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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Portland was welcomed by his master with all the kindness of old
times. But that kindness availed nothing. For Albemarle was still
in the royal household, and appeared to have been, during the
last few months, making progress in the royal favour. Portland
was angry, and the more angry because he could not but perceive
that his enemies enjoyed his anger, and that even his friends
generally thought it unreasonable; nor did he take any pains to
conceal his vexation. But he was the very opposite of the vulgar
crowd of courtiers who fawn on a master while they betray him. He
neither disguised his ill humour, nor suffered it to interfere
with the discharge of his duties. He gave his prince sullen
looks, short answers, and faithful and strenuous services. His
first wish, he said, was to retire altogether from public life.
But he was sensible that, having borne a chief part in the
negotiation on which the fate of Europe depended, he might be of
use at Loo; and, with devoted loyalty, though with a sore heart
and a gloomy brow, he prepared to attend William thither.

Before the King departed he delegated his power to nine Lords
Justices. The public was well pleased to find that Sunderland was
not among them. Two new names appeared in the list. That of
Montague could excite no surprise. But that of Marlborough
awakened many recollections and gave occasion to many
speculations. He had once enjoyed a large measure of royal
favour. He had then been dismissed, disgraced, imprisoned. The
Princess Anne, for refusing to discard his wife, had been turned
out of the palace, and deprived of the honours which had often
been enjoyed by persons less near to the throne. Ministers who
were supposed to have great influence in the closet had vainly
tried to overcome the dislike with which their master regarded
the Churchills. It was not till he had been some time reconciled
to his sister in law that he ceased to regard her two favourite
servants as his enemies. So late as the year 1696 he had been
heard to say, "If I had been a private gentleman, my Lord
Marlborough and I must have measured swords." All these things
were now, it seemed, forgotten. The Duke of Gloucester's
household had just been arranged. As he was not yet nine years
old, and the civil list was burdened with a heavy debt, fifteen
thousand pounds was thought for the present a sufficient
provision. The child's literary education was directed by
Burnet, with the title of Preceptor. Marlborough was appointed
Governor; and the London Gazette announced his appointment, not
with official dryness, but in the fervid language of panegyric.
He was at the same time again sworn a member of the Privy Council
from which he had been expelled with ignominy; and he was
honoured a few days later with a still higher mark of the King's
confidence, a seat at the board of Regency.

Some persons imagined that they saw in this strange
reconciliation a sign that the influence of Portland was on the
wane and that the influence of Albemarle was growing. For
Marlborough had been many years at feud with Portland, and had
even--a rare event indeed--been so much irritated as to speak of
Portland in coarse and ungentlemanlike terms. With Albemarle, on
the other hand, Marlborough had studiously ingratiated himself by
all the arts which a mind singularly observant and sagacious
could learn from a long experience in courts; and it is possible
that Albemarle may have removed some difficulties. It is hardly
necessary, however, to resort to that supposition for the purpose
of explaining why so wise a man as William forced himself, after
some delay caused by very just and natural resentment, to act
wisely. His opinion of Marlborough's character was probably
unaltered. But he could not help perceiving that Marlborough's
situation was widely different from what it had been a few years
before. That very ambition, that very avarice, which had, in
former times, impelled him to betray two masters, were now
sufficient securities for his fidelity to the order of things
which had been established by the Bill of Rights. If that order
of things could be maintained inviolate, he could scarcely fail
to be, in a few years, the greatest and wealthiest subject in
Europe. His military and political talents might therefore now be
used without any apprehension that they would be turned against
the government which used them. It is to be remembered too that
he derived his importance less from his military and political
talents, great as they were, than from the dominion which,
through the instrumentality of his wife, he exercised over the
mind of the Princess. While he was on good terms with the Court
it was certain that she would lend no countenance to any cabal
which might attack either the title or the prerogatives of her
brother in law. Confident that from this quarter, a quarter once
the darkest and most stormy in the whole political horizon,
nothing but sunshine and calm was now to be expected, William set
out cheerfully on his expedition to his native country.

CHAPTER XXIV

Altered Position of the Ministry--The Elections--First Partition
Treaty--Domestic Discontent--Littleton chosen Speaker--King's
Speech; Proceedings relating to the Amount of the Land Force--
Unpopularity of Montague--Bill for Disbanding the Army--The
King's Speech--Death of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria.--Renewed
Discussion of the Army Question--Naval Administration--Commission
on Irish Forfeitures.--Prorogation of Parliament--Changes in the
Ministry and Household--Spanish Succession--Darien

THE Gazette which informed the public that the King had set out
for Holland announced also the names of the first members
returned, in obedience to his writ, by the constituent bodies of
the Realm. The history of those times has been so little studied
that few persons are aware how remarkable an epoch the general
election of 1698 is in the history of the English Constitution.

We have seen that the extreme inconvenience which had resulted
from the capricious and headstrong conduct of the House of
Commons during the years immediately following the Revolution had
forced William to resort to a political
machinery which had been unknown to his predecessors, and of
which the nature and operation were but very imperfectly
understood by himself or by his ablest advisers. For the first
time the administration was confided to a small body of
statesmen, who, on all grave and pressing questions, agreed with
each other and with the majority of the representatives of the
people. The direction of war and of diplomacy the King reserved
to himself; and his servants, conscious that they were less
versed than he in military affairs and in foreign affairs, were
content to leave to him the command of the army, and to know only
what he thought fit to communicate about the instructions which
he gave to his own ambassadors and about the conferences which he
held with the ambassadors of other princes. But, with these
important exceptions, the government was entrusted to what then
began to be called the Ministry.

The first English ministry was gradually formed; nor is it
possible to say quite precisely when it began to exist. But, on
the whole, the date from which the era of ministries may most
properly be reckoned is the day of the meeting of the Parliament
after the general election of 1695. That election had taken place
at a time when peril and distress had called forth all the best
qualities of the nation. The hearts of men were in the struggle
against France for independence, for liberty, and for the
Protestant religion. Everybody knew that such a struggle could
not be carried on without large establishments and heavy taxes.
The government therefore could hardly ask for more than the
country was ready to give. A House of Commons was chosen in which
the Whig party had a decided preponderance. The leaders of that
party had presently been raised, one by one, to the highest
executive offices. The majority, therefore, readily arranged
itself in admirable order under the ministers, and during three
sessions gave them on almost every occasion a cordial support.
The consequence was that the country was rescued from its
dangerous position, and, when that Parliament had lived out its
three years, enjoyed prosperity after a terrible commercial
crisis, peace after a long and sanguinary war, and liberty united
with order after civil troubles which had lasted during two
generations, and in which sometimes order and sometimes liberty
had been in danger of perishing.

Such were the fruits of the general election of 1695. The
ministers had flattered themselves that the general election of
1698 would be equally favourable to them, and that in the new
Parliament the old Parliament would revive. Nor is it strange that
they should have indulged such a hope. Since they had been called
to the direction of affairs every thing had been changed, changed
for the better, and changed chiefly by their wise and resolute
policy, and by the firmness with which their party had stood by
them. There was peace abroad and at home. The sentinels had ceased
to watch by the beacons of Dorsetshire and Sussex. The merchant
ships went forth without fear from the Thames and the Avon.
Soldiers had been disbanded by tens of thousands. Taxes had been
remitted. The value of all public and private securities had
risen. Trade had never been so brisk. Credit had never been so
solid. All over the kingdom the shopkeepers and the farmers, the
artisans and the ploughmen, relieved, beyond all hope, from the
daily and hourly misery of the clipped silver, were blessing the
broad faces of the new shillings and half crowns. The statesmen
whose administration had been so beneficent might be pardoned if
they expected the gratitude and confidence which they had fairly
earned. But it soon became clear that they had served their
country only too well for their own interest. In 1695 adversity
and danger had made men amenable to that control to which it is
the glory of free nations to submit themselves, the control of
superior minds. In 1698 prosperity and security had made men
querulous, fastidious and unmanageable. The government was
assailed with equal violence from widely different quarters. The
opposition, made up of Tories many of whom carried Toryism to the
length of Jacobitism, and of discontented Whigs some of whom
carried Whiggism to the length of republicanism, called itself the
Country party, a name which had been popular before the words Whig
and Tory were known in England. The majority of the late House of
Commons, a majority which had saved the State, was nicknamed the
Court party. The Tory gentry, who were powerful in all the
counties, had special grievances. The whole patronage of the
government, they said, was in Whig hands. The old landed interest,
the old Cavalier interest, had now no share in the favours of the
Crown. Every public office, every bench of justice, every
commission of Lieutenancy, was filled with Roundheads. The Tory
rectors and vicars were not less exasperated. They accused the men
in power of systematically protecting and preferring
Presbyterians, Latitudinarians, Arians, Socinians, Deists,
Atheists. An orthodox divine, a divine who held high the dignity
of the priesthood and the mystical virtue of the sacraments, who
thought schism as great a sin as theft and venerated the Icon as
much as the Gospel, had no more chance of a bishopric or a deanery
than a Papist recusant. Such complaints as these were not likely
to call forth the sympathy of the Whig malecontents. But there
were three war cries in which all the enemies of the government,
from Trenchard to Seymour, could join: No standing army; No grants
of Crown property; and No Dutchmen. Multitudes of honest
freeholders and freemen were weak enough to believe that, unless
the land force, which had already been reduced below what the
public safety required, were altogether disbanded, the nation
would be enslaved, and that, if the estates which the King had
given away were resumed, all direct taxes might be abolished. The
animosity to the Dutch mingled itself both with the animosity to
standing armies and with the animosity to Crown grants. For a
brigade of Dutch troops was part of the military establishment
which was still kept up; and it was to Dutch favourites that
William had been most liberal of the royal domains.

The elections, however, began auspiciously for the government.
The first great contest was in Westminster. It must be remembered
that Westminster was then by far the greatest city in the island,
except only the neighbouring city of London, and contained more
than three times as large a population as Bristol or Norwich,
which came next in size. The right of voting at Westminster was
in the householders paying scot and lot; and the householders
paying scot and lot were many thousands. It is also to be
observed that their political education was much further advanced
than that of the great majority of the electors of the kingdom. A
burgess in a country town, or a forty shilling freeholder in an
agricultural district, then knew little about public affairs
except what he could learn from reading the Postman at the
alehouse, and from hearing, on the 30th of January, the 29th of
May or the 5th of November, a sermon in which questions of state
were discussed with more zeal than sense. But the citizen of
Westminster passed his days in the vicinity of the palace, of the
public offices, of the houses of parliament, of the courts of
law. He was familiar with the faces and voices of ministers,
senators and judges. In anxious times he walked in the great Hall
to pick up news. When there was an important trial, he looked
into the Court of King's Bench, and heard Cowper and Harcourt
contending, and Holt moderating between them. When there was an
interesting debate, in the House of Commons, he could at least
squeeze himself into the lobby or the Court of Requests, and hear
who had spoken, and how and what were the numbers on the
division. He lived in a region of coffeehouses, of booksellers'
shops, of clubs, of pamphlets, of newspapers, of theatres where
poignant allusions to the most exciting questions of the day
perpetually called forth applause and hisses, of pulpits where
the doctrines of the High Churchman, of the Low Churchman, of the
Nonjuror, of the Nonconformist, were explained and defended every
Sunday by the most eloquent and learned divines of every
persuasion. At that time, therefore, the metropolitan electors
were, as a class, decidedly superior in intelligence and
knowledge to the provincial electors.

Montague and Secretary Vernon were the ministerial candidates for
Westminster. They were opposed by Sir Henry Colt, a dull, surly,
stubborn professor of patriotism, who tired everybody to death
with his endless railing at standing armies and placemen. The
electors were summoned to meet on an open space just out of the
streets. The first Lord of the Treasury and the Secretary of
State appeared at the head of three thousand horsemen. Colt's
followers were almost all on foot. He was a favourite with the
keepers of pot-houses, and had enlisted a strong body of porters
and chairmen. The two parties, after exchanging a good deal of
abuse, came to blows. The adherents of the ministers were
victorious, put the adverse mob to the rout, and cudgelled Colt
himself into a muddy ditch. The poll was taken in Westminster
Hall. From the first there was no doubt of the result. But Colt
tried to prolong the contest by bringing up a voter an hour. When
it became clear that this artifice was employed for the purpose
of causing delay, the returning officer took on himself the
responsibility of closing the books, and of declaring Montague
and Vernon duly elected.

At Guildhall the junto was less fortunate. Three ministerial
Aldermen were returned. But the fourth member, Sir John Fleet,
was not only a Tory, but was Governor of the old East India
Company, and had distinguished himself by the pertinacity with
which he had opposed the financial and commercial policy of the
first Lord of the Treasury. While Montague suffered the
mortification of finding that his empire over the city was less
absolute than he had imagined, Wharton, notwithstanding his
acknowledged preeminence in the art of electioneering, underwent
a succession of defeats in boroughs and counties for which he had
expected to name the members. He failed at Brackley, at
Malmesbury and at Cockermouth. He was unable to maintain
possession even of his own strongholds, Wycombe and Aylesbury. He
was beaten in Oxfordshire. The freeholders of Buckinghamshire,
who had been true to him during many years, and who in 1685, when
the Whig party was in the lowest state of depression, had, in
spite of fraud and tyranny, not only placed him at the head of
the poll but put their second votes at his disposal, now rejected
one of his candidates, and could hardly be induced to return the
other, his own brother, by a very small majority.

The elections for Exeter appear to have been in that age observed
by the nation with peculiar interest. For Exeter was not only one
of the largest and most thriving cities in the Kingdom, but was
also the capital of the West of England, and was much frequented
by the gentry of several counties. The franchise was popular.
Party spirit ran high; and the contests were among the fiercest
and the longest of which there is any record in our history.
Seymour had represented Exeter in the Parliament of James, and in
the two first Parliaments of William. In 1695, after a struggle
of several weeks which had attracted much attention not only
here but on the Continent, he had been defeated by two Whig
candidates, and forced to take refuge in a small borough. But
times had changed. He was now returned in his absence by a large
majority; and with him was joined another Tory less able and, if
possible, more unprincipled than himself, Sir Bartholomew Shower.
Shower had been notorious as one of the hangmen of James. When
that cruel King was bent on punishing with death soldiers who
deserted from the army which he kept up in defiance of the
constitution, he found that he could expect no assistance from
Holt, who was the Recorder of London. Holt was accordingly
removed. Shower was made Recorder, and showed his gratitude for
his promotion by sending to Tyburn men who, as every barrister in
the Inns of Court knew, were guilty of no offence at all. He
richly deserved to have been excepted from the Act of Grace, and
left to the vengeance of the laws which he had so foully
perverted. The return which he made for the clemency which spared
him was most characteristic. He missed no opportunity of
thwarting and damaging the Government which had saved him from
the gallows. Having shed innocent blood for the purpose of
enabling James to keep up thirty thousand troops without the
consent of Parliament, he now pretended to think it monstrous
that William should keep up ten thousand with the consent of
Parliament. That a great constituent body should be so forgetful
of the past and so much out of humour with the present as to take
this base and hardhearted pettifogger for a patriot was an omen
which might well justify the most gloomy prognostications.

When the returns were complete, it appeared that the new House of
Commons contained an unusual number of men about whom little was
known, and on whose support neither the government nor the
opposition could with any confidence reckon. The ranks of the
staunch ministerial Whigs were certainly much thinned; but it did
not appear that the Tory ranks were much fuller than before. That
section of the representative body which was Whiggish without
being ministerial had gamed a great accession of strength, and
seemed likely to have, during some time, the fate of the country
in its hands. It was plain that the next session would be a
trying one. Yet it was not impossible that the servants of the
Crown might, by prudent management, succeed in obtaining a
working majority. Towards the close of August the statesmen of
the junto, disappointed and anxious but not hopeless, dispersed
in order to lay in a stock of health and vigour for the next
parliamentary campaign. There were races at that season in the
neighbourhood of Winchenden, Wharton's seat in Buckinghamshire;
and a large party assembled there. Orford, Montague and
Shrewsbury repaired to the muster. But Somers, whose chronic
maladies, aggravated by sedulous application to judicial and
political business, made it necessary for him to avoid crowds and
luxurious banquets, retired to Tunbridge Wells, and tried to
repair his exhausted frame with the water of the springs and the
air of the heath. Just at this moment despatches of the gravest
importance arrived from Guelders at Whitehall.

The long negotiation touching the Spanish succession had at
length been brought to a conclusion. Tallard had joined William
at Loo, and had there met Heinsius and Portland. After much
discussion, the price in consideration of which the House of
Bourbon would consent to waive all claim to Spain and the Indies,
and to support the pretensions of the Electoral Prince of
Bavaria, was definitively settled. The Dauphin was to have the
Province of Guipuscoa, Naples, Sicily and some small Italian
islands which were part of the Spanish monarchy. The Milanese was
allotted to the Archduke Charles. As the Electoral Prince was
still a child, it was agreed that his father, who was then
governing the Spanish Netherlands as Viceroy, should be Regent of
Spain during the minority. Such was the first Partition Treaty, a
treaty which has been during five generations confidently and
noisily condemned, and for which scarcely any writer has ventured
to offer even a timid apology, but which it may perhaps not be
impossible to defend by grave and temperate argument.

It was said, when first the terms of the Partition Treaty were
made public, and has since been many times repeated, that the
English and Dutch Governments, in making this covenant with
France, were guilty of a violation of plighted faith. They had,
it was affirmed, by a secret article of a Treaty of Alliance
concluded in 1689, bound themselves to support the pretensions of
the Emperor to the Spanish throne; and they now, in direct
defiance of that article, agreed to an arrangement by which he
was excluded from the Spanish throne. The truth is that the
secret article will not, whether construed according to the
letter or according to the spirit, bear the sense which has
generally been put upon it. The stipulations of that article were
introduced by a preamble, in which it was set forth that the
Dauphin was preparing to assert by arms his claim to the great
heritage which his mother had renounced, and that there was
reason to believe that he also aspired to the dignity of King of
the Romans. For these reasons, England and the States General,
considering the evil consequences which must follow if he should
succeed in attaining either of his objects, promised to support
with all their power his Caesarean Majesty against the French and
their adherents. Surely we cannot reasonably interpret this
engagement to mean that, when the dangers mentioned in the
preamble had ceased to exist, when the eldest Archduke was King
of the Romans, and when the Dauphin had, for the sake of peace,
withdrawn his claim to the Spanish Crown, England and the United
Provinces would be bound to go to war for the purpose of
supporting the cause of the Emperor, not against the French but
against his own grandson, against the only prince who could reign
at Madrid without exciting fear and jealousy throughout all
Christendom.

While some persons accused William of breaking faith with the
House of Austria, others accused him of interfering unjustly in
the internal affairs of Spain. In the most ingenious and humorous
political satire extant in our language, Arbuthnot's History of
John Bull, England and Holland are typified by a clothier and a
linendraper, who take upon themselves to settle the estate of a
bedridden old gentleman in their neighbourhood. They meet at the
corner of his park with paper and pencils, a pole, a chain and a
semicircle, measure his fields, calculate the value of his mines,
and then proceed to his house in order to take an inventory of
his plate and furniture. But this pleasantry, excellent as
pleasantry, hardly deserves serious refutation. No person who has
a right to give any opinion at all about politics can think that
the question, whether two of the greatest empires in the world
should be virtually united so as to form one irresistible mass,
was a question with which other states had nothing to do, a
question about which other states could not take counsel together
without being guilty of impertinence as gross as that of a
busybody in private life who should insist on being allowed to
dictate the wills of other people. If the whole Spanish monarchy
should pass to the House of Bourbon, it was highly probable that
in a few years England would cease to be great and free, and that
Holland would be a mere province of France. Such a danger England
and Holland might lawfully have averted by war; and it would be
absurd to say that a danger which may be lawfully averted by war
cannot lawfully be averted by peaceable means. If nations are so
deeply interested in a question that they would be justified in
resorting to arms for the purpose of settling it, they must
surely be sufficiently interested in it to be justified in
resorting to amicable arrangements for the purpose of settling
it. Yet, strange to say, a multitude of writers who have warmly
praised the English and Dutch governments for waging a long and
bloody war in order to prevent the question of the Spanish
succession from being settled in a manner prejudicial to them,
have severely blamed those governments for trying to attain the
same end without the shedding of a drop of blood, without the
addition of a crown to the taxation of any country in
Christendom, and without a moment's interruption of the trade of
the world by land or by sea.

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