulous of lay
courtiers; a rare skill in reading characters and in managing
tempers, a rare art of dissimulation, a rare dexterity in
insinuating what it is not safe to affirm or to propose in
explicit terms. There are two feelings which often prevent an
unprincipled layman from becoming utterly depraved and
despicable, domestic feeling, and chivalrous feeling. His heart
may be softened by the endearments of a family. His pride may
revolt from the thought of doing what does not become a
gentleman. But neither with the domestic feeling nor with the
chivalrous feeling has the wicked priest any sympathy. His gown
excludes him from the closest and most tender of human relations,
and at the same time dispenses him from the observation of the
fashionable code of honour.

Such a priest was Portocarrero; and he seems to have been a
consummate master of his craft. To the name of statesman he had
no pretensions. The lofty part of his predecessor Ximenes was out
of the range, not more of his intellectual, than his moral
capacity. To reanimate a paralysed and torpid monarchy, to
introduce order and economy into a bankrupt treasury, to restore
the discipline of an army which had become a mob, to refit a navy
which was perishing from mere rottenness, these were achievements
beyond the power, beyond even the ambition, of that ignoble
nature. But there was one task for which the new minister was
admirably qualified, that of establishing, by means of
superstitious terror, an absolute dominion over a feeble mind;
and the feeblest of all minds was that of his unhappy sovereign.
Even before the riot which had made the cardinal supreme in the
state, he had succeeded in introducing into the palace a new
confessor selected by himself. In a very short time the King's
malady took a new form. That he was too weak to lift his food to
his misshapen mouth, that, at thirty-seven, he had the bald head
and wrinkled face of a man of seventy, that his complexion was
turning from yellow to green, that he frequently fell down in
fits and remained long insensible, these were no longer the worst
symptoms of his malady. He had always been afraid of ghosts and
demons; and it had long been necessary that three friars should
watch every night by his restless bed as a guard against
hobgoblins. But now he was firmly convinced that he was
bewitched, that he was possessed, that there was a devil within
him, that there were devils all around him. He was exorcised
according to the forms of his Church; but this ceremony, instead
of quieting him, scared him out of almost all the little reason
that nature had given him. In his misery and despair he was
induced to resort to irregular modes of relief. His confessor
brought to court impostors who pretended that they could
interrogate the powers of darkness. The Devil was called up,
sworn and examined. This strange deponent made oath, as in the
presence of God, that His Catholic Majesty was under a spell,
which had been laid on him many years before, for the purpose of
preventing the continuation of the royal line. A drug had been
compounded out of the brains and kidneys of a human corpse, and
had been administered in a cup of chocolate. This potion had
dried up all the sources of life; and the best remedy to which
the patient could now resort would be to swallow a bowl of
consecrated oil every morning before breakfast. Unhappily, the
authors of this story fell into contradictions which they could
excuse only by throwing the blame on Satan, who, they said, was
an unwilling witness, and a liar from the beginning. In the midst
of their conjuring, the Inquisition came down upon them. It must
be admitted that, if the Holy Office had reserved all its terrors
for such cases, it would not now have been remembered as the most
hateful judicature that was ever known among civilised men. The
subaltern impostors were thrown into dungeons. But the chief
criminal continued to be master of the King and of the kingdom.
Meanwhile, in the distempered mind of Charles one mania succeeded
another. A longing to pry into those mysteries of the grave from
which human beings avert their thoughts had long been hereditary
in his house. Juana, from whom the mental constitution of her
posterity seems to have derived a morbid taint, had sate, year
after year, by the bed on which lay the ghastly remains of her
husband, apparelled in the rich embroidery and jewels which he
had been wont to wear while living. Her son Charles found an
eccentric pleasure in celebrating his own obsequies, in putting
on his shroud, placing himself in the coffin, covering himself
with the pall; and lying as one dead till the requiem had been
sung, and the mourners had departed leaving him alone in the
tomb. Philip the Second found a similar pleasure in gazing on the
huge chest of bronze in which his remains were to be laid, and
especially on the skull which, encircled with the crown of Spain,
grinned at him from the cover. Philip the Fourth, too, hankered
after burials and burial places, gratified his curiosity by
gazing on the remains of his great grandfather, the Emperor, and
sometimes stretched himself out at full length like a corpse in
the niche which he had selected for himself in the royal
cemetery. To that cemetery his son was now attracted by a strange
fascination. Europe could show no more magnificent place of
sepulture. A staircase encrusted with jasper led down from the
stately church of the Escurial into an octagon situated just
beneath the high altar. The vault, impervious to the sun, was
rich with gold and precious marbles, which reflected the blaze
from a huge chandelier of silver. On the right and on the left
reposed, each in a massy sarcophagus, the departed kings and
queens of Spain. Into this mausoleum the King descended with a
long train of courtiers, and ordered the coffins to be unclosed.
His mother had been embalmed with such consummate skill that she
appeared as she had appeared on her death bed. The body of his
grandfather too seemed entire, but crumbled into dust at the
first touch. From Charles neither the remains of his mother nor
those of his grandfather could draw any sign of sensibility. But,
when the gentle and graceful Louisa of Orleans, the miserable
man's first wife, she who had lighted up his dark existence with
one short and pale gleam of happiness, presented herself, after
the lapse of ten years, to his eyes, his sullen apathy gave way.
"She is in heaven," he cried; "and I shall soon be there with
her;" and, with all the speed of which his limbs were capable, he
tottered back to the upper air.

Such was the state of the Court of Spain when, in the autumn of
1699, it became known that, since the death of the Electoral
Prince of Bavaria, the governments of France, of England and of
the United Provinces, were busily engaged in framing a second
Treaty of Partition. That Castilians would be indignant at
learning that any foreign potentate meditated the dismemberment
of that empire of which Castile was the head might have been
foreseen. But it was less easy to foresee that William would be
the chief and indeed almost the only object of their indignation.
If the meditated partition really was unjustifiable, there could
be no doubt that Lewis was far more to blame than William. For it
was by Lewis, and not by William, that the partition had been
originally suggested; and it was Lewis, and not William, who was
to gain an accession of territory by the partition. Nobody could
doubt that William would most gladly have acceded to any
arrangement by which the Spanish monarchy, could be preserved
entire without danger to the liberties of Europe, and that he had
agreed to the division of that monarchy solely for the purpose of
contenting Lewis. Nevertheless the Spanish ministers carefully
avoided whatever could give offence to Lewis, and indemnified
themselves by offering a gross indignity to William. The truth is
that their pride had, as extravagant pride often has, a close
affinity with meanness. They knew that it was unsafe to insult
Lewis; and they believed that they might with perfect safety
insult William. Lewis was absolute master of his large kingdom.
He had at no great distance armies and fleets which one word from
him would put in motion. If he were provoked, the white flag
might in a few days be again flying on the walls of Barcelona.
His immense power was contemplated by the Castilians with hope as
well as with fear. He and he alone, they imagined, could avert
that dismemberment of which they could not bear to think. Perhaps
he might yet be induced to violate the engagements into which he
had entered with England and Holland, if one of his grandsons
were named successor to the Spanish throne. He, therefore, must
be respected and courted. But William could at that moment do
little to hurt or to help. He could hardly be said to have an
army. He could take no step which would require an outlay of
money without the sanction of the House of Commons; and it seemed
to be the chief study of the House of Commons to cross him and to
humble him. The history of the late session was known to the
Spaniards principally by inaccurate reports brought by Irish
friars. And, had those reports been accurate, the real nature of
a Parliamentary struggle between the Court party and the Country
party could have been but very imperfectly understood by the
magnates of a realm in which there had not, during several
generations, been any constitutional opposition to the royal
pleasure. At one time it was generally believed at Madrid, not by
the mere rabble, but by Grandees who had the envied privilege of
going in coaches and four through the streets of the capital,
that William had been deposed, that he had retired to Holland,
that the Parliament had resolved that there should be no more
kings, that a commonwealth had been proclaimed, and that a Doge
was about to be appointed and, though this rumour turned out to
be false, it was but too true that the English government was,
just at that conjuncture, in no condition to resent slights.
Accordingly, the Marquess of Canales, who represented the
Catholic King at Westminster, received instructions to
remonstrate in strong language, and was not afraid to go beyond
those instructions. He delivered to the Secretary of State a note
abusive and impertinent beyond all example and all endurance. His
master, he wrote, had learnt with amazement that King William,
Holland and other powers,--for the ambassador, prudent even in
his blustering, did not choose to name the King of France,--were
engaged in framing a treaty, not only for settling the succession
to the Spanish crown, but for the detestable purpose of dividing
the Spanish monarchy. The whole scheme was vehemently condemned
as contrary to the law of nature and to the law of God. The
ambassador appealed from the King of England to the Parliament,
to the nobility, and to the whole nation, and concluded by giving
notice that he should lay the whole case before the two Houses
when next they met.

The style of this paper shows how strong an impression had been
made on foreign nations by the unfortunate events of the late
session. The King, it was plain, was no longer considered as the
head of the government. He was charged with having committed a
wrong; but he was not asked to make reparation. He was treated as
a subordinate officer who had been guilty of an offence against
public law, and was threatened with the displeasure of the
Commons, who, as the real rulers of the state, were bound to keep
their servants in order. The Lords justices read this outrageous
note with indignation, and sent it with all speed to Loo. Thence
they received, with equal speed, directions to send Canales out
of the country. Our ambassador was at the same time recalled from
Madrid; and all diplomatic intercourse between England and Spain
was suspended.

It is probable that Canales would have expressed himself in a
less unbecoming manner, had there not already existed a most
unfortunate quarrel between Spain and William, a quarrel in which
William was perfectly blameless, but in which the unanimous
feeling of the English Parliament and of the English nation was
on the side of Spain.

It is necessary to go back some years for the purpose of tracing
the origin and progress of this quarrel. Few portions of our
history are more interesting or instructive; but few have been
more obscured and distorted by passion and prejudice. The story
is an exciting one; and it has generally been told by writers
whose judgment had been perverted by strong national partiality.
Their invectives and lamentations have still to be temperately
examined; and it may well be doubted whether, even now, after the
lapse of more than a century and a half, feelings hardly
compatible with temperate examination will not be stirred up in
many minds by the name of Darien. In truth that name is
associated with calamities so cruel that the recollection of them
may not unnaturally disturb the equipoise even of a fair and
sedate mind.

The man who brought these calamities on his country was not a
mere visionary or a mere swindler. He was that William Paterson
whose name is honourably associated with the auspicious
commencement of a new era in English commerce and in English
finance. His plan of a national bank, having been examined and
approved by the most eminent statesmen who sate in the Parliament
house at Westminster and by the most eminent merchants who walked
the Exchange of London, had been carried into execution with
signal success. He thought, and perhaps thought with reason, that
his services had been ill requited. He was, indeed, one of the
original Directors of the great corporation which owed its
existence to him; but he was not reelected. It may easily be
believed that his colleagues, citizens of ample fortune and of
long experience in the practical part of trade, aldermen, wardens
of companies, heads of firms well known in every Burse
throughout the civilised world, were not well pleased to see
among them in Grocers' Hall a foreign adventurer whose whole
capital consisted in an inventive brain and a persuasive tongue.
Some of them were probably weak enough to dislike him for being a
Scot; some were probably mean enough to be jealous of his parts
and knowledge; and even persons who were not unfavourably
disposed to him might have discovered, before they had known him
long, that, with all his cleverness, he was deficient in common
sense; that his mind was full of schemes which, at the first
glance, had a specious aspect, but which, on closer examination,
appeared to be impracticable or pernicious; and that the benefit
which the public had derived from one happy project formed by him
would be very dearly purchased if it were taken for granted that
all his other projects must be equally happy. Disgusted by what
he considered as the ingratitude of the English, he repaired to
the Continent, in the hope that he might be able to interest the
traders of the Hanse Towns and the princes of the German Empire
in his plans. From the Continent he returned unsuccessful to
London; and then at length the thought that he might be more
justly appreciated by his countrymen than by strangers seems to
have risen in his mind. Just at this time he fell in with
Fletcher of Saltoun, who happened to be in England. These
eccentric men soon became intimate. Each of them had his
monomania; and the two monomaniac suited each other perfectly.
Fletcher's whole soul was possessed by a sore, jealous,
punctilious patriotism. His heart was ulcerated by the thought of
the poverty, the feebleness, the political insignificance of
Scotland, and of the indignities which she had suffered at the
hand of her powerful and opulent neighbour. When he talked of her
wrongs his dark meagre face took its sternest expression; his
habitual frown grew blacker, and his eyes flashed more than their
wonted fire. Paterson, on the other hand, firmly believed himself
to have discovered the means of making any state which would
follow his counsel great and prosperous in a time which, when
compared with the life of an individual, could hardly be called
long, and which, in the life of a nation, was but as a moment.
There is not the least reason to believe that he was dishonest.
Indeed he would have found more difficulty in deceiving others
had he not begun by deceiving himself. His faith to his own
schemes was strong even to martyrdom; and the eloquence with
which he illustrated and defended them had all the charm of
sincerity and of enthusiasm. Very seldom has any blunder
committed by fools, or any villany devised by impostors, brought
on any society miseries so great as the dreams of these two
friends, both of them men of integrity and both of them men of
parts, were destined to bring on Scotland.

In 1695 the pair went down together to their native country. The
Parliament of that country was then about to meet under the
presidency of Tweeddale, an old acquaintance and country
neighbour of Fletcher. On Tweeddale the first attack was made. He
was a shrewd, cautious, old politician. Yet it should seem that
he was not able to hold out against the skill and energy of the
assailants. Perhaps, however, he was not altogether a dupe. The
public mind was at that moment violently agitated. Men of all
parties were clamouring for an inquiry into the slaughter of
Glencoe. There was reason to fear that the session which was
about to commence would be stormy. In such circumstances the Lord
High Commissioner might think that it would be prudent to appease
the anger of the Estates by offering an almost irresistible bait
to their cupidity. If such was the policy of Tweeddale, it was,
for the moment, eminently successful. The Parliament, which met
burning with indignation, was soothed into good humour. The blood
of the murdered Macdonalds continued to cry for vengeance in
vain. The schemes of Paterson, brought forward under the
patronage of the ministers of the Crown, were sanctioned by the
unanimous voice of the Legislature.

The great projector was the idol of the whole nation. Men spoke
to him with more profound respect than to the Lord High
Commissioner. His antechamber was crowded with solicitors
desirous to catch some drops of that golden shower of which he
was supposed to be the dispenser. To be seen walking with him in
the High Street, to be honoured by him with a private interview
of a quarter of an hour, were enviable distinctions. He, after
the fashion of all the false prophets who have deluded themselves
and others, drew new faith in his own lie from the credulity of
his disciples. His countenance, his voice, his gestures,
indicated boundless self-importance. When he appeared in public
he looked,--such is the language of one who probably had often
seen him,--like Atlas conscious that a world was on his
shoulders. But the airs which he gave himself only heightened the
respect and admiration which he inspired. His demeanour was
regarded as a model. Scotch men who wished to be thought wise
looked as like Paterson as they could.

His plan, though as yet disclosed to the public only by glimpses,
was applauded by all classes, factions and sects, lords,
merchants, advocates, divines, Whigs and Jacobites, Cameronians
and Episcopalians. In truth, of all the ten thousand bubbles of
which history has preserved the memory, none was ever more
skilfully puffed into existence; none ever soared higher, or
glittered more brilliantly; and none ever burst with a more
lamentable explosion. There was, however, a certain mixture of
truth in the magnificent day dream which produced such fatal
effects.

Scotland was, indeed, not blessed with a mild climate or a
fertile soil. But the richest spots that had ever existed on the
face of the earth had been spots quite as little favoured by
nature. It was on a bare rock, surrounded by deep sea, that the
streets of Tyre were piled up to a dizzy height. On that sterile
crag were woven the robes of Persian satraps and Sicilian
tyrants; there were fashioned silver bowls and chargers for the
banquets of kings; and there Pomeranian amber was set in Lydian
gold to adorn the necks of queens. In the warehouses were
collected the fine linen of Egypt and the odorous gums of Arabia;
the ivory of India, and the tin of Britain. In the port lay
fleets of great ships which had weathered the storms of the
Euxine and the Atlantic. Powerful and wealthy colonies in distant
parts of the world looked up with filial reverence to the little
island; and despots, who trampled on the laws and outraged the
feelings of all the nations between the Hydaspes and the Aegean,
condescended to court the population of that busy hive. At a
later period, on a dreary bank formed by the soil which the
Alpine streams swept down to the Adriatic, rose the palaces of
Venice. Within a space which would not have been thought large
enough for one of the parks of a rude northern baron were
collected riches far exceeding those of a northern kingdom. In
almost every one of the prorate dwellings which fringed the Great
Canal were to be seen plate, mirrors, jewellery, tapestry,
paintings, carving, such as might move the envy of the master of
Holyrood. In the arsenal were munitions of war sufficient to
maintain a contest against the whole power of the Ottoman Empire.
And, before the grandeur of Venice had declined, another
commonwealth, still less favoured, if possible, by nature, had
rapidly risen to a power and opulence which the whole civilised
world contemplated with envy and admiration. On a desolate marsh
overhung by fogs and exhaling diseases, a marsh where there was
neither wood nor stone, neither firm earth nor drinkable water, a
marsh from which the ocean on one side and the Rhine on the
other were with difficulty kept out by art, was to be found the
most prosperous community in Europe. The wealth which was
collected within five miles of the Stadthouse of Amsterdam would
purchase the fee simple of Scotland. And why should this be? Was
there any reason to believe that nature had bestowed on the
Phoenician, on the Venetian, or on the Hollander, a larger
measure of activity, of ingenuity, of forethought, of self
command, than on the citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow? The truth
was that, in all those qualities which conduce to success in
life, and especially in commercial life, the Scot had never been
surpassed; perhaps he had never been equalled. All that was
necessary was that his energy should take a proper direction, and
a proper direction Paterson undertook to give.

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