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 King promised to do what the Commons asked; but in truth
there was little to be done. The Irish, conscious of their
impotence, submitted without a murmur. The Irish woollen
manufacture languished and disappeared, as it would, in all
probability, have languished and disappeared if it had been left
to itself. Had Molyneux lived a few months longer he would
probably have been impeached. But the close of the session was
approaching; and before the Houses met again a timely death had
snatched him from their vengeance; and the momentous question
which had been first stirred by him slept a deep sleep till it
was revived in a more formidable shape, after the lapse of
twenty-six years, by the fourth letter of The Drapier.

Of the commercial questions which prolonged this session far into
the summer the most important respected India. Four years had
elapsed since the House of Commons had decided that all
Englishmen had an equal right to traffic in the Asiatic Seas,
unless prohibited by Parliament; and in that decision the King
had thought it prudent to acquiesce. Any merchant of London or
Bristol might now fit out a ship for Bengal or for China, without
the least apprehension of being molested by the Admiralty or sued
in the Courts of Westminster. No wise man, however, was disposed
to stake a large sum on such a venture. For the vote which
protected him from annoyance here left him exposed to serious
risks on the other side of the Cape of Good Hope. The Old
Company, though its exclusive privileges were no more, and though
its dividends had greatly diminished, was still in existence, and
still retained its castles and warehouses, its fleet of fine
merchantmen, and its able and zealous factors, thoroughly
qualified by a long experience to transact business both in the
palaces and in the bazaars of the East, and accustomed to look
for direction to the India House alone. The private trader
therefore still ran great risk of being treated as a smuggler, if
not as a pirate. He might indeed, if he was wronged, apply for
redress to the tribunals of his country. But years must elapse
before his cause could be heard; his witnesses must be conveyed
over fifteen thousand miles of sea; and in the meantime he was a
ruined man. The experiment of free trade with India had therefore
been tried under every disadvantage, or, to speak more correctly,
had not been tried at all. The general opinion had always been
that some restriction was necessary; and that opinion had been
confirmed by all that had happened since the old restrictions had
been removed. The doors of the House of Commons were again
besieged by the two great contending factions of the City. The
Old Company offered, in return for a monopoly secured by law, a
loan of seven hundred thousand pounds; and the whole body of
Tories was for accepting the offer. But those indefatigable
agitators who had, ever since the Revolution, been striving to
obtain a share in the trade of the Eastern seas exerted
themselves at this conjuncture more strenuously than ever, and
found a powerful patron in Montague.

That dexterous and eloquent statesman had two objects in view.
One was to obtain for the State, as the price of the monopoly, a
sum much larger than the Old Company was able to give. The other
was to promote the interest of his own party. Nowhere was the
conflict between Whigs and Tories sharper than in the City of
London; and the influence of the City of London was felt to the
remotest corner of the realm. To elevate the Whig section of that
mighty commercial aristocracy which congregated under the arches
of the Royal Exchange, and to depress the Tory section, had long
been one of Montague's favourite schemes. He had already formed
one citadel in the heart of that great emporium; and he now
thought that it might be in his power to erect and garrison a
second stronghold in a position scarcely less commanding. It had
often been said, in times of civil war, that whoever was master
of the Tower and of Tilbury Fort was master of London. The
fastnesses by means of which Montague proposed to keep the
capital obedient in times of peace and of constitutional
government were of a different kind. The Bank was one of his
fortresses; and he trusted that a new India House would be the
other.

The task which he had undertaken was not an easy one. For, while
his opponents were united, his adherents were divided. Most of
those who were for a New Company thought that the New Company
ought, like the Old Company, to trade on a joint stock. But there
were some who held that our commerce with India would be best
carried on by means of what is called a regulated Company. There
was a Turkey Company, the members of which contributed to a
general fund, and had in return the exclusive privilege of
trafficking with the Levant; but those members trafficked, each
on his own account; they forestalled each other; they undersold
each other; one became rich; another became bankrupt. The
Corporation meanwhile watched over the common interest of all the
members, furnished the Crown with the means of maintaining an
embassy at Constantinople, and placed at several important ports
consuls and vice-consuls, whose business was to keep the Pacha
and the Cadi in good humour, and to arbitrate in disputes among
Englishmen. Why might not the same system be found to answer in
regions lying still further to the east? Why should not every
member of the New Company be at liberty to export European
commodities to the countries beyond the Cape, and to bring back
shawls, saltpetre and bohea to England, while the Company, in its
collective capacity, might treat with Asiatic potentates, or
exact reparation from them, and might be entrusted with powers
for the administration of justice and for the government of forts
and factories?

Montague tried to please all those whose support was necessary to
him; and this he could effect only by bringing forward a plan so
intricate that it cannot without some pains be understood. He
wanted two millions to extricate the State from its financial
embarrassments. That sum he proposed to raise by a loan at eight
per cent. The lenders might be either individuals or
corporations. But they were all, individuals and corporations, to
be united in a new corporation, which was to be called the
General Society. Every member of the General Society, whether
individual or corporation, might trade separately with India to
an extent not exceeding the amount which such member had advanced
to the government. But all the members or any of them might, if
they so thought fit, give up the privilege of trading separately,
and unite themselves under a royal Charter for the purpose of
trading in common. Thus the General Society was, by its original
constitution, a regulated company; but it was provided that
either the whole Society or any part of it might become a joint
stock company.

The opposition to the scheme was vehement and pertinacious. The
Old Company presented petition after petition. The Tories, with
Seymour at their head, appealed both to the good faith and to the
compassion of Parliament. Much was said about the sanctity of the
existing Charter, and much about the tenderness due to the
numerous families which had, in reliance on that Charter,
invested their substance in India stock. On the other side there
was no want of plausible topics or of skill to use them. Was it
not strange that those who talked so much about the Charter
should have altogether overlooked the very clause of the Charter
on which the whole question turned? That clause expressly
reserved to the government power of revocation, after three
years' notice, if the Charter should not appear to be beneficial
to the public. The Charter had not been found beneficial to the
public; the three years' notice should be given; and in the year
1701 the revocation would take effect. What could be fairer? If
anybody was so weak as to imagine that the privileges of the Old
Company were perpetual, when the very instrument which created
those privileges expressly declared them to be terminable, what
right had he to blame the Parliament, which was bound to do the
best for the State, for not saving him, at the expense of the
State, from the natural punishment of his own folly? It was
evident that nothing was proposed inconsistent with strict
justice. And what right had the Old Company to more than strict
justice? These petitioners who implored the legislature to deal
indulgently with them in their adversity, how had they used their
boundless prosperity? Had not the India House recently been the
very den of corruption, the tainted spot from which the plague
had spread to the Court and the Council, to the House of Commons
and the House of Lords? Were the disclosures of 1695 forgotten,
the eighty thousand pounds of secret service money disbursed in
one year, the enormous bribes direct and indirect, Seymour's
saltpetre contracts, Leeds's bags of golds? By the malpractices
which the inquiry in the Exchequer Chamber then brought to light,
the Charter had been forfeited; and it would have been well if
the forfeiture had been immediately enforced. "Had not time then
pressed," said Montague, "had it not been necessary that the
session should close, it is probable that the petitioners, who
now cry out that they cannot get justice, would have got more
justice than they desired. If they had been called to account for
great and real wrong in 1695, we should not have had them here
complaining of imaginary wrong in 1698."

The fight was protracted by the obstinacy and dexterity of the
Old Company and its friends from the first week of May to the
last week in June. It seems that many even of Montague's
followers doubted whether the promised two millions would be
forthcoming. His enemies confidently predicted that the General
Society would be as complete a failure as the Land Bank had been
in the year before the last, and that he would in the autumn find
himself in charge of an empty exchequer. His activity and
eloquence, however, prevailed. On the twenty-sixth of June, after
many laborious sittings, the question was put that this Bill do
pass, and was carried by one hundred and fifteen votes to
seventy-eight. In the upper House, the conflict was short and
sharp. Some peers declared that, in their opinion, the
subscription to the proposed loan, far from amounting to the two
millions which the Chancellor of the Exchequer expected, would
fall far short of one million. Others, with much reason,
complained that a law of such grave importance should have been
sent up to them in such a shape that they must either take the
whole or throw out the whole. The privilege of the Commons with
respect to money bills had of late been grossly abused. The Bank
had been created by one money bill; this General Society was to
be created by another money bill. Such a bill the Lords could not
amend; they might indeed reject it; but to reject it was to shake
the foundations of public credit and to leave the kingdom
defenceless. Thus one branch of the legislature was
systematically put under duress by the other, and seemed likely
to be reduced to utter insignificance. It was better that the
government should be once pinched for money than that the House
of Peers should cease to be part of the Constitution. So strong
was this feeling that the Bill was carried only by sixty-five to
forty-eight. It received the royal sanction on the fifth of July.
The King then spoke from the throne. This was the first occasion
on which a King of England had spoken to a Parliament of which
the existence was about to be terminated, not by his own act, but
by the act of the law. He could not, he said, take leave of the
Lords and Gentlemen before him without publicly acknowledging the
great things which they had done for his dignity and for the
welfare of the nation. He recounted the chief services which they
had, during three eventful sessions, rendered to the country.
"These things will," he said, "give a lasting reputation to this
Parliament, and will be a subject of emulation to Parliaments
which shall come after." The Houses were then prorogued.

During the week which followed there was some anxiety as to the
result of the subscription for the stock of the General Society.
If that subscription failed, there would be a deficit; public
credit would be shaken; and Montague would be regarded as a
pretender who had owed his reputation to a mere run of good luck,
and who had tempted chance once too often. But the event was such
as even his sanguine spirit had scarcely ventured to anticipate.
At one in the afternoon of the 14th of July the books were opened
at the Hall of the Company of Mercers in Cheapside. An immense
crowd was already collected in the street. As soon as the doors
were flung wide, wealthy citizens, with their money in their
hands, pressed in, pushing and elbowing each other. The guineas
were paid down faster than the clerks could count them. Before
night six hundred thousand pounds had been subscribed. The next
day the throng was as great. More than one capitalist put down
his name for thirty thousand pounds. To the astonishment of those
ill boding politicians who were constantly repeating that the
war, the debt, the taxes, the grants to Dutch courtiers, had
ruined the kingdom, the sum, which it had been doubted whether
England would be able to raise in many weeks, was subscribed by
London in a few hours. The applications from the provincial towns
and rural districts came too late. The merchants of Bristol had
intended to take three hundred thousand pounds of the stock, but
had waited to learn how the subscription went on before they gave
their final orders; and, by the time that the mail had gone down
to Bristol and returned, there was no more stock to be had.

This was the moment at which the fortunes of Montague reached the
meridian. The decline was close at hand. His ability and his
constant success were everywhere talked of with admiration and
envy. That man, it was commonly said, has never wanted, and never
will want, an expedient.

During the long and busy session which had just closed, some
interesting and important events had taken place which may
properly be mentioned here. One of those events was the
destruction of the most celebrated palace in which the sovereigns
of England have ever dwelt. On the evening of the 4th of January,
a woman,--the patriotic journalists and pamphleteers of that time
did not fail to note that she was a Dutchwoman,--who was employed
as a laundress at Whitehall, lighted a charcoal fire in her room
and placed some linen round it. The linen caught fire and burned
furiously. The tapestry, the bedding, the wainscots were soon in
a blaze. The unhappy woman who had done the mischief perished.
Soon the flames burst out of the windows. All Westminster, all
the Strand, all the river were in commotion. Before midnight the
King's apartments, the Queen's apartments, the Wardrobe, the
Treasury, the office of the Privy Council, the office of the
Secretary of State, had been destroyed. The two chapels perished
together; that ancient chapel where Wolsey had heard mass in the
midst of gorgeous copes, golden candlesticks, and jewelled
crosses, and that modern edifice which had been erected for the
devotions of James and had been embellished by the pencil of
Verrio and the chisel of Gibbons. Meanwhile a great extent of
building had been blown up; and it was hoped that by this
expedient a stop had been put to the conflagration. But early in
the morning a new fire broke out of the heaps of combustible
matter which the gunpowder had scattered to right and left. The
guard room was consumed. No trace was left of that celebrated
gallery which had witnessed so many balls and pageants, in which
so many maids of honour had listened too easily to the vows and
flatteries of gallants, and in which so many bags of gold had
changed masters at the hazard table. During some time men
despaired of the Banqueting House. The flames broke in on the
south of that beautiful hall, and were with great difficulty
extinguished by the exertions of the guards, to whom Cutts,
mindful of his honourable nickname of the Salamander, set as good
an example on this night of terror as he had set in the breach of
Namur. Many lives were lost, and many grievous wounds were
inflicted by the falling masses of stone and timber, before the
fire was effectually subdued. When day broke, the heaps of
smoking ruins spread from Scotland Yard to the Bowling Green,
where the mansion of the Duke of Buccleuch now stands. The
Banqueting House was safe; but the graceful columns and festoons
designed by Inigo were so much defaced and blackened that their
form could hardly be discerned. There had been time to move the
most valuable effects which were moveable. Unfortunately some of
Holbein's finest pictures were painted on the walls, and are
consequently known to us only by copies and engravings. The books
of the Treasury and of the Privy Council were rescued, and are
still preserved. The Ministers whose offices had been burned down
were provided with new offices in the neighbourhood. Henry the
Eighth had built, close to St. James's Park, two appendages to
the Palace of Whitehall, a cockpit and a tennis court. The
Treasury now occupies the site of the cockpit, the Privy Council
Office the site of the tennis court.

Notwithstanding the many associations which make the name of
Whitehall still interesting to an Englishman, the old building
was little regretted. It was spacious indeed and commodious, but
mean and inelegant. The people of the capital had been annoyed by
the scoffing way in which foreigners spoke of the principal
residence of our sovereigns, and often said that it was a pity
that the great fire had not spared the old portico of St. Paul's
and the stately arcades of Gresham's Bourse, and taken in
exchange that ugly old labyrinth of dingy brick and plastered
timber. It might now be hoped that we should have a Louvre.
Before the ashes of the old palace were cold, plans for a new
palace were circulated and discussed. But William, who could not
draw his breath in the air of Westminster, was little disposed to
expend a million on a house which it would have been impossible
for him to inhabit. Many blamed him for not restoring the
dwelling of his predecessors; and a few Jacobites, whom evil
temper and repeated disappointments had driven almost mad,
accused him of having burned it down. It was not till long after
his death that Tory writers ceased to call for the rebuilding of
Whitehall, and to complain that the King of England had no better
town house than St. James's, while the delightful spot where the
Tudors and the Stuarts had held their councils and their revels
was covered with the mansions of his jobbing courtiers.9

In the same week in which Whitehall perished, the Londoners were
supplied with a new topic of conversation by a royal visit,
which, of all royal visits, was the least pompous and ceremonious
and yet the most interesting and important. On the 10th of
January a vessel from Holland anchored off Greenwich and was
welcomed with great respect. Peter the First, Czar of Muscovy,
was on board. He took boat with a few attendants and was rowed up
the Thames to Norfolk Street, where a house overlooking the river
had been prepared for his reception.

His journey is an epoch in the history, not only of his own
country, but of our's, and of the world. To the polished nations
of Western Europe, the empire which he governed had till then
been what Bokhara or Siam is to us. That empire indeed, though
less extensive than at present, was the most extensive that had
ever obeyed a single chief. The dominions of Alexander and of
Trajan were small when compared with the immense area of the
Scythian desert. But in the estimation of statesmen that
boundless expanse of larch forest and morass, where the snow lay
deep during eight months of every year, and where a wretched
peasantry could with difficulty defend their hovels against
troops of famished wolves, was of less account than the two or
three square miles into which were crowded the counting houses,
the warehouses, and the innumerable masts of Amsterdam. On the
Baltic Russia had not then a single port. Her maritime trade with
the other rations of Christendom was entirely carried on at
Archangel, a place which had been created and was supported by
adventurers from our island. In the days of the Tudors, a ship
from England, seeking a north east passage to the land of silk
and spice, had discovered the White Sea. The barbarians who dwelt
on the shores of that dreary gulf had never before seen such a
portent as a vessel of a hundred and sixty tons burden. They fled
in terror; and, when they were pursued and overtaken, prostrated
themselves before the chief of the strangers and kissed his feet.
He succeeded in opening a friendly communication with them; and
from that time there had been a regular commercial intercourse
between our country and the subjects of the Czar. A Russia
Company was incorporated in London. An English factory was built
at Archangel. That factory was indeed, even in the latter part of
the seventeenth century, a rude and mean building. The walls
consisted of trees laid one upon another; and the roof was of
birch bark. This shelter, however, was sufficient in the long
summer day of the Arctic regions. Regularly at that season
several English ships cast anchor in the bay. A fair was held on
the beach. Traders came from a distance of many hundreds of miles
to the only mart where they could exchange hemp and tar, hides
and tallow, wax and honey, the fur of the sable and the
wolverine, and the roe of the sturgeon of the Volga, for
Manchester stuffs, Sheffield knives, Birmingham buttons, sugar
from Jamaica and pepper from Malabar. The commerce in these
articles was open. But there was a secret traffic which was not
less active or less lucrative, though the Russian laws had made
it punishable, and though the Russian divines pronounced it
damnable. In general the mandates of princes and the lessons of
priests were received by the Muscovite with profound reverence.
But the authority of his princes and of his priests united could
not keep him from tobacco. Pipes he could not obtain; but a cow's
horn perforated served his turn. From every Archangel fair rolls
of the best Virginia speedily found their way to Novgorod and
Tobolsk.

The commercial intercourse between England and Russia made some
diplomatic intercourse necessary. The diplomatic intercourse
however was only occasional. The Czar had no permanent minister
here. We had no permanent minister at Moscow; and even at
Archangel we had no consul. Three or four times in a century
extraordinary embassies were sent from Whitehall to the Kremlin
and from the Kremlin to Whitehall.

The English embassies had historians whose narratives may still
be read with interest. Those historians described vividly, and
sometimes bitterly, the savage ignorance and the squalid poverty
of the barbarous country in which they had sojourned. In that
country, they said, there was neither literature nor science,
neither school nor college. It was not till more than a hundred
years after the invention of printing that a single printing
press had been introduced into the Russian empire; and that
printing press had speedily perished in a fire which was supposed
to have been kindled by the priests. Even in the seventeenth
century the library of a prelate of the first dignity consisted
of a few manuscripts. Those manuscripts too were in long rolls;
for the art of bookbinding was unknown. The best educated men
could barely read and write. It was much if the secretary to whom
was entrusted the direction of negotiations with foreign powers
had a sufficient smattering of Dog Latin to make himself
understood. The arithmetic was the arithmetic of the dark ages.
The denary notation was unknown. Even in the Imperial Treasury
the computations were made by the help of balls strung on wires.
Round the person of the Sovereign there was a blaze of gold and
jewels; but even in his most splendid palaces were to be found
the filth and misery of an Irish cabin. So late as the year 1663
the gentlemen of the retinue of the Earl of Carlisle were, in the
city of Moscow, thrust into a single bedroom, and were told that,
if they did not remain together, they would be in danger of being
devoured by rats.

Such was the report which the English legations made of what they
had seen and suffered in Russia; and their evidence was confirmed
by the appearance which the Russian legations made in England.
The strangers spoke no civilised language. Their garb, their
gestures, their salutations, had a wild and barbarous character.
The ambassador and the grandees who accompanied him were so
gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy
that nobody dared to touch them. They came to the court balls
dropping pearls and vermin. It was said that one envoy cudgelled
the lords of his train whenever they soiled or lost any part of
their finery, and that another had with difficulty been prevented
from putting his son to death for the crime of shaving and
dressing after the French fashion.

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