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#s
YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
Gift of
LOUISE M. BRYANT
Gunpowder Plot of Guv Fawkes. — Vol. iii. 257.
inn ruruLAR
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
BY
CHARLES KNIGHT.
•¦v
VOLUME III.
FROM THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH TO THE COMMONWEALTH.
First American Edition.
NEW YORK:
JOHN WURTELE LOVELL.
1880.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER L— a.d. 1558 to a.d. i56t.
Elizabeth proclaimed queen.— She refuses to attend Mass on Christmas-day.— Philip pro
poses marriage to Elizabeth— The Commons request that she would marry.— Her
answer.— The Coronation progress through the City.^Cecif's plans for the restora
tion of Protestantism.— Opening of Parliament.— Statute for restoring the supremacy
to the Crown.— Statute for the Uniformity of Common Prayer.— Deprivation ot
bishops — Peace with France — Pretensions of Mary Stuart.— Elizabeth the head of
the Protestant party of Europe.— Scotland.— Hostility of the queen-regent of Scot
land to the Reformers.— Their desire for an alliance with England.— French troops
sent to Scotland — ^England sends an army and fleet. — Siege of Leifh. — Peace con
cluded at Edinburgh. — Assembly of the parliament of Scotland.— Acts establishing
the reformed religion.— Mary refuses to ratify the treaty of Edinburgh.— DeaHh of
Francis II. — Mary determines to return to Scotland. —Elizabeth refuses her a safe
conduct. — Mary embarks at Calais. — Arrival in Scotland.— Contrasts' in the fortunes
of Mary and Elizabeth. " Page 13 — 39
CHAPTER II.— ajx 1561 to a,d. 1567.
fiiblic spirit- under Elizaheth.—Sports and Processions. — England sends aid to the
French Protestants. — Scotland.— Plans for Mary's marriage. — Leicester and Darnley.
— Marriage of Mlary and Darnley;— The Reformers indignant at the marriage. — Re
volt of Murray and other nobles. — Revolt suppressed, and the lords banished. —
Darnley arid Riccio. — Quarrels of the queen and Darnley. — Plot against Riccio. —
Murder1 6f* Riccio'. — Birth of a Scottish prince. — Ascendency of Bothwell. — Darnley
at the Kirk ot Field. — Assassination of Darnley. — Mock trial of Bothwell.— Mary
carried off. — Marriage of Mary and Bothwell. — Mary surrenders to her nobles. 46 — 64
CHAPTER III.— A.D. 1567.
Mary compelled to resign the Crown. — Murray accepts the Regency. — Escape of Mary
from Lochleven. — Circumstances of he* escapew-^Ba'ttle of Langsyde— Mary takes ref
uge in England. — Mary's detention in England. — Conferences. qf York ^pd London.—
Mary placed undercharge of the Earl of Shrewsbury,— Anxiety for her safe custody. —
The duke of Norfolk and Mary. — Lady Catherine Grey. . • • • 65— Sx
6 CONTENTS.
CHAPTER IV.— A.D. i568toA.D. 1572.
General view of the first ten years of Elizabeth — Movement of Rome against Protestant.
ism.— The persecutions in the Netherlands and in France.— Intrigues against Eliza
beth.— Insurrection of the north.— Pius V. issues a bull of excommunication against
Elizabeth.— Parliament of 1571 — Statutes against papists.— Puritanical party in the
House of Commons.— Motion for reform of abuses in the Church. Trial and execu
tion of the duke of Norfolk.— Troubles of Scotland.— The Huguenots of France pro
pitiated by the marriage of the prince of Navarre.— Coligny shot.— The massacre of
Saint Bartholomew resolved upon.— Its perpetration.— Effect of the news upon the
court and people of England.— New danger of the queen of £cots. Page 82—97
CHAPTER V.— a.d. 1572 to A.D. 1586.
Jesuits in England.— Campion.— Increased severities against Papists. — Expedition to the
Netherlands.— Leicester in the Netherlands.— Death of Sir Philip Sidney.— Naval
successes under JDrake.— Babington's conspiracy.— Trial of the conspirators —
Alleged complicity of Mary in the plot.— Mary's papers seized. — She is removed to
Fotheringay Castle 98— in
CHAPTER VI.— A.D. 1584 to a.d. 1587.
The Association. — Statute for the surety of the queen's person. — Commissions for trial of
Mary.— Proceedings op the trial. — Judgment against Mary. — Conflicting opinions on
this judgment — The parliament urge the execution of the sentence.— The judgment
proclaimed. — Conduct of Elizabeth. — Interview with Davison. — Warrant of execu
tion. — Mary beheaded at Fotheringay. — Elizabeth disavows her responsibility in this
proceeding.— The disavowal a self-deception. — Note on the statement that Elizabeth
desired that the Queen of Scots might be privately assassinated. . . 1x2 — X35
CHAPTER VII.— a.d. 1587 to A.D. 1588.
Funeral of Sir Philip 'Sidney. — Preparations fbr the Invasion of England hy Spain. —
Drake's Expedition to Cadiz. — Suspected policy of James VI. — The Armada an
nounced. — The spirit of the country. — Camp at Tilbury. — The Mariners of Eng
land. — Defences of the coast. — The demeanour of the queen. — Her oration at Til
bury.— Loyalty of the Catholics 136 — 147
CHAPTER VIIL— a.d. 1588 to a.d. 1589.
Sailing of the Armada. — The English fleet. — The Armada off Plymouth. — The fight up
Channel — The run to Calais. — The Fire ships at Calais. — The fight off Gravelines. —
The flight to the North. — The Deliverance, — The Thanksgivings. — Spain makes new
preparations. — Expeditions against Spain, — The heroic time. . , 148-^165
CHAPTER IX.— a.d. 1567 to a.d. 1593.
The three religious classes of the second half of the reign of Elizabeth. — Progress of
Non-Conformity.— Statute against the Puritans.— Tbe Puritan enmity to the habits
of society.— Philip Stubbes' Anatomy, of Abuses.— Pride of Apparel.— Gluttony and
Drunkenness. — Dancing considered a vice. — Music held to be corrupting. — The Sab
bath profaned by Snorts.— The Lord of Misrule.— May-games ; Wakes; Church-
ales. — Country festivals.— Athletic exercises and sports. — Gaming. — Stage Plays. 166—183
CONTENTS. j
CHAPTER X.— A.D. 1589 to A.D. 1598.'
Henry of Navarre succeeds to the throne of France.— English expeditions to aid Henry
IV.— A Parliament called.— Contests of the Crown and the Commons.— Intrigues of
Spain in Scotland.— Naval expeditions.— The taking of Cadiz.— Parliament.— Stat
utes regarding the Poor.— Progress of Poor Law Legislation.— Poverty and Vaga
bondage. — Labourers refusing to work at usual wages. — Egyptians and pretended
Egyptians.— Villanies of London.— Insecurity of the Suburbs.— Statutes against the
increase of Buildings.— Almshouses.— Incidental causes of Indigence.— Fluctuation
of Price. — Sickness. — Nuisances. ^-Firfis. — Insufficient household accommodation. —
Increase of town populations. — Crimes of towns— Police. . . Page 184 — 205
CHAPTER XL— a.d. 1598 to A.D. 1603.
Death of lord Burleigh.— Death - of Philip II.— Condition of Ireland.— Rebellion of
Tyrone. — Essex appointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland.— His bootless campaign. —
Esse;x suddenly returns to England. — He is committed to free custody, and then
suspended from his offices. — His discontent, and schemes for redress. — Armed
, assembly at Essex-House.-rAttempt-at insurrection. — Essex and Southampton tried
for high-treason.— Conduct of Bacon on that trial*— Essex executed.— Scotland. — The
Gowrie conspiracy. — The last parliament of Elizabeth. — Debates on a subsidy.— Bill
for abating monopolies. — The queen's wisdom is yielding to public opinion. — Death
of Elizabeth. — Note on the story of Essex's ring. , . . .- 206—426
CHAPTER XII.— a.d. 1588 to a.d. 1603.
Literature and Art characteristic of- the periods of their production.— First years of Eliz
abethan literature bore the impress of the two preceding reigns. — Sackville. — The
early popular drama. — Marlowe and the contemporary dramatists. — Growing refine
ment. — Spenser. — Shakspere. — Lyrical poetry.— Its association with Music. — Rural
images ii\ the poets connected with the .pleasurable aspects of country life. — Architec
ture. — The palatial mansion. — Gardens. — The gentleman's manor-house* — Classical
education . 227— 237
CHAPTER XIII.— a.d. 1603 to A.D. 1604.
James proclaimed king of England. — Question of the Succession. — Sir Robert Carey's
ride to Edinburgh. — James quits Scotland. — His progress to London. — His system
of punishments and rewards. — Cecil's influence. — The coronation. — Raleigh, Cobham,
Grey, and others arrested on charges of conspiracy, — The two plots. — Trial of
Raleigh. — His conviction and long imprisonment. — Conferences at Hampton Court.
— Meeting of Parliament. — Contest between the King and the House of Commons
upon a question of Privilege.— Statutes of this session. — Wardship. — Purveyance. —
Temper of the Commons.— Peace with Spain. — James proclaimed king of Great
Britain. — Character, of James. ,. 238-^252
CHAPTER XIV.— A.D. 1605.
The Gunpowder Plot. — Lord Mounteagle receives a letter. — Salisbury is made acquainted
„, with the letter. — Its interpretation. —Search under the Parliament House.— Seizure
of Fawkes. — The other Conspirators. — The preparations during eighteen previous
months.— Th^iL proceedings after the discovery. — They resist the sheriff.— S^ome
killed, otliers^aken prisoners. — Feelings, of the Roman Catholics-— Ben Jonson. —
Trial of Fawkes and others-— Garnet the. Jesuit. — His conriction — His doctrine of
EquivocatipnT . • . . • 253— 27°
8 CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XV.— A-D. 1606 to A.D. 1613.
Parliament of 1606. — Statutes against Papists. — Game Laws. — Manners of the Court.-*
Lavishness of James upon his favourites. — Feudal aid. — Impositions upon merchan
dise. — First Settlement in Virginia. — Progress of the Colony. — Settlement of the
Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts, — Charter of the East India Company. — First Fac
tory at Sural. — The Mogul Rulers of Hindostan. — Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe.—
Dissolution of the Parliament. — Murder of Henry IV. of France. — Authorised
translation of the Bible. — Ireland. — Plantation of Ulster. — Creation of Baronets.—
The New River. — Increase of London lji — 290
CHAPTER XVI. A.D. 1604 to A.D. 1620.
Arabella Stuart. — Death of Salisbury. — Robert Carr, king's favorite. — Death of Prince
Henry.— Marriage of the Princess Elizabeth. — The addled Parliament. — George
Villiers, the new favourite. — Murder of Overbury. — Trials for the murder. — Somerset
and his countess convicted. — Conduct of the King. — Sir Edward Coke dismissed.—
Proclamation for Sports. — Note on the Secret Communications between the King
and Sir George More. ••••••••.. 291 — 307
CHAPTER XVII.— A.D. 1616 to a.d. 1625.
Release of Raleigh. — Raleigh's expedition to Guiana.— Raleigh returns to England.— His
execution under his former sentence. — Affairs of the Palatinate. — The Elector de
feated at Prague.— Parliament. — Monopolists. — Lord Bacon impeached.— Conduct of
Parliament in Floyd's case.— The King and the Parliament at issue. — Parliament
dissolved. — Prince Charles and Villiers in Spain. — The proposed marriage of Charles
with the Infanta broken off. — Rejoicings in England. — Parliament. — War declared
against Spain.— Death of King James 308—324
CHAPTER XVIII.— A.D. 1625 to ad. 1630.
Accession of Charles I.— Marriage of the king with Henrietta Maria. — The first Parlia
ment of Charles. — Grievances. — Naval failures. — The second Parliament. — Contests
of Peers and Commons with the Crown. — Subsidies illegally levied. — Imprisonments
for refusals to pay.— The Queen's foreign attendants dismissed. — War with France.—
Its causes. — La Rochelle. — Expedition to the Isle of Rh£. The third Parliament.—
Petition of Right.— Buckingham denounced in the Commons' House. — Prorogation
of Parliament. — Siege of La Rochelle.— Buckingham and Richelieu.— Assassination
of Buckingham.— Felton, the assassin. — Surrender of La Rochelle. — Parliament.—
Religious differences.— Parliament dissolved in anger.— -Members imprisoned. — Peace
with Spain and France • ..»•». •¦¦ 325 — 345
CHAPTER XIX.— a.d. 1629 to a.d. 2638.
Absolute government. — Condition of England from 1629 to 1637.— Contrasts of France
and England.— Imprisoned Members.— Sir John Eliot.— His death in prison.— Went
worth.— Lord President of the North.— Lord Deputy of Ireland.-**His principles of
government. — Prynne's Histno-Mastix. — His punishment. — Masques and Plays. —
Character of the Drama.— Book of Sports.— Tlwrough, in Church and State.— Mo
nopolies. — Proclamations against building in London.— Other arbitrary Proclamations*
—First project of Ship-Money.— The writ of Shu>Money extended. —The Judges
CONTENTS. q
sanction th* writs.— John Hampden.— Solemn trial of the validity of the writ of Ship.
Money.— Hampden adjudged to pay.— Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick.— The despot
ism of Charles not effective of any public improvements.— His alleged patronage of
the Fine Arts.— JW/«, on the portraits of Charles 346—370
CHAPTER XX.— a.d. 1633 to a.d. 1640.
Scotland.-Visit of the king ih 1633.-A Service-book commanded to be used in 1637—
The National Covenant.— Progress of the troubles in Scotland.— The General As-
sembly.-The king and the Scots levy forces. -The king at Berwick.-Camp of the
Covenanters.— An English Parliament.— Suddenly dissolved. -Convocation continues
to sit.— The Scottish war resumed.— Rout of Newbum.— Council of Peers.— Cessa
tion of arms.— An English Parliament summoned.— Character of the House of Com
mons. — Strafford. — Laud •••..,.,.. 37I 38e
CHAPTER XXL— a.d. 1640 to a.d. 1641.
The Long Parliament.— Difficulty of narrating its history in a limited space.— Of what
manner of men composed on its first meeting.— Opening of the Parliament.— Election
of Speaker.— Petitions from the prisoners under sentence of the Star-Chamber.—
Their triumphal entry into London.— Arrival of the earl of Strafford The House
of Commons resolve to impeach him.— His arrest.— Arrest of archbishop Laud.— Im
peached of high-treason and committed to the Tower.— Finch, the Lord-keeper,
and Windebank, Secretary of State, fly the country.— The judges in the case of ship-
money proceeded against. — Destruction of crosses, and' images.— Charges against
Strafford.— His trial.— Arrangements of Westminster Hall. — Daily course of pro
ceedings. — Bill of attainder proposed in the House of Commons. — Disclosure of
Henry Vane.— Strafford's last speech in his defence.— Pym's reply.— Close of the
trial. — The bill of attainder passed by both Houses. — Army plots and popular clam
ours.— Protestation.— Efforts of the king to save Strafford.— He finally abandons
him. — His execution ......••••. 386 — 407
CHAPTER XXII.— a.d. 1641 to a.d. 1642.
Act for the non-dissolution of Parliament. — Jealousy of the Commons. — Principal legisla
tive-measures. — Ship-Money; Star-Chamber ; Local arbitrary Courts; Court of High
Commission ; Forests ; Writs for knighthood.— English and Scottish armies dis
banded. — The king goes to Scotland. — Intrigues with Montrose. — Parliament re-as
sembles. — The Irish insurrection. — The king's progress in London. — Debate on the
Remonstrance. — The kingfe entertainment in the city. — Struggle of parties. — The
Remonstrance presented. — The king at Whitehall. — Tumults.— Protest, and com
mittal of twelve bishops.^— Articles of treason exhibited against lord Kimbolton andr
five members of the Commons. — The king attempts to seize the five members. — The
house adjourned 408—428
CHAPTER XXIII.— A.D. 1642.
/he king demands the Members at Guildhall.— Manifestations of popular discontent. —
The king removes trom Whitehall.— The Members brought back in triumph.— The
queen leaves England. — Conference at Newmarket.— The king refused entrance to
Hull.— Parliamentary Ordinance for the Militia.— The king forms a bodyguard at
York.-t-Propositions of the Parliament.— View of society immediately before the
, commencement of the Civil War. — Arming of the People. — The Cavaliers. — Influ
ence and character of the Puritans.— The Clergy.— Shutting up of the Playhouses.—
IO CONTENTS.
Volunteers of London.— Women petitioning.— l<i"<W> apprentices.— Industry af
fected by the preparations for civil war.— Disturbance!! in the country districts.—
Maintenance of order generally.— Influence of the Press —The Poets.— The Jour-
nalists. - Superstitions.-The king sets up his Standard a-.. Nottingham. - His
gloomy prospects.-Messages between the king and parliaraant.-Essex marches
from London. PaSe *29-«4
CHAPTER XXIV.— a.d. 1642 to a.d. 1643.
Beginnings of the Civil War— The king marches to Shrewsbury.— Skirmish at Wor-
cester._Battle of Edgehill.— The night and day after the battle.— Richard Baxter
visits the battle-field.— The king marches upon London.— The &t;l-t at Brentford.—
The royalists retire.— The Londoners march to Turnham Green.— The war spreading
through England.— The queen lands with an army.— The court at Oxford.— Adminis
tration of justice.— Reading surrendered to Essex 455—474
CHAPTER XXV.— a.d. 1643. "
The queen joins her husband.— Various incidents of the war.— Bristol tak^i by assault. —
Proposals for peace rejected by a small majority of the Commons.— Papular disturb
ances in London.— The siege of Gloucester.— Defence of Gloucester.— Essex marches
to its relief. — The king and his army retire . — The Parliamentary army march towards
London. — The battle of Newbury.— Prowess of the Trained Bands. — Death cf lord
Falkland, — The Sortes Virgilianze. — The royal success becoming more doubtful. —
Negotiations for an alliance between the Scots and the Parliament.— The solemn
League and Covenant. — Essex returns to London. — Growing importance of Crom
well. — Skirmish of Winceby, — Death of Pym. — The Covenant severely enforced. —
Ejected ministers 475 — 489
CHAPTER XXVI— a.d. 1643 to a.d. 1645.
The Scots enter England- — The Irish army' defeated at Nantwich. — A Parliament sum
moned to meet at Oxford. — Combined armies besiege York. — Lathom House. — Battle
of Marston Moor, — The queen leaves England. — Essex defeated in the West. — Second
battle of Newbury. — Difference between the Parliamentary Commanders. — Laud con
demned for treason by ordinance of parliament.— Treaty of Uxbridge. — Montrose's-
victories in the Western Highlands. — Self-denying Ordinance. — Fairfax lord-general
of the re-modelled army. — Cromwell lieutenant-general. — The battle of Naseby. — The
king's Cabinet Opened. — Surrender of Bristol by Rupert. — Basing house taken. 490—509
CHAPTER XXVII.— a.d. 1645 to A.D. 1647.
Destruction of the Manor Houses.— Miseries of Sieges.— Montrose defeated at Philip-
haugh.— Defeat of Digby.— His Cabinet taken — The King in Oxford.— Overtures
for Pacification.— Termination of the War in the West.— Prince of Wales leaves for
Stilly— The King negotiates with the Scots.— The King's Flight from Oxford.—
Adventures of the King on his way to the Scottish Army.— The King with the
Army before Newark.— State of Parties.— Negotiations.— The King surrendered to
English Commissioners.— Capitulation of Oxford.— End of first Civil War. 510—519
CHAPTER XXVIII.— a.d. 1647.
The King at Holmly House.— Army Independents.— Cromwell. — The Army proofed to
be disbanded.— Petitions lrom Officers.— Adjutators, — The King removed <\J^n
CONTENTS. 1 1
Holmby by Cornet Joyce. — Commissioners at Triploe Heath. — The Army advances
towards London. — The King's treatment in the Army. — Proposals of the Independents
to the King. — The King rejects the Proposals.— Tumults in London.— The Army ad
vances.— The Speakers and Members go to the Army. — London submits. — The King
at Hampton Court. — Cromwell. — The intercepted Letter of the King. — Charles
makes his escape from Hampton Court Page 530 — 551
CHAPTER XXIX.— A.D. 1647 to A.D. 1648.
Narratives of the king's Escape. — He goes to the Isle of Wight. — The Levellers in the
Army. — Their meeting suppressed. — Berkeley's unsuccessful mission to Fairfax and
Cromwell. — Scotch and English Commissioners at Carisbrook. — Parliament declares
against any further treaty with the king.— Royalist Re-action. — Riots in London, —
Revolts in many districts. — The king attempts to escape from Carisbrodk. — Insurrec
tions quelled. — Cromwell in Wales — Scottish. Army in England. — Cromwell's march
from Wales. — Battle of Preston. — Cromwell in Edinburgh. — Note on the party-spirit
during the Royalist reaction. ..•..•••• 552 — 567
CHAPTER XXX.— a.d. 1648 to A.D. 1649.
Treaty of Newport. — Concessions of the King. — Remonstrance of the Army. — Crom
well's Letter to Hammond. — The King carried to Hurst Castle.— Members ejected
from the Commons' House. — The king removed to Windsor. — Ordinance for the
king's trial — The High Court of Justice appointed. — The king before the High
Court. — The king sentenced to death. — The king after his condemnation.— The king's
execution. . • 568 — 586
CHAPTER XXXI.— a.d. 1649 to a.d. 1650.
Proclamation against a new king.— The Icon Basilike^— Council of State appointed.—
Trial and Execution of Royalists.— The Levellers.— The Levellers in the Army sup
pressed. — Trial of Lilburne. — Charles II. at St. Germain's. — Ireland. — Cromwell
Lord Lieutenant. — Cromwell's Campaign.— Drogheda. — Wexford.— Cromwell's Ac
count of the Slaughters. — Waterford. — Rupert driven from the Coast. — Surrender of
Cork.— Cromwell's Policy in Ireland. — Cromwell returns to London. . 587 — 605
CHAPTER XXXII.— A.D. 1650 to A.D. 1651.
Charles II. negotiates with the Scottish Parliament.— His commission to Montrose.—
Montrose in Scotland. — Execution of Montrose.— Charles goes to Scotland.— War
with Scotland Cromwell General.— Cromwell's Advance.— His Danger.— Position
of the two Armies at Dunbar. — Battle of Dunbar.— Charles crowned at Scone.—
Perth taken by Cromwell.— Charles and the Scotch Army in England.— The Battle
of Worcester.— Escape and Adventures of Charles.— Charles returns to France.—
Note.— Whitelocke's Description of Cromwell's Army, in a Conversation with
Christina, queen of Sweden. .....•••• 606—627
Table of Contemporary Sovereigns. 6»8
POPULAR HISTOEY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER I.
Elizabeth proclaimed queen. — She refuses to attend Mass on Christmas-day. — Philip pro
poses marriage to Elizabeth. — The Commons request that she would marry. — Her
answer. — The Coronation progress through the City. — Cecil's plans for the restora
tion of Protestantism. — Opening of Parliament. — Statute for restoring the supremacy
to the Crown. — Statute for the Uniformity of Common Prayer. — Deprivation of
bishops- — Peace with France — Pretensions of Mary Stuart. — Elizabeth the head of
the Protestant party of Europe.— Scotland. — Hostility of the queen-regent of Scot
land fo the Reformers. — Their desire for an alliance with England'.- French troops
sent to Scotland — England send> an army and fleet. — Siege of' Leith. — Peace corn-
eluded at Edinburgh.— Assembly of the parliament of Scotland. — Acts establishing
the reformed religion.— Mary refuses to ratify the treaty of Edinburgh. — Death of
Francis II. — Mary determines to return to Scotland. — Elizabeth refuses her a safe
conduct. — Mary embarks at Calais. —Arrival in Scotland. — Contrasts in the fortunes
of Mary and Elizabeth.
On the" 17th of November, 1558, the day of her half-sister's
death, Elizabeth was proclaimed queen by the Lords of the Council.
It is a remarkable fact connected with the popularity of this reign,
that the 17th of November was called " The Queen's Day," up to
very recent times. Sir John Harrington has preserved the speech
which she made to the council at her accession, in which she re
quires their assistance ; " that I with my ruling, and you with your
service, may make a good account to Almighty God, and leave
some comfort to our posterity in earth." * Her speech to Cecil,
from the same authority, is more characteristic : — " I give you this
charge, that you shall be of my privy council, and content yourself
to take pains for me and my realm. This judgment I have of you,
that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that
you will be faithful to the state, and that, without respect of my
private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best; and
if you shall know any thing necessary to be declared to me of
* " Nugae AntiqUae." vol/i- p. 56.
14 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
secrecy, you shall show it to myself only, and assure yourself I
will not fail to keep taciturnity therein. And therefore, herewith I
charge you."
The unanimity with which the accession of Elizabeth was re
ceived, even by the servants of the late queen, may be ascribed to
the caution with which she concealed her intentions on the subject
of religion. .' The release of ail prisoners confined for religious
opinions, which took place upon her entry into London on the 24th
of November, might have been considered only as a politic act of
grace. Her exception of Bonner "to the cordial reception which
she gave to the bishops might have passed without any marked
inference. But on the Christmas-day there was an occurrence which
could not be mistaken, as far as regarded the queen's personal
opinions. It is thus related, in a letter of sir William Fitzwilliam :
— " This night I came home late from London ; and for news you
shall understand that yesterday, being Christmas-day, the queen's
majesty repaired to her great closet with her nobles and ladies
as hath been accustomed in such high feasts ; and she passing
a bishop preparing himself to mass, all in the old form, she tar
ried there until the Gospel was done ; and when all the people
looked for her to have offered according to the old fashion,
she with her nobles returned again from the closet and the
mass unto her privy chamber, which was strange unto divers." *
The refusal to hear mass was followed, two days after, by a proc
lamation- forbidding the elevation of the Host, and all unlicensed
preaching. It was also ordered that the Gospels and Epistles, the
Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Lit
any, should be used in English.
According to the custom of sovereign princes Elizabeth des
patched messengers to the various European courts announcing
her accession. Amongst these the pope was included. There can
be little doubt that the queen and l:er ministers desired to temporise,
in some degree. The arrogant Paul IV. replied to Elizabeth's
messenger, that it was great boldness in her to assume the crown
without his consent, and that she must submit all her claims to his
decision. Philip of Spain thought that the principles of Elizabeth
were so unsettled, that she might consent to marry him, upon the
condition that she should become Catholic. He proposed himself
as her husband within a month after her accession. She received
these proposals with great civility ; and gave, at first, no decided
" Ellis, Second Series, vol. ii, p, 262.
inn yuEEN PRESSED TO MARRY. 1 5
refusal. Philip hoped to obtain a fairer bride than the wife he had
lost. Elizabeth was thus described in 1557 by Micheli, the Veni
etian :— " The princess is as beautiful in mind as she .is in body ;
though her countenance is rather pleasing from its expression,
than beautiful. She is large and well-made ; her complexion clear,
and of an olive tint ; her eyes are fine, and her hands, on which
she prides herself, small and delicate. She has an excellent genius,
with much address and self-command, as was abundantly shown in
the severe trials to which she was exposed in the earlier part of
her life. In her temper she is haughty and imperious, qualities
inherited from her father, king Henry VIIL, who frpm'her resem
blance to himself, is said to have regarded her with peculiar fond
ness." Elizabeth told the ambassador of Philip that she could
take no step without consulting her parliament. The two houses
met on the 21st of January, six days after the queen's coronation.
She had soon the opportunity of declaring her opinions on the sub
ject of marriage. On the 10th of February the Commons waited
upon her with an address that she would vouchsafe some match
capable of supplying heirs to her royal virtues and dominions.
Elizabeth's answer was as follows : * — " The queen, after a sweet
graced silence, with a princely countenance and voice, and with a
gesture somewhat quick but not violent, returned answer, that she
gave them great thanks (as she saw great cause) for the love and
care which they did express as well towards her person as the
whole state of the realm ; ' and -first,' said she, ' for the manner of
your petition, I like it well, and take it in good part, because it is
simple, without any limitation, either of person or place. If it had
been otherwise ; if you had taken upon you to confine, or rather to
bind, my choice ; to draw my love to your likings ; to frame my
affections according unto your fantasy ; I must have disliked it
very much ; for as, generally, the will desireth not a larger liberty
in any case than in this, so had it been a great presumption for
you to direct, to limit, to' command me herein, to whom you are
bound in duty to obey. ' Concerning the substance of ybur suit;
since my years of understanding, since I was first able to take
consideration of myself, I have hitherto made choice of a single
life, which hath best, I assure you, contented me, and I trust,
* Sir Simonds d'Eweskept a record of the parliamentary proceedings during the whole
of this reign, which is accepted as authority. We pive the speech of Elizabethfrom Sir
John Hayward, which contains the substance of d' Ewes's report. — " First Four Years of
Queen Elizabeth." Camden Society, p. 31,
l£ HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
which hath been most acceptable to God ; from which, if either
ambition or high estate, offered unto me by the pleasure and ap
pointment of my prince, whereof I have some testimony in this
place (as you our treasurer well do know) ; or, if avoiding the
malice of my enemies, or the very danger of death itself, whose
messenger, or rather continual watchman, the prince's indig
nation, was daily before my eyes; if any of these, I say, could
have dissuaded me, I had not now remained as I do. But so con
stant have I always continued in this determination — albeit my
words and my youth may happily seem hardly to agree— that it is
most true I stand now free from any other meaning. Neverthe
less, if any of you suspect that, in case it shall please God here
after to change my purpose, I will determine something to the pre
judice of the realm, put the jealousy out of your heads, for I assure
you — what credit my assurance have with you, I cannot tell, but
what it doth determine to have, the sequel shall declare — I will
never conclude anything in that matter which shall be hurtful to
the realm, for the preservation and prosperity whereof as a loving
mother I will never spare to spend my life. And upon whomsoever
my choice shall fall, he shall be as careful for your preservation,
— I will not say as myself, for I cannot for another as for myself, —
but my will and best endeavour shall not fail that he shall be as
careful for you as myself. And albeit it shall please God that I
still persevere in a virgin's state, yet you must not fear but he will
so work, both in my heart and in your wisdom, that provision shall
be made, in convenient time, whereby the realm shall not remain
destitute of an heir who may be a fit governor, and, peradventure,
more beneficial than such, offspring as I should bring forth, for
although I be careful of your well-doings, and ever purpose so to
be, yet may my issue degenerate, and grow out of kind. The dan
gers which you fear are neither so certain, nor of such nature, but
you may repose yourselves upon the providence of God, and the good
provisions of the state. Wits curious in casting things to come are
often Iwirtful, for that the affairs of this world are subject to so
many accidents, that seldom doth that happen which the wisdom of
men doth seem to foresee. As for me, it shall be sufficient that a
marble shall declare, that a queen, having lived and reigned so
many years, died a virgin. And here I end, and take your coming
in very good part, and again give hearty thanks to you all ; yet more
for your zeal, and good meaning, than for the matter of your suit."
The progress of the queen from the Tower to Westminster, on
THE CORONATION PROGRESS. 17
the 14th of January, previous to her coronation on the 15th, is de
scribed by Holinshed with an extraordinary fulness. The pa
geants were of the most gorgeous description ; but the chronicler
dwells with an evident satisfaction upon the minutest circum
stances that illustrate the demeanour of Elizabeth. It is clear that
she felt that her strong hold upon power was to be found in the
affections of the people. She was the first sovereign of England
that built up the security of dominion upon so broad a foundation.
She had enough of the "haughty and imperious qualities inherited
from her father ; " but from the very first she had the wisdom to
see that the days had gone by when a king could repose safely
upon the fear of the nobles or the amity of the churchmen. She
desired to be loved and obeyed by a People, and not by a class.
She and her wise advisers had taken their resolution to abide by
Pro estantism, with a conviction that the English were a people un
suited for burnings and inquisitions. The determination was not
to be carried out without danger and difficulty ; but the affections
of the People would make that easy which would have been im
possible to a selfish despotism. Let us see how Elizabeth culti
vated those affections in the simplest courtesies of a city pageant :
•r— " When the people made the air ring with praying to God for
her prosperity, she thanked them with exceeding liveliness both of
countenance and voice, and wished neither prosperity nor safety
to herself which might not be for their common good. As she
passed by the Companies of the city, standing in their homes, she
took particular knowledge of them, and graced them with many
witty formalities of speech. She diligently both observed and
commended such devices as were presented to her, and to that end
sometimes caused her coach to stand still, sometimes to be re
moved to places of best advantage for hearing and for sight ; .and
in the meantime fairly entreated the people to be silent. And when
she understood not the meaning of any representation, or could
not perfectly hear some speeches that were made, she caused the
same to be declared unto her. When the recorder of the city pre
sented to her a purse of crimson satin, very richly and curiously
wrought, and therein a thousand marks in gold, with request that
she would continue a gracious mistress to the city ; she answered,
That she was bound in a natural obligation so to do, not so much
for their gold, as for their good wills : that as they had been at
great expense of treasure that day, to honour her passage, so all
the days of her life she would be ready to expend not only her
Vol. III.— 2
l8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
treasure, but the dearest drops of her blood, to maintain and in
crease their flourishing state. When she espied a Pageant at the
Little Conduit in Cheape, she demanded (as it was her custom in
the rest) what should be represented therein : answer was made,
that Time did there attend for her : 'Time ? (said she) how is that
possible, seeing it is time that hath brought me hither ? ' Here a
bible in English richly covered was let down unto her by a silk
lace from a child that represented Truth. She kissed both her
hands, with both her hands she received it, then she kissed it ;
afterwards applied it to her breast ; and lastly held it up, thanking
the city especially for that gift, and promisingtobeadiligent reader
thereof. When any good wishes were cast forth for her virtuous
and religious government, she would lift up her hands towards
Heaven, and desire the people to answer, Amen. When it was
told her that an ancient citizen turned his head back and wept: ' I
warrant you,' said she, 'it is for joy ; ' and so in very deed it was.
She cheerfully received not only rich gifts from persons of worth,
but nosegays, flowers, rosemary-branches, and such like presents,
offered unto her from very mean persons, insomuch as it may
truly be said, that there was neither courtesy nor cost cast away
that day upon her. It is incredible how often she caused her
coach to stay, when any made offer to approach unto her, whether
to make petition, or whether to manifest their loving affection." *
The parliament which met on the 21st of January, 1559, nad a
task before it which required the greatest discretion. A great ec
clesiastical revolution was to be accomplished, with as little vio
lence as possible, and with some show of conciliation. Cecil was
the chief adviser of Elizabeth. He was the first person sworn of
her privy council ; and to his sagacity must be attributed the com
prehensive view which was taken of the whole domestic and foreign
policy of the country. During the reign of Mary, the retired sec
retary of Edward VI., who had been so sound a Protestant, was
one of those who outwardly conformed to the Roman Catholic re
ligion, though unlike Paget, Petre, and others of Edward's coun
sellors, he held no office. But he was on terms of friendship with
Cardinal Pole; and he lived in affluence and security. The state
ments of some over-zealous writers that, under Mary, he was a
conscientious adherent to protestant opinions, are disproved by
documents which show that he attended mass, and confessed to
*" This description by Sir John Hayward is a condensation of the more interesting
(X>ints of Holinshed's account-
DEVICE FOR THE ALTERATION OF RELIGION. 19
the priest, in the parish in which he held church-lands. He was
more happily employed than in the disgusting service of persecu
tion in which Mary's ministers were engaged. He was superin
tending his mother's property at Burleigh ; making additions to
the old family house there ; holding correspondence about pur
chasing ewes, and setting kernels of apples, and pears, and chest
nuts. It is interesting information to him that his fawns do well
in the closes where the maidens go to milk, and that his calves are
to be put in the horse-pasture when the snows shall be gone.*
These unambitious occupations were Cecil's safety ; and in his
years of comparative freedom from business of state, he was en
abled to devise a broad plan of action if the sceptre should again
pass into the hands of a protestant ruler. He was held by the
Romanists, as we have seen, to have " the character of a prudent
and virtuous man, although a heretic." When the time for action
arrived, Elizabeth had the benefit cf those earnest yet temperate
convictions which he had formed during his retirement. He had
studied the temper of the people of England. He knew the char
acter of the princess, who^ in all probability, would quickly succeed
to the throne. When Cecil was called to the councils of Elizabeth
he was prepared with the whole scheme for the restoration of
Protestantism. He saw all the dangers of the course that was to
be pursued ; but he did not counsel evasion of its difficulties ; or
any delay beyond the time for the meeting of parliament. His
" Device for the alteration of religion " is an interesting document,
which has been thus abridged by Camden : f
" It seemed necessary for the queen to do nothing before a
parliament was called ; for only from that assembly could the af
fections of the people be certainly gathered. The next thing she
had to do was to -balance the dangers that threatened her both
from abroad and at home. The Pope would certainly excommu
nicate and depose her, and stir up all Christian princes against
her. The king of France would lay hold of any opportunity to em
broil the nation ; and by the assistance of Scotland, and of the
Irish, might perhaps raise troubles in her dominions. Those that
were in power in queen Mary's time, and remained firm to the old
superstition, would be discontented at the Reformation of religion ;
the bishops and clergy would generally oppose it ; and since there
was a necessity of demanding subsidies, they would take occasion,
by the discontent the people would be in on that account, to in-
» Letter in Tytler, vol. ii. p. 489 t As translated by Bumet.
2o HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
flame them ; and those who would be dissatisfied at the retaining
. of some of the old ceremonies, would on the other hand disparage
the changes that should be made, and call the religion a cloaked
papistry, and so alienate many of the most zealous from it To
remedy all these things, it was proposed to make peace with
France, and to cherish those in that kingdom that desired the Re
formation. The courses and practices of Rome were not much to
be feared. In Scotland those must be encouraged who desired
the like change in religion ; and a little money among the heads of
the families in Ireland would go a great way. And for those who
had borne rule in Queen Mary's time, ways were to be taken to
lessen their credit throughout England ; they were not to be too
soon trusted or employed, upon pretence of turning ; but those
who were known to be well affected to religion, and the queen's
person, were to be sought after and encouraged. The bishops
were generally hated by the nation : it would be easy to drawr them
within the statute of Praemunire, and upon their falling into it,
they must be kept under it, till they had renounced the pope, and
consented to the alterations that should be made. The commis
sions of the peace, and for the militia, were to be carefully re
viewed, and such men were to be put in them as would be firm to
the queen's interests. When the changes should be made, some
severe punishments would make the rest more readily submit.
Great care was to be had of the universities, and other public
schools, as Eton and Winchester, that the next generation might
be betimes seasoned with the love and knowledge of religion.
Some learned men, as Bill, Parker, May, Cox, Whitehead, Grin-
dall, Pilkington, and sir Thomas Smith, were to be ordered to
meet and consider of the Book of Service. In the meanwhile the
people were to be restrained from innovating-without authority ;
and the queen, to give some hope of a Reformation, might appoint
the Communion to be given in both kinds."
Sir Nicholas Bacon, the brother-in-law of Cecil — a lawyer who
had filled no important office, and had attained no great distinction
— was appointed lord keeper. He opened the session of parliament
with a speech of which the moderation was the most remarkable
feature. He exhorted the members to "fly from all manner of
contentions, reasonings, and disputations, and all sophistical, -cap
tious, and frivolous arguments and quiddities, meeter for ostenta
tion of wit than consultation of weighty matters." He trusted
that " contumelious and opprobrious words, such as heretic, schis-
STATUTES FOR RELIGION. 21
fnatic, papist," would be banished out of men's mouths. He im*
plored them toi use great and wary consideration that nothing be
advised or done, which might "breed or nourish any kind of
idolatry or superstition ; " but, on the other hand, to take heed lest,
by "licentious or loose handling,- any manner of occasion be given,
whereby any contempt or irreverent behaviour towards God and
godly things, or any spice of irreligion might creep in, or be con
ceived." * It was certainly in a spirit of moderation that the par
liament, though decidedly Protestant, proceeded to establish the
great religious change by statute law. The first Statute is called
" an Act restoring to the Crown the ancient jurisdiction over the
state ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolishing all foreign power
repugnant to the same." The Lords and Commons say that by
the repeal by Philip and Mary of the statutes of Henry VIIL, the
queen's subjects " were eftsoons brought under an assumed foreign
power and authority, and yet do remain in that bondage." Two
temporal lords, the archbishop of York, eight bishops, and the
abbot of Westminster, opposed this bill. Lord Montacute, who,
with the bishop of Ely, had negotiated with the pope that England
might be restored to the unity of the church of Rome, contended
that " the hazard would be as great as the scandal, should the
pope thunder out his excommunication ; and expose the nation, by
that means, to the resentment of its neighbouring enemies." f
The government of Elizabeth was not to be frightened by the
thunders of the Vatican. It went steadily forward in carrying the
measures necessary for bringing back the kingdom to its ecclesias
tical condition at the end of the reign of Edward VI. In the act
against foreign jurisdiction the statute for receiving the Sacrament
of the Altar in both kinds was restored ; and the statute of Philip
and Mary for reviving the old laws for the punishment of heresies
was repealed. All archbishops, bishops, judges, and all ministers
and officers spiritual and temporal, were to make a declaration
upon oath, " that the queen's highness is the only supreme gover
nor of this realm, and of all other her highness's dominions and
countries, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes,
as temporal." The title " supreme governor " was adopted in pref
erence to that of "head of the church." The penalties under
this act, against persons maintaining the authority of any foreign
prince or prelate were, — fine and imprisonment for a first offence ;
* As reported by D'Ewes. " Parliamentary History," vol. i. p- 638.
t Ibid., p. 659.
22 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the incurring a praemunire for the second ; and death for a third, as
in cases of high treason. The sagacious statesman, Walsingham,
pointed out the lenity of this law, as compared with the statutes of
Henry VIIL, "whereby the oath of supremacy might have been
offered at the king's pleasure to any subject, so he kept his con
science never so modestly to himself, and the refusal to take the
same oath, without further circumstances, was made treason. But
contrariwise, her majesty not liking to make windows into men's
hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did over
flow into overt and express acts, or affirmations, tempered her law
so as it restraineth every manifest disobedience, impugning and im
peaching, advisedly and maliciously, her majesty's supreme power,
maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction." * In contrast to
this, we must not forget that some of the laws against Roman
Catholics, in a later period of this reign, were conceived in a far
less moderate spirit. By this law of the first year of Elizabeth, it
was provided that the commissioners who might be appointed by
the crown to exercise spiritual and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, were
not to adjudge matters to be heresy but such as had been decided
to be so by the Holy Scripture, or by the first four General Coun
cils. This provision is held to be " equivalent to an exemption of
Roman Catholics, as such, from the imputation of heresy." t Care
was also taken, under the Act which was passed " for the uniform
ity of Common Prayer " to omit from the Service book of Edward
VI., the offensive passage in the liturgy, praying for deliverance
"from the bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities." Yet
the change thus established was so sweeping, after six years of the
Latin mass-book, that we cannot be surprised that nine prelates
and nine temporal peers voted against the statute. In the Com
mons there was only one dissentient. The Act must, however,
have been felt as a great grievance by a large body ; for it absolute
ly interdicted the celebration of the Catholic rites, even in private ;
and rendered all persons who should absent themselves from
church, on Sundays and holidays, liable to a fine of one shillino-.
The statute was, as all enactments are which interfere with the
rights of conscience, capable of being converted into an instrument
of public oppression or private malice. Many Roman Catholics
went into exile, to avoid imprisonment under the authority of the
Court of High Commission. The moderation which was professed
by the government of Elizabeth was in some degree rendered diffi.
* Barnet, part ii. book 3. t Mackintosh, " History," vol. iii. p. 10.
PEACE WITH FRANCE. 23
cult, if not impossible, by the uncompromising temper of the clergy
in convocation. Disregarding a warning from the queen, they set
forth a document asserting the supremacy of the pope, the real
presence in the sacrament, and the exclusive right of the church to
treat of doctrine and regulate public worship. A solemn disputa
tion, the lord-keeper presiding, was held in Westminster Abbey,
between catholic and protestant divines, which only produced mu
tual irritation. The new statutes for taking the oath of suprem
acy, and for the use of the English liturgy, came into operation
on midsummer-day, 1 559. Fifteen bishops refused the oath ; and
resigned their sees, or were deprived. There were ten vacant sees.
Only two bishops conformed. A very small proportion of the
beneficed clergy surrendered their livings. At the end of the year
Matthew Parker was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury ; and
he then proceeded to the consecration of four other bishops, who
had been exiles in the time of Mary.
There were some peculiarities in Elizabeth's religious opinions
which were not wholly in accordance with the great change which
her government had carried through with so little opposition. She
had a dislike to the marriages of the clergy ; and she had a linger
ing fondness for some of the gorgeous ceremonies of Catholicism.
But to the general principles of Protestantism she was fully com
mitted, not only by inclination, but by the force of political circum
stances. A peace with France was concluded in April, 1559, in
which the restoration of Calais was postponed for eight years, under
a condition that if either party acted in contravention of the treaty,
all claim to the disputed territory should be forfeited. At the con
gress during the last days of queen Mary, the English envoys said,
that if they returned without the recovery of Calais they would be
stoned to death by the people. The condition in the treaty of April
was evidently introduced only to conciliate this popular feeling, by .
the delusion that the old conquest had not been irrevocably lost.
Scotland was included in this peace. Philip IL, of Spain, and
Henry II., of P" ranee, were now free to pursue their plans for the
extermination of heretics ; and their friendship was completed by
the marriage of Philip with Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry. The
duke of Alva officiated as his sovereign's proxy. In the tourna
ments which followed this wedding, the French king was accident
ally killed by the lance of Montgomery, a young Scottish noble.
He was succeeded by his eldest son, who became Francis II.
Mary Stuart was now queei of France. She was- the next heiress.
*4
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to the throne of England. According to the Catholic notions of
that time that the pope had the disposal of earthly crowns, a pre
tence was set up that Elizabeth's claim having been rejected by
the pope, the queen of France and Scotland was now also the law
ful queen of England. Amongst Cecil's papers there are " notes cf
quoen Elizabeth's reign," in which are the following entries, under
the year 1559 :
Jan. 16. "The dauphin of France, and his wife, queen of Scots,
did by the style of king and queen of Scotland, England, and
Ireland, grant to the Lord Fleming certain things."
June 28. " The justs at Paris, wherein the king dauphin's two
heralds were appareled with the arms of England and Scotland."
July 16. " Ushers, going before the Queen of Scots, being now
the French queen, to the chapel, cry, '¦Place pour la Reine
d'Angleferre? "
At the marriage of the French king's daughter there were shown
escutcheons of the arms of Scotland and England, as " the arms of
Mary, queen dolphin of France," recording, moreover, that she was
of Scotland queen, of England, and of Ireland. The constable
Montmorency interfered to stay these dangerous exhibitions. But
these pretensions were stimulated by Mary's ambitious relatives of
the house of Guise ; and they became the foundation of that hos
tility which was the cause of so much disquiet to Elizabeth, and of
such dire calamity to Mary. Scotland became a theatre for the
contests between a French party, representing Roman Catholic in
terests, and the national party of Reformers, with whom Elizabeth
allied herself. When the connection of Mary with France was ter
minated by the death of her boyish husband, she came to a govern
ment in which her own opinions were opposed to those of the pre
dominant religious power, and she became an alien amidst a
majority of her subjects.
The character and position of Elizabeth very soon placed her
at the head of the Protestant party of Europe ; and her whole reign
must be viewed with reference to this leadership. It was a struggle
which called forth all the decision of her own nature, all the pru
dence of her counsellors, and all the energies of her people. This
was a great period, in which the English mind asserted itself with
a vigour and independence which heralded every future triumph of
the national intellect and the national courage. There was a battle
for life and death going on in Europe, and England was joined in
the battle with the weaker numerical party. The serious differ-
PROTESTANTISM IN EUROPE. 25
ences between the various Protestant persuasions ; — -the hostilities
between the puritan party at home and the church,' which had re
tained many of the ceremonials of the ancient faith ; — these dissen
sions did not disqualify Elizabeth from being the acknowledged
head of the reformed religion. The great leader of the Roman
CathoUc party was PhilipTI. England had as her companions in
the struggle the Scandinavian countries, and those who spoke the
German language on the eastern shores of the Baltic. A large part
of Germany was Protestant. "A Venetian ambassador reckons
that only a tenth part of the inhabitants of Germany had remained
faithful to the old religion."* In France Protestantism had taken
root ; but its growth was to be stopped by barbarities which were
in contemplation when Elizabeth came to the throne. In the
Netherlands Charles V. and his son were pursuing the work of ex
termination. Spain was in the grasp of the Inquisition ; one of the
powers which had been organized to support the Church of Rome
in the contest which had assumed such formidable dimensions.
Another engine devised for the security of Catholicism was the
Order of the Jesuits. With the Inquisition and the Jesuits, the
Papal power had a devoted army at its command, every member of
which was prepared to extinguish heresy by force or by cunning.
When these spiritual arms were wielded under the temporal power
of a determined bigot such as Philip 1 1., such scenes of horror
were exhibited as still curdle the blood when they are related.
Such sceneswould probably have been exhibited in England had
the throne not been left vacant for the accession of Elizabeth.
Had Philip ruled here, the spirit of her people might have been
crushed, as Spain was crushed two centuries ago, when " the hand
of the Inquisition drew the line which said, No Further." f The
time was coming when the English government, not only for its
own safety, but for the assertion of a high principle, would have to
mix itself up with the affairs of Scotland in a way which involved
much dissembling policy and many acts which the spirit of better
times must regard as oppressive ; but which could scarcely be
avoided in the position of self-defence which England was com
pelled to take against the force and intrigue which would have
subjected that portion of the island to a foreign Catholic domina
tion. The time was close at hand when England would have to
fight the Protestant battle, by giving aid to the reformed faith in
France and the Netherlands. The government of Elizabeth had
* Ranke, vol. ii. p. 12. t Prescott, Philip II.
26 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
taken its side, and wisely, because the cause of Protestantism was
the cause of progress. The bold, masculine signature of Elizabeth to
the State Papers in which she proclaimed her consistent adherence
to the opinions upon which political and religious liberty were
eventually to be built — a liberty much more enlarged than she and
her advisers could contemplate — was the terror of superstition and
tyranny ; and when we look upon that signature let us never forget,
amongst her many faults, what we owe to that great woman.
From the time when the ecclesiastical policy of the govern
ment of Elizabeth was fully manifest, the affairs of Scotland be
came all-important to England. In the relations, either by Scottish
or English historians, of the complicated transactions between the
two countries for more than forty years, it has been too generally
assumed that the intrigues of England were constantly fomenting the
divisions of Scotland ; and, to use the words of one of the most sen
sible of antiquaries, " Elizabeth has been set forth in this respect as
the very demon of discord, ever occupied in blowing coals of strife." *
This writer adds, " Upon this point we desire to see an entire
revision of the historical evidence." At the beginning of Eliza
beth's reign the connexion of the house of Guise with the Queen
of Scotland — a house determined to oppose Protestantism by the
most violent proceedings — -made the watchfulness and even hostile
intervention of England a measure of self-defence. Cecil broadly
laid down this principle : " It is agreeable to God's law for every
prince and public state to defend itself, not only from present
peril, but from perils that may be feared to come. It is manifest
that France cannot any way so readily, so puissantly offend, yea,
invade and put the crown of England in danger, as if they recover
an absolute authority over Scotland. The long, deep-rooted hatred
of the house of Guise, which now occupieth the king's authority,
against England, is well known." f Although the foolish demon
strations of a claim to the throne of England on the part of the
queen of Scotland had been disavowed by the French minister,
that claim was not allowed to sleep by the bigoted uncles of
Mary. In 1559 a great seal was sent to Scotland, on which were
engraved the arms of France, Scotland, and England. Elizabeth
had to choose between two policies ; either to unite in friendship
with the cousin who indirectly claimed not only succession but a
a prior title to the English crown — a queen whose steadfast opposi-
• Mr. Bruce. Introduction to Letters of Elizabeth and James VI., p. xx.
t Forbes' State Papers.
THE QUEEN REGENT'S HOSTILITY TO THE REFORMERS.
27
tion to the reformed religion Was at variance with the opinions of
her own subjects ;— or to manifest a sympathy with the Protestant
leaders in Scotland, who were bent upon resisting the attempts of
the French to rule over them. One of the reformed leaders, Mait-
land of Lethington, wrote to Cecil, " When we see them, the French,
attempt conquest, and you, the English, show us friendship, shall
we not hate them and favour you, especially now that we are come
to a conformity of doctrine ? " The differences between the regent,
the mother of Mary, and the Scottish reformers, were coming to a
head. By the assistance of the reformers she had attained her own
position as the actual ruler of the country ; and the dauphin of
France, the husband of her daughter, had been recognised as king
of Scotland. But after the peace of 1559 she was won over to the
designs of the house of Guise forthe re-establishment of the Roman
Catholic religion in Europe, and, as a necessary consequence, for
putting down the Reformation in Scotland, and eventually for re
moving Elizabeth from the throne of England. The queen-regent
of Scotland boldly issued a proclamation for conformity of religion ;
in which all persons were commanded to resort daily to mass and
confession. She was reminded of her promises of toleration, by
some of the Lords of the Congregation — the leaders of the re
formers being so styled — to whom she replied- that " promises
ought not to be urged upon princes, unless they can conveniently
fulfil them." At this junction John Knox arrived in Scotland.
During an absence of two years the doctrines which he had boldly
preached in the face of danger had made extraordinary progress ;
although in many places the ascendency was still with the Romish
party. Within a week of his arrival, under the excitement pro
duced by his vehement oratory operating upon the indignation
caused by the regent's hostility, there was an outburst of popular
fury at Perth, when the religious houses of the Grey Friars and
Carthusians were devastated and plundered. The struggle ap
peared likely to end in bloodshed ; for an army was assembled on
either side. But a treaty was concluded, which Knox denounced
as only intended to deceive. Tranquillity was not long preserved.
After various acts of violence, the reformers having obtained pos
session of Perth, the army of the Congregation entered Edinburgh
on the 29th of June. Knox had at this time prepared a letter to
Cecil, in which, addressing the queen, he says, " My eyes have
long looked to a perpetual concord betwixt these two realms,
the occasion whereof is most present, if you shall move your hearts
23 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
unfeignedly to seek the same. For humility of Christ Jesus cru-
cified, now begun here to be practised, may join together the hearts
of those whom Satan, by pride, has long dissevered. For the
furtherance hereof I would have licence to repair towards you.
God move your heart rightly to consider the estate of both the
realms, which stand in greater danger than many do espy. The
common bruit, I doubt not, carrieth unto you the troubles that be
lately here risen for the controversy in religion. The truth is, that
many of the nobility, the most part of barons and gentlemen, with
many towns and one city, have put to their hands to remove idolatry
and the monuments of the same. The Reformation is somewhat
violent, because the adversaries be stubbofn. None that pos-
sesseth Christ Jesus with us usurpeth anything against the authori
ties, neither yet intendeth to usurp, unless strangers be brought in
to subdue and bring in bondage the liberties of this poor country;
if any such thing be espied, I am uncertain what shall follow." *
The great object of the leaders of the Scottish Reformation was
to make a firm alliance with England. They gave repeated as
surance to the ministers of Elizabeth that their design did not con
template sedition or rebellion against any lawful authority. The
queen-regent was diligent in spreading the contrary opinion, that
their object was to overturn the existing government. Elizabeth
was too cautious to give any direct encouragement to subjects to
resist their rulers : and she required assurances upon this point,
reserving, however, the right of resistance in a case of extreme
necessity. Cecil gave them vague promises of support, if such a
necessity should arise. A convention was concluded between the
regent and the Lords of the Congregation ; but neither party trusted
to any enduring tranquillity. The regent was looking for support
from France ; the reformers to England for the aid of men and
money. At last Elizabeth rendered some secret assistance ; and
the Guises, who were now the real rulers of France, sent a force of
a thousand Frenchmen to Scotland, who disembarked at Leith.
The regent then entrenched and fortified that port, against which
proceeding the leaders of the Congregation prematurely remon
strated. At length they made a decided demonstration of war. On
the 1 5th of October they marched into Edinburgh with a force of
twelve thousand men ; and the regent retired to her stronghold of
Leith. The Congregation formed two councils, one for civil affairs,
another for religion ; and they addressed a letter to the regent, re-
• Letter in State Paper Office, given in Tytler's " History of Scotland," vol. vi. p. 131.
SIEGE OF LEITH. 2$
quiring her instantly to command all foreigners and men-at-arms to
depart from Leith. She replied, that Frenchmen were naturalised
subjects, and commanded the duke of Chastelherault,* who had
joined the reformers, and his company, to depart from Edinburgh.
They decided that the queen-regent should be deposed from her
authority. The army of the Congregation, ill-disciplined, and com
posed of vassals who would not remain long in the field, was de
feated in an assault upon Leith ; and the capital was again occupied
by the royal forces. The castle of Edinburgh was, nevertheless,
held by the reformers, the governor refusing to surrender it unless
under the authority of the parliament, who had committed it to his
charge. Elizabeth at last consented to render real and open as
sistance to the reformers, who entreated her prompt aid upon the
sole ground that it was the intention of France to make a conquest
of Scotland, and then to dispossess the queen' of England of her
throne. In January 1560 a treaty was concluded at Berwick, in
which the duke of Norfolk agreed with the commissioners of the
Congregation, that Elizabeth should send assistance, and that she
would support the confederated lords, whilst they recognised Mary
as their queen, and maintained the rights of the crown. They
stipulated that they would not sanction any other union of* Scotland
with France than then existed, and, if England should be attacked
by France, would furnish an auxiliary force of four thousand men.
On the 2nd of April, 1 560, lord Grey entered Scotland with an
army of two thousand horse and six thousand foot, and was joined
at Preston by the army of the Congregation, to the number of
eight thousand. The English Council very wisely did not encum
ber the commander of their army with more than a soldier's work.
They sent sir Ralph Sadler to negotiate, and wrote to lord Grey,
- " Stick not to go through with this enterprise, and your praise will
be more than all the rest of your life, if all your life were laid to
gether. Take heed of French enchantments. They will win time
of you, if ye take not good heed. Well ; thus we leave your lord
ship to your business."
The Scottish and English army marched on to Leith. The
English fleet, under the command of William Winter, had entered
the Frith of Forth at the end of January. When Cecil had de
spatched the squadron, he wrote to Sadler, " our ships be on the
seas, God speed them." In the northern parts of Scotland the
French had> succeeded in forming a league, by which the clans and
. f The K reuch title of the earl of Arran, who had been, regent at a Jformer period.
30 . HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
men of the isles had engaged to uphold the Romish faith and the
French authority. The siege of Leith commenced. At this crisis
the queen-regent became dangerously ill ; and at an interview
which she requested with the leaders of the Congregation, at Edin
burgh, she endeavoured to reconcile the differences which had led
to such extremities ; and exhorted them to send both the French
and English troops out of the kingdom. She died on the loth of
June. Leith was defended by the French troops with great "
bravery; and the siege went slowly on. The town was at last
surrendered, after the conclusion of a treaty of pacification. Hay
ward has well described the extremities of hunger to which the
garrison had been reduced : — " All this time the English army was
well furnished with victuals from all parts of Scotland, and that
upon very easy prices. But the French were so straitly girt up with
in Leith, that no supplies were brought unto them. Hereupon they
grew very short in strength of men; and no less in provision of
food for those men which they had ; the one happening to them by
the force of their enemies, the other either by disability or negli
gence of their friends ; so, their old store being spent, they were
enforced to make use of everything out of which hunger was able
to draw nourishment. The flesh of horses was then more dainty
than ever they esteemed venison before ; dogs, cats, and vermin of
more vile nature were highly valued ; vines were stripped of their
leaves and tender stalks ; grass and weeds were picked up, and
being well seasoned with hunger, were reputed among them for
dainties and delicate dishes." Upon its surrender' the French
governor, D'Oysell, entertained the captains of the besiegers with
in the fortress ; " where," says Stow, " was prepared for them a
banquet of thirty or forty dishes, and yet not one either of flesh or
fish, saying one of a powdered [salted] horse, as was avouched by
one that avowed himself to have tasted thereof."
The peace which put an end to this brief period of English war
fare in Scotland, was concluded at Edinburgh on the 6th of July.
The negotiations on the part of England had been managed with
remarkable skill by Cecil. He succeeded in obtaining from the
French commissioners a renunciation of the pretensions to the
crown of England, which had been assumed by the king and queen
of France ; and he obtained a complete recognition of the liberty
of conscience for which the reformers had taken up arms. This
was most difficult of accomplishment ; for they were regarded as
rebels to their sovereign. But Cecil insisted that the treaty of
PEACE CONCLUDED AT EDINBURGH. 3X
Berwick between his mistress and the Lords of the Congregation
should be recognised and confirmed. The able minister accom
plished this by a flattering '' preface " to the article which secured
this acknowledgment ; " and we," he writes, " content with the
kernel, yielded to them the shell to play withal." The Congrega
tion were to be secured by an act of oblivion ; a general peace
and reconciliation were to take place amongst the nobility and sub
jects of the land, including the reformers and the adherents to the
ancient faith ; a Council was to govern the kingdom in the absence
of the queen, of whom she was to appoint seven, and the estates
five ; all foreign troops were to quit the country ; and a parliament
was to be held in August. In this treaty no express recognition of
the reformed worship was introduced ; and the bishops and other
churchmen who had received injuries, were to be redressed. But
the reformers were filled with gratitude to Elizabeth, although she
had preserved a strict neutrality upon the great question of reli
gion. Their queen was to send over a commission for assembling
a parliament ; and they left the future to the well-known disposition
of the great body of the people to favour the Reformation.
The treaty of Edinburgh was so unpalatable to the house of
Guise, that for nearly a year the queen of Scotland refused to ratify
it. The estates of the kingdom, however, assembled, at the time
stipulated by the treaty, without receiving any commission from
their queen. It was held that the express words of the treaty pro
vided that such a meeting of the estates should be lawful without
being so convoked. There was no doubt what course affairs
would take ; for the question of the legality of the parliament was
carried by an overwhelming, majority. The first proceeding of the
estates was to draw up a Confession of Faith, founded on the re
formed doctrines as received by Calvin. The opposition of the
bishops and other Romanists was useless. This remarkable sum
mary of doctrine must have been the result of the most careful
consideration. The solemn earnestness of its tone was character
istic of the Scottish people and their spiritual leaders in the Re
formation. It concludes with this prayer : " Arise, O Lord, and
let thy enemeis be confoundit ; let theme flee fra thy presence that
hait thy godly name : Give thy servandis strenth to speik thy
worde in baldness, and lat all natiounis cleif to thy trew knawledge.
Amen." * The Confession of Faith was followed up by three Acts,
which established the reformed religion upon legislative sanction
* " Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, a.d. 1560.
32 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
much more rapidly and sweepingly than had been accomplished i»
England ; and with a more signal display of intolerance. The first
abolished the power and jurisdiction of the pope in Scotland; the
second repealed all statutes in favour of the Romish church ; and
the third provided that all who should say mass, or hear mass,
should incur confiscation of goods for the first offence, banishment
for the second, and death for the third. During the sitting of this
parliament Knox was preaching in Edinburgh with his accustomed
vehemence ; and he scrupled not to call upon the Protestant leaders
to restore the patrimony of the church, which they had appropri
ated, that it might be applied for the support of ministers, the en
couragement of learning, and the assistance of the poor. The
proceedings in the parliament of Scotland necessarily gave offence
to queen Mary ; and she again refused to ratify the treaty of Edin
burgh. When urged to do so by Throckmorton, the English am
bassador, she thus addressed him : — " Such answer as the king, my
lord and husband, and his council hath made you in that matter,
might suffice ; but, because you shall know I have reason to do as
I do, I will tell you what moveth me to refuse to ratify the treaty ;
my subjects in Scotland do their duty in nothing, nor have they
performed one point that belongeth unto them. I am their queen,
and so they call me, but they use me not so. They have done
what pleaseth them, and though I have not many faithful subjects
there, yet those few that be there on my party, were not present
when these matters were done, nor at this assembly. I will have
them assemble by my authority, and proceed in their doings, after
the laws of the realm, which they so much boast of, and keep none
of them. They have sent hither a poor gendeman to me, whom I
disdain to have come, in the name of them all, to the king and me,
in such a legation. They have sent great personages to your mis
tress. I am their sovereign, but they take me not so. They must
be taught to know their duty." *
On the 6th of December, 1560, Francis II., the young king of
France, died, after a reign of seventeen months. His death pre
vented the execution of a project for rooting the reformed doc
trines out of France, by holding an assembly of the States-Gen
eral, at which all should sign a confession of the catholic faith,
which should then be tendered for signature to every person in
the kingdom, the refusal to be punished by banishment or death.
* Letter of Throckmorton to Elizabeth, in State Paper Office. Tytler's " Scotland,"
Toi. vi. p. 225.
DEATH OF FRANCIS II. ^3
Mary appears very soon to have determined upon a return to Scot
land ; hoping, by previous negotiation, to have won over her sub
jects to a willing obedience. She was admirably fitted by her
beauty, her winning manners, and her acute intellect, to obtain the
homage of all hearts, could she have resolved to separate herself
from the policy of her family, even if she did not choose to conform
to the religion which had been so solemnly proclaimed by a vast
majority of the Scottish people assembled in parliament. It was
determined in Scotland to send as an ambassador to Mary, the lord
James Murray, the illegitimate son of James V. He was the chief
leader of the Congregation, and was intrusted with full powers to
request Mary to return home, if unaccompanied by a foreign force,
in which case she might repose with confidence upon the loyalty-of
her subjects. Murray wisely and bravely stipulated, in opposition
to the remonstrances of the reformed ministers, that his sister
should be left free to the private exercise of her own religion.
After the death of Francis, Elizabeth also sent an ambassador to
condole with her ; to assure her of the desire of England to remain
at peace ; but to demand her confirmation of the treaty concluded
by her commissioners at Edinburgh. Again Mary refused to ratify
this treaty till she had returned to her own kingdom, and submitted
the matter to her parliament. In her conferences with Murray,
in whom she seems to have firmly trusted, although he was in
intimate correspondence with the English government, Mary " did
hot scruple to admit that the amity between England and Scotland
was little agreeable to her, and that, considering the terms of the
league lately made betwixt the two realms, she was anxious to have
it dissolved."* " Murray," continues the historian, "having secret
ly met the English ambassador, insidiously betrayed to him every
thing that had passed between Mary and himself." Thockmorton,
in conveying the particulars to Elizabeth, wrote, under date of 29th
April, 1561, "At this present, thanks be to God, your majesty hath
peace with all the world ; and 1 see no occasion to move unto your
majesty or your realm any war from any place or person, but by the
queen of Scotland and her means." Those who write of the Secret
transactions of this period, as imperfectly laid open by official letters,
have the craft of Elizabeth, the confiding sincerity of Mary, and
the treachery of Murray and his associates always ready for argu
ment or illustration. It would be well to consider what the rupture
of the amity between England and Scotland, so desired by Mary,
* Tytler. " Scotland," vol. vi. p. 255.
VOL. III.— 3
34
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
really meant It meant a civil war in Scotland, which the alliance
with England kept down. It meant the establishment of the French
interest in Scotland, under the policy of the Guises, which has been
described : " To put down the Huguenots in France, to encour
age thus the Romanists in England and Scotland, to sow dissensions
amongst the Protestant princes of Germany, to support the Council
of Trent now sitting, and, in a word, to concentrate the whole strength
of France, Spain, Italy, and the Empire against that great moral and
religious revolution, by which light and truth were struggling to
break in upon a system of long-established error, was the main
object to which they directed their efforts." * That Mary Stuart
was fully imbued with the desire to support this main object, and
that Elizabeth Tudor was equally resolved to oppose it, may more
satisfactorily account for the early hostility between these queens
than the received theory that the government of England was
" constant in nothing, save in a desire to profit by the strifes and
embarrassments of the Scottish people." The able writer who has
so justly denounced this prevailing fallacy, says, with a distinct
knowledge of the historical evidence, that " there were two princi
ples which consistently regulated the English policy in Scotland
during the time of Elizabeth. The one was, a determination that
no continental power should interfere by force of arms in Scottish
affairs ; the other, a similar determination to uphold Protestantism
and the Protestant party in opposition to that party which befriended
Mary." f When the queen of Scotland desired to return to her
native country, she was assuring the English ambassador, that she
was most anxious for the friendship of Elizabeth ; I, for my part,
am very desirous to have the perfect and the assured amity of the
queen, my good sister ; and I will use all the means I can to give
her occasion to think that I mean it indeed." She was telling
Murray, in confidence, that she desired to have the amity dissolved.
Elizabeth, with a perfect knowledge of her real wishes, received
the ambassador, d'Oysell, whom Mary had sent to solicit a safe
conduct from the queen, either on her voyage to Scotland, or should
she land in the English dominions. He was also to ask for a pass
port for himself to pursue his journey to Scotland. Elizabeth, with
undisguised anger, refused both requests. " Let your queen,"
she said, "ratify the treaty, and she shall experience on my part,
either by sea or land, whatever can be expected from a queen,
* Tytlcr, vol. vi. p. 231.
t Mr. Brace's Introduction to " Letters of Elizabeth and James VI." p. xx.
MARY DESIRES TO RETURN TO SCOTLAND. 35
a relation, or a neighbour." It was the point of the renunciation
of the present claim to the crown of England that made Elizabeth
so resolved. Sir James Mackintosh has pointed out that Dr.
Robertson " confounded the right of succession with the claim to
possession ; " aad that " the claim to possession, asserted by the
arms, supposed Elizabeth to be an usurper ; the right of succession
recognised her as a lawful sovereign." * This most unwise preten
sion of Mary, thus re-asserted by her refusal to ratify the treaty,
was a real declaration of hostility, affecting the quiet of the English
nation. The refusal of a safe-conduct had undoubtedly the- ap
proval of Elizabeth's ministers, who could not forbear to look with
apprehension upon the return to Scotland of one so opposed to
their general policy. Their conduct might be ungenerous, but it
was not inconsistent. Cecil thus notices the resolve in a letter
to the earl of Sussex : — " Many reasons moved us to mislike her
passage, but this only served us for answer — that where she had
promised to send the queen's majesty a good answer for the ratifica
tion of the last league of peace made in Edinburgh, and now had
sent none, her majesty would not disguise with her, but plainly
would forbear to show her such pleasure until she should ratify it ;
and that done, she should not only have free passage, but all helps
and gratuities." f
' The indignation of Mary at this refusal was such as might have
been expected from so high-spirited a woman. Throckmorton has
related his interview with her on this occasion, and has reported
her address to him, eloquent and slightly sarcastic. She desired
her attendants to retire,. and thus spoke to the ambassador: — "I
know not well my own infirmity, nor how far I may with my passion
be transported, but I like not to have so many witnesses of my
passions as the queen, your mistress, was content to have whenshe
talked with Monsieur d'Oysell. There is nothing doth more grieve
me, than that I did so forget myself, as to require of the queen,
your mistress, that favour which I had no need to ask. I needed
no more to have made her privy to my journey than she doth me of
hers. I may pass well enough home into mine own realm, 1 think,
without her passport or license ; for though the late king, your
master, used all the impeachment he could, both to stay me and
catch me when I came hither, yet you know, Monsieur 1'Ambas-
sadeur, I came hither safety, and I may have as good means to help
me home again, as I had to come hither, if I would employ my
» " History of England," vol. iii. p. 55. t Wright's " Queen Elizabeth."
36 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
friends. Truly, I was so far from evil meaning to the queen, your
mistress, that at this time I was more willing to employ her amity
to stand me in stead than all the friends I have, and yet you know,
both in this realm and elsewhere, I have both friends and allies,
and such as would be glad and willing to employ their forces and
aid to stand me in stead. You have oftentimes told me, that the
amity between the queen, your mistress, and me, was very necessary
and profitable for us both ; and now I have some reason to think,
that the queen, your mistress, is not of that mind, for I am sure, if
she were, she would not have refused me thus unkindly. It seemeth
she maketh more account of the amity of my disobedient subjects,
than she doth of me their sovereign, who am her equal in degree,
though inferior in wisdom and experience, her nighest kinswoman
and her next neighbour." * At this interview, however, Mary said,
with reference to the complaint of her assumption of the arms of
England, that she acted under the commandment of Henry, th?
king of France, and of her husband : " whatsoever was then done
was their act, not mine, and since their death I have neither borne
the arms, nor used the title, of England."
Amongst the imprudent avowals of Mary was the declaration of
her hatred to John Knox, before she had acquired any experience
of his severe judgment cf her character, and his rough mode of
urging his opinions upon her. On the eve of Mary's departure
from France, Throckmorton wrote to Elizabeth— " I understand
that the queen of Scotland is thoroughly persuaded that the most
dangerous man in all her realm of Scotland, both to her intent
there; and the dissolving of the league between your majesty and
that realm, is Knox ; and therefore is fully determined to use all
the means she can devise to banish him thence, or else to assure
them that she will never dwell in that country as lono- as he is
there ; and to make him the more odious to your majesty, and that
at your hands he receive neither courage nor comfort, she mindeth
to send very shortly to your majesty, (if she have not already done
it,) to lay before you the book that he hath written against the
government of women, (which your majesty hath seen already,)
thinking thereby to animate your majesty against him." This book
of " The Government of Women " was a violent attack, whilst
Knox was in exile, upon the rule of Mary Tudor, and his lightest
word for her was "Jezebel." There were many other works fssued
to the same effect as that of Knox, in which a female monarchy
* Keith's " Affairs of Scotland," quoted by Tytler, vol. vi. p. 270.
MARY. EMBARKS AT CALAIS. 37.
was denounced as "monstrous." It may readily be understood
how the queen of Scotland thought this book presented an excel
lent reason for the queen of England giving no countenance to
Knox and his adherents. But Throckmorton, who knew how
important it was that passions should be subjected to policy, thus
gave his opinion about Knox and his " Blast " against female
government : " But whatsoever the said queen shall insinuate your
majesty of him, I take him to be as much for your majesty's pur
pose, and that he hath done, and doth daily, as good service for the
advancement of your majesty's desire in that country, and to
establish a mutual benevolence and common quiet between the two
realms, as any man of that nation ; his doings wherein, together
with his zeal well known, have sufficiently recompensed his faults
in writing that book, and therefore he is not to be driven out of
that realm." He was not driven out when Mary arrived ; and she
had a bitter experience how unequal she was, with her ready wit,
to cope with the dogged enthusiasm of the great reformer.
On the 14th of August, 1561, Mary embarked at Calais on her
voyage to Scotland. There was an evil omen in the wreck of a
vessel before her eyes as she left the harbour. Brantome has
recorded those touching displays of her feelings, which show how
reluctantly she quitted the country where she had moved amidst
the universal homage of a gay court ; where pleasures surrounded
her on every side ; and where there, were no severe religionists to
interpret the most innocent actions into evidences of immorality.
Yet at that dangerous court,,where female purity had ceased to be
regarded as a virtue, and female prudence was ridiculed and
despised, this fascinating woman might have learnt to forget that
self-respect which would have shielded her from harm, even
amongst the most stern judges of human conduct ; and thus France
might have been to her a cruel step-mother. She could now only
look back Upon its shores as. the seat of past joys, and exclaim,
" Farewell, France ! " Again, when the evening was drawing on,
would she again gaze, and say, " It is now, my dear France, that I
lose sight of thee. I shall never see thee more." Awakened at the
first dawning, as she had desired to be, if the coast were still in
sight, she exclaimed, " Farewell, France. It is over." On they
went to the North Sea, when a fog came on, and they cast anchor
in the open sea. It was this fog, according to some writers, which
prevented the galleys of Mary being captured by Elizabeth's
cruisers. One vessel was taken and carried into port ; but, says
38 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Tytler, " as soon as it was discovered that the young queen was
not on board, the prize was released, and pursued her voyage into
Scotland. The incident, however, demonstrated clearly the
sinister intentions of the English queen." This statement is
scarcely candid, to say the least. The counter-statement, upon the
authority of Cecil, is that the small English squadron was in
pursuit of pirates, who were then cruising in the Scottish sea; thai
this squadron saluted the royal galleys ; but detained one baggage
vessel, suspected of having pirates on board. "The conduct of
the English commanders towards Mary's vessels minutely corre
sponds with the assurance of Elizabeth, in her letter of the 16th of
August, that she suspended her displeasure at the refusal to ratify
the treaty, and had given orders to her naval officers which were
equivalent to a safe conduct." * This document must have been
familiar enough to the historian who so boldly affirms " the sinister
intentions of the English queen." Elizabeth says, "It seemeth
that report hath been made to you, that we had sent out our admiral
with our fleet to hinder your passage. Your servants know how
false that is. We have only, at the desire of the king of Spain,
sent two or three small barks to sea, in pursuit of certain Scottish
pirates. " t Mary landed at the port of Leith on the 19th of August.
She was received by a deputation, and conducted to the palace, or
abbey, of Holyrood — that seat of Scottish royalty whose chief
interest is associated with her name, but of which a very small
portion of the original building remains. Mary had been accustomed
to grander pageants than now welcomed her. Mean hackneys,
wretchedly caparisoned, waited her arrival. She went on to Edin
burgh, having no magnificence to show the French courtiers who
surrounded her. Under the windows of Holvrood the citizens
sang psalms to discordant three-stringed rebecks, which kept the
weary queen from sleeping; and the next morning, when a popish
priest was about to perform mass in her private chapel, he would
have been slain by the master of Lindsay, and a furious multitude,
had not Murray placed himself at the door of the chapel, and
maintained the principle for which he had contended, that the
queen should not be molested in the private exercise of her re
ligion. The fortunes of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor suggest the
most remarkable contrasts, even up to this period. When Mary
* Mackintosh, " History," vol. iii., p. 57.
t Robertson, " Scotland," Appendix.
CONTRASTS Off MARY AND ELIZABETH. $).
was in her girlhood she was married to the heir of one of the
greatest monarchies of Europe ; and she dwelt in the French c jurt,
surrounded with all the pomp and luxury of a refined but licentious
age. When Elizabeth had scarcely reached her twenty-first year,
she became the object of suspicion to her sister ; was a close pris
oner under apprehension of immediate, death ; and passed several
years of durance and solitary anxiety. The taint of supposed ille
gitimacy was upon her, and her succession to the crown was more
than doubtful. When she came to the throne she had to decide
upon heading an ecclesiastical revolution that would make her the
proscribed of Rome, and the contemned of Rome's supporters, or
to support a system which had become odious in England. She
threw herself upon her people, — and she triumphed. When Mary
became the widowed queen of France, and returned to assume the
rule of Scotland, she found herself supported by the great catholic
powers, but opposed to her people, — and she failed. She had to
bear the rough monitions of Knox ; the ill-concealed hostility and
uncertain support of her nobles ; and the secret or proclaimed
dislike of an angry nation., Whilst the government of England
was carrying out its resolved policy with regard to Scotland, and
all there was strife and bitterness, Elizabeth was moving amongst
her subjects with the love of the: many and the fear of the few.
Mary could depend upon no advisers ; for the adherents to the old
religion were too rash in, their weakness, and the reformers too
harsh in their strength. Elizabeth had the ablest men of the time
as counsellors, who held to a settled principle of action without
provoking hostility by capricious and passionate- exercises of au
thority. Mary was the sovereign of a people amongst whom the
feudal tyrannies had not yet been held in subjection by the growth
of profitable industry. Elizabeth governed a community in which the
strength of the middle classes had asserted itself against monarch
ical and ecclesiastical tyranny, and new channels of prosperity
were being opened wherever commerce developed the energies of
capitah. and adventurous men went forth for the conquests of peace.
The most prosaic record of the first two years of Elizabeth's reign
shows how remarkably the tranquillity of England was opposed to
the turbulent of Scotland.
40 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER II.
Public spirit under Elizabeth.— Sports and Processions.— England sends aid to the
French Protestants. — Scotland — Plans for Mary'Smarriage. — Leicester and Damley.
—Marriage of Mary and Damley.— The Reformers indignant at the marriage.— Re
volt of Murray and other nobles. — Revolt suppressed, and the lords banished. —
Darnley and Riccio. — Quarrels of the queen and Darnley. — Plot against Riccio. —
Murder of Riccio. — Birth of a Scottish prince. — Ascendency of Bothwell. — Darnley
at the Kirk of Field.— Assassination of Damley. — Mock trial of Bothwell.— Mary
carried off. — Marriage of Mary and Bothwell. — Mary surrenders to her nobles.
The aspect of the English metropolis under the protestant
government of Elizabeth is suggestive of the change that had taken
place in the thoughts and habits of the people. In 1555, when we
opened the " Diary of a Resident in London," we were following
the traces of burnings and penances, of processions of the host
and proclamations of the papal legate. We saw little of the salu
tary interference of the state with the ordinary concerns of life, in
smoothing the road of industry by removal of unnatural barriers to
prosperity; or in the association of municipal authority with cen
tral power for the establishment of laws that directly affected every
member of the community by introducing economical reforms. In
1560, when the wise Council of Elizabeth had called in the base
coin, which depreciation was now acknowledged to be the main
cause of the excessive dearness of commodities, members of the
various crafts " walk in every market with a white rod in their
hands, to look that men should take testons of the rate as the queen
has proclaimed in all markets through all London." * This diffi
cult operation of restoring the current money to a just value was
carried through successfully, because it was set about boldly. The
teston of Edward VI. had been coined to pass at the rate of
twelve-pence; it was afterwards reduced to six-pence; and lastly
to four-pence, its intrinsic value. Fine sterling money was ex-
changed at the mint for the base coin, according to this last rate.
No doubt there was individual suffering in this apparent deteriora
tion of property ; but the great body of the labourers now knew
that they were paid the agreed value for their labour, and were not
* Machyn's Diary, p. 245.
PUBLIC SPIRIT UNDER ELIZABETH. 41
deluded by receiving, as twelve-pence, what would only exchange
for the third of a bushel, of wheat instead of the bushel which the
honest twelve-pence would have bought. There required much
public spirit in the people, as well as firmness in the government,
to carry through such a change without serious confusion. But it
was accomplished with no recorded difficulty ; and to this correc
tion of the evils produced by the frauds of her despotic predeces
sors may much of the steady commercial advance of England
under Elizabeth be ascribed. Public spirit at this time also mani
fested itself in a manner which has characterised our country for
three centuries. In 1561, the steeple of St. Paul's was destroyed.
"The 4th day of June, being Corpus Christi, between four and
five of the clock at afternoon, the lightning took and entered into
one of the holes that was in the outward part of the steeple, and
set the steeple on fire, and consumed both wood and lead, and the
bells tell below where the great organs stood beneath the chapel
where the old bishop was buried." Some of the ancient devotees
ascribed this calamity to the new religion ; for there were relics of
saints, deposited two centuries and a half before by a bishop of
London, for the express purpose of protecting the steeple from the
danger of tempests. The misfortune, however, did not discourage
the Protestants from instantly beginning the repairs of the beauti
ful church. The magnificent steeple was never restored; but the
roofs, which were entirely burnt, were replaced in the course of a
year, at the cost of nearly six thousand pounds. This sum w.ts
raised by contributions from the queen, from the citizens of London,
from the clergy of the province of Canterbury and of the diocese,
and from voluntary subscribers. In earlier times the especial
-funds of the Church would have been devoted to the restoration
of this splendid cathedral. But the Church property was now
scattered ; and in that distribution amongst the laity, the popular
interests became more identified with the ecclesiastical, and the
Church ceased to stand apart in self-supporting grandeur. The
union of the high and the humble, the sovereign and the burgher,
the noble and the priest, to carry through some object of common
good, is one of the social principles of England which we see thus
developing in the restoration of St. Paul's. That principle has
formed one of the foundations of a generous and confiding nation-
-; ality, in which the inequality of ranks is lost in a concurrence of
duties : an union whose monuments are the results of systematic
growth rather than of sudden creation, and therefore more exten-
42 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sively and permanently useful than the solitary wonders of capri
cious despotism.
The English love of sports and popular amusements seems to
have revived after the years of martyrdoms. Though the displays
of a terrible criminal justice are revolting to our present notions,
and we cannot read without some disgust, month after month, of
burglars and cut-purses being hanged by dozens at Hyde Park
Corner and Tyburn, yet the people of that time thought these
things just and right ; and went, without any sad reflections, from
the scenes of the gallows and the pillory, to look upon matches of
archery and aquatic games. Whilst St. Paul's is still smouldering,
a great wagsr of archery was shot in Finsbury-field, in which lord
Robert Dudley, afterwards earl of Leicester, was the challenger;
and on Midsummer Day, there was a great triumph on the river at
Greenwich, with a sham fight, and shooting of guns, and hurling of
balls of wild-fire, and a bark for the queen's grace to be in to se*
the pastime. On the ioth of July all London is out to behold
Elizabeth go in grand procession from the Tower " unto Aldgate
church, and so down Houndsditch to the Spital, and so down Hog
Lane, and so over the fields to the Charter-house, my lord North's
place." The next day the queen travels " from the Charter-house
by Clerkenwell, over the fields into the Savoy, unto master Secre
tary Cecil to supper, and there was the council and many lords and
ladies and gentlewomen, and there was great cheer till midnight;
and after, her grace rid to my lord North's to bed at the Charter
house." These country excursions in the midst of the now " popu
lous city," sound strange to the pent-up two millions and a half, for
whom the fields, even " among the pleasant villages and farms ad-
join'd," are a dream of the past. One more glimpse of the Eng
lish queen, in her early days of triumph and splendour, if only to
make us look more compassionately upon the poor Mary of Scot
land, whose first recreation was to behold a pageant of the godly
citizens of Edinburgh, in which Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were
destroyed as they offered strange fire upon the altar— the show
signifying the divine vengeance against such idolatry as that of tire
Romish church. On the 14th of July all the streets of London
were new gravelled, as Elizabeth set forth from the Charter-house
to Whitechapel, on her progress. The houses were hung with
cloth of arras, and carpets, and silk, with cloth of gold and silver, and
velvet of all colours. The crafts of London stood in their liveries ;
and there were trains of pensioners^ and knights and lords, and
ENGLAND SENDS AID TO THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS. 43
ftie aldermen in scarlet, and heralds in their coat-armours, and my
lord mayor bearing the sceptre, and the lord Hunsdon bearing the
sword. Then came the queen, and her footmen. richly habited ;
and ladies and gentlemen, and lords' men and knights' men in their
masters' liveries ; and at Whitechapel my lord mayor and the
aldermen took their leave of her grace, and so she went on he*
way. All these pomps look like profitless vanity. But they were
the poetry of the real life of that time ; and1 we may believe that
they were not without their influence on the glorious imaginations
that have reflected this age in harmonious association with the per.
manent and the universal.
When Charles IX., a boy eleven years old, succeeded to the
crown of France, the religious differences of the people had be
come so extended that they imparted their character to the political
factions of the time. The direction of the government was in the
hands of the duke of Guise and the cardinal his brother ; who,
joined in interests with the queen-mother, were naturally opposed
by the princes of the blood, headed by the prince of Conde\ The
Guises persecuted the Protestants ; the other party supported them.
The religious wars which divided the French into two great hostile
bands of Catholic and Huguenot, now commenced in terrible earn
est. There were two fierce, armies in the field, by whom the peo
ple were alike plundered and harassed. In 1561, according to
some writers, a hundred thousand persons were butchered by the
contending factions: The Protestants, although inferior in. num
bers, fought with desperation ; and the duke of Guise solicited and
obtained assistance against them from Philip of Spain. The prince
of Conde, on the other hand, concluded a treaty with Elizabeth,
who, after some attempts at mediation, sent a force of three thou
sand men to take possession of Havre. The queen was at first
careful that this should not be deemed an act of hostility to France,
declaring to' the French ambassador that her desire was to free the
young king from the tyranny of the Guises. But the contest soon
assumed a national character. The English warlike operations,
though conducted with great bravery, were finally unsuccessful.
The Catholics and Protestants concluded a hollow peace ; and at
length, both parties agreed in determining that the English should
hold no position in France. The garrison of Havre defended
themselves for two months, and then capitulated. They were re
leased without ransom, and came with their property to London.
But they brought with them the pestilence which had thinned theit
44 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ranks ; and the French Catholics looked upon the infliction as a,.
judgment upon the English heretics. In this year, 1563, the par
liament again met, and a statute of increased rigour was passed
against Papists. This was entitled, " An Act for the assurance of
the queen's royal power over all estates and subjects within her
dominions ; " and, with what has been justly called " an iniquitous
and sanguinary retrospect," it provided that all persons who had
been in holy orders, or taken a degree in the universities, or had
practised as lawyers, or held office in the execution of the law,
should take the oath of supremacy when tendered to them, under
the penalty of a praemunire, and if continuing to refuse for three
months, should incur the pains of high treason. The statute was
inefficient from its very severity ; and although the first penalty was
incurred by some of the higher clergy, archbishop Parker warned
the bishops, with whom it rested to enforce the oath, to do so with
great circumspection, and never to tender it a second time without
his special sanction. In 1563, Edmund and Arthur Pole were
convicted of a conspiracy to set Mary of Scotland on the throne.
Their associates were executed, but they wore out their lives as
prisoners in the Tower of London.
In 1563 an Act was passed against "fond and fantastical proph
ecies." * One description of prophecy that it was declared unlaw
ful to promulgate was that founded upon the armorial bearings of
any person. There was a famous prophecy of Thomas the Rhymer
which might come within this punishable class :
" However it happen for to fall,
The Lion shall be lord of all ;
The French queen shall bear the son
Shall rule all Britain to the sea. " t
The predictions which were familiar to the people of Scotland,
might have become current on the English side of the border; and
the notion that the son of the queen of Scots, "the lion with the
floure-de-lyce " would " rule all Britain," would at that period be
naturally denounced by the government of Elizabeth as " fond and
fantastical," delusive and dangerous. At this time it was feared
by the reformers in Scotland, ancl their fears were communicated
to the English court, that intrigues were going forward for marry-
* 5 Eliz., c. 15.
t Mr. Aytoun, in his notes to " Bothwell, a Poem," has clearly shown that this Scot
tish prophecy was referred to in a poem by Alexander Scott, addressed to Marv on her
return in 1561; and that therefore the belief cf lord Mailes, that it was an interpola
tion after the death of Elizabeth, is unfounded. Page 232.
plans for mary's marriage. 45
ing Mary to some foreign prince of her own religion. When the
Scottish parliament metin 1563 Knox preached a vehement sermon,
in which he said that those who would consent that an infidel — for
all Papists were infidels — should be head to their sovereign, would
do as far as in them lay to banish Christ Jesus from the realm, and
to bring God's vengeance on the country. The queen summoned
the bold preacher before her, and asked what he had to do with
her marriage ? Knox repeated . the words he had said in public ;
and, with a passionate burst of tears, Mary commanded him to
leave her. There can be little doubt that the queen would have
sought a foreign catholic alliance had she not been deterred by the
power of the reformers at home, and her apprehensions of giving
dire offence to England. Whatever shows of amity might have
passed between the queens at this period, their policies were sys
tematically opposed, and contained the germs of hostility. Whilst
Elizabeth was lending aid to the Huguenots, and Mary was writing
letters to the Council of Trent, in which she professed that if she
succeeded to the throne of England she would subject both king
doms to the apostolic see, there must have been dissimulation on
both sides. They were to have met in J562 ; but the interview
was postponed, as if there were insuperable barriers to a cordial
personal agreement As it was not likely that the queen of Scot
land would remain a widow, with princes eager towed one so beau
tiful and of such high pretensions, it was the policy of the queen
of England to induce her to marry an English subject — " some
noble person within the kingdom of England, having the qualities
and conditions meet for such an alliance." * Lord Robert Dudley,
the younger son of the duke of Northumberland, the father of lady
Jane Grey, was recommended. It is one of the mysteries connected
with the capricious character of all Elizabeth's own matrimonial
negotiations and female preferences, that Robert Dudley, afterwards
earl of Leicester, her chief favourite, should have been pressed upon
Mary as a husband. But even in that protracted negotiation, it
was not the reluctance of Mary to "embase herself," as she
thought would be the effect of a marriage with a subject, nor any
lingering wish of the queen to retain Leicester as her devoted
follower, which prevented k being successfully concluded. Cecil,
at the end of 1564, wrote: " I see the queen's majesty very de
sirous to have my lord of Leicester to be the Scottish queen's
husband ; but when it cometh to the conditions which are demand-
* Cecil's Instructions to Randolph.
if) HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ed, I see her then remiss of her earnestness." * Whilst Mary was
always pressing that her succession to the English crown should be
recognised by a declaratory Act, Elizabeth was as reluctant to
comply ; for the eyes of the Roman Catholic party were constantly
turned towards Mary as the legitimate branch of the Tudors — the
descendant of the daughter of Henry VIL, although unrecognised
in the will of Henry VIIL " The conditions which are demanded "
under this proposed marriage with Leicester were probably such as
Elizabeth did not choose to bring too prominently before her sub
jects. She had a strong dislike even to hear of this question of
the succession ; and said that Maitland, the Scottish minister, was
always, like a death-watch, ringing her knell in her ears. In look
ing at the delays and evasions about this demand of Mary, it is
usual to represent the conduct of Elizabeth as marked by " fraud,
falsehood, and selfishness ;" and that of Mary as " warm, generous,
and confiding." \ This is an easy mode of disposing of a great and
difficult public question. The eagerness of Mary for the recogni
tion, and the reluctance of Elizabeth to grant it, may each be ex
plained by the fact that Mary was the instrument of those who had
determined to eradicate the reformed religion, and that Elizabeth was
equally resolved to support it. The negotiations for the marriage
with Leicester gradually faded away. There was another candidate
for Mary's hand, ready at an opportune moment. Henry Stuart,
lord Darnley, was the son of the earl of Lennox, by the daughter of
Margaret Tudor, queen of Scots, who had married the earl of
Angus after the death of her royal husband. The countess of
Lennox was the next to Mary in hereditary succession to the Eng
lish crown . The earl of Lennox had long resided in Eno-Jand as
an exile, and in 1564, having returned to Scotland with letters from
Elizabeth urging the reversal of his attainder, he was finally re
stored. Then came his countess and their son to the Scottish
court. Darnley arrived on the 13th of February, 1565. In a fort
night, Randolph, the English ambassador, had observed the favours
which Mary bestowed upon this youth. He soon manifested a
preference for the Romish party, and gave offence to the reform
ers. Within two months of Darnley's arrival an envoy was sent by
Mary to desire Elizabeth's approval of her marriage with her cousin.
That assent was refused by the Council on the ground that the
marriage would be dangerous to the protestant religion ; would
strengthen the league of catholic princes which was now organ-
* Ellis, Second Series, vol ii. p. 294. t Tytler, vol. vi. p. 373.
MARRIAGE OF MARY AND DARNLEY. 47
ising; and that Mary not yet having renounced her claim to the
crown of England, this marriage would more imperil Elizabeth's
title. That there was danger to the cause of the Reformation in
Scotland may be inferred from the fact that lord Murray, who for
four years had kept the kingdom in tolerable peace, holding the
scales of justice even between bitterly opposing factions, though an
earnest friend to the reformers, now withdrew from the court of
.Mary. The strong resolve with which Murray and other protest-
ants opposed this union must have been founded upon something
more than vague apprehensions of the power of a husband over
the queeni They dreaded him as an unreasoning tool of her more
determined will. Darnley had no force of character. He was a
handsome simpleton. Mary had apparently conceived a. passion for
the tall stripling, whose folly was only equalled by his pride. They
were married on the 29th of July, and he was proclaimed king the
same day. " They were married with all the solemnities of the popish
time, saving that he heard not the mass. . . . Rather he seemeth
a monarch of the world than he that not long since we have seen
and known the lord Darnley." * The register of marriages in the
Canongate has this entry : " Henry and -Marie, kyng and qweine of
Scots." The three years which followed this marriage are crowded with
strange and tragical events. Romance has seized upon them as its
peculiar property ; and History as been somewhat too eager to
follow in the wake of Romance. The occurrences which had so
material an influence upon the destinies of the Scottish and Eng
lish nations are almost unheeded in their public aspects ; and thus
the writer who desires to convey a sober view of what truly belongs
to the province of the historian finds himself bewildered amidst in
terminable controversies about the moral character of Mary, and
the contradictory evidence as to her participation in the foulest of
crimes. We are called upon, according to all precedent, to
pronounce upon her guilt or innocence ; to hold, with the
few, that she was the most shameless and abandoned of women ;
or, with the many, that she was the pure and guileless victim of the
most wicked conspiracies. These three years in which, whether
supremely guilty or singularly unfortunate, she underwent far more
than a common share of peril and anxiety, present the following
salient points : In 1565, on the 29th of July, Mary married Henry
Darnley. Murray, who had been her chief adviser since her return
* Randolph to Leicester. Ellis, First Series, vol. ii.p. 201.
48 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
from France, headed a revolt, without success, and then took refuge
in England, with other reforming leaders. Mary was now free to
give the most open encouragement to the Romanists, having the
countenance of her imbecile husband. The reforming party was
too strong to be permanently resisted ; and Mary's husband pro
fessed to have adopted their views. Within seven months of his
marriage Darnley became jealous of David Riccio, an Italian
favourite of the queen, and he, with a band of fierce nobles, mur
dered him in Mary's presence on the 9th of March, 1566. Murray
returned to Scotland. The differences between the queen and her
husband became notorious. James Bothwell was now Mary's
chief adviser. In 1567, on the loth of February, Darnley was
murdered in a lone house in Edinburgh, called the Kirk of Field,
and Bothwell was accused of the murder, but was acquitted. On
the 24th of April he carried off the queen to one of his castles, and
she was married to him on the 15th of May. The nobles now took
up arms ; and, in little more than two months from this last mar
riage, Mary was compelled to resign her crown, and was a prisoner
at Lochleven. Mary's resignation of her crown to her infant son,
who was born June 19th, 1566, took place on the 24th of July, 1567.
After nine months' imprisonment in the castle of Lochleven, she
escaped on the 2nd of May, 1568. Her Roman Catholic friends
assembled an army, which encountered that of Murray the regent,
on the 13th of May; and the queen's supporters being defeated,
she fled to England, and landed in Cumberland on the 15th of May.
We shall endeavour to tell this story as impartially as we can,
keeping in view, as. much as possible, its national bearings, rather
than entering into the minute details of a personal history which,
even when viewed under the most favourable light, is sufficiently
painful and revolting.
Mary was in her twenty-third year when she married, and
Darnley was nineteen. The dissatisfaction of Murray and the
other reformers was so great at the prospects involved in this mar
riage that they had beer, making preparations to oppose it by direct
resistance in arms. Within three days of the nuptial ceremony
Murray was commanded to appear at court, or to be proclaimed a
rebel. If we may credit one party-representation of the troubles
of this period, we must believe that the ambition of Murray and his
followers, stimulated by the intrigues of England, was the sole
cause of the opposition to this union. If we are to trust in another
view of the matter, we must consider that the resistance of the
THE REFORMERS INDIGNANT AT THE MARRIAGE. 49
lords was founded upon a sincere belief that Mary, in taking a
husband of her own religious persuasion, who would give additional
strength to her will, and to the desire of her foreign relations to
re-establkh the Roman Catholic ascendency, was perilling the great
interests of the Reformation. We must bear in mind not only the
character 'of those times, but the peculiar temper of the Scottish
people, to -enable us to form a right judgment of the actions of the
two great parties in the state. The Reformation in England had
attained its consistency, step by step ; and having passed through
its most perilous crisis under Mary Tudor, had become the estab
lished religion of the country, never to be seriously shaken. It
had attained this position by a cautious adaptation to popular
usages and opinions — a graft jipon the ancient stock rather than
the forced growth of a new plant taking the place,of the old decay
ing tree. The Reformation in Scotland was, from the first, a
negation. Whatever was Protestant was to be diametrically
opposed to Catholic. Old things were to be destroyed before new
things could be established. Whatever made the slightest.approach
to the ceremonies of the earlier church was idolatry. Whatever,
in a stern refusal to comply with habits either harmless or indif
ferent, was opposed to the practice of the Romanists, was true
religion. The character of the queen, as exhibited under its most
innocent aspects, was an offence to this severe judgment. Her
general cheerfulness, her fondness for the chase, her balls and
masquerades, her love of poetry and music, were represented as
sins. It is scarcely to be wondered at, however to be lamented,
that she often acted in defiance of a prudent decorum. It is less a
matter of surprise that she had a deep hatred of the Reformers,
and entertained a vague desire for a political alliance that would
free her from the control of her Protestant subjects, and from the
•supervision of England. In the first four years of her personal
rule in Scotland she yielded to the strong power that was over her.
She would not surrender her own habits of ceremonial religion to
what had become the prevailing faith of the majority of her subjects ;
but she abstained from any rash attempts to interfere with the
course they were following. Had she been less cautious her fall
would have been more immediate. But, supported probably by the
avowed determination of France and Spain to uproot Protestantism
— probably stimulated by the growing coldness, if not enmity, be
tween herself and Elizabeth, and by the idle belief that the English
Catholics would support her pretensions to the crown which she
Vol. III.— 4
rjo HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
claimed as the legitimate descendant of Henry VII.,— she grew
bolder'upon the occasion of her marriage, and resolved, not indeed
to persecute the Reformers in Scotland, but only to tolerate them.
Cecil, in August 1565, wrote thus to the English ambassador in
France :— " The duke [Chastelherault], the earls of Argyle, Murray,
and Rothes, with sundry barons, are joined together, not to allow
of the marriage otherwise than to have the religion established by
law ; but the queen refuseth in this sort — she will not suffer it to
have the force of law, but of permission to every man to live accord
ing to his conscience." The great minister adds, "And herewith
she hath retained a great number of Protestants from associating
openly with the other." The leading Reformers knew that the
queen's rejection of the legal establishment of their religion would
be its destruction amongst a people whose inborn habit was to take
one of two sides. If Protestantism ceased to be regarded as
" established by law," Catholicism would come back to be so
established. The Reformers would not accept this toleration, and
they rose in arms. Murray was proclaimed a rebel. " She hath
put the earl of Murray to the horn," writes Cecil. His life and
estates were declared forfeited, by sound of horn.
Mary, who had caused Darnley to be proclaimed king upon
the occasion of their marriage, was desirous that the Scottish par
liament should bestow upon him the crown-matrimonial. Chastel
herault, who was next to Mary in succession, was offended at this,
and took part with Murray. This able man, with kingly blood in
his veins, is held to have had himself designs upon the crown. The
sundry barons are reputed to have opposed Mary, lest with the re-
establishment of the Romish religion they should lose their church-
lands. Elizabeth envied Mary, as lord Herries writes, " the com
fort of a husband and the happiness of children." These are the
base and sordid motives which are assigned as the impelling causes
of the opposition to the queen at this juncture. It is singular that
some of the Scottish historians, and some English, will not allow
anything for the strengtli of a great principle ; and constantly
present to us the ministers of England as base intriguers and the
Scottish statesmen as anti-national mercenaries. Elizabeth sent an
envoy to Mary, to endeavour to promote her reconciliation with
Murray. There were cold and sarcastic words delivered by Tam
worth, Elizabeth's messenger, and haughty answers returned by
Mary. She engaged for herself and her husband that they would
attempt nothing to the prejudice of the queen of England ; but she
REVOLT SUPPRESSED, AND THE LORDS BANISHED. 5 1
required that the English crown should be settled by Act of parlia
ment upon herself and Darnley ; and that Elizabeth should afford
no countenance to Scottish rebels. It is held that Murray was
countenanced and assisted by Elizabeth, though to a very limited
extent. Mary showed her vigour of character at this crisis. She
took the field with her forces ; and- headed her troops with pistols
at her saddle-bow. The revolt was cms' eel without any decisive
contest. The rebel lords transmitted: to the English government a
declaration that they were persecuted as traitors for their zeal for
true religion, and for their attempt to redress " the great enormities
lately crept into the public regimen of this miserable common
wealth." They affirmed that the efforts of Mary and Darnley
were solely directed to the subversion of the reformed religion
within the realm,, and the re-establishment, of " superstition and
papistry." There was ample, foundation for this assertion. The
Roman see had sent money to Mary; and Philip II. had placed
twenty thousand crowns in the hands of his ambassador at London
to be employed " with secrecy and address, in the support of the
Scottish queen and her husband." That the English government
knew well that the combinations for the restoration of Catholicism
in Scotland were connected with the pretensions of Mary to the
throne filled by the Protestant Elizabeth, is evident from its inces
sant watchfulness over every indication of Mary's projects. It
was a measure of self-defence to hold a steadfast alliance with the
Scottish Reformers. There would be intrigue and dissimulation in
pursuing this policy ; but that Elizabeth was actuated by a mere
womanly jealousy of Mary, as we are asked to believe, and that her
ministers causelessly sought to embroil Scotland, is the dream of a
very weak prejudice, which assumes the garb of a poetical nation
ality. Elizabeth is held to have dissembled when, Murray having
fled to her court, she " spoke very roundly to him, before the
ambassadors, that whatsoever the world said or reported of her,
she would hy ber actions let it appear, that she would not, for the
price of a world, maintain any subject in any disobedience against
a prince." * The right divine of princes was too deeply rooted in
her thoughts to carry her beyond a certain point of opposition to
her most dangerous enemy. In this she spoke her true mind.
In the declaration of the banished lords to the English govern
ment they complained that two crafty Italians, David Riccio and
Francisco, with other unworthy persons, had dispossessed the ancient
* Memorandum of Cecil, in Raumer, p. 70.
5 2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
nobility of their place in the queen's council. Riccio, a Milanese,
had been a singer in Mary's service, and was afterwards promoted
to the office of her private secretary. He had soon acquired con
siderable influence ; had been assiduous in promoting Darnley's
marriage ; and when Mary's first passionate love for that weak young
man had given way to contempt for his follies and vices, Riccio
became her chief adviser in place of the husband she had chosen.
At the beginning of 1 566 Randolph, the English ambassador, wrote
to Cecil that the Protestants were in such fear and doubt that they
knew not what shall become of them ; and that the wisest desire
nothing more than the return of the banished lords.* There were
agencies at work to inspire the Protestants with still greater
dread. There came from France an envoy of the cardinal Lorraine,
and a messenger from the Scottish ambassador. They had high
powers entrusted to them. They were to oppose the recall of the
banished lords, they were to induce Mary to sign the "Bond " which
had been concluded, under the auspices of Catherine de Medici and
the duke of Alva, for the extermination of the Protestants in Eu
rope. " Riccio, who at this moment possessed much influence, and
was on good grounds suspected to be a pensioner of Rome, sec
onded these views with all his power. " t Mary did join this league ;
did become a party to the dark conspiracy, whose grand result was
the massacre of St. Bartholomew in France, and which, but for the
wisdom of Elizabeth and her counsellors, might have produced a
St. Bartholomew in England. The passionate impulses of Mary
were equally the safety of Scotland. She was unfitted for the con
duct of a policy which would cherish its schemes of vengeance, and
smile upon its devoted victims, as in France, until thousands could
be cut off as if they had but one neck. Mary had strong hatreds
but she looked only at individuals for their gratification. Murray
and his adherents were the objects of her wrath in 1565; when
she " declared to Randolph that she would rather peril' her crown
than lose her revenge." % Deeper offences than rebellion were
now to agitate her. Darnley had been displaced from her confi
dence, and perhaps justly so. Riccio was her most cherished
counsellor. Darnley used to sign his name to public documents
as king, before that of Mary. The queen now signed her name,
and Riccio was provided with a stamp to add that of Darnley. The
. weak young man abandoned himself to drinking ; quarrelled with
* Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 206.
+ Tytler's " Scotland,"'Vol. vii. p. 19. J Ibid., p. S.
DARNLEY AND RICCIO. S3
the queen in public ; was persuaded that Riccio was the instigator
of his humiliations ; and, says Mr. Tytler, " had the folly to become
the dupe of a more absurd delusion — he became jealous of the
Italian secretary." The absurdity of this jealousy must be esti
mated by the general impression as to Mary's character. In the
unhappy affair of Chastellart, three years before, Randolph pointed
out " what mischief ensues of the over great familiarity that any
such personage showeth unto so unworthy a creature and abject a
yarlet, as even her grace used with him." * The man was hanged
for the presumption which this " over great familiarity " encour
aged. Mary brought to. Scotland the indiscretions of the French
court, if not its vices ; and her education in this school of impurity
may suggest some apology for the imprudences which her warmest
advocates cannot wholly defend. No one doubts that the deport
ment of Riccio was calculated to excite the suspicion of a neglected
husband, and the hatred of those who saw his influence over the
queen employed for their personal abasement and the subversion
of their religious opinions. The common desire for revenge asso
ciated Darnley with some of the fierce Scottish nobles, such as
Morton and Ruthven, in a conspiracy against the life of the ob
noxious secretary. The kingwas engaged with the superior Pro
testant leaders,. in a separate bond for the restoration of the ban
ished lords, upon their promise to support him and to give' him the
crown matrimonial. They were to maintain the protestant religion
as one of the conditions of this alliance. Mixing up these separate
contracts, "for the murder of Riccio, the restoration of Murray,
and the revolution in the government," we are told that "one only
step remained : to communicate the plot to the queen of England
and her ministers, and to obtain their approval and support"!
On the 6th. of March the earl of Bedford and Randolph wrote to
Cecil, from Berwick, of the jars between the queen and her hus
band, "for that he hath assured knowledge of such usage" of her
self as altogether is intolerable to be borne ; which, if it were not
overwell known, we would both be very loth to think that it could
be true. To take away this occasion of slander he is himself de
termined to be at the apprehension and execution of him whom he
is able manifestly to charge with the crime, and to have done him
the most dishonour that can. be to any man, much more being
as he is." They then enclose the copies of " Conditions for the
earls to perform to their king," and " Conditions to be performed
* Raumer, p. 21. t Tytler, vol. vii. p. 29.
54 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
by the king of Scots to the earls." Bedford and Randolph thus
communicate to their government that the king of Scots has deter
mined personally to revenge himself on the man who has dishon
oured him ; and that he has covenanted with the Protestant
leaders in Scotland and England to accomplish their recall, on the
condition of receiving their support in his desire for the crown-
matrimonial. A political revolution was to be accomplished against
the Roman Catholic ascendency, to which ascendency the queen of
Scots had lent herself. It was to be accomplished before the
meeting of parliament, in which the Romanist interests would
have succeeded in confiscating the estates of Murray, Rothes,
Grange, and the other lords who had fled to England ; and prob
ably would have attempted the re-establishment of the ancient re
ligion. Bedford and Randolph add that " persuasions " would be
tried with the queen ; but if they did no good, " they propose to
proceed we know not in what sort." If she attempted to raise a
power at home, she was to_be withstood ; if she sought any foreign
support, the aid of England was to be asked. In this communica
tion to the English government we can scarcely see any ground
for the charges which it is held to raise against the conduct of
Elizabeth. It proves, says Mr. Tytler, that the queen of England
had the most precise intimation of the intended murder of Riccio.
He should have added, as the personal act of Darnley. It proves,
we are further told, that it was intended to put an end to Murray's
banishment, to replace him in power ; and by one decided and tri
umphant blow to destroy the schemes which were in agitation for the
re-establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Scotland. It is
held that Elizabeth ought to have imprisoned Murray, discomfited
the plans of the conspirators, saved the life of the victim marked
for slaughter, and preserved Mary from captivity, " if she had been
alive to the common feelings of humanity." This view of the
duty of Elizabeth and her government arises out of the desire to
treat such questions as personal ones, entirely separated from a
great political principle. If it were safe for England that the
queen of Scots should be supported in her alliances with those who
sought, in the destruction of Elizabeth, the extinction of Protes
tantism in Britain, then the English queen might have been what is
called magnanimous. She interfered not ; and the Protestant no
bles and preachers were not swept from the island. But all such
reasoning upon the letter of Bedford and Randolph is wholly beside
the mark. The date of this communication to the English court
PLOT AGAINST RICCIO. 55
of the approaching political revolution has not heen heeded, in the
eager desire to blame Elizabeth and her ministers for not having
saved Riccio, and prevented the banished lords from returning to
Scotland. The letter of Bedford and Randolph to Cecil was
written from Berwick on the 6th of March. It enjoined the
strictest secresy. It was the first intimation of " a matter of no
small consequence being intended in Scotland." With extraordi
nary despatch Cecil might have received that letter on the Sth of
March. On the night of the 9th, Riccio was murdered. On the
nth, Murray and the banished lords were in Edinburgh. When
Murray was safe at Berwick on the 8th of March, ready to step across
the border, he sent his secretary with a letter to Cecil to tell him
of his plans. That Elizabeth or her ministers could, in consequence
of their communications from Berwick, have prevented the catastro
phe of the 9th, or detained Murray till the Scottish parliament, which
met on the 4th, had passed a statute of treason against him and
the other banished lords, will be difficult to establish in the face of
these dates, to which the able historian of Scotland, in many re
spects so candid, has shut his eyes.
It is about an hour after sunset on Saturday, the 9th of March,
when the court of Holyrood Palace is suddenly filled with armed
men, and the glare of torches lights up the old monastic walls. This
band, in number a hundred and fifty, is led by the earls of Morton
and Lindsay. They close the outer gates ; and the inmates of Holy-
rood are in their power. Bedford and Randolph, in a letter to the
Council of England, give the most circumstantial relation of the
¦events which immediately followed : " The king conveyeth himself,
the lord Ruthven, George Douglas, and two other, through his own
'chamber by the privy stairs up to the queen's chamber, joining to
which there is a cabinet about twelve feet square, in the same a
little low reposing bed, and a table, at the which there were sitting
at the supper tV.e queen, the lady Argyle, and David, with his cap
upon his head. Into the cabinet there cometh in the king and lord
Ruthven, who willed David to come forth, saying that there was no
place for him. The queen said that it was her will ; her husband
answered that it was against her honour. The lord Ruthven said
that he should learn better his duty, and offering to have taken
him by the arm, David took the queen by the plaits of her gown
and put himself behind the queen, who would>,gladly have saved
him ; but the king having loosed his hands, and holding her in his
arms, David was thrust out of the cabinet through the bed-chamber
5 6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
into the Chamber of Presence, where were the lord Morton, lord
Lindsay, who intending that night to have reserved him and the next
day to hang him, so many being about them that bore him evil will,
one thrust him into the body with a dagger, and after him a great
many other, so that he had in his body above fifty-five wounds. It
is told for certain that the king's own dagger was left sticking in
him. Whether he stroke him or not we cannot know for certain.
He was not slain in the queen's presence, as was said, but going
down the stairs out of the Chamber of Presence." * There is a letter
from queen Mary herself to her ambassador in Paris, which, in the
main circumstances, agrees with this account. But Mary says, that
when Ruthven addressed Riccio, she asked her husband if he knew
anything of this attempt ; adding, " and on his denying it, we com
manded lord Ruthven, on pain of treason, to quit our presence,
while Riccio had sought shelter behind us." She then briefly tells
of the murder in the ante-chamber, and says that immediately after
the deed Ruthven returned, and upbraided her with tyranny, and
her submission to the counsels of Riccio. But the letter of Bed
ford and Randolph details a frightful scene of violence between
Darnley and the queen, in which he reproached her with infidelity,
and said that "for her honour and his own contentment he gave
his consent that he should be taken away." She replied, "Well;
you have taken your last of me, and your farewell." Ruthven re
monstrated, and said that Riccio " was mean, base, enemy to the
nobility, shame to her, and destruction to her grace's country."
She rejoined : " Well ; it. shall be dear blood to some of you if his
be spilt." This account exhibits a most characteristic group :
" Her husband this time speaketh little. Her grace continually
weepeth. The lord Ruthven being evil at ease, and weak, calleth
for a drink, and saith, ' This I must do with your majesty's par
don.' " The queen in a letter to the ambassador says, that against
certain of her nobility, maintainers of her authority, who were in
the palace at the time " the enterprise was conspired as well as for
David." These were Huntley and Bothwell ; who escaped by ropes
out of a back window ; Athol, Fleming, Livingston, Balfour, and
Melvil, who also escaped. The concluding scene of that Saturday
night is thus described by the queen : '¦ The provost and town of
Edinburgh having understood this tumult in our palace, caused
ring their common bell, came to us in great number, and desired to
have seen our presence, intercommuned with us, and to have known
* Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 209,
BIRTH OF A SCOTTISH PRINCE. 57
our welfare." But she was prevented speaking with these anxious
citizens, " being extremely bested by those lords, who in our face
declared if we desired to have spoken with them, they should cut us
incollops, and cast us over the wall." The next day Murray arrived
in Edinburgh. At his first interview with Mary he is said to have
expressed great solicitude for her welfare, and she to have mani
fested a confidence in' his affection. The reconcilement was very
transient. At a meeting of the conspirators against Riccio with
the lords who had returned to Scotland, strong measures were de
termined on as regarded the queen: " In their council," says Mary,
" they thought it most expedient we should be warded in our castle
of Stirling, there to remain while we had approved in parliament of
all their wicked enterprises, established their religion, and given to
the king the crown-matrimonial and the whole government of our
realm." But in a few days Mary, who had subdued her weak hus
band to her will, persuaded him to fly with her at midnight to Dun
bar. Wi.atever were the intentions of the conspirators towards
her she was now out of their power. She soon gathered a large
force around her ; and marching upon Edinburgh, issued writs of
treason against Morton, Ruthven, and others, who fled to England.
Murray denied all complicity in the-murder of Riccio ; and Darnley
took refuge in denouncing those with whom he had been associated as
traitors and murderers. They retaliated upon his baseness in a man
ner that in eleven months led to another more fearful catastrophe.
On the 4th of April Randolph writes to Cecil, "the queen hath now
seen all the covenants and bonds that passed between the king and
the lords ; and now findeth that his -declaration before her and the
council of his innocency of the death of David, was false." From
the hour of that disclosure Darnley was a doomed man.
On the 19th of June, 1566, Mary gave birth to the son who was
afterwards king of Scotland and of England. The differences be
tween the various factions now began to be composed. Amicable
relations with England were established. Elizabeth agreed to be
godmother to the heir of the Scottish throne, and sent a golden
font for his baptism. In November Mary renewed her claim to
have a parliamentary recognition of her right of succession to the
Eno-lish crown, in a letter written by her to the lords of Elizabeth's
council ; but she stated her unwillingness "to press our said good
sister further than shall come of her own good pleasure to put that
matter in question." The English parliament, which had met in
the beginning of November, had begun to debate about the succes.
58 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sion ; and, says Camden, " on the one side the Papists propounded
unto themselves the queen of Scots, which had newly brought forth
a son ; on the other, the Protestants, with different affections, pro
pounded to themselves, some one man, some another." Mary al
ludes to this debate in her letter. Elizabeth was angry at the dis
cussion of this matter ; but in her instructions to Bedford, who was.
present at the baptism of James, she had, immediately previous to
receiving Mary's letter, authorised him to declare that she would
never suffer anything to be done prejudicial to Mary's right; but re
quired that she should confirm so much of the treaty of Edinburgh.!
as regarded Elizabeth's rights : " The same being since deferred
upon account of some words therein prejudicial to the queen's.
right and title, before all others, after us, our meaning is to require
nothing to be confirmed in that treaty but that which directly apper
tains to us and our children ; omitting anything in that treaty that
may be prejudicial to her title as next heir of us and our children."
It was added that all this might be secured by a new treaty. Mary
was in no hurry to embrace this reasonable proposal ; and nothing
was done to complete such an engagement, without which, Eliza
beth said, "though we are inclined to preserve amity, yet occasions
may happen to incline either of us to be jealous one of another."
The occasions of jealousy were never removed.
On the 17th of December the baptism of the infant prince took
place at Stirling, according to the Roman Catholic ritual. Darnley,
although living in the palace, refused to attend the ceremony. Be
tween himself and the queen there was not only coldness but mani
fest dislike. Mary was profoundly melancholy ; and Darnley was
proud and moody. A remarkable man, James Hepburn, earl of
Bothwell, had now become Mary's most intimate counsellor. She
had recently manifested a more than common interest in his wel
fare. Bothwell had been dangerously wounded in an attempt to ar
rest Elliot of the Park, a border depredator ; and he was carried
to his castle of the Hermitage. The queen had been engaged for a
week holding a court of justice at Jedburgh, whilst Bothwell was
slowly re covering -from his wound; and on one day she rode to the
Hermitage and back, a distance altogether of forty miles. She was
accompanied by Murray and others, but the visit gave occasion to
scandal, upon which the historians unfavourable to Mary have not
failed to dwell. After this interview the queen became dangerously
ill ; and the melancholy whic'i subsequently settled upon her was
frequently expressed by her exclamation, " I could wish to be
ASCENDENCY OF BOTHWELL. 59
dead !" A divorce was proposed to her by Bothwell, Murray, and
other counsellors ; and it has been affirmed upon the confession of
Ormiston, a confederate, that a bond for the murder of the king
was executed about tbe same time by several of these persons.
The mysteries of this period of dark intrigues and daring plots will
never be satisfactorily disclosed, and the precise degree of guilt to
be attached to individuals will remain unsettled. Let us briefly
relate the ascertained circumstances of the momentous crime that
was perpetrated on the 10th of February, 1567.
At the end of 1 566, Mary had consented to pardon Morton,
Lindsay, and others, with two exceptions, who had been con
cerned in the murder of Riccio. Darnley dreaded the return of
the fellow conspirators with whom he had broken faith ; and he
abruptly left the court and went to his father, the earl of Lennox,
at Glasgow. Morton, one of the pardoned nobles, returned to Scot
land early in January, 1567. Darnley had fallen sick of a dis
ease which was said to be the small-pox ; and on the 22nd of Janu
ary, Mary proceeded to Glasgow to visit him. Some explanation
took place between them, and Darnley agreed to attend the queen
to Craigmillar, by slow journeys, she having brought a litter for
his conveyance. There is a deposition of Thomas Crawford, a
gentleman attending iupon Lennox, in which he relates a conver
sation between Darnley and himself, in which Crawford said, "She
treats your majesty too like a prisoner. Whyishould you not be
taken to one of your own houses at Edinburgh ? " Darnley replied,
" It struck me much the same way ; and I have fears enough,
but may God judge between us. 1 have her promise only to trust
to ; but I have put myself in her hands, and I shall go with her,
though she should murder me." * The plan of going to Craig
millar was changed, and Darnley was 1 carried to Edinburgh, where
he arrived on the 31st of January. Holyrood was declared to be
unhealthy, from its low situation ; and the king was taken to as
suburb called the Kirk of Field, where the duke of Chastelherault
had a residence. The attendants were about to convey Darnley to
the duke's mansion, when Mary said his apartments were to be in
an adjoining house, to which she conducted him. It was a mean
building belonging to Robert Balfour, one of Bothwell's depend
ents. The queen daily attended upon Darnley, , and appeared
assiduous in promoting his comfort, amidst the rude domestic ar-
* Tytler, vol, vii. p. 78. Mr. Tytler says that-'he has not been able to discover any
sufficient ground to doubt the truth of this deposition.
60 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
rangements- which this lodging afforded. Below the chamber
where he slept she had one prepared for herself. On Sunday, the
9th of February, Mary passed much of the day with her husband,
who is represented as having had his apprehensions of danger
somewhat removed by her presence, and by the appearance of
renewed confidence between them. On the evening of that Sun
day, the queen went to Holyrood, to celebrate by a masque the
wedding of Bastian, a foreigner of her household, with one of her
favourite attendants. Bothwell was present at the festivities of
the palace ; but he left about midnight. Darnley had gone to rest,
after repeating the 55th Psalm, his page being in his bedroom. At
two o'clock in the morning of the 10th a loud explosion roused the
inhabitants of Edinburgh from their sleep ; and the terrified citi
zens soon learnt that the Kirk of Field had been blown up and that
the king was dead. The house was completely destroyed. Mary
has herself described the extent of the destruction : " The house
wherein the king was lodged was in an instant blown in the air,
he lying sleeping in his bed, with a vehemency that, of the whole
lodging, wails and other, there is nothing remaining — no, not
a stone above another, but all carried far away, or dung in dross
to the very ground-stone." * But the body of the king was not
amongst these ruins. It was found lying under a tree in an
orchard, about eighty yards from the house; and the body of
his page was lying beside him. The account which Buchanan
gives of this circumstance agrees with the general evidence:
" The king had only a linen shirt on the upper part of his
body ; the rest of it lay naked. His other clothes and his shoes
lay just by him. The common people came in great crowds to see
him, and many conjectures there were ; yet they all agreed that he
could never be thrown out of the house by the force of gunpowder,
for there was no part broken, bruised, or black and blue about his
_body, which must necessarily have happened in a ruin by gunpow
der. Besides, his clothes that lay near him were not so much as
singed with the flame, or covered with any ashes." t It appears
probable that -Darnley was strangled in the orchard, as he hurriedly
attempted to escape, and that his page shared his fate. The bodies
of four of his servants were found in the ruins. Herries o-h-es a
circumstantial relation that Darnley and his attendant were stran
gled by Bothwell and his accomplices, in the bedroom ; and being
* Letter to Beaton. Dung is the preterite of ding , to strike down violently.
t Buchanan's " History of Scotland," translated by Bond, vol. ii. p. 323.
ASSASSINATION OF DARNLEY. 6 1
carried out by them by a back-gate, they fired spme barrels ol pow
der which they had put in a room below the king's chamber, and so
blew up the house. This was the room which the queen had oc
cupied ; and according to the confessions of two servants who
brought the powder, it was deposited in that room whilst Mary was
with her husband above. An opinion has been expressed, with
great plausibility, that the gunpowder, brought in a mail and trunk,
was insufficient to destroy the. house as it was destroyed; that the
walls had been undermined by another set of conspirators ; that
Bothwell was uninformed of this, and was left to take his own
course ; and that " in consequence, he was looked upon as the sole
deviser of the murder, which, however, there are strong reasons
for believing was not perpetrated by his means."* This opinion
opens up the great question of the guilt or innocence of the
queen — the question which we shall have briefly to notice when we
come to the judicial examinations which followed Mary's flight to
England. Meanwhile, no one has attempted to deny that Bothwell
was deeply concerned in this crime ; that his servants placed the
powder under Darnley's chamber ; that he left the palace at midnight,
and "went straight to the Kirk of Field, up Roblock's Wynd ; " t
that he:returned to the palace under cover of the night ; and that
when a servant rushed into his chamber to tell the news of the
catastrophe, he started up in well feigned terror and cried " Treason.''
Mary was made acquainted with the event by Bothwell and Hunt
ley, two of the conspirators, and she shut herself up in her cham
ber, as one lost in grief.
Two days elapsed before any public steps were taken to dis
cover the perpetrators..of this deed. . Then the proclamation was
issued offering a large reward. Placards were soon displayed in
the, city denouncing Bothwell, James Balfour, and others, as the
murderers. Mary removed to the seat of lord Seaton. Darnley
was buried with great privacy ; and his father made ineffectual
solicitations to the queen that she should take steps for the immedi
ate apprehension of those named in the placards. Bothwell con
tinued about the queen, having the- chief management of public
affairs ; and the Court at Seaton was occupied with somewhat ill-
timed amusements. The opportunities for a searching inquiry into
the circumstances of the murder were passing away. Some of the
inferior agents who were suspected were leaving Scotland. Both-
* W. E. Aytoun, Notes to " Bothwell," p. 263. t Herries.-
62 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
well rode through tjie streets of Edinburgh with fifty guards ; pas
sionately declaring, that if he knew the authors of the placards he
would wash his hands in their blood. The chief nobles, including
Murray, absented themselves from court, as if in disgust. Even
Beaton, the queen's ambassador at Paris, wrote to her in the
following plain terms: "Of this deed, if 1 should write all
that is spoken here, and also in England, of the miserable estate of
the realm by the dishonour of the nobility, mistrust and treason""
of your whole subjects, — vea, that yourself is greatly and wrong-
ously calumniated to be the motive principal of the whole, and all
done by your command, — I can conclude nothing besides that which
your majesty writes to me yourself that since it hath pleased God
to preserve you to take a rigorous vengeance thereof, that rather
than it be not actually taken, it appears to me better, in this world,
that you had lost life and all." Mary did not do what this honest
adviser exhorted her to do — " that you do such justice as the whole
world may declare your innocence." She received from Elizabeth
a message of condolence and advice ; and she promised the queen
of England's envoy that Bothwell should be brought to an open
trial. But she immediately admitted the guilty man to greater
favour than ever ; bestowed upon him new marks of her confidence,
such as the custody of Edinburgh castle ; and enabled him so to
strengthen himself, that the promised trial was a mockery and an
imposture. No one dared to accuse the man who commanded all
the military power of the state. The father of Damley now be
sought Mary to delay the trial, so that the accused should be less
able to control its issue by force. He applied to Elizabeth, who
exhorted her sister-queen to listen to so reasonable a request The
provost-marshal of Berwick arrived with Elizabeth's letter on the
1 2th of -April, the day appointed for the trial. The city was wholly
in the power of Bothwell, who had four thousand of his followers
in the streets and the court of the palace. The castle was under
his command. Bothweli's armed men surrounded the Tolbooth,
where the trial was to take place. Lennox was commanded to
enter Edinburgh with no more than six attendants, and he natur
ally shrank from the danger that appeared imminent, and declined
to appear in person. A gentleman, on his part, boldly re-iterated
the charge against Bothwell, but requested delay. There was no
accuser and no evidence, and a verdict of acquittal was pronounced.
The parliament confirmed the acquittal. Murray had returned to
France. Bothwell received new marks of the queen's favour ; and
MARY CARRIED OFF. 63
his ultimate elevation was anticipated by the signatures of many
nobles to a bond, in which they .recommended him as a suitable
husband for the queen. But some of the most important men in
Scotland were roused by the insolence of the favourite and the in
fatuation of Mary ; who, according, to a letter written by sir William
Kirkaldy, the laird of Grange, to the earl of Bedford, had said, with
reference to Bothwell, — •" She cared not to lose France, England,
and her own country for him, and shall go with him to the world's
end in a white petticoat, before she leave him." * The indignation
of the people was soon completed by a most extraordinary proceed
ing. The queen had been on the 21st of April to Stirling, to see
her child. As she was returning to Edinburgh, on the 24th, she
was surrounded by a great band of Bothwell's followers, to the
number ef eight hundred, led by him ; and was conducted, as if by
force, to his castle of Dunbar. Grange, on the 26th, addressed a
letter to Bedford, in which he accuses Mary of complicity in this
seizure, " to the end that she may sooner end the marriage whilk
she promised before she caused Bothwell murder her husband."
Proceedings for a collusive divorce between Bothwell. and his wife,
the lady Jane Gordon, were hurried through the courts. Craig, a
protestant minister, was ordered to proclaim the banns of matri
mony between the queen and Bothwell, which he did in the High
Church, adding, " I take Heaven and earth to witness that I abhor ,
and detest this marriage." • On the 12th of May the queen came to
Edinburgh, and created Bothwell duke of Orkney and Shetland.
On the 1 5th they were married. If there could be happiness in
such an union it was quickly over. The French ambassador, with
in a fortnight after, wrote to Catherine de Medici, " On Thursday
the queen sent for me, when I perceived something strange in the
mutual behaviour of her and her husband. She attempted to excuse
it, and said, ' If you see me melancholy, it is because I- do not
choose to be cheerful ; hecause I never will be so, and wish for
nothing but death.' " t It is related that she was treated with in
dignity by the man for whom she had sacrificed her peace of mind
and her reputation ; and that on one occasion when she had been
subjected to his insults, she called aloud for a knife to stab her
self. A confederacy of nobles was soon formed, with the declared
intention of putting down the power of Bothwell. He and the
queen were at Borthwick castle, about ten miles from Edinburgh,
* Letter in State Paper Gffice, Tytler, vol. vii. p. 106.- t Raumer, p. 99.
64 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
when the place was surrounded by an armed force. Bothwell es
caped by a postern, and reached his own castle of Dunbar. Mary
fled, disguised as a man, and joined her new husband in his fort
ress. The confederates secured the capital. The queen called her
followers round the royal banner at Dunbar ; and on the 14th of
June advanced with a considerable force towards Edinburgh. She
entrenched herself on Carberry-hill — a place remarkable as the
position which the English held before the battle of Pinkie. On
Sunday the 15th the confederates marched out of Edinburgh ; and *
the two armies were soon in presence of each other. Bothwell
sent by a herald his personal defiance of any one who accused him
of Darnley's murder. The challenge was accepted by Lindsay ;
but Mary forbadethe encounter. Her own army began to desert
her, and a general panic soon ensued. The queen demanded a
parley. Grange came to meet her, and tendered the obedience of
the lords in arms if Bothwell were dismissed. She did dismiss him.
There was a brief farewell ; and they met no more. He became a
pirate and an outcast. Mary was conducted to the camp of the
confederates ; and she soon perceived that she was a prisoner.
" Give me your hand," she said to Lindsay ; and placing her de
licate fingers in his rough palm, she exclaimed, "By the hand which
is now in yours, I'll have your head for this." Riding between
Athol and Morton, she was conducted into Edinburgh amidst the
execrations of an infuriated populace'. The soldiers carried a
banner, on which was painted the body of the murdered Darnley
lying under the tree near the Kirk of Field, and a child kneeling
beside it, with the legend, " Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord."
This terrible flag was paraded before her; and when she awoke
next morning, and looked out of the window of the provost's house
in which she had been lodged, the same dreadful representation
was hung up to meet her first gaze. In her despair she attempted
to address the people, who were moved to some pitv at her agony.
That day she was carried as a prisoner to Lochleven.
MARY COMPELLED TO RESIGN THE CROWN. 6 "J
CHAPTER III.
Mary compelled to resign the Crown. — Murray accepts the Regency. — Escape of Mary
from Lochleven. — Circumstances of her escape. — -Battle of Langsyde — Mary takes ref
uge in England. — Mary's detention in England. — Conferences of York and London. —
Mary placed undercharge of the Earl of Shrewsbury. — Anxiety for her safe custody. —
The duke of Norfolk and Mary. —Lady Catherine Grey.
The captivity of queen Mary was the signal for the return of
John Knox to Scotland. If he were not privy to the conspiracy
for the assassination of David Riccio, he did not withhold his satis
faction at an event which he considered essential to the safety of
religion and the good of the commonwealth. He had fled from
Edinburgh when Mary was in a condition to revenge that murder.
He came back when she was a prisoner, to urge the strongest
measures against her ; grounding " the lawfulness to punish her
upon Scripture history, the laws of the realm, and her coronation
oath." * The confederacy against Mary and Bothwell was known
as the Secret Council. Knox heartily embraced their cause ;
stipulating that the Reformed religion should be restored to the
position in which it was placed by the parliament of 1560. After
various attempts to persuade Mary to renounce Bothwell, Knox
" thundered out cannon-hot against her." f Morton told Throckmor
ton, the English ambassador, that he could not do for the queen
what he wished ; but was obliged to give way to the zeal of the
clergy and the people. Elizabeth, no doubt with sincerity, was'
remonstrating against the confinement and proposed deposition of
Mary ; but she was, at the same time, not prepared to take any
strong measures of forcible interference for her safety. The
unhappy queen was hemmed about with violent enemies and doubt
ful friends. Elizabeth charged her ambassador to insist that
subjects were not to be judges of a sovereign ; — it was " contrary
to Scripture and unreasonable, that the head should be subject t5
the foot." Knox, Buchanan, Craig, and other preachers boldly
maintained, and it was "a public speech amongst the people," that
* Report of Throckmo:'to-.i, July iS. t Throckmorton to Cecil.
VOL. III.— 5
66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" their queen hath no more liberty nor privilege to commit murder
nor adultery than any other private person, neither by God's laws
nor by the laws of the realm." The people were inflamed to the
highest fury. Mary's life appeared in danger, and she talked of
seeking refuge in a French nunnery. The General Assembly of
the Church united with the lords of the Secret Council in desiring
the queen to be brought to trial, and, if found guilty, to be put to
death ; " and there seemed every probability that this dreadful
result was about to take place, had it not been for the interference
of Throckmorton."* Murray was absent in France. At last,
another course was resolved upon. Lord Lindsay, under whose
severe custody she had been five weeks at Lochleven castle, and
who had come to the capital to attend the General Assembly, now-
returned to the queen with three instruments to which her signa
ture was demanded ; whose tenour was, to resign the crown in
favour of her son ; to appoint Murray regent of the realm during her
son's infancy ; and to constitute certain lords regents till Murray's
return, or permanently if he should decline the office. Mary long
refused compliance ; but the stern Lindsay terrified her into sub
mission. The immediate coronation of the infant prince was their
next measure. The English ambassador was invited to attend the
ceremony, but he gave a peremptory refusal, stating that the
proceedings of the Secret Council had -been wholly against the
advice and remonstrances of Elizabeth. The abdication of Mary
took place on the 24th of July ; the coronation of James on the
29th. The earl of Mar, his governor, bore the infant prince to the
throne at the High Church of Stirling : the deeds of resignation by
his mother were read, and Lindsay and Ruthven swore that they
were her voluntary acts ; Knox preached ; the child was crowned ;
Morton swore for him that he would maintain the Reformed reli
gion and extirpate heresy; the lords took the oath of allegiance;
and the infant of thirteen months was carried back to his cradle.
The indignation of Elizabeth at this proceeding was expressed in
the strongest terms through her ambassador ; but he was assured,
without any reserve, that the hostility of the English government
would only shorten Mary's days ; for that those who pretended to be
herfriends,the party of the Hamiltons, had, within the last forty-eight
hours, proposed to the interim-regents to put her to death. All
that Throckmorton could accomplish in favour of the prisoner was
Tytler, vol. va. p.
MURRAY ACCEPTS THE REGENCY. 67
that so fearful a measure, " the outgait " of the question, as they
termed it, should be suspended till the return of Murray.*
Murray came from France at the beginning of August. The
French government showed indifference to the fate of Mary, and
great efforts were made by that government to secure the interest
of the powerful man who had been chosen regent. He decided
to communicate with Elizabeth. Alleged proofs of Mary being
privy to her husband's murder had been put into his hands ; and
he was disposed to take part with the confederate lords. He had
an interview with the queen of England, who took a high tone, and
expressed her determination to restore Mary to her crown.
Elizabeth's advisers would have moderated her indignation at
Mary's rebellious subjects ; but she kept to her resolution to sup
port the cause of a sovereign held captive by an authority that set
itself above the throne. When Murray reached Scotland he was
irresolute as to the acceptance of the regency. On the one side, he
was pressed by those who held in their hands letters and papers
which they exhibited as proofs of Mary's guilt ; on the other, it was
represented to him that Mary's abdication was extorted from her.
He determined to see her himself. On the 15th of August, in
company with Morton, Athol, and'Lindsay, he visited her at Loch
leven. Mary appealed to him as her brother and her friend.
He set before her all that had been alleged as the follies and
crimes of her life ; and a conversation, which lasted till midnight,
ended in his exhorting her to seek refuge in the mercy of God.
In the morning they had another interview, when Mary exhorted
him to save her life, and pressed him to accept the regency. On
the 22d of August Murray was proclaimed regent. At a meet
ing with the English ambassador, he declared his intention to
make common cause with the lords. Though he had not been a
party to their past doings, he commended what they had done ;
"and seeing the queen my sovereign and they have laid on me the
charge of regency, a burden I would gladly have avoided, I am re
solved to maintain their action, and will reduce all men to obedi
ence in the king's name, or it shall cost me my life." Throck
morton having asked to see Mary, was refused ; and he was re
called to England. On the 15th December, the regent summoned a
parliament. The queen's resignation of the crown, the king's cor-
* The undoubted details of this treachery of Mary's pretended friends are given by
Mr. Tytler, vol. vii. pp, 170 to 17s, in complete disproof of the statements of " our
popular historians."
68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
onation, and the regency of Murray, were confirmed. The pope's
authority was abolished ; the Confession of Faith of 1 560 was sanc
tioned ; all heretics and hearers of mass were declared liable to
various punishments; and the Presbyterian Church was fully estab
lished as "the Immaculate Spouse of Christ." An Act of parlia
ment was passed to exonerate those who had risen in arms to de
mand justice on the murderers of Darnley ; which Act declared
that the queen was confined for her demerits, seeing that by her
private letters to Bothwell, and by her pretended marriage with him,
she was cognisant, art and part, of the murder of the king her
husband. These "divers her privy letters written wholly with her
own hand," have been the subject of interminable controversy.
They were said to Jiave been found in a silver casket, which Mary
had given to Bothwell, and which came into the hands of Morton
after her surrender at Carberry-hill. Hume holds that " the objec
tions made to their authenticity are, in general, of small force."*
These letters afterwards formed part of the evidence upon an
elaborate inquiry into the guilt or innocence of Mary. After the
queen had been six months under restraint, opinions came to be
more divided about her conduct and character. The sympathy
naturally inspired by the misfortunes of a young and beautiful
woman began to operate as a counterpoise to the severe denuncia
tions of the stern reformers. New factions began to be formed,
each having its objects of personal ambition. Murray, as was'
- almost inevitable, screened the higher delinquents in Darnley's as
sassination, and proceeded severely against their tools. The Ro
manists, now a marked and proscribed minority, were anxious for
some revolution which might restore their influence. On the 2d of
May, 156S, Scotland was convulsed by the tidings that Mary had-'
escaped from that prison whose walls were girded by the waters of
Lochleven, seeming to present an insurmountable barrier to her
release. In that isolated castle she had passed nine months of sor
row and anxiety — possibly of penitence — but never without hope
of restoration to sovereign authority. Admiration she could com
mand under the greatest reverse of fortune. George Douglas, the
younger brother of William Douglas, the owner of "Lochleven cas
tle, was subdued by her charms ; and even his proud mother, whose
* History of England, vol. v. Robertson and Laing agree in this opinion. Hume
supports his conviction by an argument for their genuineness under fifteen heads (Notes M
vol. v.) Mr. Aytoun boldly say., " The letters are now, I believe, universally admitted
to be rank forgeries." Notes to " Bothwell," p- 293.
CIRCUMSTANCES OF HER ESCAPE. 69
son was the regent Murray, had mitigated her original severity
under Mary's fascinating influence.' By the aid of George Doug
las, she had attempted to escape in the disguise of a laundress ;
but her delicate white hands had betrayed her real condition, and
she was brought back to her solitary prison. This attempt was
made on the 25th of April, and is described in a letter from Drury
to Cecil. Mary had put on the hood of her laundress and had
covered her face with a muffler or veil ; and so, with a bundle- of
" plothes she entered a boat that was about to cross the Loch. " Af
ter some space, one of them that rowed said merrily, ' Let us see
what manner of dame this is,' and therewith offered to pull down
her muffler, which to defend she put up her hands, which they espied
to be very fair and white." Thus discovered, the boatmen heeded
not her commands to row her over to the shore, but carried her
back again to the castle. George Douglas, John Beaton, a brother
of the archbishop of Glasgow, and other friends, were waiting at
Kinross. A more successful attempt quickly followed. On the
2nd of May she accomplished her purpose by the aid of the same
devoted admirer, the younger Douglas, who, dismissed from the
castle, was still able to carry on a secret correspondence with the
queen, and contrived to organise a formidable confederacy in her
favour. The story of Mary's escape has been worked up into the most
picturesque of narratives by the great novelist of Scotland, and
with no important deviation from the actual circumstances. These -
are related with some minuteness in an account transmitted by
John Beaton to the king of France, and, upon his authority, re-
Ipeated in an Italian letter to Cosmo de Medici from his envoy at
Paris. * Beaton, nothing discouraged by the failure of the 25th of
April, had contrived a new plan for her escape ; and on the evening
of the 2nd of May, there are anxious watchers on the neighbouring
hills, and in the village of Kinross. One solitary man is gazing
towards the castle from the edge of the lake. The outer gate
opens, and a -female hastens towards a boat. She leads a girl of
ten years old by. the hand ; and a youth stays behind for a minute
to lock the gate through which they have -passed. He is a page of
the castle, called the little Douglas. He has been won to Mary's"
succour, and he has rendered the most effectual aid by adroitly
removing the massy key as he places a plate before the castellan,
who is intent upon his evening meal. " The lad, Willie," as he is
* Tytler, " Proofs and Illustrations to History of Scotland," vol. vii. p, 457.
yo HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
called in a letter from Kirkaldy to Douglas, has done his work like
a true hero of romance ; and he has been immortalised under an
other name. * The female and her two youthful attendants enter
the boat. There is a white veil, with a broad red fringe, waving
in the setting sun ; and the gazers upon the boat know by this sig
nal that it remains for them to insure success to this perilous enter
prise. It was lord Seaton and his friends who were watching the
going in and the return of the boat, from their quiet hidings on the
hills. It was George Douglas who was the first to receive Mary
on the edge of the lake. The instant she landed, the queen was
on horseback— she who once regretted " that she was not a mr.n,
to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a
jack and a knapscap, a Glasgow buckler and a broadsword." She
rode at full speed to Niddrie castle, where she rested a few hours ;
wrote a letter to France ; commanded a Hepburn to go to Dunbar
to claim the castle for her; and then to carry to Bothwell, in Den
mark, the news of her deliverance. She then again took horse,
and arrived at Hamilton, where she considered herself secure. In
a few hours she was surrounded by numerous lords and their fol
lowers. The deposed prisoner of a dreary castle on the 2nd of
May, was on the 5th a queen at the head of an army.
But the earls and bishops, the barons and abbots, who, -to the
number of a hundred and fifty, had assembled at Mary's Council at
Hamilton, %nd had declared the proceedings which had ended in
Murray's regency as treasonable and of none effect, — these, in the
want of a commanding leader, and each with his motives of vague
ambition, — were unequal to cope with the master-mind of the re
gent, supported as he was by able counsellors who had every thing
to lose, and by enthusiastic reformers whom no peril could turn
away from the great cause for which they were as ready to fight as
to preach. Murray was at Glasgow, only eightymiles from Mary's
camp at Hamilton with an ordinary train, who attended upon his
presidency in a court of justice there. Offers of negotiation were
sent to him from the queen's council; but he issued a proclamation
in which he avowed his resolve to support the government of the
king. Some advised retreat. He decided not to move, but to
gather assistance for an instant attack upon the queen's force. In
ten days he was at the head of four thousand disciplined men.
Mary's soundest advisers first counselled that she should remove
to Dunbarton, which castle had been secured for her ; and there,
* Roland Gr:eme, the page in " The Abbot."
BATTLE OF LANGSYDE. 7 1
without the hazard of a battle, to endeavour to regain that influence
in the kingdom which she had lost from the time of her fatal mar
riage with Bothwell. But the party of the Hamiltons thought
themselves strong enough to destroy Murray, and secure their own
ascendency. The march to Dunbarton on the 13th of May, was,
however, decided upon ; but it was to be made in the face of an
enemy who had his choice of attack or delay. Murray's camp was
on the moor on the right bank of the Clyde, near Glasgow. The
queen's army had its line of advance on the opposite bank. They
had to defile through a narrow lane. Grange, who commanded
under Murray, saw his advantage, and fording the Clyde with his
horsemen, each having a foot-soldier behind him, placed them
amongst cottages and gardens on each side of this lane. The
queen's vanguard were driven back by the heavy fire which awaited
their progress. Murray and Morton had crossed the river by a
bridge, with their border pikemen. Morton led an advance, and
the conflict was for some time doubtful. Murray had stood for a
short time on the defensive against the charges of cavalry ; but by
an attack upon the queen's ranks with his main force the battle
of three-quarters of an hour was decided. The number slain was
comparatively small — not more than three hundred on the queen's
side, and only two persons on the side of the regent. " There is an
account in the State Paper Office, headed "Advertisements of the
Conflicts in Scotland," dated May 16, which, in mentioning the
flight of the queen's party, says, " At the beginning of which
chase the earl of Murray willed and required all his to spare for
shedding of more blood." We learn from the narrative, that " the
queen beheld this conflict within half a mile distant, standing upon
a hill." In that civil warfare she would ill distinguish between her
friends and her foes; for "there were divers of the queen's part
taken and not brought in, for there was the father against the son,
and brother against brother, as namely, three of the Melvins of the
lords' side, and two of the queen's." When all hope was lost on
the dispersion of her army, Mary rode at full speed towards Dum
fries ; and never halted till she had reached the abbey of Dun-
drennan, near Kirkcudbright. On the 16th, having determined to
take refuge in England, she crossed the Solway in a small boat,
and landed at Workington, in Cumberland. On the 17th, while
remaining at Workington, she addressed a letter in French to
¦Elizabeth, in which she enumerates the wrongs she had received
from her rebellious subjects ; describes the battle of Langsyde ;
72 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and implores the queen that, having come into her country, she
would receive her for safety of her life, and further assist her in her
just quarrel. She adds, " I entreat you to send to fetch me as
soon as you possibly can, for I am in a pitiable state not only for a
queen but for a gentlewoman ; for I have nothing in the world but
what I had on my person when I made my escape, travelling sixty
miles across the country on the first day, and not having since
dared to proceed except by night." * When Mary arrived at
Workington she was received with kindness by the country gen
tlemen ; and was conducted with respect to Carlisle by Mr. Low-
ther, the deputy-governor. She was attended by her friends, lords
Herries and Fleming. Herries had taken the precaution to write
to Lowther on the 15th, to know if the queen could come safely to
Carlisle ; but Mary was too impatient to wait for the answer, which
was to the effect that, without instructions, he could only under
take to receive her with due honour, and to keep her in safety
till the pleasure of the queen of England was known.
The position in which the English government was placed by
the sudden events of a single fortnight was one of real embarrass
ment. We say the English government ; for to attribute the policy
pursued towards Mary to the personal feelings of Elizabeth, and
not to the deliberate advice of her counsellors, is one of those mis
takes which, in deference to popular views, historical writers have
not been sufficiently careful to avoid. There is a paper extant in
Cecil's handwriting which shows his extreme solicitude to arrive at
a safe judgment upon the most difficult question that had ever pre
sented itself to the sober regard of a statesman. That the queen
of Scots should continue to be deprived of her crown, and that the
administration of the country should remain under the regenc) , he
holds to be the best way for England, but not the easiest. The
escape from Lochleven, the claim of aid from Elizabeth of succour
and protection, complicated that safer position which existed when
the matters in dispute were confined to Mary and her own people.
The queen of England had been strongly opposed to the deposition
of Mary ; but to take measures for her restoration, in opposition to an
established authority which had been confirmed by the .Scottish
parliament, was to enter upon a war against those Protestant opin
ions upon which the rule of Elizabeth herself was founded. To
permit Mary to return to Scotland without conditions, or to seek
for aid from France, would either be a course of no light danger.
* EUis, First Series, vol. p. u. 236.
mary's detention in England. 73
To suffer her to remain in perfect freedom in England would have
been to endanger Elizabeth's own position, by giving encourage
ment to that Roman Catholic party that held Mary as the legiti
mate heir of the English throne. Cecil saw all these difficulties,
when he had to consider whether Mary's demand of an interview
with Elizabeth could be conceded. Sir James Mackintosh holds
that in the arguments which Cecil had set down for the guidance
of his sovereign, he " had taken a comprehensive view of all the
mixed considerations of policy and justice which arose on that
peculiarly debateable ground, on which the safety of a people
seems to create a species of moral right, and to justify those acts
which are necessary to secure the undisturbed quiet of the state,
even when they deviate from rules which are, with reason, deemed
inviolable in any but the most extreme and extraordinary cases."*
The detention of Mary, the deposed queen of the Scots, and
of Napoleon, the abdicated emperor of the French, when each
had put themselves in the power of the English government
without conditions, have some parallel in their exception from
ordinary rules. Pointing out this general resemblance of the
cases, the same wise teacher of political philosophy says, " The
imprisonment, though in neither case warranted by the rules of
municipal or international law, was in both justified by that neces
sity from which those rules have sprung, and without which no
violence can rightfully be done to a human being." f
The policy of the English government with regard to Mary
resolved itself into a determination that there should be a solemn
investigation into the truth of the charges against her of being
accessary to the murder of her husband. Elizabeth, whatever
might have been her notion of the abstract right of sovereigns, was
too wise, or had too wise advisers, to listen to the exhortation of
Catherine de Medici, "to persevere in. the same opinion which you
have hitherto maintained, that princes should assist each other to
chastise and punish subjects who rise against them, and are rebels
to their sovereigns." Sir Francis Knollys, a kinsman of Elizabeth,
was sent by her to confer with Mary at Carlisle ; and he used an
argument towards her, as reported by him to his queen, which
opens a large field of exception to the doctrine of the queen-mother
of France : " I objected unto her that in some cases princes might
be deposed from their government by their subjects lawfully, as if
a prince should fall into madness. And, said I, what difference is
* History of England," vol. iii. p. 115. t Ibid; P- "'» note.
74 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
there between lunacy and cruel murdering ; for the one is an evil
humour proceeding of melancholy, and the other is an evil humour
proceeding of choler ; wherefore the question is whether your grace
deserved to be put from the government or not." At this argument
the tears tell from the eyes of the unhappy Mary. Whether Eliza
beth wholly approved of the logic of her representative, or not, the
decision of her government was put upon this issue.
The detention of Mary at Carlisle, near the Scottish frontier
being thought dangerous, she was removed in July to Bolton castle.
Her indignation at being considered a prisoner was unabated. The
factions in Scotland were at open war. A French army was expected
with eagerness by Mar)-'s adherents, though she herself disclaimed
any knowledge of their intended landing. An armistice was at
length concluded between the opposing parties ; and a conference
was opened at York on the 4th of October. The queen of England
was represented by three commissioners, the duke of Norfolk, the
earl of Sussex, and sir Ralph Sadler, who were to hear the allega
tions of the queen of Scots against her rebellious subjects ; and the
counter-charges against herself, made by those who had raised war
against their sovereign. Mary chose the bishop of Ross and lord
Herries, with others, to be her commissioners. Murray was ac
companied by four commissioners, with Lethington and Buchanan
as assistants. The representatives of Mary set forth the notorious
facts of the revolt against her by the usurpers of her authority, of
her imprisonment, her deposition, the coronation of her infant son,
the regency of Murray, her enforced flight into England. Murray
was placed in a position of extreme difficulty if not of danger.
Before he brought forward proofs of the crimes of Mar)-, which
could alone justify the course he and his' friends had pursued, he
sought to receive some assurance that, if the queen of Scots should
be declared guilty, he should be sanctioned by the English govern
ment in his proceedings, and supported in his office. The assur
ance was not given ; for the question was to be submitted to Eliza
beth's own decision. The duke of Norfolk, who afterwards paid a
terrible penalty for his espousal of the cause of Mary in the desire
to become her husband — not without some inclination to favour
her claim to the English crown— influenced Murray to withhold his
accusations against the queen of Scots. " The English queen, his
mi: tross," he said, " was resolved during her life to evade the
question of the succession, careless what blood might be shed, of
what confusion might arise upon the point : as to the true title
CONFERENCES OF YORK AND LONDON. 75
none doubted that it lay in the queen of Scots and her son ; and
much he marvelled that the regent, whom he had always reputed a
wise and honourable man, should come hither to blacken his mis
tress, and, as far as he could, destroy the prospect of her and her
son's succession."* In consequence of this influence, Murraj
withheld the real defence of himself and his friends, and made no
public charge against Mary. But he privately exhibited to Nor
folk, Sussex, and Sadler, the written proofs of Mary's guilt, alleged
to have been found in the silver .casket. The commissioners of
Elizabeth transmitted to her an abstract of these papers, with this
strong opinion of their authenticity : — " The letters discourse of
some things which were unknown to any other than herself and
Bothwell ; and as it is hard to counterfeit so many, so the matter
of them, and the manner in which these men came by them, are
such that as it seemeth that God, in whose sight murder is abomin
able, would not permit the same to be hid or concealed. "f The
commissioners of Mary had now an interview with Elizabeth, when
she informed them that the enemies of their queen had entirely
failed in their defence ; but that another conference should be held
in London. Murray, after some further hesitation, made his accu
sation against the qupen in the strongest terms ; and Lennox, the
father of the murdered Darnley, also accused Mary of conspiring
his death. Mary's commissioners now required that she should be
heard in person by Elizabeth ; which Elizabeth refused, until
M urray had brought forward his proofs. The commissioners of
Mary then took an extraordinary step. They made a proposal for
a compromise, by which Murray and the queen should be reconciled.
This proposition was rejected by Elizabeth. The bishop of Ross,
arid his associates, now declared that the conferences were at an
end, as Elizabeth had determined to receive from Murray proofs of
his injurious charges against Mary, before she was herself heard
in the presence of hy sister-queen. The discussions and recrimi
nations were prolonged for some time. Murray delivered his
proofs as regarded the written evidence of Mary's complicity in
the guilt of Darnley's assassination ; and her commissioners still
persisted in their refusal to re-open the conferences. Elizabeth, as
Norfolk had intimated, would come to no final decision. Mr.
* Melvil's Memoirs, quoted by Tytler as unquestionable authority, " as he was not
only present at York, but the regent made him privy to this secret interview." See also
Jardine's "Criminal Trials," vol. i.
t Letter from York, October 11, 1568.
76 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Tytler, after fully narrating these remarkable proceedings, in which
he holds that " both Elizabeth and the queen of Scots acted with
great art," says, "so far as we judge of these conferences by
themselves, they leave the mind under the unsatisfying and painful
impression that the conduct of the Scottish queen, throughout the
whole investigation, was that of a person neither directly guilty,
nor yet wholly innocent."*
During the conferences at York and London, Mary Stuart had
remained under the care of Lord Scrope, at Bolton. By an order
of Council in January, 1569, she was placed with George, earl of
Shrewsbury, and was removed to his castle of Tutbury, on the 2nd
of February. The earl, one of the highest of the peers of Eng
land, had the burthensome, dangerous, and not very honourable
office imposed upon him, of having the custody, for many years, of
the deposed queen, who, however strictly watched, was in corre
spondence, from first to last, with the enemies of Elizabeth and her
government ; and who was the pivot of most of the domestic and
foreign intrigues for the overthrow of English Protestantism. Be
fore the end of 1568 the earl of Shrewsbury had written to his en
ergetic wife, known as " Bess of Hardwick," that the queen had
told him she meant to trust him as she would trust few, by which
he understood that he was to have the custody of the queen of
Scots. It is difficult to understand how any nobleman of great
riches and influence, if possessed of a high spirit, could have sub
mitted to the slavery of such an office. Shrewsbury and his wife
were to be ever at Mary's side. She was carried about with them
from Tutbury to their various castles and manor-houses — to Shef
field, to Buxton, to Worksworth; to Chatsworth, to Winfield.
These, indeed, were pleasant places, surrounded by cultivated fields
and rich woods — far different from the solitary Lochleven. Tut
bury castle stood upon a high hill, at the foot of which runs tbe
river Dove; with Needwood forest around it, and the Peak moun
tains in the distance. Sheffield castle was upon an eminence over
looking the little town, where " the whittle " was then forged with
out the tilt-hammer. In the grand old halls where John Talbot had
held his state, Mary spent fourteen years of her captivity, with a
few temporary changes. Tradition says that Hardwick was
amongst her prison-houses ; and in that fine mansion of the Tudor
days we are shown her bedroom and her tapestry-work. But tra-
* " History of Scotland," vol. vii. p. 26S.
ANXIETY FOR THE SAFE CUSTODY OF MARY. 77
dition is wrong, according to modern archaeology ; * although
Bishop Kennet, a hundred and sixty years ago, said of Mary, " Her
chamber and rooms of state, with her arms and other ensigns, are
still remaining at Hardwick ; her bed was taken away for plunder
in the Civil Wars." f But wherever Mary was, the anxiety of
Elizabeth for her safe detention was unremitting. In August,
1569, Cecil writes to the earl that the queen was troubled that he,
Shrewsbury, was going, or gone, to the baths at Buxton ; " and,"
he says, "if you. were gone, which she said she would hardly be
lieve, then I should seek to understand what order your lordship
had left for attendance upon the said queen, and that yourself should
not be long absent from thence." Cecil adds, what may be con
sidered as a piece of court duplicity, that " her majesty said she
did as much esteem for her own honour to have the queen of Scots
to be honourably attended, as for any matter of surety." f Within
a fortnight . after this letter, Shrewsbury is warned not to permit
persons coming to himself or his lady, " to have resort to the queen
of Scots' presence." In another month, the earl of Huntingdon,
in consequence of the sickness of Shrewsbury, is commanded to
repair to Shrewsbury's house, with his own trusty servants, " and
there to take the charge of the said queen." In a letter from Eliza
beth herself to Huntingdon, she says, " We will have you also,
after conference with- our said cousin of Shrewsbury, to devise how
the number of the queen of Scots' train might be diminished, and
reduced only to thirty persons of all sorts, as was ordered, but, as
we perceive, too much enlarged of late time. You shall also, jointly
with the earl of Shrewsbury, give order that no such common resort
be to the queen as hath been ; nor that she have such liberty to
send posts as she hath clone." § A short note from Cecil to
Shrewsbury, of the same date, shows a cause for all this jealous
vigilance : " The queen's majesty is entered into no small offence
with the intention that she thinketh hath been to devise of a mar
riage with the Scottish queen." || " We have seen how, during the
conferences at York, the duke of Norfolk prevailed upon the re-
gent Murray to suppress his charges against Mary. When Murray
was goaded into a public accusation, Norfolk was greatly, angered
ao-ainst him ¦ but they became reconciled, and Murray consented
* See a paper by the Rev. J. Hunter, in " Archseologia," vol. xxxii.
t Quoted in Mr. Craik's " Romance ofthe Peerage." vol. iii. p. 178.
t Lodge's " Illustrations," ato, vol. ii. p. 18. § Ibid., p- 21
U Lodge's " Illustrations," 4to, vol. ii. p. 23
yg HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to favour Norfolk's project of a marriage with Mary. In 1569 this
scheme was promoted by some English nobles, without the privity
of Elizabeth ; and a letter was written by Leicester, and three
other lords, to Mary, urging her to consent to such a marriage, to
which she returned a favourable answer. A formal contract of
marriage was afterwards drawn up. .In August, 1569, some ladies
of Elizabeth's court got to the knowledge of this secret— with the
feminine " sagacity in smelling out amatory affairs." * Leicester,
wlio was subsequently accused by Norfolk as the inventor of this
scheme for his ruin, revealed the transaction to the queen and was
forgiven. Elizabeth then invited the duke to dine with her ; and,
when he rose to leave, significantly told him " to beware on what
pillow he laid his head." This is Camden's anecdote, no doubt
founded upon what was urged against the duke by the queen's ser
jeant, upon his trial in 1 572 ; namely, that the queen having under
stood hi* intention to marry with Mary, he complained to her of
the rumour ; " in which complaint," says the serjeant, " as I have
heard her majesty herself declare it, and some here of my lords
have likewise heard it, he said, ' To what end should I seek to
marry her, being so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulteress,
and murderer ? I love to sleep upon a safe pillow. I account my
self, by your majesty's good favour, as good a prince at home in
my bowling-alley at Norwich as she is, though she was in the mid
dle of her kingdom. The revenues of the crown of Scotland are
not comparable to mine own, that I enjoy by your goodness, as I
have heard of the chief officers of that realm ; besides, her kingdom
is not in her own hand, but possessed by another. If I should
seek to match with her, knowing, as I do know, that she pretendeth
a title to your crown, your majesty might justly charge me with seek
ing to take your own crown from your head.' This the duke spake
to the queen's majesty, in his excuse, when the rumour was spread
of his proposed marriage with the Scottish queen ; and yet, at that
time, he had dealt earnestly in it." f
The duke of Norfolk was committed to the Tower on the 9th
of October, where he continued a prisoner till the 4th of the fol
lowing August. Cecil honestly protested against the duke being
brought to trial for high treason upon insufficient evidence. But
this autumn of 1 569 was a period of great anxiety, which sufficiently
justified the vigilance and suspicion of Elizabeth's government.
Immediately after the arrest of Norfolk an insurrection broke out
* Camden. t Jardine, p. 162.
LADY CATHERINE GREY. 70
in the northern counties, headed by the catholic lords, Percy, earl
of Northumberland, and Neville, earl of Westmoreland. They
proclaimed their design of restoring the old religion, and it was
their intention to release the queen of Scots, and to place her upon
the English throne. They also contemplated the release of Nor
folk. Mary was hurriedly removed from Tutbury castle to Cov
entry. The details of this insurrection will be better understood
after a brief view of the progress of the country towards a settled
government and established religion, since the accession of queen
Elizabeth. In the desire not to interrupt the course of our narrative as re
gards Mary, queen of Scots, we passed over an interesting matter
of public and personal history — the touching story of lady Cathe
rine Grey. This second sister of lady Jane Grey had been be
trothed to lord Herbert ; but upon the fortunes of the house of
Suffolk falling before the ascendency of Mary Tudor, the alliance
was repudiated, and Herbert was married to a daughter of the earl
of Shrewsbury. After the death of the duchess of Suffolk, the
niece of Henry VIIL, in the first year of Elizabeth's reign, her
daughter, lady Catherine Grey, stood next to Mary Stuart as the
heir to the crown after the death of Elizabeth ; and, according to
the will of Henry VIIL, she was considered by some as having the
true title to its immediate possession. Lady Catherine had a court-
appointment under Elizabeth, and was the intimate friend of Jane
Seymour, the daughter of the Protector Somerset, who was also
one of the Maids of Honour. His brother, Edward Seymour, who
had been created earl of Hertford, was fascinated by Catherine ;
and these lovers were privately married, the bride being about
twenty-one, and the husband a year older. Hertford went abroad
in 1 561, and Catherine, having been unable to conceal the conse
quences of this hasty union, was sent to the Tower. The widow
of the Protector writes to Cecil denying all knowledge of her son's
marriage, and hopes the wilfulness of her unruly child will not di
minish the queen's favour. * Harsh as the imprisonment of Cath
erine Grey may seem, we must bear in mind the extreme jealousy
with which alliances of persons of royal blood, made without the
consent of the reigning sovereign, have at all times been regarded.
But the evidence of this marriage was not forthcoming. The young
people had made their way on foot from Whitehall to the earl's
house, — according to their own statements after Hertford had re-
* " Calendar of State Papers," August 22, 1561.
80 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
turned home and had been also imprisoned, — and a priest, whose
name was unknown, had married them, the sole witness being Jane
Seymour, who had soon after died. A commission of inquiry was
appointed, consisting of archbishop Parker and certain divines and
lawyers ; and it was declared that there had been no legal marriage.
A second son was born in 1563, Hertford and Catherine being still
in confinement. Some additional severity was now thought neces
sary, and Hertford was fined in three several sums of five thousand
pounds, by process in the Star-Chamber. * From this period till
her death in 1568, Catherine continued under the queen's dis
pleasure ; and there are some touching letters of her uncle, which
show how deeply she felt this anger, which kept her in a dishon
ourable position, and separated her from him who she maintained
was her true husband. But the' common narratives which state
that she wore out her life in strict confinement in the Tower, and
there died, are not founded in fact. We can trace the course of
her suffering years of marriage distinctly, from authentic docu
ments. She was sent to the Tower in August, 1561. Her rooms
were furnished somewhat sumptuously by the queen's command ;
but, according to the petition of the lieutenant of the Tower, who,
in September 1563, asked to have "the stuff " for his perquisite, it
was "most of it so torn and tattered with her monkeys and dogs,
as will serve to small purpose." Catherine and her husband were
removed from the Tower in August, in 1563, on account of the
plague having broken out in London ; the lady being given to the
charge of her uncle, lord John Grey. The displeasure of Elizabeth
might probably have passed away, had not John Hales, a partisan
of the claims of the house of Suffolk to the crown, published a
book in April, 1564, in which he attempted to confute the preten
sions of the Scottish queen, and maintained the validity of the
marriage of Hertford and Catherine Grey. On May 26, 1564, we
find that the earl of Hertford was committed to the custody of the
lieutenant of the Tower; t but the common statement that both
he and his wife were re-committed to that prison in 1565. appears
to be supported by no very clear evidence. Catherine's uncle died
in November, 1564, and she was then given in charge to Mr. Sec
retary Petre. On the 14th of May, 1566, sir John Wentworth
writes to the Council, saying he has received a letter from the
* The legitimacy of the children of this marriage was established in 1606, by an action
at law, when the priest who married Hertford and Catherine was produced.
" Calendar of State Papers."
LADY CATHERINE GREY. 8 1
queen commanding him to take charge of the lady Catherine, but
he prays to be excused. But no doubt the responsibility was
forced upon him, for on the 2nd of October, 1567, the queen di
rects sir Owen Hopton, in consequence of the demise of sir John
Wentworth, to take into his charge the lady Catherine Grey, but
to keep her from the access of, all strangers. On the nth of Jan
uary, 1568, Hopton writes to Cecil that she has kept her bed three
days. On the 27th of that month she died at his house at Yox-
ford, in Suffolk. The common assertion that she, who was re
served for a more lingering misery than her sister Jane, died in the
Tower, is altogether incorrect. There is a very affecting account
of the death-bed of this poor lady, and her last conversation with
sir Owen Hopton; who perceiving her draw near her end, said to
a bystander, " Were it not best to send to the church, that the bell
be rung." * Upon this subject we have received the following
interesting communication, f
"When vicar of Yoxford, in Suffolk, 1 found the record of her
burial there. It was the first entry I noticed in the register. This
led me to examine the Manuscript in the British Museum, giving
an account, as stated, of her death in the Tower. The heading of
the Manuscript, indeed, is" to this effect; but the heading is not in
the handwriting of the original scribe, and is of more recent date.
The error is obvious, and so is its cause. Sir Owen Hopton, after
wards lieutenant of the Tower, X was present, and asked, should
the passing bell be tolled ? The writer of the heading was not
aware that sir Owen Hopton was lord of Yoxford, and that Cath
erine resided under his charge at Cockfield hall. Here her great
chest with the royal arms of England may be still seen. One of
the heralds in his Visitations mentions the affecting story of her
lap-dog persisting to lie upon her grave there, and expiring in sor
row for her loss."
The lady Mary Grey, the youngest daughter of Frances Bran
don, made also a rash marriage with Elizabeth's Serjeant Porter.
She, the least at the court, married the biggest gentleman — as
Cecil described them. They also had to endure the anger of the
queen, and were sent to prison. The tiny woman survived her
husband, but died many years before Elizabeth.
* Harl. MS., Ellis, Second Series, vol. ii. p. 288.
t Letter to the author of this History, from the Rev. Joseph D'Arcy Sirr, D. D., As
sistant Chaplain to the Forces.
t The first notice of sir Owen Hopton being Lieutenant of the Tower is found t " Cal
endar of State Papers") under the date of March, 1571.
Vol. III.— 6
82 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER IV.
General view of the first ten years of Elizabeth. — Movement of Rome against Protestant
ism. — The persecutions in the Netherlands and in France. — Intrigues against Eliza
beth. — Insurrection of the north. — Pius V. issues a bull of excommunication against
Elizabeth. — Parliament of 1571 — Statutes against papists. — Puritanical party in the
House of Commons. — Motion for reform of abuses in the Church. Trial and execu
tion of the duke of Norfolk. — Troubles of Scotland. — The Huguenots of France pro
pitiated by the marriage of the prince of Navarre. — Coligny shot. — The massacre of
Saint Bartholomew resolved upon. — Its perpetration. — Effect of the news upon tbe
court and people of England. — New danger of the queen of Scots.
The contemporaries of Elizabeth regarded the first ten years of
her reign as " her halcyon days." The transition from the fiery
Catholicism of Mary Tudor to the temperate Protestantism of her
sister Elizabeth had been accomplished without bloodshed or con
vulsion. In the parliament of 1559. the nation was quietly led back
to its ecclesiastical condition in the time of Edward VI. ; and con
formity was not rendered difficult or impossible by any needless
stringency towards those who adhered to the old religion. In the
parliament of 1 563 measures of a stronger character were adopted
against papists. Symptoms began to manifest themselves of a
more active opposition to the civil and religious settlement under
Elizabeth, induced by the arguments of catholic teachers who were
spread about the country. Some persons, lay and ecclesiastical,
were deterred from conformity, and others left the realm. But still
there was no outbreak produced either by supineness or persecu
tion. The parliament of 1 566 passed no new law that, in any mat
ter of importance, touched the subject of religion. Differences of
opinion as to ceremonial observances had arisen amongst the Enc-
lish protestants themselves ; and those who were called Puritans
were fast becoming an organised power. But at the time when
Mary Stuart had crossed the Solway, and the great question of
policy had been raised as to her detention, the state of Protestanism
in Europe, upon the maintenance of which in England the govern
ment of Elizabeth was to stand or* fall, was one of great insecurity
and alarm. The halcyon days were fast passing away. The people
of this country had been prospering in the labours of peace. They
GENERAL VIEW ^OF TEN YEARS OF THIS REIGN. 83
had been extending their commerce to distant lands where the
benefits of inter-communication had been little appreciated by
earlier adventurers. Their sailors had gone forth to make mari
time discoveries. Frobisher was seeking a new passage to India •
and Hawkins had found a fresh source of wealth in the hateful
African slave-trade. Gresham was building an Exchange in Lon
don, where the merchants of all nations might meet to buy and sell.
The great principles of commerce were so far understood that
merchandise was allowed to be exported and imported in foreign
ships, upon the payment of alien imposts ; and the English and
Flemish merchants united their contributions for marine insurance.
The people were lightly taxed, for the government was an econom
ical one. Whatever were the religious differences of the com
munity, its various members united peaceably in the duties of their
several callings. They felt that they were under a firm govern
ment ; and in the security of such a governmeat, despotic enough
but not corrupt or lavish, the wealth and intelligence of England
were steadily progressing.
In 1568, when Elizabeth and her ministers were displaying
towards Mary Stuart a policy which it is easy to call unjust and
cruel, treacherous and ungenerous, the heretical queen of England
and her protestant subjects were the objects of the bitterest hatred
of those who thought the time was come to extirpate heresy by fire
and sword. A Dominican monk of the severest life — a zealot who
had distinguished himself as an inquisitor — became pope in 1566,
under the title of Pius V. A more furious bigot never sat on the
papal throne ; and his bigotry was the more terrible from the cir
cumstance that it was conscientious. When he sent a force to the
aid of the French catholics, he told their leader " to take no Hugue
not prisoner, but instantly to kill every one that fell into his hands." *
When the savage duke of Alva was butchering without remorse in
the Netherlands, the holy father sent him a consecrated hat and
sword, in admiration of his'Christian proceedings. Pius V. avowed
his desire to devote the treasures of the church, even to its chalices
and crucifixes, to carry a religious war into England ; and to head
such an expedition himself. The influence of this frantic perse
cutor over kings who made their religious intolerance an instrument
of their cruel tyranny, such as Philip II. , was enormous. This
Popa of the Inquisition, as he has been called, arose, with his sole
ides- of extirpating heresy by force, at a time when the two great
* Ranke, vol. i. p. 383.
84 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
religious principles were coming into open conflict. The period
for accommodation had passed away. In 1568 Alva was appointed
by Philip, Captain-general of the Netherlands. His mission was
to destroy the heretics, root and branch ; and he accomplished his
work with a success that left his master -and his master's holy coun
sellor nothing to desire. While Alva was in Valenciennes, Ghent,
Brussels, Antwerp, hanging, beheading, racking, burning, and con
fiscating, the secretary of Philip said to the papal nuncio, "are you
now satisfied with the proceedings of the king ? " The smiling
nuncio answered, " quite satisfied." The tribunal which condemned
the victims whom their officers had ferreted out, was called the
" Council of Blood." From the great commercial cities of the
Netherlands there were hosts of fugitives, although the most terrible
penalties were denounced against those who attempted to fly. Many
came for refuge to England. The same asylum was sought by
Huguenots of France, when the hopes of their party were destroyed
on the field -of Moncontour. They said, —
" Our hearths we abandon, our lands we resign,
But, Father, we kneel to no altar but thine." *
Amongst these refugees were not only a great number who pro
fessed Calvinistic opinions, but others who carried their principle
of liberty of conscience into the avowal of doctrines which even
liberal protestants considered dangerous. Those who were op
posed to infant baptism were held, with great injustice, to belong
to the old sect of anabaptists, whose social opinions were deemed
adverse to all regular government. Whilst the general body of
exiles, by the recital of their injuries, diffused a popular hatred of
papal persecution, some strengthened that dislike to many of the
ceremonial observances of the English church, which gradually es
tablished a large class who, in their hatred of popery, would tolerate
no forms that appeared derived from the ancient worship. A few
became obnoxious to that intolerance which, in the earlier days of
the Reformation, hunted out those who, deservedly or not, were
suspected of holding to the opinions which John of Leyden rendered
infamous. But the puritan doctrines, or the more heterodox, as
yet gave slight trouble to the government of Elizabeth, compared
with the civil and religious dangers apprehended in the present
crisis of Catholic hostility to every form of Protestantism. The
furious pope had his agents in England denouncing the queen as a
* Macaulay, " Songs of the Huguenots."
INTRIGUES AGAINST ELIZABETH. 85
heretic. Philip was maturing plots by advances of money to his
spies in London. Alva was devising plans for an invasion of the
island that had cast off the successor of St. Peter. Around Mary
Stuart were concentred all the intrigues that sought to place the
orthodox and legitimate descendant of Henry VII. upon the throne
of the heretical and illegitimate daughter of Anne Boleyn. The
insurrection of the north, of 1 569, was no immature combination of
a few discontented papist nobles, but a result of the general move
ment against the reformers that was agitating Europe. Those who
regard this crisis through the thick veil of their sentimentalities
about the unfortunate Scottish queen, with the usual trashy belief
in Elizabeth's jealousy of her superior charms, will do well to ab
stain from the study of what they call history, and surrender them
selves with an undivided trust to the professed writers of poetry
and romance. History has to deal with serious truths, and not
with morbid sympathies and blind nationalities. It was the glory
of the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign that "no English blood
had been shed on the scaffold or in the field for a public quarrel,
whether civil or religious."* If, during the next twenty years, we
h ive, amidst a constant advance of national prosperity, to trace the
course of conspiracies and insurrections, we must look at England
as the arena where the two great principles that were dividing
Europe were fought out. The victory remained with the sagacious
statesmen who best understood the character of the nation — states
men led by a ruler unsurpassed in the highest attributes of a sov
ereign; one who in every danger was equal to the emergency;
who felt the grandeur of her pbsition as the head of the Reforma
tion ; whose force of character made that Protestantism secure
which was once more than doubtful ; who, in the hour of her great
est trial, when the catholic world gathered together all its strength
to crush the heretic islanders, threw herself boldly upon the affec
tions of her people, one and all, and the danger was overpast ; the
sovereign to whom we chiefly owe that, after the lapse of three
hundred years, the faith which she built up is so safe that it allows
the widest toleration to take the place of the exclusive conformity
of her time. This is the queen that history should paint. The
foibles of the woman belong to a lower province of literature.
In the autumn of 1569 there were symptoms of disquiet in the
northern counties. Cecil, in a letter of the 13th of October, to the
earls of Shrewsbury and Huntingdon, says, in a postscript, " My
* Mackintosh.
86 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
lords,— It may be that you have [heard] or shall hear of a fond
rumour stirred up the 6th of this month, in the North Riding and
the Bishopric, of a rising should be ; but it was a vain smoke, but
without any spark of any account,"* When the wary minister
wrote this he probably knew perfectly well that the smoke was not
without fire. The general disaffection of the northern catholics
was well known. Sadler wrote from the border counties, " There
are not in all this country ten gentlemen that do favour and allow
of her majesty's proceedings in the cause of religion." t Dr. Nor
ton, who had been a prebendary of York in the time of Queen
Mary, had come from Rome with the title of apostolical peniten
tiary. He had incited the catholic priests and the northern gentle
men by statements that the pope was about to issue a bull of
deposition against Elizabeth. He was a relative of the families of
Norton and Markenfield, whom Mary Stuart numbered amongst
her friends. The earls of Westmorland and Northumberland were
in secret communication with her. The adroitness by which Mary
contrived to elude the vigilance of those who had her -custody is
one of the most remarkable points of her character. She was always
borne up by the belief that she had the right to the throne filled by
Elizabeth, and that the people of England would support her in
that right if she had her liberty. The arrest of Norfolk precipi
tated the insurrection. The schemes for foreign aid were devised,
but not perfected. Alva was to have sent an auxiliary force to land
at Hartlepool. These schemes and preparations could not be con
cealed from the vigilance of Elizabeth's ministers. On the loth of
November the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland were
summoned to repair to court. Apprehensive of arrest Northum
berland marched with his vassals to join Westmorland at the cas
tle of Brancepeth. There was no longer any disguise. A proclam
ation was issued, addressed to all professing the catholic faith, to
restore the ancient worship ; and the earls marched on to Durham
with a banner representing the bleeding Saviour — "the banner of
the five wounds." It was borne by a brave old man, whose fate,
and the fate of his eight sons, have been preserved from the
oblivion of dry annals by the legends which a true poet has in
vested with almost historical reality 4 The Nortons of Rylstone
may claim our tears ; but we have little pity for the weak earls,
who, when Sussex appeared against them with a strong force, fled
* Lodge, vol. ii. p. 26. t Quoted in Lingard, vol. viii. p. 54
J Wordsworth, " White Doe of Rylstone."
INSURRECTION OF THE NORTH. 87
to Scotland, leaving their followers to the terrible vengeance that
followed a suppressed revolt. Northumberland, after a confine:
ment of several years at Lochleven, was given up to the English
government and executed. Westmorland died an exile in Flan
ders. There was a subsequent revolt under lord Dacres of the
North, which was put down after a battle, in which the catholics
fought with desperation. The English Bible and Common Prayer
had been burnt by the insurgents of 1569 in the cathedral of
Durham. Their avowed intention was to march to Tutbury, and
release Mary. Had they succeeded, the nation would have been
plunged into a terrible civil war. The Catholics of the thinly-in
habited border counties were numerous as well as desperate ; but
the Protestants of the more densely peopled parts of England, and
especially of the great towns, were far too united to have the old
worship forced back upon them, the contest involving a new strug
gle for the crown. Tbeir'horror of the past days of martyrdoms — •
their dread of a foreign domination, with a Council of Blood and
an Inquisition — -made the ascendant party furious and the govern
ment revengeful. The triumph of 1569 was disgraced by fearful
executions. It might have been disgraced by a more terrible act
of vengeance. There is a letter written by Leicester to Walsing-
ham in 1586, in which he urges the execution of the queen of
Scots, and says, " Remember how, upon a less cause, how effect
ually all the Council of England once dealt with her majesty for
justice to be done upon that person ; for, being suspected and in
formed to be consenting with Northumberland and Westmorland
in the rebellion, you know the great seal of England was sent then,
and thought just and meet, upon the sudden, for her execution." *
Had the powers of the great seal thus been exercised — and the ex
pressions of Leicester do not imply that any trial was contemplated
— the reign of Elizabeth would have been stained with a greater
crime than the eventual execution of Mary, after seventeen years
more of hopeless plots and ever-present suspicions. But, what
ever justification there may have been for the intrigues to recover
liberty and power made by this victim of an insurmountable state
necessity, there can be no doubt. that her life was a constant source
of alarm to the English nation ; and that at every hostile move
ment against Protestantism her death was loudly called for. If the
unhappy Mary had warm friends amongst the Catholic party in both
divisions of the island ; if there were many who regarded her as
*•" Leycester Correspondence," edited by Mr. Bruce, p. 81.
88 HISTORY OF ENCLAND.
innocent of the crimes laid to her charge, and were touched by a
real pity for her misfortunes ; the great body of the English peo
ple, who lived in security under the sagacious government of the
queen, and looked with admiration upon her extraordinary abilities
and strength of character, would have most gladly heard of the re
moval, even by some violence to which long years of despotism had
familiarised them, of one whom they justly regarded as a public
enemy. The nation was in a more earnest mood than when it had
quietly passed from the Protestantism of Edward to the Cathol
icism of Mary, and back again to the Protestantism of Elizabeth.
The number of enthusiasts on either side was rapidly increasing.
Puritan and Jesuit were coming into closer warfare. There was a
great battle of principle still to be waged by the Reformers ; for
their victory could scarcely be held as thoroughly achieved.
Opposed to them were men as zealous and more united. The
power of the state was with the Protestant cause ; the ancient
habit of implicit obedience to the head of the universal church gave
a coherence to every movement of the Romanists. When Pius V,
on the 25th of February, 1570, signed the threatened bull of ex
communication against Elizabeth, which anathematised her and her
adherents as heretics ; absolved all her subjects from their oath of
allegiance ; and enjoined them, under pain of excommunication,
not to obey her commands ; it was not likely that the principles at
issue would approach nearer to accommodation. We are told by
the catholic historian, "the time was gone by when the thunders of
the Vatican could shake the thrones of princes."* When Alva
sent copies of the bull to England, and Felton, an enthusiastic
catholic, fixed it on the gates of the bishop of London's -residence,
they could scarcely have meant its publicity as harmless sport.
Felton was executed ; but he died, avowing himself a martyr, and
gave the queen the title of "the pretender." There was at this
time a conspiracy detected in Norfolk. With a less vigilant gov
ernment the thunder might not only have alarmed, but the Iightninc
might have struck. The danger was not so much to be appre
hended from the catholics in a united body, as from the Jesuits and
refugee priests who were constantly passing from the continent to
England to dissuade the wavering from conformity, and to stimulate
the hostile to acts of rebellion. An English college for these zeal
ous missionaries had been established at Douav, about a year
before the issue of the bull of excommunication. The natural issue
* Lingard, vol. viii. p. 67.
STATUTES AGAINST PAPISTS. . 89
of these attempts to shake the government and the established
religion was the enactment-of more stringent laws against Roman
Catholics, — laws, which in the happier spirit of our own age we
may justly decry as harsh and unjust, but which we can scarcely
venture to consider as simply tyrannical.
The parliament met on the 2nd of April, 1571, after a suspen
sion of legislation for more than four years. The speech of the
lord-keeper, sir Nicholas Bacon, sets forth, with • considerable
eloquence, the past blessings of the queen's reign, — the setting at
liberty God's Word, and deliverance from Roman tyranny ; the
inestimable benefit of peace ; and the clemency and mercy of the
government. " I pray you," he says, " hath it been seen or read,
that any prince of this realm during ten whole years' reign, and
more, hath had his hands so clean from blood ? " That this peace
had been disturbed and this clemency interrupted, he then imputes
to " the raging Romanist rebels." This is the prelude to the first
Statute of the session, which makes it treason to set forth that the
q leen ought not to possess the crown but some other persons ; or
to affirm that she is a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper.
The second clause of this Statute is evidently directed against
Mary Stuart, enacting that all persons of any degree, nation, or
estate, who during the queen's life should claim title to the crown
should be disabled from inheriting the same ; and that any claim
ant to .the right of succession, cdntrary to any proclamation on the
matter that might be issued by the queen, should be declared
guilty of high treason. The queen's advisers were desirous to
carry the principle of exclusion further ; and to make a law that
the queen of Scots was unable and unworthy to succeed. A com
mittee of the Commons presented an address to Elizabeth, asking
her to proceed criminally against Mary. Divines and statesmen
concurred in urging violent measures against the prisoner. With
archbishop Parker she was " one desperate person." With Wal-
singham she was " that dangerous woman." Each called for
"justice." It is the fashion to represent Elizabeth as always
thirsting for her rival's blood ; yet it is perfectly clear that she re
sisted Council and Parliament when they called for extreme pro
ceedings against " the pretended Scottish queen." Parker asked
for justice upon the desperate person that " the papists' daily ex
pectation " might be " vanquished." The difficulties of the crisis
were held to be met by the enactment of strong laws against the
papists themselves. The statute of the 5th of Elizabeth against
90 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
upholding the jurisdiction of' the See of Rome had been trans
gressed by bringing in bulls and instru'ments of absolution. It was
now enacted, that the putting in use or publishing any such bull,
or giving absolution under the same, or obtaining such an instru
ment from Rome, shall be adjudged high treason ; and that such
as brought into the kingdom crosses, pictures, beads, or other
" vain and superstitious things," claiming to be hallowed by the
bishop of Rome, or under his authority, should incur the penalties
of praemunire. This statute was more comprehensive in its se
verity than at first sight appears ; for the outward conformity of
Romanists had been tolerated under absolution, without which
they were excluded from the communion of their own church.
How far it was politic to force the pliant and wavering into the
established religion against the rights of conscience, or to render
them liable to extreme dangers in asserting these rights, is a ques
tion of which we cannot wholly judge. Of the injustice of such a
proceeding there can be no doubt. But we cannot quite go along
with the belief of one whose opinion is entitled to the utmost re
spect, that " the nation, as it was clearly ready to profess either
religion, would, beyond all doubt, have been ready to tolerate
both; " and that " Elizabeth might have united all conflicting sects
under the shelter of the same impartial laws and the same paternal
throne, and thusjiave placed the nation in the same situation, as
far as the rights of conscience are' concerned, in which we at last
stand."* We can as readily believe that, without the experience
of three centuries, Elizabeth might have bestowed upon her peo
ple the relief from the system of commercial restriction which we
have at length attained. " Confidence," said Chatham, "is a plant
of slow growth ; ' ' and so is toleration. Lament as we may with
the great historian over " the heart-burnings, the persecutions, the
conspiracies, the seditions, the revolutions, the judicial murders,
the civil wars, of ten generations," we have no assurance that the
rights of conscience could have been established without such
fearful trials of a nation's courage and endurance. Whilst the
storm of papal bigotry was raging in the Netherlands and in
France, — whilst Knox was proclaiming in Scotland that one mass
was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed men, and carry
ing the people with him,— it is difficult to imagine that England
could have been smoothed into a perfect indifferentism, or that
England would have been what she is if she had been so " rocked
_ » Macaulay, " Essays— Burleigh and his Times."
TRIAL OF THE DUKE OF NORFOLK. 9 1
and dandled" into liberality. But there was, moreover, a strong
party in England that would not have endured anything approach
ing to union between Protestant and Roman Catholic. The Act
of the sth of Elizabeth, which excluded Roman Catholics from the
House of Commons, gave an ascendency in that house to the more
earnest reformers — those • who had very influential supporters in
the queen's own councils, though their hostility to any ceremony
or practice of the church supposed to be an approach to the old
worship, was very obnoxious to the queen herself. That contest
between the establishment and the Puritans which convulsed Eng
land for many a year, and of which the traces are by no means ex
tinct, was actively beginning before the " halcyon days " were
past. That spirit which would admit of no toleration for papists
had, in a few years, to fight its own battle against intolerance. But
the "ice-brook temper "of the sword, then in its sheath, which
was to be drawn seventy years afterwards, was known to some in
this parliament. A motion for a further reformation of religion
was made in the House of Commons on the 6th of April, by Mr.
Strickland, " a grave and ancient man, of great zeal," says the re
porter, sir Simonds D'Ewes. Having set forth various abuses he
moved that a convenient number of the house might have confer
ence with the Lords spiritual. During the Easter recess, Mr.
Strickland was called before the Privy Council, and commanded
not to resume his seat in the house. Then rose in his place Mr.
Carleton, and moved that Mr. Strickland should be sent for to the
bar of the House, " forasmuch as he was not now a private man,
but specially chosen to supply the room of a multitude ; " and Mr.
Yelverton " showed it was fit for princes to have their prerogatives,
but. yet the same to be straitened within reasonable limits." Tbe
ministers of Elizabeth understood the force of such words, and
they whispered with the Speaker. The debate was suspended ;
and the next day Mr. Strickland took his seat, amidst cheers whose
echoes reverberated in that Chapel of St. Stephen, when kings,
long afterwards, had forgotten their import.
The duke of Norfolk had been released from his imprisonment
in the Tower on the 4th of August, 157°- On the 7th of Septem
ber, 1571, he was again arrested. During the thirteen months of
his comparative freedom he was in a sort of honourable custody,
and was not called to Council or to Parliament. Before his release
from the Tower he had sent a declaration to the queen, in which he
had solemnly engaged " never to deal in that cause of marriage of
g2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the queen of Scots, nor in any other cause belonging to her, but as
your majesty shall command me." In April, 1 571, a correspond
ence was detected, which showed that some treasonable project
was in course of formation. Further correspondence was inter
cepted in August, and various persons were arrested. Amongst
these was the bishop of Ross, who, after pleading in vain that his
privilege as an ambassador from the queen of Scots ought to shield
him from answering questions, made a full declaration, which- was
corroborated by the confessions of the other prisoners. The duke
was tried on a charge of high treason by his peers, on the 16th of
January, 1572. All the previous transactions connected with the
plan of marriage with the queen of Scots were entered into ; and
it was urged that his continued desire for that alliance had a view
tc Mary's claim to the present possession of the crown of England.
This was very slight matter upon which to found the accusation of
an overt act of treason. The more serious charge was, that
through the agency of Rudolphi, an Italian, who had been sent by
Mary to the pope, the king of Spam, and the duke of Alva, he had
received assurances of the support of these personages to a plan
for uniting Mary with the duke, for seizing the person of Elizabeth,
and for landing a foreign army in England. Mr. Jardine, in his
excellent report of this great trial, expresses his opinion, from a
critical examination of the voluminous documents connected with
the Rudolphi conspiracy, that, " though the duke was probably a
tool in the hands of persons more artful than himself, he probably
participated in the scheme." The trial itself was conducted with
such fairness as is compatible with evidence mainly resting upon
the confessions of absent persons, some of which were extorted by
the rack, or by its terror. Norfolk was unanimously condemned ;
but his execution was deferred till the 2nd of June. Ag^in and
again, Elizabeth revoked the warrant which consigne'd him to the
block. The duke was the chief of the English nobles. He was
of royal lineage. He was the son of the illustrious Surrey who
had perished under the jealousy of her father. There were many
causes for Elizabeth hesitating when, for the first time, she was
called to shed the blood of an English peer, besides the dissimula
tion which some are ready to impute to her. There is a real strug
gle of mind to be traced in her letter to Burleigh, received by him
at two o'clock of the morning of the nth of April, when, in her
obscure style, she writes, '• My lord, methinks that I am more
beholding to the hinder part of my head than well dare trust the
TROUBLES IN SCOTLAND. 93
forwards side of the same, and therefore sent to the lieutenant and
the S. [sheriff ?], as you know best, the order to defer the execu
tion till they hear further. . . The causes that move me to this are
not now to be expressed, lest an irrevocable deed be in mean while
committed." *
The spectacle of a great nobleman perishing upon the scaffold
was not amongst the experiences of the rising generation of Eng
land. The catastrophe of Norfolk made a popular impression in
proportion to the rarity of such an exhibition. The very aspect of
the place of punishment was suggestive of political remembrances.
"Upon Tower-hill," says Holinshed, "a scaffold had been builded
many years ago, serving for execution ; which being old was both
rotten and ruinous. For queen Elizabeth having with mercy
governed her commonwealth, there was no punishment there in
flicted upon any for the space of fourteen years ; wherefore a new
scaffold must needs be made." The penalty which the duke had
incurred by meddling with the affair of the queen of Scots could
not deter others from the same dangerous course. Two Derby
shire gentlemen were tried and executed in May, upon a charge of
having' corresponded with Mary for the purpose of delivering her
from the custodyof the earl of Shrewsbury. The affairs of Scot
land had become more and more distracted since the period of the
detention of the queen. The regent Murray had been assassinated,
from motives of private revenge, at Linlithgow, in January, 1570.
Lennox, the father of Darnley, had succeeded him. He, also, was
assassinated in September, 1571. The country was enduring some
of the worst miseries of a civil war between the two factions of
catholic and presbyterian, contending, one in the name of Mary,
and the other in the name of her son. On the 30th of July, 1572,
there was a truce between these fierce opponents ; and it is pos
sible that s6me negotiations might have successfully proceeded
between those who made the restoration of Mary a condition of
pacification, and the reformers, who might have thought it possible
to secure their ascendency, even under " the wicked woman " whom
Knox continued to denounce, had not an event occurred which
produced a rage against the Romanists, both in England and Scot
land, compared with which all previous indignation was moderate.
The Huguenots of France were a body isolated from their coun
trymen, who viewed them with dislike, — sometimes conciliated and
sometimes persecuted by the Court,as their support was sought or re-
* Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 263.
94 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
jected by the mere ambitious factions that alternately prevailed. In
1570, a treaty was concluded between them and the young king,
Charles IX. ; who professed great anxiety for reconciliation with this
portion of his subjects. The great Huguenot leader,Coligny,Admiral
of France, was earnestly pressed to repair to the king's court ; to
which, after some manifestations of distrust,he went in the autumn of
1571. The sister of Charles was pressed in marriage upon the prince
of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. ; and that marriage was celebrated
with great magnificence on the 1 8th of August, 1572. England
had made a treaty with France, which had for one of its objects to
wrest the Netherlands from Spain ; and the advisers of Elizabeth
had recommended a marriage with the duke of Alencon, the
younger son of Catherine de Medici, who had given intimation of
his disposition to favour the Protestants. Like many other recom
mendations of her Council and her Parliament, the queen of Eng
land treated this proposal with civility, but with a secret determina
tion, from whatever cause it proceeded, not to marry at all. Under
these circumstances the apprehension that there was a deep con
federacy for the annihilation of Protestantism began to be lessened.
The Huguenots were drawn in large numbers to Paris by the festiv
ities of the marriage of the French princess with Henry of Navarre,
their acknowledged head. On the 22d of August, Coligny was
shot from the window of a house occupied by a dependant of the
duke of Guise. His wounds were not dangerous. The king, with
his mother, Catherine, visited the wounded man. The queen-
mother could ill disguise her alarm when the admiral began to
speak earnestly with the king, whilst the house was filled with
Coligny's armed retainers. She had concerted the assassination
with the duke of Anjou and the duchess of Nemours, whose first
husband had been slain by a Huguenot. A cautious historian says,
speaking of Catherine de Medici, "The Huguenots won over the
king, and appeared to supplant her influence over him. This per
sonal danger put an end to all delay. With that resistless and ma
gical power which she possessed over her children, she re-awakene d
all the slumbering fanaticism of her son. It cost her but one word
to rouse the populace to arms, and that word she spoke. Every in
dividual Huguenot of note was delivered over to the vengeance of his
personal enemy."* This is, perhaps, a better solution of a dis
puted question than the theory that Charles IX., a veryyoungman,
weak and impulsive, vacillating and ferocious, was such a master of
* Ranke, " History of the Popes," vol. ii. p. 69.
TERROR OF ENGLAND. 95
dissimulation, that for several years he could have deceived the
English ambassador, Walsingham, into a belief that he was favour
able to the Protestants whilst meditating their destruction. On the
other hand, the jealousy of Catherine is a more rational explana
tion of her conduct, than the belief that the Massacre of St. Bar
tholomew had been part of a plan for the extirpation of Protestant
ism, settled between that fearful woman and the duke of Alva, in
their conferences at Bayonne, in 1564. These questions have form
ed the subject of much historical controversy. The terrible events
that followed the attempt to assassinate Coligny admit of no dis
pute. On the 23rd of August, according to the account given by
Charles himself to his sister Margaret, after the noontide dinner of
the court he was told of a treasonable conspiracy of the Hugue
nots against himself and his family. It would be necessary, his
relations said, to anticipate the designs of the conspirators by their
previous destruction. He gave his consent, and expressed his
hope that not a single Huguenot would be left alive to reproach him
with the deed. Night had descended upon Paris. There was no
alarm, as bands of assassins silently congregated in the streets. A
signal was to be given when the work of slaughter was to com
mence. The king, his mother, and Anjou sate amidst darkness
and stillness in a balcony of the Louvre. The noise of a pistol is
heard, and Charles trembles in the agony of guilty expectation. At
length the clocks of Paris strike two. Then the bell of St. Ger-!
main l'Auxerrois tolled forth the signal. The duke of Guise bursts
into the defenceless courts where Coligny slept, and three hundred
men slaughter him and his followers. His body is cast out of the
window, and the cry of ' Death to the Huguenots,' amidst the sound
of the tocsin, wakes up the fanatical citizens, and one universal
butchery of the protestants is being accomplished. For three days
the slaughter goes on and the fury extends to Orleans, Lyons, Troyes,
Rouen, Toulouse, Bourdeaux, and other towns. We may choose
what estimate we please of the number ofthe victims, from the highest
estimate of a hundred thousand, to the extenuating calculation of
Dr. Lingard that there might be about sixteen hundred. What
ever was the number, the massacre was considered as a glorious
triumph for the catholics. The pope, now Gregory XIII., cele
brated the event by a solemn procession ; and the pious Venetians
expressed their satisfaction at this mark of God's favour. Charles,
in his despatches to foreign courts, bewailed the massacre, and
imputed it to the populace of Paris. To his parliament lie avowed
96 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
himself the author, and claimed the glory of having given peace
to his kingdom. He sent an ambassador to England, to explain
away the causes of this termination of his proposed tender mer
cies to the Protestants. The queen was at Woodstock ; and when
the envoy was admitted to a public audience, he had to pass be
tween two lines of lords and ladies in deep mourning. Not a word
was uttered as he advanced towards the queen, who also wore the
deepest black. It was the chamber of death which he seemed to
have entered. Motionless and silent was every courtier as he
made his salutations. Elizabeth heard with perfect calmness the
lying excuses which he was entrusted to utter. Charles wrote let
ters to her, which she first refused to answer ; but afterwards re
plied to with courteous words. But her measured civility produced
an impression in France that Elizabeth was about to arm. There
was a general terror in England that the example of St. Barthol
omew's day would spread. The bishop of London writes to lord
Burleigh, on the Sth of September, '• These evil times trouble all
good men's heads, and make their hearts ache, fearing that this
barbarous treachery will not cease in France, but will reach over
unto us. . . . Hasten her majesty homeward ; her safe return
to London will comfort many hearts oppressed with fear." The
bishop, Edwin Sandys, then advises, amongst other precautions,
"Foithwith to cutoff the Scottish queen's head." Walsingham
writes from France that " certain unsound members must be cut
off," for " violent diseases will have violent remedies." Elizabeth
would not comply with these suggestions, pressed on her, as they
were, by the terrors of her subjects and the counsels of her minis
ters. But there appears little doubt that she was cognisant of a
plot between some of these ministers and the earl of Mar, the re
gent of Scotland, to deliver Mary up, that she might be put to
death by her own people. It is not so clear, as Mr. Tytler believes,
that she was to be secretly made away with. The death of Mar
put an end to these dark intrigues ; and Burleigh was left to make
his moan that " if her majesty will continue her delays, for provid
ing for her own surety by just means given to her by God, she and
we shall vainly call upon God when the calamity shall fall upon
us." Those means " for her own surety " were not employed by
the queen for fourteen years ; and, however indefensible they may
have been when called into exercise, it is an abuse of historical
evidence to represent that her perpetual anxiety was to get rid of
her hated rival. There might be deep policy in Elizabeth's delays ;
DANGER OF THE QUEEN OF SCOTS. 97
but her jealousies and fears must have been under some subjection
to a higher feeling, when she was hounded on by those in whom
she had the surest trust ; by the petitions of the Commons and the
clamour of the populace ; to do a deed for which all the bells of
London would have rung, but which she shrank from, to remain in
perpetual apprehension of losing crown and life. Unless we can
believe, against all proof, that such danger was imaginary, we must
be content to think that each of these queens was the victim of a
sad necessity ; and that some of the wretchedness which Mary had
to endure in her lonely prisons was not unfelt by Elizabeth in her
gorgeous court. But it awakens, indeed, a painful contrast to im
agine the one queen wearing out her life in some inaccessible
castle ; working tapestry with her maidens in gloomy rooms ;
walking in the narrow garden, or gazing from the guarded turret ;
waiting eagerly for news which never comes ; sending secret letters
which are intercepted ; watched by a stately earl and his haughty
countess ; and then to read of the other making joyful progresses,
and smiling upon loving subjects ; borne on the willing shoulders
of handsome courtiers, amidst "throngs of knight " and "store of
ladies ; " feasting at Kenilworth with Leicester, or opening the
Royal Exchange with Gresham ; speaking Greek with the Greek
professor at Oxford, or correcting the exercises of the scholars at
Eton. It is indeed a sad contrast. But in our pity for the one
queen we must not forego our respect for the other, — for the queen
who, despotic as she was, always relied upon the people — who, as
Mr. Macaulay-has most justly said, "did not treat the nation as an
adverse party : " the queen under whose auspices Drake circum
navigated the world, and Raleigh founded Virginia; the queen
whose name will be ever associated with the splendid literature
of her age, for that sprang out of the emancipation of the national
mind which she was the great instrument of accomplishing.
Vol. III.— 7
98
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER V.
Jesuits in England.— Campion.— Increased severities against Papists.— Expedition to tho
Netherlands.— Leicester in the Netherlands.— Death of Sir Philip Sidney.— Naval
successes under Drake. — Babington's conspiracy. — Trial of the conspirators — -
Alleged complicity of Mary in the plot.— Mary's papers seized.— She is removed to
Fotheringay Castle.
From the terrible day of Saint Bartholomew in 1572, to the
detection of the conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth in 1586, the
struggles between the two great principles of Romanism and Pro
testantism was incessant in England. The government was earnest
ly supported in this contest by what was now a large majority of
its subjects ; for although the opinions of the Puritans had be
come a serious source of alarm to the Established Church, this
party never swerved from a general loyalty to the queen, even under
persecution. We shall defer, till another chapter, a general notice
of this Protestant schism ; and here confine ourselves to a rapid
view of the events in which the hostility between the old and new
religions was the principal element.
In 1580, the pope, Gregory XIIL, at the suggestion of William
Allen, despatched a body of Jesuits to England. The mission of
these religious enthusiasts was to attempt the re-conversion of the
heretic islanders. They were led and organised by Robert Parsons
and Edmond Campion, who had formerly belonged to colleges in
Oxford, and had been avowed Protestants before their conversion
to Romanism. Out of the college of Douay, in which Campion was
professor of divinity, came many of those ardent spirits who pro
fessed to interpret the bull of Pius V. against Elizabeth in a purely
religious sense, but who, nevertheless, were not regarded by the
English government as other than secret and most dangerous
traitors. The parliament of 1581 met this inroad of able English
men, trained in the school of Loyola to extraordinary subtlety and.
invincible determination, by the most stringent enactments. The
first Act of the session of the 23rd of Elizabeth recites that the
Statute against bringing in bulls and writings from Rome has been
evaded ; and that " divers evil-affected persons have practised con
trary to the meaning of the said statute, by other means than by
JESUITS IN ENGLAND. — CAMPION. 99
bulls written and printed, to withdraw the queen's majesty's sub
jects from their natural obedience to her majesty," &c. This is
distinctly levelled against those who interpreted the decrees of the
see of Rome through their oral communications ; who, invested with
especial authority, moved quietly about from town to town, and from
village to village ; who were cherished and concealed in mansions
where they were cautiously introduced to persons of wavering
opinions. The statute makes it a treasonable offence to pretend to
any power of absolving subjects from their obedience, or practising
to withdraw them to the Romish religion ; and all subjects thus
willingly absolved or withdrawn from their obedience were also to
be deemed traitors. Those who said mass or attended mass, and
those who did not attend church, were subject to heavy penalties.
The proceedings against Campion and others are such as strikingly
exhibit the unfairness and cruelty of trials for treason, as then con
ducted. Campion was arrested in Berkshire, in July, 1581 ; and
was lodged in the Tower with two other priests. He was tor
tured ; and revealed the names of those who had sheltered him.
He was questioned, again and again, upon the power of the pope
to depose sovereigns, and, his answers being evasive, he was
racked with increased severity. Finally, he was tried for high-
treason, not under the statute of 1581, but under that of Edward
III., for compassing and imagining the queen's death. Others
were tried and convicted with him ; but three were spared, who
renounced the pope's deposing power. It was a principle of the
Jesuits that the pope had an undoubted right to deprive kings of
their crowns. The Romanist exiles had proclaimed throughout
Europe that the heretic Elizabeth was an usurper. The English
government rested its defence of the severities which it had prac
tised, upon the ground that the persecutions were not directed
against religious tenets ; that catholics, whether of the laity or the
priesthood, lived unmolested on the score of their faith, when they
paid due temporal allegiance to their sovereign ; and that none
were indicted for treason but such as obstinately maintained the
pope's bull depriving the queen of the crown. Gregory XIIL had
opened the door to evasion of this charge, by granting to Romanists
a permission to dissemble, under the colour of an explanation, " that
the- bull should be considered as always in force against Elizabeth
and the heretics, but should only be binding on catholics when due
execution of it could be had : " * — that is, that they should obey till
* Hallam, " Constitutional History."
IOO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
they were strong enough to throw off their allegiance. The queen's
High Court of Commission would not accept this interpretation :
" The prisoners were called upon to say, if the pope were to absolve
them from their oath of allegiance, and to attack England, what they
should do, and which side they should support. The miserable
frightened men knew not how to extricate themselves from this
dilemma. They answered that they would render unto God what
was God's and unto Csesar what was Caesar's ; but this evasion was
itself interpreted into a confession by their judges. Thus the
prisons were filled ; execution followed upon execution ; and
Catholicism, in its turn, had its martyrs." * The severities of the
laws against papists went on increasing. In 1584, all Jesuits,
seminary priests, and other priests, were commanded by Act of
parliament, to depart from the kingdom within forty days, on pain
of being adjudged traitors ; and penalties were to be inflicted upon
those who, knowing any priest to be within the realm, should not
denounce him to a magistrate . These intolerant enactments pro
duced the very opposite consequences that were contemplated by
the legislature. It was probably difficult to restrain the zealotry of
some of the more fiery Protestants. In a memorial to the queen in
1 583, Burleigh thus sensibly speaks of the results of enforcing penal
laws against such as refused the oath of supremacy : " I ac
count that putting to death does no ways lessen them ; since we
find by experience that it worketh no such effect, but, like hydra's
heads, upon cutting off one, seven grow up ; persecution being
accounted as the badge of the church : and, therefore, they should
never have the honour to take any pretence of martyrdom in Eng
land, where the fulness of blood and greatness of heart is such,
that they will even for shameful things go bravely to death, much
more when they think themselves to climb to heaven ; and this vice
of obstinacy seems to the common people a divine constancy ; so
that for my part, I wish no lessening of their number, but by
preaching and by education of the younger under schoolmasters." f
The reign of Elizabeth was, happily for the progress of the
country, singularly exempt from foreign wars . Her policy was of
the most cautious nature ; involving upon the face of it some
insincerity. In her relations to France and to Spain, when the
governments were oppressing their Protestant subjects, she ab
stained, except in 1 562, from sending troops to the assistance of
those with whom she was identified in principle. But indirect aid
* Rauke, vol. ii. 168. t Quoted in Hallam, chap. iii.
EXPEDITION TO THE NETHERLANDS. roi
she on many occasions afforded. Thus, in 1577, she had assisted
the revolted provinces of the Netherlands, whose commissioners
had, in 1575, offered her the sovereignty, which she declined to
accept. But ten years later it had become of essential importance
to England to weaken the power of Philip of Spain, by keepino-
alive the cause of independence and religious freedom in the Low
Countries. The assassination of the prince of Orange in 1 584, by
a religious fanatic, excited by the reward which Philip II. had set
- upon his head, had produced a fierce indignation in England against
the bigoted king of Spain. The schemes of Philip and pope Sixtus
V. for the invasion of the contumacious island were no longer con
cealed. The Jesuits and seminary priests had been steadily endea
vouring to weaken whatever spirit of patriotism remained amongst
the English catholics. It was a wise resolve, therefore, of Eliza
beth's government to break through that superstitious love of peace
which influenced the queen, and boldly encounter Philip on his
own ground. Elizabeth was very slow to consent to engage in a
war in the Netherlands. To support subjects' against their sove
reign, appeared to her as treason against the rights of monarchs.
The democratic government of the United Provinces was to her an
anomaly which she held in scorn. Above all, she dreaded, and
wisely, expenses wliich would fall heavily upon her people. But
her old sagacious counsellor, Burleigh, the acule Walsingham, and
the favourite Leicester, prevailed over her scruples, and an expedi
tion was determined upon at the end of 1585. Burleigh, writing to
Leicester, who was appointed to its command, says, " For the •
avancement of the action, if I should not with all the powers of my
heart continually both wish and work avancement thereto, I were
to be an accursed person in the sight of God; considering the ends
of this action tend to the glory of God, to the safety of the queen's
person, to the preservation of this realm in a perpetual quietness." *
Elizabeth had again declined the sovereignty which had been
again offered her by the commissioners of the States ; and she now
instructed Leicester also to refuse their offer to put themselves
under the absolute control of the lieutenant she should send with
her army, but to exhort them to listen to his advice. The extreme
eagerness of the ambitious earl to undertake this command, offer
ing even to pawn his estates to the Crown to cover some of the
expenses of the undertaking, seems to indicate that he had personal
designs upon that sovereignty which his queen had rejected. On
* " Leycester Correspondence," p. 21.
io2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND,
the loth December, the English fleet was near Flushing. Leices
ter was received with pageantries which appear to have thrown him
off that balance which it was somewhat hazardous for one of
Elizabeth's ministers to lose. On New Year's Day, 1586, the
States General, by a solemn deputation, offered the queen of Eng
land's lieutenant the absolute government of the United Provinces.
He first hesitated, then yielded to further supplications, and on the
25th of January accepted the dangerous honour. On that day, a
letter was written to him expressive of the queen's dislike of his
proceedings. He had sent his secretary with explanations, but his
arrival was unaccountably delayed. Then the queen herself wrote
a letter to the earl, which is one of the most remarkable examples
- of that force of character which she frequently displayed in the
nervous words of her correspondence. There was no chance of
mistaking the meaning of such sentences as these : •' We could
never have imagined, had we not seen it fall out in experience, that
a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favoured by us
above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible.
a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth
us in honour. . . . Our express pleasure and commandment is,
that all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently, upon the
duty of your allegiance, obey and fulfil whatsoever the bearer
hereof shall direct you to do in our name ; whereof fail you not, as
you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril." * One who
could thus write might not be an amiable mistress to serve ; but
she was a queen fit to be at the head of a great nation. She had
sent an army to assist the people of the Low Countries to maintain
their civil privileges and their religious faith against Philip and
against Rome ; and was she to co-itradict her own published
declarations ? was her servant to disobey her positive instructions ?
It was very long before the anger of the queen could be softened.
She withdrew from her first intention to compel Leicester publicly
to lay down his authority, but she restricted its exercise in many
ways which were irksome to so proud a man. The war was alto
gether mismanaged. The prince of Parma, who commanded the
troops of Spain, was an experienced general. Leicesterwas always
hesitating ; sometimes successful through the bravery of his cap
tains ; but gradually losing fortress after fortress, and obtaining
petty advantages with no permanent results. There was one in his
* " To my lord of Leycester from the queen by Sir Thomas Heneage," " Leycester
Correspondence," p. no.
DEATH OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
I63
army who, in this disastrous campaign, closed a short career of
military experience, but who has left a name which Englishmen
still cherish amongst their most eminent examples of real greatness.
Few were the heroic deeds of Philip Sidney, but his heart was the
seat of true heroism. The rare scholar, the accomplished writer,
the perfect gentleman, might have been forgotten as a soldier, if
his night-march upon Axel, and its daring capture, had been his
chief title to distinction. But his demeanour when he was carried
wounded from the walls of Zutphen, will never be forgotten. His
friend, lord Brooke, has told the story, which, known as it is to
every schoolboy, must be repeated in every History of England
if that history is to show of what material our heroes have been
made. " Passing along by the rear of the army where his uncle
[Leicester] the general was, and being thirsty with excess of bleed
ing, he called for some drink, which was presently brought him.
But as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier
carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly cast
ing up his eyes at the bottie ; which Sir Philip perceiving took it from
his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these
words, ' Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.' " Being repulsed
at Zutphen, Leicester shortly went into winter quarters. The
expedition came to an end without calling forth any higher qualities
in the general than might naturally be expected from an intriguing
courtier ; showing, indeed, that the raw levies of England might
be led to fight valiantly ; but also showing that, without the habit
ual discipline of a regular army, they could not stand up against
starvation and other consequences of mismanagement. There had
been a long peace ; and even in the warlike times of the Planta-
genets armies were often lost from the natural difficulties of obtain-
inc supplies. ¦ But in those times the feudal relations of lord and
vassal kept men together under the direst pressure of want.
Leicester's army was without food or clothes ; and they deserted by
hundreds. The old organisation was broken up ; the organisation
of modern times was not established.
The partial failure of the expedition to the Low Countries was
in some measure compensated by the naval successes against Spain.
Philip had laid an embargo upon English vessels and property,
through the extent of his wide dominions. Elizabeth did not fit
out royal fleets ; but she gave her subjects permission to seize
Spanish ships or merchandise wherever they were to be found.
This war of privateering was perfectly suited to the Anglo-Saxon
104 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
character. The spirit of the old Norsemen was revived ; and the
hope of gain sent hardy adventurers into distant seas, and eager
colonists to search for new lands to subdue. The daring spirits of
Elizabeth's reign have a strong similitude to the pirates and buc
caneers that became odious when they were no longer wanted, and
to the filibusters that are still offensive to European civilisation.
But they led the way to England's maritime and colonial glories ;
and if they plundered somewhat too freely, and destroyed too
mercilessly, they had large national objects in view as well as
private lucre. Drake, in his expedition to the West Indies in
1585, with twenty-five ships, of which only two belonged to the
crown, destroyed several Spanish settlements ; took Carthagena
and San Domingo ; and brought home a considerable amount of
treasure and two hundred and forty pieces of ordnance.
Whilst the battle between the two great principles that were
dividing Europe was being fairly fought out by England and Spain,
horse to horse, and ship to ship, there was a more deadly strife
about to be waged, with all the inveteracy of war without its honours.
In a letter from Walsingham in London to Leicester in the Low
Countries, dated the 9th of July, 1 s86, we hear the first mutterings
of the coming storm. The secretary alludes to " the discovery of
some matter of importance, in the highest degree, through my
travail and cost ; " a secret about which he cannot write, but which
the gentleman who bears the letter is to communicate to the earl.
He then adds, " my only fear is that her majesty will not use the
matter with that secresy which appertaineth. . and surely, if the
matter be well handled, it will break the neck of all dangerous
practices during her majesty's reign." * The handling of such a
matter by Francis Walsingham could not be other than successful —
if success it could be called to "break the neck of all dangerous
practices" by a deed which the historian of the Reformation mildly
deems "the greatest blemish of this reign ; " which others describe
as an act of unparalleled wickedness ; but which was then held as a
political necessity, of which we, who live in happier times, and are
trained to very different feelings, are no competent judges. Wal
singham saw that the conspiracy of a missionary priest with some
enthusiastic young men for the deliverance of Mary might involve
her in their plot for the assassination of Elizabeth. The secretary,
though a statesman of rare disinterestedness and general integrity,
was so vigilant in the detection of plots against his mistress, that
* " Leycester Correspondence," p. 341.
BABINGTON'S CONSPIRACY. 105
his spies and secret agents were in every suspected house at home.
In what is meant for panegyric it is said of him, "he outdid the
Jesuits in their own bow, and over-reached them in their own
equivocation and mental reservation. . . . He would cherish a plot
some years together, admitting the conspirators to his own and the
queen's presence familiarly. His spies waited on some men every
hour for three years." * This was the man, with his maxims that
"knowledge is never too dear," and that "secresy is policy and
virtue," whom a dozen rash young catholics, incited by a fanatical
priest, thought to circumvent.
In February, 1585, Dr. William Parry was convicted of high
treason, and he was executed on the 2nd of March. His career
was a very extraordinary one. He was, after 1 580, employed as
" a collector of secret intelligence in foreign countries." He had
a pension given him in 1584. He is tried as a public enemy six
months afterwards. On his trial he made a confession which
implicated one Morgan, an agent of Mary at Paris for the receipt
and administration of her dower as queen of France. His state
ment was to this effect: "In October [1582] I came to Paris,
where (upon better opinion conceived of me amongst my catholic
countrymen) I found my credit well settled, and such as mistrusted
me before ready to trust and embrace me. And being one day at
the chamber of Thomas Morgan, a catholic gentleman (greatly
beloved and- trusted on that side), amongst other gentlemen, talk
ing of England, I was desired by Morgan to go up with him to
another chamber, where he told me that it was hoped and looked
for that 1 should do some service for God and his church. I
answered him, I would do it, if it were to kill the greatest subject
in England, whom I named, and in truth then hated. ' No, no,'
said he, 'let him live to his greater fall and ruin of his house. It
is the queen I mean.' I told him ' it were soon done if it might be
lawfully done, and warranted in the opinion of some learned divines.'
And so the doubt once resolved (though, as you have heard, I was
before reasonably well satisfied), I vowed to undertake the enter
prise for the restitution of England to the ancient obedience of the
see apostolic."
Elizabeth was greatly enraged against Morgan, and called upon
the king of France to deliver him up. This was refused ; but
Morgan was sent to the Bastile. Full of plans of revenge, he pro
cured means of correspondence with Mary, and had various, agents
* Lloyd, "State Worthies," pp. 514-516.
Io6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
in England, some of whom were unable to elude the vigilance of
Walsingham, and yielded up their secrets to the wary minister, or
became his own dark sentinels.* In the summer and autumn of
1585, a catholic priest came to England, who was dressed as an
officer, and moved about under the name of Fortescue. His real
name was John Ballard. One of Walsingham's intelligencers
obtained his confidence ; and after visiting various parts of this
island they proceeded to Paris. Here Ballard saw Mendoza, the
Spanish ambassador ; and proposed to him, that during the absence
of English forces in the Netherlands, an army should be landed,
whose presence would be the signal for a general rising in favour
of the queen of Scots. The ambassador gave little encouragement
to this scheme ; and Ballard turned to other devices. There was
an English officer of the name of Savage, who had undertaken to
assassinate Elizabeth ; and Ballard came back to England to tempt
violent partisans into listening to this proposal. He addressed
himself to Anthony Babington, a gentleman of Dethick, in Derby
shire. He had always professed a chivalrous devotion to the cause
of Mary ; and had been the medium of transmitting letters to her
when she was at Sheffield castle. He adopted the proposal that
Savage should kill the queen ; but he held that it was a plan of too
much importance to be left to one man's resolution ; and that six
should engage in that service, whilst others should liberate the
queen of Scots. There can be no doubt that here was a real
plot. Young men, the friends of Babington, were induced to enter
into the scheme, to their eventual destruction. One of the most
interesting of these was Chidick Titchbourne, of Porchester, in
Hampshire ; and in the address which he delivered at his execu
tion, we may see how such rash and criminal projects found ac
ceptance with ardent and generous minds : — " I had a friend, and
a dear friend, of whom 1 made no small account, whose friendship
hath brought me to this ; he told me the whole matter, I cannot
deny, as they had laid it down to be done ; but I always thought it
impious, and denied to be a dealer in it; but the regard of my
friend caused me to be a man in whom the old proverb was verified ;
I was silent, and so consented. Before this thing chanced, we
lived together in most flourishing estate. Of whom went report in
the Strand, Fleet-street, and elsewhere about London, but of Bab
ington and Titchbourne ? No threshold was of force to brave our
entry, Thus we lived, and wanted nothing we could wish for ; and
* Lloyd's happy definition of a spy was " a dark sentinel."
TRIAL OF CONSPIRATORS. I07
God knows what less in my head than matters of state. Now give
me leave to declare the miseries I sustained after I was acquainted
with the action; wherein I may justly compare my estate to that ot
Adam's, who could not absta'n one thing forbidden, to enjoy all
other things the world could afford ; the terror of conscience awaited
me. After I considered the dangers whereinto I was fallen, I went
to sir John Peters, in Essex, and appointed my -horses should
meet me at London, intending to go down into the country. I
came to London, and then heard that all was bewrayed : where
upon, like Adam, we fled into the woods to hide ourselves."
The employment of spies by a government necessarily leads to
the belief that the spy incites the enterprise which he is commis
sioned to discover. Walsingham was acquainted with this conspir
acy through a seminary priest of the name of Gifford ; and, says
Dr. Lingard, " that artful minister, while he smiled at the infatua
tion of the youths, who had thus entangled themselves in the toils,
was busily employed in weaving a new intrigue, and planning the
ruin of a more illustrious victim." What that artful minister did
is clear enough. He removed the difficulties which prevented
Babington's correspondence with Mary; and he possessed himself
of copies of that correspondence. The ruin of the more illustrious
victim was accomplished by her own readiness to enter into a plan
for her deliverance, founded upon invasion and insurrection, and
the assassination of Elizabeth. This was the charge justly sus
tained against her, if the documents produced upon her trial were
not forgeries.
On the 13th, 14th, and 15th of September, fourteen persons
accused as treasonable conspirators were brought to trial. Babing
ton, Ballard, and Savage, with four others, pleaded guilty. The
remainder were also convicted. The executions of seven, on the
20th of September, were attended with the horrible barbarities of
the full penalty of treason. In the case of the others these cruel
ties were dispensed with. Babington is held " to have behaved
ungenerously. He it was who sought to inveigle the others into
the conspiracy ; and yet his confession was the chief proof against
them." * In that confession, as given upon the trial of Mary, was
also found what was alleged as a corroborative proof of her com
plicity with this attempt : — " He set down at large what conferences
passed between B. [Ballard] and him, and the whole plot of con
spiracy for the murder of Elizabeth, and deliverance of Mary. He
* Lingard, vol. viii. note at p. 261.
108 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
declared further, that he did write a letter to the queen of Scotland
touching every particular of this plot, and sent it by the same
unknown boy [through whom he had corresponded previously].
She answered twenty or thirty days [after] in the same cipher by
which he wrote unto her, but by another messenger. The tenour
of both which letters he carried so well in memory, that he reported
and set down -all the principal points of the same, as upon con
ference of the said declaration with the copies of the said letters it
appeared. Babington in all particular points prayed her direction ;
for instance, that six noble gentlemen would undertake that tragical
execution." *
The queen of Scots had two secretaries, de Naou, a French
man, and Curie, a Scot. It appears from a letter of Elizabeth to
Shrewsbury, that de Naou was recommended by the French king;
and that she consented to his appointment, he having "promised
that he shall carry himself in that even manner that becomelh an
honest minister." t When the knowledge of the conspiracy was
sufficiently mature, these secretaries were arrested, and the papers
of Mary were seized and transmitted to the council. Tbe queen
of Scots was at Chartley,}: in the county of Stafford. She had
been removed from Tutbury in the beginning of 1586, which place
she appears to have greatly disliked, saying, in one of her letters,
" I suffered here so much rigour, insult, and indignity, that I have
ever since looked on it as wretched and unfortunate." Mary was
residing at Chartley when the discovery of the suspicions against
her was abruptly communicated. She was riding to the chase,
with sir Amyas Paulet, her two secretaries, and her usual attend
ants. On the way sir Thomas Gorges told her that he had received
orders from the queen to take her to Tixhall, a country seat at a
short distance, and that de Naou and Curie were to be arrested.
She was very angry, and even called upon her people to protect
her. But Gorges went one way with the secretaries, and Paulet
another with the queen. Meanwhile a messenger from the Council
had taken possession of Mary's papers. § Some days after, Mary
was conducted back to Chartley; and found that her private cabi
nets had been opened, and her papers removed. On the 27th of
August, Paulet thus reports of her demeanour as she left Tixhall,
a seat of the Astons : — " As Mary was coming out of sir Walter
* Raumer, p. 344. t Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. p. 278.
t Lingard, perhaps by a typographical error, speaks of Mary's residence at Chertsey.
§ Letter from M. d'Esneval. Raumer, p. 315.
ALLEGED COMPLICITY OF MARY IN THE PLOT. 109
Aston's gate, she said with a loud voice, weeping, to some poor
folks which were there assembled, ' I have nothing for you, I am a
beggar as well as you ; all is taken from me.' And when she came
to the gentleman, she said, weeping, ' Good God ; I am not witting
or privy to anything intended against the queen.' . . . On her
coming hither Mr. Darell delivered the keys as well of her chamber
as of her coffers to Bastian, which he refused by direction of his
mistress, who required Mr. Darell to open her chamber-door, which
he did, and then this lady, finding that the papers were taken away,
said in great choler, that two things could not be taken away from
her — her English blood and her catholic religion, which both she
would keep unto her death, adding further these words, ' Some of
you will be sorry for it,' meaning the taking away of her papers.
I was not present when these words were spoken, but no doubt
they reached unto me, in what sense she only knoweth. I may be
sorry for others, but I know there is nothing in her papers that can
give me cause to be sorry for myself."
The sensation produced upon the citizens of London, when the
news of the Babington conspiracy first opened upon them, and the
determination in the mind of Elizabeth to regard Mary as a principal
in the design, are described in a letter of Chateauneuf, the French
ambassador, to his, king, Henry III. : — " I have not been able to
send your majesty any information for the last fortnight, all -the
roads tcuFrance being closed on account of a conspiracy which was
directed against the queen and the state. She told me herself
that she has had from twenty-five to thirty persons, all catholics,
arrested on account of it, and this continues daily. A great sensa
tion was caused by it in this town, where the people are much in
censed against the catholics ; nay, for eight or ten days there was
reason to apprehend that acts of violence would be committed upon
all who were considered to be catholics. Bonfires were lighted in
every street, and the bells rung for twenty-four hours together, be
cause the queen had escaped from so great a danger. It was de
termined, it is said, to shoot the queen on the isth of August, and
according to the plan agreed upon, every catholic in the kingdom
was to take up arms, and place Mary on the throne. Elizabeth, at
least, ascribes the whole undertaking to her, for which reason M.
d'Esneval and I repaired to Windsor last Sunday, when she said
to me, ' I know that the queen of Scotland contrived this. This,
in truth, is repaying evil for good, and the more so as I have sev
eral times saved her life. The king of France will have news in a
110 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
few days that will little please him.' .... For the understand.
ing of this, I must inform your majesty, that during the ten or
twelve days that the investigations were carried on with the great
est ardour, there was a report in the city that this conspiracy had
its origin in France, and that even your majesty and the king of
Spain took part in it ; that your fleet was in readiness to aid it, and
that those leaders of the plot who had not yet been discovered
were concealed in my house, and that it ought be forcibly searched.
.... I have accordingly complained of this report, and also of a
thousand scandalous and insulting words which my people are ex
posed to in the streets ; and that I was as if besieged, and in dan
ger of being plundered. The only answer I received was, ' The
people are greatly excited, and cannot be restrained.' " *
From .Chartley, the queen of Scots was transferred to Fother
ingay castle. This feudal pile, of which scarce a trace remains,
was demolished by order of James VI., when he came to tlie Eng
lish throne. Here Richard III. was born, and here Mary Stuart
closed her life." Its associations were necessarily painful to James ;
and they probably offered some reproach to his conscience. As
we proceed to the close of the tragical history of his mother, we
shall find sufficient evidence of the weakness and selfishness of
this king. His endeavours to procure a mitigation of the fate of
Mary, and his final resentment, were never very strenuous. He
was always thinking of the splendid lot that was before him as suc
cessor to both thrones. It may be very reasonably conjectured,
from the whole tenor of Elizabeth's conduct, that she designed
James to succeed her; that she was perfectly aware of the inesti
mable benefits that would result to both countries from their union
under one sovereign. Her solicitude was far greater for the good
government of Scotland than was to be ascribed to her desire for
a peaceful and protestant neighbour. She took James under her
tutelage, and read him many a sage, and many a stern admonition.
There is a remarkable letter from Elizabeth to James VI., dated
the 4th of October, 1 586, which is a reply to a letter of James in
which he congratulates the queen upon her escape from the con
spiracy directed against her life. This characteristic letter of
Elizabeth gives a dark hint of her belief that the mother of the
king of Scotland was accessory to this design. He would, indeed,
shortly " hear all ; " for at this very date it had been determined to
put Mary upon her trial. A league between England and Scot-
* Raumer, p. 317.
MARY REMOVED TO FOTHERINGAY CASTLE. Ill
land had been concluded a short time before this eventful season.
" And for that the curse of that design rose up from the wicked
suggestion of the Jesuits, which make it an acceptable sacrifice to
God, and meritorious to themselves, that a king not of their pro
fession should be murdered, therefore I could keep my pen no
longer from discharging my care of your person, that you suffer
not such vipers to inhabit your land. They say you gave leave
under your hand that they might safely come and go. For God's
love regard your surety above all persuasions, and account him
no subject that entertains them. Make not edicts for scorn, but
to be observed. Let them be rebels, and so pronounced, that
preserve them. For my part, I am sorrier that they cast away so
many goodly gentlemen than that they sought my ruin. I thank
God I have taken more dolor for some that are guilty of this mur
der than bear them malice that they sought my death. I protest
it before God. But such iniquity will not be hid, be it never so
craftily handled ; and yet, when you shall hear all, you will wonder
that one accounted wise will use such matter so fondly."* There
can be no doubt to whom the singular expression " one accounted
wise " refers. * " Letters of Elizabeth and James VI.," p. 38,
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER VI.
The Association.— Statute for the surety of the queen's person.— Commissions for trial of
Mary.— Proceedings on the trial.— Judgment against Mary.— Conflicting opinions on
this judgment The parliament urge the execution of the sentence. — The judgment
proclaimed.— Conduct of Elizabeth.— Interview with Davison.— Warrant of execu
tion.— Mary beheaded at Fotheringay.— Elizabeth disavows her responsibility in this
proceeding. — The disavowal a self-deception. — Note on the statement that Elizabeth
desired that the Queen of Scots might be privately assassinated.
To judge correctly of the course of proceedings against the queen
of Scots, we must go back to the session of parliament of 1584-5
when the nation was alarmed by well-founded apprehensions of a
Spanish invasion, and by decisive indications of plots for the de
position of Elizabeth and the recognition of Mary's claim to the
English crown. In that session a law was passed, entitled "An
Act for provision to be made for the surety of the queen's majesty's
most royal person, and the continuance of the realm in peace." *
Before the passing of this Act, a most extraordinary combination
had been entered into, which is thus recognised in the fourth
clause of the statute for the surety of the queen's person : " And
whereas of late many of her majesty's good and faithful subjects,
have, in the name of God, and with the testimony of good con
sciences, by one uniform manner of writing under their hands and
seals, and by their several oaths voluntarily taken, joined themselves
together in one Bond and Association, to withstand and revenge to
the uttermost all such malicious actions and attempts against her
majesty's most royal person." The specific object of the Associa
tion was much more explicitly defined in the instrument to which
the good and faithful subjects had set their hands and seals. It
was to the effect that if any attempt against the queen's person
"shall be taken in hand or procured," whereby any should pretend
title to come to the crown by the untimely death of the queen so
procured, the Associators not only bind themselves never to allow
of any such pretended successor, by whom or for whom any such
act shall be attempted, but engage to prosecute such person or
* 27 Eliz., c. 1.
STATUTE FOR THE SURETY OF THE QUEEN'S PERSON. 1 13
persons to death. It is not correct to state that in the statute for
the surety of the queen's person, "the terms of this Association
were solemnly approved by parliament." * It provided that the
articles of the Association " shall and ought to be in all things ex
pounded and adjudged according to the true intent and meaning of
this Act ; " and the Act expressly limited its meaning by the con
dition " that if any invasion or rebellion should be made by or for
any person pretending title to the crown after her majesty's de
cease, or if any thing be confessed or imagined tending to the hurt
of her person," it should be " with the privity of any such person."
In that case it was provided that a commission, composed of peers,
privy councillors, and judges, should examine and give judgment
on such offences ; and that, after a proclamation of such judgment
under the great seal, all persons against whom such sentence shall
be given and proclaimed should be disabled for ever to have any
claim to the crown ; and all her majesty's subjects, by virtue of
this statute, and by the queen's direction, might pursue the said
persons to death. In case of the violent death of the queen, the
privy council, with others, might proclaim the guilty parties, and
use force in pursuing them to death. Mr. Hallam has pointed out
that " this statute differs from the associators' engagement, in
omitting the outrageous threat of pursuing to death any person,
whether privy or not to the design, on whose behalf an attempt
against the queen's life should be made."f Such was the law
when the Babington conspiracy was discovered ; and Mary was
put upon her trial under this law, and not under the old Statute of
Treasons, to determine whether that conspiracy against the life of
Elizabeth was with the privity of any person that shall or may pre
tend title to the crown of this realm. %
On the sth of October, 1586, a commission was issued to alarge
number of the most eminent persons of the kingdom, including
twenty-nine peers, nine privy councillors, the chancellor, and five
judges. In this commission it was recited, that since the first day
of June, in the 27th year of the queen, " divers matters have been
compassed and imagined tending to the hurt of our royal person, as
well by Mary, daughter and heir of James the fifth, king of Scots,
and commonly called queen of Scots and dowager of France, pre
tending title to this realm of England ; as by divers other persons,
cum scientia, in English with the privity of the same Mary, as we
are given to understand." To the commissioners was assigned
* Tytler, vol. viii. t " Constitutional History." tz7 Eliz-, ».. .. clause 1.
Vol. III.— 8
114 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
full power to examine' all such matters, and to give sentence and
judgment, under the Act for the surety of the royal person. Thir
ty-six commissioners repaired to the castle of Fotheringay; and
letters from Elizabeth were delivered to Mary, apprising her of the
proceedings that were to be taken against her. At some prelimi
nary interviews with a deputation from the commissioners, Mary
maintained that she was an absolute queen ; that she was no sub
ject ; and rather would die a thousand deaths than acknowledge
herself a subject. She especially objected to the recent law, — upon
which the authority of the commissioners wholly depended, as un
just, as devised of purpose against her. But Hatton, the vice-
chamberlain of Elizabeth, urged her to lay aside the bootless privi
lege of regal dignity, and by appearing before the commissioners
have the means of showing her innocence. She ultimately yielded.
The court was opened on Friday, the 14th of October, in the great
hall at Fotheringay castle. Amongst the Cottonian MSS. there is
a rough plan, in the hand-writing of lord Burleigh, for the arrange
ment of the hall. The " Great Chamber " was to be divided by " a
rail as is in the Parliament Chamber." Within the bar was to be
a cloth of state, with a chair for the queen of England ; and oppo
site, nearer the rail, a chair for the queen of Scots. On the right of
the queen of England's chair, a form for four justices, and a
form for fourteen earls. On the left a.form for the queen's coun
sel ; a form for seven counsellors : and a form for thirteen barons.
The space below the bar was " for all persons not being in commis
sion, nor of the queen's learned counsel." *
It is scarcely possible, within reasonable limits, to furnish an
adequate relation of this so-called trial. Like all other trials for
high-treason at that period, the witnesses were not examined in
open court ; the accused was not allowed counsel. There sat,
facing the empty chair of royal state, this acute and courageous
warnan, with those before her whom she regarded as her enemies
ready to overwhelm her by their accusations or their arguments.
She repeated her declaration, that whatever answers she gave were
made under protest against the authority of the commission to try
a princess who was no subject of the queen of England. Gawdy,
the queen's serjeant, went through the history of the Babington
conspiracy, and brought forward arguments that she knew of it,
approved it, and showed the means of its execution. She main
tained that she knew not Babington ; had never received any letters
* See plan in Ellis, First Series, vol. ii.
PROCEEDINGS ON THE TRIAL".. IIS
from him, nor written any to him ; that she never plotted the de
struction of the queen ; and that to prove the same her subscription!
under her own hand ought to be produced. Copies of Babington's
letters to her were read. " Let it be proved," she answered, " that
I received them." The confessions of Babington and others were
then recited, to prove that she had written letters which showed
knowledge of the conspiracy. She said this was second-hand evi
dence. A copy of a letter was read, as of one written by her to
Babington. She demanded that the original, said to be in cypher,
should be produced. She hinted that Walsingham, who had placed
spies about her, might have caused her cypher to be counterfeited.
Walsingham protested that as a private person he had done nothing
unbeseeming an honest man, nor as he bore the place of a public
person had he done anything unworthy his place. Burleigh took
part in the charges against the undaunted queen ; who thus fought.
a battle single-handed against the most adroit statesmen of that
age. It was not a trial, but a most unequal debate ; and it is pain
ful to see how Burleigh, in many points so worthy of respect, could
describe the keen encounter between himself and an inexperienced
woman. " This queen of the castle was content to appear before
us again in public, to be heard, but, in truth, not to be heard for her'
defence, for she could say nothing but negatively, that the points
of the letters that concerned the practice against the queen-majes
ty's person were never by her written, nor of her knowledge. The
rest, for invasion, for escaping by force, she said, she would neither
deny nor affirm. But her intention was, by long artificial speeches,
to move pity, to lay all blame upon the queen's majesty, or rather
upon the Council, that all the troubles past did ensue, avowing her
reasonable offers and our refusals ; and in this her speeches I did
so encounter her with reasons out of my knowledge and experience,
as she had not that advantage she looked for ; as I am assured the
auditory did find her case not pitiable, her allegations untrue ;
by which means great debate fell yesternight very long, and this
day renewed with great stomaching." *
This letter of Burleigh refers to the proceedings of the second
day. Mary then acknowledged that notes had been written to
Babington by her secretaries ; but said that they wholly referred to
plans for her escape. She did not deny that she sought this deliv
erance, even through an invasion of the realm. Letters were pro-
* Letter to Davison, October 15, Ellis, First Series, vol. iii. p. 12.
ir6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
duced, of which the genuineness is now scarcely disputed,* in
which she minutely expounded plans for the king of Spain " to set
on the queen of England;" which invasion she would aid by in
ducing the Catholic lords of Scotland to join the enterprise ; and,
seizing the young king James, deliver him into the hands of the king
of Spain, or of the pope, to make him to be instructed and reduced
to the Catholic religion. Another letter was read, in which Mary
expressed her intention of bequeathing to the Spanish king her
right of succession to the English throne. The plots for invasion
and the overthrow of Elizabeth's government were almost neces
sarily connected with the .assassination of the queen. Whether
Mary was cognisant of one part of these plots, and wholly ignorant
of the other, may be reasonably questioned.
At the close of the proceedings at Fotheringay, on the second
da)', the court was adjourned to the 25th at Westminster. Naou
and Curie, Mary's two secretaries, were then examined, in the ab
sence of their mistress. Camden says that they voluntarily con
firmed all and every the letters and copies of letters, before pro
duced, to be most true. But this historian adds, " I have seen
Naou's apology to king James, written in the year 1605, wherein,
laboriously protesting, he excuseth himself, that he was neither
author, nor persuader, nor the first revealer of the plot that was
undertaken, nor failed of his duty through negligence or want of
foresight ; yea, that this day [the 25th of October] he stoutly im
pugned the chief points of accusation against his lady and mistress ;
which, notwithstanding, appeareth not by records." The commis
sion unanimously delivered as their sentence " that the Babington
conspiracy was with the privity of Mary, pretending title to the
crown of England ; and that she hath compassed and imagined
within this realm, divers matters tending to the hurt, death, and
destruction of our sovereign lady the queen." The commissioners
added that this sentence did not derogate fram James, king of
Scots, in title or honour, but that he was in the same place, degree,
and right, as if the sentence had never been pronounced.
Between the trial of Mary and the execution of the sentence
there was- an interval of four months. They were four months of
intense anxiety, not only to the unhappy queen of Scots, but to
Elizabeth, to her ministers, to the parliament, to the people. There
* " These, if they were genuine, and of that there can be littie doubt, showed that she
had not only approved of the invasion devised at Paris, but had offered to aid its execu
tion." — Lingard.
JUDGMENT AGAINST MARY. 1 17
are many doubtful points in the recorded transactions of this
period, and historians have too often cut the knot instead of at
tempting to unloose it. Starting upon the hypothesis that if Mary
were not wholly innocent, the judgment against her was illegal, she
is usually represented as the victim of remorseless statesmen, of a
fanatical parliament, of a ferocious people, and of a cruel and dis
sembling rival queen. In the natural sympathy of mankind for a
woman who had so long been acquainted with misery, the fact
seems to have been overlooked that she was thrust from her le
gitimate throne by her own subjects, under charges of the most
atrocious nature, and with the conviction that she would never
cease to plot with foreign powers for the overthrow of the reformed
religion. It is equally clear that her detention in this country was
upon the ground that she was a public enemy ; that she had never
given up her claim to the actual possession of the cro.vn; that her
efforts to induce the Catholic powers to support her claims were
unceasing ; and that for years she was the centre around which all
the intrigues for destroying the heretical governments of England
and Scotland revolved. During her life, however strictly Mary
was watched, the government of the Protestant Elizabeth was in
perpetual danger. It was no popular delusion which ascribed to
the bigoted popes who held the queen of England accursed, the
doctrine that — "blessed shall he be that doth revolt
From his allegiance to a heretic ; "
that the hand which took away Elizabeth's " hateful life " should
be deemed "meritorious." When Mary was pronounced guilty of
privity to the Babington conspiracy, the most extensive prepara
tions for the overthrow of Elizabeth were rapidly maturing. Inva
sion from without, treason from within, were to work together to
place upon the throne one who would call in foreign aid to destroy
the religion which had been generally adopted by a whole genera
tion of English, and which no differences of opinion were otherwise
likely essentially to disturb. Assuming Mary to have been privy
to the various plots that had ripened during the last two years of her
detention, — and one of the soberest of historians says, " in Murden's
State Papers we have abundant evidence of Mary's acquaintance
with the plots going forward in 1585 and 1586 against Elizabeth's
government, if not with those for her assassination " * — the" ques-
* Hallam, Note to chap, iii,
It8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tion arises whether the deposed queen of Scots was amenable to
any English tribunal ? Camden says, that amongst contemporaries,
" divers speeches were raised about the matter according to the
divers dispositions of men." Some held that " she was a free and
absolute princess, under the superior command of God alone, —
that she could not commit treason because she was no subject."
Others maintained that she was "only a titular queen, because she
had resigned her kingdom, and when she first came into England
had subjected herself under the protection of the qvieen of Eng
land." These abstract differences were no doubt settled, for the
most part, by the doctrine, with which Camden concludes his state
ment of the opinions of those who defended the sentence against
Mary,—" that the safety of the people is the highest law." What
ever violent historical partisans may maintain, we concur in the
opinion' of Mr. Hallam, that those who held Mary to be only a
titular queen were in the right. "Though we must admit that
Mary's resignation of her crown was compulsory, and retracted on
the first occasion ; yet, after a twenty years' loss of possession, when
not one of her former subjects avowed allegiance to her, when the
king of Scotland had been so long acknowledged by England, and
by all Europe, is it possible to consider her as more than a titular
queen, divested of every substantial right to which a sovereign
tribunal could have regard ? " * If we accept of the doctrine that
" the safety of the people is the highest law," we must further agree
that the sentence against Mary, " if not capable of complete vindica
tion, has at least encountered a disproportioned censure." f But
there must be censure more or less. The contendingfeelings excited
by the fate of Mary have been as correctly analysed by the great
contemporary poet as by any historian. There can be no doubt
that Spencer's " False Duessa " was the type of Mary, the " un
titled queen." Following out the poet's brief enumeration of the
crimes of Duessa, Authority opposed her ; the Law of Nations rose
against her ; Religion imputed God's behest to condemn her ; the
People's cry and Commons' suit importuned for care of the Public
Cause : Justice charged her with breach of law : —
" But then, for her, on the contrary part,
Rose many advocates for her to plead ;
First there came Pity with full tender heart,
And with her joined Regard of Womanhead ;
* " Constitutional History," chap. iii. f ffi/j.
PARLIAMENT. — PROCLAMATION OF THE JUDGMENT. 119
And then came Danger, threatening hidden dread
And high alliance unto foreign power ;
Then came Nobility of Birth, that bred
Great ruth through her misfortune's tragic stour,
And lastly Grief did plead, and many tears forth pour." *
The Pity, the Regard of Womanhead, the ruth for fallen Nobility
of Birth, the Grief -that speaks in tears, will always prevail over
political considerations when we peruse the sad story of Mary
Stuart. But it is not to read the past aright if we wholly shut our
eyes to Justice and the Public Cause. It would be worse than
mere tenderness to impute to Elizabeth and her advisers, to the
parliament and to the people, a blind hostility to a suffering and
harmless captive. Mary was for years the terror of England. Pier
destruction was " the Great Cause " to which the highest and the
humblest in the land looked as a relief. If her death were a crime
it was a national crime. To regard it at the present day as an
outrage upon Scotland, and to talk of it, as some do, in this spirit,
appears to us one of those hallucinations of a distempered patriotism,
with which men vainly endeavour to call up the shadows of long-
buried rivalries and forgotten discontents.
The parliament was opened by Commission, an unusual course,
on the 29th of October. The chief business was to bring before
the houses the proceedings against the queen of Scots ; and the
principal discussions were upon what was commonly termed " the
Great Cause." The members of the Council appear to have been
firmly persuaded of the duty of urging Elizabeth to the most ex
treme course. Davison, one of her secretaries, writes to Leicester
on the 4th of November, " Your lordship's presence here were more
than needful for the great cause now in hand, which is feared will
receive a colder proceeding than may stand with the surety of her
majesty, and necessity of our shaken estates." f On the 10th of
November, a committee of both houses declared the sentence
against Mary to be just; and the houses agreed in a petition to
Elizabeth, that proclamation of the judgment might be made, and
that further proceedings might be taken against the Scottish queen;
" because upon advised and great consultation, we cannot find that
there is any possible means to provide for your majesty's safety
but by the just and speedy execution of the said queen." J The
answer of Elizabeth is generally considered hypocritical : " If my
* " Faery Queen," book v. canto ix. t " Leycester Correspondence." p. 453-
t " Parliamentary History-"
120 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
life alone depended hereupon, and not the safety and welfare of all
my people, I would, I protest unfcignedly, willingly and readily
pardon her. Nay, if England might by my death obtain a more
flourishing condition and a better prince, I would most gladly lay
down my life. For, for your sakes it is, and for my people's, that
I desire to live." This is egotism; but egotism which has not only
the " princely dignity," but the " motherly tenderness," with which
Elizabeth always spoke of her people. On this occasion she re
quested time to consider. The houses again resolved that no safety
can in any wise be had as long as the queen of Scots doth live.
Again Elizabeth hesitated : " If I should say unto you," she re
plied, "that I mean not to grant your petition, by my faith I should
say unto you more than perhaps I mean. And if I should say
unto you I mean to grant your petition, I should then tell you more
than is fit for you to know. And thus I must deliver you an answer
answerless." But the government acceded to one part of the peti
tion of parliament to the queen. At the beginning of December
the judgment of the Commissioners against Mary was solemnly
proclaimed in London and other places. Our historians record the
joy of the citizens of the capital ; the ringing of bells and the bon
fires. They pass over the statutory effect of this proclamation:
"After such sentence or judgment given, and declaration thereof
made and published, by her majesty's proclamation, under the great
seal of England, all persons against whom such sentence or judg
ment shall be so given and published, shall be excluded and dis
abled for ever to have or claim or to pretend to have or claim, the
crown of this realm." * The dread of the great body of Protest
ants had been that, in the event of Elizabeth's death, a Romanist
successor would come, in the person of Mary, the next heir. The
proclamation under the statute put an end to that chance ; and
hence the joy. For two months a more fatal termination of the
" great cause " had been suspended. When Elizabeth was threat
ened by the French ambassador, she wrote a letter of defiance to
his master Henry III. When James sent commissioners to Eng
land upon a mission of intercession, she delayed and protested her
desire to save Mary, although in a letter to James she called her
" the serpent that poisons me." As these efforts became more
strenuous Elizabeth became more determined ; and wrote to James
"though like a most natural good son you charged them [the
ambassadors] to seek all means they could devise with wit or
• 27 Elii.
CONDUCT OF ELIZABETH. 121
judgment to save her life, yet I cannot, nor do not, allege anyfault
to you of, their persuasions; for I take it that you will remember
that advice or desires ought ever agree with the surety of the party r
sent to and honour of the sender."* Camden has described the
state of Elizabeth's mind at this period. " She gave herself over
to solitariness, sat many times melancholy and mute ; and often
sighing muttered to herself, aut fer, aut fcri, — that is, either bear
strokes or strike : and, out of I know not what emblem, neferiare,
fjri, — that is, strike, lest thou be stricken." At last the struggle, or
the simulated struggle, seemed over. On the 1st of February, the
queen sent for Davison, one of the secretaries, at ten in the morn
ing. After various talk, she asked if he had brought the warrant
for the execution of the Scottish queen. He had been desired by
the lord admiral Howard to bring it, and he delivered it to Eliza
beth. That warrant had been in his hands five or six weeks ; but
now, as he was told, the queen had resolved to sign it, in conse
quence of rumours of invasions and rebellions spread abroad. The
queen signed the warrant, and ordered Davison to carry it to the
great seal, and then dispatch it with all expedition. She told him
to show the warrant to Mr. Secretary Walsingham, who was sick ;
saying, merrily, that she thought the sight thereof would kill him
outright. This might be cruel indifference, or forced levity to hide
a conflict within. He showed the warrant to Burleigh and Leices
ter, and then went to the chancellor, and afterwards to Walsingham.
The next morning the queen sent him a message, that if he had
not been already to the chancellor he should forbear till he knew
her further pleasure. He went therefore to the queen, and told
her that the warrant was sealed; and she said, "whatneedeth that
haste ? " She objected that this course threw the whole burthen
upon herself. Davison, fearing to take the responsibility of dis
patching the warrant, went to Burleigh, who assembled a Council,
and gave his advice that they should join in sending the warrant
to the commissioners ¦' without troubling her majesty any further
in that behalf, she having done all that in law or reason could be
required of her." Burleigh undertook to prepare letters to accom
pany the warrant; and the next day, the 3rd, the warrant and des
patches were delivered by Burleigh to Mr. Beale, who was thought
the fittest messenger. Two or three days after, the queen spoke to
Davison about another course " that had been propounded to her
underhand by one of great place," against which Davison gave rea-
* "Letters of Elizabeth and James VI.," p. 441.
122 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sons " wherewith she seemed to rest satisfied without any show of
following the new course, or altering her former resolution in any
point." At this interview Elizabeth complained that the warrant
was not already executed. Such is the straightforward account
contained in a Manuscript which is amongst the papers in the Har
leian Collection. This is, in substance, the same account as that
given by Camden. But there are other statements by this unfor
tunate secretary, who was prosecuted in the Star Chamber for not
obeying Elizabeth's commands in the matter of the warrant, which
are familiar to the most cursory reader of history, and which are
usually accepted as evidence of a desire of the queen that Mary
should be privately murdered. Camden refers to these statements
of how Davison " excused himself in private," which he gives
" compendiously," with this addition to what we have related as
found in the other narrative : " Moreover she blamed Paulet and
Drury that they had not eased her of this care, and wished that
Walsingham would feel their minds in this matter." On a subse
quent day, "she asked me whether I had received any answer from
Paulet, whose letter, when I had showed her, wherein he flatly re
fused to undertake that which stood not with honour and justice,
she waxing angry, accused him and others, which had bound them
selves by the Association, of perjury and breach of their vow."
We forbear to enter here upon this remarkable story, of which,
holding the evidence to be very doubtful as regards assassination,
we have thrown the minuter details into the form of a note, so as
not to interrupt the main narrative. *
The last hours of Mary Stuart have been described with an ex
actness which is far more interesting than the highest efforts of
imaginative art. Indeed, the art of Schiller has borrowed its most
effective touches from an official narrative whose authenticity is
established by an indorsement in lord Burleigh's hand.f The
scenes immediately preceding the fatal morning of the Sth of Feb
ruary have been derived from various sources, and some of the inci
dents are conflicting. The relations, however, agree in the most
essential particulars. The earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, to whom
the Lords of the Council had specially sent Mr. Beale, arrived at
Fotheringay on the 7th of February, after dinner. They commu
nicated to Mary the purpose for which they had arrived ; and Beale
* See page 128.
t ¦' 8 Feb. 1586. The manner of the Q\ of Scott's death at Fodrynghay, wr. by R.
Wy." This is amongst the Lansdowne MS. Ellis. Second Series, vol. iii. p. 102.
WARRANT OF EXECUTION. 1 23
read the queen's commission for her execution. She bowed her
head, made the sign of the cross, and thanked her God that the
summons so long expected had come at last. She asked at what
time she should die, and was informed at eight the following morn
ing. Having desired the presence of her priest and almoner, she
was refused ; and was told that in the place of her confessor she
might have the spiritual assistance of the dean of Peterborough,
She necessarily declined this. This ferocious bigotry would be
incomprehensible, if we did not bear in "mind that the severe Pro
testant and the rigid Catholic were equally convinced that it was
their duty to urge their own doctrines, even whilst the axe or the
fagot were ready for those who were about to perish for their opin
ions. The " bachelor of Divinity, named Elye, of Brazennose Col
lege," who pressed Cranmer to recant when he was chained to the
stake ; and the earl of Kent, who attempted to convert Mary, on
the evening before her death, were misjudging zealots, but they
meant not cruelty. Camden has it, that the earl of Kent said to
Mary, "Your life will be the death of our religion, as, contrariwise,
your death will be the life thereof." The doomed one saw her ad
vantage in this speech : and afterwards said to her physician,
" They say that I must die because I have plotted against the
queen's life ; yet the earl of Kent signified! unto me that there is
no other cause of my death but that they doubt their rtlig'on be
cause of me." Mary then' looked over her will ; distributed money
to her attendants ; wrote letters ; prayed long and fervently ; and
went quietly to sleep.
At the upper end of the great hall of Fotheringay had been
erected a scaffold, two feet in height and twelve in breadth, railed
round, and covered with black cloth. On that scaffold were a low
stool, a long cushion, and a block ; all covered also with black.
There were many persons assembled in that hall. The queen had
dressed herself " gorgeously and curiously," says Camden, " as she
was wont to do on festival days." She came forth from her cham
ber, -at the bidding of Thomas Andrews, sheriff of Northampton
shire ; and was met in the entry next the hall, by Shrewsbury and
Kent, "with divers knights and gentlemen." Melvin, one of her
old servants, fell fn his knees before her ; and said that it would
be the most sorrowful message he ever carried when he should re
port in Scotland that his queen and mistress was dead. The official
narrative thus continues: "Then the queen of Scots, shedding
' tears, answered him, ' You ought to rejoice rather than weep for
I24 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
that the end of Mary Stuart's troubles is now come. Thou know-
est, Melvin, that all this world is but vanity, and full of troubles
and sorrows ; carry this message from me, and tell my friends that
I die a true woman to my religion, and like a true Scottish woman
and a true French woman. But God forgive them that have long
desired my end ; and he that is the true Judge of all secret thoughts
knoweth my mind, how that ever it hath been my Gdsirs.- to have
Scotland and England united together. Commend me to my son,
and tell him that I have not' done anything that may prejudice his
kingdom of Scotland; and so, good Melvin, farewell;' and kissing
him, she bade him pray for her."
We have again a scene characteristic of ah age in which to be
tender was too often accounted to be weak, and to be tolerant was
held to be impious. Mary requested that her servants might be
present at her death. The earl of Kent refused, lest they should
trouble her grace, and disquiet the company by their speeches.
She replied that she would give her word that they should do noth
ing of the kind. After some consultation two of her female ser
vants and Melvin, with two medical attendants and an old man,
were allowed to enter the hall. Melvin carrying her train, she
stepped up the scaffold with a cheerful countenance, and sat down
on the stool ; and there stood by her side the two earls, and the
sheriff, and two executioners. The commission was read : Mary
" listening unto it with as small regard as if it had not concerned
her at all." The dean of Peterborough, Dr. Fletcher, standing
outside the rail, directly before her, began an exhortation ; but she
stopped him, saying, " Mr. Dean, I am settled in the ancient Catho
lic Roman religion, and mind to spend my blood in defence of it."
The pertinacious dignitary replied, with more zeal than charity,
" Madam, change your opinion, and repent of your former wicked
ness, and settle your faith only in Jesus Christ, by him to be saved."
Mary told him to trouble himself no further ; and Shrewsbury and
Kent said they would pray for her. She thanked them, "but to
join with you in prayer I will not, for that you and I are not of one
religion." The dean then prayed aloud from the English liturgy;
and Mary with steadfast voice, having in her han<J a crucifix, began
to pray in Latin ; and she finally prayed in English for Christ's
afflicted church, for her son, and for the queen of England. The
callous earl of Kent was not moved even by this solemn earnest
ness, but told her to "leave those trumperies." Such is fanaticism,
from whatever perverted view of the religion of love it may spring.
ELIZABETH DISAVOWS THE PROCEEDINGS. 125
The last dread trial was sustained with equal fortitude and
steadfastness dy Mary, in whom, whatever were her faults, were
many of the elements of true heroism. As her two women wept,
she besought them to be calm : " I have promised for you." A
Corpus-Christi cloth being pinned over her face, she knelt down
upon the cushion "most resolutely," reciting aloud the Latin psalm,
In teconfido, " In thee, O Lord, do I trust." Groping for the block,
she laid down her head, and cried, In mantis tuas, Domine, " Into
thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. " Her head was severed
in two strokes. One poor servant there was who went upon that
scaffold without permission. Her little dog was taken from be
neath her robes ; and " afterwards would not depart from the dead
corpse." Fifteen months after this tragedy, Elizabeth wrote to James,
" God, the searcher of all hearts, ever so have misericorde of my
soul as my innocency in that matter deserveth, and no otherwise ;
which invocation were too dangerous for a guilty conscience."
Opposed as the narratives of Davison are to each other, in many
essential particulars,- we cannot wholly reject them. We must be
lieve, with one of these, that Elizabeth only desired the non-per
formance of the warrant for execution, that her prompting of some
form that would shift the burthen from herself might be adopted—
for which purpose she caused letters to be written to Paulet and
Drury : or, with the other, that she was always resolved upon the
execution; and accept the statement of both " apologies " of Da
vison, that the very day before that of the Scottish queen's death,
"she fell of herself into some earnest expostulation with me about
the execution of her said warrant, complaining, greatly of myself
and the rest of her Council, as men careless of her safety and our
own duties, commanding me to write a sharp letter to sir Amias
Paulet to that effect." And yet the Council, when the news of the
execution arrived, says Davison, "did not think fit to break sud
denly to her majesty, who nevertheless, by other means, under
stood thereof that night." The next morning he met the other
members of the Council, who told him that "her majesty seemed
greatly offended against them all about this action, disavowing
that she had either commanded or intended any such proceeding
therein." Davison was sent to the Tower, and tried in the Star
Chamber. Burleigh was forbidden to appear in court. The as
sertions of Elizabeth have been attributed to "the earnestness
of a dreadful self-deception."* Her conduct during the four
* Bruce, in Introduction to " Letters of Elizabeth," &c.
126 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
months from the trial to the last act of this terrible drama, has
been designated as " hollow affectation." But nevertheless we
believe that she was not one of those whose " feet are swift to shed
blood ; " * that there was a real contest in her mind between her
private and her public feelings ; and that in her violent declara
tions of innocency she deceived herself into throwing the whole
blame upon parliament and her ministers. Six days after the exe
cution she wrote to James to express " the extreme dolor that
overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which, far con
trary to my meaning, hath befallen." She further says, "As I
know this was deserved, yet if I had meant it I would never lay it
on other shoulders." She persisted in this assertion, without any
variation. There can be little doubt that she shielded herself by
some technical objection to the mode in which her Council had
proceeded, upon the representations of Davison. At Davison's
trial in the Star Chamber, on the 28th March, sir Roger Manwood,
lord chief baron, said, "This thing, then, being so high a point of
justice, was not in any respect to be done otherwise than her ma
jesty's express commandment would bear The instru
ment was not so peremptory and irrevocable as he [Davison] took
it ; nor a sufficient warrant for any kind of proceeding against the
Scottish queen, neither for his associates, nor for any other; for the
last statute, besides the condition and proclamation, doth require
the queen's^ direction ; and that must be either general, that all
men may do it, which is not here granted, or particular, who or by
what means ; neither is there here any such, especially her majesty
having no knowledge of the thing done." f The statute of the 27th
Elizabeth certainly says, that after sentence and judgment, and
proclamation of the same, "all her highness's subjects shall and
may lawfully, by virtue of this Act, and her majesty'' 's direction in
that behalf, by all forcible and possible means pursue to death
every such wicked person." Elizabeth had signed a general in
strument of this nature ; which the chief baron says was " not a
sufficient warrant for any kind of proceeding against the Scottish
queen." The Council, upon the representations of Davison, chose,
honestly interpreting the queen's wishes, to supply what was de
ficient in that instrument. Burleigh told the Council, having read
the instrument to them, that they were met to advise of " such
means as might be most honourable and expedient for the dispatch
thereof: seeing her majesty had for her part performed as much as
• Hallam. + Report of the Trial, by an eye-witness. Nicolas, p. 343.
ELIZABETH DISAVOWS THE PROCEEDINGS. 1 27
in any honour, law, or reason, was to be required at her hands."
They took upon themselves the responsibility, fully understanding
"her doubted inclination to drive this burthen, if it might be, from
herself ; " and they determined to apply no more to the queen, lest
she, "upon such a needless motion, should have fallen into any
new conceit of interrupting and staying the course of justice." *
There was some slight foundation for a " dreadful self-deception.'
* Davison's " Discourse." Nicolas, p. 241.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
NOTE ON THE STATEMENTS THAT ELIZABETH DE
SIRED THAT THE QUEEN OF SCOTS MIGHT BE
PRIVATELY ASSASSINATED.
The popular impression of the guilt of Elizabeth with regard to the death of Mary
Stuart has been considerably aggravated in modern times. The worst belief formerly
was, that the queen of England was 'most anxious for the execution of the queen of
Scots, but long dissembled ; was exhorted by her council and by parliament to issue the
fatal warrant ; resisted only that she might cast the odium of the act upon others ; and
meanly persecuted Davison the secretary for really obeying her commands. Hume and
Robertson briefly notice a far more odious charge against Elizabeth. Robertson says,
" She often hinted to Paulet and* Drury, as well as to some other courtiers, that now was
the time to discover the sincerity of their concern for her safety, and that she expected
their zeal would extricate her out of her present perplexity. But they were wise ennugh
to seem not to understand her meaning." It is now the almost uniform practice of his
torical writers perfectly to understand that the meaning was, private assassination. This ac
cusation against E izabeth is now generally related in the most circumstantial manner,
and as generally accepted as resting upon unquestionable testimony. It appears to us, at
the risk of being tedious, a duty to examine the evidence upon which this accusation is
founded. There are four narratives, or "apologies" attributed to Davison. The one with
which the general reader is best acquainted is given in Robertson's " History of Scot
land," Appendix xix. vol. ii. It contains no word respecting any suggestion for the re
moval of Mary, except by public execution. The original is amongst the Cottonian
MSS-* The second "apology," with which Hume, Robertson, and other, historians of
the last century were acquainted, is printed in Kippis' " Biographia Britannica, " Art.
" Davyson," as " transcribed by Mr. John Urry, of Christchurch, from the papers of Sir
Amias Paulet." t But it was first printed in the third volume of Dr. George Mackenzie's
" Lives and Characters of Scottish Worthies," in 1722 ; and he derived his knowledce of
it from Mr. John Urry. In this " apology," the command of Elizabeth to Davison, that
he and Walsingham should write to Paulet and Drury " to sound their dispositions, aim
ing still at this that it might be so done as the b'anie might be removed from herself," is
detailed atsome length. These are the materials which, with two letters which we shall
have especially to notico, were"1?nown before the close of the last century. These letters,
according to the ordinary belief, have converted the doubtful into the positive. Robert
son says, " Even after the warrant was signed, she commanded a letter to be written to
Paulul, in less ambiguous terms, complaining of his remissness in sparing so long the life
of her capital enemy, and begging him to remember at last what was incumbent on him as
an affectionate subject, and to deliver his sovereign from continual fear and danger, by
shortening the days of Iiis prisoner.'"' Paulet, adds this historian, " rejected the proposal
with disdain." Conversations 'might have buen misunderstood ; rash expressions exagger-
* Printed hy Nicolns, ' Life of Dnvison," Appendix D.
t Printed by Nicohis, Appendix C.
note on davison's statement. I2q
lted. But letters of this import could not be capable of any other interpretation than thmt
Elizabeth desired Mary to be removed by secret murder.
In 1823, Sir N. H. Nicolas published his " Life of William Davison,'" in which he
gave two dther apologies, which he describes as "the fullest and most satisfactory " of
these papers, and which he believes have "never before been cited or published." The
first of these is taken from th.2 Cottonian MS., Titus, C. vii. f. 4S, and the Cottonian MS.
Caligula, C. ix. f. 149, and these " appear to be in Davison's hand." * The second is the
HarleLm MS., 290, f. 213, and, says Nicolas, "the manuscript is very similar to Davi
son's." t The one from the Harleian MS. is headed " A true relation of what passed
between her majesty and me," &c. The other from the Cottonian MS. is headed "A
Discourse sent by and' from Mr. Secretary Davison, being then prisoner in the Tower of
London, unto Secretary Walsingham," &c. There is another copy of the " Discourse "
in the Harleian Collection, of which the Catalogue says, "written by the hand of Mr.
Rafe Starkey." Nicolas points out that it varies very slightly from that in the Cottonian
Collection. Three' examinations of Davison, whilst he was a prisoner in the Tower, and
reports of his trial in the Star-chamber, are the principal documents which further bear on
the question.
The offence for which Davison was prosecuted in the Star-chamber was, — as related
in a letter written about three months after Mary's death — "for not proceeding with the
queen of Scots according to his mistress' commandment at the delivery of the warrant,
which was, not to put it in execution before the realm shall be actually invaded by some
foreign power." X The examinations of Davison in the* Star-chamber are recorded in
several papers, in which there are allusions to some other mode of proceeding than that
contemplated in the warrant. Thus, amongst questions put to Davison on the 12th of
March, he is asked, " whether six or seven days after it [the warrant] was passed the great
seal, and in your custody, her majesty told you not in the gallery that she had a better way
to proceed therein than that which was before advised?" Would the courtly examiners
have ventured to ask such a question if they had expected that Davison would have blurted
out that the other way was assassination ? The answer of Davison was this : " He remem-
bereth that upon some letters received from Mr. Paulet, her majesty falling into some
complaint of him upon such cause as she best knoweth, she uttered such a speech that she
•would have matters otherwise doiic" § Did this speech, that she would have matters
otherwise done, contemplate assassination ?
The two Reports purporting to be from Davison, which are preserved in the Harleian
and Cottonian MSS., and have been reprinted by Sir N. H. Nicolas have most
important variations. The narrative of Sir N. H. Nicolas is mainly founded upon
the Cottonian MS., which varies very slightly from that first published by Macken^
zie. The Harleian Catalogue says of the two narratives, though they " differ in many
circumstances, each containing several which the other wants, they are not repugnant one
to the other, and therefore both may be true." They are so repugnant, however, that the
most material averment of the "discourse" is not found in the "relation." The "dis
course " purports to be sent by Davison to Walsingham when he was " a prisoner in the
Tower," and bears the date as having been so sent, February 20, 1586 [1587.] It is an
extraordinary circumstance that of this confidential communication there should be many
copies ; for it contains allegations against the queen which the writer, " a prisoner in the
Tower," would scarcely entrust to any person but his co-secretary, Walsingham, who, ac
cording to this statement, was art and part with him in an unscrupulous act. Of the
" relation " only one copy is known. This fact is certainly insufficient to impugn the
authenticity of the paper bearing the date of February 20. But as there were evident
pains taken to publish it, by a multiplication of copies, it is not impossible that it might be
* Printed by NicolaB, Appendix A. t Ibid., Appendix B.
t Ellin, Second Series, vol. iii. p. 126.'
g Sir N. H. Nicolas , " Life of Davison," p. 95.
VOL. III.— 9
i3°
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
so circulated after the death of Elizabeth, when any insinuations against the great queen
would not have been displeasing to her successor.
We proceed to point out the chief discrepancies between the two papers ; and we
give, in the first place, an example of one material deviation, placing the passages in par
allel columns ; each describing what took place immediately after the warrant had been
signed on the first of February :
From tJie Cotton MS-
" And thereupon (after some intermingled
speech to and fro), told me bhc would have it
done as secretly as might be, appointing the
haU where phe was for the place of execution ;
and misliking the court, or green of the castle
for divers respects she alleged, with other
Bpeech to like effect. Llowbeit, as I was ready
to depart, she fell into some complaint of Sir
Amias Paulet and others, that might have cased
hei of thia burthen, wishing that Mr. Secretary
W alsingham and 1 would ye? write unto both
Jiim and Sir Drue Drury, to sound their dispo
sition in that behalf The same after
noon I waited on my lord chancellor for the
sealing of the said warrant. ... I returned
back unto Mr. Secretary "Walsingham, whom I
had visited by the way, and acquainted him
with her pleasure touching letters that were to
be written to the said sir Amias Paulet and sir
Drue Drury, which at my return I found ready
to be sent away."
From the Harleian 3£8.
" She finally willed me to take up the Baid
warrant, and to carry it immediately to the
great seal, commanding me expressly to dis
patch and send it down unto the commission era
with all the expedition I might appointing the
hall of Fotheringay for the place of execution,
misliking the court-yard for divers respect*, bhe
alleged ; and, in conclusion, absolutely forbade
me to trouble her any further, or let her hear
any more thereof till it was done, seeing that
for her part she had now performed all that
either in law or reason could be required of her;
and so, calling for the rest of the things. I had
to be signed, dispatched them all. This done,
she entered into some speech with me of Mr.
Secretary 'Walsingham, delivering me a mes
sage to be imparted unto him. and willing me
withal to shew him her warrant in my way to
the seal (he being then sick at his house in Lon
don), yielding merrily this reason, that she
thought the sight thereof would kill him out
right. . . . After dinner I repaired to the
lord chancellor, according to my directions,
having first visited Mr. Secretary "Walsingham
on my way, and acquainted him with those
things her majesty had given me in charge."
In the above " relation" from the Harleian MS. there is not a word about the joint
letter that was to be written, as the " discourse** states, to sound the disposition of Paulet
and Drury . The warrant was to be dispatched and sent down to the commissioners with
all expedition ; the queen commanded that she should hear no more about it till it was
done. The " discourse " has a very different story. Paulet and Drury were to be writ
ten to with reference to some irregular proceeding for taking the life of Mary without the
necessary forms' : " Albeit I had before excused myself from meddling therein, upon sun
dry her majesty's former motions, as * matter I utterly prejudged, assuring her that it
should be so much labour lost, knowing the wisdom and integrity of the gentlemen, whom
I thought would not do such an unlawful act for any respect in the world ; yet, finding
her desirous to have the matter attempted, I promised for her satisfaction to signify this
her pleasure to Mr. Secretary." Thus becoming an accessory to " an unlawful act," he
goes to Walsingham, " he being then sick at his house in London ; " and the most wary
man in the world instantly adopts some illegal suggestion, full of peril and difficulty, at
the very moment when the great object of himself and the other members of the council
was accomplished, and Elizabeth's warrant for Mary's execution was signed at last. The
letter was such a matter of course that the sick man sets about its instant preparation ;
and when Davison returns, in an hour or so, he finds it " ready to be sent away." In the
" true relation *' of Davison there is not one word to indicate that any such letter was
written, or ordered to be written. This relation, throughout, aims only at showing that
the queen held firmly to her original command that the warrant should be quickly exe
cuted ; " albeit, she thought it might have been better handled, because tnis course threw
note on davison's statement. 131
the whole burthen upon herself." This was said on the 2nd of February; and Davison
replies to the queen that he " saw not who else could bear it, seeing her laws made it
murder in any man tu take the life of the meanest subject in her kingdom but by her war
rant." This is corroborated by the " discourse." She thought " that it might have been
otherwise handled for the form, naming unto me some that were of that opinion, whose
judgments she commended." Her ministers complained of Elizabeth that she hesitated
to give that authority to the council that would have been their warrant to issue a writ for
the execution of the queen of Scots. Davison distinctly separates the warrant which the
queen signed from the writ of execution which was issued by the council. It is clear that
the queen had a vague desire that the warrant should come from her council, as the writ
of execution did come — a weak and crafty desire, but not A longirgfor assassination.
Some such longing had indeed, according to the " true relation," been put into her head
by one of her most dangerous advisers, some days after the sick Walsingham and the con
scientious Davison had, according to the ordinary interpretation, proposed to Paulet and
Drury that they should murder their prisoner. Thus Davison relates a subsequent inter
view with the queen : " Some two or three days after, having special occasion to attend
her majesty, and finding her in her gallery at Greenwich all alone, she entered into some
speech with me of a course that had been propounded unto her underhand by one of great
place, concerning that queen ; asked me what I thought thereof ; which, being in truth
very unsuitable to the rest of her public proceedings, I utterly misliked, delivering my
reasons, wherewith she seemed to rest satisfied, without any show of following this new
course, or altering her former resolution in any point.'.' This, it seems, was " a new^
course," — a course " very unsuitable to the rest of her public, proceedings," which Eliza
beth told Davison " had been propounded to her underhand by one of great place," but
" without any show of altering her former resolution in any point" — the resolution that
the warrant should take effect. And yet this " new course," according to the ordinary
belief, was the " underhand " one which Walsingham and Davison had proposed to Pau
let and Drury some days before, at the express desire of the queen herself.
The manifest discrepancies between the two papers attributed to Davison might per
haps have suggested some such doubts as we have stated, if not of their genuineness, at
least of their real meaning, if there had not appeared other papers which profess to be the
identical correspondence of Walsingham and Davison with Paulet and Drury. We give
the letter of Elizabeth's secretaries as it was first discovered and presented to the world
about a hundred and forty years after it professed to have been written. If this letter
had never appeared, we might have most reasonably doubted whether the strongest state
ments of Davison had any reference to secret assassination.
" To Sir Amias Paulet.
" After our hearty commendations, we find by speech lately uttered by her maj
esty, that she doth note in you both a lack of that care and zeal for her service that she
looketh for at your hands, in that you have not in all this time of yourselves, without
other provocation, found out some way to shorten the life of that queen, considering the
great peril she is hourly subject to so long as the said queen shall live. Wherein, besides
a kind of lack of love towards her, she noteth greatly that you have not that care of your
own particular safeties, or rather of the preservation of religion, and the public good and
prosperity of your country, that reason and policy commandeth ; especially having so
good a warrant and ground for the satisfaction of your conscience towards God, and the
discharge of your credit and reputation towards the world, as the oath of Association,
which you both have so solemnly taken and vowed, and especially the matter wherewith
she standeth charged being so clearly and manifestly proved against her. And therefore
she taketh it most unkindly towards her that men professing that love toward her that
you do, should in any kind of sort, for lack cf the discharge of your duties, cast the bur
then upon her, knowing as you do her indisposition to shed blood, especially of one of
that sex and quality, and so near to her in blood as the said queen is. These respects, we
132 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
find, do greatly trouble her majesty, who, we assure you hath sundry times protested, that
if the regard of this danger of her good subjects and faithful servants did not more move
her than her own peril, she would never be drawn to assent to the shedding of her blood.
We thought it very meet to acquaint you with these speeches lately passed from her maj
esty, referring the same to your good judgments. And so we commit you to the protection
of the Almighty. " Your most assured friends,
" Francis Walsingham.
At London, Feb. 1, 1586 [1587]. " William Davison."
Mr. Hallam has referred to doubts of the genuineness of this letter which were ex
pressed in the original edition of the " Biographia Britannica," Note to Art. " Walsing
ham." Others, less candid, have avoided hinting that such a doubt had ever been
expressed. The point is all -important. If this letter is a genuine one, there is an end of
all doubt — Elizabeth desired that Mary should be secretly murdered. If it be a forgery,
the charge falls to the ground ; for there is nothing in the apologies of Davison that gives
this meaning absolutely — nothing that is incapable of another interpretation. The writer
of the note in the " Biographia Britannica " rests his scepticism upon his confident belief
that Walsingham, the most wary of politicians, — who, according to Camden, had resisted
every suggestion for dealing with Mary except by open trial, — would never have commit
ted himself to an expression of the queen's regret that Paulet and Drury had not taken
^neans to shorten her life. But»there is another suspicious point of internal evidence,
which that writer has not noticed. Davison signs a letter, in which he says that the oath
of the Association (which was an engagement to pursue to death any person plotting
against the life of queen Elizabeth) would be a ground for the satisfaction of their con
science in proceeding of themselves to the execution of that oath. The man who signs
this exhortation had refused himself to join the Association, and sets forth, at a later pe
riod, that such refusal had been injurious to him. Is it possible that any conscientious
man — as Davison is held to have been — would plead the obligation to shed blood imposed
by an oath upon others, which oath he had refused to take, as being against his own con
science ?
The answer of Paulet and Drury to the infamous proposal of Walsingham and Davison
is as follows : —
"To Sir Francis Walsingham, Knt.
" Sir,— Your letters of yesterday coming to my hands this present day at five in
the afternoon, I would not fail, according to your directions, to return my answer with all
possible speed, which shall deliver unto you great grief and bitterness of mind, in that I am
so unhappy to have liven to see this unhappy day, in the which I am required, by direction
from my most gracious sovereign, to do an act which God and the law forbiddeth. My
good livings and life are at her majesty's disposition, and am ready to lose them this next
morrow if it shall so please her ; acknowledging that I hold them as of her mere and most
gracious favour. I do not desire them, to enjoy them, but with her highness's good liking ;
but God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwrack of my conscience, or leave so great
a blot to my posterity, or shed blood without law and warrant ; trusting that her majesty,
of her accustomed clemency, will take this my dutiful answer in good part (and the rather,
by your good mediation), as proceeding from 6ne who will never be inferior to any Chris
tian subject living in duty, honour, love, and obedience towards his sovereign. And thus
I commit you to the mercy of the Almighty. From Fotheringay, the 2nd of February,
1586 [1587]- " Your most assured poor friends, " A. Paulet.
"D. Drury."
NOTE ON DAVISON'S STATEMENT. 133
The following is a postscript : —
" Your letter coming in the plural number, seems to be meant as to sir Drue Drury as
to myself : and yet because he is not named in them, neither the letter directed unto him,
he forbeareth to make any answer, but subscribeth in heart to my opinion." (And yet
he does answer, and appends his signature.)
If any one can readily believe that this is the boastful style in which two of Elizabeth's
servants, the breath of whose nostrils was court favour, would answer a half-command of
the queen herself, transmitted by her two secretaries of state, we can only say that they
have more confidence than ourselves, not only in the public virtue of such men, but in their
unexampled boldness in hurling foul scorn at their mistress and her ministers. We have
seen how suspicious are all the circumstances connected with the dispatch of the letter
held to contain a plain command of the queen " to shorten the life *' of the unhappy pris
oner of Paulet and Drury. According to Davison's "discourse," as explained by the
letter itself, Elizabeth gives her order without any hesitation. She does not dally, as
John dallied with Hubert : *' I had a thing to say,— But let it go."
Let us see how she receives the refusal of Paulet to execute this supposed unholy command.
Does her conscience sting hei1 when she reads what Paulet replies — " God forbid that I
should make so foul a shipwrack of my conscience, or leave so great a blot to my poster
ity, or shed blood without law or warrant " — " to do an act which God and the law for-
biddeth " — to be an assassin ? Does she use any solemn oath to purge herself from a sus
picion that her meaning was murder ? With the same matchless impudence that prompted
her command, she reads the refusal to obey it. " She rose up, and after a turn or two
went into the gallery, whither I followed her : and there renewing her former speech,
blaming the niceness of those precise fellows, as she termed them, who in words
would do great things for her surety, but in deed performed nothing, concluded that she
would well enough have done without them. And here, entering into particularities,
named unto me, as I remember, one Wingfield, who, she assured me, would, with some
others, undertake it." ("Discourse.") If to "undertake it" meant to poison, or to
stab, no murderess that ever lived was so brazen-faced in her "particularities" as this
Elizabeth. Mr. Tytler paraphrases this passage, and says, " Who this new assassin was
to whom the queen alluded does not appear." Let us try to make the matter clearer.
The earl of Shrewsbury had a castle called Wingfield, or Winfield. There Mary was,
in 1584, under the charge of sir Ralph Sadler. Insert two letters in the Davison MS.,
and we read, " One [at] Wingfield." The one who would " undertake it " would not
necessarily be an assassin ; and from the answer of Davison to this allusion of the queen,
it is quite clear that he did not view the refusal of Paulet and Drury to " undertake it "
as a refusal to perpetrate a secret murder. He " discoursed unto her the great extremity
she would have exposed those poor gentlemen to ; for if, in a tender care of her surety,
they should have done that she desired, she must either allow their act, or disallow it."
Whatever it was to be, it was to be an open act. Elizabeth— if we altogether reject the
two suspicious letters from the evidence —desired an informal public execution, but not a
mysterious removal of the condemned prisoner. The trial of Mary took place while Lei
cester was in the Netherlands. On the 25th of October he wrote from Utrecht a letter to
Walsingham, in which he says, " My heart cannot rest for fear, since I heard that your
matters are deferred I do fear, if I had been there with you, I should rather
have put myself into her majesty's place, than suffered this dreadful mischief to be pro
longed, for her destruction." * Elizabeth wished some one to take upon himself the re
sponsibility of "her majesty's place r'— a wretched device, but not a scheme of assassina-
tibn. * " Leycester Correspondence," p. 447.
*34
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
But any objections that might be raised to the internal evidence of the authenticity of
these letters would be overthrown, if the originals were preserved, and the signatures
could be compared with the well-known autographs of Walsingham and Davison. They
are professedly copies ; and yet Mr. Tytler calls them " original letters ; " and another
historian speaks of them as "unquestionable documents." In quoting them, or com
menting upon them, we are sometimes referred to the Harleian MS. There, indeed, may
we find copies of the two letters, which copies are thus described in the Catalogue of the
MSS. in the British Museum:—" One is dated the ist, the other the 6th of Feb., 1586.
Both copies partly in lord Oxford's own hand, and inclosed in a letter from the duke of
Chandos to his lordship, who had lent them to him, expressing his return of them and
opinion that they are a very valuable curiosity, and deserve well to be preserved. Dated
Cannons, Aug. 23, 1725." The famous Robert Harley died in May, 1724, and was suc
ceeded by his son Edward, to whom the duke of Chandos must have returned the " very
valuable curiosity." At that time, however, they had been published by Dr. Mackenzie,
as illustrative of Davison's apology, in his " Worthies," 1722 ; and by Thomas Hearne,
in his edition of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, which bears the date of 1724. Hearne.
says, they were copied by a frie?id of his, in September, 1717, from <x manuscript folio
book, containing letters to and from Sir Amias Paulet, when the queen of Scots' governor
at Fotheringay. Where is that " manuscript folio book," so curious on many other ac
counts ? H earne gives us, after the letter of Walsingham 'and Davison, the following as
entries in what Dr. Lingard calls " the letter-book " of Paulet.
" This letter was received at Fotheringay the 2nd of February, at five in the afternoon."
Immediately after, we have " An abstract of a letter from Mr. Secretary Davison, of the
said ist of February, 15S6, as followeth : — ' I pray you let this and the inclosed be com
municated to the fire, which measure shall be likewise met to your answer, after it hath
been communicated to her majesty for her satisfaction.' " But Davison is still anxious ;
and we have next, "A postscript in a letter from Mr. Secretary Davison, of the 3d of
February, 1586: — 'I entreated you in my last letters to burn both the letters sent unto
you for the argument's sake ; which, by your answer to the secretary (which I have seen)
appeareth not to be done. I pray you let me intreat you to make heretics both of th' one
and th' other, as I mean to use yours after her majesty hath seen it.' " Davison is fur
ther so uneasy about the murderous letter, that he adds a postscript to the postscript. — " I
pray you let me know what you have done with my letters, because they are not fit to be
kept." The letters, it is said, were not burnt. Chalmers gives an extract of a letter from
Paulet, in which he says, " If 1 should say I burnt the papers you wot of, I cannot tell if
anybody would believe me ; and therefore I reserve them to be delivered into your
own hands at my coming to London." Dr. Lingard, who quotes this, says, " He might
do so : but the Jetter and answer had previously been entered into his letter-book. Had
this not happened, the fact would never have come to light." How does Dr. Lingard
know that " the papers you wot of " refers to the letter of the ist of February ? If the
(letter-book itself were come to light we should be better satisfied as to " the fact." As it
£s, these laborious postscripts, so carefully preserved, appear very much like the perform
ance of some fabricator overdoing his work. There is one expression which to us is very
suspicious : " I pray you let me entreat you to make heretics both of th' one and th'
other-" Was this a common joke of the "Home Office" of 15S7? Walsingham, in a
letter to Leicester about the Babington Conspiracy (Cottonian MS.), says, " I pray youf
lordship make this letter an heretic after you have read the same." * Or was this remark*
able expression worked into Secretary Davison's postscript by one who had been struck by
it in the Cotton MS. ? — the friend of Hearne, who found these choice bits, and no other,
in the " Manuscript folio book." If these letters and postscripts were forgeries, they
'were founded upon the " discourse " of Davison, as " transcribed by Mr. John Urry, of
* " Leycester Correspondence," p. 342.
NOTE ON DAVISON S STATEMENT. I35
Christen urch." They fit tolerably well , but there is one slip. The haste with which
the letters were exchanged, at a distance of eighty miles, is very remarkable. The an-.
swer to the secretary's letter of the 1st of February is in London on the 3rd, according to
Davison's postscript, in which he says that he has seen it. But in Davison's "dis
course" we find that the queen asks him on the 4th if he had heard from Paulet, and he
tells her "no." That same afternoon he says, " I met with letters from him, in answer
to those that were written some few days before" In Davison's story, after the date of
the ist of February, we have to fix the other dates by following the narrative day by day.
It was easy to mistake the exact date, in the manufacture of a letter to suit the narrative,
and give it a darker hue.
We might leave this mysterious question at this point, had we not a fewwords to add
about the period at which the correspondence so calculated to damage the memory of the
Protestant queen Elizabeth was first given to the world. It was in the hottest period of
Jacobite plots for the bringing in of the Pretender. Harley, who makes copies of these
letters, was implicated in these intrigues. They are first published by Dr. Mackenzie, in
1722 ; and being re-published in 1725, in a life of Mary, Queen of Scots," by Freebaime,
he says, with a curious sort of candour, speaking of the odious charge about assassination,
(( This affair, which leaves so foul a stain upon queen Elizabeth's reputation, I dare not
assert to be fact," and he adds that, therefore( he shall only transcribe these letters ; "a
copy of which, transcribed from the originals, was sent to the Doctor by our learned coun
tryman, Mr. John Hurry, of Christ's Church College, Oxon." Mr. John Urry, the in
competent editor of Cftaucer, was known to Harley and Atterbury ; and he might have
received the letters from some zealous friend of the Stuarts. Hearne, who publishes
them in 1724, was a non-juror ; and his anxiety to give them to the world was shown by
his thrusting them into the middle of a glossary of an ancient chronicle which he pub
lished. Lastly, Dr. Jebb prints the two letters in the Appendix to his History of Mary,
queen of Scots, published in London, also in 1725. From that time the odious charge
against Elizabeth has mainly rested upon these letters, as those who printed them clearly
saw.
136 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER VII.
Funeral of Sir Philip Sidney.— Preparations for the In-rtsion of England by Spain.—
Drake's Expedition to Cadiz.— Suspected policy of James VI.— The Armada an.
nounced.— The spirit of the country.— Camp at Tilbury.— The Mariners of Eng
land.— Defences of the coast.— The demeanour of the queen. — Her oration at Til*
bury. — Loyalty of the Catholics.
London has had its rejoicings that the great blow has been
struck which is to deliver England from the dread of a papist suc
cessor to Elizabeth. The bells of the city's hundred steeples have
proclaimed the stern exultation of the citizens that the voice of the
parliament had at last been listened to. There is secret anger
amongst a few ; and generous pity in many a woman's heart. But.
the common sentiment is that the danger of domestic treason has
been removed ; and that the other danger of foreign invasion is
less to be dreaded. In another week the patriotic feelings of the
people are wisely stirred in their utmost depths. The queen has
undertaken the charge of a costly public funeral of sir Philip Sid
ney. He who under the walls of Zutphen had perished untimely
— who was no more to show his knightly bearing in the Tilt-yard,
or to wander amidst the flower-enamelled meadows of his own
Penshurst — is lying insensible to earthly hopes or fears, at the
house of the Minorites, without Aldgate. On the 16th of Feb
ruary there is a magnificent pageant in honour of the self-denying
hero. From the Minories to St. Paul's there is a long procession
of the rulers of the city, clad in solemn .purple. Young men se
lected from the train-bands march "three and three, in black cas-
sokins, with their short pikes, halberds, and ensign trailing on the
.ground." * Brave comrades of Sidney in his battle-fields are
there ; and there is the ambitious Leicester, who has not yet re
signed his scheme of being sovereign of the Netherlands. The
people gaze upon Drake, the great mariner who has circumnav
igated the world ; and has carried terror of the English flag
through all the Spanish settlements. In the pomp of that funeral
of Sidney there is something more than empty pageantry. A long
* Stow'i " Annals,"
PREPARATIONS FOR INVASION BY SPAIN. . 137
course of prosperous industry might be supposed to have unfitted
those who had been winning the spoils of peace, for the defence of
their country at a time of great national danger. The memory of
that brave knight, who had fallen in the war of principle in the
Low Countries, would present an example worthy of all imitation
to high and humble. But the ancient spirit was not dead. In the
midst of many differences of opinion amongst Protestants con
nected with the discipline of the Church, and with Romanists liv
ing under severe laws, there was to be, in another year, such an
outburst of patriotism as would manifest that the love of country
was above all divisions of creed. That glorious manifestation of
national spirit in 1588 was also to show that a people does not
necessarily become weakened in character by a long course of
prosperity, but that the accumulations of peace are the real re
sources of war. It is not the diffusion of comforts and luxuries
that renders a nation unwarlike and apathetic. It is the treading
out of true nationality by lawless rulers — the shutting-up of all the
fountains of independent thought by slavish superstition — that de
stroy the patriotism of- a people, and make them incapable of defend
ing their homes. There were many things in the political condi
tion of the English under Elizabeth that are opposed to our notions
of freedom — that were essentially characteristic of an arbitrary gov
ernment. But the people were thriving ; they were living under
an equal administration of justice ; and they were trusted. They
had arms in their hands, and they were taught how to use them.
There was no standing army ; but every man of full age was a
soldier. The feudal military organisation was gone. There was
an organisation of the people amongst themselves equally effective,
and far more inspiriting.
In the spring of 1587 it was certain that Spain was making
great preparations for the invasion of England. This design was
the result of no sudden resolve. Elizabeth was not to be hurled
from the 'throne of the heretic island, because Philip was provoked
out of his forbearance by " an insult to the majesty of sovereigns,
which, as the most powerful of Christian monarchs, he deemed it
his duty to revenge."* The people of England by their parliament,
Elizabeth by her ministers, " had taken, on a scaffold, the life of
the queen of Scots ; " but the projected invasion had been stimu
lated by that queen as the great scheme for bringing back Eng
land and Scotland to the faith for which Philip and his adherents
* Lingard, vol. viii.
138 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
were calling into terrible vindictiveness all the horrors of the In
quisition and all the subtlety of the Jesuits. The day that was to
decide for us which should prevail of the two principles that divided
the Christian world was fast approaching. There was no hesita
tion here. Elizabeth provided Drake with four royal ships, and
twenty-four other vessels were placed under his command by the
citizens of London. On the 2nd of April this squadron was ready
to sail out of Plymouth Sound. Drake wrote on that morning to
Walsingham. "This last night past came unto us the Royal
Merchant, with four of the rest of the London fleet ; the wind
would" permit them no sooner. . . The wind commands me away.
Our ship is under sail. God grant we may so live in his fear, as
the enemy may have cause to say that God doth fight for her
majesty as well abroad as at home." In this solemn confidence
in the Divine protection, went out these heroic men of an heroic
age, " to stand," as Drake said, " for our gracious queen and coun
try against Anti-Christ and his members ; " and doubting not to
give a good account of their enemies, " for they are the sons of
men."* On the 19th of April he entered the harbour of Cadiz,
which was filled with many Spanish ships, embarking provisions
and warlike stores, and destined to proceed to join the great arma
ment at Lisbon. Defying the guns of the fortress, and the huge
Spanish galleys, with the dash of the true English seaman, Drake
made himself master of the roadstead ; and in the course of two
nights and one day had sunk, burnt, or captured shipping of ten
thousand tons lading. To use his own expressive phrase, he had
" singed the Spanish king's beard." He had tried the compara
tively small English vessels against the mighty galleys. They ran
under the protection of the fort, after two had been sunk. He had
found that daring and activity were of more importance in a sea-
fight than unwieldy strength ; and the lesson was not forgotten
when the day of the greater battle had come. Till another year
the mighty attempt upon England was delayed by the 'skill and
courage of the Devonshire captain. Setting sail for the Azores,
Drake fell in with a most valuable Portuguese carrack, returning
from the East Indies ; and he took this ship with a lading which
made the San Philipe the greatest prize that had ever rewarded
the energy of English mariners. This triumph at Cadiz, and this
capture of the rich merchant-ship, were of permanent importance.
" The English, ever after that time, more cheerfully set upon those
* Lotl.-r in Stale P.ipir O.TL;, giv--n i.t B mow's " Life of Drak;."
SUSPECTED POLICY OF JAMES VI. 13a
huge, castle-like ships; which before they were afraid of; and also
they so fully understood, by the merchants' books, the wealth of
the Indian merchandises and the manner of trading in the eastern
world, that they afterwards set up a gainful voyage and traffic
thither, ordaining a company of East Indian merchants." * Drake
came back to Plymouth; and during a year of warlike inaction,
with that practical energy which is one of the characteristics of
greatness he conferred a lasting benefit upon that town. The
populous place had no adequate supply of fresh water. At Dart
moor he found a leat, or spring, that he saw was capable of being
conducted from the high ground to a reservoir at the northern
suburb of Plymouth. He mounted his horse, says the local tradi
tion, and riding to the distant hills found the desired supply ; and
having pronounced some magical words rode back, and the stream
followed him all the way to the town. The Plymouth Leat still
bestows its blessings upon a large population Science since that
time has uttered many words 'that appear still more magical ; but
the scientific instinct of this rough sailor was following the track
by which philosophy has achieved its most enduring glories, in be
coming the great minister to all those conveniences of life whose
blessings are of universal diffusion.
After Drake's return there were many months of suspense.
The people of England knew that the great attempt of the Span
iard was only deferred. The colonial enterprises in which Raleigh
and other bold spirits desired to persevere, in spite of loss and
disappointment, were suspended. Never were the prudence and
vigilance of Elizabeth's statesmen more* required. The position
of Scotland was a very doubtful one. James had become of full
age ; and he was urged on many sides to revenge the death of his
mother, by joining in the projects of Spain. It is difficult to under
stand what were his real inclinations. Henry Cary, lord Hunsdon,
was sent as an ambassador to James; and Elizabeth professed
great confidence in his 'friendship. James admitted that he had re
ceived tempting offers from Spain : but declared that he detested,
as much as herself, the plots of the papists. Hunsdon had no
faith in him, and wrote to Elizabeth, " If there were any good in
clination in him toward your highness, which I neither find nor
believe to be, yet he hath such bad company about him, and so
maliciously bent against your highness, they will not suffer him ' to
remain in it two days together." The " bad company " of which
* Camden.
140 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Hunsdon speaks consisted of Huntley, and other Catholic lords, who
were preparing to collect forces to revolutionise Scotland, and aid,
by a diversion, the great attemptupon England. Some of the band
were intriguing in foreign courts, and communicating with Spain
and Rome. But Elizabeth and her agents eventually prevented
James from being led away by his " bad company." She wrote to
him in her bold characteristic style, " Right well am I persuaded
that your greatest danger should chance you by crossing your strait
paths ; for he that hath two strings to his bow may shoot stronger, but
never strait ; and he that hath no sure foundation cannot but ruin." *
But James was more effectually made to walk strait by present pay
ments and large promises than by pithy lectures. The schemes of
the Spanish faction were penetrated by the acuteness of Walsing
ham and his agents ; and England was free to concentrate her en
ergies upon the defence of her southern and western coasts, with
out troubling herself about an enemy on her northern borders.
The notion of a maritime invasion of England was, to the ma
jority of Ihe people, a dim tradition of centuries long past There
were a few towers on the coast, more calculated to resist a hand
ful of sea-robbers than a large invading army. In the interior of
the country most of the old feudal castles had gradually given place
to baronial mansions ; and those that remained were little suited
for defence against artillery. Raleigh, the most sagacious in coun«
sel or action, held that an invader Could only be prevented landing
by the resistance of a fleet; and he maintained that in a country
where there were no fortified places, and the ramparts were only
the bodies of men, it was most dangerous not to offer that resistance
by a navy of competent strength. The government of Elizabeth
knew the weakness of the country ; but they also knew its power.
They knew the mettle of its mariners ; and they had no fear of the
loyalty of the people. The mask of negotiation, by which Philip
and the prince of Parma thought to divert attention from their
real proceedings, had been thrown off. It was now thought the
true policy to proclaim their vast preparations and the objects of
that mighty arming so as to terrify rather than delude. Pope Sixtus
V. made a solemn treaty with Philip, and promised him an enor
mous subsidy, to be'paid when he had taken absolute possession of
any English port. The warlike pontiff was equally ready with his
spiritual weapons. He published a new bull of excommunication
against Elizabeth, and called all Catholics to a crusade against
* " Letters of Elizabeth and James VI.," p. 51.
THE SPIRIT OF THE COUNTRY. 141
England, as for a holy war against the Infidel. They came from all
lands where the doctrines of the Reformation had never taken root
or had been extirpated — they came, needy adventurers with high-
sounding names, ready to fight for the true faith, and to have each
a dainty plot of the English garden. They thought less of the
plenary indulgences promised for their voluntary service, than of
the stores of wealth that would reward their valour, when the Jez
ebel, the accursed queen, should be hurled from her throne, and
the pope should have bestowed the crown upon Philip or his nom
inee. Such were the bands that flocked to the standard of the
duke of Parma in the Netherlands. But in Spain, and in Spain's
newly acquired dominion of Portugal, all the proud chivalry that
had won the golden lands of Mexico and Peru were to go forth
to an easier conquest of the worse than heathen, who obstructed
the universal acceptance of the Catholic faith in the old world, and
had dared to dispute the power of Spain to have an absolute mo
nopoly of the soil and the commerce of the new world. In the
pride of their invincibility they now threw away all caution and
concealment. They were " men grown fierce in the confidence of
their own strength ; and they held it sufficient to commend the
cause, armada, and army, to the bishop of Rome, and the prayers
of the Catholics to God and the saints ; and to set forth a book in
print, with maps for a terror, wherein the whole preparation was
particularly set down." *
The unequalled magnitude of this armament wrought no terror
in England. The minds of men might be impressed with a solemn
foreboding of a great battle to be fought which would determine
the whole future destinies of this island ; but there was no faint
heartedness. "Many ancient and strange prophecies, in divers
languages, and many excellent astronomers of sundry nations, had
in very plain terms foretold, that the year 1588 should be most fatal
and ominous unto all estates, concluding in these words : ' And if in
that year the world do not perish and utterly decay, yet empires
all, and kingdoms after, shall ; and no man to raise himself shall
know no way, and that for ever after it shall be called the year
of wonder.'"! Englishmen heard the prophecy; but there was
no faint-heartedness. They interpreted it, after their own resolute
fashion, that the year 1588 should be a fatal and ominous year to
?Camden. Lord Burleigh's copy of the book " set forth in print " (Lisbon, 1588) is
in the King's Library in the British Museum.
t Stow.
I42 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
their enemies; the God of the Bible, which Englishmen had learned
to read and study, being with the defenders of the land that had cast
off the usurped power and the superstitions of Rome. "The
whole commonalty of England became of one heart and mind. . . .
The English nation were so combined in heart, that I here confess
I want art lively to express the sympathy of love between the sub
jects and the sovereign."* The queen called upon her lieuten
ants of counties to set before the gentlemen under their lieuten
ancy, " the instant extraordinary occasion " for a larger proportion
of horsemen and footmen than had been certified ; " considering
these great preparations and arrogant threatenings now burst
out in action upon the seas, tending to a conquest wherein every
man's particular state is in the highest degree to be touched,
in respect of country, liberty, wife, children, lands, life, and that
which specially is to be regarded, for the possession of the true and
sincere religion of Christ." t She had, before this, through her
Council, asked the authorities of London what the city would do ;
and the lord mayor and aldermen had besought that the Council
would name what they thought was requisite. "The lords,"
says Stow, " demanded five thousand men and fifteen ships. The
city craved two days' respite for an answer, which was granted ;
and then entreated their lordships, in sign of their perfect
love and loyalty to their prince and country, kindly to accept
ten thousand men and thirty ships, amply furnished." In such a
spirit as this there was something more invincible than all the
armadas in the world. At the great camp at Tilbury was collected
an army of train bands from the adjicent counties. Another army
was in the interior for the defence of the queen's person, and to be
used as a disposable force. " It was a pleasant sight to behold the
soldiers as they marched towards Tilbury, their cheerful counte
nances, courageous words and gestures, dancing and leaping
wheresoever they came." Well does the old historian paint the
national spirit, most cheerful under the pressure of danger ; — the
spirit of a really free population, ready to fight " as if lust}- giants
to run a race," and not the less prepared to fight because they had
little experience of real warfare. They had country, liberty, wife,
children, lands, life, religion, to defend, as their queen had told
them. There was inequality of rank amongst them, but there
was equality of duties and interests. The ploughman who followed
* Stow.
t Letter of the queen, dated 18th of June. Ellis, Second Series vol. iii. p. 187 .
THE MARINERS OF ENGLAND.
143
his master's landlord to the field, the apprentice who was led by
the alderman of his ward, had not been chilled into indifference by
the insolence of birth, for the true gentleman was never insolent ;
nor by the pride Of wealth, for the wealthy then respected those
who were the instruments of their money making. It was free
England, socially free, which in 1588 was called to fight against the
hated Spaniards, whose great galleys were rowed along by slaves,
and whose best mariners were regarded only as the drudges of the
proud warriors who crowded the decks of the sailing ships. And
thus, when an agent of the English council wrote home that the
Spanish navy lay under the castle of Belem, expecting wind to set
sail, and that he judged they would soon be in the English quar
ters — " so that the lightning and the thunder-clap will be both- in a
moment " * — at the same time every port, from the Lizard to the
North Foreland, from the Naze to the Tyne, looked to its own
little craft, and asked, in no niggard spirit, if it had a ship that
could be fitted out at the common expense, to make one in that
great sea-fight that was near at hand. There was not a port where
mariners were not trained to hardy and dangerous adventure. They
had gone forth, once from Deptford and twice from Harwich, with
Frobisher, to search for the north-west passage. Three times had
the polar seas been penetrated by this intrepid navigator, who left
his name in those regions to which so many other noble sailors
have given a nomenclature. Davis followed Frobisher in the
same enterprise. Our mariners had circumnavigated the world
with Drake ; and had carried the terror of the English flag, floating
from the Pelican of Plymouth, into what was called the Indian Sea,
in despite of the Spaniard, who held that the bishop of Rome had
bestowed that vast ocean upon him alone. When Elizabeth told
the Spaniard that her ships should sail, and her people should
found colonies in places not already settled, in the Atlantic and
the Pacific, without any regard to such imaginary right, there was
many a gentleman of ancient family, and many a merchant prince
of self-created fortune, ready to embark his property in this open
ing for colonial enterprise. In the year of the Armada, Caven
dish was circumnavigating the world, and was warring against
Spain, after the example of Drake, upon the coasts of Chili, and
Peru, and New Spain ; and he had taken a great galleon on the
coast of California. But " the intrepid corsairs, who had rendered
every sea insecure, now clustered round the coasts of their native
* Ellis, Second Series, vol. iii. p. 134*
X44 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
island." * There were with them at this time an enterprising band
who were preparing to send out a new colony to Virginia. The
first noble projects of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother,
Raleigh, had failed. Sir Richard Grenville had effected a settle
ment on the island of Roanoak : yet the hostilities of the natives,
and the disputes of the colonists had prevented any effectual estab
lishment of the English in North America at that period. The
governor had returned home, despairing of success. A few years
were to pass over before the Anglo-Saxon race was " to make new
nations," amidst dense forests and boundless prairies. England,
at the time of the governor of Virginia's return, had something
nearer home to think of than the colonisation of North America.
But she had tasted tobacco, and she hoped to find gold. The
time for that great work of " plantation " was not far distant.
Amongst the curious relics of this most interesting period of
our history one of the most curious is " A Plott of all the coast of
Cornwall and Devonshire, as they were to be fortified in 1588
against the landing of any enemy." f In this " Plott " is mo t di' -
tinctly laid down every accessible point from the Land's end to
Exmouth ; and, less carefully marked for defence, on the north
also. There appear? to have been one invariable mode of defence
upon the exposed coast, that of breastworks or redoubts, behind
whose angles, more or less in number, appear soldiers, bearing
pikes. At the havens, such as St. Michael's Mount, Plymouth,
and Dartmouth, pieces of ordnance are placed. By this plan we
are enabled to see what were the defences of Plymouth. In the
centre of the Sound is a little fort with cannon ; and on each side
of the passage to the inner harbour are also cannon. The town is
indicated by a church and some houses with gabled roofs ; and be
fore the town cannon are planted. Taken altogether, the number
of stations for artillery is very inconsiderable. On this south-west
ern coast, which was so exposed to the first attack of the invaders,
the lines of entrenchment were evidently intended to be of no or
dinary extent. But we may readily imagine that Raleigh's counsel
to meet the enemy boldly at sea was considered far more practi
cable than the construction of land defences of such magnitude.
Their purposed formation does not appear to have been entrusted
to any famous military engineers, if we may judge from a notice of
magistrates, in 1587, that they intended to proceed along the coast,
* Ranke, " History of the Popes," vol. ii. p. 173.
t Cotton Collection in the British Museum, Aug. 1., vol. i. 6.
THE DEMEANOUR OF THE QUEEN. 145
to view the dangerous places for the landing of an enemy, calling
upon the mayors of the town to attend with all that are skilled in
fortifications. * The temporary beacons that were built on every
hill and high cliff of that coast, and which were to blaze out
when the great hostile fleet first appeared in the Channel, were
amongst the best means of defence. " The warning radiance " was
to call every merchant ship that was waiting for the signal, to give
its sails to the wind, and go forth to fight. It was to be repeated
in the remotest counties, where well-disciplined men with bow and
arquebuss, with pike and bill, were mustered day by day under their
natural leaders. " There was through England, no quarter, east,
west, north, or south, but all concurred in one mind, to be in readi
ness to serve for the realm. ... As the leaders and officers
of the particular bands were men of experience in the wars, so, to
make the bands strong and constant, choice was made of the prin
cipal knights of all counties to bring their tenants to the field, being
men of strength, and landed, and of wealth ; whereby all the forces,
so compounded, were of a resolute disposition to stick to their lords
and chieftains, and the chieftains to trust to their own tenants." f
From Cornwall to Kent, and eastward to Lincolnshire, the same wri
ter, who describes himself as an eye-witness, says that the maritime
counties were so furnished with soldiers, that twenty thousand fight
ing men, with victuals and ammunition, could have been collected in
forty-eight hours at any point where an enemy landed.
Of all the defences of the realm at this crisis there were none
which gave the people a greater confidence than the demeanour of
the queen. At the camp at Tilbury, she was, day by day, in the
midst of her soldiers ; going amongst the lev»:s in their particular
stations ; reviewing them when they were trained in battalions ;
saluted, wherever she moved, "with cries, with shouts, with all
tokens of love, of obedience, of readiness and willingness to fight
for her." From that army, adds the eye-witness, went forth at cer
tain times, a solemn voice to Heaven, of "divers psalms, put into
form of prayers, in praise of Almighty God, no ways to be mis
liked, which she greatly commended, and with very earnest speech
thanked God with them." To that camp of Tilbury, and to the
towns near London, came bands of men from distant places;
* Quoted from " Sherren Papers," in Roberts's " Southern Counties," p. 426.
f " Copy of a Letter sent to Mendoza." London, 1588. This curious tract, reprinted
in the Harleian Miscellany, purports to be by a Seminary Priest, but is evidently written
by a well-informed Englishman in that character.
Vol. III.— io
146 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
"whom she remanded to their countries, because their harvest was
at liand ; and many of them would not be countermanded, but still
approached onward, on their own charges as they said, to see her
person, and to fight with them that boasted to conquer the realm"
The soldiers gazed upon their sovereign riding amidst the camp,
bearing a marshal's truncheon ; and knights and gentlemen pressed
round her tent, where she sat surrounded by her great nobles, and
having proffered their services and received her winning accept
ance, led their bands home to spread the fame of the great queen,
who was resolved, as she said, " to lay down for my God, and for
my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in
the dust." Thus she said, in the famous oration which has been
handed' down to us — " words that burn," — words which England
has never forgotten in any hour of similar peril : —
" My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are
careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to
armed multitudes, for fear of treachery ; but I assure you, I dc not
desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants
fear! I have always so behaved myself, that, under God, I have
placed my chief est strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and
good will of my subjects ; and therefore I am come amongst you,
as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being
resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst
you all ; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my
people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have
the body but of a weak and feeble woman ; but I have the heart
and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul
scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare
to invade the borders of my realm ! To which, rather than any
dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, — I myself
will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues
in the field. I know already, for your forwardness, you have de
served rewards and crowns ; and we do assure you, on the word of
a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the meantime, my lieuten
ant-general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded
a more noble or worthy subject ; not doubting but, by your obedi
ence to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour
in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those ene
mies of my God, of my kingdoms, and of my people."
But of all the defences of the country at this perilous crisis the
loyalty of the great body of the Catholics was amongst the most
LOYALTY OF THE CATHOLICS. 147
important. The laws against Popish recusants were severe, but
they were greatly mitigated in their execution ; and it may reasonably
be doubted whether the fines imposed upon them were inflicted,
except in extreme cases. On the approach of the armada some of
the recusants were thrown into prison ; but they were released
upon subscribing a declaration that the queen was their lawful
sovereign, notwithstanding any excommunication ; and that they
would defend her with life and goods against prince, pope, or
potentate.* It was proposed by some to disarm them, but this
absurd scheme was rejected ; and the confidence of the government
in the patriotism of the great body who adhered to the ancient
church was strikingly exhibited by the appointment of Howard, a
Catholic, to the command of the fleet. In truth the Jesuits and
Seminary Priests had executed their mission in a way to disgust
those who had sense to know that the Romanists constituted a
minority of the country ; and that although their faith was not in
the ascendant, they would not be persecuted for their opinions
unless they were hounded on into conspiracy. The Catholic landed
proprietors were Englishmen ; they were gentlemen ; their welfare
was bound up with the prosperity of their country, and that was
prosperous beyond all example. The miserable libels against the
queen provoked their disgust, instead of exciting them to rebellion.
The invading ships of Spain were laden with printed books, whose
title was an " Admonition to the Nobility and People of England
and Ireland, concerning the present Wars made for the execution
of his holiness' sentence, by the high and mighty king catholic of
Spain; by the cardinal of England." This brutal production, to
¦ which cardinal Allen had the baseness to put his name, contained
the same filthy libels against Elizabeth as those which had been
whispered through the land by the missionaries of Rome. The
honest Catholics despised these gross calumnies and incentives to
murder. When the trial came they were found in the train-bands
of that queen who, they were told, " deserveth not only deposition,
but all vengeance both of God and man." They were found nobly
fighting in her ships. The time might come when such loyalty
might be rewarded by equal civil rights, though not with ecclesias
tical preponderance. There was a struggle of two hundred and fifty
years before this great principle was fully recognised ; but the
noble example of the Catholics of 1 588 has always endured, as one
of the best arguments for a final arid complete justice to their de
scendants. * See note in Lingard, vol. viii.
XqS HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER VIIL
Sailing of the Armada.— The English fleet.— The Armada off Plymouth.— The fight up
Channel — The run to Calais. — The Fire ships at Calais. — The fight off Gravelines. —
The flight to the North. — The Deliverance. — The Thanksgivings. — Spain makes new
preparations. — Expeditions against Spain,— The heroic time.
On the 28th of May, 1588, from his galleon San Marten, lying
in the Tagus off Belem the duke of Medina Sidonia, " captain-gen
eral of the ocean sea, of the coast of Andalusia, and of this army of
his majesty," issued his orders to be observed in the voyage to
wards England. This was an army, be it remarked, and the com
mand of it was given to a general.. The fighting men who went on
board that fleet, and the mariners who worked the ships, were a
distinct race ; and there were especial regulations for holding them
together in a very doubtful amity. On the 29th of May, the cap
tain-general being under the towers of Belem, led the way down
the Tagus ; and amidst the sounding of trumpets from every ves
sel, the mighty armada followed him, when he. had fired his gun as
the signal. Being specially warned in these orders to beware of
sands and " cachops," * they sweep majestically down the broad
river, and having passed the Bar are in the vast Atlantic. Never '
did such a sight present itself to the gazers on the hills, as when
the ten squadrons of this fleet dropped down the Tagus, issuing,
in a succession that appeared endless, out of the great bay. The
captain-general commanded twelve Portuguese gaUeons, the largest
sailing-vessels. There were the fleets of Biscay, of Castile, of An
dalusia, of Guypuscoa ; the Eastern fleet ; the fleet called Ureas or
Hulks, and a squadron of smaller vessels. Lastly, were four ga-
leasses of Naples, and four galleys of Portugal ; these eight enor
mous vessels being rowed by two thousand and eighty-eight slaves.
The whole number of ships was one hundred and thirty-six; hav
ing a burthen of 59,120 tons ; mounted with 3165 pieces of cannon;
worked by 8746 mariners, besides the slaves ; and carrying 21,639
" Cachops are great banks at the mouth of the Tagus.
SAILING OF THE ARMADA. 1 49
soldiers. This fleet was accompanied by a large number of trading
vessels, ready to supply its wants. Every ship was provided with
two boat-loads of stones, '¦ to throw in the time of fight ; " and with
wild:fire, to be given out to the most expert. All the vessels were
to sail as close as possible. Their course was for Cape Finisterre,
where they were to rendezvous, in case of separation ; or to make
for Corunna, then known as The Groyne. Departing thence,
" they shall set their course for Scilly." If any ship were to lose
the fleet, the crew were not to return to Spain, under penalty of
death; but to seek the navy "in Mount's Bay, which is between
the Land's End and the Lizard." And so they sailed along in
great pomp and security, hoping to be on the south-western coast
of England at the time when another fleet, equipped in the Nether
lands, should be ready to sail under the command of the prince of
Parma. But when the Spanish fleet had nearly reached Cape Fin
isterre, a storm arose, which scattered the ships, and compelled
the great body of the armament to go into Corunna to refit. The
news reached England that the mighty fleet had been nearly de
stroyed ; and the lord high admiral, Howard of Effingham, sailed
from England to complete the destruction. But he found that the
storm had been less fatal than believed, and that the expectation
that no invasion would be attempted that summer was a mistake.
He wisely returned, to wait for the enemy in the Channel. For a
month did the great fleet lie in Corunna harbour. The prince of
Parma's flat-bottomed vessels, for the "conveyance of thirty-five
thousand men, were lying at Bruges ; and the ports of Nieuport
and Dunkirk, from which they could have put to sea, were block
aded by a combined English and Dutch fleet. The instructions
for the invasion were rigidly laid down at the court of Madrid.
The Spanish fleet was to steer for Flanders ; and under its protec
tion the duke of Parma was to disembark his army in Kent or
Essex, and march to London. The plan was known ; and hence
the camp at Tilbury, with a bridge of boats to Gravesend, for con
necting the Essex and Kentish shores. The Flemish army having
landed, the troops of the armada were to be carried to the coast of
Yorkshire. There was an arrangement also, that when the Span
ish armament came into the Channel it should have the co-opera
tion of the duke of Guise, who was to land in the west, to effect a
diversion ; whilst the real attacks upon the capital and in the north
were going forward. The delay at Corunna disconcerted these
arrangements. But whilst the triple danger appeared imminent,
IJO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the English courage never quailed. Guise withdrew his troops to
the interior. Parma made no strenuous efforts to take his share
in the great enterprise. The storm that drove Medina and his
galleons and galeasses into Corunna might have disturbed these
plans ; but the English and Dutch preparations were not likely to
make Guise and Parma confident of their easy execution.
The queen's ships at Plymouth, under the lord high admiral,
were thirty-four in number. Their aggregate burthen was 11,820
tons ; they mounted 837 guns ; and they mustered 6279 seamen.
Howard was in the Ark-Royal, of 800 tons ; Drake, the vice-admi-
ra1, was in the Revenge, 500 tons ; Hawkins, the rear-admiral, was
in the Victor}', 800 tons ; Frobisher was in the Triumph, 1100 tons.
This was the largest ship of the fleet, of which one-third of the
number was below 100 tons. But there were forty-two vessels
serving by tonnage, merchant-ships, which had 2587 mariners ; and
there were thirty-eight vessels, carrying 2710 mariners, fitted out
by the city of London. With coasters and volunteers, the whole
number of ships, large and small, was one hundred and ninety-seven,
having one-half only of the tonnage of the Spanish fleet. The
greater part was in Plymouth and Dartmouth ; but a squadron
under lord Seymour was taking part in the blockade of the Flemish
coast. The whole number of sailors in the fleet was 15,785. The
mariners were the only fighting men of the ships. The differences
of construction and of equipment in the English and the Spanish
navies were most remarkable ; but they were not so remarkable as
the difference of the men on board of them. The Portuguese gal
leys, each with three hundred rowers, could move against the wind
as if by steam. But the poor slaves were perfectly exposed to the
shot of large and small arms ; and the movements of the enormous
vessels were thus liable to serious interruption. The galleons were
unwieldy floating towers, with many decks, where the soldiers and
gunners were stowed amidst comforts unknown to the mariners.
In the orders for sailing of the duke of Medina we find, "for that
the mariners must resort unto their work, tackle, and navigation,
it is convenient that their lodging be in the upper works of the
poop and forecastle, otherwise the soldiers will trouble them in
the voyage." But this was the invariable practice in the Spanish
navy. " The mariners are but as slaves to the rest, to moil and
to toil day and night; and these [the mariners] but few and bad,
and not suffered to sleep or harbour under the decks. For, in
fair or foul weather, in storms, sun, or rain, they must pass void of
THE ENGLISH FLEET.
TS*
covert or succour." * The English ships were short in the build;
and were rigged so as readily to tack. Every man on board was
as willing to assist in working his vessel as to fight. Drake, in
his voyage round the world, exclaimed, <• I must have the gentlemen
to hale and draw with the mariners." • Officers and men stood by
each other in a brot lerhood made closer by a common danger and
a mutual dependence. Thus, when the two fleets came together
in action, "the English ships, being far the lesser, charged the
enemy with marvellous agility ; and having discharged their broad
sides' flew forth furiously into the deep, and levelled their shot
directly without missing, at these great ships of the Spaniards." f
When Valdez, the commander of the Andalusian squadron, lost his
foremast ; " he lay," says Stow, "like a stiff elephant in the open
field, beset with eager hounds." Wotton has compared the move
ments of the English ships to "a morice-dance upon the waters."
On the 1 2th of July the Spanish fleet stood out to sea from
Corunna. The armada kept its course through the Bay of Biscay,
with a favourable wind, until the 16th, when there was a great calm
and a thick fog till noon. The wind shifting from north-east to
west, and then to east-south-east, dispersed the ships; and they
were scarcely gathered together when the English coast was in
sight. On the 19th they were seen entering the Channel by
Fleming, a captain of a pinnace, according to Camden ; but by
other accounts a Scottish pirate. This captain, whether honest
trader or rover, made all sail for Plymouth, to communicate his
momentous news. There was a gallant fleet in the harbour ; and
there were commanders on shore, of the same material as that out
of which the Blakes and Nelsons were formed. About the port
was a great land force under the orders of Raleigh, who would
rather have been at sea. The Howards were there, lord Charles
and lord Thomas, with lord Sheffield, the nephew of the lord high
admiral, and sir Robert Southwell, his son-in-law. But birth then
gave no exclusive title to command. The rough-handed Hawkins,
and Drake, and Frobisher, and Fenner, and many another captain
who had steered and fought his way upwards from the forecastle,
were there ; and they went to their work with that hearty will
which is best inspired by a free service. And so, on the night of
* Quoted in " Westward Ho,", by the Rev. Charles Kingsley ; a romance imbued with
the truest spirit of history, and displaying a far higher, because more intelligent, patriot
ism, than most of our modem histories of this period of heroic struggle.
t Camden, ed. 1630.
1 52 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the 19th,— after Drake had finished his game at bowls, in which
tradition we have a lively faith,— the fleet was warped out of the
harbour. Howard told, in a letter of the 21st addressed to Wal
singham, the story of his first operations, using the brief style best
suited for a man of action : " I will not trouble you with any long
letter ; we are at this present otherwise occupied than with writing.
Upon Friday, at Plymouth, I received intelligence that there were
a great number of ships descried off the Lizard; whereupon,
although the wind was very scant, we first warped out of harbour
that night ; and upon Saturday it turned out rain, hard by, the wind
being at south-west ; and about three of the clock in the afternoon
descried the Spanish fleet, and we did what we could to work for
the wind, which by this morning we had recovered, descrying their
fleet to consist of a hundred and sixty sail." *
" At Plymouth speedily, took they ship valiantly ;
Braver ships never were seen under sail,
With their fair colours spread, and streamers on their head — -
Now bragging Spaniards, take care of your tail." t
Up the Channel sail the galleons and the galeasses, the carracks
and argosies, before that south-west breeze. England is on the
look-out from every hill and every beach from the Lizard to the
Start. Little pinnaces go boldly forth from Marazion, and Fal
mouth, and Fowey ; as Howard and his fleet pass the Eddystone,
then a bare rock witli no warning light. Is the great armada about
to attack Plymouth ? The day will show. It sweeps on " in front
like a half-moon, the horns stretching forth about the breadth of
seven miles, sailing as it were with labour of the winds, and groan
ing of the ocean, slowly, though with full sails." Will Howard
not give fight ? Will the daring captains who have borne the En
glish flag from the north pole to the tropics, and some of whom
have put a girdle round the earth, will they let the armada pass
unscathed? They know their business. " Willingly they suffer it
to pass by, that they might chase them in the rear with a foreright
wind." On the 21st, "about nine of the clock, before noon, the
lord admiral commanded his pinnace; called the Disdain, to give the
defiance unto the duke of Medina." It was the old feudal chal
lenge ; but there was no pause for the answer. The pinnace fired
a shot at the first ship it met, and Howard, like a gallant leader as
he was, began the fight : " with much thundering out of his own
* Letter in the State Paper Office.
t Ballad, " The winning of Cales," Percy, vol.
THE FIGHT UP CHANNEL. 1 53
ship, called the Ark-royal, he first set upon the admiral, as he
thought, of the Spaniards ; but it was Alphonso de Lena's ship.
Soon after, Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, played with their
ordnance upon the hindmost squadron, which was commanded by
Recalde, who laboured all he could to stay his men that fled to the
fleet, till his own ship, being much battered with shot, and now
grown unserviceable, hardly withdrew itself to the main fleet. At
which time the duke of Medina gathered together his fleet scattered
here and there, and hoisting more sail, held on his intended course.
Neither could he do any other, seeing both the wind favoured the.
English, and their ships would turn about with incredible celerity
which way soever they would to charge, wind, and tack about again.
And now had they maintained a hot fight the space of two hours,
when the lord admiral thought not good to continue the fight any
longer, for that forty of his ships were not yet come in, being scarce
yet gotten out of the haven." *
The night that followed was one of strange tumult in those
waters, which a foreign ship had not traversed in man's remem
brance without vailing to the English flag. The sea was troubled ;
the sky was dark ; a huge Biscayan vessel took fire ; and in the
confusion the galleon of Don Pedro de Valdez got foul of another
ship, and was left behind. Drake had gone after five vessels that
proved to be merchantmen of Germany ; and this had deranged the
movements of the squadron that was to have followed his lantern.
Howard, with two ships, had held on through the night after the
Spaniards. Drake coming-' back from his bootless chase fell in
with the great galleon abandoned by her companions ; and Valdez
became his prisoner, with a booty of 55,000 ducats, which were dis
tributed amongst the crews. At nightfall of that second day the
active vice-admiral was again with his commander. The next morn
ing Howard was better prepared for a general engagement. His men
were in great heart, for the invincible armada was found to be
vulnerable. The remainder of the fleet has come out of Plymouth,
and Raleigh has come with them, to take his share in that sea-fight
rather than remain with his inactive army on land. The armada on
this morning of the 23rd of July is off Portland. And now, says
Stow, " the English navy, being well increased, gave charge and
chase upon the enemy, squadron after squadron seconding each
other like swift horsemen that could nimbly come and go, and fetch
* This passage is from Camden. We shall use his words occasionally, and those of
Stow and other old writers, without always indicating the authority from which we quote.
154 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the wind with most advantage. . . . The English chieftains ever
sought to single out the great commanders of the Spanish host,
whose lofty castles held great scorn of their encounter.'' But
the English chieftains knew better tactics than to attempt to
grapple with these castles, and to board them. They knew
that if their daring sailors could climb to their highest decks,
th;v would there find great companies of soldiers in armour, pro
vided with every instrument of destruction. Raleigh had told them,
as he said afterwards in his " History of the world," that " to clap
ships together without consideration belongs rather to a madman
than a man of war ; " that " the guns of a slow ship pierce as well,
and make as great holes, as those in a swift." And so the English,
having been well taught " the difference between fighting loose or
at large, and grappling," ran in under the great galleons, and
having delivered their broadsides, sheered out of the range of the
Spanish guns, which were high above the water-line. " Never was
heard greater thundering of ordnance on both sides, which notwith
standing from the Spaniards flew for the most part over the En
glish without harm." In the furious skirmish there was alternate
success. The ships of London, hemmed in by the Spaniards, were
rescued by the queen's ships ; and the fleet of Biscay, under
Recalde, being surrounded by the English wasps, was delivered
from danger by the galeasses, who, " as sergeants of the band,
would issue forth to succour their distressed friends." One En
glish commander only fell — " Cock, an Englishman, who died with
honour in the midst of the enemies in a small ship of his." From
morning till night this fight continued ; the Spaniards sometimes
bearing down upon their pursuers and then going before the west
wind towards St. Alban's Head.
The 24th is a day of rest. The fleets are becalmed, with the
Needles in distant view. Howard has sent some small craft to
Portsmouth for supplies of ammunition. From every port of
Dorsetshire and Hampshire fresh ships have come forth, hired and
armed by the gentlemen of England to aid in this great defence.
The harvest-time is at hand; but let the rye and the barley, the
wheat and the oats, be gathered in by the women and the children
and the old men ; for the able-bodied must fight, or no harvest will
in future be worth the gathering for the Anglo-Saxon race. For
four clays the fishermen of the long line of shore have been hover
ing about the fleets, instead of casting their nets. The sea-weed
burners on the shelves of the coast have let out their fires, and have
THE RUN TO CALAIS. 1 55
climbed to the cliffs to gaze upon the flashing smoke far out at sea.
Now the great towers lie idly about Purbeck, and the men of Poole
and Christchurch wonder if they are going up the Solent. For
four nights the beacon-fires have been lighted. For four nights they
have proclaimed to the people throughout the land that they must
watch and pray. On this fifth night of danger they again send out
their tongues of flame from every cliff and every hill :—
¦" For swift to east and swift to west the warning radiance spread —
High on St Michael's Mount it shone — it shone on Beachy Head.
For o'er the deep the Spaniard saw, along each southern shire,
Cape beyond cape, in endless range, those twinkling points of fire."*
The armada lies becalmed, on the 25th of July, below the chalk
cliffs of Freshwater. It is the day of St. James the Great, the
patron saint of Spain ; but it is not a day in which the saint will
inspire the Spaniard with the determination to fight against the
Heretic, as he inspired him to fight against the Moslem. A great
galleon, disabled in the fight of the 23rd, has dropped astern ; and
Hawkins, in the Victory, has been towed to take possession of her.
There is no resistance from the galleon. But a thousand oars are
mow lashing the quiet waves ; and three of the great galeasses come
to rescue her, and to punish her daring captor. But the Lion and
the Bear, the Triumph and the Elizabeth Jonas, are quickly about
them, with their sixty pounders, and their thirty-tlvee pounders,
known as cannon and demi-cannon, " sending their dole until the
Spaniard's blood ran out at scupper-hole." The battle, for a breeze
had sprung up, again becomes general. Medina's ship, the San
Martin, has her mainmast shot away, and is about to strike to Fro
bisher. Medina is saved by his generals, Mexia and Recalde.
Howard joins in the struggle. The issue is long doubtful. But
the English powder is exhausted ; and there is no more fighting on
that summer afternoon. The next day the lord high admiral is
bestowing the greatest honour that the worthies of England then
aspired to receive. Lords might be born, but Knights must be
made. For their services in these six days of incessant work, lord
Sheffield and lord Thomas Howard, Frobisher, Townsend and
Hawkins, were knighted "for their valour." It was resolved to
defer any further attack till the Spaniard was in the narrow sea.
" So with a fair Etesian gale, which in our sky bloweth for the
most part from the south-west and by south, clear and fair, the
Spanish fleet sailed forward, the English fleet following close at
* Macaulay.
156 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the heels." On the 26th and 27th, the vast navies are seen as
they coast along, from Selsea Bill, and from the downs of Brighton,
from Hastings, and from Dungeness. For seven days has the
Spaniard been fighting his way. through the Channel, and at length
he is at anchor before Calais on the Saturday night of that week
of memorable conflict. But when the morning of Sunday dawns,
and the French and Walloons go out in their boats with fresh pro
visions for those whose ships are laden with gold, and who readily
give sixpence for a fresh egg, the English fleet of a hundred and
forty sail is riding in Calais Roads within cannon-shot of the ex
ceeding great sliips, whose greatest still keep the outer line against
their enemy. England, then, is not yet beaten, as the rumour has
gone forth ; for " in Paris, Don Bernadino de Mendoza, ambassador
from Spain, entered into the church of Notre Dame, advancing his
rapier in his right hand, and with a loud voice, cried, Victoria, Vic
toria ; and it was forthwith bruited that England was vanquished. '
On that Sunday the heart of England sends up to Heaven the
simple but solemn prayer, " Save and deliver us, we humbly be
seech Thee, from the hands of our enemies." In this time of need
the queen had herself composed a prayer, which had been sent to
" the general of her highness' army at Plymouth," as her majesty's
private meditation : — " Most Omnipotent, and Guider of all our
world's mass, that only searchest and fathomest the bottom of all
hearts' conceits, and in them seest the true original of all actions
intended, how no malice of revenge, nor quittance of injury, Jior
desire of bloodshed, nor greediness of lucre, hath bred the reso
lution of our now set out army ; but a heedful care, and wary watch,
that no neglect of foes, nor over surety of harm, might breed either
danger to us, or glory to them ; these being grounds, Thou that
didst inspire the mind, we humbly beseech, with bended knees,
prosper the work, and with the best forewinds guide the journey,
speed the victory, and make the return the advancement of Thy
glory, the triumph of Thy fame, and surety to the realm, with the
least loss of English blood. To these devout petitions, Lord, give
Thou Thy blessed grant. Amen." * The prayer was mercifully
heard to its fullest extent.
On that Sunday in Calais Roads, there is work being done by
Drake and his men— a work of necessity which will brook no de
lay. For the duke of Medina has dispatched messenger after
messenger to the duke of Parma, to bid him send " light vessels,"
* MS. in British Museum, endorsed as being sent by Sir Robert Cecil to the gjnerals.
THE FIGHT OFF GRAVELINES. 157
without which the Spaniard could not well fight with the English;
and to urge him to put to sea with his army, which the Spanish
fleet would protect till the landing upon the hated shore was ac
complished. Parma's boats were leaky ; his provisions were ex
hausted ; his sailors had deserted ; he was kept in port by the
vigilant Dutch. But nevertheless a junction might have been
fatal ; and the Spaniard must be crippled before he again weighs
anchor. It is two o'clock of the Monday morning. The stillness
is scarcely broken by a slight movement upon the sea. There are
eight small vessels being towed from the main body of the Eng
lish fleet, and they are bearing with the wind upon the Spanish
anchorage. Are they deserters ; or are they rushing upon certain
destruction ? Suddenly a strong light bursts out from each ves
sel. The tow-boats leave them, and they drift with the breeze
right into the centre of the armada. Then vast volumes of flame
and smoke roll out from the burning hulks, with fearful explosions
and sulphury stenches ; and the sea defences of Calais, and the
church towers which overlook them, gleam with more than noon
day brightness ; and the red glare is seen across the sea from
Dover heights, and along the shore from Gravelines to Boulogne.
Young and Prowse; who led these fire-ships into the heart of the
enemy's fleet, ha< e done their duty well. T'he bold stroke, de
vised by Elizabeth herself as contemporaries say, has beeji suc
cessful beyond hope. The Spaniards had seen the effects of
" sundry works of wild-fire lately made to break the bridge at Ant
werp," — it was in the siege of 1585 — and now, "all amazed, with
shrieks and loud outcries, to the great astonishment of the near
inhabitants, crying ' The fire of Antwerp ! the fire of Antwerp ! '
some cut cables, others let the hawsers slip, and happiest they
who could first be gone, though few could tell what course to
take." * One of the largest of the galeasses was stranded near
the town of Calais, and was taken, after a fierce engagement, in
which many English were slain, and the Spaniards lost four hun
dred men. Medina conducted himself with courage and coolness,
and his ship, with a few others, resumed their stations. But the
bulk of the fleet was running up Channel in wild confusion. Some
went ashore on the Flemish coast ; others stood out to sea ; many
cot together as well as they could near Gravelines. But Drake
and Fenner were fighting them from the first peep of the dawning;
and now come up Hawkins and Fenton, Seymour and Cumberland,
* Stow.
I58 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Southwell and Frobisher, and there is again a general battle under
the castle of Gravelines ; for Howard himself is up at his post.
He has written somewhat despairingly to Walsingham of the want
of ammunition ; saying, with the true modesty of the brave,
" Their force is wonderful great and strong, and yet we pluck their
feathers by little and little." In that fleet the "mighty ships and'
of great strength," were as four to one compared with the larger
ships of the English. The Spanish castles have fearful difficulty
in avoiding the shallows. They are hemmed in with danger. They
must keep together ; or be made prize if they run out to sea. A
galleon of Biscay, the San Matthew, has surrendered; another great
ship is stranded ; the San Philipe is drifting disabled upon the
Flemish shore, and will be boarded by the sailors of Flushing. No
help will come from the duke of Parma. There is no chance of the
union of the two armies. " The English forces," says Stow, " be
ing now wholly united, prevented their enemies conjoining to
gether, and followed their fortunes to the uttermost, continuing
four days' fight in more deadly manner than at any time before,
and having incessant cause of fresh encouragement chased the
Spaniards from place to place, until they had driven them into a
desperate estate ; so as of necessity, as well for that the wind was
westerly, as that their enemies increased, and their own provision
of sails, anchors, and cables greatly wasted, resolved to shape
their course by the Orcades and the north of Ireland."
The last great fight was on the 29th of July. The scattered
remnant of the armada holds on its perilous course, past Dunkirk,
past the mouth of the Scheldt, full into the North Sea. No more
will the beacon-fires be lighted on the Southern coast of England.
The Eastern has nothing to fear from these enemies. Drake is
in the wake of the flying squadrons. What a model despatch does
this true English sailor write to Walsingham, on this last of July,
1588: — "We have the army of Spain before us, and mind, with
the grace of God, to wrestle a fall with them. There was never
anything pleased me better than the seeing the enemy flying with
a south wind to the northwards. God grant they have a good eye
to the duke of Parma ; for with the grace of God, if we live, I
doubt it not but ere it be long so to handle the matter with the
duke of Sidonia as he shall wish himself at St. Marie amono- his
orange-trees. God give us grace to depend upon Him, so shall we
not doubt victory, for our cause is good."
The prince of Parma had failed the Spaniards. They had re
THE FLIGHT TO THE NORTH. 1 59
ceived a message from him, as they lay before Calais on that Sun
day the 28th, that he could not be ready for them till the Friday
following. On that Friday they were far away to the north, the
English pursuing. Howard writes, on the 7th of August, to Wal
singham, " Notwithstanding that our powder and shot was well
near all spent, we set on a brag countenance and gave them chase,
as though we had wanted nothing, until he had cleared our own
coast and some part of Scotland." Seymour had returned with
his squadron, after he had passed the Brill, to look after the duke
of Parma. On the 2nd of August, says a Spanish narrative, " the
enemy's fleet still followed the armada in the morning, but they
turned towards the coast of England, and we lost sight of them."
Sir William Monson, a contemporary writer, says, " The opportu
nity was lost, not through the negligence or backwardness of the
lord admiral, but merely through the want of providence in those
that had the charge of furnishing and providing for the fleet ; for,
at that time of so great advantage, when they came to examine
their provisions, they found a general scarcity of powder and shot,
for want of which they were forced to return home." The arse
nals of England in those days were scantily supplied ; and we may
well believe that there was no expectation that the dreaded con
flict would have ended at sea. The daring and the endurance of
her sailors could not have been wholly trusted to, when the enemy
to be resisted was of such gigantic force. The men on shore
would have fought to the death ; and there was not a town that
would not have sent out its train-bands in harness, with arquebuss,
and pike, and the old mighty long-bow. Raleigh held, that without
an adequate fleet no force could debar an enemy from landing ;
but the fleet which drove Medina to the Orkneys, and left Parma's
gun-boats in the canal of Bruges, could scarcely have been counted
upon to do the work of defence single-handed. It did its work
nobly. It saved England in those twelve days of desperate fight
and stormy chase. The breath of heaven did what Howard and
Drake left undone. " Flavit Jehovah et dissipati sunt " — Jeho
vah blew and they were scattered — is the legend of one of the
medals that recorded this marvellous success.
There are minute and apparently trustworthy accounts of the
wretched fortune of the armada, after it had passed the coast of
Scotland, which are derived from the examinations of Spanish,
Portuguese, and Italian sailors who were wrecked in September on
l6o HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the western coasts of Ireland. * Putting this evidence together,
we find it stated that after the fight off Gravelines there were a hun
dred and ten (some state a hundred and twenty) sail left of the
whole Spanish navy. After the English fleet left them, the Span
iards cast all the horses and mules into the sea, to save their water.
Coming to an island at the north of Scotland, the general gave
orders that they should make the best of their way to any part of
the Portuguese or Spanish coast. Ships, having lost their anchors,
their masts shot through, their hulls riddled with shot-holes, had
sunk on the coast of Scotland, and in the open North Sea, or were
cast on the shores of the Western Isles. About the 20th of August
there came on a great storm which divided the fleet ; and ten days
after, another storm scattered them around the shores of Con-
naught and Kerry. The testimony of a Genoese pilot of the ship
called Our Lady of the Rosary, in which was the prince of Ascule,
a natural son of the king of Spain, is thus recorded : " He saith
this ship was shot through four times, and one of the shot was be
tween the wind and the water, whereof they thought she would
have sunk, and most of her tackle was spoiled with shot. This
ship struck against the rocks in the Sound of theBleskies, a league
and a half from the land, upon Tuesday last at noon, and all in the
ship perished, saving this examinant, who saved himself upon two
or three planks that were loose." The duke of Medina kept out
in the open sea, and entered the Bay of Biscay about the end of
September. A few ships reached Spain, under the command of
Recalde, in a shattered condition. Some of the wretched men
who were shipwrecked were murdered by the wild Irish ; and some,
more disgracefully, were put to the sword by order of the lord
deputy. Hakluyt thus sums up the Spanish losses : " Of one hun
dred and four and thirty sail, that came out of Lisbon, only three
and fifty returned to Spain. Of the four galeasses of Naples, but
one ; the like of the largest galleons of Portugal ; of the one and
ninety galleons and great hulks, from divers provinces, only three
and thirty returned. In a word, they lost eighty-one ships in this
expedition, and upwards of thirteen thousand five hundred sol
diers." Before the ultimate fate of the armada could be known, Eliza
beth wrote this characteristic letter to the king of Scotland : —
" Now may appear, my dear brother, how malice conjoined with
* " Certain Advertisements out of Ireland," 158s, reprinted in the " Harleian Mis
cellany."
THE THANKSGIVING. l6l
might strive to make a shameful end to a villainous beginning, for,
by God's singular favour, having their fleet well beaten in our nar
row seas, and pressing with all violence to achieve some watering
place, to continue their pretended invasion, the winds have carried
them to your coasts, where I doubt not they shall receive small
succour and less welcome ; unless those lords that, so traitor like,
would belie their own prince, and promise another king relief in
your name, be suffered to live at liberty, to dishonour you, peril
you, and advance some other, which God forbid you suffer them
live to do. * * * You may assure yourself that, for my part, I
doubt no whit but that all this tyrannical, proud, and brainsick at
tempt will be the beginning, though not the end, of the ruin of
that king, that, most unkingly, even in midst of treating peace, be
gins this wrongful war. He hath procured my greatest glory that
meant my sorest wreck." *
On the 8th of September eleven banners taken in the Spanish
ships were displayed to the Londoners, who had done such hearty
service in the cause of their country. They were afterwards hung
over London bridge, a far nobler trophy than the heads of traitors.
But in the midst of this triumph Leicester had died. The private sor
row of the queen retarded her participation in the public joy. But
on Sunday the 24th of November, Elizabeth rode in a chariot to
Saint Paul's, in the most magnificent of dresses ; and the streets
were hung with blue cloth ; and the Companies of the city stood
on each side in goodly order ; and the trophies were carried in
procession ; and the great captains of England's Salamis were
about their queen ; and she graciously saluted them by name ; and
a solemn thanksgiving was offered up, and the glory given to God
only. On that day there were also given in every church of the
land "public and general thanks unto God, with all devotion and
inward affection of heart and humbleness, for his gracious favour
extended towards us in our deliverance and defence, in the won
derful overthrow and destruction showed by his mighty hand on
our malicious enemies the Spaniards, who had thought to invade
and make a conquest of the realm."
The parliament which met in February, 1589, was naturally
warlike ; exulting in the past success, and resolved upon support
ing the queen in the contest which was so truly a battle for national
existence. Sir Christopher Hatton, the lord chancellor, told the
Peers and Commons not to be deceived into a belief that England
* Letters of Elizabeth and James VI.," p. 53.
VOL. III.— II
162 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
was secure, through the Divine mercy which had rendered the
vast armada vain and useless. " Do not you imagine," he said,
"that they are ardently studious of revenge? Know you not the
pride, fury, and bitterness of the Spaniard against you ? " This
was preparatory to asking for a subsidy ; and, although there was
no precedent for such a mark of confidence, two subsidies were
granted in one supply, payable in four years. There was no delu
sion in the belief that Philip would renew his attempt upon Eng
land. It was proclaimed by the fanatical Romanists in their wri
tings, that it was not till two attacks had failed that the Israelites
made desolate the towns and villages of the tribe of Benjamin, and
smote man and beast with the edge of the sword. The chastise
ment of the English, they said, was only deferred. Philip resolved
to build smaller vessels, and to sail direct to the English coast from
his harbours in the Peninsula. He would persevere, even if he
sold the silver candlesticks which stood on his table. * The Anglo-
Saxon spirit was now thoroughly roused ; and any scheme for at
tacking Spain was sure to receive the heartiest encouragement.
The government of Elizabeth was economical in the extreme ; and
it was indisposed to undertake any war, except a war of defence,
upon a large scale. The people, therefore, were encouraged to fit
out expeditions at their own cost, in which the queen lent assist
ance. It is common to impute blame to Elizabeth for this parsi
mony ; but her revenues were not spent in her own luxurious grat
ification. In 1592, sir John Fortescue, after reciting how she had
sustained the people of the Low Countries in their contest for
freedom ; and had assisted Henry of Navarre against the League,
" to free us from war at home ; " went on to state in what other
honourable ways Elizabeth had employed her revenues : " When
her majesty came to the crown, she found it four millions indebted.
Her navy when she came to view it, she found greatly decayed.
Yet, all this she hath discharged, and, thanks to God, is nothing
indebted ; and now she is able to match any prince in Europe,
which the Spaniards found when they came to invade us
As for her own private expenses, they have been little in building;
she hath consumed little or nothing in her pleasures." It has ever
been a fashion to call such royal economy meanness ; and other
queens, as well as Elizabeth, have been slandered for their integ
rity. We may excuse her government, in their desire not to make
rash experiments upon the willingness of the people to bear heavy
* Rauke, vol. ii. p. 174.
EXPEDITIONS AGAINST SPAIN. 163
taxation, if mcy only gave sixty thousand pounds towards a great
expedition ror winning Portugal from the Castilians, — whom the
Portuguese hated, — to place the crown upon the head of Don Anto
nio, an illegitimate branch of the royal line of that country which
Philip had added to Spain. Sir Francis Drake and sir John Nor
ris undertook to lead this somewhat rash enterprise. A great
body of adventurers joined the expedition. They did not, however,
sail direct to Portugal, but attacked Corunna ; burnt some ships ;
defeated a Spanish army ; and took the lower town. At last they
went on the real purpose for which the armament was fitted out.
But Philip was now prepared. Every attempt at insurrection was
promptly suppressed. Lisbon was defended by a large force.
When the English army under Norris advanced from Peniche,
their landing-place, and Drake sailed up the Tagus, they could
only obtain possession of the suburbs of Lisbon ; and were speedily
forced to re-embark for want of ammunition and provisions. On
their return they took and burned Vigo ; and then came back to
England — triumphant to a limited extent, but having lost one half
of the adventurers, many in fight, but the greater number by fam
ine and sickness. The young earl of Essex was one of those who
took part in this enterprise as a volunteer.
As Drake's ships were returning homeward, with their half-
starved crews and soldiers, they received some supplies from a
fleet of seven ships, which the earl of Cumberland had fitted out at
his own charge to attack the Spanish coasts. A fearful mortality
amongst the men of this expedition also crippled their exertions ;
and, though many prizes were made, the prosperous issue of the
great contest was little advanced by this and other detached enter
prises. But there was a higher result of such a warfare than the
taking of ships or the burning of towns. A grand spirit of devo
tion to their country was engendered in the people. The energies
called forth in that stirring time produced a corresponding elevation
of the national character. In one of his earliest comedies, Shak-
spere, in a scene where a father recommends his son " to seek
preferment," has briefly indicated the great principles which stim
ulated the ambition of the gentlemen of England at this period : —
" Some, to the wars, to try their fortune here ;
Some, to discover islands far.away
Some, to the studious universities."
* " Two Gentlemen of Verona," act i. sc. 3.
164 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
They had been lighting in the Netherlands during the command
of Leicester ; they were still fighting for the same cause under
Maurice of Nassau ; they were about to fight for Henry of Na
varre. War against Philip of Spain, wherever to be carried on,
would be a war of enthusiasm. Discovery, a natural result of com
mercial extension, was the one thing wanting to fill the " home-
keeping youths " with an ardent desire to burst the narrow confines
of their own land, to seek wealth and honour in regions where the
earth yielded its richest increase to the slightest labour. Knowledge
was to be sought ; for not only were learning and ability now the
stepping-stones to civil preferment, but ignorance had become a dis
grace amongst the highborn, who once left the churchmen to the
almost exclusive possession of intellectual power. The stormy
time of the Reformation had been succeeded by a time of compara
tive peace and security; but this position had been won by a gen
eral enlargement of the national thought, and through this growing
freedom of opinion a great Literature was bursting into life, — sus
taining and carrying forward the mental independence which had
produced it. Gabriel Harve}', in one of his tracts, directed, as
verses of his friend Spenser had been directed, against some ofthe
ribaldry of vulgar controversialists, shows, in a passage which is
worth quoting, the stimulus which heroic action ought to give, as
it must have given, to intellectual production : " England, since it
was England, never bred more honourable minds, more adventur
ous hearts, more valorous hands, or more excellent wits, than of
late. . . . The date of idle vanities is expired. Away with
these scribbling paltries. There is another Sparta in hand, that
indeed requireth Spartan temperance, Spartan frugality, Spartan
exercise, Spartan valiancy, Spartan perseverance, Spartan invinci
bility ; and hath no wanton leisure for the comedies of Athens. . .
The wind is changed, and there is a busier pageant upon the stage.
. . . When you have observed the course of industry, examined
the antecedents and consequences of travel, compared English and
Spanish valour, measured the forces of both parties, weighed every
circumstance of advantage, considered the means of our assurance,
and finally found profit to be our pleasure, provision our security,
labour our honour, warfare our welfare, — who of reckoning can
spare any lewd or vain time for corrupt pamphlets ; or who of
judgment will not cry, away with these paltering fiddle-faddles." *
This stilted eloquence of Gabriel Harvey conveys a great truth.
* " Pierce's Supererogation," 1593. Reprinted in " Archaica," vol. ii. p. 62.
THE HEROIC TIMES. 1 65
The English nation was growing into loftier proportions in this
period of new-born energies. He points to the western discoveries
of Gilbert; the West-Indian voyage of Drake ; the arctic expedition
of Frobisher; the colonisation of Virginia by Raleigh; the hot wel
come of the terrible Spanish armada to the coast of England ; the
voyage into Spain and Portugal of Norris, Drake, and Essex. But
he recounts these, to show how the period which called forth such
energies ought to bear the corresponding fruits of a high literature,
— and he exclaims, " what miracles of excellency might be achieved
in an age of policy and a world of industry." They were achieved.
1 66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER IX.
The three religious classes of the second half of the reign of Elizabeth. — Prcgress of
Non-Conformity. — Statute against the Puritans. — The Puritan enmity to the habits
of society. — Philip Stubbes' Anatomy of Abuses. — Pride of Apparel. — Gluttony and
Drunkenness. — Dancing considered a vice. — Music held to be corrupting. — The Sab
bath profaned by Sports. — The Lord of Misrule. — May-games ; Wakes ; Church-
ales. — Country festivals. — Athletic exercises and sports. — Gaming. — Stage Plays.
The three chief religious classes of the second half of the reign
of Elizabeth have been defined by one who lived near that period: —
"They may for distinction be called the active Romanists, the
restless Nonconformists (of which there were many sorts), and the
passive peaceable Protestants." * In the history of this time, as
of every other time, the doings of the " active " and of the " rest
less " must be far more prominent than any movement of the
"passive peaceable." Up to the period of the death of Mary
Stuart, the " active Romanists " were the only objects of grave
solicitude to the government. All the just and rational energies of
the queen and the statesmen who surrounded her ; all the severities
against Popish recusants, which were defended as being levelled
only against traitors, were calculated to uphold the great edifice of
Protestantism which was the shelter and bulwark of the civil
polity. In this contest against the Romanists, none were more
zealous than those who, known as Puritans, first objected to some
ceremonies of the Anglican Church, and then denounced the hier
archical constitution upon which she rested. They became " rest
less Nonconformists." They were compared to a man " who
would never cease to whet and whet his knife, till there was no steel
left to make it useful."! Both these classes, however, constituted a
decided minority, as compared with the " passive peaceable Pro
testants " — those who were content to remain in the quiet enjoy
ment of the security which had been won by the sagacity of their
rulers. Amongst their ranks the enthusiasts were not to be found.
The Established Church had opened its arms widely, to embrace
many who conscientiously differed as to doctrine and discipline.
• Walton, " Life of Hooker." \Ibid.
PROGRESS OF NON-CONFORMITY. 167
The majority accepted the invitation to abide by the religion of
the State, — to form contented if not zealous members of a Church
which was expressly calculated to reconcile differences. Her de
cent ceremonies, her abundant provision for the maintenance of
her ministers, her beautiful form of Common Prayer, her solemn
Offices, were well suited to the quiet and orderly English charac
ter. The Romanists, who, at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign,
were a powerful body decidedly hostile to the government, had,
after the contests of a quarter of a century, been absorbed into
the ranks of the conformists, or held their own opinions in secret,
or had been crushed. The power which had largely contributed
to crush the more dangerous of the enemies of the reformed doc
trines had, in its turn, become troublesome if not dangerous. Let
us endeavour to sketch an outline of the position of the Puritans,
in their relations to the church and state and in their social rela
tions, as they present themselves to our observation during the
years immediately succeeding the great triumph over the attempt
to make England an appanage of Spain, a country for the bishop
of Rome "to tithe and toll in."
In 1588, the bishop of Winchester, Thomas Cooper, published
"An Admonition to the People of England," which aimed at coun
teracting the effect of certain bold and scurrilous pamphlets which
had been issued with the intent to bring the Church and its minis
ters into contempt. He especially complains that such books
should be in men's hands and bosoms, "when the view of the
mighty navy of the Spaniards is scant passed out of our sight ;
when the terrible sound of their shot ringeth, as it were, yet in our
ears." But though the Puritans were at issue with the government
upon the great question of religious freedom, and held opinions
very adverse to the constitution and discipline of the Church, as
enforced by the Act of Uniformity, they had not been the less
ready to defend their country against invasion. They were natur
ally most strenuous in their hatred of the invader that drew the
sword in the name of Rome. When the immediate danger had
passed away, the Puritans went with redoubled zeal about the
work which they called a Re-reformation. The age of pamphlets
had now fully come. As the power of reading was more widely
extended, tracts were multiplied, whose tone was adapted for men
of strong convictions and obstinate prejudices, to whom abuse
would be more acceptable than placid reasoning. Many, also, who
cared little for the subjects of controversy, read with avidity the
1 68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
little books that bore the name of Martin Marprelate, and the an
swers they called forth ; for they were bitter and sarcastic, with
touches of coarse humour. The queen's proclamation against cer
tain. seditious and schismatical books and libels was issued with
little effect. The Marprelate tracts were secretly printed and cir
culated in despite of authority " The public printing-presses be
ing shut against the Puritans, some of them purchased a private
one, and carried it from one county to another, to prevent discov
ery. It was first set up at Moulsey, in Surrey, near Kingston-on-
Thames ; from thence it was conveyed to Fawsley, in Northamp
tonshire ; from thence to Norton ; from thence to Coventry ; from
Coventry to Woolston, in Warwickshire ; and from thence to Man
chester, in Lancashire, where it was discovered. Sundry satirical
pamphlets were printed by this press, and dispersed all over the
kingdom." * The crisis of a great struggle had arrived ; and these
libels were the straws which, thrown up, showed which way the
wind blew.
The Protestant ministers who fled from the persecutions of
queen Mary, had remained long enough in communion with foreign
reformed Churches to bring home, upon the accession of Elizabeth,
opinions much opposed to the system of church government as es
tablished by the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. There were
some portions of the ceremonies prescribed in the rubric which
they held to be superstitious. They regarded the vestments of the
clergy as popish. They objected to the sign of the cross in the
office of baptism, and to the ring in that of matrimony. They ob
jected to kneeling at the communion service. Throughout the
reign of Elizabeth her Council held divided opinions upon these
matters of controversy ; but the queen herself was opposed to an
abolition of forms to which the only serious objection was that they
belonged to the rites, of the earlier Church. But in that age opin
ions assumed a more violent character of opposition when their
differences centred round some visible object ; and we still con
tend in a like fashion, as soldiers in a battle strive to gain or to
hold the rag of silk under which one side fights, whilst the princi
ple of the warfare has passed out of mind. The clergy who re
turned from their seven years' exile during the time of persecution,
were put in possession of many of the livings from which the
Romish priests had been in their turn ejected. They very soon
ceased to regard the Act of Uniformity as imperatively binding;
* Neal's " History of the Puritans," vol. i. chap. viii.
STATUTE AGAINST THE PURITANS. 169
and great irregularities in the performance of ceremonies crept in,
and were for some time tolerated. But at length a rigid observ
ance of the rubric was enforced ; and the ministers who would not
conform were thrust out from their benefices. There was now a
body of men, powerful from their abilities and their earnestness,
deprived of their means of subsistence, and excluded from the vo
cations to which they were dedicated. They had their admirers
and their followers ; and their course was to form separate assem
blies. In 1567 a congregation of dissenters were seized at Plumb
ers' Hall, and some were committed to prison. As yet, the contest
had been about what the Puritans held as superstitious ceremonies.
The resistance with which they were encountered upon minor
points ultimately led them to condemn the episcopal constitution of
the Anglican Church, and to proclaim the superiority of the Ge
nevan model. Although the queen was decidedly opposed to their
pretensions, which, as set forth by some of their leaders, affected
her own claim to supremacy, they had a covert support amongst
the most influential of her ministers. Burleigh and Walsingham,
and even the favourite, Leicester, knew that if the civil government
became persecutors of these zealous men it would alienate its
warmest supporters in the contest between Protestantism and Ro
manism. These were the men who were the most powerful in
keeping the people from lukewarmness in the great cause for which
they were fighting. But the queen and the ecclesiastical author
ities were too strong for the moderate party of the Council. Arch
bishop Parker discountenanced the meetings of the clergy called
Prophesyings. The licences for preaching were greatly restricted
under his authority. Archbishop Grindal, who succeeded Parker,
took a different view of what he considered the interests of the
Church. He inclined to a toleration of preachings and prophesy
ings, and accordingly fell under the queen's displeasure. Arch
bishop Whitgift, who succeeded to the primacy in 1583, was deter
mined to put down rather than conciliate the party of tbe Puritans.
As might be expected he drove them into Non-conformity. He pro
hibited all preaching, reading, or catechising in private houses, if
any resorted thereto not of the same family. He imperatively re
quired from every minister of the Church a new subscription,
which under previous requirements had been probably evaded.
The clergy were now absolutely driven to subscribe to the point of
the queen's supremacy, to that of the lawfulness of the Common
Prayer and the Ordination Service, and to the Thirty-nine Articles.
170 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
He appointed a new Ecclesiastical Commission, who were to ex
amine the clergy upon twenty-four articles, of so stringent and
subtle a nature that Burleigh wrote to the archbishop : " I find
them so curiously penned that I think the Inquisition of Spain
used not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their
-priests." Burleigh remonstrated in vain; the archbishop, sup
ported by some of the bishops, pursued his course. The result was
first a furious attack upon episcopacy in the pamphlets of Martin
Marprelate ; and then severe laws against the Puritans, which had
no ultimate effect but that of fortifying their opinions, and ultimately
of making their cause the rallying point of civil and religious lib
erty. In 1593, an Act was passed " to restrain the queen's sub
jects in obedience." Those who disputed the queen's ecclesiastical
authority, abstained from church, or attended " any assemblies,
conventicles, or meetings, under colour or pretence of any exercise
of religion," were to be imprisoned unless they made a formal sub
mission in t':e open church; if at the expiration of three months
they did not conform they were to abjure the realm ; if they re
fused so to do, or returned after abjuration, the penalty of death
awaited them. In the same session an Act of increased severity
was passed against "popish recusants." The times were changed.
There was now little distinction between the non-conforming Prot
estant and the recusant Romanist, in the eyes of the dominant
Church. The obvious and not unreasonable excuse for this course,
which we now call bigotry, is that neither of the three great parties,
if placed in power, would have admitted the principle of toleration.
There was not for Protestant, Puritan, or Papist, any middle course
between the assertion of his own principles and the destruction of
those of his adversaries. Cartwright, the great leader of the Pu
ritans, claimed absolute power for the Church he would have set
up ; and he exhorted his brethren to resistance and nothing but
resistance : " The Lord," he says, " keep you constant, that ye
yield neither to toleration, neither to any other subtle persuasions
of dispensations and licences, which were to fortify their Romish
practices ; but as you fight the Lord's fight, be valiant." * And
so, in this spirit of giving no quarter to those who asked none, the
Ecclesiastical Commission ejected ministers ; the government
hanged libellers ; and Penry, the supposed author of the Marpre
late tracts, was hastily and cruelly executed under the statute of
1 581, for seditious words and rumours against the queen. These
» Quoted by Mr. Hallam, from Madox, " Vindication of the Church."
THE PURITAN ENMITY TO THE HABITS OF SOCIETY. 171
severities were chiefly directed against the separatists from the
Church who were then denominated Brownists, and afterwards In
dependents. No man of those times who really desired the ad
vancement of true religion could look upon the odious scoffings of
either party — upon the schismatic spirit which rejected union as an
accursed thing, and upon the arrogant temper which thought to
compeLconformity by banishment and the gibbet — without feeling
sorrow and humiliation that so noxious weeds had sprung up
amidst the rich harvest of the Reformation. Such lovers of peace
would long to address the violent of both classes in the prophetic
words which the most illustrious of the defenders of the establish
ment, the eloquent, profound, and sensible Hooker, addressed "to
those who seek the reformation of the laws and orders ecclesiasti
cal in the Church of England : " — " Far more comfort it were for us,
so small is the joy we take in these strifes, to labour under the
same yoke, as men that look for the same eternal reward of their
labours ; to be enjoined with you in bands of indissoluble love and
amity; to live as if our persons being many, our souls were but
one ; rather than in such dismembered sort to spend our few and
wretched days in a tedious prosecuting of wearisome contentions ;
the end whereof, if they have not some speedy end, will be heavy,
even on both sides." *
Such, then, were the relations of the Puritan party to the
Church and State, and so ominous were these " wearisome con
tentions," when Hooker published the first four books of his great
work in 1594. In their social relations these dissenters certainly
did not present an amiable aspect to the rest of the community.
What Hooker said of the Anabaptists was indirectly pointed at
them : " Every word otherwise than severely and sadly uttered,
seemed to pierce like a sword through them. If any man were
pleasant, their manner was fervently with sighs to repeat those
words of our Saviour Christ, ' Woe be to you which now laugh,
for ye shall lament.'" It was in this temper that the Puritans
made themselves obnoxious as the enemies of all innocent amuse
ments ; and, affecting "to cross the ordinary custom in every
thing," equally denounced the general habits of society, however
harmless or indifferent, as well as its exceptional vices. In look
ing at this aspect of Puritanism we may collect some distinctive
traits of the social life of the latter period of the reign of Eliza
beth. We believe that we should greatly err if, accepting the de>
* Preface to " Ecclesiastical Polity," vol i. p. 190. Oxford ed., 1820.
172 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
nunciations of the puritanic writers without qualification, we were
to regard this as a period of very marked profligacy. We open
" The Anatomie of Abuses " of Philip Stubbes— •' a most rigid
Calvinist, a bitter enemy to Popery, and a great corrector of the
vices and abuses of his time."* This lay-preacher has no grada
tions in his scale of wickedness. " The horrible vice of pestiferous
dancing " is as offensive to him as " the beastly vice of drunken
ness ; " and "new devices and devilish fashions " of apparel are as
odious in his sight as "gaming-houses, the shambles of the devil."
Nevertheless, he is an honest and trustworthy observer of man
ners, at a time when the moralist had a wide range for observa
tion ; when he looked upon a people rather than a class — the cour
tier and the citizen, the artisan and the peasant. The pursuits of
all members of the social state had become blended in mutual
wants and dependencies. Let us follow this quaint old writer in
some of his delineations of the English of the latter part of the
sixteenth century — "a strong kind of people, audacious, bold,
puissant, and heroical, of great magnanimity, valiancy, and
prowess ; " but, " notwithstanding that the Lord hath blessed that
land with the knowledge of his truth above all other lands in the
world, yet is there not a people more corrupt, wicked, or perverse,
living upon the face of the earth." t Out of the manifest exag
gerations of this declaimer we may collect many curious and un
questionable facts.
In the Epistle Dedicatory of his volumes, Stubbes says, " re
formation of manners, and amendment of life, was never more
needful ; for was pride, the chiefest argument of this book, ever so
ripe ! " By " pride " we understand him to mean what is the ac
companiment of every period of general prosperity — a love of lux
ury and of luxurious display, not confined to the superior classes,
but spread by the force of the imitative principle very widely
through many inferior degrees of station. "Do not," he says,
" both men and women, for the most part, every one, in general,
go attired in silks, velvets, damasks, satins, and what not, which
are attire only for the nobility and gentry, and not for the others
at any hand?" The sumptuary laws of Henry VIIL had ceased
to be regarded. Those who were winning wealth by industry
would no longer submit, if they ever did submit, to be told by stat
ute what they were not to wear, according to a scale of income
* Antony a Wood.
t Stubbes, p. 4. We quote from the rare reprint, edited by Mr. Turnbull.
PRIDE OF APPAREL. 1 73
yarying from 200/. a year to 5/.* They utterly despised the rea
son set forth^for such arbitrary regulation — namely, to prevent
" the subversion of good and politic order in knowledge and dis
tinction of people, according to their estates, pre-eminences, dig
nities, and degrees." f A statute of Philip and Mary was directed
against the wearing of silk, except by certain privileged classes.
The statesmen of Elizabeth 'meddled little with these matters, but
we find in the statute-book three laws which were intended, as we
suppose, for the encouragement of home manufactures. By a stat
ute of 1562-3, a most singular device was adopted, for preventing
persons, except those of inordinate wealth, indulging too largely in
the extravagance of " foreign stuff or wares " for appareling or
adorning the body. If such finery was sold to any person not pos
sessing 3000/. a year in lands or fees, not being paid for in ready
money, the seller was debarred of any legal remedy for the recov
ery of the debt.t By a statute of 1 566, velvet hats or caps were
prohibited to all under the degree of a knight; and by that of 1571,
every person, except ladies, lords, knights, and gentlemen having
twenty marks by the year in land, was to wear upon his head, on
Sundays and holidays, a home-made cap of wool, very decent and
comely for all states and degrees. § If Stubbes is to be relied
upon, all states and degrees rejected the statutory notion of what
was decent and comely. They wore hats " perking up like the
spear or shaft of a temple ; " — or hats " flat and broad on the
crown, like the battlements of a house ; " or " round crowns " with
bands of every colour. They wore hats of silk, velvet, taffety,
sarsenet, wool, and of "fine hair, which they call beaver, fetched
from beyond the seas, from whence a great sort of other vanities
do come besides." He was of no estimation among men who had
not a velvet or taffety hat ; "and so common a thing it is, that
every serving-man, country-man, or other, even all indifferently, do
wear of these hats." With these exceptional laws, which thus ap
pear to have been wholly inoperative, Elizabeth and her Council
left the regulation of apparel to a far higher law than any parlia
ment could enact— to the tastes of the people and their ability to
gratify them. The foreign fashions were copied, and the foreign
silks and velvets imported, with no restraint that had the least
effect. The queen herself carried her love of costly dress almost
into a mania. It was the only expenditure in which she was pro-
' 24 Hen. VIII. c. 13. MUd.
X 5 Eliz. c. 6. 5 13 Eliz. c. 19.
174 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
fuse. In her youth, said bishop Aylmer, " her maidenly apparelj
which she used in king Edward's time, made the nohlemen's
daughters, and wives to be ashamed to be dressed and painted like
peacocks." Sir John Harrington has a story of a bishop, which
shows how the same Elizabeth thought of such adornments at a
later period of her life. " On Sunday my lord of London preached
to the queen's majesty, and seemed to touch on the vanity of deck
ing the body too finely. Her majesty told the ladies that ' if the
bishop held more discourse on such matters, she would fit him fo>
heaven, but he should walk thither without a staff, and leave hi*
mantle behind him.' " * The ruff and the vardingale had then su
perseded all " maidenly apparel ; " and we are now accustomed to
think of Elizabeth and her ladies as they shone forth in the most
gorgeous but least graceful of womanly attire. The liberty of the
press, small as it was, must have been more relied upon than the
liberty of the pulpit, when Philip Stubbes hurled his thunder
against every article of dress with which we are familiar in the
portraits of the magnificent queen. The wreaths of gold and
jewels in the bolstered hair; the rings of precious stones in the
pierced ears ; the " great ruffs and neckerchers of holland, lawn,
cambric, and such cloth, smeared and starched in the devil's
'liquor,' starch;" the gowns " of divers fashions, changing with
the moon ; " the fringed petticoats ; the coloured kirtles — these
vanities of the rich and great, had, according to this minute cen
sor, descended to the very humble : " So far hath this canker of
pride eaten into the body of the commonwealth, that every poor
yeoman's daughter, and every husbandman's daughter, and every
cottager's daughter, will not stick to flaunt it out in such gowns,
petticoats, and kirtles, as these." Doubtless this description of
the spread of luxury is greatly overdone ; or we might receive it as
a proof of the general diffusion of wealth. But when this godly
satirist tells us of these cottagers' daughters, — " they are so im
pudent that, albeit their poor parents have but one cow, horse or
sheep, they will never let them rest till they be sold, to maintain
them in their braveries,"— we may be certain that he is speaking
" in Ercles' vein." The holiday finery of the village maiden was
limited, to a ribbon and a coloured nether-stock. A "queen of
curds and cream," transplanted to a town, might "spend the great
est part of the day in sitting at the door, to show her braveries,"
* " Nuga: Antiquai," vol. i. p.
GLUTTONY AND DRUNKENNESS. 1 75
but on her native green she was as pure and simple as the rose in
her bosom.
The pride of apparel, set forth by this anatomist of abuses, was
scarcely more obtrusive in women than in men. All ranks, accord
ing to this authority, lavished their means upon the abominations
of stately bands and monstrous ruffs, upon embroidered shirts,
upon slashed and laced doublets, upon French and Venetian hosen,
upon knit nether-stocks (stockings), upon velvet cloaks. There
never was a period in which the satirist did not affirm that the pre
ceding generation was healthier and braver, and altogether nobler
than that to which he had the misfortune to belong ; and so our
good old Puritan writes, " how strong men were in times past, how
long they lived, and how healthful they were, before such niceness
and vain pampering curiosity was invented, we may read, and many
that live at this day can testify. But now, through our fond toys
and nice inventions, we have brought ourselves into such pusillani
mity and effeminacy of condition, as we may seem rather nice dames
and wanton girls, than puissant agents or manly men, as our fore
fathers have been."* The year 1 588 gave a practical answer to
the charge of pusillanimity. The Saxon heart was as brave as
ever, though it beat under an Italian doublet. Nevertheless, if
there had not been some salt in society to preserve the body politic
from the taint of selfishness, these and other excesses of pride
might be received as symptoms of national decay. Gluttony and
drunkenness are the vices of the rudest communities ; but in the
more general diffusion of wealth in the reign of Elizabeth, they
assumed those forms of ostentatious display which are amongst the
worst evils of social refinement. The puritan writers were not
alone in their remonstrances against the luxuries of the table which
marked the latter years of the sixteenth century. Stubbes com
pares the variety of meats and sauces, the sweet condiments, the
delicate confections of his time, with the past days, when "one
dish or two of good wholesome meat was thought sufficient for a
man of great worship to dine withal." Thomas Nash, whom the
Puritans counted amongst the wicked, enlarges on the same theme :
"We must have our tables furnished like poulterers'" stalls, or as
though we were to victual Noah's ark again. . . . What a coil
have we, this course and that course, removing this dish higher,
setting another lower, and taking away the third. A general might
in less space remove his camp, than they stand disposing of their
* Stubbes, p. 44.
176 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
gluttony." * Excessive drinking, a vice which reached its climax
in the degraded court of James I., was not wholly of native growth.
The same writer says, " From gluttony in meats let me descend to
superfluity in drink, — a sin that, ever since we have mixed our
selves with the Low Countries, is counted honourable ; but before
we knew their lingering wars was held in the highest degree of
hatred that might be."f Stubbes says, every country, city, town,
village, and other places, hath abundance of ale-houses, taverns,
and inns, which are so fraught with maltworms, night and day, that
you would wonder to see them." There were punishments for low
debauchery, such as the drunkard's cloak. Against this growing
sin, which was creeping up from the peasant and the mechanic to
the yeoman and the courtier, the preachers lifted up their voices in
the pulpit, and not always in vain. Robert Greene, the unhappy
dramatist, who died in trie midst of his excesses, tells how he was
stopped in his early career of riot by hearing a good man preach of
future rewards and punishments ; but that he could not stand up
against the ridicule of his companions, who called him Puritan and
Precisian, and so went again to his drinking-booth, his dice, and
his bear-baiting. But we may be sure thTat these earnest preachers
in some degree injured the good effect of their religious exhorta
tions against real vices, by denouncing those harmless recreations
which to the greater number supplied the place of grosser excite
ments. . In resisting " the beginnings of evil " too much zeal may
-be as fatal as too much laxity.
The court of Elizabeth, in which
" My grave Lord-Keeper led the brawls,"
was a dancing court. The queen danced when she was a girl, as
her sisteV Mary also danced. In 1589, at her palace of Richmond,
her " ordinary exercise " was " six or seven galliards in a morn
ing, besides music and singing." t. In 1600, when she was feeble,
and asked for a staff when wearied, she could still delight, at the
house of sir Robert Sydney, to look upon the pleasures of the young,
" and smiled at the ladies, who in their dances often came up to
the step on which the seat was fixed to make their obeisance, and
so fell back into their order again." § The Puritans denounced all
dancing in mixed companies of the sexes. The dancing-schools,
which then abounded, were, they said, for teaching " the noble
* " Pierce Pennilesse," edited by J. P. Collier, from the original of 1592. p. 47.
t Ibid. p. 52. x Lodge, vol. ii. p. 411.
§ " Nugae Antiquas," vol. i. p. 315.
THE SABBATH PROFANED BY SPORTS. 1 77
science of heathen devilry." They held that " men by themselves
and women by themselves " might dance without sin, "to recreate
the mind oppressed with some great toil and labour." The people,
high and low, did not choose to accept this limitation of their
favourite amusement ; and so upon the rushes of the torch-lighted
hall, having before them the noble example of sir Christopher
Hatton, * the courtiers danced their grave measures and corantoes,
to the airs of queen Elizabeth's " Virginal Book ; " and the
peasant youths and maidens, on the village green, saw the sun go
down, as they tripped " the comely country-round." Puritanism
thought it right to make war upon every such amusement, crying
out, " Give over your occupations, you pipers, you fiddlers, you min
strels, and you musicians, you drummers, you tabretters, and you
fluters, and all other of that wicked bropd." f They held that
" sweet music at the first delighteth the ears, but afterward corrupt'
eth and depraveth the mind." In this, and in many other battles
which they fought, they warred against nature, and were beaten.
Music was the especial Art of the Elizabethan days. In every
household there was the love of music, and in many families it was
cultivated as an essential part of education. The plain tune of the
church did not unfit the people for the madrigals of the fire-side —
exquisite compositions, which tell us how much of the highest
enjoyments of a refined taste belonged to an age which we are too
apt to consider very inferior to our own in the amenities of life.
We should do the Puritanic writers and preachers injuslice if
we did not see and point out that many of their objections to
the recreations of the people were originally directed against
their use on the Sunday. The Christians' first day of the week
being regarded by the Romanists as a holiday, on which, after the
hours of devotion, all amusements lawful in themselves were not
unlawful, the more rigid Protestants determined, in their implicit
reverence for the Old Testament, to adopt the strictest Judaical
observance of the Sabbath, as one of the most distinguishing attri
butes of the Reformation. This view was injurious to the iesire
for conciliation which influenced the majority of the conforming
clergy ; who were either opposed upon principle to the application
of this supposed test of a holy life, or saw the impolicy of depriv
ing the people of the recreations which their forefathers deemed
not only innocent but salutary. After the evening service, to shoot
at the butts, to play at football, even to see an interlude, vfere not
* See Gray's " Long Story." t Stubbes, p. 204.
Vol III.— 12
178 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
accounted unchristian occupations. Round the old manor-house,
the lads and lasses of the village would have their Sunday evening
games of barley-break and handball, while the squire and even the'
parson would look on approvingly. The Puritans conscientiously
believed such license to be incompatible with religious principle, and
set about opposing these pursuits with an earnestness commensu
rate with the difficulty of their task. Cartwright, the most influen
tial of their number, speaking of the way in which a clergyman per
formed the service, says — "He posteth it over as fast as he can
gallop ; for either he hath two places to serve, or else there are
some games to be played in the afternoon." When there were daily
prayers in the parish-churches, and especially at holiday-seasons, the
old traditional sports and mummeries of the people were also offen
sive to some, though tqlerated by man}'. Thus Puritanism came
to do battle, not only against those amusements on Sundays, and
at other especial times when the Church claimed serious thoughts,
but against the amusements themselves, whenever practised. In
1585, a bishop of Lincoln, in his " Visitation articles of Inquiry,"
asks, " Whether your Minister and Churchwardens have suffered any
Lords of Misrule, or Summer Lords and Ladies, or any disguised
person in Christmas, or at May-games, or Morris-dancers, cr at
any other time, to come unreverently into the church-yard, and
there to dance or play any unseemly part, with scoffs, jests, wanton
gestures, or ribald talk, namely in the time of common prayer."*
The popular license on these holiday occasions, amongst a people
in whom the love of fun was inbred, no doubt often went bevond
the bounds of decorum ; and thus the stricter Protestants endeav
oured to sweep away the merriments altogether. They were in due
time successful — "the hobby-horse was forgot," and the "sealed
quarts " at the alehouse-door remained the only attraction.
The Lord of Misrule was a great personage in town and coun
try. He was the "master of merry disports " in royal palaces and
civic halls. Learned doctors of the universities, and great benchers
of the inns of court, recognised his authority. He held his ground
through all the troublesome times of the Reformation up to the
Civil Wars, when his mock pageantry was swept away with the
realities of power that then perished. The Christmas sports and
their lord would have perished, even though Prynne, with other
learned Puritans, had not called upon "all pious Christians etern
ally to abominate them," because they were " derived from the
* Quoted in " The Martin Marprelate Controversy," by the Rev. W. Maskell.
THE LORD OF MISRULE.
179
Roman Saturnalia and Bacchanalian festivals." But in Elizabeth's
days, though most of the so-called superstitious ceremonies of the
ancient Church had been swept away, the people, high or low,
would not readily surrender those festive observances which^
although common in the times of Popery, were not necessarily
connected with its spirit or its practice. Thus, in every borough,
and more especially in every village, the Lord of Misrule,' chosen by
universal suffrage at Christmas or at Whitsuntide, headed his com
pany of lusty mummers, in their gaudy liveries, their scarfs and laces,
their legs hung with little bells ; and " then march this heathen com
pany towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their
drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their
handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobby
horses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the throng." * We
laugh atthese follies which the Puritans execrated; but in this license
the national character may be recognised. The riot of the multitude
was placed by themselves under control. The Lord of Misrule was as
absolute as the Parish Constable. The empire of Law was
recognised by "the wild heads of the parish" in choosing their
captain ; and " the foolish people " submitted themselves for their
guidance to his authority, upon the principle of order by which
their more serious liberties were upheld. Amongst such a people
it was useless declaiming against May-games ; against Plough-
Monday dances, with their "tipsy jollity; against Church-ales, and
Wakes. The old hearty spirit of hospitality might be denounced
as gluttony, and the free intercourse of joyous hearts reprobated
as licentiousness. If the feasts and the merry-makings had been
simply vicious they could not have so long prevailed amongst a
nation essentially moral. Even in the popular gatherings, which
have been so emphatically described as occasions for sin, there
were objects of piety and charity connected with the harmless
merriment and wild excitement. Such were the Wakes and the
Church-ales. The Wake was the annual feast to commemorate
the dedication of the parish church. Stubbes has described the
festival with less than his usual acrimony : " Every town, parish, and
village, some at one time of the year, some at another, — but so that
every one keep his proper day assigned, and appropriate to itself,
which they call their wake-day, — useth to make great preparation
for good cheer ;' to the which all their friends and kinsfolks, far and
near, are invited." He speaks the language which the Puritans ap-
* Stubbes, p. 169.
ISO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
plied to every relaxation, when he asks, " wherefore should the
whole town, parish, village, and country, keep one and the same
day, and make such gluttonous feasts as they do ?" Such declaim-
ers have ever confounded abuse with use. The use of Wakes
was recognised at a later period, as promoting " neighbourhood and
freedom, with manlike and lawful exercises." * '¦ Neighbourhood"
was that old " hearty spirit of social intercourse, constituting a
practical equality between man and man, which enabled all ranks
to mingle without offence and without suspicion in these public
ceremonials." t The object of the Church-ale was thoroughly
practical ; and in complete accordance with one great national
characteristic — that of voluntary contributions for public objects.
At the season of Whitsuntide, when the spring was calling up "a
spirit of life in every thing," there was a parish feast, which the
churchwardens had prepared for by an ale-brewing ; and the profit
that was made by filling the black-jacks of the jovial countrymen
was applied to the repairs of the church. Fancy-fairs have super
seded Whitsun-ales. We are a more decorous people than these
our ancestors, with their exuberant merry-makings for every season
— their sheep-shearing feasts, with cheese-cakes and warden-pipes,
— their Hock-cart at Harvest-home, — their Christmas, with the
Boar's-head and the Yule-log in the great hall, the tenants sitting
at their landlord's table, and the labourers and their wives and
children crowding in unreproved. All these indications of a kindly
spirit, not chilled by distinctions of rank, are gone. Let us strive
to revive the spirit in all forms fitting our own age.
Roger Ascham maintained that " to ride comely ; to run fair at
the tilt or ring ; to play at all weapons ; to shoot fair in bow or
surely in gun ; to vault lustily ; to run ; to leap ; to wrestle ; to
swim; to dance comely; to sing, and play of instruments cunningly;
to hawk ; to hunt ; to play at tennis ; and all pastimes generally
which be joined with labour, used in open place, and in the day
light, containing either some fit exercise for war or some pleasant
pastime for peace, be not only comely and decent, but also very
necessary for a courtly gentleman to use." The training of the
courtly gentlemen of England has, for three centuries, been accord
ing to the maxim of the wise old " Schoolmaster ; " and a better
training could never have been devised to produce the leaders of a
manly people. But the pastimes joined with labour— the vaulting,
running, leaping, wrestling, swimming— were as necessary for the
* Proclamation of Charles I., 1633. t " William Shakspere, a Biography."
ATHLETIC EXERCISES AND SPORTS. l8l
yeomen, the artisans, and the peasants, as for the gentlemen of
England. Such training, " fit exercise for war," has won our
country's battles, from Agincourt to Alma. Such training, " pleas
ant pastime for peace," has still done something for brotherly kind
ness amongst degrees of men whom fortune had too much
isolated. It was this frank and rough fellowship in their field
sports — their hunting, hawking, birding, fishing, otter-hunting ; it
was this bold rivalry in their hurling and their foot-ball, their wrest
ling and their single-stick, their archery, their land and water
quintain, which knitted the squire and the yeoman and the plough
man — the merchant, the artificer, and the sturdy apprentice, — in a
companionship which made them strong enough to defy the world
in Elizabeth's heroic time. The Puritans, who, when it came to
the issue whether they should be slaves or fight, fought as well as
the most reckless, made the mistake of trying to put down the rude
games of the people because they might lead to brawling and con
tention, and withdraw them from godliness. They were wiser in
their denunciations of gaming and gaming-houses, which were
amongst the corruptions of the town at this period. Sir John
Harrington wrote " A Treatise on Playe," in which he endeavours
to purify its abuses rather than banish it from the, houses of princes,
and out of their dominions, as " holy and wise preachers " desired.
If he were to show no indulgence to such recreations, he says, " I
should have all our young lords, our fair ladies, our gallant gentle
men, and the flower of all England against me." But he neverthe
less draws a picture of " one that spends his whole life in play, of
which there is too great choice," that sufficiently illustrates the pre
vailing madness : " In the morning, perhaps, at chess, and after his
belly is full then at cards ; and when his spirits wax dull at that,
then for some exercise of his arms at dice ; and being weary there
of, for a little motion of his body, to tennis ; and having warmed
him at that, then, to cool himself alittle, play at tables ; * and, being
disquieted in his patience for overseeing cinque and quatre, or
missing two or three foul blots, then to an interlude ; and so, as
one well compared it, like to a mill-horse treading always in the
same steps, be ever as far from a worthy and wise man as the circle
is from the centre." f
Drinking, dicing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, — the coarsest temp
tations to profligacy, — were not such abominations in the eyes of
the Puritans,' as " stage-plays, interludes, and comedies." The
* " Tables," backgammon. t " Nugae Antiqua;," vol. i. p- 198.
182 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
aversion which the early Reformers entertained towards the Mys
teries and Miracle Plays, were poured forth in fuller measure upon
the plays of profane subjects, which had now become the universal
amusements. The more it was said that some good example might
be learned out of them, the more furious were those who would
suppress them altogether. This was the great controversy of a cen
tury. It began when the drama was in its puling infancy , it grew
more violent during its erratic youth ; it ceased not when its glori
ous manhood had supplied the best answer to its enemies ; it tri
umphed in that drama's licentious decline. The history of the
stage is an interesting chapter of our social history, through several
generations. In the latter years of the reign of Elizabeth, when
the Puritans, zealous, persevering, and united, had possessed them
selves of much of the municipal power of the larger cities and
towns, there was frequent warfare between the civic authorities
and the performers of plays. The severe moralists called them
" caterpillars of the commonwealth ; " the law defined them as
" vagabonds." But the law, which mixed together in one common
opprobrium "all fencers, bearwards, common players in interludes,
minstrels, jugglers, pedlars, and petty chapmen," who wander
abroad and have not license of two justices of the peace, in what
shire they shall happen to wander,* — that same law excepted the
established companies of players, by making those only vagabonds
who were " not belonging to any baron of this realm, or towards
any other honourable person of greater degree." The number of
honourable persons who gave their sanction to companies of play
ers was sufficient to secure a sanction for dramatic performances,
wherever there was a demand for such amusements. But, notwith
standing these privileges, there was frequent opposition to the
acting of plays, especially in London ; and thus the earl of Leices
ter's players, of which company James Burbacce was the chief share
holder, being refused a license to perform within the walls of the
city, erected a theatre in the Blackfriars, in 1576. The original
theatrical performances were in t le inn-yards of the city, such as
the Belle-Savage. The better sort of spectators sat in the gallery
which connected the inn-chambers ; the larger number of the audi
ence stood in the open yard. Gradually, hostelries were converted
into theatres, and new buildings were erected for dramatic repre
sentations. They were multiplied in various parts of the town, and
especially in Southwark. The company of the Lord Chamberlain,
¦ 14 Eliz. c. 5.
STAGE PLAYS. 183
frho were the queen's household servants, had two theatres — the
Blackfriars and the Globe — the one for winter, the other for sum
mer perfonmances. Of this company Richard Burbage was the
chief actor, and William Shakspere was a shareholder in 1 589. This
we know from a document, in which the "poor players " address
lord Burleigh, affirming that they " have never given any cause of
displeasure, in-that they have brought into their plays matters of
state and religion, unfit to be handled by them, or presented to
lewd spectators." A commission had been issued to inquire
what companies of players had thus offended. This was the period
of the Marprelate controversy ; and the stage was made an instru
ment for attacking the Puritans. Nash boasted that " Vetus Co-
moedia had brought forth Divinity with a scratched face, holding her
heart as if she were sick." Spenser has described this period of
license as one of ugly barbarism and brutish ignorance, of scoffing
scurrility and scornful folly ; and he asks why " the man whom
Nature self had made to mock herself" — "our pleasant Willy "
chooses " to sit in idle cell " rather " than so himself to mockery
to sell." There can be little doubt that " the gentle spirit," thus
alluded to by the greatest poet of that time — a poet of enduring
greatness — was Shakspere. He had, we are assured, already
written two or three of his comedies, of which " unhurtful sport,
delight, and laughter " were the characteristics. A grander labour
was before him — the labour of preserving for all ages and all na
tions the influences of what has been truly called " great Eliza's
golden time ; " a time of free thought and heroic action, when in
dividual prosperity had not deadened the sympathy for national
greatness ; when men lived for their country as much as for them
selves ; a time of security and comparative peace, born out of a
long period of unrest. Of the great interpreter of the spirit of that
age we shall have again to speak, in a brief notice of the Elizabethan
Literature.
184 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER X.
Henry of Navarre succeeds to the throne of France. — English expeditions to aid Henry
IV. — A Parliament called. — Contests of the Crown and the Commons.— Intrigues of
Spain in Scotland. — Naval expeditions. — The taking of Cadiz. — Parliament. — Stat
utes regarding the Poor. — Progress of Poor Law Legislation.— Poverty and Vaga
bondage. — Labourers refusing to work at usual wages. — Egyptians and pretended
Egyptians. — Villa-nies of London. — Insecurity of the Suburbs. — Statutes against the
increase of Buildings. — Almshouses. — Incidental causes of Indigence. — Fluctuation
of Price. — Sickness. — Nuisances. — Fires. — Insum::i2:it household accommodation. —
Increase of town populations. — Crimes of towns — Police.
Henry of Navarre, the great champion of Protestantism, by a
tragical event was suddenly placed upon the throne of France. On
the 8th of August, 1589, Jacques Clement, a monk, stabbed Henry
III. ; and the king died of his wounds on the following day. Henry
IV. became the sovereign of a troubled kingdom, reduced by long
intestine conflicts to extreme weakness and misery. Henry III.,
when he fell under the blow of an assassin, was in arms against the
great catholic confederacy known as the League ; then exasperated
by the murder of their leader, the duke of Guise, and of t: e cardinal
his brother. The king was advancing against Paris with an army,
to put down this formidable party, and the rebellious citizens who
adhered to them; when the Dominican friar fearfully revenged the
crime which his monarch had perpetrated. Henry IV., on account
of his religion, had to encounter the most determined opposition to
his succession to the crown, although the undoubted heir. The
duke of Mayence, the brother of the murdered Guises, took the
command of the League. The king of Spain was ready with his
most strenuous aid, to keep a protestant out of the throne of France,
coveting probably that great kingdom for himself. Elizabeth of
England hesitated not to give her support to the Huguenot king,
who had so long battled with the most adverse fortune. She sent
him a supply of money — no large sum, it may seem in these
days; being only twenty-two thousand pounds, — but Henry declared
it was a larger treasure than he had ever seen. An English force,
under the command of lord WiUoughby, soon after landed at
Dieppe ; and the king was thus encouraged to continue a contest
which without this timely assistance might have been hopeless.
Henry, who had learnt the art of war in many a desperate
ENGLISH EXPEDITIONS TO AID HENRY IV. 185
struggle with the powerful enemies of the reformed religion — and
had early known how to win the love of all who served him, and to
gain new adherents to his cause, by his kind and generous nature,
his courage and endurance — was now in a position to risk a general
engagement with the enemy who, at his accession to the throne,
appeared well able to destroy him. At the great battle of Ivry a
gallant army followed his white plume to a complete victory. But
the duke of Parma, with the forces of Spain, came to the relief of
the League, and compelled Henry to raise the siege of Paris.
Elizabeth again sent him succour. In April, 1591, sir John Norris
landed at France with a. force of three thousand men ; and in July
of that year, another small army,' four thousand in number, under
the earl of Essex, was also sent to the aid of Henry. But the
duke of Parma, the most accomplished general of that time, again
came to the relief of the League ; and the expeditions of England
had no satisfactory result.
Robert Devereux was the son of a distinguished but unfortu
nate nobleman, Walter, earl of Essex, who died at Dublin in 1576,
" his hard estate having long ebbed even to the low water mark,"
as he described the issue of his ruinous attempt to subdue and col
onise a district of Ulster. He committed his eldest son, Robert,
who was horn in 1567, to the kindness of the queen, requesting
that he might be brought up in the household of lord Burleigh.
The youth was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, and with a
.handsome person, and many accomplishments, made his appearance
at court in 1584. He was related to the queen ; and the favourite,
Leicester, had become his &tep-father by marrying Letitia, the
widow of the lord Walter. Honours were showered upon him, to
an extent which provoked the jealousy of older courtiers, and in
creased the dangerous impetuosity of his own nature. We have
mentioned his participation in the attack upon Lisbon under Drake
and Norris. He had displeased the queen by joining this expedition
without her permission ; but on his return soon regained her favour.
Raleigh and Essex were each jealous of the influence of the
other ; and the Cecils, though they kept their feelings under sub
jection to their policy, could ill brook the confidence which the
queen placed in one so young and so indiscreet. The petted earl
claimed an almost exclusive right to the royal smiles ; and having
offered an insult to sir Charles Blount, to whom Elizabeth had
given some mark of approbation, a duel ensued, in which Essex was
wounded. The queen upon the occasion exclaimed, " By God's
186 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
death, it was fit that some one or other should take him down, and
teach him better manners, otherwise there would be no rule with
him." Such was Essex, at the age of twenty-four, when he was
appointed to the command of the expedition sent to the aid of
Henry IV. He conducted himself with his native gallantry; but
made a singular display of his want of discretion, by sending a
challenge to the governor of Rouen to meet him in single combat.
He had attempted the same revival of the worn-out spirit of chiv
alry in his Lisbon campaign. The only brother of Essex, Walter
Devereux, was killed in the unsuccessful warfare of 1591.
The naval enterprises of this year had no more fortunate issue.
A squadron of seven ships was sent, under the command of lord
Thomas Howard, to intercept the Indian fleet on its return to Spain.
But Philip was prepared ; and had fitted out a force of fifty-five sail
as an escort. The little English squadron fell in with this armament ;
and one of Howard's vessels became a Spanish prize. This was
the first ship that Spain had taken from England during the war.
It was commanded by sir Richard Grenville, the vice-admiral ; and
the memory of the unequal fight which this heroic captain sus
tained from three in the afternoon to day-break the next morn
ing, long abided with the English sailor as one of his noblest ex
amples of courage and resolution. Grenville was three times
wounded during the action, in which he again and again repulsed
the enemy, who constantly assailed him with fresh vessels. At
length the good ship lay upon the waters like a log. Her captain-
proposed to blow her up rather than surrender ; but the majority of
the crew compelled him to yield himself a prisoner. He died in a
few days, and his last words were,—" Here die I, Richard Gren
ville, with a joyful and quiet mind ; for that I have ended my life
as a true soldier ought to do, fighting for his country, queen, relig
ion, and honour."
The mode in which the war against Spain was carried on by
England made the wealth of the Indies a very insecure possession
to king Philip. Rich carracks were sometimes taken and some
times destroyed. Real treasures, such as fourteen hundred chests
of quicksilver, which were found in two ships captured by a Lon
doner, were abstracted from the riches of the Spaniard ; and the
Catholic king's dealings in a commodity which he sold at great
profit to his Indian subjects were also interrupted. Thomas White,
the Londoner, with his valuable quicksilver, also obtained a prize,
worthless in England, of two millions of papal bulls for indulgence^
CONTESTS OF THE CROWN AND THE COMMONS. 187
But this war was also costly to England ; and in 1593 Elizabeth
called a parliament, for she needed a subsidy. In this parliament
the Act against " Popish recusants," and the Act against the
Puritans, "to restrain the queen's subjects in their obedience,"*
were passed with little debate, but amidst manifest heartburnings.
The queen and the Commons were beginning to be at issue. Pre
rogative and Privilege were giving indications that the time was
approaching when they would come into actual conflict. There
was a temper growing up amongst the people which, if it appeared
feeble when compared with the ancient feuds between the sovereign
and the aristocracy, was, to some acute observers, the little cloud
which foretold the coming tempest. Cecil, in 1569, complained of
" the decay of obedience in civil policy, which being compared with
the fearfulness and reverence of all inferior estates to their superiors
in times past, will astonish any wise and considerate person, to
behold the desperation of reformation." There is a remarkable
passage in Sidney's " Arcadia," in which he, no doubt, seeks to
indicate the popular temper of his times : " When they began to
talk of their griefs, never bees made such confused humming : the
town-dwellers demanding putting down of imposts, the country
fellows laying out of commons : some would have the prince keep
his court in one place, some in another: all cried out to have new
counsellors ; but when they should think of any new, they liked
them as well as any other that they could remember ; especially
they would have the treasure so looked unto, as that he should
never need to take any more subsidies. At length they fell to
direct contrarieties. For the artisans they would have corn and
wine set at a lower price, and bound to be kept so still ; the plough
men, vine-labourers, and the farmers would have none of that. The
countrymen demanded that every man might be free in the chief
towns ; that could not the burgesses like of. The peasants would
have all the • gentlemen destroyed; the citizens, especially such as
cooks, barbers, and those other that lived most on gentlemen, would
but have them reformed. And of each side were like divisions,
one neighbourhood beginning to find fault with another, but no
confusion was greater than of particular men's likings and dislik-
ings : one dispraising such a one, whom another praised, and
demanding Such a one to be punished, whom the other would have
exalted. No less ado was there about choosing him who should
be their spokesman. The finer sort of burgesses, as merchants,
* See Chapter IX. p. 170.
1 88 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
prentices, and cloth-workers, because of their riches, disdaining the
baser occupations : and they, because of their number, as much
disdaining them ; all they scorning the country men's ignorance,
and the country men suspecting as much their cunning." This
picture of a state of things from which the " regimenting " of the
Plantagenets and the two first Tudors had passed away, presents
a vivid notion of the keen and jealous competition of an industrious
people amongst themselves ; and the grudging submission which
citizen and peasant now yielded to those who had once lorded it
over their traditionary liberties. Out of such " contrarieties " is
gradually formed that power of public opinion which no statesman
can safely despise. When the chaotic elements have grown into
form and substance — when there is liberty of speech and liberty of
writing — representative government becomes the surest basis of
social order. But in the first rough utterances of public opinion
rulers only hear prophetic sounds of coming woe. Such a condition
of society as Sidney has described, of which the more daring spirits
in the House of Commons were the exponents, was calculated to
precipitate a contest between the Crown and the people's repre
sentatives. But the strength was as yet all on one side; and
Elizabeth was too sagacious to use her strength unnecessarily.
There was a discontented temper amongst some members of the
parliament of 1593, and the queen put it down with a haughtiness
which looks like unmitigated despotism. When the Commons
asked, according to ancient usage, for Liberty of Speech, the lord
keeper replied, in the name of the queen, " Privilege of speech is
granted, but you must know what privilege you have ; not to speak
everyone what he listeth, or what comethin his brain to utter that;
but your privilege is, aye or no. Wherefore, Mr. Speaker, her
majesty's pleasure is, that if you perceive any idle heads, which will
not stick to hazard their own estates ; which will meddle with
reforming the Church, and transforming the Commonwealth ; and
do exhibit any bills to such purpose, that you receive them not,
until they be viewed and considered by those who it is fitter should
consider of such things, and can better judge of them." A few
bold members were not daunted by this temper ; -but prepared a
bill for entailing the SuGcession to the Crown. This, of all other
subjects, was the most disagreeable to the queen ; and four of the
members were committed to prison for this hardihood. The cour
age of the Puritans was not subdued by this severity, for Mr.
Morice brought in a bill for correcting the abuses of the Ecclesias-
CONTESTS OF THE CROWN AND THE COMMONS. 1 89
tical Court. The queen sent for the Speaker, who delivered a
message to the House, that her majesty commanded that " no bills
touching matters of state, or reformation in causes ecclesiastical,
be exhibited." The same day Morice was committed to custody
and, according to some statements, was in confinement when he
died in 1 596. In a dignified letter to Burleigh, the persecuted Morice
says, " That I am no more hardly handled, I impute, next unto God,
.to your honourable good-will and favour I see no cause in
my conscience to repent me of what I have done, nor to be dis
mayed, although grieved, by this restraint of my liberty; for I
stand for the maintenance of the honour of God and of my prince,
and for the preservation of public justice and the liberties of my
country against wrong and oppression ; being well content, at her
majesty's good pleasure and commandment, (whom I beseech God
long to preserve in all princely felicity,) to suffer and abide much
more. But I had thought that, the judges ecclesiastical, being
charged in the great council of the realm to be dishonorers of God
and of her majesty ; perverters of law and public justice ; and
wrong-doers unto the liberties and freedoms of all her majesty's
subjects, by their extorted oaths, wrongful imprisonments, lawless
subscription and unjust absolutions ; would rather have sought
means to be cleared of this weighty accusation, than to shroud
themselves under the suppressing of the complaint and shadow of
mine imprisonment." Such men as Morice built up the constitu-
. tional freedom whose foundations were still strong, however decayed
the old fabric. Upon the matter of the subsidy, the Commons
met the wishes of the Crown, but with evident reluctance. Francis
Bacon, then rising into importance, made a strong speech against
the amount of the subsidy, and for some time lost his chance of
court favour.
The contest between the Crown and the Commons, in the ques
tion of the succession, was the renewal of a controversy which had
been conducted with some bitterness in 1566. There had been
other occasions on which the queen resisted the freedom with
which members uttered opinions which seemed to limit her prerog
ative. Mr. Yelverton, in 1576, said that princes were to have
their prerogatives, but yet to be confined within reasonable limits ;
the queen could not of herself make laws, neither could she break
them. In 1576, Peter Wentworth complained that the liberty of
free speech had been infringed ; and he went so far as to say,
" none is without fault, no, not our noble queen, — but has com-
I90 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
mitted great and dangerous faults to herself." The Commons
themselves consigned Wentworth to the Tower; but after a
month's imprisonment, the queen said she- remitted her displeasure
towards him. Before we join in the common cry against the des
potism of Elizabeth as a personal attribute, we must bear in mind
that in those days the doctrine of ministerial responsibility for
every act of the Crown was utterly unknown. There was no in
tervening authority to break the force of a collision between the
sovereign and the parliament. Elizabeth was responsible to pub
lic opinion for her public acts, and she almost invariably took these
acts upon herself. We need therefore scarcely wonder at occa
sional displays of temper when any member made an attack upon
her administration of affairs. Mr. Hallam has truly remarked
upon the conflicts between the Crown and the parliament, that " if
the former often asserted the victory, the latter sometimes kept
the field, and was left on the whole a gainer at the close of the
campaign." * Whatever might have been the desire of the Crown
to narrow the powers of parliament, its constitutional authority
was universally recognised. Had the monarchy under Elizabeth
been so wholly despotic as Hume, the defender of the divine right
of the next race of kings, has chosen to maintain, Harrison, in
l577, would not have dared to write the following unqualified
statement of the nature of parliament : " This house hath the
most high and absolute power of the realm ; for thereby kings and
mighty princes have from time to time been deposed from their
thrones ; laws either enacted or abrogated ; offenders of all sorts
punished ; and corrupted religion either disannulled or reformed.
To be short, whatsoever the people of Rome did in their centu-
riatis or tribunitiis comitiis, the same is and may be done by au
thority of our parliament-house, which is the head and body of all
the realm, and the place wherein everv particular person is -in
tended to be present, if not by himself, yet by his advocate or
attorney. For this cause also any thing there enacted is not to
be misliked, but obeyed of all men, without contradiction or
grudge." f
The war of Spain against England never lost its original char
acter of a war of religious hatred, in which the utter destruction of
the Protestant queen was the great object to be kept in view. In
1593 Elizabeth was to be assailed through Scotland. Philip was
conspiring with the earls of Angus, Errol, and Huntley, to send an
* " Constitutional History," chap. v. t " Description of England."
INTRIGUES OF SPAIN IN SCOTLAND. 191
army to operate with them in re-establishing Romanism in Scot
land, and to march upon England with a united force for the same
purpose. This scheme to betray Scotland to Spain, and then to
subdue England, had been the policy of the Roman Catholic fac
tion for several years. The lord-keeper, in his speech to the par
liament in 1593, says, " A greater part of the nobility in Scotland
be combined in this conspiracy, and they have received great sums
of money for their services therein This conspiracy
the king of Scots was hardly brought to believe, but that her ma
jesty advertised him thereof, having entertained intelligence thereof,
as she hath of all things done and intended in these parts." This
vigilance on the part of the English government was necessary for
its own safety ; for James, with the weakness and cunning of his
nature, suspected Elizabeth of a design to promote discord be
tween himself and his friends — a design which many historians
take for granted in these transactions, as in every other between
the governments. A writer, who is too well informed to be led
away by these historical prejudices, says, with regard to this plot
of the Catholic nobles, that when the truth became too apparent
to the Scottish king "to admit of denial, his childish fondness for
some of the very persons who were striving to ruin him, involved
his country in troubles and bloodshed, and called down upon him
many an indignant remonstrance from his neighbour queen." *
James at length took arms against the " Spaniolised rebels," and
this danger was past. But Philip had in his armoury another
Weapon against Elizabeth. He bribed her domestic physician,
Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, to poison her. This man had
been taken prisoner in one of the ships of the Armada, and his
skill in medicine, according to the imperfect knowledge of that
time, recommended him to the queen. He soon availed himself of
his position to become a spy of the Spanish ministers. The Count
de Fuentes accepted the offer of Lopez to poison the queen for a
reward of fifty thousand crowns ; and he urged the mediciner to
complete the business speedily, " that the king may have a merry
Easter." Lopez had two Portuguese refugees as confederates.
They were convicted, and hanged on the 7th of June, 1 594. The
discovery of this atrocious scheme was due to the perseverance of
Essex. In 1593 Henry IV. made a formal abjuration of those Protes
tant opinions for which he had so long gallantly fought. Without
* Bruce, Introduction to " Letters of Elizabeth and James " D. xv.
192 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
this concession he would probably never have succeeded in tran-
quillising France. But he did not, as many apostates have done,
persecute the religion which he had forsaken. The edict of Nan
tes, by which he granted toleration to the Protestants, in 1598,
may advantageously contrast with the penal laws to which the Ro
man Catholics of England were so long subjected. Elizabeth,
although displeased at the position which Henry had taken, still
continued to render him aid in his war with Spain — the common
cause of each country. An English naval armament assisted him,
in 1594, in taking Brest from the Spaniards. In the attack upon
this fort, sir Martin Frobisher was mortally wounded. Two other
of the heroes of 1588 fell victims to disease, in an expedition
against the Spanish settlements in the West Indies. Sir Francis
Drake and sir John Hawkins sailed in 1595, with six of the queen's
ships, and twenty others, fitted out at private charge, having on
board a considerable land force, commanded by sir Thomas Basker
ville. They made an assault on Porto Rico ; but they were
repulsed. Hawkins soon after died. Drake went forward, and
landed at Nombre di Dios, in the isthmus of Darien. The success
which had attended his early exploits had now deserted him. The
Spaniards were prepared, as at Porto Rico. The enterprise failed,
and the great admiral succumbed to sickness and to disappoint
ment. Baskerville returned home, after having fought with a Span-
'ish fleet off Cuba, with no decisive results on either side.
The year 1 596 was signalised by an expedition against Philip's
European dominions. He was making preparations for another
invasion of England ; and the lord-high admiral, Howard, of Effing
ham, counselled that the blow should be anticipated by an attack
upon Spain herself. Burleigh, always cautious, but more cautious
in his declining years, was opposed to so costly and doubtful an
enterprise. But there was a youthful counsellor with influence
greater than Burleigh's, whose sentence was for the boldest war
like policy. Essex prevailed ; and was appointed commander of
the expedition, but somewhat restrained by a council of war. The
English fleet sailed from Plymouth on the ist of June, 1596. The
harbour of Cadiz was known to be full of shipping ; and after an
attempt, which failed, to land at St. Sebastian's, it was determined
to attack the galleys in the bay. Essex, when the council had
somewhat unwillingly come to this determination, threw his hat
into the sea, in the extravagance of his joy ; and, although against
the orders which had given the honour of leading the attack to
THE TAKING OF CADIZ. 1 93
Raleigh and lord Thomas Howard, broke through the midst of the
fleet in which he had been stationed, and was soon in the heat of
the action. The Spanish ships fled to the protection of the guns
at the fort of Puntal, where some were set on fire by 'their own
crews. The English admiral refused to accept a price as the ran
som of the remainder ; and they were all burnt by the Spanish
commander. Essex now led his men to an attack upon the town
of Cadiz, which was strongly fortified. The daring of this young
leader called forth the impetuous courage of his " war-proof " Eng
lish. At the moment when the issue of the attack seemed doubt
ful, Essex threw his own standard over the wall; "giving withal a
most hot assault upon the gate, where, to save the honour of their
ensign, happy was he that could first leap down from the wall, and
with shot and sword make way through the thickest press of the
enemy." The town was taken, and given up to plunder. But Es
sex, departing somewhat from the brutal spirit of ancient warfare,
exerted himself as strenuously to prevent slaughter as he had
done in leading the attack. The town was burnt, after the unhappy
inhabitants had been permitted to withdraw. It was the wish of
Essex to hold Cadiz ; but, he was over-ruled by the council. Nor
was he more successful in receiving their support for other enter
prises which he proposed . The fleet returned to England, with no
greater success than the large destruction which had been effected
of the resources of Spain, whose loss was estimated at twenty
millions of ducats. Essex wrote a " Censure " upon the conduct
of the expedition, in which he blamed the lord admiral and Ra
leigh. His impetuous nature was calculated to draw down oppo<-
sition, even in the hour of the most brilliant success. For such a
teat as the capture of Cadiz he was eminently fitted ; and in being
restrained in carrying forward his victory some injustice was prob
ably inflicted upon him. In our time, what Essex did at Cadiz has
been described as " the most brilliant military exploit that was
achieved on the Continent by English arms during the long inter
val which elapsed between the battle of Agincourt and that of
Blenheim." *
In the following year another naval armament was fitted out
against Spain. A fleet sailed from Plymouth, on the 9th of July,
1597 ; but was driven back by a storm, in which many of the ships
were disabled and sunk. The remainder of this shattered squad
ron sailed again on the 17th of August. The commanders, Essex
* Macaulay, " Essays," art. " Lord Bacon."
Vol. III.— 13
194
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and Raleigh, had disagreements ; and the only success that saved
the expedition from disgrace was the profitable capture of three
ships returning from the Havannah.
A new- parliament was called to meet on the 24th of October,
1597, which sate till the 9th of February, 1598. In this parliament
some of the most important statutes of domestic policy were passed,
which require a detailed notice ; illustrating, as they all do, the
condition of society at that period ; and some having held their
places in our system of economical law, even to the present time.
When the legislators of the reign of Edward VI. had suddenly
repealed their wicked and foolish Statute of Vagabondage,* they
had discovered that something more effectual than severity was
necessary to be applied to the large number of the population who
were unable to work, who were unwilling to work, or for whom no
work was provided. They saw that there was a class for whom
some public provision must be appointed — a class who would not
be content to starve whilst beggary or thievery offered a last re
source. The nation, generally, was growing richer in the advance
of profitable industry ; but there was a large body who found no
place in the ranks of the industrious. The feudal organisation was
gone. The more healthful organisation of free labour was essen
tially imperfect. All the irregular modes of subsistence which be
longed to the transition period, when the unreclaimed portion of
the land was, to some extent, for common use, were passing away.
In the towns, the organisation of trades, with their strict laws of
apprenticeship and their guilds, excluded from competition with
the recognised artisan all those who had not the claim of caste —
for caste it was, when a workman must have been brought up to
a calling, and could follow that calling and no other. The popu
lation of England at the end of the sixteenth century was probably
not far short of five millions. Some of the more fortunate of the
humbler classes were forcing their way into wealth; for although
there was a jealous system of exclusion against a general invasion
of the domain of profitable employment, the more resolute spirits,
having conquered some small vantage-ground, could readily win a
higher position by never-ceasing toil and thrift. One of the wits of
this age who, as he says, " had spent many years in studying how
to live, and lived a long time without money," looks around him
and sees how some thrive whom he considers as base men : " I
cailed to mind a cobbler that was worth five hundred pounds ; an
* See ante, vol. ii. p. 469.
PROGRESS OF POOR-LAW LEGISLATION. 1 95
hostler that had built a goodly inn, and might dispense forty pounds
yearly by his land ; a carman, in a leather pilch, that had whipped
a thousand pounds out of his horse tail." * The way to wealth
was open to the meanest, if they could find an entrance into the
road. But there was a large body who never found the way even
to a bare subsistence. It was impossible to have been otherwise
in a country where the local divisions that belonged to the times
before the Conquest were still so rigidly preserved ; and where the
means of communication were still- so imperfect. In such a con
dition of society, with the larger number of the more fortunate
prospering, and a comparatively few, but still a large body, driven
into vagabondage, it was necessary to do something more than en
force the old terrors of the stocks and the whip. A legal provis
ion for the poor, supplied by the assessment of all property, was
perfected at the close of Elizabeth's reign by bold and far-sighted
legislation. This was the result of a series of experiments which
arc in themselves a conclusive indication of the gradual advance
of society to a condition sufficiently stable to dispense with tem
porary expedients, to build up a system which would endure through
all political vicissitudes, and without which the inequalities of mod
ern competitive life would be fatal to the security of the whole
social fabric.
The tentative process by which the principle of a public con
tribution for the relief ofthe poor was first approached, is distinctly
set forth in the Statute of 1551-2.! A book was to be kept
for each parish, in which should be entered the names of the
householders and of the impotent poor. In Whitsun week two or
more persons were to be appointed as collectors of alms ; and on
the Sunday following, when the people are at church, "the said
collectors shall gently ask and demand of every man and woman,
what they of their charity will give weekly towards the relief of the
poor." The sums so collected weekly were to be distributed by
the same collectors, " after such sort that the more impotent may
have the more help, and such as can get part of their living have
the less ; and by the discretion of the collector to be put in such
labour as they be able to do." If any person, being able, refused
to contribute, he was to be gently exhorted by the parson and church
wardens ; and if their exhortations failed, he was to be sent for by
the bishop, to be induced and persuaded to so charitable a deed.
* Nash, " Pierce Pennilesse," p. 6. t 5 & 6 Edw. VI. «.. 2.
196 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
A Statute of 1555, and another of 1557, continue to provide for the
impotent poor by weekly collections, the principle being held " good
and beneficial for the common wealth of this realm." The same
principle is maintained by the Statute of 1562-3 ;* but there is to be
now something more stringent than the exhortations of parson,
churchwardens, and bishop. " If any person of his froward or wil
ful mind shall obstinately refuse to give weekly to the relief of the
poor according to his ability," the bishop had power to bind him to
appear at the next sessions, when the justices, if he continued
obstinate, might determine what sum he should pay, and commit
him to prison if he persisted in his refusal. This first assertion of
the principle of a compulsory assessment of property for the relief
of the destitute is the foundation of the system of Poor Laws,
which has endured through all the changes of three centuries. In
a few years the general application of the principle was to be
gradually effected by a far more perfect machinery. In 1572-3 was
passed " An Act for the punishment of vagabonds, and for relief of
the poor and impotent." t It repeals all previous enactments by
one sweeping law, in which the old principle of severity against
" rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars " receives little mitigation,
but which also emphatically declares that poor, aged, and impotent
persons should be provided for. The justices of the peace in their
several divisions are to use diligent inquiry as to all such impotent
poor ; to make a register of the names of those who were born
within such divisions, or have been living there by alms within
three preceding years ; to assign them convenient places for their
habitations, if the parish does not provide for them ; to assess the
inhabitants of such division to a weekly charge ; and to appoint
overseers of the poor, who shall have the power of setting to work
all such diseased or impotent persons who are not wholly past
labour. In this Act the system of parochial administration was
not fully developed ; the justices were to make the assessment.
By an Act of 1575-6 a stock of wool and hemp was to be provided
for setting the poor at work ; and " houses of correction " were to
be established.^ The law remained in this state of transition till
1 597-8, when it took the form in which it subsisted, with various
slight modifications, till within the last quarter of a century. The
Statute of the 39th Elizabeth provides for the appointment of over
seers of the poor in every parish, who were to make a rate with
the consent of the justices. This Act " approximates very closely
• { Elii. c. 4. t 14 Eliz. c. 5. { 18 Eliz. c. 3.
POVERTY AND VAGABONDAGE. 197
to that passed four years afterwards (the 43rd of Elizabeth), which
still continues in force, and is the foundation and ground work of
our English Poor Law."* But the Act of the 39th Elizabeth, which
makes so wise and merciful a provision for the helpless portion of
the community, was accompanied by " An Act for the punishment
of rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars." This Act repealed all
previous Statutes. It prescribed the whipping, the stocks, and the
passing from parish to parish, as of old; but it empowered the justices
assembled at quarter-sessions to erect houses of correction within
their respective counties or cities, and to provide funds for the
maintenance of the same. The houses of correction were for the
employment of vagrants till they could be placed in some service ;
or, if infirm of body, in some alms-house. Under the law of Henry
VIIL destitution was treated as a crime, and wandering poverty
was to be stocked and scourged out of existence. By the law of
Elizabeth the impotent poor were nurtured ; the sturdy mendicant
was punished. The spirit of Christian charity had §ystematised a
provision for the poor, in each parish, even while the justices, under
the Act of 1572-3 had the power of assessing the district. Stubbes,
writing in 1 583, says, " The sabbath-day of some is well observed,
namely, in hearing the word of God read, preached, and interpreted ;
in private and public prayers ; in singing of godly psalms ; in cele
brating the sacraments; and in collecting for the poor and indi
gent."! Individual benevolence might have mitigated much suffer
ing by its merciful zeal ; but legalised benevolence, by including
alike the warm-hearted and the grudging, compelled every owner
of property to recognise the absolute claims of the impotent poor
to a small portion in the bounty of the All-giver.
The principle of compulsory assessment was immediately pro
ductive of the parochial despotism that has always attached to any
Law of Settlement, even in the mitigated form which the law has
assumed in modern times. Long before " the Settlement Act " of
Charles II., their own parish was the boundary within which the
poor might endeavour to obtain a livelihood ; beyond that circle
they could not pass. That Act recited that, " by reason of some
defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from
one parish to another ; and therefore do endeavour to settle them
selves in those parishes where there is the best stock." By "the
best stock " is meant the largest amount of capital ; and in those
* Sir G. Nicholls, " History of the English Poor-law," vol. i. p. 185.
t " Anatomy," &c, page 154.
198 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
parishes where there was the best stock the funds for the mainten
ance of labour were most readily unlocked for the labourers there
established. Of course other poor people would endeavour there
to settle themselves. A natural struggle took place between those
who wanted to come in, and the authorities who were resolved to
keep them out. The dread that under-tenants might become
chargeable led to a domestic inquisition of a very tyrannous nature.
At Leicester a search was made every month to discover under
tenants. At Brighton no incomerwas to be allowed until the con
stable and churchwardens had ascertained that he was of sufficient
ability not to be likely to become burthensome to the town. A new
tailor comes to Lyme, and he is met by a peremptory notice of a
day on which he is to depart. The jury in that ] lace even present
a man who "harboureth his wife's sister."* We may also be as
sured that, armed with two such laws as those of the 39th Eliza
beth, the justices and overseers often confounded the class that was
to be relieved with the class that was to be punished. After the
passing of these Statutes, instructions were issued by the judges
at the assizes for carrying out their provisions, f They are very
minute; and their precise directions were no doubt useful. But
the definition of " a rogue," however intelligible to those who were
practically acquainted with the species, must have been liable to
the harshest misconstruction. The articles thus begin : — " A ro°ue
that saith he was* born in such a town, in such a county, he ou"ht
to be sent thither." The ninth article runs thus : " No man is to
be put out of the town where he dwelleth, nor to be sent to the
place of birth or last dwelling, but a rogue." The third article
says, " If the husband and wife have a house, and either of them
rogue about, they must be sent to the town where that house is ;
and so of inmates." The verb may explain what the noun leaves
doubtful. To " rogue about " was to be living from hand to mouth,
even if that living was derived from occasional labour; to be with
out regular service under a master ; to be without a settled abode
and a permanent occupation. The old definition of " a rocue " is,
" an idle sturdy beggar that wanders up and down from place to
place without a license."}: One statutory definition of the class
is, " Persons whole and mighty in body, but having neither land
• See these, and numerous other instances, in Roberts's " Southern Counties," pp. 179
—l84» t These articles, as addressed to the constables of Swanboume, Bucks, are given i.
the " Verney Papers," published bv the Camden Society, p, 88.
X PhiUips, " World of Words," 1696.
LABOURERS REFUSING TO WORK AT USUAL WAGES. 199
nor master, nor able to give an account of how they get their liv
ing." * Shakspere's Autolycus is a specimen of the clever species
of the genus. When the chronicler describes " a great parcel of
rogues encompassing the queen's coach near Islington one evening,
when she was riding abroad to take the air, which seemed to put
her in some disturbance," f we must not conclude that they were
thieves who contemplated an attack upon the queen. They were
" masterless men," some "valiant and sturdy rogues," but the
greater number having no permanent occupation, and gradually
swelling the army of professional beggars and robbers. The
rogue, as distinguished from the mere vagabond and beggar, was
perhaps more particularly comprised in the busy-idle classes which
are minutely recited in the Statute : " All persons calling them
selves scholars, going about begging ; all seafaring men pretending
losses of their ships and goods on the sea ; all idle persons going
about either begging, or using any subtle craft or unlawful games
and plays, or feigning to have knowledge in physiognomy, palmis
try, or other like crafty science, or pretending that they can tell
destinies, fortunes, or such other fantastical imaginations ; all fen
cers, bear-wards, common players and minstrels; all jugglers."
But the poor itinerant tradesman came under the same definition.
" Tinkers, pedlers, and petty chapmen " were consigned to the
constable by this sweeping statute. Necessary as the severities
might be for " all persons that wander abroad begging, pretending
losses by fire or otherwise ; and all persons pretending them
selves to be Egyptians," there was a bitter relic of the old tyr
anny of capital over labour when those severities were applied to
"all wandering persons and common labourers, able in body, and
refusing to work for the wages commonly given." The Statute of
the 5th Elizabeth, entitled " An Act touching clivers ordersof arti
ficers, labourers, servants of husbandry, and apprentices," repeals
all- previous statutes, chiefly because the wages limited are in many
instances too small, and not answerable to that time, on account of
the great advancement of prices. The rates of wages were there
fore to be settled annually by the justices in sessions assembled.
The rate so settled, having been approved by the Privy Council,
was to be proclaimed by the sheriff ; and the payer and the re
ceiver of higher wages were subjected to fine and imprisonment.
The Act which declares all able-bodied labourers, wandering through
their refusal to work for the wages commonly given, to be " rogues
* 14 Eliz. c. 5. t Stow.
200 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and vagabonds," and subjects them to cruel punishments, was an
outrage upon the freedom of labour, which was as certain to be
ineffectual as the obsolete statutes for an invariable determina
tion of the rate of wages. The general impulse of society towards
industrial improvement was sure to free the labourers from these
galling restraints, step by step, as the true principle of the common
interest of employer and employed came to be better understood,
and more honestly carried out.
The Statute of the 39th Elizabeth includes amongst Rogues and
Vagabonds, " all persons pretending themselves to be Egyptians."
The Egyptians, or Gipsies, themselves, were to be dealt with by
the very summary process under the statute of Philip and Mary,
by w'lich, being declared felons, they were liable to be hanged.
But the pretended . Egyptians, by an early statute of Elizabeth,
were also recognised as felons : " Every person which shall be
seen or found in any company or fellowship of vagabonds commonly
called Egyptians, or counterfeiting, transforming, or disguising
themselves by their apparel, speech, or other behaviour, like unto
such vagabonds, and shall continue and remain in the same by the
space of one month, every such person shall be deemed and judged
a felon, and suffer the pains of death."* This special Act, to meet
a condition of life which we might otherwise consider most rare and
exceptional, shows us that England was still a country offering
facilities for existence to those who elected to go forth from the
restraints of civilisation into the extremest license of vagabond
age. The Robin Hood class had passed away with the Planta-
genets. A lower class of denizens of the woods, with nothing
heroical about them, had grown with the growth of a population
amongst which the principle of competition had wholly superseded
the feudal organisation. The bold spirits of the time of Elizabeth,
who spurned the base mechanical arts, had many outlets of honoura
ble employment. The wild profligate who had spent all his means
had a new career opened to him, when the rovers became captains
and admirals : " He will go to the sea, and tear the gold out of the
Spaniards' throats." + But the most reckless of the large number
to whom regular labour was misery went out of the towns and
villages to the wealds and heaths ; discoloured their skins ; gave
an oriental fashion to their ragged apparel ; learnt the gipsy-dialect ;
and put on the gipsy-nature of cheating and pilfering. To some
minds there must have been a charm in this mode of life, proscribed
• s Eliz. c. 20. t Nash.
VILLANIES OF LONDON. 201
as it was, far beyond the mere desire of a precarious subsistence.
The dramatic poets saw its sunny side ; and when we read " The
Beggars' Bush" of Fletcher, in which the whole aspect of vagrancy
has a freshness which makes it look like an essential part of nature,
we need not wonder that " pretended Egyptians " were numerous
enough to have a statute to themselves. There is another Act of
Elizabeth which is also an indication of an altered condition of
society. * It sets forth that lewd and licentious persons '' have, of
late days, wandered up and down in all parts of the realm, under the
rrame of soldiers and mariners, abusing the title of that honourable
profession to countenance their wicked behaviour, and do continually
assemble themselves, weaponed, in the highways and elsewhere, in
troops, -to the great terror and astonishment of her majesty's true
subjects." There had been ten years of war with Spain at the time
of passing this Act ; and in the long interval between the military
service of feudality and the standing army of modern times, troops
were occasionally raised for a special warfare, such as the expedi
tion to Cadiz; and whether with pockets filled with plunder, or
penniless, they were returned to their parishes, and were told, by
this same statute, " to betake themselves to some lawful course of
life, on pain of being reputed felons." This was hard measure, and
we need not be surprised that " under the name of soldiers and
mariners," some ofthe honourable profession were a real terror to
the true men, whilst the habitual thieves and beggars became their
counterfeits. In this case, as in most others where punishment
was first resorted to as the cure of an evil, severity alone was found
to be ineffectual ; and, four years afterwards, the parishes were
required by statute to pay a weekly sum, to be determined by the
justices towards the relief of sick, hurt, and maimed soldiers and
mariners, having been in the queen's service. If they were found
begging, after receiving such allowance, they were to forfeit all
claim, and be deemed rogues and vagabonds. +
The latter period of the reign of Elizabeth was a time when the
ability to read was widely extended, compared with the general
education of the previous century. All readers, especially those
with whom study is not habitual, want amusing reading ; and there
were several smart writers then ready to supply this demand. The
Puritans denounced, as " invented by Belzebub," the little novels,
and other " toys andbableries " which these writers produced ; and
the more they railed at the Greenes and Dekkers who supplied this
* 39 EKz. t. 17. t43 Eliz. c. 3.
202 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ephemeral literature, the more their productions were purchased.
These men, who lived amongst the irregular frequenters of taverns
and play-houses, had a keen eye for observing- the various forms of
crime and imposture which presented themselves in London ; and
their racy descriptions of " Coneycatching," and of the more daring
" Villainies," were amongst the most popular of pamphlets. We
sho-ild do great injustice to the morals of the community if we
were to conclude from thes,e representations that society was then
mainly composed of two classes — the rogues and the gulls. The
natural attraction of the subject led to the production of such de
scriptions in an age before police-reports ; and the amplitude of the
details has induced some in recent times to assign far too large a
proportion of folly and roguery to the composition of Elizabethan
society. Cutpurses there were in abundance. There were gangs
of thieves " under Pancras " and at " Hvde Park Corner."* Fleet
wood, the recorder, is wearied out of his equanimity by the multi
tude of rogues for whom he has to make search. When he catch
es them, and the gallows is ready, gentlemen of the court can
baulk justice by reprieves. t Within the city walls there is watch
and ward, not altogether ineffectual ; but the suburbs are wholly
unprotected. The northern side of London and Westminster is
almost wholly fields and woods ; and the " ways over the country,"
from Finsbury-field, covered with trees and windmills, to Kilburn,
with its solitary priory, surrounded by a real " St. John's Wood,"
are familiar to robbers by day and night. The '• Marribone jus
tice," who lives in these rural parts far away from city magistrates,
is the warrant-granter of the district.}: But the metropolis and its
suburbs of the days of Fielding could match their robbers for num
bers and audacity against those of Fleetwood. Let us not imagine
chat the times of Elizabeth were marked by more than usual enor
mities. The gallows then consumed about three hundred annual
victims ; but the hangmen of Henry VIIL had to operate upon two
thousand in each average year. Hanging was the one remedy ;
and its efficacy did not begin to be much doubted till the present
century. The increase of London through the rapid progress of
commerce, and of Westminster as the seat of government and of
legal administration, constantly brought thither a large class of
" valiant anJ sturdy rogues, masterless men, vagrants, and maimed
• Norden's " Essex," Camden Society.
t See Ellis, First Series, vol. ii. pp. 283, 291, 299.
J Jonson, " E\*/y Man in his Humour."
STATUTES AGAINST INCREASE OF BUILDINGS. 203
soldiers."* Splendid houses connected the City with Westminster,
some of which, in the Strand, were standing at the beginning of
the present century. But a dense population was beginning to
crowd into obscure alleys. In 1580 a proclamation was issued
against the erection of new buildings in London. The number of
beggars, it alleged, was increased ; there was greater clanger of
fire and of the plague ; the old open spaces for walking and for
sports were enclosed ; the trouble of governing so great a multitude
was become too great. By a statute of 1593 it was providedthat-
no new buildings should be erected in London and Westminster,
or within three miles, unless they were fit for the habitation of
persons assessed at 5/. in goods or 3/. in land. Houses were not
to be converted into separate dwellings. By the increase of build
ings, it is said, "great infection of sickness, and dearth of victuals
and fuel, hath grown and ensued, and many idle, vagrant, and
wicked persons have harboured there." In 1602, the Act had been
so ineffectual, that a proclamation was issued for pulling down
newly-built houses. " Little was done," says Stow, " and small
effect followed." The increase of the poorer classes was sought
to be prevented in the country districts upon the same principle.
By a statute of 1589, no cottage was to be erected, unless four
acres of land were perpetually annexed to the holding ; and one
family only was to occupy the tenement. The system might be a
temporary expedient ; but long experience, and in the case of
Ireland bitter adversity, have shown how incompatible is the
principle of small holdings of land with the proper cultivation of
the country, and the inevitable increase of population as a genera
tion succeeds that must be driven forth into irregular means of
subsistence. It was in the merciful spirit which produced the Act for the
relief of the Poor nf the 39th Elizabeth, that, in the same year, the
Legislature placed Hie endowment of hospitals,or alms-houses,upon
a new footing. By a special Act of Parliament the earl of Leices
ter had been enabled to found his hospital at Warwick, — an insti
tution which still remains to make the observer doubt whether the
favourite of the great queen was altogether so bad a man as his
torians have chosen to represent. Other hospitals had been
founded by special Hcense under the Great Seal. By this AcLany
person might, within twenty years, found and establish, with an
adequate provision of 'and, "hospitals, maisons de Dieu, abiding-
* Stow.
204 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
places, or houses of correction, as well for the sustentation and
relief of the maimed poor, needy, or impotent people, as to set the
poor to work ; and from time to time place therein such head and
members, and such number of poor, as to him shall seem conven
ient." * By an Act of the 21st James I., this statute was made
perpetual. Such foundations, which are numerous throughout the
land, are enduring monuments of the kindly spirit of our ancestors ;
and others have been established in the same spirit by associations
¦ in modern times. The purposes of many of the old endowments
have been abused; their funds have been misapplied; but the-
value of such institutions has been universally felt as decent re
treats for the unprositerous — resting-places, before the final resting-'
place, where poverty may exist without degradation.
As early as 1563 the Legislature had declared that the Statutes
for the regulation of Wages could not be enforced, on account of
the advancement of prices. The unnatural advances that had been
produced by the depreciation of the currency, in previous reigns,
had been wisely remedied in 1560 by reducing the coin of the
realm to a just standard.-)- But there were causes in operation
which tended to a steady rise in the market-rate of all commodities.
The influx- of the precious metals had begun decidedly to produce
this effect ; and concurrently with that increase the condition of
the great body of the people was greatly improving, so that there
was a more universal demand for every necessary of life. This
demand produced a consequent rise of price. In the half century
from 1550 to 1599, the average price of wheat had risen 100 per
cent. This advance of prices is no indication of a. more impov
erished condition of the labourers, but the contrary. The increase
of the market rate gave an impulse to production ; and the cultiva
tion of the land necessarily went on improving. But the improve
ments were too slow, — the amount of agricultural produce too en
tirely dependent upon good or bad seasons, — so that the utmost
misery was occasionally produced by excessive fluctuations in price.
Wheat was at a famine price in 1573, in 1586 and 1587, in 1596
the price per quarter in those terrible seasons of scarcity being as
high, or higher, than the average prices of the present times. Tem
porary relief was given, in some places, by buying up corn, and
selling it at a reduced rate. The necessity in the summer of 1587
was so extreme, that some foreign hulks, belonging to the subjects
of a friendly power, were seized by English vessels, and brought
* 39 Eliz. t. 5. t See ante, p. 40.
INCIDENTAL CAUSES OF INDIGENCE. 205
into Weymouth, being laden with corn and provisions for Spain.
The Council held that they might be compelled to sell their corn ;
but wisely did not attempt to enforce such a violation of commer
cial freedom. The mayor of Weymouth had hoped that a com
pulsory sale of these stores would relieve the distresses of that
part of the country* Such fluctuations of price were amongst the
most bitter inflictions that poverty had to bear. The plague was a
necessary attendant upon any dearth approaching to famine. The
general health of the people was habitually inferior to the sanitory
condition of our own days. Medical knowledge was to a great
extent empirical. The universal system of blood-letting twice a
year was likely to produce more maladies than it averted. Those
who lived in detached cottages and small villages were subject to
fevers, from the ill-drained lands by which they were surrounded.
Those who lived in towns had to endure the pestilent nuisances of
the streets, which no magisterial power could keep clean. The
scarcity of fuel made the mud-built cottages, in which chimneys
were still rare, miserably cold in winter. The thatched cottages of
the towns were often on fire ; and the rapid destruction of whole
streets produced the greatest misery, when the protection of fire
insurance was unknown. Such were some of the many causes that
reduced the poor to helpless indigence, and which sometimes pros
trated even the comparatively wealthy. It was a state of society
in which a merciful provision for the relief of the poor was one of
the great exigencies of the time. The old laws which equally con
signed crime and misery to the fetter and the whip had happily
died out. * Roberts's " Southern Counties," p. 212.
206 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XI.
Death of lord Burleigh. — Death of Philip II. — Condition of Ireland. — Rebellion of
Tyrone. — Essex appointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. — His bootless campaign. —
Essex suddenly returns to England. — He is committed to free custody, and then
suspended from his offices. — His discontent, and schemes for redress. — Armed
assembly at Essex-House. — Attempt at insurrection. — Essex and Southampton tried
for high-treason. — Conduct of Bacon on that trial. — Essex executed. — Scotland. — The
Gowrie conspiracy. — The last parliament of Elizabeth. — Debates on a subsidy. — Bill
for abating monopolies. — The queen's wisdom in yielding to public opinion. — Death
of Elizabeth. — Note on the story of Essex's ring.
In August, 1598, died William Cecil, lord Burleigh, the faithful
counsellor of Elizabeth for forty years. He was the acknowledged
head, by character as well as by office, of that illustrious band,
whom Mr. Macaulay terms " the first generation of statesmen by
profession that England produced." His consummate prudence,
his large experience, his perfect adaptation to the nature of his
royal mistress, made his long tenure of power almost as much a
political necessity as the security of the throne itself. In his last
illness Elizabeth sent him a cordial, saying " that she did entreat
Heaven for his longer life ; else would her people, nay herself,
stand in need of cordials too." * Months after his death, it was
written of the queen that her highness " doth often speak of him
in tears, and turn aside when he is discoursed of." t Burleigh,
like Elizabeth herself, had a deep and abiding sense of responsibili
ty. Walsingham, seeing him come in from prayers, wished he
were as good a servant of God as the lord treasurer, "but that he
had not been at church for a week past." The reply of Burleigh
is worthy to be held in remembrance: " I hold it meet for us to
ask God's grace to keep us sound at heart who have so much in
our power ; and to direct us to the well-doing of all the people,
whom it is easy for us to injure- and ruin." % Cecil, Walsingham,
Smith, Mildmay, Nicholas Bacon, were themselves of the people.
They were English gentlemen— the best depositaries of political
power that our country has produced ; with broader views for the
common welfare than the views of the intriguing churchmen, and
* Harrington, " Nugae Antiqux," p. 237. t Ibid., p. 244.
% Harrington, "Nuga; Antique," p. 174-
DEATHS OF BURLEIGH AND PHILIP Tl. 207
of the ambitious nobles, who had the chief direction of affairs
before the days of Elizabeth. When Burleigh died there was
a struggle for ascendancy between two court factions, which had
a tragical ending, and made the last days of the queen's life dark
and dreary.
Within a month of the decease of Burleigh died Philip II.
Henry IV. had concluded a separate peace with Spain ; for which
act, though probably one of imperious necessity, Elizabeth called
him "an antichrist of ingratitude." But the two sovereigns had a
respect, each for the other ; and there was no permanent ill-will
between England and France. The death of Philip, however,
caused no abatement of the hostility between the Protestant queen
and the Most Catholic king. In 1599 Spain again threatened
invasion; and extensive preparations for resistance were made with
the usual alacrity. The weak place of Elizabeth's dominions was
Ireland. The intrigues of Jesuits, who were always scheming and
negotiating with the Spanish ministers to obtain money and men
for the restoration of the Roman Catholic religion in England,
might be detected and defeated by ordinary prudence ; but Ireland,
with its rud-e native population, under the control of the Romish
priesthood, and with the ancient families of their Anglo-Irish
oppressors, haters of Protestantism, was a perpetual trouble to the
English government. Ireland yielded no revenue to England ; she
absorbed a large annual amount of the queen's treasure for her
defence. Since the time of Henry VIIL, Ireland, without having
been wholly neglected, had not been governed with the same vigour
that characterised the general administration of Elizabeth. Sir
Henry Sidney was engaged, for eleven years in keeping down the
animosities of the Desmonds and the Ormonds ; in repressing
insurrections and rebellions ; in doing a little, but only a little, for
the general civilisation of the people. Lord Gray succeeded
Sidney, and had the same chronic difficulties to contend with. The
attempt of the elder lord Essex to colonise some forfeited lands
was a ruinous failure. Spenser, who made his few years' residence
on the banks of the Mulla famous, had his house burned over his
head, and his child slaughtered. The neglect and misrule of
previous centuries was visited upon those who, in the second half
of the sixteenth century, desired " to turn so goodly and commod>
ous a soil to good uses," by " reducing that nation to better govern
ment and civility." * So Spenser felt when he prophetically wrote,
* Spenser, " View of the State of Ireland."
208 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" whether it proceed from the very genius of the soil, or influence
of the stars ; or, that Almighty God hath not yet appointed the
time for her reformation ; or, that he reserveth her in this unquiet
state still, for some secret scourge, which shall by her come unto
England, — it is hard to be known but yet much to be feared." The
poet, with the practical wisdom of a statesman, saw that the great
est evils of Ireland were social evils ; and that her state would
never be otherwise than unquiet until these were in some degree
remedied. They were so difficult to be remedied that Spenser says
that he had often heard it wished, — " even by some whose great
wisdom in opinion should seem to judge more soundly of so weighty
a consideration — that all that land were a sea-pool." It was Wal
singham who uttered that wish. He could dive into plots with a
sagacity that beat the Jesuits at their own weapons ; but he could
not comprehend the height and breadth and depth of the troubles
of Ireland ; or, comprehending them, could not see any instant
remedy. The footing of the English was still confined to the
Pale. * Beyond that narrow region there was barbarism. But
where the quiet cultivator took the place of the gallow-glass and
kerne, there grew up a system even worse than that of the outlaw,
whose boast was that he " did never eat his meat before he had
won it with his sword." It was the foolish oppression of the land
lords, who " there use most shamefully to rack their tenants ; " it
was the inconstancy of the tenant, who " daily looketh after change
and alteration, and hovereth in expectation of new worlds," — that
kept Ireland miserable, rebellious, the scourge of England, for
three centuries. It was no political evil — it was not even religious
differences — that made the description which Spenser gives of the
cabin in 1593, the true picture of the same cabin two hundred and
fifty years after ; — " rather swine-sties than houses " — these dwell
ings of abject poverty being the chiefest cause of the poor cultiva
tor's "beastly manner of life and savage condition, lying and living
with his beast, in one house, in one room, in one bed, that is, clean
straw, or rather a foul dunghill." The mode in which this accurate
observer speaks of the tenure of land in" Ireland implies that a
wholly contrary practice prevailed in England ; and we may thence
have one solution of the different rate of industrial progress in the
two countries. "There is one general inconvenience, which
reigneth almost throughout all Ireland, — that is, the lords of land
and freeholders do not there use to set out their land in farm, or
* See ante, vol. ii. p. 393.
REBELLION OF TYRONE. 209
for term of years to their tenants, but only from year to year, and
some during pleasure; neither indeed will the Irish tenant or hus
bandman otherwise take his land than so long as he list himself."
The natural bonds of mutual interest between landlord and tenant
thus hanging loose, there could be no growth of capital, and no im
proved cultivation : a wretched Cottier tenantry, worn to the bone by
exactions, increased in numbers and in poverty generation after
generation ; till at length the great collapse came, and the merciful
severity of God's providence solved the problem which man's wis
dom could never wholly fathom.
The first remedy for the evils of Ireland at the end of the six
teenth century was to put down rebellion with a sufficient force.
Hugh O'Neale, earl of Tyrone, had been for some time in insurrec
tion against the English government. He had received arms and
military stores from Spain ; he was the leader of all who, according
to Spenser, were " waiting when the watch-word should come that
they should all arise generally into rebellion." As yet he had
met with no adequate resistance. Sir John Norris, with the few
thousand men that the English government maintained, was unable
to make head against an enemy whose defeat only drove his wild
companies to the woods and morasses, again to sally forth in new
strength. Norris died of fatigue and vexation in this troublesome
warfare. Another commander, Sir Henry Bagnal, was defeated with
great loss, and himself killed, in an attempt to relieve the fortress
of Blackwater, which was besieged by Tyrone's men. It became
necessary to make some great effort, if Ireland were to remain to
the English crown.
The determination to employ Essex in subduing the Irish
rebels was unfortunate for Elizabeth's government, and more un
fortunate for himself. He was a chivalrous soldier, fit for daring
'exploits, but unqualified for conducting a war requiring not only
bravery and decision, but that foresight and faculty of organisation
which are rarely united with an ardent temperament. He was a
courtier, but not a statesman ; and as a courtier he was rash and
obstinate to a degree. Friends and foes alike predicted his fall.
He differed in council with the queen, and then insolently turned
his back upon her. The thin jewelled hand of Elizabeth was
raised in uncontrollable anger, and she boxed his ear as a mother
would a petted child. The earl put his hand upon his sword, and
swore that he would not have borne such an affront from Henry
VIII. For months he sulked and kept away from court. At
Vol. III.— 14
2IO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
length, probably to remove him without disgrace, he was appointed
to the lord lieutenancy of Ireland, with higher powers than had
ever before been granted to that great office. At the end of March,
1599. he left London for Dublin, surrounded by a train of nobles
and knights, and greeted by the acclamations of the people, with
whom he was an especial object of regard. There were those who
said that the high trust bestowed upon Essex would be fatal to him.
Bacon, his friend, and probably then a sincere friend, endeavoured
to dissuade him from accepting the dangerous appointment ; and
afterwards declared that he plainly saw his overthrow, '¦ chained as
it were by destiny to that journey." Stow, describing the march
of Essex from that city, amidst the blessings of the multitude, says,
" When he and his company came forth of London, the sky was
very calm and clear ; but before he could get past Islington, there
arose a great black cloud in tbe north-east, and suddenly came
lightning and thunder, with a great shower of hail and rain, the
which some held as an ominous prodigy." The superstition, which
saw a presage of danger in the great black cloud in the midst of
sunshine, was the natural reflection of the judgment of those who
anticipated evil from the too confident deportment of Essex. He
swore that " he would beat Tyr-Owen in the field, for nothing
worthy her majesty's honour hath yet been achieved." * He un
derrated the services of all who had preceded him, and the policy
they had pursued, of endeavouring to conciliate the Irish malcon
tents, rather than extirpate them. He was to return from Ireland,
" Bringing rebellion broached on his sword."
He came back in six months, without having accomplished a single
object that his predecessors in the government had not more com
pletely effected with a far inferior force. He was entirelv ignorant
of the difficulties of the enterprise. Raleigh, who knew the coun- "
try and the people, shrank from the command. Essex maintained
that a man of the highest rank, a man popular with soldiers, a man
of military experience, should be the queen's vicegerent. *He
pointed to himself ; and his rivals, Robert (^ecil and Raleigh, suf
fered him to fall into the toils. He had a force of sixteen thou
sand men when he marched out of Dublin on the loth of May.
From some extraordinary vacillation, produced, it is said, by inter
ested advisers in the Irish Council, instead of leading his force
against Tyrone, he made a progress of seven weeks through Mun-
* Harrington, p. 246.
HIS CAMPAIGN AND HIS RETURN. 211
ster; now and then skirmishing with small parties of rebels, and
displaying his superfluous energy, " flying like lightning from one
part of the army to another;" and having his love of popularity
abundantly gratified by his reception in the towns. At Kilkenny
the streets were strewed with rushes. At Limerick, " where he ar
rived by easy journeys," he was "entertained with two English
orations." At Waterford' he " was received with two Latin ora
tions, and with as much joyful concourse of people as any other
town of Ireland." He had marched to Waterford ; and he marched
back to Dublin by another route, having obtained some useless
triumphs over small bodies of rebels, and wasted his army without
the least beneficial result. Essex remained at Dublin from the
3rd of July till the 28th of August, and then set forth into Ulster
to do battle with Tyrone. After a skirmish, the queen's army and
the rebel's army were in sight of each other ; and Tyrone sent a
message that he desired her majesty's mercy, and asked that the
lord lieutenant would hear him. He proposed to meet Essex at
the ford of Bellachinche. " Upon this message his lordship sent
two gentlemen with H. Hagan to the ford, to. view the place. They
found Tyrone there, but the water so far out as they told him they
thought it no fit place to speak in. Whereupon he grew very im
patient, and said, " Then I shall despair ever to speak with him ; "
and at last, knowing the ford, found a place, where he, standing up
to the horse's belly, might be near enough to be heard by the lord
lieutenant, though he kept the hard ground ; upon which notice the
lord lieutenant drew a troop of horse to the hill above the ford,
and seeing Tyrone there alone, went down alone ; at whose coming
Tyrone saluted his lordship with a great deal of reverence, and
they talked near half an hour, and after went either of them up to
their companies on the hills." * There was a second confer
ence, when others on each side were present ; and the result
was an armistice for six weeks. " This being concluded," says
Harrington, " on the 8th of September, on the 9th the lord lieuten
ant dispersed his army." Tyrone retired with his forces. On the
17th of September Elizabeth wrote a letter to Essex, disapproving
of his proceedings in the strongest terms. The impetuous nature
of the man would not endure this reproof. He saw, and perhaps
justly, that his rivals in Elizabeth's court were working his down
fall ; and, in a blind confidence in the queen's favour, he took the
fatal resolution of leaving his command in Ireland.' There is a
* Harrington's " Report concerning the Earl of Essex's Journeys in Ireland, p. 299.
212 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
graphic narrative by a contemporary of his arrival in England.
On the 28th of September, " about ten o'clock in the morning,
my lord of Essex lighted at the court-gate in post, and made all
haste up to the presence, and so to the privy chamber, and stayed
not till he came to the queen's bed-chamber, where he found the .
queen newly up, with her hair about her face ; he kneeled unto
her, kissed her hands, and had some private speech with her,
which seemed to give him great contentment ; for when he came
from her majesty, he was very pleasant, and thanked God, though
he had suffered much trouble and storms abroad, he found a sweet
calm at home. 'Tis much wondered at here that he went so boldly
to her majesty's presence, she not being ready, and he so- full of
dirt and mire, that his very face was full of it. About eleven he
went up to the queen again, and conferred with her till half an
hour past twelve. As yet all was well, and her usage very gracious
towards him. He was visited frankly by all sorts here of lords and
ladies, and gentlemen ; only strangeness is observed between him
and Mr. Secretary, and that party. After dinner he went up to
the queen, but found. her much changed in that small time, for she
began to call him to question for his return, and was not satisfied
in the manner of his coming away, and leaving all things at so
great hazard. She appointed the lords to hear him, and so they
went to council in the afternoon, and he went with them, where
they sat an hour, but nothing was determined on, or yet known :
belike it is referred to a full council, for all the lords are sent for
to be here this day. It is mistrusted that for his disobedience he
shall be committed." *
The personal affection of the queen for Essex was, as in the
instances of other favourites, under subjection to what she held as
her public duty. We have avoided, and shall still avoid, those
passages of the scandalous chronicles of the reign of this queen,
which may add to the interest of a novel, but have little to do with
the sober narratives of history. The passions of Elizabeth — if we
may apply the term passions to her feminine weaknesses — never
turned her aside from an impartial decision upon the political faults
of those who appear to have had the largest share of her private
regard. These favourites, it must be observed, were always men
of great ability and rare accomplishments. They were no low
adventurers or fierce desperadoes, such as other female sovereigns
have honoured. Leicester, Hatton, Raleigh, Essex, were men that
* Letter of Rowland White, in the " Sidney Papers."
ESSEX AND THE QUEEN. 213
brought no disgrace upon the court ; though the queen's relation
to them might be so equivocal that historians have chosen to doubt
whether, in youth or age, " the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free."
The adulation which her flatterers, and even Raleigh, heaped upon
her was in the exaggerated style of the euphuistic romance of the
time ; and, however we may smile at the vanity with which a gray
and wrinkled woman received these compliments with approving
delight, we must not forget that when she went from the presence
chamber to the council-board, the wisest who sat there, the most
patriotic, could not excel Elizabeth in sagacity, or show a deeper
solicitude for the honour and prosperity of her country. We can
forgive every personal folly to the ruler who felt that she held her
power as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people. There were
many despotic practices recognised as lawful in that period, and
the queen had enough of the arbitrary notions of the Tudors in her
composition. She required obedience ; but she knew what conduct
ensured the heartiest and most constant obedience. Harrington
has a domestic anecdote which illustrates this principle of Eliza
beth's conduct as well as her set orations : " The queen did once
ask my wife in merry sort, 'how she kept my good will and love,
which I did always maintain to be truly good towards her and my
children.' My Mall, in wise and discreet manner, told her high
ness, 'she had confidence in her husband's understanding and
courage, well founded on her own stedfastness not to offend or
thwart, but to cherish and obey; hereby did she persuade her
husband of her own affection, and in so doing did command his.'
— ' Go to, go to, mistress,' saith the queen, 'you are wisely bent I
find : after such sort do_I keep the good will of all my husbands,
my good people ; for if they did not rest assured of some special
love toward them, they would not readily yield me such good
obedience." We may understand, as Essex did not understand,
why his public delinquencies would not escape the displeasure of
the queen through her private regard. In the morning of the 28th
of September he thought he had escaped from the dangers of his
Irish career. In the evening he was commanded to keep his cham
ber. On the next day he was examined before the Council, and,
instead of being restored^ to favour, was commanded from court,
and committed to the " free custody " of the lord keeper, and was
214 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
afterwards under the same restricted liberty at his own house.
This condition, so irritating to one of the temperament of Essex,
was followed by more decided humiliation. His deportment was
penitential ; he addressed the queen in letters of the deepest con
trition. But the affairs of Ireland had grown worse ; Tyrone was
again in rebelliop. Another lord deputy was sent, and Blount, lord
Mountjoy, although without military experience, soon restored
obedience to the English authority by his energy and prudence.
The contrast was injurious to Essex, and gave new opportunities
to his rivals. He was again examined before commissioners ; and
received the severest censure in being suspended from his offices
of privy counsellor, of lord marshal, and of master of the ordnance.
He was released from custody in August, but was still commanded
not to appear at court. A valuable monopoly of sweet wines which
he held having expired, the queen refused to renew the patent,
saying " that in order to manage an ungovernable beast, he must
be stinted of his provender." Under these indignities the mind of
Essex lost all balance. Harrington relates his demeanour in his
last conversation with him, before the outbreak which sealed his
fate : " It resteth with me in opinion, that ambition thwarted in its
career doth speedily lead on to madness. Herein I am strength
ened by what I learn in my lord of Essex, who shifteth from sorrow
and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth
him devoid of good reason or right mind. In my last discourse, he
uttered strange words bordering on such strange designs, that
made me hasten forth and leave his presence. Thank Heaven ! I
am safe at home, and if I go in such troubles again, I deserve the
gallows for a meddling fool. His speeches of the queen becometh
no man who hath mens sana in corpore sano. He hath ill advisers,
and much evil hath sprung from this source. The queen well
knoweth how to humble the haughty spirit ; the haughty spirit
knoweth not how to yield ; and the man's soul seemeth tossed to
and fro, like the waves of a troubled sea."*
It is difficult to understand what method there was in the mad
ness of Essex. It is still more difficult to understand how other
men, not having the same excitement of jealousy and revenge which
drove the humiliated favourite to acts of treason, should have joined
in his wild projects. There can be no doubt that he contemplated
removing the queen's advisers by force ; believing them to be, as
they to a great extent were, his personal enemies. Cecil, Raleigh,
* " Nugae Antiqua;," p. 179.
SCHEMES OF ESSEX AND HIS ADHERENTS. 2x5
and Cobham were held by him to be the chief obstacles to his res
toration to favour. But there were circumstances which rendered
his attempt not altogether hopeless. The queen was now sixty-
eight years of age; and although she had sfopwn no signs of a
failure of intellectual vigour, the people were naturally looking for
ward to a successor. James VI. of Scotland was intriguing in
various quarters to procure his official recognition as the future
king of England ; but upon this point Elizabeth was unapproachable.
The wary Cecil was in secret correspondence with James ; but the
incautious Essex had not scrupled to contemplate the possibility of
compelling the government into such recognition; and had even
proposed to Mountjoy, the lord deputy of Ireland, to bring over a
body of troops for that purpose. His own plans to the same end
during his tardy prosecution of the Irish war were more than sus
pected. There was great discontent amongst the opposing classes
of Papists and Puritans, naturally, excited by the penalties to which
each was subjected as recusants or non-conformists. Essex,
whether conscientiously or politically, professed sentiments of toler
ation. The citizens of London were greatly inclined to the Puritan
opinions ; and Essex had his house open to preachers of that de
nomination. The more fanatical Romanists, in which number were
included several of those who were afterwards prominent in the
Gunpowder Plot, did not scruple to ally themselves with those of
the extreme opposite opinions, in any scheme for the overthrow of
the government. Essex surrounded himself with a number of those
who had been his companions in arms ; but he placed a greater re
liance upon his popularity with the Londoners. Extraordinary
pains were taken to familiarise the people with that great story of
English history which told how a corrupt and imbecile king had
been hurled from his throne. Elizabeth was apprehensive of the
effect of the example thus made prominent of the deposition of
Richard II. ; and when, during the period in which Essex was
secluded from court, Hayward dedicated his life of Henry IV. to
ttje earl, she asked Bacon whether he did not see treason in it?
She persisted in her notion in spite of Bacon's witty answer, that
he " saw no treason, but very much felony, for every second sen
tence was stolen from Tacitus." The queen was perhaps right as
to the possible effect of the popular knowledge of this passage of
our annals. At any rate those who were concerned in the schemes
of Essex fancied that the bringing forward upon the stage the
deposition of a king might familiarise the people with an idea that
2l6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
had long passed out of the English mind, as to the responsibility of
sovereign power. Sir Gilly Meyrick, an officer of the household of
Essex, on the afternoon of February I, "procured the out-dated
tragedy of ' The Deposition of Richard II.' to be publicly acted at
his own charge."* The overt act of treason in which Essex and
his adherents were involved took place on the 8th of February.
Six months after this event, Elizabeth, in a conversation with
Lambarde, keeper of the records in the Tower, in examining a list
of historical documents, " her majesty fell upon the reign of Richard
II. , saying ' I am Richard II. ; know ye not that ? ' " In this con
versation the queen also said, " This tragedy was played forty times
in open streets and houses." +
On Sunday morning, the Sth of February, the earls of Rutland
and Southampton, the lords Sandys and Monteagle, with about
three hundred gentlemen, assembled at Essex House, in the Strand.
Essex had sent round to say that his life was threatened by Raleigh
and Cobham. The queen was apprised of this remarkable gather
ing, and she despatched the lord keeper, the comptroller of the
household, the lord chief justice, and the earl of Worcester to de
mand the cause of this assembly. They were admitted by the
wicket, without their servants, and found the court full of men.
The lord keeper declared their errand, to which Essex replied that
his life was sought, and that he had been perfidiously dealt with.
These great officers assured him that he should have honourable
and equal justice. The evidence given by the lord chief justice
upon the trial of Essex describes this scene very strikinglv. After
this conversation, " There was a great clamour raised among the
multitude, crying ' Away, my lord, they abuse you, they betray you,
they undo you, you lose time.' Whereupon the lord keeper put
on his hat, and said with a loud voice, ' My lord, let us speak with
you privately, and understand your griefs ; ' and then he said to the
company, ' I command you all, upon your allegiance, to lay down
your weapons and to depart, which you ought all to do, being thus
commanded, if you be good subjects and owe that duty to the
queen's majesty which you profess.' Whereupon they all broke
out into an exceeding loud shout, crying, ' All, all, all.' And whilst
the lord keeper was speaking, the earl of Essex and most of the
company put on their hats. Then the earl of Essex went into the
* There are reasonable doubts whether this play was Shakspere's " Richarfl II." See
" Studies of Shakspere," by Charles Knight.
t Nicholls' " Progresses of Queen Elizabeth."
ATTEMPT AT INSURRECTION. 217
house, and we followed him, thinking that his purpose had been to
speak with us privately as we had required ; and at that instant
one at my back cried, ' Kill them, kill them.' I know him not, if I
should see him again, but he had on a white satin doublet. And
as we were going into the great chamber some cried ' Cast the
great seal out of the window ; ' some others cried there, ' Kill
them,' and some others said, ' Nay, let us shut them up.' The
lord keeper did often call to the earl of Essex to speak with us pri
vately, thinking still that his meaning had been so, until the earl
brought us into his back chamber, and there gave order to have
the farther door of that chamber shut fast. And at his going
forth out of that chamber, the lord keeper pressing again to have
spoken with the earl of Essex, the earl said, ' My lords, be patient
awhile and stay here, and I will go into London and take order
with the mayor and sheriffs for the city, and will be here again
Wi Lhhi this half hour. ' "
When Essex left the lord keeper and the others in custody, he
drew his sword, and rushed out of his house, followed by a large
number of his adherents, and he shouted, " For the queen, for the
queen, a plot is laid for my life." The people, as he rode at the
head of his company, either did not comprehend his object, or were
unwilling to assist him ; for though they were provided with arms,
and trained, as they always were during any apprehension of foreign
invasion, not a sword or a musket was brought forth to give him
assistance. Camden shrewdly says, " Though the citizens were,
according to the temper of the common people, desirous enough
of change, yet their wealth made them cautious and loyal. And, to
say the truth, poverty is that, which, above all things, prompts the
English to rebellion." Disheartened, the unhappy nobleman and
his friends attempted to return from the city ; but they found the
streets barricaded with empty carriages. At Ludgate the chains
were drawn ; and a party of soldiers opposed their progress. A
fight ensued, in which several were killed, Essex escaped by
water to his own house ; which he attempted to defend, with those
who got in with him. But no succour from the city reached him,
and they surrendered. Essex and Southampton were that night
removed to the Tower.
On the 19th of February the two noble friends were put upon
their trial, in the court of the lord high steward. The facts against
them were too clearly proved to allow of any verdict of the Peers
hut that of Guilty. They were tried upon the old statute of Ed-
2l8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ward III. "As far as can be ascertained, it seems to have been
intended to rest the charge on two propositions : first, that the de
sign to restrain the queen's person, and remove her counsellors,
amounted to treason, in the article of compassing the queen's
death, of which general treason, the consultation at Drury-house,
the insurrection in London, the imprisonment of the lord keeper
and his companions, and the refusal to dismiss the company upon
the queen's command, were overt acts ; and, secondly, that the in
surrection in the city was in itself a rebellion, and, consequently, a
levying of war against the queen, within the statute of Edward III.,
of which the skirmish at Ludgate, the defence of Essex-house
against the queen's troops, and many other actions of the earl's on
that day, were overt acts." * There was no straining ofthe law to
procure the condemnation of these rash men ; although we may
well believe the truth of the solemn averment of Essex, " Here I
protest before the living God, as he may have mercy upon me,
that my conscience is clear from any disloyal thought of harm to
her majesty, and my desire ever hath been to be free from blood
shed." Coke, the attorney-general, bitterly alluded to that Dart of
the indictment which accused him of aiming to be king, saying of
Essex, " He of his earldom shall be Robert the Last, that of a
kingdom sought to be Robert the First." Essex, to this charge,
made his denial in these words : "And thou, O God,- which knowest
the secrets of all hearts, knowest that I never sought the crown of
England, nor ever wished to be of higher degree than a subject."
There is an incidental circumstance connected with the trial of
Essex which cannot be passed over, affecting as it does the moral
character of one of the most illustrious in the roll of England's
immortals. Francis Bacon was one of the queen's counsel, and he
was officially employed against Essex in this trial. He was bound
to Essex by no common obligations. The generous earl had given
him an estate, because he could not procure for him a lucrative
appointment. Essex had struggled against the ill-will of the Ce
cils to advance Bacon's fortunes, in season and out of season. Yet
upon the trial Bacon said stronger things against his friend than
were urged by his bitterest adversaries. Bacon compared his pro
ceeding in saying his life was in danger, to that of " one Pisistra-
tus, in Athens, who, coming into the city with the purpose to pro
cure the subversion of the kingdom, and wanting aid for the ac
complishing his aspiring desires, and as the surest means to win
* Jardine, " Criminal Trials," vol. i. p. 381.
CONDUCT OF BACON. 219
the hearts of the citizens unto him, he entered the city, having cut
his body with a knife, to the end they might conjecture he had
been in danger of his life." He compared " this rebellion of my
lord of Essex to the duke of Guise's, that came upon the barri
cades at Paris in his doublet and hose ; and when he failed, alleged
that he was there upon a private quarrel." There was a general
indignation expressed against Bacon for this severity ; but what his
contemporaries objected to him was mildness itself, compared with
the judgment of an eloquent modern writer upon these passages of
his speeches. They were intended, Mr. Macaulay holds, to de
prive the prisoner of those excuses which " might incline the queen
to grant a pardon " — " to produce a strong impression on the mind
of the haughty and jealous princess on whose pleasure the earl's
fate depended."* Bacon, in the " Apology " which he wrote of
his conduct in this trial, says, " that which I performed at the bar
in my public service, by the rules of duty I was bound to do it
honestly and without prevarication." To shut out Essex from
mercy, Mr. Macaulay says that Bacon " employed all his wit,
his rhetoric, and his learning." We would, rather than impute
deliberate blood-guiltiness to this great man, whose kindness of
nature was as conspicuous as his genius, entertain- the belief that
the temptation to a counsel, almost for the first time employed on
a great cause, to show forth "his wit, his rhetoric, and his learn
ing " to the best advantage, was a temptation too great to be re
sisted, even at the sacrifice of his gratitude. That Bacon was a
high-minded man in public transactions is as difficult to believe as
that he possessed a treacherous and cruel nature. His concern
with the official publication entitled " The Declaration of the Trea
sons of the late earl of Essex and his complices," is as little to
be defended as his rhetorical flights upon the trial. It is a garbled
and partial narrative. He says, " never secretary had more partic
ular and express directions and instructions, in every point, how to
guide my hand in it. — Myself, indeed, gave only words and style
in pursuing their directions ; " — those of certain principal coun
sellors. We must feel acutely the meanness of the great writer —
he who had already published a volume of his noble " Essays "—
in becoming such an unworthy instrument of expediency. But
there were excuses. He was poor; he was ambitious. In pen
ning his Apology for his conduct in the unhappy affair of Essex, he
is manifestly unconscious of his own degradation. There was a
* "Essays," vol. ii., art. " Bacon."
2 20 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
singular combination, in those times, of private virtue and public
immorality, amongst courtiers and statesmen. " High-erected
thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy " were to be found in the
English gentleman as his general characteristic ; but the rivalry
for power, when power was to be reached chiefly by subserviency,
made the aspirant too often a sycophant and a tool. Bacon pock
eted the wages of an hireling*, when he received a large sum out of
the fine which Catesby, one of the Romanist followers of Essex,
pa"id for his pardon. But Bacon probably did not himself see that
this was the price of his dishonour.
The earl of Essex was beheaded within the walls of the Tower
on Wednesday morning, the 25th of February. There were few
persons present at the execution, which was stated to have been
in private by his own desire. There were politic reasons for avoid
ing the manifestations of popular sympathy which one so generally
beloved would have called forth in his dying hour. His end was
truly " pious and Christian," to use the words of Camden. To
the noblemen and others who sat upon the scaffold he addressed a
brief speech, in which he deplored the " last sin," which had drawn
others for love of him to offend God, to offend their sovereign.
But he besought them to hold a charitable opinion of him for his
intention towards her majesty, " whose death I protest I never
meant, nor violence to her person." Lord Southampton, who had
been found guilty and sentenced to death at the same time with
Essex, was spared from the scaffold but was confined during the
remainder of Elizabeth's reign. Sir Gilly Meyrick, Henry Cuffe,
Sir Christopher Blount, and Sir Charles Danvers, were executed
as adherents to the conspiracy.
The correspondence of Essex with king James VI. was cer
tainly amongst the causes which prevented his restoration to the
favour of Elizabeth. The harshness with which he was treated in
the autumn of 1600 was a natural consequence of the indignation
of the English government at the proceedings of James. At a con
vention of the Scottish estates, in June of that year, the king pro
posed that a tax should be levied, for the purpose of asserting his
claim to the succession to the crown of England. This demand
met with the most strenuous resistance. Amongst those who led
the opposition was the young earl of Gowrie, who had recently
returned from the court of Elizabeth. The king was furious
against his parliament. They had laughed at his notion of raising
money to make a conquest of England ; and altogether refused to give
THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY. 221
him more than forty thousand pounds Scots. After this, Robert
Cecil was informed that James had a party in England, and in
tended not to tarry for the queen's death. The mutual ill-will that
subsisted at this time between James and Elizabeth has led to the
belief, resting upon very insufficient foundation, that what is called
the Gowrie plot may be traced to the contrivance of the English
queen. * The whole of this dark affair is involved in the greatest
mystery. The facts which are commonly related are briefly these.
On the morning of the 5th of August, 1600, James was going forth
from his palace at Falkland to hunt, when Alexander Ruthven, the
younger brother of Gowrie, desired to speak with him privately.
He whispered something about an unknown man having found a
pot of gold ; and the treasure, which was in Gowrie house, at
Perth, might be seen by the king if he would come thither without
his attendants. The scent of gold was irresistible to James. Af
ter the chase he rode off to Perth with young Ruthven ; but he
was ultimately joined by his attendants. James dined alone ; and
after dinner Gowrie, with James's suite, went into the pleasure gar
den. Alexander Ruthven then told the king it was now time to go
and look at the gold. They went together through various apart
ments, Ruthven locking the doors as they passed along. At length
they reached a small round room ; and then Ruthven, removing a
curtain, disclosed a portrait of his father, and asked James who
murdered him ? He held a dagger to the king's breast, and said
that if he made any attempt to open the window, or to cry out, the
dagger should be in his heart. There was a man in the room,
Henderson, who had been placed there to aid in the plot. Young
Ruthven left the king alone with this man. James appealed to
Henderson for protection. Ruthven, soon returning, ran upon the
king and attempted to bind him. A desperate struggle ensued ;
in which James managed to reach the window and cry out for help.
Lennox and the other courtiers in the garden saw the king's flush
ed face at the window, as he uttered the cry of " Treason." Some
rushed up the great staircase ; but found the door locked. Ram-
. say, one of the suite, remembered a back stair ; and reaching the
door of the round chamber, dashed it open, and found the king
still struggling with Ruthven. Ramsay stabbed the youth, who
was quickly dispatched by others who came up the turnpike-stair.
Gowrie himself, with his servants, having seen the dead body of
his brother, rushed frantically to the gallery where some of the
* Robertson, " History of Scotland."
222 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
attendants of James were assembled, and was quickly slain. The
populace in the streets of Perth were roused to madness when they
heard of the deaths of the two Ruthvens ; and they cried to the
king, as he looked out, " Come down, thou son of signor Davie ;
thou hast slain a better man than thyself." Some of the preach
ers of the kirk maintained that the king conspired against the
Gowries, and not the Gowries against the king ; and this belief
was by no means confined to the Presbyterian ministers.
The last parliament of Elizabeth met on the 27th of October,
1601. There were debates on the question of a subsidy, which it
would be scarcely necessary here to no'Jce, but for amis-statement
of Hume. The prejudiced historian affirms that, when Mr. Ser
jeant Heyle said, "all we have is her majesty's, and she may law
fully at her pleasure take it from us," there was no one who" cared
to take him down, or oppose those monstrous positions." In the
Reports of D'Ewes, where Hume found Serjeant Heyle's speech,
he would have read the reply of Mr. Montague : " If all preambles
of subsidies were looked upon, he should find it were of free gift.
And although her majesty requireth this at our hands, yet it is in
us to give, not in her to exact of duty." Hume compares the
government of England, under Elizabeth, to that of Turkey. " The
sovereign possessed every power except that of imposing taxes ;
and in both countries this limitation, unsupported by other privi
leges, appears rather prejudicial to the people. In Turkey, it
obliges the sultan to permit the extortion of the bashas and gover
nors of provinces, from whom he afterwards squeezes presents or
takes forfeitures : in England, it engaged the queen to erect monop
olies, and grant patents for exclusive trade ; an invention so per
nicious, that had she gone on during a tract of years at her own
rate, England, the seat of riches, and arts, and commerce, would
have contained at present as little industry as Morocco, or the
coast of Barbary."* There was one difference between England
and Turkey which the historian does not point out in this com
mentary upon the English government. Public opinion, expressed
to herself in person, and through the House of Commons, led
Elizabeth, with true wisdom, entirely to reform that system which
many members of her Council had an interest in upholding. On
the 20th of November a bill was brought in by Mr. Lawrence
Hyde, entitled, " An Act for the explanation of the Common Law
in certain cases of Letters Patent." Bacon, as attorney-general,
* " History of England," vol. v. Appendix iii.
PARLIAMENT. — MONOPOLIES. 223
opposed the bill, saying, " the use hath been ever to humble our
selves unto her majesty, and by petition desire to have our
grievances remedied, especially when the remedy touchelh her so
nigh in point of prerogative." Many independent members used
strong language in support of the bill, for considering which a com
mittee was formed. On the 25th of November, the Speaker stood
up, the House wondering at the cause, and said that he had been
commanded to attend upon the queen, and had a message to deliver.
She thanked them, he said, most heartily for the subsidy; and
then added, " that partly by the intimation of her Council, and
partly by divers petitions that have been delivered unto her both
going to the chapel and also to walk abroad, she understood that
divers patents, which she had granted, were grievous to her subjects ;
and that the. substitutes of the patentees had used great oppres
sions." She concluded by declaring, said Mr. Speaker, " that
further order should be taken presently, and not ' in futuro ; ' and
that some should be presently repealed, some suspended, and none
put in execution but such as should first have a trial according to
the law, for the good of the people." Then Mr. Secretary Cecil
stood up, and in a speech as important as amusing, declared that
no new patents should be granted, and that the old ones should be
revoked : " I say, therefore, there shall be a proclamation general
throughout the realm, to notify her majesty's resolution in this
behalf. And because you may eat your meat more savoury than
you have done, every man shall have salt as good and cheap as he
can buy it or make it, freely without danger of that patent which
shall be presently revoked. The same benefit shall they have
which have cold stomachs, both for aquavita? and aqua composita
and the like. And they that have weak stomachs, for their satis
faction, shall have vinegar and alegar, and the like, set at liberty.
Train-oil shall go the same way ; oil of blubber shall march in equal
rank ; brushes and bottles endure the like judgment." The proc
lamation against the growth of woad was to be revoked, only the
queen " prayeth thus much, that when she cometh on progress to
see you in your countries, she be not driven out of your towns by
suffering it to infect the air too near them. Those that desire to
go sprucely in their ruffs, may at less charge than accustomed
obtain their wish ; for the patent for starch, which hath so much
been prosecuted, shall now be repealed." The patents for calf-skins
and felts, for leather, for cards, for glass, should also be suspended,
and left to the law. From this speech we may judge how extensive
224 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
was the evil of monopolies ; and although Cecil disclaimed a desire
to yield to popular clamour, he was not insensible to the words which
he says he heard as he came along in his coach, " God prosper those
that further the overthrow of these monopolies ! God send the Pre
rogative touch not our Liberty." The House was in a fever of
rapture at the declaration of the queen ; and it was moved that the
Speaker should convey their thanks to her majesty. On the 30th,
a hundred and forty members of the House were received by
Elizabeth ; and, after the Speaker's address, he, with the rest,
knelt down, and the queen gave her answer. Having spoken a few
sentences she begged them to rise, and then proceeded : " Mr.
Speaker, you give me thanks, but I doubt me, I have more cause
to thank you all, than you me ; and I charge you to thank them of
the House of Commons from me ; for had I not received a knowl
edge from you, I might have fallen into the lap of an error, only
for lack of true information. Since I was queen, yet never did I
rjut my pen to any grant, but that upon pretext and semblance made
unto me that it was both good and beneficial to the subjects in
general, though a private profit to some of my ancient servants who
had deserved well ; but the contrary being found by experience, I
am exceeding beholding to such subjects as would move the same
at first. . . . I have ever used to set the last judgment-day be
fore mine eyes, and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before
a higher judge. To whose judgment seat I do appeal, that never
thought was cherished in my heart that tended not to my pedple's
good. And now if my kingly bounty hath been abused, and my
grants turned to the hurt of my people, contrary to my will and
meaning ; or if any in authority under me have neglected or per
verted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay
their culps and offences to my charge Though you
have had, and may have, many princes more might}- and wise, sit
ting in this seat, yet you never had, or shall have, any that will be
more careful and loving." This was the last address of Elizabeth
to the Commons of England.
The remaining events of this reign may be briefly told. Lord
Mountjoy was more fortunate than Essex in his Irish administra
tion. The Spaniards had landed in Ireland to assist the Roman
Catholic insurgents. They took up a strong position at Kinsale,
with four thousand troops. Tyrone came to the assistance of the
Spanish commander, with six thousand Irish, and some foreigners.
Mountjoy defeated him ; and the Spaniards capitulated. Tyrone,
in 1602, surrendered, upon a promise of life and lands.
DEATH OF ELIZABETH. 225
In March, 1603, Elizabeth was fast sinking. Some have held
that she looked back with poignant anguish to the fate of Essex,
and hence " the deep melancholy visible in her countenance and
actions," noticed by Beaumont, the French ambassador. But he
more justly ascribed her dejection to " the sufferings incident to
her age." She died at three o'clock in the morning of the 24th of
March. On the night before, she was entreated to name a succes
sor. Her reply was equivocal. Cecil, however, affirmed that she
declared by signs that the king of Scots should succeed her ; hold
ing her hands joined over her head, in manner of a crown, when
his name was mentioned.
Vol. III.— 15
226 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
NOTE ON THE STORY OF ESSEX'S RING.
There is, in the State Paper Office, an Account written in French, by Dudley Carleton,
"ofthe-death of queen Elizabeth, as caused by melancholy on the death of the earl of
Essex." * This paper, which bears the date of April 4th, 1603,-to a certain extent con
firms the court belief which the French ambassador refers to, but to which he reasonably
gives little credit. The story of the ring which Essex sent to E.izabeth,as the token that
he ask2d her mercy, but which token was never delivered, has been circumstantially told
by Hume. We have not inserted a similar narrative in our text, believing, with a very
competent judge of evidence, that "it is of too doubtful authenticity." t But as we are
unwilling entirely to omit so romantic a story, we here give it, as related by Dr. Birch :—
" The following curious story was frequently told by lady Elizabeth Spelman, great-
grand-daughter of Sir Robert Carey, brother of lady Nottingham, and afterwards earl cf
Monmouth, whose curious Memoirs of himself were published a few years ago by lord
Corke :— When Catherine, countess of Nottingham, was dying (as she did, according to
his lordship's own account, about a fortnight before queen Elizabeth), she sent to her
majesty to desire that she might see her, in order to reveal something to her majesty, with
out the discovery of which she could not die in peace. Upon the queen's coming, lady
Nottingham told her that while the earl of Essex lay under sentence of death, he was de
sirous of asking her majesty's mercy in the manner prescribed by herself during the height
of his favour ; the queen having given him a ring, which, being sent to her as a token of
his distress, might entitle him to her protection. But the earl, jealous of those about him,
and not caring to trust any of them with it, as he was looking out of his window one mora
ine-, saw a boy with whose appearance he was pleased ; and, engaging him by money and
promises, directed him to convey the ring, which he took from his finger and threw dowK,
to lady Scroop, a sister of the countess of Nottingham, and a friend of his lordship, whp
attended upon the queen ; and to beg of her, that she would present it to her ma]esty.
The boy, by mistake, carried it to lady Nottingham, who showed it to her husband, the
admiral, an enemy of lord Essex, in order to take his advice. The admiral forbade her to
carry it, or return any answer to the message ; but insisted upon her keeping the rmg*
The countess of Nottingham, having made this discoverv, begged the queen's forgive
ness ; but her majesty answered, ( God may forgive, but I never can,* and left the room
with great emotion. Her mind was so struck with the story, that she never went into
bed, or took any sustenance from that instant ; for Camden is of opinion that her chief
reason for suffering the earl to be executed was his supposed obstinacy in not applying to
her for mercy."
A sequel to this story was communicated by a trustworthv correspondent to the editor
of " Old England." The substance of this communication is, that when Marv, queen of
Scots, married Darnley, she sent Elizabeth a ring, being a plain gold circle, to fit the
thumb having a rose diamond, in the form of a heart ; that Elizabeth gave this ring to
Essex; that it passed into the hands of king James ; that it was given by him to sir
Thomas Warner ; and has remained in the possession of his descendants to the present
time. It must be clear to every reader that the existence of such a ring does not in the
slightest degree add to the authenticity of the original ston,'. In the relation as given by
Dr. Birch there is manifest exaggeration. The countess of Not iogham died, according
to lord Corke, " about a fortnight before queen Elizabeth." It has been ascertained that
she died on the 25th of February ; Elizabeth died on the 24th of March. The death of
the queen must have been even more remarkable than her life, if, upon this fatal disc'os-
ure, " she never took any sustenance from that instant." A drawing of the " Warner"
ling was engraved in " Old England.'*
* " Calendar of State Papers of tho rcig^i of James I." edited by Mrs. Green, 1S57.
t Jardine " Criminal Trials," vol. i. p. 370.
LITERATURE AND ART. 227
CHAPTER XII.
Literature and Art characteristic of the periods of their production. — First years of Elir
abetban literature bore the impress of the two preceding reigns. — Sackville. — The
early popular drama. — Marlowe and the contemporary dramatists. — Growing refine
ment. — Spenser. — Shakspere. — Lyrical poetry. — Its association with Music. — Rural
images in the poets connected with the pleasurable aspects of country life. — Architec
ture. — The palatial mansion. — Gardens. — The gentleman's manor-house. — Classical
education. The historian Hume, in his desire to exhibit the reign of
Elizabeth as a period of uncontrolled despotism, says, " It is re
markable that in all the historical plays of Shakspere, where the
manners and characters, and even the transactions, of the several
reigns are so exactly copied, there is scarcely any mention of civil
Liberty!''''* Mr. Hallam, without adverting to this passage, has
furnished an answer to it: "These dramatic chronicles borrowed
surprising liveliness and probability from the national character
and form of government. A prince, and a courtier, and a slave,
are the stuff on which the historical dramatist would have to work
in some countries ; but every class of free men, in the just subor
dination without which neither human society nor the stage, which
should be its mirror, can be more than a chaos of huddled units,
lay open to the selection of Shakspere." f The " manners and
characters," not only of Shakspere's historical plays, but of all his
other dramas, are instinct with all the vitality that belongs to a
state of social freedom, in which what we hold as tyranny was
exceptional. The very fact which Hume alleges, but which must
be taken with some limitation, that in Shakspere's historical plays
"there is scarcely any mention of civil liberty," is really a proof of
the existence of such liberty. In our own time a French writer
has recorded, that after attending a debate in our House of Com
mons, he observed to an English statesman that he had heard no
assertion of the general principles of constitutional freedom. The
answer was, " We take all that for granted." We are not about to
analyse the characters of Shakspere's dramas to show that " they
* " History,'' Appendix iii. vol. v. t " Literature of Europe," vol. ii. p. 39S-
228 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
comprise every class of free men." We believe of Shakspere, as
we believe of Chaucer, that neither of these great poets could have
existed except under a condition of society which permitted a very
large amount of civil liberty. But this is not the place to set forth
any detailed reasons for this belief ; and we should scarcely have
alluded to the assertion of Hume, except to show that he properly
looked beyond Courts and Parliaments to discover the spirit of an
age. All Poetry, as all other Art, must in a great degree be the
reflection of the time in which it is produced. The Elizabethan
Poetry, and especially the Drama ; the Elizabethan Music ; the
Elizabethan Architecture ; bear the most decided impress of their
own time. The rapid, and therefore imperfect, view which we
shall take of the most prominent indications of intellectual pro
gress will be principally to exhibit them as characteristics of their
period. The stormy reigns of Edward VI. and of Mary were not favour
able to the cultivation of Literature. Wyatt and Surrey belonged
to the time of Henry VIIL, before the elements of religious conten
tion had penetrated much below the surface of society. But when the
nation came to be divided into two great opposing classes, earnest in
their convictions, even to the point of making martyrs, orbeingmartyrs .
the sonneteer and the lyrist would have little chance of being heard.
There were a few such poets — Vaux, Edwards, Hunnis — but even
their pleasant songs have a tincture of seriousness. The poet who
at the very beginning of the reign of Elizabeth struck out a richer
vein — Thomas Sackville — breathes the very spirit of the gloomy
five years of persecution and almost hopeless bigotry through which
England had passed into a healthier existence. There was then a
long interval, during which poetry was imping her wings for her
noblest flights. The drama was emerging from the childishness
and buffoonery of her first period of separation from the shows of
Catholicism. The same Thomas Sackville, early in the reign of
Elizabeth, produced his tragedy of " Gorboduc," of which it may
be sufficient to say, that Sidney describes it as " full of stately
speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Sen
eca his style." * English Dramatic poetry was not born with the
courtly Sackville. It was struggling into life when it first seized
upon the popular mind as an instrument of education — "made the
ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge
of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the
* " Defence of Poesy."
THE EARLY ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. 229
discovery of all our English chronicles." * Roughly was that
useful work originally done ; but it was a reflection of the national
spirit, and it produced its effect upon the national character. The
early dramatists, if we may credit one of their eulogists, proposed
great moral lessons in their representations : " In plays, all cozen
ages, all cunning drifts, overgilded with outward holiness, all strat
agems of war, all the canker-worms that breed on the rust of peace,
are most lively anatomised : they show the ill-success of treason, the
fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of
civil dissention, and how just God is evermore in punishing of mur
der." f Such passages have been again and again quoted ; but we re
peat them to show how thoroughly the English drama became adapt
ed to its time, even before its palmy state. It went forth from the
courtly direction of the Master of the Revels at Whitehall and
Greenwich, to delight multitudes at the Belle Savage and the Bull.
The Bones of Brave Talbot were " new embalmed with the tears
of ten thousand spectators at least." J It was a rude stage, in
which the place of action was "written in great letters upon an old
door ; '' a stage without scenes, so that "ahideous monster came out
with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound
to take it [the stage] for a cave." § And yet the most elaborate
mechanism, the most gorgeous decoration, never produced the
delight which the unassisted action and the simple dialogue of
these early plays excited. The spectators were in a new world.
They were there to believe, and not to criticise. " You shall have
three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the
stage to be a garden." The thousands who paid each their penny
did so believe. They gave up their imaginations to the delusion,
and were taken out of themselves into a higher region than that of
their daily labours. When the transition period arrived, in which
the first rude utterings of a mimetic life were passing into the higher
art of the first race of true dramatists, — of which race Marlowe was
the undoubted head — there was extravagance in action and char
acter; bombast in language; learning, — for Marlowe, Peele,
Greene, Lodge, Kyd, were scholars — but learning falsely applied ;
yet there was real poetical power. They dealt in horrors ; their
comedy was for the most part ribaldry. The Drama, says Sidney,
" like an unmannerly daughter, showing a bad education, causeth
her mother Poesy's h°nesty to he called in question." But the
* Heywood's " Apology for Actors," — Shakspere Society, p. 52.
t Nash. t Ibid. § Sidney.
23°
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
bad education of the unmannerly daughter was to be greatly
attributed to the examples of the outer world in which she was
born. She asserted her divine origin when strength and refinement
had become united, in the greater assimilation of character between
the courtly and the industrious classes ; when rough ignorance was
not held to be the necessary companion of martial prowess ; and
elegance and effeminacy had ceased to be confounded.
Against the growing refinement which was a natural conse
quence of the more general diffusion of wealth, the satirist,
whether he belonged to the severe religionists or to the class held
by them as the licentious, directed his constant invectives. There
was a general belief that luxury, as the use of the humblest com
forts was termed, was lowering the national character. Harrison
denounces the chimneys which had taken the place of the rere-
dosse in the hall ; the feather bed and the sheets which had driven
out the straw pallet ; the pewter vessels which were splendid at
the yeoman's feasts, instead of the wooden platters; the carpets
and the tapestry, the bowl for wine, and the dozen silver spoons.
The town wits held the growing riches of the citizens as the spoils
of usury and brokery ; and the lawyers who "fatted on gold"
were counted the oppressors of the poor. All this is indicative of
a great change of manners, resulting from the growing opulence
of the middle classes, and the wide increase of competition. There
was a general activity of intellect ; and it was one of the fortunate
circumstances of the social condition of England, that there was a
great national cause to fight for, which lifted men out of the sel
fishness of unwonted industrial prosperity. At such a period
arose the two greatest poets of that age, or of any age, Spense?
and Shakspere. They each essentially belonged to their time.
They each, in their several ways, reflected that time. Spenser
dealt much more largely than Shakspere with the events and char
acteristics of his age. In his " Shepherd's Kalendar," he is a de
cided Church-reformer. In the " Faery Queen " he shadows forth
" the most excellent and glorious person " of Elizabeth ; and many
historical personages may be traced in the poem. Amongst the
numerous allegorical characters we find Una, the true Church, op
posed to Duessa, the type of Romanism. But it is not in these
more literal marks of the time, that we discover in Spenser the
spirit of the lim?. It is not in his " Mother Hubberd's Tale,"
where we find the boldest satire against courtly corruption — justice
sold, benefices given to the unworthy, nobility despised, learning
SPENSER. 231-
little esteemed, the many not cared for, — that we must look for the
general reflection in Spenser's verse of the spirit of his age. His.
fate had been " in suing long to bide," and he took a poet's revenge
for the neglect. It is in the general elevation of the tone of "the
Faery Queen," and of the other poems of his matured years, that
we may appreciate the moral and intellectual tastes of the educated
classes of Elizabeth's latter period. Unquestionably the poet, by
his creative power, may in some degree shape the character of an
age, instead of being its mirror ; but in the relations of a great
writer to his readers there is a mutual action', each inspiring the
other. The tone of Spenser's poetry must at any rate have been
in accordance with the mental condition of those with whom " the
Faery Queen " became at once the most popular of all books. It
ceased to be popular after two generations had passed away, and
the Rochesters and Sedleys were the great literary stars. The
heroic age to which Spenser belonged was then over. " Fierce
wars and faithful loves " had become objects of ridicule. The
type of female perfection was not " heavenly Una, with her milk-
white lamb," but " Mistress Nelly " in the side-box. " The goodly
golden chain of chivalry " was utterly worthless compared with the
price paid for Dunkirk. Such were, the differences of morals and
intellect between 1600 and 1670. Spenser was the most popular
of poets while the ideal of chivalry still lingered in the period that
had produced Sidney, and Essex, and Raleigh, and Grenville —
when the rough Devonshire captains fought the Spaniard with an
enthusiastic bravery and endurance that the Orlandos and the Red
Cross Knights of Ariosto and Spenser could not excel. The great
laureate's popularity was gone when the Dutch sailed up the Med-
way ; for the spirit of the Elizabethan " golden time " was gone.
The age of Elizabeth may pre-eminently claim the distinction
of having called up a great native literature. The national mind
had already put forth many blossoms of poetry, and in the instance
of Chaucer the early fruit was of the richest flavour. But in the
latter part of Elizabeth's reign England had a true garden of the
Hesperides. It has been most justly observed that " in the time
of Henry VIIL and Edward VI., a person who did not read French
or Latin could read nothing or next to nothing."* Hence the
learned education of the ladies of that period. The same writer
asks, "over what tragedy could lady Jane Grey have wept, over
what comedy could she have smiled, if the ancient dramatists had
* Macaulay, "Essays,'' art. "Bacon."
232 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
not been in her library ? " Lady Jane Grey meekly laid her head
upon the block in 1554. Had she lived fifty years longer she
would have had in her library all Shakspere's historical plays, ex
cept King John and King Henry VIIL ; she would have had Ro
meo and Juliet, Love's Labour Lost, the Merchant of Venice, Mid
summer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merry
Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, — for all these were printed before
that period. She might have seen all these acted ; and she might
also have seen As you Like it, All's Well that Ends Well, The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, Othello. Her pure
and truly religious nature would not have shrunk from the perusal
of these works, which might worthily stand by the side of her Ter
ence and her Sophocles in point of genius, and have a far higher
claim upon her admiration. For they were imbued, not with the
lifeless imitation of heathen antiquity, but with the real vitality of
the Christian era in which they were produced ; with all the intel
lectual freedom which especially distinguished that era from the
past ages of Christianity. The deities of the old mythology might
linger in the pageants of the court ; but the inspiration of these
creations of the popular dramatist was derived from the pure faith
for which the lady Jane died. From no other source of high
thought could have originated the exquisite creations of female
loveliness which Shakspere, and Spenser equally, presented. Some
portion of what was tender and graceful in the Catholic worship of
" Our Lady," passed into the sober homage involuntarily paid to
the perfectness of woman by the two great Protestant poets. In
Shakspere was especially present a more elevated spirit of charity
than belonged to the government of his times, although his tolera
tion must have abided to a great extent amongst a people that had
many common ties of brotherhood whatever were their differences
of creed. Hence the patriotism of Shakspere — a considerate pa
triotism founded upon that nationality by which he is held "to
have been most connected with ordinary men." * But Shakspere
lived in an age when nationality was an exceeding great virtue,
which alone enabled England, in a spirit of union, to stand up
against the gigantic power which sought her conquest through her
religious divisions. All around the dramatist, and reflected by
him in a thousand hues of "many-coloured life," were those mixed
elements of society, out of whose very differences results the unity
of a prosperous nation. There was a great industrious class stand-
* Frederick Schlegel.
LYRICAL POETRY, AND MUSIC. 233
ing between the noble and the peasant, running over with individ
ual originality of character, and infusing their spirit into the sov
ereign, the statesman, and the soldier. The gentlemen of Shaks
pere are distinct from those of any other poet in their manly
frankness ; and the same quality of straightforward independence
may be traced in his yeomen and his peasants. His clowns even,
are the representatives of the national humour, which itself was a
growth of the national freedom. There was a select lettered class,
who, having shaken off the trammels of the scholastic philosophy,
were exploring the depths of science and laying the foundations of
accurate reasoning. Shakspere stood between the new world of
bold speculation that was opening upon him, and the world of sub
mission to authority that was passing away. Thus, whilst he lin
gers amidst the simplicity and even the traditionary superstitions
of the multitude with evident delight — calls up their elves and their
witches, and their ghosts, but in no vulgar shapes — he asserts his
claim to take rank with the most elevated of the world's thinkers
in the investigation of the hardest problems of man's nature. Such
are a few of the relations in which the art of Shakspere stood to
the period in which he lived ; and although it has been truly said,
" he was not for an age, but for all time," we hold that he could
not have been produced except in that age, and in the country of
which he has become the highest glory. There must have been a
marvellous influence of the social state working upon the highest
genius, to have called forth those dramas for the people, which
having their birth in a yeoman's house at Stratford,
" Show, sustain, and nourish all the world."
The lyrical poetry of the Elizabethan time was chiefly written
to be married to music. As Shakspere's drama was drama to be
acted, so his songs were songs to be sung. Their grace, their
simplicity, their variety of measure, were qualities which are found
in the lyrical poems of Marlowe, Green, Lodge, Raleigh, Breton,
Drayton, and others less known to fame, whb contributed to the
delight of many a tranquil evening in the squire's pleasure garden,
and by the citizen's sea-coal fire-side, where Morley's "Airs," and
other popular collections, were as familiarly known as Moore's
" Melodies " in our own day. It was not that the musical taste of
England was first developed in this period, but that it had spread
from the court to the people. There was a greater diffusion of
wealth, and therefore more leisure for the cultivation of the elegan
cies of life. Property was secure. The days of feudal tyranny
234 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
were past. The whole aspect of the country was necessarily
changed. If we open the county histories of this period we find
an enumeration of "principal manor-houses," which shows how
completely the English gentleman, of moderate fortune, had in
every parish taken the place of the baron or the abbot, who were
once the sole proprietors of vast districts. A poet of the pe
riod has noticed this change in his description of rural scenery.
" Hera on soma mount a house of pleasure vanted
Where once the warring cannon had been planted."
These lines are from the "Britannia's Pastorals" of William
Browne, whose poems, unequal as they are, contain many exquis
ite descriptions of country life. But nearly all the poetry of this
age shows how thoroughly the realities of that life had become
familiar to the imaginative mind. The second-hand images with
which town poets make their rural descriptions wearisome are not
found in the Elizabethan poets. The commonest objects of nature
uniformly present their poetical aspects in Shakspere, as they did
in Chaucer. The perpetual freshness and variety of creation were
seen by these great masters with that rapid' power of observation
which belongs to genius. But the minor poets of the end of the
sixteenth century evidently studied rural scenery with that feeling
of the picturesque which is always a late growth of individual or
national cultivation. The country, to the educated proprietor of
the soil, had become something more than the source of his rev
enue. His ancestral trees had now for him a higher interest than
to furnish logs for his hall-fire. His garden was no longer a mere
place for growing kail and pot-herbs ; — it was to have choice flowers
and shady seats — the stately terrace and the green walk — the foun
tain and the vase. The poets reflect the prevailing taste. They
make their posies of the peony and the pink, the rose and the
columbine. They go with the huntsman to the field, and with the
angler to the river. They are found nutting with the village boys,
and they gather strawberries in the woods. They sit with the
Lady of the May in her bower, and quaff the brown ale at the har
vest-home. The country has become the seat of pleasant thoughts ;
and the poets are there to aid their influences.
The Architecture of the reign of Elizabeth is essentially charac
teristic of the period, not only in the simple manor-house of the
squire, but in the "great house" of the noble. Sidney had de
scribed his own Penshurst, in the early half of that period, when
ARCHITECTURE. 235
the old massive style, adapted for security rather than convenience,
had not wholly passed away : — " They might see (with fit consid
eration both of the air, the prospect and the nature of the ground)
all such necessary additions to a great house, as might well show
that provision is the foundation of hospitality, and thrift the fuel
of magnificence. The house itself was built of fair and strong
stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness, as
an honourable representing of a firm stateliness. The lights,
doors, and stairs, rather directed to the use of the guests than to
the eye of the artificer ; and yet, as the one chiefly heeded, so the
other not neglected ; each place handsome without curiosity, and
homely without loathsomeness ; not so dainty as not to be trod on,
nor yet slubbered up with good fellowship ; all more lasting than
beautiful, but that the consideration of the exceeding lastingness
made the eye believe it was exceedingly beautiful." * The " firm
stateliness," the " exceeding lastingness," became of secondary
importance when the lord of the house and his retainers had ceased
to dine in the great hall; and that principal apartment became little
more than an entrance to those rooms dedicated to privacy or to
state. There was to be provided, in the latter part of the century,
a gorgeous gallery "for feasts and triumphs," as Lord Bacon held;
— such a gallery as may still be seen at Hardwick. Here all the
quaint forms of decoration in carving and colour were lavished.
The walls were covered with portraits, almost the only branch of
art then cultivated or encouraged in England. In these places
there were tapestried " chambers of presence ; " many bed-cham
bers for the family and their guests ; lodgings for the various offi
cers of the household ; bake-houses and brew-houses ; the great
court in the centre ; and the whole distribution of the private
rooms often regulated by " My lord's side '! and " My lady's side."
The garden was an especial object of artistical decoration. Hentz-
ner, in his " Travels in England," in 1 598, has described the gar
den of Theobalds, one of the mansions of lord Burleigh. It was
"encompassed with a ditch full of water, large enough for one to
have the pleasure of going in a boat, and rowing between the
shrubs ; here are great variety of trees and plants ; labyrinths
made with a great deal of labour ; a jet d'eau, with its bason of
white marble ; and columns and pyramids of wood and other ma
terials up and down the garden. After seeing these, we were led
by the gardener into the summer-house, in the lower part of which,
* "Arcadia."
236 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
built semi-circularly, are the twelve Roman emperors in white mar
ble, and a table of touchstone ; the upper part of it is set round
with cisterns of lead, into which the water is conveyed through
pipes;, so that fish may be kept in them, and in summer time they
are very convenient for bathing ; in another room for entertainment
very near this, and joined to it by a little bridge, was an oval table
of red marble." From the gardens and terraces of these great
houses the hall was entered ; but now, when the grandest apart
ments were above, there was a staircase in the hall, of the most
decorated character. At such mansions Elizabeth rested during
her progresses, when her nobles vied with each other in the most
lavish hospitality to welcome their queen; and soon turned their
old dreary castles into gorgeous palaces, by the magic art of John
Thorpe, the great constructive genius of that age. He perfected
that union of the Italian style with the Gothic, which produced
what we call the Tudor architecture. Some of these palatial edi
fices still stand, although for the most part dilapidated. Their
faded splendours carry us back to the days of " mask and antique
pageantry," when the lavish magnificence had something poetical
even in its discomfort.
The Elizabethan manor-house is too well known to need any
description. It is generally a plain building, with two projecting
wings and a centra] porch. The initial letter of Elizabeth has been
held to have suggested this form. In its homely provision for do
mestic convenience, the manor-house is more completely identified
with the prevailing character of English society than the more gor
geous mansion. The manor-house had its hall and its buttery ; its
dining-room and its parlour ; sometimes its chapel ; always ils
great kitchen. It was surrounded with a moat ; it possessed its
little flower-garden. When the tobacco which Raleigh introduced
ceased to be worth its weight in silver, the smoking-room was ad
ded. On great festival days the rich plate is brought out, and dis
played on the " court-cupboard " of the dining-parlour ; and " it is
merry in hall, when beards wag all."
The reign of Elizabeth, which witnessed such an outburst of
our native literature, had not neglected that cultivation of ancient
learning, upon which sound literature and correct taste must in a
great degree be built. New colleges had been founded at Oxford
and Cambridge. Elizabeth had also founded Trinity College,
Dublin. James VI. had erected the university of Edinburgh, in
addition to the Scottish academical institutions ; and Marischal
CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 237
College, Aberdeen, was built in his reign. To the London Gram
mar Schools of St. Paul's and Christ Church had been added
Westminster School, by the queen, and Merchant Tailors' School,
by- the great city company of that name. The grammar-schools
were essentially the schools of the people ; and it is a sufficient
praise of Elizabeth's new foundation of Westminster to say that
Camden there taught, and that Jonson there learnt.
238 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XIIL
James proclaimed king of England.— Question of the Succession.— Sir Robert Carey's
ride to Edinburgh.— James quits Scotland.— His progress to London.— His system
of punishments and rewards.— Cecil's influence.— The coronation.— Raleigh, Cobham,
Grey, and others arrested on charges of conspiracy.— The two plots.— Trial of
Raleigh. His conviction and long imprisonment.— Conferences at Hampton Court.
—Meeting of Parliament.— Contest between the King and the House of Commons
upon a question of Privilege.— Statutes of this session.— Wardship.— Purveyance.—
Temper of the Commons— Peace with Spain.— James proclaimed king of Great
Britain. — Character of James.
Queen Elizabeth died at Richmond at three o'clock in the
morning of the 24th of March. Before ten o'clock of that day
James, king of Scotland, was proclaimed as her successor. Cecil,
and others of the Council who were favourable to the claim of James
to the English throne, were about the queen during her last illness,
and lost riot a moment in taking the important step of proclaiming
him to the people. It was a wise decision; for, although the title
of the descendants of Margaret, queen of Scots, was clear, accord.
ing to the principle of hereditary succession, the statute of the 35th
of Henry VIIL, gave that king power to dispose of the succession
to the crown by will, and in his will he passed over the descendants
of Margaret. The parlimentary title was thus placed in opposition
to the hereditary claim. There were descendants in existence of
Mary, duchess of Suffolk, the younger sister of Henry VIIL To
lord Beauchamp, one of these, it may be supposed that Eliza
beth alluded, in the speech ascribed to her that she would have no
" rascal " as her successor. Other titles to the throne were talked
of, however remote, amongst which that of Arabella Stuart was
most prominent. The queen's political sagacity would naturally
have pointed out the king of Scotland as the successor whose
claim would have been recognised with the least confusion; and
she probably would not have hesitated, in her dying hour, however
she might have unwillingly entertained the question at previous
seasons, had she not had sufficient reason to think meanly of the
character of James. He was weak and untruthful. Their natures
were essentially opposite. There was no love between them.
JAMES PROCLAIMED KING. — QUITS SCOTLAND. 239
Sir Robert Carey, at the moment of Elizabeth's death, received
a token from lady Scrope, his sister, that the great queen had
passed away after a placid sleep. With the ring that this lady took
from the finger of her mistress, Carey posted for Scotland. On
Saturday night, after an extraordinary ride of three days and two
nights, the alert courtier was on his knees before James to salute
him as king of England, with the royal ring as his credential. Carey
had obtained the start of the slow messenger of the Privy Council,
who arrived in Edinburgh on the following Tuesday. On the 3rd of
April, James, having attended the service in the High Church of
St. Giles, delivered a farewell harangue to the congregation f and
on the 5th he Fook his departure from Edinburgh. His queen,
Anne of Denmark, and his children were left behind. Curious was
his progress towards London, and very characteristic of his coarse
and self-sufficient nature. Men saw the respect for law which was
at the foundation of English liberty and order, despised by the man
who was coming to rule over them. A cut-purse was tal en at
Newark, who had followed the court from Berwick ; upon which the
king sent a warrant to the recorder of Newark to have the thief
hanged. The wise perceived the approach of an ignorant despotism
in this contempt of the ordinary course of justice : " I hear our
new king," writes Harrington,"hath hanged one man before he was
tried ; 'tis strangely done ; now if the wind bloweth thus, why may
not a man be tried before he hath offended ? " But James's notion
of kingly rewards was as absurd as his notion of kingly punish
ments. During his journey of thirty-two days from Edinburgh to
London, he showered the honour of knighthood on two hundred and
thirty-seven gentlemen who were presented to him. Elizabeth
bestowed such honours sparingly upon her statesmen and soldiers.
James made the noblest title of the old chivalry ridiculous.
During his progress to London James feasted at many houses,
where he beheld the tokens of wealth and luxury to which he was
little used. He at last rested at Theobalds, where the adroit Cecil
made his arrangements for a long tenure of power. The king
entered London on the 7th of May. Meanwhile Elizabeth had
been followed to her grave at Westminster by fifteen hundred
gentlemen in mourning. Many of her late subjects were looking to
her successor for relief from the penal laws, which obstructed
Puritan as well as Papist in the exercise of their relig;on. Before '
James reached London a petition was presented to him, signed by
eight hundred and twenty-five ministers from various counties,
240
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
desiring the redress of ecclesiastical abuses. In the State Paper
Office there is an address to him from the Catholics of England,
imploring " the free exercise of their religion, in private if not in
public, by sufferance if not with approbation."* Some of the
Romanists, however, expected more from the new king than tolera
tion. In a letter dated from Rome, May 14th, of Robert Parsons,
the Jesuit, he hopes the king may become a Catholic ; says there
are prayers for him in the seminaries ; and states that the pope is
delighted with the king's book, " Basilicon Doron." t There can
be no doubt that, before the death of Elizabeth, James had prom
ised that the Roman Catholics should be tolerated. Within three
months of his arrival in London, some of the leading recusants
were assured that the fines for recusancy should no longer be
enforced ; and in the following year the sum paid as fines was very
small. That the king had no large views of toleration was soon
evident. He bestowed some honours and lucrative places on a few,
upon a principle which he avowed when objection was made to
lord Henry Howard, a Catholic, having a seat in the Council ; James
saying that by this tame duck he hoped to take many wild ones.
In June, the queen of James, and his eldest son prince Henry
arrived in England. The coronation took place on the 25th of
July, amidst the gloom and consternation of the people of London,
for the plague was making the most fearful ravages in the city.
The sight of the pageant was confined to the nobility and the
court. On this account, as alleged, a parliament was not sum
moned, according to the usual course upon the accession of a new
sovereign. Ambassadors came from the United Provinces, from the
archduke of Austria, and from Henry IV., to congratulate the new
king of England. To all of them James made professions of peace.
Sully, the minister of France, was there to sustain the influence of
his master. He did so by the power of gold, and not by the sym
pathies of friendship, as in the time of the great queen. Sully wore
mourning for Elizabeth when he first appeared at James's court ;
but he was soon told that such a tribute of respect was disagree
able, and that at Whitehall her name must no longer be mentioned.
At the death of Elizabeth, the rivalry which had sprung up be
tween Robert Cecil and Raleigh was to have its triumph, in the
confirmed favour of James to the minister with whom he had for
some time been in secret communication. The wily Secretary of
State was far too strong for the bold Captain of the Guard. The
• " Calendar of State Papers," edited by Mrs. Green, p. 5. Ibid. p.8.
RALEIGH, COBHAM, AND OTHERS ARRESTED. 241
adroit politician, weak of body but close and circumspect, would be
secure of his advantage over the accomplished soldier and naviga
tor, even if James had not manifested a personal dislike for Ra
leigh. It was unnecessary for Cecil to have written, within a week
of the queen's death, that the Council had " stayed the journey of
the captain of the guard, who was conducting many suitors to the
king." * If they had met, James would probably have insulted
the man whose most ardent passion was to diminish the power of
Spain, while James would have laid England and Scotland at her
feet. So Raleigh was deprived of his offices ; and within a few
months was under a charge of high treason. Hume, in a very
brief relation of " the discovery of a conspiracy to subvert the gov
ernment, and to fix on the throne Arabella Stuart, a near relation
of the king by the family of Lennox, and descended equally from
Henry VIL," mixes up the accounts of two alleged conspiracies.
He says Roman Catholic priests ; lord Grey, a puritan ; lord Cob-
ham, a profligate man, and Raleigh, a freethinker ; were engaged
in " a conspiracy ; " and he asks " what cement could unite men of
such discordant principles, in so dangerous a combination ? " The
Roman Catholic conspiracy was wholly different from that in which
Raleigh, Cobham, and Grey were accused, of engaging ; and was
known as " the treason of the priests," or the " Bye," — the cant
word by which it was designated upon the trials of the accused.
Its object was to seize the person of the king. The other treason
was known as the " Main ; " and its purposes were so ill defined,
that, half a century afterwards, it was described, by Rush worth, as
"a dark kind of treason;" the author of the "Historical Collec
tions" adding, "in his time the veil still rested upon it." Subse
quent investigations have not withdrawn the veil. Cobham, a very
weak man, though possessed of great power from his position, had
taken part with Raleigh in his jealousy of the earl of Essex ; and
James, who considered that Essex had been sacrificed through 'his
anxiety to promote that claim to the succession which Elizabeth
did not recognize, held them both in great dislike. Cecil, who was
equally united with them in jealousy of Essex, had propitiated the
king of Scotland ; and to him was confided the chief power of the
government when James came to the English throne. There is
little in these alleged treasons' that deserves any minute relation,
except as they involve the trial- and conviction of one of the most
remarkable men in the history of our country. The mind of Ra-
* " Calendar of State Papers," p. z.
Vol. III.— 16
242 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
leigh never was exhibited in a more heroic attitude than in his con
duct on this memorable trial.
On the 17th November, 1603, a Special Commission was held
at Winchester, the plague then raging in London and other parts.
Sir Walter Raleigh had been indicted on the previous 21st of Au
gust, upon a charge of high treason ; the overt acts alleged being
that he had conferred with lord Cobham as to advancing Arabella
Stuart to the crown of England, dispossessing the king ; and that
it was arranged that lord Cobham should go to the king of Spain
and the archduke of Austria, to obtain six hundred thousand
crowns for the support of Arabella's title. It was also alleged in
the indictment that Cobham communicated the plan to George
Brooke, and that they both said " there never would be a good
world in England till the king and his cubs were taken away ; "
that Cobham wrote to count Aremberg for the six hundred thou
sand crowns, which Aremberg promised to give ; and that Raleigh
was to receive eight thousand crowns. Raleigh pleaded Not
Guilty. The conduct of the Attorney-General upon this trial, was snch
as made even Cecil remonstrate against his unfairness. Coke's
brutality to the prisoner remains as a perpetual warning to the bar
and the bench, that if the character of the gentleman is ever pub
licly dissociated from that of the lawyer in the administration of
justice, the greatest learning, the most elevated rank, will not save
the trickster or the bully from the contempt of his own generation
and of future times. Coke began by declaring that the treason of
Raleigh was '-the treason of the tiiain, the others were the bye"
and then went on to mix him up, as the historian has done, with
both treasons. " I pray you; gentlemen of the jury," said Raleigh,
"remember I am not charged with the bye, which was the treason
of the priests." To this quiet observation Coke replied, " You are
not ; but your lordships will see that all these treasons, though
they consisted of several points, closed in together, like Samson's
foxes, which were joined in the tails, though their heads were sev
ered." Let us pursue this dialogue a little further. Coke went
on, again travelling far out of the indictment, to associate Raleigh
with every charge against other conspirators of whose proceedings
it is manifest that he knew nothing. " To what end do you speak
all this ? " said the prisoner. '• I will prove you to be the most no
torious traitor that ever came to the bar," rejoined Coke. " Thou art
a monster. Thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart." Coke
CONDUCT OF COKE THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL. 243
then proceeded with a recital of his charges against Cobham. " If
my lord Cobham be a traitor, what is that to me ? " said Raleigh.
Then the great lawyer replied, " All that he did was by thy instiga
tion, thou viper, for I thou thee, thou traitor ! "* When Coke came to
the words about "destroying the king and his cubs," which rested
upon a declaration of one of the priests of what the Jesuits intended,
Raleigh lost patience for a moment, and exclaimed, " O barbarous !
Do you bring the words of these hellish spiders against me ? "
Coke retorted, " Thou art thyself a spider of hell." Such were the
flowers of rhetoric with which the Attorney-General of that day
sustained the dignity of English justice. There is an account of
the trial, supposed to be written by sir Thomas Overbury, in which
he contrasts the conduct of Coke, behaving himself " so violently
and bitterly," and using " so great provocation to the prisoner,"
with the demeanour of Raleigh : " As the attorney was noted, so
was the carriage of Raleigh' most remarkable ; first to the lords,
humble yet not prostrate ; dutiful yet not dejected ; for in some
cases he would humbly thank them for gracious speeches ; in
others, when they related some circumstances, acknowledged that
what they said was true ; and in such points wherein he would not
yield unto them, he would crave pardon, and with reverence urge
them and answer them in points of law and essential matter of fact ;
towards the jury, affable, but not fawning; not in despair, but
hoping in them ; carefully persuading with reason, not distemper-
edly importuning with conjuration ; rather showing love of life,
than fear of death. Towards the king's counsel patient, but not
insensibly neglecting nor yielding to imputations laid against him
by words ; and it was wondered that a man of his heroic spirit
could be so valiant -in suffering that he was never once overtaken
in passion." The charge against Raleigh rested solely upon the accusation
of lord Cobham, of which a contemporary letter-writer says, it
"was no more to be weighed than the barking of a dog." Sir
Dudley Carleton, in a letter from Winchester, gives a narrative of
the trial of Raleigh. He says, " The evidence against him was
only Cobham's confession, which was judged sufficient to condemn
him ; and a letter was produced, written by Cobham the day before,
by which he accused Raleigh as the first practiser of the treason
"The speech of sir Toby Belch, "if thou thou'st him some thrice it shall not be
amiss," has been held to have been suggested by Coke's insult. But " Twelfth Night''
had been acted in 1602,
244 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
betwixt them, which served to turn against him; though he
showed^ to countervail this, a letter written by Cobham, and deliv
ered to him in the Tower, by which he was clearly acquitted."
Raleigh demanded that Cobham should be confronted with him.
He contended that by the law of treasons two witnesses were
necessary to conviction. His eloquence was unavailing. He was
found guilty, and sentenced to death. The opinion of after times
is expressed by Mr. Hallam : " His conviction was obtained on
the single deposition of lord Cobham, an accomplice, a prisoner,
not examined in court, and known to have already retracted
his accusation. Such a verdict was thought contrary to law,
even in that age of ready convictions." Raleigh's contempora
ries felt that his conviction was most unjust. Raleigh was un
popular, for he was proud ; but his trial produced a complete
change in the general feeling. One who was present at Winches
ter affirmed "that whereas when he" saw him first, he was So
led with the common hatred that he would have gone a hundred
miles to see him hanged, — he would, ere he parted, have gone a
thousand to save his life." * The priests and Brooke were found
guilty of the " Bye " plot, and were executed. Cobham, Grey, and
Markham were found guilty, and were brought upon the scaffold
to die. After a theatrical mummery these were reprieved, and
wore out long years of imprisonment. Raleigh was also reprieved,
and was confined in the Tower till 1616. Those twelve years of
captivity were not spent in vain repining. In his prison chamber
he wrote his " History of the World " — a noble book, worthy of
the man and of the days in which he had gloriously lived — full of
poetry and high philosophy, and in its solemn recognitions of the
" power, light, virtue, wisdom, and goodness " of the " Omnipotent
Cause," and " Almighty Mover," furnishing the best answer to the
scurrility of the Attorney-general, who called him " damnable
atheist," and of the Chief Justice who, in sentencing him, said>
" You have been taxed by the world, sir Walter Raleigh, with hold
ing heathenish, atheistical, and profane opinions, which I list not
to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them ; but
the authors and maintainers of such opinions cannot be suffered to
live in any Christian commonwealth."
When the Puritan ministers presented their petition to James
on his journey to London, they asked for a conference. On the
* Carleton's letter in the " Hardwicke State Papers." This, and other documents
connected with Raleigh's trial, are given by Mr. Jardine.
CONFERENCES AT HAMPTON COURT. 245
14th, 15th and 1 6th of January, 1604, the king summoned to
Hampton Court the archbishop of Canterbury, eight bishops, five
deans, and two doctors, who wete to sustain the ceremonies and
practices of the Church, and to oppose all innovation. To meet
them, four members of the reforming party were summoned, in
cluding Dr. Reynolds, a divine of acknowledged learning and abil
ity. Royalty never displayed itself in a more undignified manner.
Episcopacy never degraded itself more by a servile flattery of roy
alty. James, in his insolent demeanour to the representatives of a
growing party in the English Church, thought to avenge himself
of the humiliation he had been occasionally compelled to endure
from ministers of the Scottish kirk. He was the chief talker in
these conferences. Harrington, who was present, says " The king
talked much Latin, and disputed with Dr. Reynolds ; but he rather
used upbraidings than argument, and told the petitioners that they
wanted to strip Christ again, and bid them away with their snivel
ling The bishops seemed much pleased, and said his maj
esty spoke by the power of inspiration. I wist not what they
mean ; but the spirit was rather foul-mouthed." * A few altera
tions were made in the Common Prayer Book; and a new version
of the Holy Scriptures was ordered to be undertaken. James had
taken his side ; but his pedantic vanity, though suited to the taste
of bishop Bancroft, who fell upon his knees and thanked God for
giving them such a king, was not quite fitted for the government
of the English nation. In the first Parliament of his reign James
was at issue with the House of Commons.
On the 19th of March, 1604, the two Houses were assembled.
In the proclamation by which the king called parliament together,
he had, in his grand style of common places, chosen to prescribe
the sort of men the people were to choose for their representa
tives. " There are often," he proclaims, " many unfit persons ap
pointed for that service ; and where it is so well known to every
private man of wit and judgment, much more to Us, who have had
so long experience of kingly government, what ill effects do fol
low.'' Amongst other directions, he emphatically says, " We do
command that an express care be had that there be not chosen
any persons bankrupt or outlaw." Furthermore, " We notify by
these presents, that all returns and certificates of knights, citizens,
and burgesses ought, and are, to be brought to the Chancery, and
there to be filed of record ; and if any shall be found to be made
* " Nugaa Antiquae," p. 182.
246 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
contrary to this proclamation, the same is to be rejected as unlaw
ful and insufficient, and the city or borough to be fined for the
same." Again and again, in the. reign of Elizabeth, as they had
done in former reigns, the Commons had successfully maintained
the principle that no writ for a second election of knight or citizen
or burgess should issue, without an order from the House .itself.
It is strongly but truly observed that, in spite of these assertions '
of the constitutional principle, " a stranger is no sooner seated on
the throne than he aims a blow at the very foundation of the peo
ple's rights." * The House of Commons had no especial regard
for bankrupts or outlaws ; but they chose themselves to examine
into an allegation of this nature, and not let the Chancellor exer
cise an authority which interfered with their Privileges. Sir Fran
cis Goodwin had been returned for Buckinghamshire, in opposition
to sir John Fortescue, who was favoured by the government. An
outlawry had been found to have formerly hung over him ; and the
election of Goodwin being declared void, a new writ was issued
from Chancery. The House restored Goodwin to his seat ; and
then James, in his impatient ignorance of the spirit of the Eng
lish monarchy, told the Commons that " they derived all matters
of privilege from him, and from his grant ; " and that precedents
were not to be credited, when derived from " the times of minors,
of tyrants, of women, of simple kings." His contemptuous men
tion of " women " was an intimation of his scorn for his predeces
sor, before whose genius he had crouched like a whipped school
boy. The dispute went on ; and then this interpreter of the spirit
of the old free monarchy of England said, " We command, as an
absolute king, a conference with the judges." The matter ended
by both elections being set aside. James was wise enough not to
engage in such a conflict a second time.
The House of Commons, at this commencement of a new
dynasty, the head of which had not scrupled to proclaim principles
inconsistent with the foundations of national freedom, did not care
to separate without leaving a solemn record of their opinions, and
a justification of their proceedings. It is entitled an " Apology of
the House of Commons, made to the King, touching their Privi
leges." Had the doctrines therein asserted been respected by the
Stuarts, the blood that was shed forty years afterwards might have
been spared. We will extract one or two passages of this remark
able document. The Commons review the attempts to maintain
* Brodie, " British Empire," vol. i. p. 343.
STATUTES OF THE SESSION. 247
that they held not Privileges of right, but of grace only ; that they
were not a Court of Record ; and that the examination upon the
return of writs was without their compass ; and they thus proceed:
— "Against which assertions, most gracious sovereign, tending
directly and apparently to the utter overthrow of the very funda
mental Privileges of our House, and therein of the Rights and
Liberties of the whole Commons of your realm of England, which
they and their ancestors from time immemorable have undoubtedly
enjoyed under your majesty's most noble progenitors ; we, the
knights, citizens, and burgesses of the House of Commons assem
bled in parliament, and in the name of the whole Commons of the
realm of England, with uniform consent for ourselves and our pos
terity, do expressly protest, as being derogatory in the highest de
gree to the true dignity, liberty, and authority of your majesty's
high court of parliament, and consequently to the rights of all your
majesty's said subjects, and the whole body of this your kingdom;
and desire that this our protestation may be recorded to all poster
ity What cause we your poor Commons have to
watch over our privileges is manifest in itself to all men. The
Prerogatives of Princes may easily, and do daily grow. The Privi
leges of the Subject are for the most part at an everlasting stand.
They may be by good providence and care preserved ; but being
once lost are not recovered but with much disquiet. If good kings
were immortal, as well as kingdoms, to strive so for privilege were
but vanity perhaps and folly; but seeing the same God, who in his
great mercy hath given us a wise king and religious, doth also
sometimes permit hypocrites and tyrants in his displeasure, and
for the sins of the people, from hence hath the desire of rights,
liberties, and privileges, both for nobles and commons, had its just
original, by which an harmonical and stable state is framed ; each
member under the head enjoying that right, and performing that
duty, which for the honour of the head and happiness of the whole
is requisite." But it was not only upon the question of their Privileges that
the Commons were not in accord with the Crown. There had
been, with the king's assent, a novel code of canons established in
convocation, which aimed at excluding non-conformists from civil
rights, and setting up an unconstitutional authority over the laity,
as well as the clergy. The Commons, in a conference with the
Lords, remonstrated against such an innovation. The language
in which the king was addressed in the " Apology," is the voice of
248 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
men who have been nurtured in the belief that they were freemen,
and who abide in the determination to remain freemen. They say
to the king, " Your Majesty would be misinformed if any man
should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power
in themselves, either to alter religion, which God defend should be
in the power of any mortal man whatsoever, cr to make any laws
concerning the same, otherwise than, as in temporal causes, by
consent of Parliament. We have, and shall, at all times by our
oaths acknowledge that your majesty is sovereign lord and supreme
governor in both."
During this session a parliamentary title was given to king
James and his descendants by an Act for " a most joyful and just
recognition of the immediate, lawful, and undoubted succession,
descent, and right of the Crown." * The natural and wise desire
of the king for an Union of the two countries was not very cor
dially met; and in their " Apology" the Commons say, "We were
long in treating and debating the matter of Union. The proposi
tions were new ; the importance great ; the consequence far reach
ing, and not discoverable but by long disputes ; our numbers also
are large, and each hath liberty to speak." But at length an Act
was passed, appointing Commissioners to treat with the Scots
upon this great question. f Many years elapsed before public prej
udices had been softened down, and private interests conciliated,
so that Scotland and England became one nation. We must not
be too ready to hold the legislators of this time as peculiarly igno
rant, in passing a law to declare Witchcraft felony, without benefit
of clergy. { The superstition was productive of enormous cruel
ties ; but it had its earnest supporters, and amongst others the
king himself. The popular belief went wholly in that direction.
The legislation of the Parliament of 1604 was not so remarkable
as the spirit which it displayed in the resistance of encroachments
upon its ancient liberties, and in the demand for reforms of
ancient abuses. Amongst those who most strongly maintained
the necessity of improvement was Francis Bacon. The griev
ances of which the Commons had complained, in a petition,
were those of purveyance, which fell upon all the people. The
burthen of wardships, by which the custody, and therefore the
profits, of every estate held under military tenure, was claimed by
the crown during the minority of the heir, fell upon the landed
proprietors. Purveyance was the relic of a condition of society
* 1 Jac. I. c. 1. t 1 Jac. I. c. 2. t 1 Jac I. c. 12.
TEMPER OF THE COMMONS. 249
¦which had passed away. Before the communications between the
producers'" of food and the consumers in towns were easy, those
wants of the sovereign's household which could not be supplied
from the royal demesnes were arranged by purveyors, — a body of
officers who had the right of claiming provisions in any market for
the king's use. They took corn, flesh, every description of food, at
their own prices. They had the right of impressing carts and car
riages in the same arbitrary manner. Statute after statute had been
passed for the regulation of purveyance ; but a power so enormous
was liable to the grossest abuse. Elizabeth herself called the
purveyors "harpies." The evil when James came to the throne
had become intolerable ; and, according to a speech of Bacon, the
purveyors, under their commissions from the Board of the Green
Cloth, lived at free quarters upon the country ; terrifying dealers by
their claims of immense quantities of provisions at an insufficient
price, out of which they made a profit ; cutting down woods with
out the owner's permission ; and even demanding the labourers to
work for them at their own grinding rate of payment. The Com
mons now asked for a total abolition of purveyance. Their peti
tion was not offensive to the king, for he hoped to make good
terms for himself by the concession of this remnant of feudal pre
rogative ; but nothing was done. The question of worship was also
postponed, at the desire of the House of Lords.
The temper of parliament, as was the temper of the people,
was favourable to the quiet rule of the new king. But it was di
rectly opposed to his notion of a divine right which gave him, in
the exercise of his prerogative, an absolute power such as he was
prompt to claim. He had declared in a book, " The true Law of
Free Monarchies," printed before he came to the English throne,
that " although a good king will frame all his actions to be according
to law, yet he is not bound thereto, but of his own will, and for
example-giving to his subjects." He was told In distinct terms
that the loyalty of the people was associated with the care which
the sovereign had of their welfare. " If your majesty," says the
Apology, " shall vouchsafe at your best pleasure and leisure, to
enter into your gracious consideration of our petition for the ease
of those "burthens under which your whole people of long time
mourned, hoping forrelief of your majesty, then may you be assured
to be possessed of their hearts ; and, if of their hearts, of all they
can do or have." *
* The substance of this important paper is given by Mr. Hallam. It is to be found ill
" Cobbett's Parliamentary History."
250 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
In August, 1C04, a treaty of peace was concluded between.
James, king of England, the king of Sjjain, and the archduke of
Austria. The policy of the country was wholly changed in the
change of its sovereign. The hostility to Spain was a national
sentiment ; for it was built on the conviction that no peace would
be safe with that power whilst England was Protestant, and was
identified with the cause of Protestantism in Europe. Robert
Cecil had been bred in the political creed of Elizabeth ; but the
disposition of James to abandon her policy, and to desire peace
with her great enemy in a temper amounting to pusillanimity, com
pelled Cecil to a subserviency in the negociations with Spain very
different from the spirit which a minister of Elizabeth would have
shown. The old friendship with the Netherlands was abandoned.
The king of England engaged to give no further aid to the Hol
landers, or other enemies of the king of Sjpain and the arch
dukes. The commercial treaty, which was connected with the
treaty of peace, contained clauses which the Hollanders felt were
to their disadvantage. Enmity was thus to spring up between the
two countries in which the struggle for the Reformation had been
carried on most cordially and strenuously. There was one clause
to which Elizabeth would never have consented as long as she had
a ship or a cannon, — that there was to be '* moderation had in the
proceedings of the Inquisition " against English traders repairing
to Spain. What the people felt with regard to Spain, and to the
foreign policy of England, may be collected from the boldness
witlvwhich Raleigh spoke on his trial. Indignantly repelling the
charge that he had been bribed with Spanish gold to engage in
a conspiracy, he alluded to the warfare in which he had battled so
long against a power that once aimed at universal monarchy, but
was now reduced to comparative insignificance. Spain never for
gave Raleigh's efforts for her humiliation, nor his public mention
of them when she was suing for peace. " I was not so bare of
sense but I saw that if ever this state was strong and able to defend
itself, it was now. The kingdom of Scotland united, whence we
were wont to fear all our troubles ; Ireland quieted, where our
forces were wont to be divided ; Denmark assured, whom before
we were wont to have in jealousy ; the Low Countries, oftr nearest
neighbours, at peace with us ; and instead of a Lady, whom time
had surprised, we had now an active King, a lawful successor to
the crown, who was able to his own business. I was not such a
madman as to make myself^in this time a Robin Hood, a Wat
JAMES PROCLAIMED KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. 25 1
Tyler, or a Jack Cade. 1 knew also the state of Spain well ; his
weakness, and poorness, and humbleness at this time. I knew
that he was discouraged and dishonoured. I knew that six times
we had repulsed his forces, thrice in Ireland, thrice at sea, and
once at Cadiz on his own coast. Thrice had I served against him
myself at sea, wherein for my country's sake I had expended of
my own jjropertics 4000/. I knew that where before-time he was
wont to have forty great sails at least in his jjorts, now he had not
past six or seven; and for sending to his Indies he was driven to
hire strange vessels ; — a thing contrary to the institutions of his
proud ancestors, who forbad, in case of any necessity, that the king
of Spain should make their case known to strangers. I knew that
of five-and-twenty millions he had from his Indies, he had scarce
any left ; nay, I knew his poorness at this time to be such that the
Jesuits, his imps, were fain to beg at the church doors ; his pride
so abated, as, notwithstanding his former high terms, he was glad
to congratulate the king, my master, on his accession, and now
cometh creeping unto him for jieace." With such a power the king
of England might have concluded an honourable peace, without
sacrificing the principle for which Elizabeth had fought for twenty
years. She would not have forsaken the United Provinces, for any
temptation which the Most Catholic king could have held out to
shake her good faith and her constancy.
Previous to the accession of James, the sovereign, in the unal
tered style of ancient feudal assumption, had the title of " King of
England, Scotland, France, and Ireland." On the 24th of October,
1604, James was proclaimed "King of Great Britain, France, and
Ireland." We cannot reflect upon him for retaining the absurd
title of king of France, for the folly was kept up for two centuries
longer. His vanity was abundantly gratified in being king of Great
Britain and Ireland — an absolute king, as he believed ; and not
only a king, but a master of all learning, and especially of theologi
cal learning, of whom his Chancellor declared, at the Hampton
Court conference, that never since our Saviour's time had the king
and the priest been so wonderfully united in the same person. He
was not altogether so royal a personage as Elizabeth, or her majes
tic father. His figure was ungainly ; his habits were slovenly ; he
was by nature a coward. Not deficient in a certain talent which
he rarely jDut to a right use — "the wisest fool in Christendom," —
he had no sense of that public responsibility which attached to his
high office. He was a king for himself alone. He estimated the
252 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
cost of war as the principal inducement to remain at peace. But
the wise economy which was opposed to the martial tendencies. of
the people that he was called to govern, was not an economy for
the public good. He wasted his revenues upon silly baubles for
personal ornaments, and in lavish grants to unworthy favourites.
He almost wholly neglected the business of the state ; for he was
hunting, bolstered up on an ambling palfrey ; or he was writing
pedantic treatises which nobody read ; or he was going in progress,
to be flattered and feasted ; or he was moving by easy journeys
from his palace of Richmond to his palace of Windsor, or in trium
phal procession in his state-barge from Greenwich to Whitehall.
There were some refinements in his court, for the plays that were
acted before him were often those of Shakspere ; and at a later
period Jonson wrote " Masques at Court," and Inigo Jones sup
plied the decorations. In a short time the palace became a scene
of profligacy, in which even the mask of decency was not attempted
to be put on. Yet this was the king who was to try his hand at
making England an absolute monarchy by divine right. Lord
Thomas Howard, who had been a powerful instrument in forward
ing the accession of James, wrote to Harrington, " Your queen did
talk of her subjects' love and good affection, and in good truth she
aimed well. Our king talketh of his subjects' fear and subjection,
and herein I think he doth well too, — as long as it holdeth good."
THE GUNPOWDER PLOT. 253
CHAPTER XIV.
The Gunpowder Plot. — Lord Mounteagle receives a letter. — Salisbury is made acquainted
with the letter. — Its interpretation. — Search under the Parliament House. — Seizure
of Fawkes. — The other Conspirators. — The preparations during eighteen previous
months. — Their proceedings after the discovery — They resist the sheriff. — Some
killed, others taken prisoners. — Feelings of the Roman Catholics. — Ben Jonson. —
Trial of Fawkes and others- — Garnet the Jesuit. — His conviction — His doctrine of
Equivocation. In the last week of October, 1605, the king was contemplating
"his return from his hunting exercise at Royston, upon occasion
of the drawing near of the parliament time, which had been twice
prorogued already." * Whilst James was at his favourite sports,
hunting according to a more discreet fashion than that of the old
Norman kings, his "little beagle," for so he called Robert Cecil,
now earl of Salisbury, was diligently carrying forward the business
of the State. Salisbury was at his post at Whitehall on the
night of the 26th of October, when his wonted meditations upon
the difficulty of providing money for his extravagant master and his
rapacious followers, were disturbed by the demand for an audience
of a Catholic peer, lord Mounteagle. The position of this noble
man, who had been called to the House of Peers in the parliament
of 1604, was a very equivocal one. He was the son of a Protestant
peer, lord Morley ; but, when very young, married a daughter of
sir Thomas Tresham, who was a pervert to Rome under the guid
ance of missionary priests, and, during the reign of Elizabeth, a
most uncompromising recusant. Lord Morley's son then became in
volved with several leading Roman Catholics in the conspiracy of
Essex, and in their invitations to the king of Spain to invade Eng
land and to depose the queen. Upon the accession of James, when
the king was either balancing the advantages of being -Catholic or
Protestant, or holding out to the Papists professions of toleration
which he had no intention of accomplishing, Mounteagle was a
satisfied recipient of court favours, whilst the severities against re-
*" A discourse of the Manner of the Discovery of the late intended Treason," &c
Published officially. Reprinted in " Harleian Miscellany."
254 HTSTORY OF ENGLAND:
cusants had been renewed, and the Roman Catholics in general were
becoming hopeless of power, or even of indulgence. A strange in
cident had occurred on that night of the 26th of October, when
Mounteagle broke in upon the quiet of the secretary of state. The
catholic peer had a house at Hoxton, from which he had been ab
sent a month, when he suddenly arrived that evening to supper.
Very opportune was the return, as we learn from the official " Dis
course : " " Being in his own lodging ready to go to supper, at seven
of the clock at night, one of his footmen, whom he had sent of an
errand over the street, was met by a man of a reasonable tall person
age, who delivered him a letter, charging him to put it in my lord his
master's hands ; which my lord no sooner received, but that, having
broken it up, and perceiving the same to be of an unknown and
somewhat unlegible hand, and without either date or superscription,
did call one of his men unto him, for helping him to read it." It
appears from another account, that the letter was read aloud, of
course in the presence of the lord's attendants. It was as fol
lows : —
" My lord out of the love i beare to some of youer frendz i have
a caer of youer preservacion therefor i would advyse yowe as
yowe tender youer lyf to devyse some exscuse to shift of your at
tendance at this parleament for god and man hathe concurred to
punishe the wickednes of this tyme and thinke not slightlye of this
advertisment but retyere youre selfe into youre contri wheare yowe
maye expect the event in safti forthowghe theare be no apparance
of anni stir yet i saye they shall receyve a terrible blowe this par
leament and yet they shall not seie who hurts them this cowncel is
not to be contemned because it maye do yowe good and can do yowe
no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as yowe have burnt
the letter and i hope god will give yowe the grace to mak good use
of it to whose holy proteccion i comend yowe." The letter is ad
dressed ' To the right honourable the lord Mowteagle.'
There have been many conjectures as to the writerof this ex
traordinary letter. One probable guess is that Francis Tresham,
the brother-in-law of Mounteagle, gave him this warning to save
his own life", though in such obscure terms as should not lead to dis
covery of the conspiracy in which Tresham and others of Mount-
eagle's friends were engaged. Greenway, the Jesuit, whose relation of
the plot, although written to exculpate himself and others, contains
many curious details, gives in his manuscript what seems "to have
been the opinion of the conspirators themselves. They attributed it
SALISBURY IS INFORMED OF THE LETTER. 255
to Tresham, and suspected a secret understanding between him and
lord Mounteagle, or at least the gentleman who was employed to
read the letter at table. They were convinced that Tresham had no
sooner given his consent than he repented of it, and sought to
break up the plot without betraying his associates." * The circum
stances indicate that there was a got-up scene enacted in the ho'use
of lord Mounteagle at Hoxton. The unexpected return of the lord
of the house ; the page met in the street by a man of tall person ;
the reading aloud of the letter, which the page had received as one
of great importance to be delivered to his master's own hand ; —
these are all suspicious incidents. Whether the visit of Mounteagle
to Salisbury, ¦' notwithstanding the lateness and darkness of the
night in that season of the year," t was a part of the same wt',1
arranged mystery, may be reasonably doubted. Mr. Jardine says,
" Many considerations tend to confirm the truth of Father Green-
way's suggestion, that the whole story of the letter was merely a
device of the government to cover Tresham's treachery, or, for
some other state reason, to conceal the true source from which
their information had been derived." J According to Dr. Lingard's
account of Greenway's relation, he makes no such suggestion as
that "the letter was merely a device of the government." It could
have been no object of the government that the conspirators should
escape. Thomas Winter, one of those actively concerned in the
plot, had been a confidential attendant upon Mounteagle ; and
Thomas Ward, the man who read the letter aloud at Mounteagle's
supper, went the next .morning to Winter and urged him to fly.
We can understand how Mounteagle might have sought to cover
his previous knowledge of the plot by having a letter openly de
livered which would convey to him the intimation of some danger
ous design ; and we can also understand how the very unusual
course of causing a letter to be read aloud would have been adopt
ed, that his old friends should have a hint to look after their
own safety. But- it appears unlikely that Salisbury should have
been concerned in a device so calculated to defeat the discovery of
some impending danger. It would be unsafe to affirm that the
letter sent to Mounteagle gave the first intimation to the govern-
* Dr. Lingard's " History," vol. ix. p. 69, 8vo ed. Dr. Lingard brought Greenway's
MS. from Rome, and first made it known in his " History."
t " Discourse," &c.
X " Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot," 1857. This admirable narrative is an ex
panded and corrected re-publication of Mr. Jardine's Introduction to " Criminal Trials,"
vol. ii.
256 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ment of some imminent peril. A man of the name of Thomas Coe
appears to have made a communication to Salisbury which con
veyed " the primary intelligence of these late dangerous treasons."
He claims this merit in a letter to Salisbury of the 20th December,
in which he says, " My good lord, my writing so obscurely, and
entitling my narration by the name of a dream or vision, was oc
casioned by the reason aforesaid " — [a doubt whether his letters
might-be opened]. " Not that it was a dream or idle fantasy, but
such an approved truth as was wrested from a notorious Papist, unto
whom I did so far insinuate by private conference that he confessed
unto me the whole circumference of this treason, as it is since
fallen out." * The administrative ability of Salisbury is shown by
the wariness with which he conducted his operations, from the
moment that Mounteagle came to him from Hoxton on that dark
October night. Whether his suspicion was first raised, or whether
he had a previous knowledge, his course was unaltered. He made
no fuss ; he quietly communicated the letter to others of the
Council; he suffered James to go on with his hunting exercise;
and when the king came to London, the Secretary, having had the
ominous letter six days in his possession, presented it to the king, no
other person being present. The official "discourse " claims for the
king the right interpretation of the riddle, " For the danger is pas
sed as soon as you have burnt the letter." If the danger was past so
soon as the letter was burnt, argued Salisbury, what was the use of
the warning. But the king read the mysterious sentence thus : —
the danger is to be sudden and quick — the terrible hurts, of which
the authors should be unseen, " should be as quickly performed
and at an end, as that paper should be a blazing up in the fire."
Thence, held the king, according to the " Discourse," it should be
"by a blowing up of powder." It was "a divine illumination of
the royal mind," said Coke on the trial of the conspirators. Salis
bury, according to his own statement, had suggested the same in
terpretation to several of the Council, before the king knew any
thing of the matter. But Salisbury was too politic not to let the
vanity of his master expatiate to his parliament upon his claim to
the discovery. It was set forth in the " Discourse " howallinquiry
had been postponed by the Council, "for the expectation and ex
perience they had of his majesty's fortunate judgment, in clearing
and solving obscure riddles and doubtful mysteries." The Sec
retary completely threw the conspirators off their guard, even
* Lodge, " Illustrations," vol. iii. p. 30*.
SEARCH UNDER THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE. 257
when they knew that the letter to Mounteagle was in the hands of
the vigilant minister. They had conferred upon their danger ; but
the absence of every indication of alarm or suspicion on the part of
the government made them despise the advice which Winter had re
ceived from his friend in Mouriteagle's household.
On Monday the 4th of November, the Lord Chamberlain, whose
duty it was to make arrangements for the meeting of parliament,
went to the House of Lords ; and afterwards entered the vaults
under the parliament-chamber. Lord Mounteagle was of the
party. They observed a large store of coals and wood in a cellar ;
and standing carelessly there they saw " a very tall and desperate
fellow." The Lord Chamberlain asked who the fuel belonged to:
and the man answered that they belonged to his master, Mr. Percy,
who had rented the cellar for a year and a half. There were no
more questions. B.ut there was a general examination, by the
direction of a Westminster magistrate, of neighbouring houses and
cellars, under a pretence of looking for some missing property be
longing to the royal wardrobe. The " tall and desperate fellow,"
was not yet frightened from his purpose. A little before midnight
on the eve of the 5th of November, the same magistrate, with a
strong body of attendants, repaired to the cellar under the parlia
ment house. A man just stepjMng out of the doot was seized and
searched. Slow matches and touchwood were found upon him ;
and a lantern, with a light within its dark covering, was in the
cellar. The heaps of billets were quickly removed, and beneath
them were thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.
It is one o'clock in the morning. The prisoner is led to White
hall. A Council is hastily assembled in the king's bed-chamber.
The resolute man is beset with hurried interrogatories by king and
peers. His name, he says, is John Johnson ; he is a servant of
Thomas Percy ; if he had not been ajjprehended that night, he had
blown up the parliament house, when the king, peers, bishops, and
others had been assembled. "Why would you have killed me?"
asks the king. " Because you are excommunicated by the pope,''
is the reply. " How so ? " said James. " Every Maundy Thursday
the pope doth excommunicate all heretics, who are not of the
church of Rome," is the explanation. He is asked who were privy
to the conspiracy, and answers, "he could not resolve to accuse
any." The night was passed iii the examination ofthe prisoner;
but nothing could be obtained from him that could commit his
accomplices. In the morning he was taken to the Tower.
Vol. III.— 17
2^8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
That morning of the sth of November was a time of deep anxiety
in London. The news of a conspiracy so daring in its objects, so
mysterious in its origin, so terrible in its remorseless fanaticism,
filled all classes with alarm. It was scarcely possible to exaggerate
the consequences of a plot which threatened to involve the whole
machinery of government in one indiscriminate destruction. Two
of the conspirators had left London on the 4th. Two others fled
the instant they knew that the pretended servant of Percy was
seized. Two more lingered till the morning. Five of these joined
company on their road to Ashby St. Legers, in Northamptonshire,
all riding with extraordinary speed, having relays of horses. It had
been arranged that a general rendezvous should take place at
Dunchurch, on the 5th of November, after the great act of ven
geance should have been accomplished in London. Towards that
place various bodies of Roman Catholics were moving on the ap
pointed day ; some being cognisant of a design against the govern
ment, but tew having been intrusted with the secrets ofthe leaders.
A party was collected on the 5th at the house of lady Catesby, at
Ashby St. Legers. They were at supper when the five who had
fled from London rushed in, covered with the mire of the wintry
roads, exhausted, hojaeless. They had little to think of now but
self-defence. Taking with them all the arms they could collect,
the rode off to Dunchurch. Here they found a large assembly,
with sir Everard Digby at their head, carousing, and anxiously
expecting some joyful intelligence of the triumphs of their party,
which they had been led to anticipate by vague hints of a coming
time when heresy should no longer sit in high places. The ill-
concealed fears, the pale looks, the secret whisperings of the
friends who had ridden so hard to join them, told another tale.
The instinct with which those who with a half-confidence, are to be
made the instruments of conspiracy fly from their leaders at the
first approach of detection, was now in full operation. Those who
came with numerous retainers to the great chase on Dunmore
heath, which was to be a gathering for more important objects than
the hunting of the deer, gradually slunk away. On that night the
chief conspirators were left alone. Let us now see who were the
principal actors in this perilous enterprise ; and how they had been
occupied for many months before the fatal fifth of November.
Robert Catesby, the only son of sir William Catesby, who in
the time of Elizabeth passed from the Protestant faith to the
Roman Catholic, and whose mother was a sister of Thomas Throck-
PREPARATIONS OF THE CONSPIRATORS. 259
morton, also a most determined recusant, was imbued with a more
than common hatred to the established religion. He was con
cerned in the insurrection of Essex, but was pardoned upon paying
a fine of ,£3000 ; and he was prominent in other seditions during
the two latter years of the queen's reign. Thomas Winter was
of a Roman Catholic family, who were connected by marriage with
the family of1 Catesby ; and he also had been occupied with plots,
and had been in Spain to negotiate for the invasion of England by
a Spanish force, in 1601. John Wright was a pervert from Pro
testantism, and he had also been engaged in the treason of Essex.
These men were old and intimate friends ; and these " three first
devised the plot, and were the chief directors of all the particu
larities of it," as their principal associate declared in one of his
examinations. He who stated this, on the 19th of November, was
the "tall and desjjerate fellow " who called himself John Johnson,
and refused when brought to Whitehall on the 5th, to declare any
who were privy to the design which he so boldly avowed. He had
been compelled to disclose his real name by a hateful jDrocess ; for
on the 6th of November the king projxised a number of interrogn.
tories to be put to the prisoner, concluding thus : " The gentler
tortures are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad ima
tenditur: " [and so proceed by steps to the extremest.] This
recommendation produced its effect ; as we may learn from the
signature of Gviido Fawkes to his examination before the torture,
and his signature to an examination after the torture. He was the
son of a notary of York, who was Registrar of the Consistory Court
of the Cathedral ; and he was brought up as a Protestant at the free
school there. He became, however, a zealous Papist ; and, having
served in the Spanish army in Flanders, acquired some of the
Spanish notions of the Christian treatment by which heresy was to
be extirpated. Guido Fawkes and Thomas Winter came to London
together in 1604; and a few days after there was a remarkable
meeting between Catesby, Wright, Winter, Fawkes, and a new
malcontent, Thomas Percy, a relation of the earl of Northumber
land. From the time of this meeting, at which the first words which
Percy uttered, were, " Shall we always, gentlemen, talk, and never
do any thing ? " — there was abundant work, and very hard work, for
these five fanatics.
The confession of Thomas Winter, on the 23rd of November,
is a very elaborate paper, minutely detailing the rise and progress
of the conspiracy. It is perfectly consistent in its details with tha
260 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
facts derived from other sources ; and altogether presents so vivid
a picture of the energy and perseverance of these misguided men,
that we shall use occasionally its exact words in detailing their
proceedings after they were solemnly banded together in then-
dangerous enterrjrise. They gave each other an oath of secrecy,
"in a chamber wheie no other body was ;" and, going "into the
next room, heard mass, and received the blessed sacrament upon
the same." The object for which the oath was taken was then
disclosed by Catesby to Percy, and by Winter and Wright to
Fawkes. In the State Paper Office there is an agreement between
Thomas Percy and Henry Ferrers, for the hire of a house next the
parliament-house. It is dated, May 24th, 1604; — and is endorsed
by Salisbury. " The bargain between Ferrers and Percy for the
bloody cellar, found in Winter's lodging." * Eighteen months were
these five men carrying their terrible secret close in their bosoms ;
imparting it to very few others ; never doubting their own unaided
power to produce a revolution by one stunning blow ; and, from
the very nature of the means they employed, exposed to detection
at every step. " The bloody cellar," was not under the parliament
chamber. They saw no chance of preparing a mine beneath that
chamber, but by breaking through the massive foundation wall of
the House of Lords. Fawkes received the keys of the house next
the parliament-house ; and they were ready for their work previous
to the expected meeting of parliament. But the parliament was
again prorogued to February, 1605; so they departed to the country
for awhile. They then took another house at Lambeth, " where,"
says Winter, " we might make provision of powder and wood for the
mine, which being there made ready, should in a night be conveyed
by boat to the house by the parliament, because we were loth to foil
that with often going in and out." The charge of this Lambeth house
was given to Robert Keyes ; who, although sworn as a member of the
confederacy, appears to have been received " as a trusty honest man,"
who was ready to earn money for his services. At the beginning of Mi
chaelmas term, 1604, Fawkes and Winter conferred with Catesby in
the country, and they agreed " that now was the time to begin and set
things in order for the mine." Percy's house was wanted for a meet
ing of the Commissioners for the Scotch Union. It was an official
house ; and Percy, its temporary tenant, was obliged to defer his un-
susjDected proceedings. Percy held the office of a Gentleman-Pen
sioner, which may account for the absence of all suspicion as to his
• Mrs. Green's " Calendar of State Papers," p. 113.
PREPARATIONS OF THE CONSPIRATORS. 261
objects. The conferences of the commissioners were ended a
fortnight before Christmas ; and then other labours were com
menced in right earnest within those. walls. Percy and Wright now
joined Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes ; " and we," says Winter,
"against their coming, had provided a good part of the powder;
so as we all five entered with tools fit to begin our work, having
provided ourselves with baked meats, the less to need sending
abroad. We entered late in the night." They had to get through
a stone wall three yards in thickness. Their labour was far beyond
what they had expected ; arid they sent to Lambeth for Keyes, and
obtained tbe adhesion to their plot of Christojpher Wright, the
brother of John. Fawkes, with the boldness which characterised
him, vindicated himself and his associates from the belief that they
were men of low birth and mean employments, to whom such toil
was habitual ; but that they were " gentlemen of name and blood."
In his examination of the 8th of November, he says, " not any was
employed in or about this action, no, not so much as in digging or
mining, that was not a gentleman. And while the others wrought,
I stood a sentinel to descry any man that came near; and when
any man came near to the place, upon warning given by me, they
ceased until they had again notice from me to proceed. All we
seven lay in the house, and had shot and powder ; being resolved
to die in that place before we should yield or be taken." Father
Greenway expresses his surprise that men delicately nurtured
should, in a short space of time, have accomplished far more rough
work than men who had been bred to laborious occupation would
have accomplished. They were enthusiasts. They had little sense
of fatigue, in the confidence that they were engaged in a holy work
to which they were called by the immediate voice of heaven.
Whether they were driven on their desperate course by those who
claimed to be interpreters ot the divine voice must remain to some
extent a matter of doubt. They were all followers of the Jesuits.
There were none of the conspirators who belonged to the more
loyal body of Catholics who were guided by the secular priesthood.
Tlie Jesuit missionaries were, at this period, hiding in the secret
chambers of old manor-houses to avoid exjjulsion from the kingdom.
But if these seven gentlemen who worked in the mine had been
bound together in their atrocious jpurpose by those who ruled over
their consciences, they were at least faithful to their secret advi
sers. As they worked, they beguiled the time by discoursing
about what should be their first proceeding when they had acconv
«62 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.'
plished the sweeping destruction of all the estates of the realm.
They were to carry off prince Charles, and his sister Elizabeth,
prince Henry having perished with the king. They were then to
proclaim the heir-apparent, and appoint a Protector of the kingdom,
during the minority of the sovereign. They were to ask help of
foreign princes, when "the business was acted." What next they
were to do with a state so "out of joint," was not manifest. They
were sometimes beset with superstitious fears. They heard a
sound from the middle of the wall, as of a tinkling bell. It was an
unearthly sound, and was heard no more when holy water had been
sprinkled again and again. They did not resume their labours till
February, 1605, having learnt that parliament was to be again pro
rogued. But now their plan of operations was changed. They
had " wrought also another fortnight in the mine against the stone
wall, which was very hard to beat through," when they heard a
rushing noise above their heads. Fawkes, always foremost in any
danger, went to ascertain the cause, in his usual disguise of a
porter's frock. He found that above the spot where they had
been mining was a cellar in the occupation of a coa'.-dealer, and
that he was moving his coals, being about to give up possession.
That cellar was immediately under the parliament chamber. They
seized upon the opportunity. The cellar was hired, and was
quickly filled with barrels of gunpowder, covered over with fagots
and billets. In May all their stores were carried in, and, locking
the cellar, they departed from London. Fawkes went to Flanders
to see if any foreign plotting looked promising. Catesby employed
the summer in raising a troop of horse, for service in Flanders, as
a part of an English regiment levied by the Spanish ambassador.
This troop was officered by Catesby's immediate friends. The
conspiracy widened by the introduction to its secrets of sir Everard
Digby, Ambrose Rookwood, and Francis Tresham. Digby was
only twenty-four years of age, and was evidently a weak tool of the
Jesuits, whom he secreted in his house. " He cordially joined in
the project from religious zeal, as soon as he satisfied himself that
the action had been approved by his spiritual advisers." * Rook
wood was also a young man, who had been repeatedly prosecuted
for harbouring priests in his house. He had scruples about joining
in so extensive a scheme of slaughter, saying, " it was a matter of
conscience to take away so much blood ; " but Catesby silenced
him by saying "it had been resolved on good authority that in con-
* Mr. Jardine refers to Digby's letters, published in 1678, as evidence of this.
THE CONSPIRATORS IN ARMS. 263
science it might be done. Tresham and Catesby were cousins.
Tresham had taken a prominent part in the Essex conspiracy ; and
he very narrowly escaped arraignment and execution ; for it was
he who kept guard over the Lord Keeper in Essex House, and
told him that having stayed two years for a motion in Chancery, he
hoped his lordship would now be at leisure to hear him. We have
seen how Tresham was suspected to have been the author of the
letter to lord Mounteagle ; and it appears that Catesby had great
misgivings of the success of his scheme from the time that Tresham
became possessed of its perilous secret.
We now resume our narrative from the point at which we left
the bewildered conspirators at Dunchurch, after the seizure of
Fawkes. The timid adherents to some vague plan of revolt having
departed, and left the bolder spirits to their own resolyes, these
daring confederates determined at once to march with their armed
retainers, in the hope to excite a general insurrection of Roman
Catholics in the midland counties, and in Wales. They set out
from Dunchurch at ten o'clock on that same night of the 5th, hav
ing despatched a letter to the Jesuit Garnet, who was in the neigh
bourhood with sir Everard Digby's family. They marched through
Warwick, where they helped themselves to horses, on to Alcester;
and having seized some armour at lord Windsor's, on Wednesday
night they had reached Holbeach, the house of Stejjhen Littleton,
one of their friends. Their numbers were gradually diminished by
desertion. Not one man joined them. The Roman Catholic party
saw that the odious enterprise would long retard any hope of toler
ation from the government. The conspirators were pursued by- the
sheriff of Worcestershire with his posse comitatus. Digby fled
from them at Holbeach, and was seized at Dudley; for the hue and
cry had gone through the country. Those who remained at Hol
beach prepared to defend the house against assault. An accidental
¦ circumstance filled them with terrible forebodings — a circumstance
which Coke cleverly alluded to, ujjon the trial of Fawkes and
others, as an exemplification of the principle that there is no law
more just than that the wicked should perish by thei»- own acts : —
"Observe," he said, " a miraculous accident which befel in Stephen
Littleton's house called Holbeach, in Staffordshire, after these
traitors had been two days in open rebellion, immediately before
their apprehension ; for some of them standing by the fire-side, and
having set two pounds and a half of powder to dry in a platter
before the fire, and underset the said platter with a great linen bag
264 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
full of other powder, containing some fifteen or sixteen pounds, it
so fell out, that one coming to put more wood into the fire, and
casting it on, there flew a coal into the platter, by reason whereof
the powder taking fire and blowing up, scorched those who were
nearest, as Catesby, Grant, and Rookwood, and blew up the roof
of the house ; and the linen bag, which was set under the platter,
being therewith suddenly carried out through the breach, fell down
in the court-yard whole and unfired, which if it had taken fire in
the room, would have slain them all there, so that they never should
have come to this trial; and Lex justior nulla est, quam necis
artifices arte perire sua." * This explosion of gunpowder was re
garded even by the boldest of these men as a token that God was
against them. But the next day when the sheriff arrived and sum
moned them to surrender, the few who remained determined upon
resistance. Thomas Winter was not jjresent when the gunpowder
exploded. Stephen Littleton then fled, having asked Winter to fly
with him ; but Winter, who supposed that Catesby was killed by
the accident, said he would see the body of his friend, and bury
him before he left. Winter tells the remainder of the story with
expressive brevity: " When I came I found Mr. Catesby reasona
ble well, Mr. Percy, both the Wrights, Mr. Rookwood, and Mr.
Grant. I asked them 'what they resolved to do.'- They answered,-
' we mean here to die,' I said again, ' I would take such part as
they did.' About eleven of the clock came the company to beset
the house, and, as I walked into the court, I was shot into the
shoulder, which lost me the use of my arm ; the next shot was the
elder Wright struck dead ; after him the younger Mr. Wright ; and
fourthly, Ambrose Rookwood. Then said Mr. Catesby to me
(standing before the door they were to enter), ' stand by me, Tom,
and we will die together.' ' Sir,' quoth I, ' I have lost the use of
my right arm, and I fear that will cause me to be taken.' So, as
we stood close together, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, and myself, they
two were shot, as far as I could guess, with one bullet, and then
the company entered upon me, hurt me in the belly with a pike,
and gave me other wounds, until one came behind, and caught hold
of my both arms."
Previous to the trial of the principal conspirators who remained
alive, there had been twenty-three days occupied in various examina
tions ; during which the general progress of the conspiracy had
been slowly extracted from the confessions of the prisoners.
•"Criminal Trials," vol. ii. p. 135.
SOME KILLED; OTHERS TAKEN PRISONERS. 265
Tresham, who is supposed to have been instrumental in discover
ing the plot to the government, was not arrested till the 12th of
November, although Fawkes had distinctly mentioned him as one
concerned. He died in the Tower -before the trial. In postponing
the trial, it was the great object of the government to obtain evi
dence that would inculpate the Jesuit missionaries. All the con
spirators, with the excejation of Thomas Bates, a servant of Catesby,
persisted in denying the privity of the Jesuits to the enterprise.
The alarm which was felt at the revelation of a treason which con
templated such awful consequences was universal ; and thus we
may understand how Ben Jonson, a person who, although a writer
of masques for the court, was of a sturdy and independent charac
ter, appears to have lent himself to the government, in what we
may regard as the odious function of a spy. There is a letter in
the State Paper Office, bearing date the 8th of November, addressed
by the poet to Salisbury, in which he says, " There hath been no
want in me, either of labour or sincerity, in- the discharge of this
¦ business, to the satisfaction of your lordship, or the State." Upon
the first mention of it the day before, he had consulted the chaplain
of the Venetian ambassador, who, he says, " not only apprehended it
well, but was of mind with me, that no man of conscience, or any
indifferent lover of his country, would deny to do it. " The chajslain
had recommended a fitting person to assist in the " business," but
he could not be found. Jonson had made attempts in other places,
but could speak with no one in person, " all being either removed
or so concealed ujjon the present mischief." In the " second
means " which he had employed, he had " received answers of doubt
and difficulties, that they will make it a question to the Archpriest,
with other soch like suspensions." The dramatist was himself at
this time a Roman Catholic* Not believing him to have been al
together in the position of a vile, informer and betrayer, we are in
clined to think he was doing what other Roman Catholics were
doing — assisting in the discovery of a conspiracy which the greater
number of their persuasion repudiated. There was a broad line of
separation between the disciples of the Jesuits and the majority of
Catholics, who lived under the more quiet guidance of the ordinary
priests.. Jonson was clearly endeavouring to get at some secrets
which would remove from the great body of the Catholics the odium
* In his Conversations with Drummond, he says that when he was imprisoned for kill
ing his adversary in a duel, (which was in 1598) " then took he his religion by trust of a
friend who. visited him in prison. Thereafter he was 12 years a papist. Drummond's
Notes, published by Shakspeare Society, p. 19.
266 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
which attached to the supposed movers of this conspiracy. " For
myself," he says, " if I had been a priest, I would have put on
wings to such an occasion, and have thought it no adventure, where
I might have done (besides his majesty and my country) all Chris
tianity so good service." The plot was offensive to him, as it was
to many others of the Romish Church, upon religious and political
grounds. It was opposed to every feeling of justice and humanity.
When Jonson says, " I think they are all so enweaved in it, as it
will make five hundred gentlemen less of the religion within this
week, if they carry their understanding about them," we hold him
to mean that those Catholics who exercised their understanding
would turn from a religion whose priest-led fanatics were ready to
commit such an abominable crime.* We take the poet's case to be
an illustration of a very general tone of feeling amongst the moder
ate Papists ; who, whatever might be their grievances, did not see
their way to redress in casting aside all love of country, and all re
gard for religion, by being neutral and indifferent at a time when
such a fearful mystery was suddenly brought to light.
The trial of Robert and Thomas Winter, Guido Fawkes, John
Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, and Thomas Bates,
took place in Westminster Hall, on the 27th of January, 1606, be
fore a Special Commission. They all pleaded, "not guilty," al
though each of them had been brought to acknowledge the chief
facts -set forth in the indictment. Fawkes was asked by the Lord
Chief Justice how he could deny the indictment, having been actu
ally taken in the cellar with the powder. The report of the trial
makes him say, that he had done so, because there were certain
conferences mentioned in the indictment which he knew not of.
Eudasmon Jones, who published an Apology for Garnet, the Jesuit,
declares that what Fawkes said went much further : that he stated
that " none of them meant to deny that which they had not only volun
tarily confessed before, but which was quite notorious throughout
the realm. But this indictment," he added, " contains many other
matters, which we neither can nor ought to countenance by our
assent or silence. It is true that all of us were actors in this plot,
but it is false that the holy fathers had any part in it. We never
conferred with them about the matter." f In the indictment, Henry
* The letter from Jonson is noticed in Mrs. Green's " Calendar of State Papers ; "
and in a review of that book, in the " Athenajum " of August 15th, 1857, the docum.nt
is given in full.
t See Jardine's "Criminal Trials," vol. ii. p. 120. Mr. Jardine was the first to pub
lish any satisfactory report of this trial, and of that of Garnet, by giving the erigirtal evi-
TRIAL OF FAWKES AND OTHERS. 267
Garnet, clerk, of the profession of Jesuits, otherwise called Henry
Walley; Oswald Tesmond, otherwise called Oswald Greenway and
Oswald Fermour, of the aforesaid profession ; and John Gerrard,
otherwise called John Brooke, also of the same profession, are in
cluded as principals with other conspirators. A proclamation was
issued for their apprehension ou the 15th of January. Tesmond,
more commonly mentioned as Greenway, and Gerrard, escaped be
yond sea. It is unnecessary for us to dwell upon the trial of
Fawkes and the others. They were necessarily condemned, and
sentenced to the penalties of treason. Sir Everard Digby was tried
and found guilty at Northampton. They were ajl executed on the
Thursday and Friday following the 27th of January. There ap
pears very sufficient evidence that some of the prisoners believed
to the last that their project was not a sinful one. Sir Everard
Digby wrote to his wife, " If I had thought there had been the
least sin in it, I would not have been of it for all the world, and no
other cause drew me to hazard my fortune and life, but zeal for
God's religion." Such was the fanaticism of Digby, a man of
no great force of character, but amiable, and just in his domestic
relations. When we look at the unswerving fidelity of these men
to each other ; their undoubted confidence of success ; their utter
blindness to the awful consequences of their scheme, — we can
scarcely doubt that they were all working together under a strong
delusion, gradually taking a firm hold upon their minds through
some external influence of the most powerful nature. Grant is re
ported to have said on the day of his execution, "I rely entirely
upon my merits in bearing a part of that noble action, as an abun
dant satisfaction and expiation for all sins committed by me during
the rest of my life." But Digby, who at first thought there was
not the least sin in that action, adds in his letter to his wife, " But
when I heard that Catholics and priests thought it should be a great
sin that should be the cause of my end, it called my conscience in
doubt of my very best actions and intentions." The great body of
Roman Catholics, we may well believe, were free from such a hor
rible delusion. The trial of Henry Garnet, the superior of the
Jesuits in England, which we shall now have briefly to notice,
does not quite settle the question of the complicity of " the holy
fathers ; " but it leaves very little doubt of the principles upon
which they acted,
dence as far as it could be ascertained . We regret that in his excellent " Narrative of th»
Gunpowder Plot," these reports are not^iven.
268 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Henry Garnet, an Englishman, educated at Winchester, became
a member of the Society of Jesus, in 1575. In 1586 he was ap
pointed to the mission of the Society in England ; and in 1 588 he
became Superior of the Jesuits here. An acconrplisbed scholar, of
mild demeanour and gentle nature, he exercised great influence
amongst the most devoted adherents to the ancient faith. In Sep
tember, 1605, a remarkable pilgrimage, under the conduct of Garnet,
was undertaken by a party of Roman Catholics to St. Winifred's
Well, in Flintshire. Anne Vaux, the daughter of lord Vaux, was
amongst the most devoted followers of the fascinating Jesuit ; and
she, with the wife of sir Everard Digby, the wife of Ambrose
Rookwood, and other ladies, walked barefoot on a part of the road
to the holy fountain. Rookwood himself was amongst the pil
grims ; and in their long progress from Digby's house in Bucking
hamshire, they rested at the houses of John Grant and Robert
Winter. The time of the pilgrimage, the persons associated in it,
and its suggestion by Garnet, render it difficult to believe that the
smooth Jesuit would not have found many an opportunity during
this fortnight's adventure, to suggest the holiest precepts of the
duty of hazarding life and fortune " for God's cause." On the 29th
of October, Garnet moved with lady Digby and her family, to sir
Everard's house at Coughton, near the place of general rendezvous
appointed for the 5th of November. Here he received the letter
from Digby and Catesby announcing the failure of the great busi
ness. In December he was conducted by Oldcorne, otherwise
Hall, a Jesuit, to Hendlip House, near Worcester. Here he re
mained concealed before and after the proclamation against him.
On the 20th of January, 1606, sir Henry Bromley, a magistrate, ar
rived at Hendlip House, with a commission to search the mansion.
That house was full of secret apartments, which had been con
structed by Thomas Abington, a devoted recusant. There were
staircases concealed in the walls; hiding places in chimneys ; trap
doors ; double wainscots. On th? fourth day after the arrival of the
magistrate, two men were forced from their concealment by hunger
and cold. They were the servants of the two priests. On the eighth
day an opening had been found to the cell where Garnet and Old
corne were hidden. They had been fed through a reed with broths
and warm drinks ; the reed being inserted in an aperture in a chim
ney of a gentlewoman's chamber, that backed another chimney of
their secret room. Garnet after being taken was kindly used. He
was examined before the Privy Council on the 13th of February
GARNET THE JESUIT. 269
and the examination was often repeated. But no blandishments
and no threats could induce him to confess his participation in the
plot. He was not subjected to torture, although his unfortunate
companion, Oldcorne, and the two servants, ajppear to have been
cruelly treated. One of these, Owen, died by his own hand in the
dread of a second infliction of the accursed instruments which law
yers and statesmen were not ashamed to employ in their blind zeal
for the discovery of treason. Evidence of some kind against Gar
net was at last obtained, by a pretended kindness of his keeper,
who told him that by opening a concealed door in his cell he might
confer with his fellow-prisoner, Oldcorne . Two persons were so
placed that they could hear the greater part of whatever words
were exchanged. There were several of these conferences be
tween the two Jesuits ; and their conversations were taken down,
and submitted to the Council. The facts which they revealed cer
tainly indicated that Garnet had a knowledge of the general scope
of the plot ; and that in these conferences he made no attempt to
deny the truth of the accusation that he had such knowledge.
When pressed upon these points he boldly asserted that he had
never had any speech or conference with his fellow-prisoner. Old
corne had admitted the fact ; and Garnet at length acknowledged
it, justifying his jprevious untruth upon the principle that no man
was bound to criminate himself until the charge against him was
otherwise proved. He at length acknowledged that the design of
blowing up the house of Parliament on the first day of the Session
had been revealed to him by Greenway, who had received it in
confession from Catesby and Wright. He maintained, however,
that he had endeavoured to turn Catesby from, his purpose. The
trial of Garnet took place on the 28th of March. He defended
himself with ability and courage ; in which, though acknowledging
" that he had done more than he could excuse by law in having
concealed his privity to the design," he maintained "that he had
acted upon a conscientious persuasion that he was bound to dis
close nothing that he heard in sacramental confession." He was
found guilty, and received the usual sentence for treason. After
his condemnation his examinations were renewed. He was con
demned on the 28th of March, and was not executed till the 3rd of
May. Oldcorne had been tried at Worcester, and was executed
on the 7th of April. Dr. Lingard is of opinion that Garnet's de
fence had made a favourable impression on the mind of the king;
and that his avowals on the subject of Equivocation, after his trial.
270 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
fed to his execution. His general princijjles had been thus ex
pressed in apajDer written before his trial : " Concerning equivoca
tion, this is my opinion ; in moral affairs, and in the common inter
course of life, when the truth is asked amongst friends, it is not
lawful to use equivocation, for that would cause great mischief in
society — wherefore in such cases there is no place for equivocation.
But in cases where it becomes necessary to an individual for his
defence, or for avoiding any injustice or loss, or for obtaining any
important advantage, without danger or mischief to any other per
son, there equivocation is lawful." In an examination after the
trial he goes further, and holds that an oath might be lawfully used
to confirm a ''simple equivocation : " This, I acknowledge to be,
according to my opinion, and the opinion of the schoolmen : and
our reason is, for that in cases of lawful equivocation, the speech
by equivocation being saved from a lie, the same speech may be
without perjury confirmed by oath, or by any other usual way,
though it were by receiving the sacrament, if just necessity so re
quire." Dr. Lingard, with a candour very different from some apol
ogies for Garnet and his doctrines which were put forth in past
times, says, " The man who maintained such opinions could not
reasonably complain, if the king refused credit to his asseverations
of innocence, and permitted the law to take its course." Garnet's
opinions were not shared by the majority of the Roman Catholics
even in his own day ; any more than the same body in general ap
proved of the murderous project in which Catesby and his asso
ciates were involved. During the struggles between the two
Churches in the seventeenth century, the Gunpowder Treason was
the standing argument for denying liberty of conscience to our
Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. Its traditions lingered through
the eighteenth century, to support the same oppression in a miti
gated form. They now scarcely survive even in popular prejudice ;
for, combined with the spread of knowledge has grown up a spirit
of charity and justice, in the prevalence of which the State having
ceased to persecute or to exclude for religious opinions, has nothing
to fear from the fanatic or the casuist.
PARLIAMENT OF 1606. 2JI
CHAPTER XV.
Parliament of 1606. — Statutes against Papists. — Game Laws. — Manners of the Court. —
Lavishness of James upon his favourites. — Feudal aid. — Impositions upon merchan
dise. — First Settlement in Virginia. — Progress of the Colony. — Settlement of the
Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. —Charter of the East India Company, — First Fac
tory at Surat. — The Mogul Rulers of Hindostan. — Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe. —
Dissolution of the Parliament. — Murder of Henry IV. of France. — Authorised
translation of the Bible; — Ireland. — Plantation of Ulster. — Creation of Baronets. —
The New River. — Increase of London.
The parliament which was to have met on the 5th of November,
1605, was necessarily prorogued to a later period. It assembled on
the 21st of January, 1606. It was scarcely to be expected that the
discovery of a conspiracy so atrocious as that of the Gunpowder
project should have induced a parliament, becoming more and more
puritan, to deal with the papists in a spirit of toleration. To the
previous severities of the penal code were added various penalties
which touched convicted recusants in their domestic and private
relations. All Roman Catholics who had been convicted of recu
sancy, and all who had not received the sacrament twice in twelve
months in a Protestant church, were^also required to take an oath
of allegiance. In this oath the pretended power of the pope to
absolve subjects from their obedience was to be expressly re
nounced ; and the Roman Catholic was further to swear that he,
from his heart, abhorred, detested, and abjured, as impious and
heretical, " the damnable doctrine and position that princes ex
communicated or deprived by the pope may he deposed, or mur
dered by their subjects." Looking at the history of the country
from the time of the Reformation, it can scarcely be maintained
that such an oath was unreasonable. The secular priests in Eng
land recommended their brethren so to declare their allegiance.
The papal court issued a. breve to forbid such a renunciation of the
deposing power. Cardinal Bellarmine wrote a book to. prove the
unlawfulness of the oath. King James, never more happy than
When engaged in a theological controversy, published An Apologie
-for the Oath of Allegiance ; " by which," says Mr. Hallam, " he
272 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
incurred the contempt of foreign courts, and of all judicious men."
In spite of the threatenings of the pope and the sophistries of the
cardinal, many of the Catholic clergy, and all the Catholic peers
with one exception, accepted this test of their obedience to the
civil government.
In this Session an Act was passed " against unlawful hunting
and stealing of deer and conies ; " which states that, through the
insufficiency of previous statutes, "many riots,- manslaughters,
mischiefs, and other inconveniences have been daily committed,
and are like to be committed, if circumspect remedy be not here
unto provided." * There was to be fine or imprisonment for those
who took or chased game in any grounds without the consent
of the owner; and, what must have been a frequent cause of
riots and manslaughters, qualified persons, having lands of the
clear annual value of 100/., were empowered to seize all guns
and sporting implements from unqualified persons, the qualifi
cation being as high as 40/. a-year. Evils enough have resulted
from a harsh administration of the game-laws in our own times ;
but such a distinction as this law of James made between the
great proprietor and the substantial yeoman must have been
as odious as it was impracticable. England had now got a
sporting king, who told his ministers, when they implored him on
their knees to attend to the public business, that his health was
the health and welfare of all, and that he never would forego his
exercise and relaxation. His brother-in-law, Christian IV., king of
Denmark, came over to England in July, 1606 ; and James, having
received a liberal subsidy from the parliament, indulged in every
species of disgusting excess, in which the royal example was so
encouraging, that, writes Harrington, "the ladies abandon their
sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication." t He adds,
" I will now, in good sooth, declare to you, who will not blab, that
the gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads, and we are going
on hereabouts, as if the devil was contriving every man should blow
himself up by wild riot, excess, and devastation of time and tem
perance." The next session an Act was passed " for repressing
the odious vice of drunkenness;" which vice it describes as "the
overthrow of many good arts and manual trades, the disabling of
divers workmen, and the general imvjoverishing of many good sub
jects." % The Statute was directed against the sins of the humble.
James and his profligate court had to bear a severer penalty than
* 3 Jac. I. c. 13. f " Nuga; Antiquae," vol. i, p. 349. J 4 Jac. I- c. 5.
MANNERS OF THE COURT. 273
the fine of five shillings to be levied on a convicted drunkard. They
had to bearthe open exhibition of their follies on the public stage ;
and the growing contempt of the great body of English gentlemen,
such as Harrington, who writes : " I have passed much time in see
ing the royal sports of hunting and hawking, where the manners
were such as made me devise the beasts were pursuing the sober
creation, and not the man in quest of exercise or food." Such were
the royal sports of Theobalds, where Salisbury was entertaining
the two kings ; and where king James, according to another au
thority, got so drunk with king Christian, that his Britannic majesty
was obliged to be carried to bed. Salisbury, in another year or
two, had made a provident exchange with the king, of Theobalds
for Hatfield ; and Theobalds became the favourite residence of
James, where he dissipated his hereditary revenues, aided by occa
sional taxation ; keeping sometimes a decent state with his family,
but more frequently listening to the ribaldry of unworthy favour
ites, beating his servants, and swearing and cursing habitually, in
spite of the statute under which common people could not have
that diversion without paying twelve pence to the relief of the
poor.* Although king James was intensely devoted to his favourite
sports, exhibiting himself in Waltham forest and in other Royal
Chases, leading his dogs in a grass-green hunting suit, and
blowing his hunting-horn with the lungs of a game-keeper, —
although he was sometimes lying in bed the whole day, over-
gorged with tne delicacies of the table, and filled with strong
wine, — he found time for more intellectual pursuits ; and amongst
other strange literary performances wrote his famous " Counter
blast to Tobacco." He hated the tobacco-smokers as intensely as
he'hated the Puritans ; but nevertheless both the tobacco-consumers
and the Puritans went on increasing. His dislike of the Indian
weed was probably diminished as he found that it brought a con
siderable accession to his revenue ; for, in addition to his own in
ordinate expenses, the sums which he bestowed upon his minions
would appear incredible if their amount did not rest upon the most
trustworthy authority. His early favourites were needy Scotsmen
who had followed the court to England. His folly in this costly
favouritism provoked the indignation of the House of Commons,
and was one of the main causes that his laudable anxiety for a per
fect Union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland was con-
* 3 Jac. T. c. 21.
Vol. III.— 18
274 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
stantly defeated. In 1607, James delivered a speech tp the parlia
ment for hastening the Union— sensible in many points — in which
he made a sort of apology for these preferences : — " For my liber
ality, I have told you of it heretofore. My three first years were to
them [the Scots] as a Christmas. I could not then be miserable.
Should I have been oversparing to them, they might have thought
Joseph had forgotten his brethren; or that the king had been
drunk with his new kingdom." * But he also said, " There is none
left for whom I mean extraordinary to strain myself." How well
he kept hh word may be inferred from the riches which were ob
tained and lavished by sir James Hay, who was afterwards created
earl of Carlisle. He was called the Scottish Heliogabalus : and
first won the king's favour by giving him "a most strange and
costly feast." Clarendon, who was not likely to speak with ex
aggeration in such a case, has left this character of Hay : — " He
was surely a man of the greatest exjDense in his own person of any
in the age he lived ; and introduced more of that expense in the
excess of clothes and diet than any other man ; and was indeed
the original of all those inventions from which others did but tran
scribe copies. He had a great universal understanding, and could
have taken as much delight in any other way, if he had thought
any other as pleasant and worth his care. But he found busi
ness was attended with more rivals and vexations ; and, he thought,
with much less pleasure, and not more innocence. He left
behind him the reputation of a very fine gentleman, and a most
accomplished courtier; and, after having spent in a very jovial life
about four hundred thousand pounds, which upon a strict compu
tation he received from the crown, he left not a house nor acre of
land to be remembered by.''t Robert Carr, afterwards earl of
Somerset, was another of the brothers of Joseph whom Joseph
did not forget. Osborn tells a curious story of the ignorant lav
ishness of James. He had given Carr an order upon the Lord
High Treasurer for twenty thousand pounds ; but the Treasurer
apprehended " that the king was as ignorant of the worth of what
was demanded as of the desert of the person who had begged it ; "
and knew, " that a pound, upon the Scottish accompt, would not
pay for the shoeing of a horse, by which his master might be far
ther led out of the way of thrift than in his nature he was willing
to go." The wise Cecil, according to this story, placed the twenty
* Cobbett's " Parliamentary History," vol. i. p. 1104.
t " History of the Rebellion," book i.
FEUDAL AID. 275
thousand pounds in specie upon the floor of a room to which the
king was coming. " Whose money is this ? " said James. " It
was your majesty's before you gave it away." The kin°- threw
himself upon the heap, and swore that Carr should have no more
than a few hundred pounds.
The prodigality of the king was carried to such an extent that
the government was precipitated into dangerous courses to find
the means of its gratification. According to the practice of the
Plantagenets, an aid was asked of the subject when the king's
eldest son was knighted. James levied this tax when prince Henry
was created prince of Wales in 1610.. The prince was justly pop
ular ; but this tax was paid with great repinings. A custom which
belonged to the feudal organisation of society was revolting to
those who lived under a very different political and social condition.
But a more strenuous resistance was made to the imposition of
heavy duties on all merchandise, not by authority of parliament
but under the great seal. In the House of Commons the illegality
of such impositions was argued with a thorough constitutional
knowledge. The king, with his wonted arrogance, commanded
the Commons not to enter upon a question which so touched his
prerogative. They presented a strong remonstrance, of which the
nervous language proclaimed, with a warning voice, that the liber
ties of England were not to be thus invaded: "The policy and
constitution of this your kingdom appropriates unto the kings of
this realm, with the assent of the parliament, as well the sovereign
power of making laws, as that of taxing, or imposing upon the
subjects' goods or merchandises, as may not, without their consent
be altered or changed. This is the cause that the people of this
kingdom, as they ever showed themselves faithful and loving to
their kings, and ready to aid them in all their just occasions with
voluntary contributions, so have they been ever careful to preserve
their own liberties and rights when anything hath been done to
prejudice or impeach the same. And therefore, when their princes
occasioned either by their wars or their over-great bounty, or by
any other necessity, have without consent of parliament set impo
sitions, either within the land, or upon commodities either exported
or imported by the merchants, they have, in open parliament, com
plained of it, in that it was done without their consents ; and there
upon never failed to obtain a speedy and full redress, without any
claim made by the kings of any power or prerogative in that
point." * The commerce of the country had become an important
* Quoted by Mr. Hallam from Somers* Tracts.
276 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
source of its wealth ; and if the king could tax merchandise without
the consent of parliament, the one great restraint upon despotic
power would soon be swept away. At this period there were two
events connected with commerce far more important to the England
of the future than in their immediate consequences, which require-
especial notice, — the colonisation of North America, and the Char
ter to the East India Company.
The attempts to colonise North America in the time of Eliza
beth had been failures, — not from any want of energy or of fore
thought in the originators and conductors of these great schemes,
but as a necessary consequence of the difficulties that must always
beset the first settlers in an unknown region. The long voyage by
the West Indies and through the Gulf of Florida in vessels of
small burthen was then attended with real dangers, of which mod
ern navigation has no conception. The adventurers were gener
ally men unaccustomed to labour, and they went to lands where
they believed that the fruits of the earth would merely require
gathering, as in the golden age, to find that starvation could only
be averted by the most incessant toil. Roanoak, the island which
Grenville planted under the auspices of Raleigh, had been de
serted in 1590; and whether the few colonists had perished, or
h id been received amongst the friendly Indian tribes, was always
uncertain, although Raleigh had never lost hope of discovering
them, whilst he could reward any mariners for the search. He
had spent, it is said, forty thousand pounds in his noble efforts to
plant an English colony on the northern coasts of the new world.
He was a state-prisoner; he was defrauded of his property by his
rapacious sovereign ; he was filling his declining years with high
contemplation instead of heroic action. But the example of his
perseverance survived his misfortunes. The colonisation of Norlh
America was still the hope of generous statesmen and bold mari
ners. Voyage after voyage was undertaken. Bartholomew Gos-
nold, having been the first to cross the Atlantic by a direct course
in 1602, discovered the promontory to which he gave no dignified
name, Cape Cod; and he laid the foundation of the first New Eng
land colony on Elizabeth island. Martin Pring, in 1603, surveyed
the coast of Maine. George Weymouth, in 1605, ascended the
western branch of the Penobscot. The undying spirit of enter
prise which Raleigh had first fostered received at length some en
couragement from the government. In 1606, James granted the
first Charters for colonising North America, to a London Com-
PROGRESS OF THE COLONY. 277
pany, and to a Plymouth Company. That same year, the London
or South Virginia Conrpany sent out three ships, with one hundred
and five men who were to remain as settlers. The sagacity of
Raleigh had pointed out the Chesapeake Bay as a favourable place
cf settlement. A storm drove these adventurers into that mag
nificent anchorage. The two headlands were named Cape Henry
and Cape Charles ; and having ascended a fine river which they
named after their king, they planted their colony in a pleasant spot,
and called it James Town.
Newport, the commander of the ships, and James Smith, a
man whose name will be. ever associated with the colonisation of
America, ascended the James river, and saw the Indian chieftain,
Powhatan. The savages were hostile to the strangers : " the em
peror of the country," as Powhatan was- styled, protected them.
'But gradually the colonists, unused to manual labour, perished of
want and disease. Newport left for England. Some of the lead
ers had serious contentions. The evil destiny of Roanoak seemed
to be coming on James Town. But Smith, who was endowed with
many of the high qualities of the Elizabethan age, rallied the
hopes of the disjDirited, and calmed the jealousies of the quarrel
some. In the winter of 1607 the colonists had secured a supply
• of food in the abundance of game, and had provided some shelter
against the rain and cold. Smith set off upon an expedition to ex
plore the interior. His companions were surprised and butchered
by the Indians. He would have perished with them, had not the
savages conceived that he was a superior being when he showed
them a pocket compass, and told how the wondrous needle always
pointed to one quarter. He asked that a letter should be conveyed
to James Town ; and when it was known that he could so endue a
'piece of paper with intelligence as to speak to his distant compan
ions from his captivity, he was beheld with superstitious awe.
Amongst the tribes was the daughter of Powhatan, named Poca
hontas. This maiden saved the life of the Englishman, who had
gained her confidence. She hung upon his neck when the toma
hawk was raised to destroy him ; and she induced her father to re
ceive him in a strict friendship. When Smith returned to his col
ony, the hundred and five settlers were reduced to forty. Some
of these attempted to desert in the pinnace which had been left
when Newport sailed to England. The fortitude of Smith never
failed. He restored order, and again went forth in the summer of
L608 for new discoveries. In an open boat, with two or three com-
278 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
panions, he navigated three thousand miles of the American coasts
and rivers. He constructed a map of the country, which is still in
existence. He explored the Patapsco and the Potamac. He es
tablished a communication with native tribes. He saw the Mo
hawks, " who dwelt upon a great water, and had many boats ani
many men." On his return a second body of emigrants came to
join the Virginian colony. The London Company required that the
ship which brought them should return with gold, or laden with
commodities. The settlers had accomplished no accumulations.
It had been difficult to preserve their own existence. The Com
pany, with the same ignorance of colonial organisation which pre
vailed for two centuries, had thought that the unskilled and the
idle, who would starve at home, might prosper in another hemi
sphere. Smith wrote to the corporation that when they sent again,
they should rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gar
deners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and even diggers up of the
roots of trees, than a thousand such as had last come out. But
still the energy of the man triumphed. He taught the gentlemen
the use of the axe and the spade ; and industry slowly achieved
its rewards. A new Charter was granted in 1609. The rage for
emigration extended. Other ships arrived, with men of broken
fortunes and dissolute gallants. Smith still maintained his author
ity over the useless members of the community. But he was dis
abled by an accident, and he returned impoverished and enfeebled
to England. When he left, there were four hundred and ninety
persons in the colony. In six months they were reduced by their
idleness and their excesses to sixty. The settlement was about to
be abandoned when, in 1 610, a new body of emigrants arrived un
der the leadership of lord Delaware, who had been apj ointed gov
ernor of Virginia. There was again a glimmering of prosperity;-
but ill-health compelled the return of the wise governor to Eng
land. In 161 1 the Council at home exerted itself to prevent the
great scheme of American colonisation from utterly failing; and
six ships, with three hundred emigrants and abundant supplies,
arrived at James Town, under sir Thomas Gates. A distribution
of land to each emigrant as his private property gave a new stimu
lus to industry. The colony prospered. Indian tribes submitted
to the settlers. Pocahontas, the beautiful girl who had saved the
life of Smith, was married to John Rolfe, a young Englishman.
After four years the Indian wife and mother sailed with her hus
band to England ; and there she died. It was not in the natural
SETTLEMENT OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS. 279
course of God's Providence that there should be many such
unions. The savage man gradually melted aWay as the civilised
man occupied his forests, and in a few years the race of Powhatan
was extinct. The Virginian colony went on to prosper. Its mem
bers found more certain riches than mines of gold in the cultiva
tion of tobacco. Their prosperity was confirmed by their free in
stitutions. In 1621 they obtained a representative constitution, in
which the object of government was declared to be "the greatest
comfort and benefit to the people, and the prevention of injustice,
grievances, and oppression."
Such were the vicissitudes which attended the first settlement
of the Anglo-Saxon race on the North American continent. There
was another colony formed fourteen years later, whose planters
went to their task in a solemn spirit, which recognised the finger
of God jxiinting the way to a pleasant land where they might enjoy
liberty of conscience, and be free from the persecution of the great
and the ridicule of the licentious. The congregation of separatists
from the Church of England, who, with their pastor John Robin
son, had become exiles in Holland in 1608, had thought much of
the settlements in North America. They desired to live under the
English government, if they could be secure of toleration in the
strange land which they desired to colonise. They could obtain
no such promise from the government; but they were resolved
upon their enterprise. They had obtained a patent from the Lon
don Company, and they obtained funds, on very hard terms, from
London merchants. They purchased the Speedwell, a vessel of
forty tons : and hired the Mayflower, of a hundred and eighty
tons. On the 22nd of July, 1620, having left some of the brethren
at Leyden, they embarked at Delft-Haven. Robinson, their pas
tor, did not accompany them ; but he knelt on the shore as the
emigrants ascended the decks of the Mayflower, and gave them
his blessings and his prayers. This event, so insignificant as it
must have seemed at the time, so all-important in the real history
of England, now forms the subject of a fresco in the House of
Lords. The Pilgrim Fathers, as they are now affectionately called,
reached, after a long and stormy voyage, the northern shores of
Virginia in November. Their political constitution was a simple
one. Forty-one men, whose families amounted to sixty more per
sons, formed themselves by deed into a civil body politic, for their
better ordering and preservation ; and agreed " to enact, consti
tute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, consti-
28o HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most
convenient for the general good of the colony." On the nth of
December, an exploring party landed in Massachusetts Bay, at a
spot which they afterwards determined to call Plymouth. "A
grateful posterity has marked the rock which first received their
footsteps. The consequences of that day are constantly unfolding
themselves as time advances. It was the origin of New England;
it was the planting of the New England institutions."*
On the last day of the sixteenth century a Charter was granted by
queen Elizabeth to a body of adventurers, styled " The Governor
and Company of merchants of London trading to the East Indies."
This charter was limited, in its exclusive liberty of trading, to the
term of fifteen years ; and was to be renewed if the privileges so
granted were not found " prejudicial or hurtful to this our realm."
A direct commercial intercourse with India had been previously
carried on by the Turkey Company ; but the maritime trade had
been in the possession, first of the Portuguese, and afterwards of
the Dutch. The English could not compete with these rivals,
whilst the merchandise in which they trafficked was burthened with
the heavier cost of an overland route. The trade of England with
the East Indies was henceforth to be carried on by sea. During
the reign of Elizabeth the success of the new company was very
doubtful. Their privileges were invaded by James at the beginning
of his reign. But in 1609 their Charter was renewed without limi
tation of time ; several voyages were attended with large profits ;
and in 1612, the Englishman planted his foot in India, having
obtained permission from the Great Mogul to establish a factory at
Surat. But the prosperity of the Company was not generally held
to be beneficial to the nation. Camden doubted " whether it be
for the real advantage of the kingdom to have such a mass of
money exported, and so many men lost yearly in the voyage." The
loss of mariners by sickness and the perils of the sea was held to
be the main cause of the decay of England's navigation. To the
complaint of the heavy money jjavments for Indian produce it was
answered that the country saved in the cost of spices alone, 70,000/.
a year; and that we exported cloths to the annual value of 14,000/.
The intercourse with India had its romantic aspects. The power,
the magnificence, the unbounded wealth of the Mogul conquerors
* Bancroft, " History of the United States," vol. i. p. 313, ed. 1839. In this brief
outline of the first colonisation of North America, we have followed Mr. Bancroft's lucid
narrative.
THE FIRST ENGLISH FACTORY. 28 1
of Hindostan had long been familiar to the English mind. Thomas
Coryat, whom Fuller described in the household of prince Henry,
as " the courtiers' anvil to try their wits upon," began, in 1608, to
satisfy " a very burning desire in him to survey and contemplate
some of the choicest parts of this goodly fabric of the world."
Having walked over many countries of Europe, and hung up in his
parish church as a memorial the one pair of shoes in which he had
trudged nine hundred miles, he began a longer march in 1612. He
walked from Jerusalem to Agra, the seat of the Great Mogul,
having occupied fifteen months in this trip. Being welcomed by
the English merchants, he there rode proudly on an elephant, and
was represented in his grandeur in his posthumous book. Having
obtained an audience of Jehangir, who had succeeded the great
Akbarinhis mighty sovereignty, the pedestrian, having a competent
¦ knowledge of the Persian and other oriental .languages, thus address
ed the emperor : " Lord Protector of the world, all hail to you.
I am a poor traveller and world-seer, which am come hither from a
far country, namely England, which ancient historians thought to
have been situated in the farthest bounds of the West, and which
is the queen of all the. islands in the world. The cause of my
coming hither is for four resjpects. First, to see the blessed face
of your majesty, whose wonderful fame hath resounded over all
Europe and the Mahometan countries. When I heard of the fame
of your majesty;- 1 hastened hither with speed, and travelled very
cheerfully to see your glorious court. Secondly, to see your
majesty's elephants, which kind of beasts I have not seen in any
other country. Thirdly, to see yourfamous river Ganges, which is
the captain of all the rivers of the world. The fourth is this, to
entreat your majesty that you would vouchsafe to grant me your
gracious pass, that I may travel into the country of Tartaria, to
visit the blessed sepulchre of the Lord of the Corners ; * whose
fame by reason of his wars and victories is published over the
whole world : perhajps he is not altogether so famous in his own
country of Tartaria as in England." We give this part of the ora
tion of the eccentric traveller to indicate the vague impression
which then prevailed in England of the grandeur of the Mogul
rulers of India, f "The Lord of the Corners " had become popu
larly known by Marlowe's famous tragedy of " Tamburlaine.the
* The Persian title of Tamerlane — Lord of the Corners of the world.
t Coryat's " Commendations to his friends in England," dated from Agra, 1616, in
" The Works of John Taylor, the Water-Poet," 1630, p. 81.
282 HISTORY OF ENGLAND,
Great." The successors of the shepherd-king had achieved a more
permanent conquest of Hindostan than the remorseless warrior,
who, having destroyed Delhi, and carried the terror of his name to
the Ganges, was content to recross the Indus in the same year in
which he had set out upon his march over the Ghur mountains
from Samarkand. In another century, his descendant, Baber,
having lost his own inherited dominion, founded a new empire in
India. The fourth of that dynasty sat upon the Mogul throne
when James granted his charter to the East India Company. In
161 5 an English ambassador, sir Thomas Roe, was sent to the
court of Agra ; and there he was resident till 1619, a favourite with
the emperor Jehangir, moving about with the jovial ruler, partaking
his pleasures and marvelling at the wealth that presented itself in
so many tangible shapes, in the j^alaces where the disciples of
Mohammed ruled as gods over the crouching tribes who lived under
the Brahminical law. The ambassador of James came back, to tell
the story which others had less authoritatively told, of the riches
that industry might win in that region of gold and pearls, of silk
and ivory. Any project for conquering that region would then have
appeared as wild as the scheme of Tamerlane, to cut a channel to
unite the Mediterranean and the Red Sea,
" That men might quickly sail to India." *
Sir Thomas Roe had looked upon Jehangir riding upon an ele
phant in the streets of Agra, with a train of "twenty royal ele
phants for his own ascending, so rich that in precious stones and
furniture they braved the sun;" and had marvelled, when "his
greatest elephants were brought up before him, some of which,
being lord elephants, had their chains, bells, and furniture of gold
and silver," how " they all bowed down before the king." He had
beheld how the emperor's wives, "on their elephants, were carried
like parakitoes half a mile behind him ; " and he had seen the
closed palanquins of the female slaves, borne on men's shoulders,
amidst crowds of mutes and eunuchs. He had been at the great
huntings, where sport assumed the pomp of war— very different
from the hunting-exercise of James at Royston and Theobalds.
He had gazed at the vast cavalcades of armed horsemen, the long
files of camels and mules, the thousands of servants, the " numbers
numberless " of camp-followers, when the emperor went forth on a
progress from one of the imperial cities. More than these ^>ar-
* " Tamburlainfi," part ii. act v. s. 3.
THE MOGUL RULERS OF HINDOSTAN. 283
baric splendours, he had looked upon the old gorgeous palaces of
the earlier race of Pathan kings, of whose works it is said, " they
built like giants, and finished like goldsmiths."* The palace and
mosque of Akbar, near Agra ; the mosques and tombs of Delhi ;
the public buildings in every city where the characteristics of Sar
acenic and Hindoo architecture were often combined ; the tasteful
groups of domes and minarets ; the ojpen colonnades, the lofty
gateways, the terraces, — these were works of art rising up amidst
the rich eastern vegetation, which would cause Whitehall and Non
such, St. Paul's and the abbey of Westminster, the old wooden
houses of Cheapside and the brick mansions of the Strand, to be
remembered as comparatively mean and tasteless. But the con
trast must have been almost painful to those who beheld the
power and wealth of England represented by a paltry factory at
Surat, for the quiet possession even of which her sailors had to
fight with the Portuguese. The wildest dream could not have pic
tured the palaces of the Moguls turned into English arsenals, and
their polished marbles and flowered arabesques hidden beneath the
whitewash characteristic of English taste, t By no prophetic
power could it have been imagined by one who, at the beginning
of the seventeenth century had looked upon the glories of the Tar
taric emperors, that before the middle of the eighteenth century,
the sovereignty which was to be carried forward under one mag
nificent ruler to an unequalled height of splendour and prosperity,
should then fall to pieces by its own weight, and that many princes
of the divided empire should become tributaries to " a Convpany of
Christian merchants of a remote island of the Northern sea." t
Even if a jDartial conquest of the Mogul tyrant and the Hindoo slave
had been thought possible by those who had seen how the Span
iard had subdued and exterminated the descendants of the Incas,
what enthusiast could have believed that, by the middle of the
nineteenth century, the race of the humble settlers of Surat would
have obtained a far wider dominion than the greatest of these Mo
guls ; — that not only in their proudest seats, amidst the ruined
palaces and the tieserted mosques of Shah Jehan and Aurungzebe,
the native races would have been disciplined in the military arts of
Europe, but that they would become the instrument's of bringing
under one foreign dominion the Afghans and the Sikhs, the Raj
poots, and the Mahrattas, who had shaken the foundations of the
* Fergusson " Handbook of Architecture," vol. i. p. 444.
t See Mr. Fergusson, book ix. c. 4. t Gibbon, chap. lxv.
284 , HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ancient empire. Who that then had seen how the victim of tyr-
anny had his life trampled out when the despot nodded to his ele
phant ; — how the rulers sat under golden canopies and were clothed
with jewelled silks, because they had an unlimited command over
the property of all the industrious, — could have anticipated that a
stern justice and a confiding toleration would extinguish the old
dominion of robbery and fraud, throughout a region twelve times
more extensive than that which the lawgivers inhabited, and six
times more populous ? If such a dream could have shown how the
energy of our race might triumph over disunited barbarism, would
not the dreamer wake to ask, will such a triumph be permanent, —
will not the Moslem some day re-appear in the sanguinary pride of
his oppression, and the Hindoo in the blind treachery of his super
stition, to proclaim the dangers of an overweening confidence in
the might of civilisation ?
The strong remonstrance of the House of Commons, in 1610,
against impositions upon merchandise, was not a solitary act of
public spirit. They had stood ujj, session after session, to protest
against the theories of the king that he was absolute ; and to make
him comprehend that there was a power superior to his arbitrary
will. He had issued proclamations which assumed the character
of laws ; and they told him it was •" the indubitable right of the
people of this kingdom, not to be made subject to any punishment
that shall extend to their lives, lands, bodies, or goods, other than such
as are ordained by the common laws of this land, or the statutes
made by their common consent in parliament." Whenever the
king wanted a subsidy, the Commons immediately preferred a
petition for redress of grievances. Cecil had a scheme for making
the Crown to a great extent independent of parliament, by propcs-
ing that a fixed annual revenue of 200,000/. should be granted, on
condition that the king should give up the right of purveyance, and
the various profits derived from wardships and other branches of
ancient prerogative. The session of 1610 was chiefly employed in
negotiations for this object, which was termed -" the great contract
with his majesty ; " but nothing had been settled when parliament
was prorogued in July. The courtiers thought that the adroitness
of Cecil had prevailed over the doubts and suspicions of the Com
mons. " The little beagle," writes one, " hath run about, and
brought the rest of the great hounds to a perfect tune."* When
parliament met again in October, the Commons were out of humour.
* " Calendar of State Papers." Letter of Sir Roger Aston, p. 625.
DISSOLUTION OF PARLIAMENT. 285
Not a grievance had been redressed, although a temporary subsidy
had been granted in the expectation that some of the evils of which
they had complained would have been removed or mitigated. In
November, James had become tired of the word grievance. He
would dissolve parliament. He had been patient, but " he cannot
have asinine patience." He was for punishing those members who
had uttered offensive speeches, some of which he thought
amounted nearly to treason.* The parliament was dissolved on
the 9th of February, 161 1, after having sat nearly seven years.
In the first session of 1610, the Treasurer communicated to the
Lords the intelligence of the murder of Henry IV. of France.
Cecil said that this king was an assured friend to their sovereign
and to this realm ; and an especial defence and wall between the
reformed religion and its opponents in Christendom. The English
minister also told the parliament that Henry, at his death, had a
great army in readiness ; but Cecil did not divulge what was the
intent for which this army was levied. James was not likely to
have joined in any martial project against the Spanish power ; or
even to have seconded Henry's " grand scheme," as it was called,
for a great European confederacy that would have put an end to
warfare. If money had been wanting for accomplishing that, or
any other elevated project, James would have stood aloof. England
had now no foreign policy, but that of an almost ignominious
neutrality. The cause of Protestantism in Europe, which was at
the same time the cause of civil liberty, had lost its great leader
when Elizabeth died. The son of Mary Stuart had no opinions
but those which resulted from his cowardice or his selfishness.
When the Reforming ministers lectured him in Scotland, he
favoured the Papists. Whilst the terrors of the Gunpowder-plot
were uppermost in his mind, he was as staunch a Protestant as the
sternest Puritan in his parliament. He naturally leaned upon that
jparty in the Church of England which supported his doctrine of
absolute power. In his contempt for the opinions of his subjects
he thrust episcopacy upon the kirk of Scotland. For the rights of
conscience he had not the slightest regard. He exhorted the
States of Holland to jpersecute Vorstius, an Arminian professor at
Leyden. In 1 612 he signed a writ for the burning in Smithfield of
Bartholomew Legate, an Arian, whose errors he had vainly
attempted to remove by argument. This writ was not a mere
formal instrument, but expressed that, the Church having delivered
• " Calendar of State Papers." Letter of Sir Roger Aston, p. 646.
286 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the offender to the secular power, as a blasphemous heretic, the
king, " as a zealot of justice, and a defender of the Catholic faith,
and willing to maintain and defend the Holy Church and the rights
and liberties of the same," holds that the said Bartholomew
Legate "ought to be burned with fire." One other atrocity of the
same kind was committed — the last of such barbarities which Eng
land witnessed. To the " religious " king James is our present
translation of the Bible dedicated. That translation was an
excellent work, and it was right to dedicate it to the sovereign who
had encouraged the undertaking. But it was in the spirit of that
dangerous adulation which hid realities from James, as they were
hidden from his successor, that he was told in this dedication that
his conduct in going forward " with the confidence and resolution
of a man in maintaining the truth of Christ, and propagating it far
and near, is that which hath so bound and firmly knit the hearts of
all your majesty's loyal and religious people unto you, that your
very name is precious amongst them ; their eye doth behold you
with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts as that sanctified
person, who, under God, is the immediate author of their true
happiness." It might be supposed, the king being herein called
" the mover and author of this work," that the Bible had not been
previously known in England. The translation of 1611 was founded
upon the Bishops' Bible of 1568; and that was founded upon
Cranmer's Bible ; which was founded upon the translations of the
Old and New Testament of the earlier reformers — the Tyndal who
was burnt, and the Wycliffe whose ashes were cast into the Avon.
In such a work it was the part of true wisdom to deviate as little
as possible from the text with which the people had become
familiar, and which their forefathers had devoured when it was
dangerous to possess the sacred volume. It does not appear to
us an objection to this translation that, " in consequence of the
principle of adherence to the original versions which had been kept
up ever since the time of Henry VIIL, it is not the language of
the reign of James I."* Nor is it wholly to be deplored that it
abounds " with obsolete phraseology, and with single words long
since abandoned, or retained only in familiar use." f It will be a
national misfortune if, to get rid of some archaisms in this trans
lation which have ceased to be difficult, the noble simplicity of our
Anglo-Saxon tongue— "the tongue which Shakspere spake"—
should yield to the refined Gallicisms of a later period ; and if the
* Hallam, " Literature of Europe," vol. III., p. 134. j md.
AUTHORISED TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE. 287
K obsolete phraseology " of the days of Hooker should be driven
out by German idioms and American vulgarities. In this transla
tion, as in every species of contemporary literature, there was no
attempt to write down to the understandings of the people. The
great preachers at Paul's Cross, in common with the great dramatic
poets, employed the most elevated language and the richest
imagery, in union with the most homely phrases. If some of their
sentences were involved, some of their words unfamiliar, their
arguments perplexing in their subtlety, their* metaphors beyond
the range of ordinary comprehension, the whole tendency of what
they uttered was to elevate the minds of their readers. Their
doctrine might be abstruse, their illustrations pedantic, but their
tone was not cold and passionless. The rudest listener caught
something of their excitement ; the instructed listener did not
retire into his own thoughts, wearied by platitudes and babyisms.
The jpreachers, whether they followed the high-church archbishop
Bancroft, or the puritan archbishop Abbot, were in earnest. They
had great truths to proclaim to all men alike, and they tasked their
abilities and their learning to utter them as if they really felt their
grandeur and solemnity.
.Whatever were the differences of opinion in the English Church,
and however great the increase of non-conformists, the time for any
serious attempt to re-establish Roman-Catholicism in England had
evidently passed away. It was the same in Scotland. But in
Ireland the great bulk of the people still clung to the Roman
Catholic worship. At the beginning of the reign of James the
people of some cities boldly ejected the Protestant ministers from
their churches ; and they gave other demonstrations of a general
resistance to the statutes of supremacy and uniformity which had
been passed in the Irish parliament. They were met by a stricter
execution of the laws against recusants and priests, as far as juries
could be found to enforce them. In the meantime much had been
done to bring the whole of the kingdom under the dominion of one
system of law. The king's writ now ran in every part. Old cus
toms which interfered with the administration of justice were
abolished. The possession of lands by the chieftains was regulated
according to English tenures ; and the tenants were relieved from
many of the exactions of their lords. The one evil which inter
fered with the tranquil progress of civilisation was the exclusion
from civil privileges and offices which the majority had to endure,
on account of their faith, at the hands of the minority. The great
288 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Irish chieftains, Tyrone and Tyrconnel, had submitted to the gor-
ernment of James, and had been graciously received at the Eng
lish court. But the alterations in the tenure of lands had interfered
with what they considered their territorial rights ; and the denial
of all toleration to the Roman Catholics had led them to conclude
that, resistance to the government might once more be attempted.
In 1607 they suddenly departed from Ireland, with their families.
They had embarked in treasonable schemes which they had no
power to carry through. Tyrone became a pensioner of Spain
and of the pope, and died in 161 6 at Rome. The two earls having
been attainted of treason and outlawed, their lands, to the extent of
five hundred thousand acres, were forfeited to the crown. It is to
the honour of the government of James that this opportunity was
judiciously employed in accomplishing what is called " the planta
tion of Ulster." Extraordinary inducements were held out to Eng
lish capitalists to settle in the north of Ireland ; the corporation
of London received large grants of lands in the county of
Derry, upon their engagement to spend ^20,000 upon the colony,
and to build two towns. Hence the cities of Londonderry and
Coleraine. The lord deputy, sir Arthur Chichester, carried through
this project with great energy and prudence. The mistake of grant
ing vast tracts to individuals, as in the time of Elizabeth, was not
repeated. The allotments were in portions of 2000 acres, 1500
acres, and 1000 acres, the grantees agreeing to build according to
their several proportions. The forfeited lands were divided amongst
a hundred and four English and Scots, fifty-six servitors, and two
hundred and eighty-six natives. Thus was Ulster to become, but
not without its periods of fierce contention and of terrible massacre,
the most prosperous and enlightened j)rovince of Ireland. Its half
a million of acres had offered a jjrecarious existence to a scattered
race of half-civilised and marauding natives. It became the seat
of agricultural and commercial industry — a model to the rest of
Ireland for removing those social evils which were destined for
two centuries to press far more heavily upon her than political
jealousies or religious disunions.
The plantation of Ulster was a scheme which is attributed to
the king and to his able counsellor, Bacon. It soon became mix
ed up with a manoeuvre to put some ready money into the royal
treasury, which the sturdy parliament had refused to fill except
upon conditions. Sir Antony Shirley, according to the represen
tation of his son to the king, had the > merit of inventing a whole-
BARONETS. — THE NEW RIVER. 289
sale mode of obtaining supplies by the sale of honours : " My
father," he says, " being a man of excellent and working wit, did
find out the device of making baronets, which brought to your
majesty's coffers well nigh ,£100,000." A new title of honour,
intermediate between a baron and a knight, was to be bestowed
upon two hundred gentlemen possessing lands' to the yearly value
of ,£1000; and they were each to pay into the treasury for the pat
ent the sum of ,£1095, being the estimated cost of thirty soldiers to
defend the settlers in Ulster for three years. The project took to
a certain extent. In ten years ninety-three patents of baronetcy
were sold ; but the price paid for them was employed in other
purposes than the military protection of the new colony.
King James, to award him no more than justice, was favourably
disposed to any large enterprise of public improvement ; always pro
vided that it offered him a chance of personal gain. We are indebted
to him, in some degree, for a benefit which London enjoys to this
day — the supply of pure water by the New River. In the third
year of the king's reign was passed " An Act for the bringing in
of a fresh stream of running water to the North part of the City of
London." It was to be brought from the springs of Chad well and
Amwell, in Hertfordshire ; and the Corporation of London were
empowered to execute the work. The Corporation in that age, —
and the character has not absolutely departed from the body, — was
not very energetic in setting about costly enterprises for the public
good. They did not undertake this work themselves; and, when
a spirited citizen and goldsmith at his own risk engaged in the
undertaking,- — a mighty work in those days and indeed at any time
— the Corporation refused him any pecuniary aid. James, when
Hugh Middleton had spent all his private fortune, covenanted
with him to bear half the share of the expense. The work was
completed in 1613. Before the opening of the New River, London
was supplied with water from the public conduits ; and by the water
works at London Bridge, erected in 1582, by Peter Morris, a
Dutchman. London in the reign of James was rapidly increasing.
Other supplies were needed. The city had become nearly joined
to Westminster ; which an intelligent writer chiefly attributes to
the union with Scotland under the king : " For the Scots, multiplying
themselves here mightily, nestled themselves about the court ; so
that the Strand, from mud walls and thatched houses, came to
that perfection of buildings, as now we see."* Yet this mo-
* Howell, " Londinopolis," 1657, p. 346.
Vol. III.— 19
29O HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tropolis of the seventeenth century was very different from the
metropolis of the nineteenth. It was a city whose most crowded
thoroughfares were in the neighbourhood of pleasant fields. The
same writer says, " Go and walk in her fields, you shall see some
shooting at long marks, some at butts ; some bowling upon
dainty pleasant greens." The citizens had only to step out of
Moorgate into Finsbury fields, to pursue their archery. The rural
occupiers of the " town of St. Giles' in the Fields " were sometimes
visited by the urban dwellers of Holborn and the Strand, who
went thither to take the air ; but the road which led to that village
into Holborn, and by Drury Lane, through the growing traffic had
become "foul and dangerous to all that pass that way."* The
growth of London had been attempted to be repressed by statutory
enactments under Elizabeth. James thought to accomplish the
same end by proclamations. He said that the new buildings were
"but a shelter for those who, when they had spent their estates
in coaches, lacqueys, and fine clothes, like Frenchmen, lived mis
erably in their houses, like Italians." He commanded all noblemen
and gentlemen who had mansions in the country, to return to them,
and there abide, till the end of the summer season. He com
manded them to go home to celebrate the feast of Christmas and
to keep hospitality. The great people little heeded these proclama
tions ; and the House of Commons told him they were illegal.
London, from the happy circumstances of her position, was sure to
increase with the increase of commerce. The presence of the
courts of law at Westminster, the circumstance of the capital be
ing the seat of government, favoured this increase. But one great
natural cause was far more important to its prosperity than these
incidental advantages. James, having been refused a benevolence
by the City, sent for the Corporation ; and vowed that he would
remove his own court and the courts of Westminster Hall — he
would send the Records in the Tower to a more loyal place — he
would bring ruin upon the disobedient Londoners. The Lord
Mayor replied, " Your majesty hath power to do what you please,
and your City of London will obey accordingly ; but she humbly
desires that when your majesty shall remove your courts you would
please to leave the Thames behind you." f
* Statute, Jac. 3, c. 18. t " Londinopolis," p. 19.
ARABELLA STUART. 291
CHAPTER XVI.
Arabella Stuart. — Death of Salisbury. — Robert Carr, king's favourite. -TDeath of Prince
Henry. — Marriage of the Princess Elizabeth. — The addled Parliament. — George
Villiers, the new favourite. — Murder of Overbury.— Trials for the murder.— Somerset
and his countess convicted. — Conduct of the King. — Sir Edward Coke dismissed. —
Proclamation for Sports. Note on the Secret Communications between the King
and Sir George More.
One of the overt acts of treason with which sir Walter Raleigh
was charged upon his trial, was that he had conferred with lord
Cobham for the support of Arabella Stuart's claim to the crown of
England.* The lady herself was present at this trial. It is not at
all clear that this design had been seriously entertained ; and cer
tainly Arabella herself had given no sanction to it. She was the
cousin of king James ; being the only child of Charles, earl of
Lennox, the grandson of Margaret Tudor. Her parents died
young ; and she was brought up by her maternal grandmother, the
countess of Shrewsbury. If James had died childless, Arabella
Stuart would have been the lineal heir to the crown. During the
reign of Elizabeth she was occasionally at court ; and the queen
pointed her out to the wife of the French ambassador, when she
was about twelve years old, as a girl of talent, who would one day
be a great lady. After the accession of James she appears to have
been in much favour. In 1604 she received the grant of an annual
pension for life of iooo/.f In 1609 she "had the profits of a
monopoly, in the privilege of nominating the sellers of wines and
spirits in Ireland. % In that year she appears to have given offence
by listening" to some overtures for marriage. In 1610 it was dis
covered that William Seymour, the second son of lord Beauchamp,
was endeavouring to gain the lady Arabella as his wife. They
were brought before the Council, and protested that they never
intended marrying without the king's consent. In a few months
they were privately married. The husband was sent to the Tower;
the wife was placed in official custody. On the 3rd of June, 161 1,
* Ante, p. 242. t " Calendar of State Papers," p. 173- t Ibid., p. 555.
292 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
she escaped from Highgate, disguised as a man ; having drawn
" a pair of great French fashioned hose over her petticoats, putting
on a man's doublet, a manlike perruque with long locks over her
hair, a black hat, black cloak, russet boots with red tips, and a
rapier by her side." Seymour meanwhile had escaped from the
Tower, also in disguise. Arabella rode to Blackwall ; and then
crossed to Lee. A French bark, hired for the occasion, was there
lying at anchor, and when she went on board, the captain stood
out to sea, without waiting for Seymour, who was expected to join
his wife. They never saw each other again. Arabella was cap
tured in the French bark by an English pinnace that had been sent
in chase of the fugitives ; and she was carried to the Tower.
Seymour escaped to Ostend. The jealousy of king James would
never permit him to show any mercy to his unhappy cousin. She
died in the fourth year of her imprisonment, worn out with grief
which ended in mental derangement. Of the cruelty of the king to
his kinswoman there can be no doubt. The illegality of her im
prisonment is equally clear. It could not be justified by the very
distant possibility that any issue of a marriage between two per
sons who each were of the blood royal might be dangerous to the
succession. * Arabella was treated by James with far greater
harshness than was used to Catherine Grey by Elizabeth ; nor was
there the apology in James's case, as in that of the queen, that
the title of the reigning sovereign was open to dispute. Arabella
was the victim of a causeless injustice, " through the oppression of
a kinsman whose advocates are always vaunting his good nature." f
In May, 1612, died Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury. " He was
a good statesman, and no ill member of the Commonwealth," says
sir Simonds D'Ewes ; but he died amidst " a general hate, almost
of all sorts." X Bacon has described him as " a more fit man to
keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man to reduce
things to be much better." When he was gone, things did grow
much worse. He had left an empty treasury, which he. had vainly
attempted to fill by his scheme for a permanent revenue. The
constant manifestation of an arbitrary temper on the part of the
king, " willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike," made the Com
mons cling with great tenacity to their undoubted power of re
fusing supplies. Robert Carr succeeded Cecil, not as prime minis-
* Seymour was grandson of the earl of Hertford who married Catherine Grey. See
ante, p. 79.
t Hallam, vol. i. p. 351. X " Autobiography," vol. i. p. 50.
ROBERT CARR, KING'S FAVOURITE. 293
ter ; but he was all-powerful as prime favourite. Before the death
of Cecil, the king's minions had not ostensibly influenced public
affairs. James gormandised with Heliogabalus Hay; and when
Carr, a raw Scotch lad, had broken his leg in the tilting-yard, the
king watched over his recovery, placed him about his person,
pinched his cheek, taught him Latin, * bestowed on him forfeited
lands, created him baron Branspath and then viscount Rochester,
and made him a knight of the garter. But neither Hay nor Carr
appear to have meddled with the functions of a Treasurer or Sec
retary of State while Cecil lived. For four years after that rniriis-
t'er's death Carr ruled supreme, till another favourite came to eject
him. The history of this period is disgusting to trace in contem
porary memoirs and documents, and much of it is unfit to be re
lated in a modern narrative. Justly does Mr. Carlyle say, " Somer
set Ker, king's favourite, son of the Laird of Fernieherst, he and
his extremely unedifying affairs — excejit as they might transiently
affect the nostrils of some Cromwell of importance — do not much
belong to the History of England. Carrion ought at length to be
buried." -f Yet they cannot be wholly passed over. The " ex
tremely unedifying affairs " of the court of James had a great deal
to do with the momentous events of the next reign. The disgust
of the sober and religious part of the community drove vast num
bers into the opposite extreme of religious aceticism. In propor
tion as the Puritans were hated by the courtiers, denounced in the
high-church pulpits, ridiculed upon the stage, they grew in the real
strength of their earnest principles ; and they gained an enormous
accession of strength in town and country, of those who, "out of
mere morality and civil honesty, discountenanced the abominations
of those days." Their religion " was fenced with the liberty- of the
people, and sq linked together, that it was impossible to make
them slaves till they were brought to be idolaters of royalty and
glorious lust, and as impossible to make them adore these gods
while they continued loyal to the government of Jesus Christ." J
So writes Lucy Hutchinson, one in whom the beauty of holiness
is presented under its noblest aspects of manly courage and fem
inine tenderness.
In 1606, on Twelfth Night, a masque was performed at court,
ofwhich Jonson wrote the verses, and Inigo Jones superintended
* " Nugae Antique," vol. i. p. 390-
t " Cromwell's Letters," Introduction, p. 32.
X " Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, vol. i. p. iai, ed.a82».
294
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the decorations and machinery. This " Masque of Hymen " was
to celebrate the marriage of the earl of Essex, a boy of fourteen
years, with lady Frances Howard, a girl of thirteen. In 1613, there
was another masque in honour of the marriage of this lady with
Robert Carr, then created earl of Somerset. The young Essex
had gone abroad after his marriage ; and his child-bride had lived
amongst the seductions of the court — "incomparably the most dis
graceful scene of profligacy which this country has ever witness
ed." * The odious circumstances which attended the divorce of
lady Essex, that she might be bestowed upon her paramour,
Somerset, brought equal disgrace, in the eyes of the people, upon
the king who urged the divorce in the most unkingly manner, and
upon the Ecclesiastical Court which decreed it. The king, in pan
dering to an adulterous connexion, dared to tell archbishop Abbot,
who opposed the disgraceful proceeding, "the best thankfulness
that you, that are so far my creature, can use towards me, is to rev
erence and follow my judgment, and not to contradict it." t This
profligate man was now freed from the observation of his two elder
children, whose lives and opinions were not in exact agreement
with his own. Prince Henry was in his nineteenth year, when, on
the 6th of November, 161 2, he died, after a short illness. The
prince, although there was no public difference between them,
had probably as little respect for the king as the king had affection
for the prince. Between Henry and Somerset there was decided
enmity. The popularity of the prince, who was an especial hope
of the strict religious section of the nation, was offensive to the
king ; so that when the son's court was frequented by a very differ
ent class of men from those who thronged round the court of the
king, James was heard to exclaim, "will he bury me alive?"
Henry was attached to Raleigh, whom he often visited in prison .;
and he loved to hear, as he might have heard from him, stories of
the martial princes of our Plantagenet race, and of the later period
when the support of the Protestantism of Europe was the great
policy of England. He has been reported to have said, with re
gard to the imprisoned Raleigh, that only such a king as his father
would keep such a bird in such a cage. When Henry died, there
was an outcry that he had been poisoned. D'Ewes says, " It is
not improbable but that he might overheat and distemper himself
in some of those sports and recreations he used in his company;
but the strength of his constitution, and the vigour of his youth,
* Hallam, !. p. 342. t Amos, " The great Oyer of Poisoning," p. 6.
MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH. 295
might have overcome that, had he not tasted of some grapes as he
played at tennis, supposed to have been poisoned." * Some cir
cumstances which were disclosed a few years later favoured this sus
picion. But whatever might be the cause of prince Henry's death,
his father exhibited some strange feelings which strongly contrast
with the national grief, when " the lamentation made for him was
so general as even women and children partook of it." f There
had been a negotiation for marrying Henry to a princess of France ';
and within three days of his death Rochester directed our ambas
sador, who had' the decency not then to propound the matter, to
make overtures for the marriage of the same princess to the king's
remaining son, Charles. Henry was buried at Westminster on the
7th of December. There was no time lost in grief ; for on the
14th of February following the princess Elizabeth was married at
Whitehall to Frederick, the elector palatine. The king again de
manded a feudal aid on this occasion, as he had demanded one when
his eldest son was created prince of Wales. It defrayed only a
portion of the enormous expenses of the marriage festivities. The
. union was a happy one in the mutual affection of the prince and
princess. It was doomed to be unfortunate in the loss which the
elector sustained of his hereditary dominions, when he consented
to be chosen king of Bohemia. The demeanour of a light-hearted
girl of sixteen at her bridal ceremony was held to be prophetic of
evil : — " While the archbishop of Canterbury was solemnizing the
marriage, some eruscations and lightnings of joy appeared in her
countenance, that expressed more than an ordinary smile, being
almost elated to a laughter, which could not clear the air of her
fate, but was rather a forerunner of more sad and dire events." t
From the twelfth child of the princess Elizabeth the House of
Brunswick inherits the crown of this kingdom.
Hume has said, with some truth, " except during sessions of
parliament, the history of this reign may more properly be called
the history of the court than that of the nation." But the excep
tion is a very considerable one. During sessions of parliament we
clearly trace how the nation was growing into a power truly formi
dable to the arbitrary disposition of the king and the selfish indul
gences of the court. We see in these sessions of parliament of what
materials the English nation was composed. When we open the
parliamentary debates of this period, we find abundant evidence that
* " Autobiography," vol. i. p. 47. t " Autobiography," vol. i. p. 46.
X Wilson, " Life of James I."
296 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
such of the gentlemen of England as remained uncorrupted by court
favours, and had not " learnt the court fashion," * were not only a
spirited race but were highly intelligent. They were perfectly ac
quainted with the laws of their country and the history of its
constitution. They had not only solid arguments, but carefully
sought precedents, to shape their resistance to impositions and
benevolences, to monopolies and purveyance, to proclamations
which claimed to have the force of statutes, but which were only
legaLif they prescribed obedience to some established principle of
constitutional government. They were practically familiar with
the laws of property, and with the administration of justice in their
several localities; A writer whose learning and industry, if his life
had been longer spared, would have no doubt added many more able
contributions to our history, says of the country gentlemen, " un
doubtedly, in the earlier half of the seventeenth century a great
amount of solid and polite learning distinguished them ; and
to this must be attributed the energetic resistance which the king
and his corrupt courtiers met with in their insane crusade against
the liberties of England."! The parliament which, after an interval __
of four years, met on the 6th of April, 1614, was called, not for any
purpose of general legislation, but in the expectation that by proper
management it might relieve the king's necessities. Bacon, then
attorney-general, sir Henry Neville, and some others, undertook
to bring the Commons into a gracious frame of mind, by inducing
the king to relax some of his claims of prerogative, which were
called grievances, and thus to obtain a liberal supply. The scheme
could not be concealed ; and hence these politicians obtained the
name of "undertakers." The king in his opening speech protested
that it was as false as it would have been unworthy of himself, that
he should employ " private undertakers" who "would do great
matters." Bacon laughed at the notion that private men should
undertake for all the Commons of England. In 1621 James openly
acknowledged what he had before denied. Mr. Hallam points to
this circumstance as showing "the rise of a systematic parliament-
ary influence, which was one day to become the mainspring of gov
ernment." Hume says, " so ignorant were the Commons, that they
knew not this incident to be the lirst infallible symptom of any reg
ular or established liberty." The Commons knew better than the
* Mrs. Hutchinson.
t J. M. Kemble, Introduction to Twysden on "the Government of England," Car*
den Society, p. xix.
THE ADDLED PARLIAMENT. 297
historian, that, whatever might have been attempted under des
potic princes, there was an ancient system of " regular or estab
lished liberty," which did not require any symptoms for its mani
festation. They did not acknowledge what the historian has
constantly inferred, that the notion of liberty was a sudden growth
of the seventeenth century ; " that the constitution of England was,
at that time, an inconsistent fabric, whose jarring and discordant
parts would soon destroy each other." * They opposed the parlia
mentary influence because they dreaded corruption as much as
they hated tyranny. The scheme of the undertakers was entirely
unsuccessful. James uttered smooth words and made specious
promises ; but the Commons, with one voice, passed a vote against
the king's right of imposing customs at the outports, without the
consent of 'parliament. A supply was demanded, under a threat
that if it were not given the parliament should be dissolved. The
house passed to the question of impositions. There were various
bills in progress. After a session of two months of stormy debate,
the parliament was dissolved, without a single bill being passed.
It was named "the addled parliament." No other parliament was
called till 1621. For eleven years the Statute book is a blank.
The king was not satisfied with the perilous measure of attempting
to govern without a parliament, but he committed to the Tower five
of the members of the House of Commons who had been most
strenuous in their opposition. He had to supply his necessities
by fines in the star-chamber, and by exercises of the prerogative
which were galling and oppressive. His first great resource was a
Benevolence. Mr. Oliver St. John declined to contribute, and
wrote a letter setting forth his reasons for refusal. He was brought
into the star-chamber, and was fined in the sum of ,£5000. The
courtiers would think this a mild punishment for one who had pre
sumed to doubt the right to put his hands into the pockets of his
subjects of a king who had just told his disobedient parliament,
" my integrity is like the whiteness of my robe, my purity like the
•metal of gold in my crown, my firmness and clearness like the pre
cious stones I wear, and my affections natural like the redness of
my heart." f Such was the gabble of this ridiculous pedant upon
solemn occasions. When he sat at table, with a crowd of listeners,
he discoursed largely of his divine right to implicit obedience, and
of the superiority of his prerogative over the laws and customs of
* " History of England," chap, xlvii.
t " Parliamentary History," vol. i. p. 1150.
298 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
England. There is " a specimen of his usual liberty of talk," as
Hume terms a story which Mr. Hallam deems " too trite for repe
tition," but which we venture to repeat. Waller, the poet, when
young, stood among the spectators who were allowed to see the
king dine. James, with his loud sputtering voice, asked the opin
ions of bishop Neile and bishop Andrews, whether he might not
take his subjects' money, when he needed it, without all the fuss
of parliament ? Neile replied, ' God forbid you should not, for you
are the breath of our nostrils.' Andrews hesitated ; but the king
insisting upon an answer, he said, ' Why, then, I think your ma
jesty may lawfully take my brother Neile's money, for he offers it."
By the death of the earl of Northampton, within a week of
the dissolution of parliament, the king and his courtiers had an
opportunity for a scramble to recruit their finances. The office of
Lord Privy Seal having become vacant, the occasion was embraced
to effect what we should now call a partial change of ministry.
But this change was accomplished in a way that would be rather
startling in modern times. Some of the high offices were sold.
Sir Fulk Greville paid ^4000 for the Chancellorship of the Ex
chequer. Inferior places went to the highest bidder. When Som
erset sold the office of cup-bearer to George Villiers, one of the
sons of a Leicestershire knight, he appears to have forgotten that
another might supplant him in the favour of a king who dwelt on
"good looks and handsome accoutrements."* The cup-bearer
was a dangerous rival. " His first introduction into favour," says
Clarendon, " was purely from the handsomeness of his person."
The history of the country, to the end of this reign, is in great part
the personal history of George Villiers, — the adventurer, who had
in his capacity of the king's cup-bearer been " admitted to that
conversation and discourse with which that prince always abounded
at his meals." In a few weeks, continues Clarendon, he mounted
higher; " and, being knighted, without any other qualification, he
was at the same time made gentleman of the bedchamber and
knight of the order of the garter ; and in a short time (very short
for such a prodigious ascent) he was made a baron, a viscount, an
earl, a marquis, and became lord high admiral of England, lord
warden of the cinque-ports, master of the horse, and entirely dis
posed of all the graces of the king, in conferring all the honours
and all the offices of three kingdoms without a rival." f
The marriage of the earl of Somerset with the divorced lady
* " Nugje Antiqux," p. 392"; t History of the Rebellion, book i.
MURDER OF OVERBURY. 299
Essex, on St. Stephen's day, 161 3, had been preceded by the death
in the Tower of Somerset's friend, sir Thomas Overbury. The
incense that was offered to the royal favourite on the occasion of
his marriage is almost as revolting as the marriage itself. Bacon
spent ^2000 upon " The Masque of Flowers," in which grave law
yers spoke the flattering words which were put into the mouths of
hyacinths and jonquils. Donne wrote an eclogue, in which he de
scribes the eyes of the bride as sowing the court with stars. The
Corporation of London gave the earl and countess a magnificent
banquet at Guildhall ; and when the lady, to go to the festival,
borrowed the four superb horses in which sir Ralph Winwood, the
Secretary of State, took pride, he begged her to accept them, as so
great a lady should not use anything borrowed. In less than two
years the same sir Ralph Winwood was labouring to discover the
suspected murderers of sir Thomas Overbury. According to one
account, an apothecary's boy, falling sick at Flushing, confessed
that he had administered a poison to Overbury, who was then a
prisoner in the Tower. According to another account, the dis
covery was as follows : — " It came first to light by a strange acci
dent of sir Ralph Winwood, knt., one of the Secretaries of State,
his dining with sir Jervis Elvis, lieutenant of the said Tower, at a
great man's table, not far from Whitehall. For that great man,
commending the same sir Jervis to sir Ralph Winwood as a person
in respect of his many good qualities very worthy of his acquaint
ance, sir Ralph answered him, that he should willingly embrace his
acquaintance, but that he could first wish he had cleared himself
of a foul suspicion the world generally conceived of him, touching
the death of sir Thomas Overbury. As soon as sir Jervis heard
that, being very ambitious of the Secretary's friendship, he took
occasion to enter into private conference with him, and therein to
excuse himself to have been enforced to connive at the said mur
der, with much abhorring of it. He confessed the whole circum
stance of the execution of it in general, and the instrument*
to have been set on work by Robert, Earl of Somerset, and his
wife."* The confession of Elvis, or Helwys, as thus related by D'Ewes,
is not very probable. But suspicion being roused, and that sus
picion pointing to the once favourite of the king — of whom, accord
ing to Clarendon, his majesty "begun to be weary," — all the state
machinery was put in action to bring the murder home to the in-
* D'Ewes, "Autobiography," vol. i. p. 68.
3°°
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
jtigators and the perpetrators. Coke, the lord chief justice, is
stated by Bacon to have taken three hundred examinations. The
king, according to the narrative of Roger Coke, the grandson ofthe
great judge, was at . Royston, and Somerset with him, when Win
wood came to tell him what had been discovered. James immediate
ly sent a messenger to Coke to apprehend the earl. Coke prepared
a warrant, and despatched it to Royston : " The messenger went
back post to Royston, and arrived there about ten in the morning.
The king had a loathsome way of lolling his arms about his favour
ites' necks, and kissing them ; and in this posture the messenger
found the king with Somerset, saying, ' When shall I see thee
again ? ' Somerset then designing for London, when he was
arrested by sir Edward's warrant. Somerset exclaimed, that never
such an affront was offered to a peer of England in presence ofthe
King. ' Nay, man,' said the king, ' if Coke sends for me, I must
go ; ' and when he was gone, ' Now the Deel go with thee,' said the
king, 'for I will never see thy face any more.' " In the afternoon,
according to the same account, the chief justice arrived, and then
the king commanded him to search into the bottom of the con-
sjMracy, and to spare no man, however great ; concluding with an
awful appeal to God to curse Coke if he spared any of them, and
invoking the same curse upon himself if he pardoned any.
On the 19th of October, on the 9th of November, and on the
1 6th of November, 161 5, Richard Weston, James Franklin, Anne
Turner, and sir Jervis Elvis, were arraigned and condemned at
Guildhall, and were executed. The countess of Somerset was
committed to the Tower, where she gave birth to a daughter; and
her husband was also committed. On the 24th of May, 1616, the
countess was arraigned before the peers. She pleaded guilty, and
was sentenced to death. The motive which induced her to be
accessary to this crime was set forth by the chief justice in a re
port to the king. The examinations, he said, disclosed that lady
Frances, countess of Essex, had employed sorcery for the double
purpose of estranging the affections of her husband and winning
those of Rochester ; that Overbury, who had exhorted Somerset
not to think of a divorce for the wife of Essex, to be followed by
his own marriage, was, through the management of the deceased
earl of Northampton, committed to the Tower ; that Wade, the
lieutenant of the Tower, was removed to make room for Elvis ;
that Weston was recommended as warder of the prisoner ; that
the countess, by the aid of Mrs. Turner, procured poisons from
SOMERSET AND HIS COUNTESS CONVICTED. 30I
tFranklin ; and that by Weston they were administered, with the
connivance of Elvis.
The earl of Somerset was put upon his trial on the day after his
countess had confessed her guilt. It is one of the disgraces of
Bacon that, in managing this trial, he had tampered with the due
course of justice, so as to preconcert with the king that Somerset
should be convicted, but, as he says under his own hand, " It shall
be my care so to moderate the manner of charging him, as it might
make him not odious beyond the extent of mercy."* Somerset
was convicted ; and was sentenced to die. In a few days his wife
received a free pardon, which was afterwards extended to himself.
He obtained a large pension ; and only lost his great offices. The
mysterious circumstances which led to such a flagrant defiance of
public opinion may be explained by a remarkable account given by
sir A. Weldon. His little book, "The Court and Character of
King James," was long held to be a libel upon the Stuart family ; but
in the words of the most temperate of historians, his statement with
regard to Somerset has " received the most entire confirmation by
some letters from More, lieutenant of the Tower, published in
Archaologia, vol. xviii." Somerset's trial was undoubtedly so
managed by Bacon "as to prevent him making any imprudent dis
closure, or the judges from getting any insight into that which it
was not meant to reveal." f The following is the narrative of
Weldon, of which he says, " this is the very relation from More's
own mouth " : —
" And now for the last act, enters Somerset himself on the stage,
who, being told, as the manner is, by the lieutenant, that he must
provide to go next day to his trial, did absolutely refuse it, and
said they should carry him in his bed ; that the king had assured
him he should not come to any trial, neither durst the king to bring
him to trial ; this was in a high strain, and in a language not well
understood by George More (lieutenant in Elwaies his room), that
made More quiver and shake, and however he was accounted a wise
man, yet was he near at his wits' end.
" Yet away goes More to Greenwich, as late as it was (being
twelve at night), bounceth at the back stairs, as if mad, to whom
came Jo. Leveston, one of the grooms, out of his bed, enquires the
reason of that distemper at so late a season ; More tells him he
must speak with the king ; Leveston replies, he is quiet (which in
* Amos, "Great Oyer," p. 459. t "Constitutional History," vol. i. p. 353> note.
302 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the Scottish dialect is fast asleep) ; More says, you must awake
him ; More was called in ; the chamber left to the king and More,
he tells the king those passages, and desired to be directed by the
king, for he was gone beyond his own reason to hear such bold and
undutiful expressions, from a faulty subject, against a just sover
eign. The king falls into a passion of tears, On my soul, More, I
wot not what to do ; thou art a wise man, help me in this great
strait, and thou shalt find thou dost it for a thankful master , with
other sad expressions. More leaves the king in that passion, but
assures him he will prove the utmost of his wit, to serve his majesty,
and was really rewarded with a suit worth to him ^1500 (although
Annandale, his great friend, did cheat him of one half), so was there
falsehood in friendship.
" Sir George More returns to Somerset about three next morn
ing, of that day he was to come to trial ; enters Somerset's chamber,
tells him he had been with the king, found him a most affectionate
master unto him, and full of grace in his intentions towards him,
but (said he) to satisfy justice, you must appear, although return
instantly again, without any further proceeding, only you shall
know your enemies and their malice, though they shall have no
power over you. With this trick of wit, he allayed his fury, and got
him quietly, about eight in the morning to the Hall, yet feared his
former bold language might revert again, and being brought by this
trick into the toil, might have more enraged him to fly out into
some strange discovery, that he had two servants placed on each
side of him, with a cloak on their arms, giving them a peremptory
order, if that Somerset did any way fly out on the king, they should
instantly hood-wink him with that cloak, take him violently from the
Bar, and carry him away ; for which, he would secure them from
any danger, and they should not want also a bountiful reward.
But the earl finding himself over-reached, recollected a better
temper, and went on calmly in his trial, where he held the company
until seven at night. But who had seen the king's restless motion
all that day, sending to every boat he see landing at the bridge,
cursing all that came without tidings, would have easily judged all
was not right, and there had been some grounds for his fears of
Somerset's boldness ; but at the last one bringing him word he
was condemned, and the passages, all was quiet." *
The mysteries which were involved in the death of Overbury,
whose murder can scarcely be attributed solely to the revenge of
* " The Court of King James, " 1650, p. 115. See Note, p. 306.
SIR EDWARD COKE DISMISSED. 303
lady Somerset ; the fearful secrets which Somerset might have re
vealed had he not been assured of the king's pardon, and of the
rewards which he afterwards received— are conjectured to be of a
nature that had better be buried with the " carrion " to which they
belong. That Somerset was guilty of being accessary to the mur
der of Overbury is very little to be doubted. That the murder
was for the concealment of some terrible secret can as little be
questioned. How far James was implicated in these dark affairs
may be better judged from a careful perusal of the great body of
evidence collected by Mr. Amos, than by any brief mention in this,
or any other historical abstract.
The conduct of sir Edward Coke upon these Somerset trials
was probably not such as won the favour of the king, especially if
an expression which he is said to have used during the proceedings
be authentically stated. It was: "God knows what became of
that sweet babe prince Henry, but I know somewhat." This has
been disputed ; but it appears in a sentence from a report of Ba
con to the king, that Coke was not so discreet as the courtiers
could have wished. "My lord Coke," he says, "hath filled this
part with many frivolous things." The chief justice was not so in-
clinea to sustain the prerogative as some of his brother judges.
At an earlier period of his career, he had given umbrage to the
king, in saying that " his highness was defended by his laws : "
James told him " he spake foolishly ;" that " he was not defended by
his laws, but by God ; " and Coke went upon his knees, and beg
ged pardon. In 1610, Coke had been consulted by the council,
whether the king, by his proclamations, might limit the increase
of buildings in London, and forbid the making of starch from
wheat. Parliament was then sitting, and the Commons were then
expected to remonstrate against this exercise of the prerogative.
The chief justice and three judges decided that the king by his
proclamations could not create any offence which was not one be
fore ; that the king, by his proclamations, may admonish his sub
jects that they keep the laws, and do not offend against them. The
same sound doctrine was held even in the reign of Mary, when the
judges laid down, that no proclamation can make a law, but only
confirm and ratify an ancient one.* In 161 5, Coke opposed his
legal knowledge to the preliminary proceedings in a detestable act
of tyranny. Edmund Peachum, a clergyman in Somersetshire, had
his study broken open ; and a manuscript sermon being there found,
.* Hallam, vol. i. p. 337.
304 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
in which there was strong censure of the extravagances of the
king and the oppressions of his officers, the preacher was put
to the rack, and interrogated ''before torture, in torture, between
torture, and after torture." He was suspected of treason ; but
this horrible severity could wring no confession from him. It was
doubted whether the sermon itself could be received as an overt
act of treason. Bacon was directed by the king to confer with the
judges of the King's Bench separately ; to which Coke objected,
as " not according to the custom of this realm." The other judges
were tampered with. Coke at length gave an opinion, which eva
ded the question, and did not confirm the king's arguments and
that of the other unscrupulous judges, that the sermon itself was
treasonable. The unhappy man was, however, tried and con
demned ; but he died in gaol. The chief justice again offended
by contending that the equitable jurisdiction of the Court of Chan
cery ought not to be exercised after a judgment obtained at law.
But his greatest offence was in demurring to the authority of a
letter which Bacon had written at the king's desire, to direct that
the Court of King's Bench should not proceed to judgment in a
case which concerned the validity of the grant of a benefice to a
bishop, in connexion with his bishopric. Coke said that such a
letter should be written to the judges of all the courts ; and that
being done, ne induced them to take the honourable course of cer
tifying to the king that they were bound by their oaths not to re
gard any such letters, which were contrary to law. The king went
into one of his usual fits of rage when his prerogative was ques
tioned, and called the twelve judges before him to answer for their
disobedience. They all tamely yielded, with the exception of
Coke. He was very shortly after first suspended from his office,
and then dismissed.
It is not difficult to imagine, whilst such scandalous revelations
and suspicions were rife as those of the Overbury case ; whilst
the majority of the judges were slavish ; whilst the Court of High
Commission was proceeding in its arbitrary course in matters of
religion — a Court which, according to an unheeded remonstrance
of the Commons, took upon itself to fine and imprison, and pass
sentences without appeal ; whilst the Star Chamber was trampling
upon every personal right, — that the nation was growing univer
sally disgusted with the government under which it lived. The
people had no constitutional organ to proclaim their grievances.
Parliaments had been laid aside. The great religious body
PROCLAMATION FOR SPORTS. 305
termed Puritans were offended, in 161 8, by a proclamation that all
lawful recreations, such as dancing, archery, leaping, May-games,
might be used on Sundays after divine service. They associated
this injuJicious measure — which had a tendencyHo make the dis
putes between the two parties in the Church more rancorous —
with the king's visit to Scotland to enforce episcopacy upon a re
luctant people. After that visit a better provision was made for
the parochial clergy, by the passing of an Act in the Scottish Par
liament, which compelled the impropriators of tithes to allow a
stipend to the resident minister. But the ecclesiastical policy of
James in Scotland was not successful; and in 1620 the preachers
were inveighing against episcopal rule, and that general discontent
was growing which, in a few years, broke out in bitter hostility. In
neither of the kingdoms could the people be deemed happy, or the
government paternal.
Vol. III.— 20
306 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
NOTE ON THE SECRET COMMUNICATIONS BE
TWEEN THE KING AND SIR GEORGE MORE.
The letters to which Mr. Hallam refers as giving the most entire confirmation to the
passage in Weldon's Memoirs, are in the handwriting cf king James ; and were pub
lished in 1835, the originals being then in the possession of James More Molyneux, Esq.,
of Losely. They had been carefully preserved in sir G- More's family ; and were en
closed in an envelope, on which was an inscription in handwriting of the early part of the
seventeenth century. It thus commences: " These four letters were all in King James
his own hand-writing, sent to Sir George More, Lieut, of the Tower (being put into that
place by his own appointment, without the privity of any 'man), concerning my Lord
Somerset, who being in the Tower and hearing that he should come to his arraignment,
began to speak big words touching on the King's reputation and honour. The King
therefore desired, as much as he could, to make him confess the poisoning of Sir Thomas
Overbury, and so not to come to his arraign, but to cast himself on his mercy. But
being a Courtier and beaten to these courses, would not ; fully imagining, that the King
durst not or would not bring him to his trial.
16 16. May gth.
" Good Sir George,
" As the only confidence I had in your honesty made me, without the knowledge
of any, put you in that place of trust, which you now possess, so must I now use your trust
and secrecy in a thing greatly concerning my honour and service. You know Somerset's
day of trial is at hand, and you know also what fair means I have used to move him by
confessing the truth, to honour God and me, and leave some place for my mercy to work
upon. I have now at last sent the bearer hereof, an honest Gentleman, and who once
followed him, with such directions unto him, as, if there be a sponke of grace left in him,
I hope they shall work a gond effect. My only desire is that you would make his con
voy unto him in such secrecy, as none living may know of it, and that, after his speaking
with him in private, he may be returned back again as secretly. So, reposing myself
upon your faithful and secret handling of this business, I bid you heartily farewell. "Jambs R."
1616. May izth.
" Good Sir George,
" Although I fear that the last message I sent to your unfortunate Prisoner shall
not take the effect that I wish it should, yet, I cannot leave off to use all means possible
to move him to do that which is both most honorable for me, and his own best. You shall
therefore give him assurance in my name, that if he will yet before his trial confess clearly
unto the Commissioners his guiltiness of this fact, I will not only perform what I prom
ised by my last Messenger, both towards him and his wife, but I will enlarge it, according
to the phrase of the civil 1- w, quod gratix sunt amplianda;. I mean not that he shall con
fess if he be innocent, know evil likely is, and of yourself you may dispute
NOTE ON THE TRIAL OF SOMERSET. 307
with him what should mean his confidence now to endure a trial, when as he remembers,
that this last winter he confessed to the Chief Justice that his cause was so evil likely, as
he knew no jury could acquit him, Assure him that I protest upon~my honor, my end in
this is for his and his wife's good ; you will do well, likewise, of yourself to cast out unto
him, that you fear his wife shall plead weakly for his innocency, and that you find the
Commissioners have, you know not how, some secret assurance that in the end she will
confess of him : but this must only be as from yourself ; and therefore you must not let
him know that I have written unto you, but only that I sent you private word to deliver
him this message. Let none living know of this, and if it take good effect, move him to
send in haste for the Commissioners to give them satisfaction, but if he remain obstinate,
I desire not that you should trouble me with an answer, for it is to no end, and no news
is better than evil news ; and so farewell, and God bless your labours. "James R."
Without date.
"Good Sir George,
" I am extremely sorry that your unfortunate prisoner turns all the great care I
have of him, not only against himself, but against me also, as far as he can. I cannot
blame you, that you cannot conjecture what this may be, for God knows it is only a trick
of his idle brain, hoping thereby to shift his trial ; but it is easy to be seen that he would
threaten me with laying an aspersion upon me of being in some sort accessory to his
crime. I can do no more (since God so abstracts his grace from him), than repeat the
substance of that letter which the Lord Hay sent you yesternight, which is this : if he
would write and send me any message concerning this poisoning it needs not be private ;
if it be of any other business, that which I cannot now with honour receive privately, I
may do it after his trial, and serve the turn as well ; for except either his trial or con
fession prcecede, I cannot hear a private message from him, without laying an aspersion
upon myself of being accessory to his crime, and I pray you to urge him by reason, that I
refuse him no favor which I can grant him, without taking upon me the suspicion of
being guilty of that crime whereof he is accused ; and so farewell. "James R."
Without date.
" Good Sir George.
" For answer to your strange news, I am first to tell you, that I expect the Lord
Hay and Sir Robert Carr have been with you before this time, which if they have not yet
been, do you send for them in haste, that they may first hear him, before you say any
thing unto him, and when that is done, if he shall still refuse to go, you must do your
office, except he be either apparently sick or distracted of his wits, in any of which cases,
you may acquaint the Chancellor with it, that he may adjourn the day till Monday next,
between and which time, if his sickness or madness be counterfeited, it will manifestly
appear. In the mean time, I doubt not but you have acquainted the Chancellor with this
strange fit of his, and if upon> these occasions you bring him a little later than the hour
appointed, the Chancellor may in the mean time protract the time best he may, whom
I pray you to acquaint likewise with this my answer, as well as with the accident. If he
have said any thing of moment to the Lord Hay, I expect to hear of it with all speed ; if
othe'rwars, let me not be troubled with it till the trial be past. Farewell. "James R."
308 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XVII.
Release of Raleigh.— Raleigh's expedition to Guiana.— Raleigh returns to England.— His
execution under his former sentence.— Affairs of the Palatinate.— The Elector de
feated at Prague — Parliament. — Monopolists. — Lord Bacon impeached. — Conduct of
Parliament in Floyd's case.— The King and the Parliament at issue. — Parliament
dissolved.— Prince Charles and Villiers in Spain.— The proposed marriage of Charles
with the Infanta broken off.— Rejoicings in England. — Parliament. — War declared
against Spain. — Death of King James.
Sir Walter Raleigh had been a prisoner in the Tower
somewhat more than twelve years. To a man of such activity of
mind even imprisonment would not be unhappiness. His wife
was permitted to dwell with him. He had access to the Lieuten
ant's garden ; and, says sir William Wade, one of the Lieutenants,
" he hath converted a little hen-house to a still-house, where he
doth spend his time all the day in distillations." Mrs. Hutchinson,
whose father, sir Allen Apsley, was also Lieutenant of the Tower,
gives a more intelligible account of these distillations, in relating
the virtues of her mother : " Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin
being prisoners in the Tower, and addicting themselves to chemis
try, she suffered them to make their rare experiments at her cost ;
partly to comfort and divert the poor prisoners, and partly to gain
the knowledge of their experiments, and the medicines to help
such jxior people as were not able to seek to physicians." * Ra
leigh was the inventor of a famous cordial which went by his name.
In an evil hour the tranquil studies and useful diversions of Raleigh
were exchanged for schemes which were to renew the energies of
his youth. The dream of a gold mine in Guiana never ceased to
haunt his imagination. Indians had interviews with him in the
Tower ; for he had kept up a correspondence, through his agents,
with the natives of the country which he had partially explored in
1 595. At length he obtained permission to employ the liberty which
was promised to be granted to him, through the mediation of Vil
liers, in again attempting to work the gold mine in whose existence
he firmly believed. He was released from his prison on the 20th of
March, 1616. He was now in the sixty-fifth year of his age. But
* " Memoirs of Col. Hutchinson,'' p. 22.
RALEIGH S EXPEDITION TO GUIANA. 309
he was one of those who bated no jot of heart or hope, and he sent
an expression of his gratitude to Villiers in a letter which smacks
of the old enthusiasm : " You have, by your mediation, put me
again into the world. I can but acknowledge it ; for to pay any
part of your favour by any service of mine, as yet, is not in my
power. If it succeed well, a good part of the honour shall be
yours ; and if I do not also make it jsrofitable unto you, I shall
show myself exceeding ungrateful " Raleigh risked in this scheme
all he possessed in the world. When lady Raleigh went on her
knees to James, to beg that her family might not be robbed of the
estate at Sherborne, which had been secured to them before her
husband's attainder, he exclaimed, " I maun have the land — I maun
have it for Carr." Eight thousand pounds were afterwards ob
tained as the " competent satisfaction " for an estate worth five
thousand pounds a year. This sum, with the produce of a small
estate which his wife sold, was all invested in the Guiana project.
James stipulated for a share of the profits of the enterprise. But
the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who had at that time obtained
great influence over the king, at first remonstrated, and declared
that the expedition was for piratical purposes. Raleigh maintained
that his sole object was to settle a country which belonged to Eng
land by right of discovery, and to work its gold mines; and Gon
domar affected to be satisfied. Raleigh got together a squadron
of fourteen vessels, and he set sail on the 28th of March, 161 7,
having received a commission by which he was constituted general
and commander of the expedition-, and governor of the country.
It was imprudent in Raleigh to have gone upon a doubtful adven
ture without having received a previous pardon, which was to be
obtained for money. But it is said that Bacon, who, in 1617, had
accomplished the prime object of his ambition, the custody of the
great seal, said to Raleigh, " The knee-timber of your voyage is
money. Spare your purse in this particular ; for upon my life you
have a sufficient pardon for all that is past already, the king hav
ing under his broad seal made you admiral of your fleet, and given
you power of the martial law over your officers and soldiers." The
outward voyage was unpropitious. There was sickness in the
ships, of which many of the voyagers died. They landed in Gui
ana on the 12th of November; and on the 14th Raleigh wrote in a
hopeful spirit to his wife : " To tell you that I might be king of
the Indians were a vanity. But my name hath still lived among
them here. They feed me with fresh meat and all that the coun-
310 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
try yields. All offer to obey me." In a short time he began to
have glimpses of the treacherous nature of the sovereign in whose
name he had gone forth to " make new nations.'' James had ob
tained from him the most minute details of his plans ; and the king
had conimunicated them to Gondomar, who had sent them to his
court at Madrid. The king's commander had been promised a
free passage through the country. He found it fortified against
him. He was himself weak from sickness, and was obliged to be
carried in a litter. He sent his faithful follower, Captain Keytnis,
to sail up the Orinoco with a part of the squadron in the direction
of the mine. The instructions which Raleigh had given were not
obeyed. If Keymis found the mine of great richness — royal, as
the term was — he was to repel any attack of the Spaniards. But
if not royal, he was to return with a basket or two of the ore, to
satisfy James that there was a foundation of reality in the attempt
to find gold. Keymis landed in the night near the Spanish town
of Santa Thome, near the mine. The Spaniards attacked his en
campment ; and a battle ensued. After much slaughter, the Eng
lish drove back their assailants to the town ; and the Spaniards
coming out in fresh force, the son of Raleigh was killed. The
governor of the town, a kinsman of Gondomar, also fell. The
English burnt Santa Thome, in which they found refining houses.
and two ingots of gold. But the passes to the mine were defended
by too strong a force to enable Keymis to accomplish the great
object of the expedition. When he returned with his diminished
crew, the reproaches of his commander led the unfortunate man to
commit suicide. The great spirit of Raleigh was crushed. He
saw nothing before him but reproach and danger. In a letter to
his wife he says, " I protest before the majesty of God, that as sir
Francis Drake and sir John Hawkins died heartbroken when they
failed of their enterprise, I could willingly do the like, did I not
contend against sorrow for your sake, in hope to provide somewhat
for you to comfort and relieve you. If I live to return, resolve
yourself that it is the care for you that hath strengthened my heart.
It is true that Keymis might have gone directly to the mine, and
meant it. But after my son's death, he made them believe that he
knew not the way, and excused himself upon the want of water in
the river; and counterfeiting many impediments left it unfound.
When he came back, I told him that he had undone me, and that
my credit was lost forever. He answered that when my son was
lost, and that he left me so weak that he thought not to find me
RALEIGH RETURNS TO ENGLAND.
3"
alive, he had no reason to enrich a company of rascals, who, after
my son's death, made no account of him." Raleigh conducted his
fleet, with mutinous crews, to Newfoundland, and then sailed
homeward. On the 1 8th of March, after his return, Howell wrote,
" The world wonders extremely that so great a wise man as sir
Walter Raleigh would return, to cast himself upon so inevitable a
rock as I fear he will." * Two friends, the earls of Pembroke and
Arundel, had jiledged their honour for his return, and he would not
be a cause of trouble to them. This Arundel acknowledged when
Raleigh, on the scaffold, reminded him of the promise that he had
made to the earl that he would return. Gondomar was now su
preme at the English court, negotiating a marriage between prince
Charles and the Infanta of Spain. The destiny of Raleigh was in
the hands of the malignant Spaniard and the revengeful king.
Raleigh was arrested at Plymouth ; and after some stratagems to
escape to France, and to obtain delay, having feigned madness, he
was conducted to his old prison of the Tower. He was examined
before commissioners, upon the charge that he fraudulently pre
tended that he went to discover a mine, when his real object was
to make a piratical attack upon the Spanish settlements. He de
nied these charges with constancy and boldness ; but admitted his
attempt to escape, and his pretence of mental derangement, which
he excused by the desire which every man feels to escape death.
In his imprisonment he was no longer under the care of the kind
sir Allen Apsley. That lieutenant of the Tower was removed
from the charge of Raleigh, to make way for sir Thomas Wilson,
who wrote constant reports of his conversations with his prisoner.
These are in the State Paper Office. " On the perusal of these
papers, it is difficult to say whether the preponderating feeling is
sympathy for the captive, or disgust and indignation for his unfeel
ing and treacherous keeper." f It was the king himself who was
urging on his creature to worm himself into the confidence of Ra
leigh for the purpose of betraying him. But all the arts of the be
trayer were unavailing. Nothing could be obtained which could
furnish a new ground of accusation. The letters which passed
between Raleigh and his wife were intercepted, and were read by
the king. It was determined at length that the prisoner should be
executed under his former sentence, by a writ of privy seal direct
ed to the judges. But they held that their warrant for execution
could not be issued, after so long a time had elapsed since the
* " Letters,'-' p. 8. t Jardine, " Criminal Trials," vol. i.
312 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
judgment, without bringing up the prisoner to plead. Raleigh,
suffering under an ague, was brought on the 24th and again on the
28th of October to the King's Bench at Westminster, and there
being asked why execution should not pass against him, he urged
that he was discharged of the original judgment by the king's com
mission for his voyage, which gave him new life and vigour. Exe
cution was granted. Raleigh asked for a little delay, to settle his
affairs and his mind. He was brought out of his prison the next
morning to die upon the scaffold, in the Old Palace Yard at West
minster. The night before his death, he wrote these lines on a
blank leaf of his Bible : —
" E'en such is time ; who takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust ;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wander* d all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
The Lord will raise me up, I trust.' '
The last end of this heroic man was worthy of his great genius.
He received the Sacrament; he declared his forgiveness of all
persons ; he manifested the utmost cheerfulness ; he gave thanks
to the Almighty who had imparted to him the strength of mind
never to fear death, and to meet it with courage in the assurance
of His love. He breakfasted, and smoked his usual pipe of tobac
co. When he came to the scaffold he was very faint ; and com
menced his speech tc the assembled crowd, by saying that during
the last two days he had' been visited by two ague fits. "If there
fore you perceive any weakness in me, I beseech you ascribe it to
my sickness rather than to myself." His speech was of a manly
tone, defending himself from slanders which had been raised
against him. He implored the bystanders to join with him in
prayer to that great God whom he had grievously offended ; "be
ing a man full of all vanity, and one v. ho hath lived a sinful life in
such callings as have been most inducing to it ; for I have been a
soldier, a sailor, and a courtier, all of them courses of wickedness
and vice." He was asked by the dean of Westminster in what re
ligion he meant to die, and he replied, in the faith professed by the
Church of England, hoping to be saved by the blood and merits of
our Saviour. It was a bitter morning; and the sheriff proposed
that he should descend from the scaffold and warm himself : " No,
good Mr. Sheriff, let us despatch, for within this quarter of an
AFFAIRS OF THE PALATINATE. 3 13
hour my ague will come upon me, and if I be not dead before that,
my enemies will say I quake for fear." He took the axe in his
Band, kissed the blade, and said to the sheriff, " 'Tis a sharp med
icine, but a sound cure for all diseases." So died the last of Eliz
abeth's heroes.
The execution of Raleigh called forth indignation, " not loud
but deep," in the English mind. The people felt that he was sacri
ficed to Spain, against which power, its Jesuits and its inquisitions,
he had waged no inglorious warfare. He was sacrificed by a king
from whom the bold Protestant spirit was departed, and who
remained sujiine whilst the two great principles which divided
Europe were again preparing for a struggle. Thus thought the
majority of the natior, at a time of extraordinary excitement in con
nection with foreign events. The daughter of James had been
married six years to the Elector Palatine. He was a prince of a
serious character ; by nature proud and reserved ; earnest in the
discharge of his duties as a ruler; not devoid of ambition to
become a leader for a great public object. The Calvinists of
Bohemia had been in insurrection upon a question of the posses
sion of some lands of the church which were held by Catholics ;
and the quarrel was under arbitration at the instance of the em
peror Mathias when he died. Mathias was also king of Bohemia;
and the archduke Ferdinand was chosen emperor. He had been
recognized as successor to the throne of Bohemia ; but he was a
determined zealot of Catholicism ; and the Bohemians, who held
that their crown was elective, offered it to Frederic, who had been
one of the arbitrators to settle the difference which had led to their
insurrection. The Elector Palatine, after some hesitation, accepted
vthe dangerous promotion, and was crowned at Prague, in Novem
ber, 1 619. The resolve was the signal for a general array of hos-.
tile forces throughout Europe. The great battle of Protestantism
and Catholicism appeared once more likely to be fought out. Had
Elizabeth been alive she would have thrown all her force into the
conflict. James at first refused to give any assistance to his son-
in-law. The Protestants of England were roused to an enthusiasm
which had been repressed for years. They saw the armies of
Austria and Spain gathering to snatch the crown from the elective
king of Bohemia, and to invade the Palatinate. They saw many
of the Protestant princes forming an union for his defence. Volun
teers were ready to go forth from England full of zeal for the
support of the Elector. James was professing an ardent desire tc
314 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Protestant deputies to assist his son-in-law ; and at the same time'
vowing to the Spanish ambassador that the alliance with his
Catholic master, which was to be cemented by the marriage of
prince Charles to the Infanta, was the great desire of his heart.
At length the Catholic powers entered the Palatinate ; and the cry
to arm was so loud amongst the English and the Scotch, that
James reluctantly marshalled a force of four thousand volunteers,
not to support his son-in-law upon the throne of Bohemia, but to
assist in defending his hereditary dominions. The scanty assist
ance came too late. Frederic was defeated by the Austrians at
Prague, on the 7th of November, 1620, which decisive battle en
tirely destroyed his slight tenure of power in Bohemia. He was
very shortly after driven from the Palatinate, which was handed
over to the tender mercies of the conquerors. The supporters of
the Elector, in Bohemia, a country which had been the refuge of
persecuted reformers, were trodden down by the iron heel of Aus
tria. The Puritan party in England considered this misfortune as
" the greatest blow which the Church of God had received, since
the first Reformation by Martin Luther in 1517."* The union of
the Protestant princes was broken up. " The Catholic principle
passed with wonderful rapidity from a moment of the utmost danger
to an omnipotent sway over the south of Germany and the Austrian
provinces." f
It was during the excitement of this conflict, and in the month
following the victory of the Austrians at Prague, that James adopted
one of those arbitrary measures which weak governments resort to
in their imbecile desire to control public opinion. On the 27th
of December, says D'Ewes, " I saw and perused a proclamation
set out by his majesty inhibiting or forbidding any of his sub
jects to discourse of state-matters, either foreign or domestic ;
which all men conceived to have been procured by the count
of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador." The Autobiographer
holds this proclamation to be "unseasonable and harsh," be
cause the triumphs of Romanism •¦ required men's mutual con
doling, which might prove a means to stir them up to a more zealous
and earnest intercession with God by prayer." This was an inno
cent delusion of the young Puritan ; for that Englishmen should
cease to interchange their thoughts at the bidding of an insolent
government was as impossible as to prevent them thinking. Their
* D'Ewes, " Autobiography,** vol. i. p. 162.
t R.i nkc, " History of the Popes," vol. ii. p. 465.
PARLIAMENT. 315
thoughts broke out in! signs not to be mistaken. The Spanish
ambassador, who dwelt in the bishop of Ely's house in Holborn,
was obliged to have a guard of soldiers to protect him ; and " when
he passed at any time through London in his horse-litter, many
were the curses and execrations the people bestowed upon him."
The old dread of the supremacy of Popery was coming back.
Round the Spanish ambassadors a vast following of English and
Irish papists had been accustomed to collect. " Their house was
the resort of their brethren in the faith, and, as a Venetian said,
they were regarded almost in the light of legates of the apostolic
see."* It was in this excited temper of the nation that the king
at length called a parliament, which met on the 30th of January, 1621.
In his progress from Whitehall to Westminster, "he spake often
and lovingly to the' people, standing thick and three-fold on all sides
to behold him, ' God bless ye ! God bless ye ! ' contrary to his former
hasty and passionate custom, which often in his sudden distemper
would bid a plague on such as flocked to see him." f A little before
this time he had in a proclamation directed that those.who crowded
upon him in joining the royal hunt without permission, should be sent
to gaol, calling their curiosity " the bold and barbarous insolency of
multitudes of vulgar people." J He is bow in a gracious, humour. He
has something to ask ofthe Parliament : '•' I have reigned eighteen
years, iii which time you have had peace, and I have received far
less supply than hath been given to any king since the Conquest.
The last queen, of famous memory, had, one year with another,
above a hundred thousand jjounds per annum in subsidies." James
does not attempt a comparison between the manner in which the
queen of famous memory spent her subsidies in the defence of her
country, and in the support of Protestantism in Europe ; while he
was lavishing thousands upon Hay and Somerset and Villiers,
impoverishing the crown and degrading the nation. Clarendon,
speaking of the reigning favourite of 1621, and his host of depend
ants, says that the demesnes and revenues of the crown were
sacrificed to the enriching of a private family ; " and the expenses
of the court so vast and unlimited, that they had a sad prosjject of
that poverty and necessity which afterwards befell the crown,
almost to the ruin of it." §
The parliament of 1621 was in no complacent mood. James
said to them, " 1 have often piped unto you but you have not
* Ranke, " History of the Popes," vol. ii p. 498. t D'Ewes, vol. i. p. 170.
X " Verney Papers," p. 117. § " History of the Rebellion," book i.
316 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
danced." They gave him a small subsidy in return for unusually
gracious speeches ; and then went boldly about the redress of
grievances. They revived the use of the terrible word "impeach
ment," which had gone out of men's mouths for nearly two centu
ries. Monopolists were the first attacked with this constitutional
weapon. One of the greatest of them, sir Giles Mompesson, find
ing that the government which had granted him his patents for gold
and silver thread, and for licensing inns and alehouses, would not
stand up in his defence, fled beyond sea. In his licensing of ale
houses, a justice ofthe peace, sir Francis Michell, had been the instru
ment of Mompesson's oppressions. His patent for gold thread was
used for the purposes of fraud. " They found out a new alchy-
mistical way to make gold and silver lace with copper and other
sophistical materials." * The dramatists of the time brought the
monopolists into notice upon the public stage :
" Here's another :
Observe but what a cozening look he has !
Hold up thy head, man; if, for drawing gallants
Into mortgages for commodities, or cheating heirs
With your new counterfeit gold thread, and gumm'd velvets,
He does not transcend all that went before him,
Call in his patent." f
The sir Giles Overreach of Massinger's " New Way to Pay Old
Debts " was sir'Giles Mompesson, and the justice Greedy of the
same popular play was justice Michell. The real Overreach and
the real Greedy were degraded from knighthood, were fined, and
were banished. Higher delinquents began to tremble. Yelverton,
the attorney-general, was connected with the prevailing corruption,
and when detected denounced Villiers as his enemy. The judge
of the Prerogative Court was impeached for venality ; and the
bishop of Landaff for being accessory to a matter of bribery. It
was an age of universal abuses. Local magistrates were influ
enced by the pettiest gifts, and were called "basket-justices," — a
name which in the next century was applied to the stipendiary
justices of Bow-street. Upon the highest branch of this rotten
tree sat Francis Bacon, viscount St. Alban's, the great lord Chan
cellor. His contemporaries were impressed with his versatile
abilities and his majestic eloquence ; but they were disgusted hy
his profusion, and they had little confidence in his honesty. The
greatness of his intellect was to be appreciated in other ages ; and
•Wilson. t Massinger, ''The Bondman," Act IL, sc. 3.
LORD BACON IMPEACHED. 317
his faults were then to be slightly regarded while the eyes of all
men were to be dazzled by the splendour of his genius. His con
temporaries, with one accord, resolved that no excuse should in
terfere with his degradation, for what he himself called his frailty
in partaking of "the abuses of the times." He was charged by the
Commons, before the Lords, with twenty-two acts of bribery and
corruption. He attempted no defence. He saw that the court
would not shield him, even if it had the power. He made a dis
tinct confession in writing of the charges brought against him ; and
when a deputation from the peers asked if that confession was his
own voluntary act, he replied, " It is my act, my hand, my heart.
Oh, my lords, spare a broken reed." The sentence of the parlia
ment was that the viscount St. Alban's, late Lord Chancellor, be
fined ,£40,000; be imprisoned in the Tower during the king's
pleasure ; made incapable to bear office in the commonwealth,
never to sit in parliament ; nor to come within the verge of the
court. The king remitted the fine, and released the fallen man
after an imprisonment of a few days. It is vain to attribute Bacon's
fall to the malevolence of Coke or the intrigues of Villiers. The
House of Commons saw that the time had come for striking at the
root of some of the most flagrant of official corruptions ; and Bacon,
though perhaps not more guilty than many others, was struck
down as a signal example to lesser offenders. The latest editor
of Bacon's Philosophical Works, pointing out that the Chancellor
admitted the taking of presents, as he himself had taken them, to
be indefensible, adds that he always denied he had been an unjust
judge ; or, to use his own words, " had ever had bribe or reward
in his eve or thought when he pronounced any sentence or order."
With regard tp the degree of moral criminality, these questions
are proposed : " 1. What was the understanding, open or secret,
upon which the present was given or taken ? 2. To what extent
the practice was prevalent at the time ? 3. How far it was toler
ated ? 4. How it stood with regard to other abuses prevailing at
the same time." * If these points could be satisfactorily ascertain
ed the most merciful conclusion at which we could arrive would be
the opinion of Bacon himself, as recorded by Dr. Rawley : " I was
the justest judge that was in England these fifty years ; but it was
the justest censure in parliament that was there these two hundred
years." * " Works of Francis Bacon," collected and edited by James Spedding, vol. i. Note
to Life by Rawley. 1S57.
318 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
If the stern severity of the House of Commons, in which the
peers went along with them, towards every order of delinquents,
from the griping usurer to the prodigal chancellor, demands our
respect, we must regard with equal abhorrence the same popular
assembly when carried away by a passionate fanaticism into an act
of vindictive cruelty. The House was in a fever about the Palati
nate ; and when it became known that a Roman Catholic barrister,
Edward Floyd,, had expressed his joy that "goodman Palsgrave
and goodwife Palsgrave " had been driven from Prague, there was
no punishment too terrible to be inflicted upon the delinquent—
whipping, the pillory, boring of his tongue, nailing of his ears, were
small justice for such an offence. The House went beyond its
powers in passing a heavy sentence upon Floyd, without hearing
him. He appealed to the king, denying the accusation against
him ; and the Commons were asked by the Council how they took
upon them to judge offences which did not interfere with their
privileges. The House paused; and Floyd was arraigned before
the Lords, who confirmed the sentence, with additional severities.
Whipping, which was a part of this sentence, was remitted on the
motion of prince Charles. The unhappy man underwent the other
unjust punishment, — to pay a fine of 5000/., and to be imprisoned
for life. " There is surely no instance," says Mr. Hallam, " in the
annals of our own, and hardly of any civilised country, where a
trifling offence, if it were one, has been visited with such outrage
ous cruelty." Let us not forget, as we proceed in tracing the his
tory of this nation, that the passions of a parliament have been as
marked, if not as frequent, a source of injustice as the despotic
tendencies of a king ; and let us feel that a due balance of the
powers of the respective estates cannot be so happily preserved
that prerogative and privilege may be kept equally innoxious,
except under the guidance of an enlightened public opinion.
The king and the parliament had been proceeding in apparent
harmony, when they were adjourned over the summer. The court
had manifested no zeal about the question of the Palatinate ; but
the Commons made a solemn protestation, which was entered in
the Journals, that they would spend their lives and fortunes in the
defence of their religion, and of the cause of the Elector. Their
pledge " was sounded forth with the voices of them all, withal lifting
up their hats in their hands as high as they could hold them, as a
visible testimony of their unanimous consent, in such sort that the
like had scarce ever been seen in parliament." The Houses met
THE KING AND THE PARLIAMENT AT ISSUE. 319
again, after an interval of five months, on the 20th of November.
It was announced that troops had been sent for .the defence of
the Palatinate under sir Horace Vere. The Commons voted a
small subsidy, which was totally inadequate to any vigorous exer
tions. The clamour for warlike operations was not seconded by
any liberality which could rouse James to exertion. The Parlia
ment had no confidence in a king who shuddered at a drawn sword.
His natural temperament and his policy were in complete accord ;
and it was perhaps well for the country that they were so. Had
his son Henry been on the throne, who proposed the Black Prince
and Henry the Fifth as his models, England might have put her
self at the head of a great religious war ; but she would have wasted
that strength which enabled her, in another quarter of a century,
to wage a greater battle at home for civil and religious liberty,
without losing her power of commanding the respect of every gov
ernment in Europe.
England had in this year an opportunity to draw the sword in a
necessary quarrel — the suppression of the outrages of the Barbary
pirates. Spain had agreed to co-operate in an attack upon Algiers ;
but she sent a very insufficient force to join the English flag.
James went about this salutary work in his timid and parsimonious
way. He directed the commander of his fleet, sir James Mansell
not to risk his ships. The Algerines, having had only a few boats
burnt, defended their harbour, and Mansell came home with noth
ing achieved. The English merchantmen were now the prey of
the African pirates, and the country bitterly complained of the
national losses and the national dishonour. When the parliament
re-assembled, it was in no conciliating humour. Lords Essex and
Oxford had returned from the Palatinate, and proclaimed that the
country of the Elector and the Protestant cause were lost for want
of timely aid. As we have seen, the two Houses were afraid to
trust the expenditure of money in uncapable hands. They could
not understand how James was affecting a desire to contend against
the power of Spain and Austria, when he was negotiating, in secret
as he believed, for the marriage of his son to the daughter of the Most
Catholic king. During the recess, a leading member of the Com
mons, sir Edwin Sandys, had been committed to the Tower ; but
it was protested that the commitment was unconnected with the
privileges of the House. His bold manner of speaking in par
liament was undoubtedly his offence. The Commons passed over
this matter ; but they drew up a petition, prepared by Coke, against
320 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the growth of Popery, urging that prince Charles should marry one
of his own religion, and that the king should turn his attention to
wards that power which had first carried on the war in the Palatinate.
That power was Spain. James had heard of this motion ; and he
anticipated the receipt of the petition by sending a violent letter to
the Speaker, commanding the House not to meddle with any matter
which concerned his government, or the mysteries of state. He
informed them also that he meant not to spare any man's insolent,
behaviour in parliament. The Commons returned a temperate an
swer, in which the king was told that their liberty of speech was their
ancient and undoubted right. James replied that their privileges
were derived from the grace and permission of his ancestors and
himself. Some excuses were made for the expressions of the king,
which were called a slip of the pen. The Commons deliberately re
corded their opinions, in a memorable protestation, on the 18th of
December, 1621, in which they solemnly affirmed, that the liberties"
and jurisdictions of parliament are the ancient and undoubted birth
right and inheritance of the subjects of England ; that the affairs
of the king and the state, of the defence of the realm, and of the
Church of England, the making of laws, the redress of grievances
are proper subjects of debate in parliament; that in handling such
business every member of the House hath, and of right ought to
have, freedom of speech ; and that every member hath like free
dom from all impeachment, imprisonment, and molestation, except
by the censure of the House itself. There were great men con
cerned in this protestation, — Coke, Pvm, Selden. Eminent peers,
for almost the first time in the history of the country, took part
with the Commons against the Crown. The king dissolved the
parliament, and imprisoned the earl of Oxford, and the leading
members of the Commons. The struggle which was to be fought
out in the battle-field, twenty years afterwards, was already com
menced in a most unmistakable manner. It was a contest for first
principles. England was to be a Constitutional Monarchy or a
Despotism. The parliament being dissolved, James again resorted
to a Benevolence — a voluntary contribution of the people, as the
courtiers pretended. Its voluntary character may be understood
from a little incident : " A merchant of London, who had been a
cheesemonger, but now rich, was sent for by the Council, and re
quired to give the king 200/., or to go into the Palatinate and serve
the army with cheese, being a man of eighty years of age." *
* " Letter of Mr. Mead," February, 1622. Ellis, Second Series, vol. iii. p. 240
PRINCE CHARLES AND VILLIERS IN SPAIN. 32 1
The king, who publicly declared that "he would govern accord
ing to tire good of the commonweal but not according to the com
mon-will," * went on with his Spanish negotiation in utter defiance
of the public feeling. His son-in-law was now a refugee at the
Hague, with his queen, — a favourite of the English, — and their fam
ily. Their misfortunes, as well as the defeat of the principle which
they represented, excited the warmest sympathy. In no point of
policy was there any concord between the government and the
people. In February, 1623, London was startled with the extraor
dinary news that the prince of Wales and Villiers, now marquis
of Buckingham, had gone off privately for Madrid. The negotia
tion for the marriage with the Spanish princes^ had been nearly
concluded by the earl of Bristol, a special ambassador to the court
of the young king Philip IV., the brother of the Infanta. A dis
pensation from the pope was only waited for ; and James had him
self written to his Holiness to urge the favour. He promised all
sorts of toleration ; and to give an earnest of his disposition, sud
denly released from prison a large number of Popish recusants, to
the great anger of the Puritans. The motives for the strange pro
ceeding of the prince and the favourite remain a mystery. Claren
don holds that Villiers originated the scheme to gain favour with
the prince, who had been long jealous of him. The king was at
first greatly opposed to the adventure, which was not without its,
danger. Smith seems to be a favourite name for disguised princes.
Charles was John Smith, and the marquis Thomas Smith. They
were accompanied by Sir Richard Graham. They got to Dover,
after some awkward enquiries, and there were joined by sir Francis
Cottington and Mr. Endymion Porter. The)" reached Paris, and
in their disguise had a peep at the Court, and saw the princess
Henrietta Maria, the lady whose good or evil destiny to be the
future queen of England overruled that of the Spanish princess.
On the 7th of March the " sweet boys and dear ventrous knights,
worthy to be put in a new romanso," as James termed them, ar
rived at Madrid. Howell, one of the most amusing of letter-writers,
was then in the Spanish capital, and he describes how, " to the
wonderment of all the world, the prince and the marquis of Buck
ingham arrived at this court." He tells how they alighted at my
lord of Bristol's house; how Mr. Thomas Smith came in at first
with a portmantle, whilst Mr. John Smith staid on the other side of
the street in the dark ; how Bristol brought in the prince to his
* " Letter of Mr. Mead," February, 1622. Ellis, Second Series, vol.~iii. p. 240.
Vol. Ill — 21
*22 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
bed-chamber ; how the marquis the next day had a private audience
of the king of Spain ; how the king came to visit the prince ; how
the royal family went out in a coach, the. Infanta having a blue
ribbon about her arm that the prince might distinguish her as he
took the air on the Prado ; and how when the lady saw her lover
her colour rose very high. The prince and his companion were
seven months absent from England. To attempt to follow out the
course of the intrigues that took place during this period, would be
far beyond our limits ; nor do we conceive that, however amusing
may be the relation of court festivities, the bull-fights and the
tournaments, the processions and the banquets, with which the heir
of England's throne was received, they are necessary to be here
detailed. That Charles was conducting himself with that duplicity
which belonged to his nature is agreed on all hands. He was ready
to promise, not only toleration for the Roman Catholics in England,
but that he would never engage in any hostile measure against the
Church of Rome ; but on the contrary would endeavour to bring
about an unity in one faith and one church.*" In August James
made oath to certain articles which had been agreed upon : that
the Infanta, with her suite, was to be allowed the exercise of
her religion ; that the early education of her children should be en
trusted to her ; that even if they should remain Catholic their right
of succession should not be interfered with. The king also prom
ised not to trouble the Catholics in the private exercise of their
religion ; nor to impose any oath against their faith ; and to endeav
our to obtain from parliament a repeal of all penal laws against
them. If the marriage had taken place, and these conditions had
been observed, England would infallibly have been plunged into
civil war. As it was, after a long course of deceit either to the
court of Spain or to the people of England, or to both, Charles
and Buckingham returned home. The ministers of Spain had in
terposed many vexatious delays whilst Charles was at Madrid, and
had attempted to take advantage of his presence. He made en
gagements which he would not have ventured to fulfil ; and he sanc
tioned misrepresentations for his vindication when he returned to
England. Buckingham was jealous of the earl of Bristol; and he
conceived a dislike to the Spanish court, to which his insolent
manners and gross licentiousness were displeasing. His personal
resentments, and perhaps the tastes of the prince, destroyed the
web of policy which James had been so long weaving. The king
* See Ranke, vol. ii. p. 500.
PARLIAMENT. — WAR. 323
had been, quite willing to surrender all the outworks which defended
England against a new invasion of papal supremacy, in his desire
for a marriage which would give his son a princess with a great
dowry, and secure, as he fondly expected, the restoration of his
son-in-law to his hereditary dominions. The people would have
made no compromise with Spain and they would have boldly
sought to settle the affairs of the Palatinate by the sole argument
which the Catholic powers would have regarded, success in arms.
When the prince and Buckingham returned home, and the marriage
treaty was broken off, there was universal rejoicing. The duke be
came immediately popular ; and in his confidence in the altered tone
of public feeling he persuaded the king to summon a parliament. It
met on the 19th of February, 1624. The houses confided in Buck
ingham's artful representations of his conduct in the transactions
with Spain ; and he was hailed by Coke, in the Commons, as the
saviour of his country. The king was all graciousness. It was re
solved that a grant to the extent of ,£300,000 should be made, for
the specific purpose of recovering the Palatinate ; and the war
was thus necessarily a war against Spain, united as she was with
the other branch of the house of Austria in holding the dominions
of the Elector and in endeavouring to destroy Protestantism in
Europe. In this Session of three months a great good was sought
to be accomplished by the passing of a Statute which declared all
monopolies to be contrary to law, and all such grants to be void.*
The struggle to effect this object had been a long one. The prom
ises of the Crown had been constantly broken ; but now, by a
solemn Act of Parliament, the exclusive privileges to use any trade
and to sell any merchandise were declared to be contrary to the
ancient and fundamental laws of the realm, and all grants and dis
pensations for such monopolies to be of none effect. How the
Statute was respected will be seen in the next reign.
In this last parliament of James, there was unquestionably a better
understanding between the Crown and the representatives of the
people : — a practical concord that, under a new king, might have
been improved into a co-operation for the general good, if the altered
condition of society had been understood by both rjarties. The
Commons had now acquired a full confidence in their own strength.
They impeached Cranfield earl of Middlesex, lord treasurer of
England, for bribery and other misdemeanours. He was convicted,
after a trial before the Peers, conducted by managers on the part
* 21 Jac. I. c. 3.
324 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the Commons ; was fined ,£50,000 ; and was decjared incapable
of sitting in jjarliament. Buckingham's jealousy of the lord trea
surer's power is held to have contributed to this result. The king
warned his son and his favourite that they might live to have their
fill of parliamentary impeachments ; but he could not resist, the
united force of public justice and private intrigue. From the time
of the failure of the Spanish treaty, the monarch who claimed to be
absolute felt that he was powerless. He had lost even the respect
of his son ; his insolent minion despised him. He was forced into
war against his will ; and the war brought him no honour, whilst it
absorbed his revenues. An army of twelve thousand men was
raised in England for the service of the Elector Palatine. Half
the number were lost from sickness by being embarked in foul
and crowded ships ; and their commander, Count Mansfeldt, was
not strong enough to undertake any offensive operations. England
was not in any very glorious attitude. The people became discon
tented ; and their discontents were not lightened when another ne
gotiation was set on foot for the marriage of prince Charles with
a princess of France, in which country Catholicism was again be
coming intolerant and persecuting.
In March, 1625, king James was taken ill at Theobalds. He
died on the 27th of that month, in the fifty-ninth year of his age.
and in the twenty-third year of his reign.
ACCESSION OF CHARLES I: 325
CHAPTER XVIII.
Accession of Charles I.— Marriage of the king with Henrietta Maria.— The first Parlia
ment of Charles. — Grievances. — Nival failures.— The second Parliament. — Contests
of Peers and Commons with the Crown.— Subsidies illegally levied.— Imprisonments
for refusals to pay.— The Queen^s foreign attendants dismissed.— War with France. —
Its causes.— La Rochelle.— Expedition to the Isle of Rhe\— The third Parliament.—
Petition of Right. — Buckingham denounced in the Commons' House.— Prorogation
of Parliament. — Siege of La Rochelle. — Buckingham and Richelieu.— Assassination
of Buckingham.— Felton, the assassin.— Surrender of La Rochelle.— Parliament.—
Religious differences. — Parliament dissolved in anger. — Members imprisoned.— Peace
with Spain and France.
Charles I. was proclaimed king on the day of his father's
death. The possessor of the crown was changed. The administra
tion of government was unaltered. Buckingham was still the first
in power ; with equal influence over the proud and dignified Charles
of twenty-five, as <over the vain and vulgar James of fifty-nine. We
are told that " the face of the Court was much changed in the change
of the king; " that the grossnesses of the court of James grew out
of fashion.* The general change could have been little more than
a forced homage to decency, whilst Buckingham was the presiding
genius of the court of Charles ; but from the first the king exhibited
himself as " temperate, Chaste, and serious." f A letter, written
within a few weeks of his accession, says, " Our sovereign, whom
God preserve, is zealous for God's truth ; diligently frequents and
attentively hearkens to prayers and sermons ; will pay all his
father's, mother's, and brother's debts, and that by disparking most
of his remote parks and chases ; will reform the court as of unne
cessary charges, so of recusant papists." J The personal demean
our of the king compelled a corresjDonding outward show in the
courtiers. At the beginning of this reign the people must have
had a reasonable expectation of being religiously and quietly gov
erned. The marriage of Charles with the princess Henrietta Maria of
France was the result of the treaty made in the previous reign;
* Mrs. Hutchinson. t Ibid.
X Letter of Mr. Mead. Ellis, First Series, Vol. iii. p. 187.
326 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and it was concluded by proxy even before James was laid in the
tomb at Westminster. There were bonfires in London for the
marriage on the 3rd of May. On the 7th Charles was the chief
mourner at the funeral of his father. The young queen arrived at
Dover on the 12th of June. She came at a gloomy time, for Lon
don was visited with pestilence. On the 1 8th the parliament was
opened by the king. Although the bonfires had been lighted in
London for the king's marriage, the union with a Roman Catholic
princess was in itself offensive ; and Charles had given indications
of concessions to the papists which were distinctly opposed to the
existing laws. Although he vailed his crown to the Lords and the
Commons when he first spoke from the throne, he had roused the
suspicions of the sturdy band who had resisted the despotic at
tempts of his father. He defied public opinion by granting special
pardons to Romish priests, without the intervention of the law.
There was a restrictive code, harsh and unjust no doubt, but not
to be dispensed with by an exercise of the jjrerogative. Bucking
ham had led the jjarliament into the sanction of a war ; but his
popularity was fast passing away. Time had revealed the conces
sions which had been made to Rome in the negociations for the
Spanish marriage ; and the people were not all in raptures about
"a most noble new queen of England who in true beauty is
beyond the long-wooed Infanta;"* for they had learnt that
concessions as strong had been made that Charles might wed
this " most absolute delicate lady " of France. f Henrietta's
" radiant and sparkling black eye " enchanted those who gazed as
she dined in public at Whitehall ; J but there was many a country
gentleman in the House of Commons who thought the daughters
of England as fair and far less dangerous. Henrietta brought
twenty-nine priests in her train ; and mass was celebrated at the
palace on Sundays and saints' days. She showed temper too ; and
one who was driven with the crowd out of the public dining room,
because it was too hot, said, " I suppose none but a queen could
cast such a scowl." § In the House of Commons were the old op
ponents of the absolute kingship of James, who were far from the
mood which the lord-keeper, Coventry, thought befitting — he who
in opening the next session talked of the " incomparable distance
between the supreme height and majesty of a mighty monarch and
the submissive awe and lowliness of loyal subjects." When they
* Howel, section iv., letter 34. t D'Ewes, vol. i. p. 272. X Ibid.
§ Mordant to Mead. Ellis, First Series, vol. iii. p. 206.
THE FIRST PARLIAMENT. — GRIEVANCE'S. 327
were told by the courtly sir Dudley Carleton that In all Christian
kingdoms there were once parliaments, till the monarchs overthrew
these turbulent assemblies, and stood upon their prerogatives,
they the more resolved that the example should not be followed in
England ; and when he illogically compared the misery of the
people in foreign countries with the happy state of the English who
had store of flesh on their backs, they became more assured that
the prosperity of the people mainly depended upon their own resolu
tion to maintain their freedom. Hence, when a supply was asked,
they came to the old question of unredressed grievances. They
granted a very limited subsidy ; and would only vote tonnage and
poundage for one year. The plague was raging in London. " While
we are now speaking," said a member, "the bell is tolling every
minute." The parliament was adjourned to Oxford. A disgrace
ful transaction had taken place, which was well calculated to make
the Commons very cautious of granting further supplies. Seven
ships had been lent to the king of France, which had been engaged
under pretence of serving against Austria. They were employed
against the French protestants who were defending themselves at
La Rochelle. When Frenchman were taken on board, the English
sailors deserted. The king grew importunate for more supplies ;
the Commons complained of the mismanagement of public affairs.
An abrupt dissolution took place on the 12th of August.
To counteract the influence of parliament, and to show the in
justice of its want of confidence in the government, some bold and
showy enterprise was to be undertaken. A great fleet was to be
fitted out against Spain. The cost of the expedition was to be
provided for without asking supplies from a: parsimonious and sus
picious House of Commons. Writs were issued under the Privy
Seal, demanding loans from private persons ; and chiefly from
those who had presumed to think that grants of money and redress
of grievances should go together. If a loan was refused by a per
son of station and local authority he was struck out of the Com
mission of the Peace. By these and other arbitrary means a fleet
of eighty sail was dispatched from the Downs in October, under
vague instructions to intercept the Spanish treasure ships, and to
land an army on the coast of Spain. The command of this arma
ment was given to a landsman, lord Wimbledon. The ten thousand
English troops, who had been set on shore near Cadiz, accom
plished no greater feat than plundering the " cellars ¦ of sweet
wines, where many hundreds of them being surprised, and found
328 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
dead drunk, the Spaniards came and tore off their ears, an4
plucked out their eyes."* The gallant commander now led his
disorderly men back to their ships, to look after the rich fleet that
was coming from the Indies. While he was thus master of those
seas, the rich fleet got safe into Lisbon. A contagious disease
broke out in one ship ; and the sick men being distributed amongst
all the other ships, some thousands died before an English port-
was again made. Parliament was not to be propitiated by Buck
ingham's great scheme for raising money by the same process that,
was so successful in the hands of the Drakes and Frobishers.
During twenty years of weak and corrupt government the race of
naval heroes had died out.
A new parliament met on the 6th of February, 1626. The pro*
ceeds of the forced loans were gone, and sums that had beei\
raised by pawning the crown jewels to the Dutch had also dis
appeared. The constitutional mode of raising money must again
be resorted to, however unwillingly. The parliament now assembled
has been called a "great, warm, and ruffling parliament." t It saw
that the government of England by a rash and presumptuous
minion, whose continued influence was not obtained by his talents
or his honesty, was incompatible with the honour and safety of the
country. Committees were appointed in both houses; and they
traced the disgrace of the national flag, and the corruptions of the
time, to Buckingham. When supplies were demanded, the, Com
mons again demanded redress of wrongs. The king assumed a
tone that irritated the representatives of the people without alarm
ing them : " I must let you know," said Charles in a message, " that
I will not allow any of my servants to be questioned amongst you,
much less such as are of eminent place, and near unto me." He
threatened that if they did not hasten for his supply it would be
worse for themselves. There were men in that house who were un
moved by this " representation of great fear." The Commons
locked their doors ; and after a long deliberation resolved upon the
impeachment of Buckingham. The business was committed to
eight managers. The most eloquent man in the house, sir John
Eliot, discharged his duty of summing up the charges, with a bold;
ness that must have been appalling. He complained of Buckingi
ham's oppressions and his extortions ; his engrossing of all offices.
for himself and his kindred ; his pride and his covetpusne^s:: his
boundless ambition. Finally, he compared the duke tp Sejanus;
* Howcl, vol. i. sect. 4, p. 184. t Whitelocke's " Memorials."
CONTESTS OF PEERS AND COMMONS WITH THE CROWN. 329
and exclaimed to the assembled peers, " My lords, you see the
matt." Charles was transported with rage. If Buckingham Was .
'Sejarius, he, the king, must be Tiberius. Eliot was instantly
arrested, as well as sir Dudley Digges, who had opened the charges.
The house refused to proceed to any business whilst their privileges
were thus violated. Digges made some submission and was
speedily released. Eliot refused any compromise. After eight
days' confinement in the Tower the king saw it was not a time for
the continuance of this ominous contest ; and Eliot again took his
place in the house. Subsidies had been agreed to be voted ; but
while these quarrels were going on no formal Act had been passed
for their levy. The king, with the impeachment hanging over the
head of Buckingham, commanded the University of Cafhbridge to
elect the obnoxious minister to its Chancellorship, then vacant.
There was a spirited resistance to this ill-timed act of power; but
the election of the duke was carried by a small majority. Bucking
ham had replied to the articles of impeachment ; and had ex
pressed his wish for a regular trial. The king interposed, and sent
a peremptory message to the Commons, demanding a supply with
out condition. They drew up a Remonstrance ; and being suddenly
summoned to the House of Peers, they found commissioners of
the Crown assembled to dissolve the parliament. The Remon
strance was useless ; but the spirit which had called it forth be
came permanent — a principle which no violent measures could
weaken or destroy. At this crisis the sovereign had not, as in
previous times, a subservient House of Peers to support any out
break of despotic power. He had caused the earl of Arundel to
be arrested, during the sitting of parliament, for some private
offence. The Lords asserted their privilege that no peer should be
arrested, the parliament being sitting, except for treason or felony,
or for refusing " to give surety for the peace." Arundel was dis
charged. The earl of Bristol was obnoxious to the court ; for he
was the person best acquainted with the proceedings regarding the
Spanish marriage. He was not summoned to this parliament. The
Peers insisted that the earl should receive his summons. He was
ordered by a royal letter not to take his place. But he did take
his place ; and laid the secretary's letter before the House. Bristol
was then suddenly charged at the bar of the Lords as a traitor.
The Peers insisted that Bristol should be allowed to make his
accusation against Buckingham before the charge against himself
was heard. He brought forward his allegations against the duke
330 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
for his conduct in Spain, and exhibited the falsehood of his repre.
sentations upon his return to England. The earl was then accused
by the attorney-general for his conduct as ambassador, the facts
alleged against him being dependent on the king's own testimony.
The peers sent to the judges for their opinion, whether such testi
mony was to be admitted. The judges were commanded by the
king not to return an answer. Bristol made a satisfactory reply to
the charges against him. The king and his minister were alone
damaged by these impolitic proceedings.
Thus, then, had Charles dismissed two parliaments within fifteen
months of his accession to the throne. The Commons had de
clared their intention to grant five subsidies — " a proportion," says
Clarendon, "scarce ever before heard of in parliament."- But they
were required to grant them without their complaints being listened
to ; and the king, by his jmssionate resolution to dissolve, was
again left to unconstitutional devices. " That meeting," continues
Clarendon, " being upon very unpopular and unplausible reasons
dissolved, these five subsidies were exacted, throughout the whole
kingdom, with the same rigour, as if, in truth, an Act had passed
to that purpose. Divers gentlemen of prime quality, in several
counties of England, were, for refusing to pay the same, committed
to prison, with great rigour and extraordinary circumstances."*
But it was not the " divers gentlemen of prime quality " only, who
resisted these arbitrary exactions. " On Monday." says a contem
porary, " the judges sat in Westminster Hall to persuade the people
to pay subsidies, but there arose a great tumultuous shout amongst
them, -A parliament, a parliament, else no subsidies.'"! There
were five thousand whose voices shook that roof with their protest
against tyranny. The name of subsidy being found so likely to
conjure up a spirit that could not readily be laid, commissioners
were sent out to accomplish the same result by a general loan from
every subject, according to the proportion at which he was rated
in the last subsidy that had been granted by parliament. The
pretensions of the crown were advocated from the pulpit, and the
disobedient were threatened with more than temporal penalties.
But the denunciations of the servile portion of the clergy were
probably less efficacious than the examples of men of station and
influence being committed to the Fleet and the Gatehouse, for
their steady refusal of an illegal demand ; of tradesmen and ar-
* " History of the Rebellion," vol. i. p. 9. Oxford edit. 1826.
t Mead's Letters.
SUBSIDIES ILLEGALLY LEVIED. — IMPRISONMENTS. 33 1
tificers being dragged from their homes for imprisonment or for
forced service in the army or navy ; of licentious soldiers, who had
returned from the miserable expedition to Spain, being quartered
in the houses of those who knew their rights and dared to main
tain them. Some of the more distinguished of the gentlemen who
had been committed to prison sued the King's Bench for a writ of
habeas-corpus. The writ was granted ; but the warden of the
Fleet made a return that they were committed by a warrant of the
privy council, by the special command of the king, but which war
rant specified no cause of imprisonment. The argument upon this
return was of the highest importance to establish "the funda
mental immunity of English subjects from arbitrary detention." * It
was not that the judges decided against the Crown, but that the
discussion of the question eventually led to the establishment of
the principle by the Statute of Charles II. The arguments of
Selden and Noy for the liberty of the subject were heard in the
court of King's Bench with shouting and clapping of hands ; but
they had a far higher influence. They sank into the hearts of the
people, and sent them to ponder the words of Selden, "If Magna
Charta were fully executed, as it ought to be, every man would
enjoy his liberty better than he doth."
In the orders that were issued to the deputy-lieutenants and
justices to enforce these exactions, the king affirmed that he was
threatened with invasion. This was in July, 1626. The alarm of
invasion was probably only a pretext " in order to shelter the king's
illegal proceedings."! Another fleet was sent to sea, under the
earl of Denbigh ; and there was another series of neglects and
disasters. But there was a growing cause of quarrel with France
as well as with Spain, which would very speedily render the pros
pect of invasion not so improbable. In the early days of their
union the king and queen did not live without serious disagreements.
In November, 1625, Charles wrote to Buckingham, who was in
Paris, desiring that the duke would communicate to the queen-
mother the king's intention " to put away the Monsieurs " — the
numerous priests and other attendants of Henrietta. There is
another letter in which he complains that the queen does not treat
him with due respect. At length Charles made up his mind to get
rid of these enemies of his happiness, as disagreeable to his peo
ple as to himself. On the 7th of August, 1626, he writes to Buck
ingham, " I command you to send all the French away to-morrow
* Hallam. t Ibid.
33*
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
out of the town. If you can, by fair means ; but stick not long in
disputing. Otherwise force them away, driving them away like sq
many wild beasts, until you have shipped them." * They refused
to go; but when the captain of tlu guard with his yeomen and
heralds appeared at Somerset House, where the French were es
tablished, they went on board the barges prepared for them, and
' afterwards travelled from Gravesend to Dover in forty coaches.
In four days they were landed in France. The queen, according
to the gossiping Howel, " broke the glass windows and tore
her hair." He adds, " I fear this will breed ill-blood 'twixt us and
France ; " and he was right. In October came over marshal Bas-
sompierre, as a special ambassador, to remedy these misunder
standings. His account of his embassy is full of curious details
of the English court. He saw Buckingham at his state palace of
York House (Jorchaux, the Frenchman writes), which James had
given to the favourite, having acquired it by exchange with the
archbishopric of York. Here Buckingham had displayed his
wonted extravagance. It was " more richly fitted up than any
other I saw," says Bassompierre. When the ambassador went to
see the king at Hampton Court, Buckingham was exceedingly anx
ious that the audience should be private. " He swore to me,"
writes Bassompierre, " that the only reason which obliged the king
to this was, that he could not help putting himself into a passion,
in treating the matters about which I had to speak to him, which
would not be decent on the high dais, in sight of the chief persons
of the kingdom, both men and women ; that the queen, his wife,
was close to him, who, incensed at the dismissal of her servants,
might commit some extravagance, and cry in spite of everybody."
Bassompierre at last consented to say nothing but ceremonial
words at this public audience. He had afterwards a private inter
view, at which the king did " put himself into a great passion ; "
and he "witnessed, there, an instance of great boldness, not
to say impudence, of the duke of Buckingham, which was, that
when he saw us the most warmed, he ran up suddenly and threw
himself between the king and me, saying, ' I am come to keep the
peace between you two.' " In a letter to the king of Franca de
scribing this interview, Bassompierre relates the spirited speech
which he made to Charles when asked by him why he did not exe
cute his commission to declare war: "I told him, that I did not
hold the office of herald to declare war, but that of marshal oi
^. * Ellis, First Series, vol. iii, p, 244,
QUEEN S FOREIGN ATTENDANTS DISMISSED. 333
France to conduct it whenever your majesty should resolve upon
it." In a very short time there was war with France. It has been
usual to ascribe this outbreak of hostility, between two courts con
nected by marriage, solely to the presumption and licentiousness
of Buckingham. " He had the ambition," says Clarendon, " to fix
his eyes upon, and to dedicate his most violent affection to, a lady
of a very sublime quality, and to pursue it with most importunate
addresses." This lady was Anne of Austria, the queen of Louis
XIII. She was a neglected wife, and heard with too much levity
the flatteries of the handsome duke. These familiarities took
place when Buckingham went to France to bring over Henrietta.
It was intimated to him that he had better decline such attempts
if he would escape assassination ; but he swore, adds Clarendon,
that he would see and speak to that lady in spite of the strength
and power of France." The historian of "the Rebellion " does
not exhibit the court of England in a very favourable light when
he ascribes the origin of a great war to the profligacy of so unwor
thy a person as George Villiers. But such an assumption is cal
culated to hide the real cause of this war — the broken faith of Eng
land to France upon the most important points of the marriage-
treaty. In defiance of public opinion James and Charles had sol
emnly agreed that the French princess should have the education
of her children till they were twelve years old. Henrietta wrote
to the pope to j>rotest that if her marriage were blessed with line
age she would " make no choice of any but Catholic persons to
nurse and bring up the children that may be born of it." It is
clear that the court of France expected from this secret treaty not
only toleration for Roman Catholics, but an open encouragement,
which the king, however bound by his promise, could not venture to
grant. The explanation which the able historian of the popes
offers of the origin of this war is far more satisfactory than the
ordinary solution. Pope Urban VIIL, says Ranke, represented to
the French ambassador how offensive it was to France, that the
English by no means adhered to the promises made at the mar
riage. Either Louis XIIL ought to compel the fulfilment of these
engagements, or wrest the crown from a heretic prince who was a
violator of his word. To the Spanish ambassador the pope said
that Philip IV. was bound to succour his kinswoman, the queen of
England, who was suffering oppression on account of her religion.
On the 20th of April, 1627, a treaty was signed between the French
minister, Richelieu, and the Spanish minister, Olivarez, by which
334 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
it was agreed that the two powers should unite in an invasion of
Eno-land. It was also agreed that in the event of conquest the
pop&e should have Ireland, and govern it by a viceroy. " While
the Catholic powers were devising this vast plan of an attack on
England, it fell out that they were themselves surprised by an at
tack from England." * This solution of an historical .problem, the
cause of the French war, is far more consistent with probability
than Charles's " alliance, with the Huguenot party in consequence
merely of Buckingham's unwarrantable hostility to France, founded
on the most extraordinary motives." t The treaty between France
and Spain had become known to the Venetian ambassador at Paris,
and it was not likely that the knowledge would not have been com
municated to the English government, with which the Venetians
held friendly relations. It is creditable to the statesmanship of
Buckingham that he resolved to anticipate the projected attack
upon England by a strenuous aid to the French Protestants, who
were asserting their religious freedom in the ancient stronghold of
the reformers, La Rochelle. The policy of the war was calculated
to redeem the odium into which Buckingham had fallen. The
conduct of the war, under his own generalship, only brought on
him a deeper public indignation.
On the 27th of June, 1627, whilst cardinal Richelieu was pre
paring to besiege La Rochelle, Buckingham set sail from- Ports
mouth with a fleet of a hundred shijss, carrying six or seven thou
sand land forces. At the latter end of July he appeared before La
Rochelle, and proffered his assistance in the defence of the town.
The inhabitants, perhaps remembering that English ships had
been lent to France to be employed against them, had a natural
distrust of the proffered friendship ; and declined to open their
gates to the duke. It was then determined to occupy the adjacent
island of Rhe. Buckingham and his forces landed, having driven
back the troops which opposed him. But he wanted the skill of a
general, though his personal courage cannot reasonably be doubted.
His plans were unformed. He remained inactive whilst the French
threw reinforcements and provisions into their forts. He besieged
the principal fort of St. Martin without success ; and at the time
when further aid from England was expected, raised the siege and
retreated towards his ships. " The retreat," says Clarendon, "had
been a rout without an enemy ; and the French had their revenge
by the disorder and confusion of the English themselves, in which
* See the curious relation in Ranke, vol. ii. book vii. chap. 3. t Hallam.
THE THIRD PARLIAMENT.
335
great numbers of noble and ignoble were crowded to death or
drowned." The people had their joke upon this disastrous expe
dition, for they called the isle of Rhe"the isle of Rue;" but
there was something more enduring than popular sarcasm. There
were mutinies, after Buckingham's return in the autumn, in the
fleet and army. The people refused to suffer the soldiers to be
billeted on them, and opposed an impress of fresh forces. Martial
law was proclaimed, and many were executed ; " which," says Clar
endon, " raised an asperity in the minds of more than of the com
mon people." The general discontent was increased by an inland
army being retained during the winter. Sir Robert Cotton repre
sented to the king that this was an unexampled course; that Eliza
beth, even in 1588, adopted no such measures ; and that the peo
ple considered that this army was kept on foot to " subject their
fortunes to the will of power rather than of law, and to make good
some further breach upon their liberties at home, rather than de
fend them from any force abroad." There was a general disaffec
tion throughout the conntry. "This distemper," says Clarendon,
" was so universal, that the least spark still meeting with combus
tible matter enough to make a flame, all wise men looked upon it
as the prediction of the destruction and dissolution that would fol
low. Nor was there a serenity in the countenance of any man,
who had age and experience enough to consider things to come."
In this temper of the people resort was once more had to a par
liament, to supply the urgent necessities created by this ill-con
ducted war.
In summoning his third parliament the king evinced some faint
indication of a desire for a better understanding with his people,
by releasing those who had been imprisoned for refusing to con
tribute to the forced loan of the previous year. From seventy-
seven persons thus released no submission was required ; and no
concession was offered to them for the wrong. Many of them
were men of fortune ; and the sense of the injustice which had
been done to them was shown by their being returned to the par.
Iiament which met on the 17th of March. No House of Commons
more powerful from the station, the wealth, and the talent of its
members, was ever before assembled in England. In the letter of
a contemporary it is said, " I heard a lord intimate they were able
to buy the Upper House over, notwithstanding there be of lords
temporal to the number of a hundred and eighteen ; and what lord
in England would be followed by so many freeholders as some of
336 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
these are?"* The ardour of their debates, the energy of their
resolves, were tempered by a patience and gravity which is the
more remarkable considering the personal indignities which some of
their body had received. Clarendon acknowledges that he does not
know any formed act of either house that was not agreeable to the
wisdom and justice of great courts ; and that " whoever con
siders the acts of power and injustice of some of the ministers in
the intervals of parliament, will not be much scandalised at the
warmth and the vivacity of those meetings." The king opened
this parliament with words which the house of Stuart seemed to
think essential to its dignity. He asked for a supply ; if denied a
speedy relief to his necessities he would resort to other means.
" Take not this as a threatening," he added ; " I scorn to threaten
any but my equals." The menace passed unnoticed. The Com
mons knew that commissioners had been appointed to levy imposi
tions, if there was an inevitable necessity ; and that a contract had
been entered into for sending over troops and arms from Flanders,
under pretence to defend the country from invasion. They re
solved to grant a large supply, — five subsidies, — to be paid within
a year. Put your excellent resolution in the form of a bill, said
the courtiers. Wait a little, was the answer. We must have
securities that his money shall be no longer exacted from the sub
ject in the form of loans ; that no person shall be imprisoned or
molested for refusing such loans ; that soldiers shall not be billeted
on pruvate persons ; that commissions for martial law shall be re
voked or annulled. Upon these demands was founded the "Peti
tion of Right" which became one of the Statutes of the realm. It
were long to tell how hard was the struggle before this memorable
petition became a law. Coke, in a conference between the Lords
and Commons, exclaimed, "it lies not under Mr. Attorney's cap to
answer one of our arguments." Selden stated that he had written
out with his own hand all the precedents which existed in the
records, and that Mr. Attorney would not find one omitted. Went
worth (afterwards Strafford) said " We vindicate — what ? new
things ? No ; our ancient, legal, and vital liberties, — by re-enforc
ing the laws enacted by our ancestors ; by setting such a seal upon
them as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to enter upon
them." The king was extremely unwilling to give up what he
thought his right of arbitrary imprisonment; and he secretly sub
mitted certain questions to the judges, the most material of which
* Quoted from Sloan's MSS. in Mr. Forster's " Life of Sir John Eliot," p. 57, note.
PETITION OF RIGHT. 337
was whether, in assenting to the Commons' petition, he should not
exclude himself from committing a subject without showing cause.
The judges held out an indirect promise that this apprehended
limitation should not be the effect of the Petition if it should be
come law. The lord-keeper had declared that the king held Magna
Charta and the other Statutes which protected the liberty of the
subject to be in force, and that they would find as much security
in his royal word as in any law that they could make. The secre
tary, Cook, when he asked in the name of the king, whether the
House would rest on the royal word, was answered thus by Pym ;
" We have his majesty's coronation oath to maintain the laws of
England : what need we then to take his word ? " After many at
tempts to shake the resolution of the Commons, the bill was passed ;
and the Houses were assembled to hear the royal assent. It was
given in these words : " The king willeth that right be done accord
ing to the laws and customs of the realm, and that the Statutes be
put in due execution, that the subjects may have no cause to com
plain of any wrong or oppression contrary to their just rights and
liberties ; to the preservation whereof he holds himself in con
science as well obliged, as of his prerogative." Smooth words ;
but not such as would content the Commons, who had been accus
tomed to hear a much more explicit answer from the throne, when
a Petition was to become a law. The Commons returned to their
deliberations. " Sir John Eliot," writes a member of the house,
Thomas Alured, " moved that as we intended to furnish his
majesty with money, we should also supply him with counsel."
His speech, — "wherein," says Rushworth, "he gave forth so full
and lively a representation of grievances, both general and particu
lar, as if they had never before been mentioned," — was a master
piece of argument and invective. The king's evasive words formed
no topic of this harangue ; but " there wanted not some who said
that speech was made out of distrust of his majesty's answer to
the petition." * On the day after Eliot had spoken, the Commons
had a message from the king to dispatch their old business without
entertaining new ; and the day following another message, requir
ing them " not to cast or lay any aspersion upon any minister of
his majesty." Then was presented a scene such as the tame pa
triotism of modern times may have difficulty in comprehending*.
Mr. Alured thus describes it in his letter : " Sir Robert Philips of
* Rushworth. Eliot's speech is imperfectly given by that' collector ; and is reprinted,
with connecting observations, in Mr. Forster's " Life of Eliot."
Vol. III.— 22
338 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Somersetshire spake, and mingled his words with weeping. Mr.
Pym did the like. Sir Edward Coke, overcome with passion, seeing
the desolation likely to ensue, was forced to sit down when he be
gan to speak, by the abundance of tears." * The Speaker begged
to retire ; and the House went into committee. Then Coke rose
and with a solemnity befitting his advanced age, denounced the duke
of Buckingham as the author and the cause of all the miseries of
the country. There was something in that passion of tears against
which the habitual obstinacy of Charles could not contend. The
Petition of Right was assented to by the king in the usual manner
after the two Houses had requested him to give a satisfactory
answer. It now stands in the Statute Book as " The Petition ex
hibited to his majesty by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and
Commons in this present Parliament assembled, concerning divers
rights and liberties of the subjects : with the King's Majesty's
royal answer thereto in full parliament." That answer is " Soil
droit fait come est desire." \ The Commons passed their bill of
subsidies ; and there were bonfires and bell-ringing throughout the
land, for there was hope that the old days of oppression were
passed. But the Commons were unwilling to leave their work
imperfectly finished ; and they proceeded to prepare a bill to grant
the king tonnage and poundage, but delayed passing it till they
had delivered a remonstrance against the levy of dues upon mer
chandise without consent of parliament. The king stopped the
remonstrance by a prorogation ; and told the Commons that he
drew this branch of his revenue by his prerogative, and would not
submit to have his right questioned.
The war with France had assumed the aspect of a trial of
strength between Buckingham and Richelieu. Without admitting
the very questionable theory that they were rivals for the favour of
Anne of Austria, there can be no doubt that on either side there
was more than ordinary political hostility. The war has been
called a duel between these two ministers. Never was duel fought
with greater inequality. Buckingham's highest praise was that of
having such " endowments as made him very capable of being a
great favourite to a great king." This opinion which Clarendon
formed of him indicates very different qualities than those which
g,re required in a minister to a great nation. This proud, insolent,
voluptuous young man, whose " inordinate appetite and passion,
* This interesting letter is to be found in Rushworth, and in " Acta Regia," p. 666.
t 3 Car. I. c. 1.
SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE.
339
according to the same authority, were the main cause of the na
tional calamities, was to be matched against the most calculating
and at the same time the boldest statesman of that age. It was
the battle of a pigmy and a giant. Whilst Buckingham was wast
ing his soldiers by his gross mismanagement in the isle of Rhe,
Richelieu was taking a comprehensive view of the position and re
sources of La Rochelle, and forming a plan for its reduction em
inently characteristic of his genius. After Buckingham's inglori
ous return, a second expedition had gone forth from Plymouth in
the spring of 1628, under the duke's brother-in-law, the earl of
Denbigh. Having looked at the French fleet in the harbour, he
speedily came back to report what he had seen, after the exchange
of a few harmless shots. On the 28th of May, Charles wrote to
the authorities of La Rochelle, urging them to hold out to the last,
and,using these solemn words of assurance to fifteen thousand
people, who saw famine slowly but surely approaching, — "Be as
sured that I will never abandon you, and that I will employ all the
force of my kingdom for your deliverance." A third fleet was
equipped, after parliament had granted the subsidies ; and in spite
of a remonstrance of the Commons against the power of Bucking
ham and his abuse of that jDower, the duke was again to take the
command. Had he sailed, the triumph of Richelieu over the man
who had aspired to be his rival would have been complete. La
Rochelle was wholly blockaded on the land-side ; but the port was
ojjen. An English fleet might come to the relief of the town, under
better commanders than the rash Buckingham or the timid Den
bigh. Richelieu had read in Ouintus Curtius how Alexander the
Great had subdued Tyre, by carrying out a mole to interi-ujjt the
entrance to the harbour. He caused a great mound to be made
fourteen hundred yards across, with a small tide-way ; and it was
nearly completed, when a storm destroyed it. He was a man not
to be discouraged by one failure, and he caused the work to be
begun anew. The tacticians of the army laughed at the extrava
gant schemes of the j>riest whom the king had appointed their
lieutenant-general. The cardinal persevered ; the mole was formed ;
the fate of La Rochelle was certain. The English fleet might now
come. It was getting in readiness to sail from Portsmouth. The
great duke had arrived to take the command. That he would have
fought to tbe death for the relief of the beleaguered Huguenots
there can be no doubt. Not only was his pride engaged in the
quarrel, but his future political existence depended upon the issue
340 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of this his last venture. He was not destined to fall before the
superior genius of Richelieu. He perished by the tenpenny knife
of an assassin.
At the beginning of June, Charles sent to his minister these
orders : " Buckingham, I command you to draw my army together
to Portsmouth, to the end I may send them speedily to Rochelle.
I shall send after you directions how and where to billet them,
untihthe time that you will be able to ship them."* The duke
had been at Portsmouth and its neighbourhood for several weeks.
On the 23rd of August he was sitting at breakfast in a lower room
of the house which he occupied in the town ; and his coach was
waiting at the door to convey him to the king, who was staying at
a mansion at Southwick. The breakfast-room and the ante-chamber
were filled with a crowd of attendants and officers ; and amongst
them passed in, unobserved, a short dark man, who, having looked
upon the company, went back to the dimly-lighted lobby through
which the duke would pass to the street. Buckingham stopped to
speak to sir Thomas Fryer ; and the short man being behind
stabbed the duke in his left side, leaving the knife in the body.
The duke, exclaiming " the villain hath killed me," drew out the
knife, and reeling against a chimney fell down dead. The villain
was John Felton, a younger brother of a Suffolk family. He had
served as lieutenant in the expedition to Rhe ; had been disap
pointed of some promotion ; was " of a deep melancholy, silent,
and gloomy constitution ; " t and, according to his own dying dec
laration, was moved to assassinate the duke as " an enemy to the
public." " In a bye-cutler's shop on Tower-hill he bought a ten-
penny knife, and the sheath thereof he sewed to the lining of his
pocket, that he might at any moment draw forth the blade alone
with one hand, for he had maimed the other." | Felton, full of his
dark design, made his way to Portsmouth, partly on foot and partly
on horseback ; and he there struck down, in one instant, the man
whom the shrewd Bassompierre regarded as he who governed ab
solutely in England. " Within the space of not many minutes be
fore the fall of the body, and removal thereof into the first room,
there was not a living creature in either of the chambers." § Felton
might have escaped, but in endeavouring to pass through the crowd
in the ante-chamber he lost his hat. In that hat was found a paper
with the following writing: " That man in my opinion is cowardly
and base, and deserveth neither the name of a gentleman nor a
• Harleian MS., in the king's hand. t Sir H. Wotton. % Ibid. § Ibid
FELTON, THE ASSASSIN. 34 1
soldier, that is unwilling to sacrifice his life for the honour of God
and the good of his king and country. Let no man commend for
doing it, but rather discommend themselves ; for if God had not
taken away their hearts for their sins, he had not gone so long un
punished. John Felton." * The assassin went quietly unjjursued
into the kitchen of the same house, whilst the people and the sol
diers were wildly rushing about, and the gates of the town were
closed. The search was in vain for the murderer; but when the
multitude returned to the house, a hatless man, standing in the
kitchen, exelaimed, " Here I am," and boldly confessed the deed.
When it was pretended that the duke was not dead, he declared
that he knew he was dispatched, for that it was the hand of heaven
that gave the stroke, and if the duke's whole body had been cov
ered with armour of proof he could not have avoided it." f Felton
was removed to the Tower of London ; was brought to trial on th'e
27th of November ; was sentenced upon his voluntary confession ;
and was executed on the 29th, acknowledging that he had been
guilty of a great crime. Whilst in the Tower " he was at one time
there threatened by Sir Edward Sackville, earl of Dorset, that he
should be forced upon the rack to confess who were privy with
him and consenting to the duke's death. ' I have,' said he, 'already
told the truth on that point, upon my salvation ; and if I be further
questioned by torture, I will accuse you, and you only, my lord of
Dorset, to be of conspiracy with me." %
The deportment of Charles, on receiving the news of his fa
vorite minister's untimely death, was more composed than some
writers have held to be compatible with a sincere grief. It is as
frivolous as unjust to make any such inference. The king did
what is the best thing to be done under any calamity — he tasked
his faculties in active exertion. He applied himself to complete
the equipment of the fleet that Buckingham was to have led to La
Rochelle. In twelve days, seventy vessels sailed from Portsmouth,
and thirty more quickly followed. On the 15th of September the
fleet was off the Isle of Rhe. The earl of Lindsey was the admi
ral. In the town of La Rochelle there was the most intense suf
fering from famine. The French army surrounded it. The great
mole prevented any supply of necessaries from the sea. The Eng-
* This document was found amongst the Evelyn papers at Wotton ; and came into the
possession of the late Mr. Upcott.
t Howel, p. 204. X D'Ewes, vol. i. p. 387.
342 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
lish fleet coasted up and down without any fixed purpose. The
spirit of national enterprise was gone. Lindsey looked upon the
mole, and had no thought of breaking it down. He looked upon-
the French camp, and had no inclination to land his men for an
attack. He sent a fire-ship or two into the port, and he discharged
a few cannon. On the I Sth of October La Rochelle was surren
dered, in despair of receiving any help from the lukewarm or
treacherous allies that had stimulated the Protestants to a des
perate resistance to their persecutors. The horrors of this siege
of fourteen months exceed most of the miseries recorded of be
leaguered towns. Fifteen thousand persons died of hunger and
disease. There was not a horse left alive in the town, for they had
all been eaten. Cow-hides were a delicacy; and when these were
gone, and the supply of dogs and cats was exhausted, leather was
in request, so that the household of the duchess of Rohan gladly
devoured the animal covering of her coach. Lindsey took his fleet
back to Portsmouth ; and probably even the courtiers might think
that the Commons would have some justice on their side if they
repeated the words of their Remonstrance of the last Session, that
the conduct of the war had "extremely wasted that stock of hon
our that was left unto this kingdom, sometime terrible to all other
nations, and now declining to contempt beneath the meanest."
On the 20th of January, 1629, the Parliament was assembled.
During the recess of six months there had been causes of discon
tent and irritation, besides the calamities of La Rochelle. Tonnage
and poundage had been collected, as the king had threatened to do,
without consent of Parliament ; and goods had been seized when
merchants resisted the demand. The king now adopted a less
lofty tone. He had enforced these dues, but he was willing to
receive them in future by the gift of his people. The judges had
decided against the merchants who had refused, payment ; and the
Commons were not content to let the matter rest without some
marked condemnation of the past violation not only of the ancient
Statutes, but of the recent Petition of Right. The House was
soon again in a controversial attitude ; and the questions of civil
liberty then became embittered by religious differences. There
were now two distinct parties in the Church, the Calvinistic and the
Arminian — each taking different views of the doctrines of free will
and necessity. The Arminian, or High-Church party, the more
powerful with the king, was proportionately weak in parliament.
The great body of the Commons were puritans — the holders of
RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES. 343
opinions that had been gradually strengthening from the time when
king James insulted their professors. These opinions had become
allied with the cause of constitutional freedom; for it was amongst
the High- church party that the intemperate assertors of the divine
right of kings were to be found. Laud, translated from the bishop
ric of Bath and Wells, had become bishop of London in 1628 ; and
was in effect the primate, for archbishop Abbot, whose principles
were not in accordance with those ofthe court, had been suspended.
Under Laud there had been ceremonial observances introduced
into the performance of divine worship, which were offensive to
those wlio dreaded a revival of popery in copes and candlesticks,
prayers towards the east, and bowings to the altar. We know a
little in the present day of the somewhat unchristian spirit engen
dered by differences about ceremonies ; but we cannot adequately
comprehend the strong feelings of the Englishmen of the seven
teenth century upon these jpoirits, unless we bring to the proper
understanding of their struggles a candid and tolerant admission
that they were men in earnest. It is an odious blemish upon the
narrative of Hume, our most popular historian, that whenever he
encounters a strong instance of religious zeal in the puritans he
exclaims " hypocrisy." It is an almost equal fault of other writers
that they regard the desire, however ill-regulated, to invest the
performance of religious rites with some ofthe decent orcygfand
even pomp of the earlier churches, as mere superstition/ and idol-
worship. There was a man who made his first speech in the
session of 1629, who it was once the fashion to reg'.r'd as the arch-
hypocrite of his times. — Hume calls him " fanatical hypocrite."
He was described, as he appeared in the same house eleven years
afterwards, as " a gentleman very ordinarily appareled, for it was a
plain cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country-
tailor," * — but this plain gentleman, with " his countenanee swol
len and reddish, his voice sharp and untunable," had, according to
the same observer, an " eloquence full of fervour." It was Oliver
Cromwell that attracted the attention of the courtly young gentle
man," as Sir Philip Warwick terms himself, in 1640: and in 1629
he was disturbing the complacency of other courtly gentlemen, by
a speech thus briefly reported : " That he had heard by relation
from one Dr. Beard that Dr. Alablaster had preached flat Popery at
Paul's Cross ; and that the bishop of Winchester had commanded
him, as his diocesan, he should preach nothing to the contrary,
* Warwick's Memoirs, 1701, p. 247.
344 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Mainwaring, so justly censured in this House for his sermons, was
by the same bishop's means preferred to a rich living. If these
are the steps to church preferment, what are we to expect ? " At
present we need not further enter into these theological complaints
of the Commons than to indicate their nature by this speech. It
was a declaration of opinion by one who, though new to public life
in 1629, was connected with some of the great parliamentary leaders
by family ties and private friendships ; and was sent to parliament
from Huntingdon, the town in which he dwelt, with the reputation
of sagacity and energy in his local relations. The complaints thus
briefly reported to be uttered by Cromwell at this time are to be
found at much greater length in the speeches of more conspicuous
members. Brief, but ominous, was the session. There was a
committee formed on religion ; and charges against bishop Laud
were to be presented to the king. Eliot prepared a form of three
protestations, — that whoever should bring in innovations in religion,
extend or introduce Popery or Arminianism ; whoever should
advise the levying or taking tonnage and poundage not granted by
parliament ; whoever should voluntarily pay the same ; should be
reputed a capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth. On
the 2nd of March Eliot brought forward these matters, in the shape
of a remonstrance. The Speaker refused to read the paper ; the
clerk at the table refused to read it. Eliot then read it himself, and
demanded that it should be put to the vote. The Speaker refused ;
for " he hacH'een commanded otherwise by the king." He rose to
quit the chai-r ; but two members dragged him back, and there
forcibly h^ld/him. Eliot threw his remonstrance on the floor ; and
placed hJiS -protestations in the hand of Denzil Hollis, who put them
ta'Jnevite. They were carried by acclamation. The Commons
then adjWned to ' 'ie 10th of March. Three days after, Eliot,
/StL\ nd other members, were summoned before the Privy
Council ; and four were committed to the Tower. They refused to
ansv out of parliament for what they had done as members. The
subsequent proceedings against them belong to the unhappy period
when England was under absolute government for eleven years.
On the 10th of March Charles dissolved the parliament, denouncing
some members of the Lower House as " vipers ; " and he issued
a proclamation which, says Clarendon, "was commonly understood
to interdict all men to speak of another parliament."
Before entering upon the course which was now before him of
governing without parliaments, the king and his advisers saw that
PEACE. 345
it would be dangerous to have the responsibility of conducting a
foreign war amidst national discontents. Peace was concluded
with France and Spain in the course of the next year. One public
effort was made for the cause of Protestant liberty in Europe by
sending a small force to the aid of Gustavus Adolphus. But this
aid was not given in an open and manly way, or for the assertion of
a great principle. It was pretended that the force was raised in
Scotland as a private undertaking of the marquis of Hamilton. It
was ill equipped; insufficiently provided with provisions; and
" mouldered away in a short time," without rendering any service
to the Protestant cause in Germany.* In truth there was no real
affection for the Protestant cause. The majority of the foreign
Protestants were regarded by the government, now closely allied
with the dominant party in the church, with dislike and distrust.
The doctrines of Geneva had become more offensive than the
doctrines of Rome. In England the religious principles of the
puritans were identified with a sturdy assertion of civil rights, whilst
the arbitrary tendencies of the king were encouraged by many of
the higher clergy who held the tenets from which the puritans
wholly dissented. To the great body of the people the innovations
in religion, as they were termed, not unnaturally seemed an approach
to Romanism. To the king and the prelates the resistance to these
innovations seemed a dangerous opposition to the courtly doctrine
that to disobey any of the commands of sovereigns was a heinous,
sin. The parliament impeached the preachers who maintained in
their printed sermons that kings had an absolute power over the
property of their subjects. Charles gave them preferments. The
foreign Protestants were fighting, for the most part, for civil as
well as religious liberty ; and thus they found no real support
among the rulers of England. Gustavus Adolphus went his own
way to uphold the Reformation. Charles entered into a secret
treaty with Spain for the subjugation of the Seven United Prov
inces ; which, after better consideration, he declined to ratify.
* Whitelocke.
346 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XIX.
Absolute government. — Condition of England from 1629 to 1637. — Contrasts of France
and England. — Imprisoned Members. — Sir John Eliot. — His death in prison.— Went
worth.— Lord President of the North. —Lord Deputy of Ireland. — His principles of
government.— Prynne's Histrio-Mastix.— His punishment. — Masques and Plays.—
Character of the Drama.— Book of Sports. — Thorough, in Church and State.— Mo
nopolies. — Proclamations against building in London. — Other arbitrary Proclamations.
— First project of Ship-Money.— The writ of Ship-Money extended.— The Judges
sanction the writs, — John Hampden.— Solemn trial of the validity of the writ of Ship-
Money.— Hampden adjudged to pay.— Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick.— The despot
ism of Charles not effective of any public improvements. — His alleged patronage of
the Fine Arts. — Note, on the portraits of Charles.
Lord Clarendon, in a passage that has been more than once
quoted to show how happy a people may be under an absolute gov
ernment, says, that after the dissolution of Charles's third parlia
ment, " there quickly followed so excellent a composure through
the whole kingdom, that the like peace, and plenty, and universal
tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation.'- The
great historian, with something like impartiality, then proceeds to
detail the exactions and abuses of these ten years. The imposition
of duties which the parliament refused to grant ; vast sums extorted
from " all persons of reasonable condition upon the law of knight
hood " — that is fines for refusing knighthood ; monopolies which
had been abolished renewed ; new projects of the same sort, "many
scandalous, all very grievous," set on foot ; the old forest-laws re
vived, under which great fines were imposed; the writ of ship-
money framed, •' for an everlasting supply on all occasions ; " the
jurisdictions of the council-table and the star-chamber enlarged to
a vast extent, " and being the same persons in several rooms, grew
both courts of law to determine right, and courts of revenue to bring
money into the treasury; " proclamations enjoining what was. not en
joined bylaw, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited, " so that
any disrespect to any acts of state or to the persons of statesmen, was
in no time more penal ; " and lastly, the abuse of justice at its fountain-
head in the enforcement of arbitrary acts of power by the corrup
tion of the judges. This is the catalogue of grievances presented
by the eulogist of king Charles ; — a strange commentary upon his
CONDITION OF ENGLAND. 347
representation of "the excellent composure through the whole
kingdom " during these years of unmitigated despotism. There is,
however, a far more unscrupulous defender of arbitrary power than
Clarendon. It required something beyond common effrontery in
Hume, after he had noticed the oppressive levies of money, the
monopolies, the heavy fines and brutal punishments of the star-
chamber, the iniquities of the courts of law, to write thus : " The
grievances under which the English laboured, when considered in
themselves without regard to the constitution, scarcely deserve the
name ; nor were they either burdensome on the peorjle's properties,
or any way shocking to the natural humanity of mankind." * Had
this been true instead of being distinctly opposed to truth, it would
have been perfectly impossible for any amount of prosperity
amongst the jjeople — which prosperity really depended upon their
own industrious energies — to have made " the so excellent a com
posure " a real symptom that they had agreed to renounce "those
foundations of right by which men valued their security " t — to
accept slavery in the place of freedom. Wisely has it been said,
" in the long run freedom ever brings, to those who know how to
keep it, ease, comfort, and often wealth ; but there are times in
which it disturbs for a season the possession of these blessings ;
there are other times when despotism alone can confer the epheme
ral enjoyment of them. The men who prize freedom only for
such things as these, are not men who ever long preserved it." %
The men who lived in England, in that fourth decade of the seven
teenth century were not seduced from their allegiance to freedom
by the vaunted "peace and plenty" of arbitrary power. Nor did
their subsequent awful manifestation of their love of freedom sud
denly arise out of their imrjatience of evil government. "They
were native and to the manner born." They did not prize freedom
solely because, having from very early times enjoyed a larger share
of it than other nations, they found in its enjoyment a larger share
than other nations of material blessings. They clung to free
dom — to borrow the words of M. de Tocqueville — for "its native
charms independent of its gifts — the pleasure of speaking, acting,
and breathing without restraint, under no master but God and the
Law." In briefly presenting the few striking incidents that vary the
monotonous prospect over the dead level of ten years, we shall
* History, chap. liil. t Clarendon.
X De Tocqueville, " Society in France," p. 308.
348 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
endeavour to exhibit them in connection with some of the general
aspects of society.
There has been a battle between the crown and the parliament,
and the crown keeps the field. There is not the slightest indica
tion of any other collective resistance. The camp of the people
is broken up, and there will be no irregular warfare. The timid
amongst the puritans are in despair. The day of the dissolution,
with them, " was the most gloomy, sad, and dismal day for England
that happened in five hundred years last past."* A great branch had
indeed been lopped off the tree of liberty ; but there stood the old
gnarled trunk, and " the splitting wind " could not bend it or disturb
its roots. "Be a king," said Henrietta Maria to Charles, "like the
king of France." There were some barriers to be removed, besides
that of a parliament, before that wish could be accomplished,
France and England were essentially unlike in the whole construc
tion of the machine of government. Let us point out some of these
differences, without entering upon minute comparisons.
The absolute monarchy of France was upheld by a most numer
ous aristocracy ; standing apart from the people, and despising the
people in their pride of birth ; exempt from taxation ; possessing
many exclusive privileges ; abhorring any industrious occupation ;
intermarrying with their own caste alone. The limited monarchy
of England had strengthened its power by the destruction of the
military organisation of the feudal chiefs ; but the aristocracy,
being absorbed amongst the people, became identified with the in
terests of the people ; formed family alliances with the rich middle
classes ; were united with them in various administrative functions ;
above all, were equally taxed with the very humblest yeomen and
burghers. The illegal imposts of Charles were not exclusively
levied upon the tradesman. They touched the nobleman and the
squire ; and some of the heaviest " lighted most upon persons of
quality and honour, who thought themselves above ordinary oppres
sions." f The union of classes in England for great public objects
is not a thing of yesterday. It was never more complete than in
the period which we are now regarding. Richard Chambers, the
London merchant, who refused to pay the duties illegally levied
upon a bale of silk, and was imprisoned and fined ^2000 for his
insolence in comparing the injustice to the practices of the govern
ment of Turkey ; and John Hampden, the Buckinghamshire squire,
who roused the heart of England to a quicker pulsation, in his conttst
•D'Ewes, vol. i. p. 402. t Clarendon.
CONTRASTS OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 349
with the whole power of the crown upon a question of twenty shil
lings levied upon his lands at Stoke Mandeville, — these were each
fighting the same battle, with the most perfect accord, and with
equal sympathy amongst all ranks'. " If the English had, from the
period of the Middle Ages, altogether lost, like the French, politi
cal freedom and all those local franchises which cannot long exist
without it, it is highly probable that each of the different classes of
which the English aristocracy is composed would have seceded
from the rest, as was the case in France, and more or less all over
the continent, and that all those classes would have separated
themselves from the people. But freedom compelled them always
to remain within reach of each other, so as to combine their strength
in time of need." *
The " local franchises " dependent upon " general political
freedom '' constituted another powerful barrier against the disposi
tion of an English king to govern like a king of France. The Eng
lish had been trained, from the very earliest times, to manage their
own affairs. The principle of local Association was the familiar
condition of an Englishman's existence. Parochial vestries, trade
guilds, municipal corporations, were the life of the whole social
body. Though parliaments had been suspended by Charles, these
remained in their original vigour, and perhaps in a more intense
activity. This existence of administrative bodies throughout the
kingdom rendered it impossible for any amount of absolute power
to effect more than a very partial suppression of liberty of speech
and action. The proceedings of the guilds and corporations were
conducted with the strict order of the highest deliberative assem
blies. The entire machinery of representative administration called
them together and regulated their debates. There is no parliament
at Westminster from 1629 to 1640; but there is a parliament in
Guildhall. There, is the elective principle in full force. There,
the Lower House discusses every matter of its franchises with
perfect freedom. There, is an Upper House, to which the Lower
House presents its Bills, and with their mutual concurrence they
pass into Acts. Could this vital representation of two or three
hundred thousand inhabitants of London be in daily use, and the
hin-her representation of all England be ultimately put down by the
will of the king ? To be as a king of France, Charles must have
swept away every local franchise, and have governed by one wide-
embracing centralisation. That was simply impossible in Eng
land. * De Tocqueville, p. 178.
350 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
But if there was one cause more than another why, at that
period, a king of England could not govern like a king of France,
it was the state of religious feeling amongst a rapidly increasing
number of the most influential portion of the community. It was
not the outwardly devout formalism, veiling indifference, which
prevailed amongst Roman Catholic pojpulations, who had rarely
been stirred to serious thought upon the great doctrinal questions
that had agitated Europe for more than a century. It was an
active principle, that was constantly seeking to grapple with luke-
warmness in the assertion of what it held to be true, as much as
with the positive tenets which it pronounced to be false. The
earlier professors of the doctrine and discipline called puritan had
been discountenanced by Elizabeth. But they clung with unques
tionable loyalty to her government, because the hatred of popery
was as much the passion of the people as it was the policy of the
crown. The puritans of the time of James suffered in their worldly
interests and their rights of conscience. They were visited with
penalties as nonconformists, and they were hunted as schismatics
if they formed independent congregations. But they were as yet
without the character of a political party. When Charles had been
four years on the throne, the religious dissatisfaction with church-
government became essentially political. The opinions which
forty years before had been heard in remote pulpits, or had crept
forth in secretly-printed tracts, were now loudly proclaimed in par
liament, and boldly assailed the government of the church in the
same votes and remonstrances that protested against the violations
of civil liberty by the crown. By this union, which gave a new
vitality to the struggle for constitutional freedom, was it rendered
more and more impossible that a king of England, however tran
siently paramount, could govern like a king of France.
It is related that when Charles put off his robes on the day of
the dissolution of parliament, he vowed that he would never again
put them on. The purpled dignity of the king was to be hence
forth displayed only beneath the canojay of the presence-chamber,
where every face was to be dressed in smiles, and no bold men
who talked of rights should dare to intrude. There was now one
in that presence-chamber whose voice had been of the loudest
amongst the Commons in opposing the misgovernment of Bucking.
ham. The death of that favourite opened a career to sir Thomas
Wentworth far more congenial to his nature than that of a patriot.
He was essentially different in character from the minions who had
IMPRISONED MEMBERS. — SIR JOHN ELIOT. 351
governed James, and one of whom had bowed Charles to his will.
Highly descended; abundantly wealthy, intellectually great, proud
and despotic, he saw that the time was come when England would
be ruled either by a king or by a parliament, and not by a well-
balanced union of the monarchical and the democratic power. He
chose the part most congenial to his nature, and became the ablest
servant of the crown, the most dangerous enemy of public liberty.
Pym and Wentworth had long " kept together in their chivalry."
Wentworth displayed to his friend a glimpse of the sunny prospect
that was opening to him. " You are going to be undone," said
Pym : " But remember that though you leave us now, I will never
leave you while your head is on your shoulders." * There were
other companions of Wentworth in the great battle against preroga
tive, who were not in a condition to utter any such prophetic threat.
The members of the Commons who were committed to the Tower
on the 5th of March were still imprisoned. The judges had de
clared in the autumn that they were entitled to be bailed ; but that
they must give securities for their good behaviour. They refused
to accept their liberty upon such terms. Three were then indicted
in the King's Bench ; Eiiot for words uttered in the House, and
Hollis and Valentine for a tumult in forcibly detaining the Speaker
in the chair. They pleaded that the jurisdiction of the Court did
not extend to offences said to be committed in Parliament. The
great constitutional question of privilege was thus raised. Steadily
refusing to put in any other plea, judgment was given against
them, to the effect that they should be imprisoned during the king's
pleasure ; that Eliot should be fined two thousand pounds ; and
the others fined in a smaller amount. After eighteen months
the two who were considered the lighter offenders were re
leased. Eliot, one of the noblest of a noble band, was sacrificed
to the vengeance of the crown. He was committed to the Tower
on the sth of March, 1629. He died' there, of a lingering disease
brought on by confinement, on the 27th of November, 1632. In his
dangerous illness his friends urged him to petition the king for his
release. The county of Cornwall had in vain petitioned that their
old member might be discharged. Eliot, in addressing Charles,
simply stated his bodily ailment, and said — " I humbly beseech
your majesty you will command your judges to set me at liberty,
that for recovery of my health I may take some fresh air."
*Welwood's Memorials.
352 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The answer was that the petition was "not humble enough."*
Eliot, like Raleigh, employed his prison hours in literary occupa
tion. His treatise, " The Monarchie of Man," which remains un
published, has been analysed by his best biographer ; f and it
presents in this form many passages which show that his ardour
for constitutional liberty was built upon the noblest philosophy,
and that while dealing with questions that were then called " The
Politicks," in a free and unsubdued spirit, he sets forth the highest
views of man's duty and happiness in his exposition of the Mon
archy of Mind. Such was the martyr in that contest for the liberty
of speech by the representatives of the people. He perished ; but
judgment against him was solemnly reversed, after the Restoration,
as an illegal judgment and against the freedom and privileges of
Parliament. The rise of Wentworth to power was rapid. Created a viscount,
he was first placed in the great office of Lord President of the
North. The authority of this functionary was almost absolute. In
the reign of Henry VIIL, a commission had been granted to the
Council of York, for preserving the peace in the counties of York,
Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland during the insur
rections caused by t'.:e dissolution of the monasteries. The Coun
cil had gradually fallen into disuse as a court of law, after the oc
casion had passed away for its jurisdiction. But under James, a
new commission was issued, by which authority the commissioners
were not to determine causes by juries and according to the laws
of the land, but according to secret instructions. The judges of
the Common Pleas had the honesty in James's time to resist this
encroachment upon the liberty of the subject, by issuing prohibi
tions to the President and Council. But when Wentworth became
President he declared he would lay anv one by the heels who dared
to sue out prohibitions in the Courts of Westminster. During his
presidency, the inhabitants of this great portion of the kingdom —
not indeed so populous as the South or so wealthy, but occupied
by an energetic race, whose descendants, numbered by hundreds of
thousands, are now amongst the foremost in grand industries and
high intelligence— the people of this great division of the North,
" were disfranchised of all their privileges by Magna Charta and
the Petition of Right." These are the words of Mr. Hyde, after
wards lord Clarendon. The "discretion," he maintained, given
* Harleian MS., quoted in Mr. Forster' s " Life of Eliot."
t Ibid. Appendix, pp. 125 to 177.
WENTWORTH. LORD DEPUTY OF IRELAND. 353
under the various commissions bf Charles, " hath been the quick
sand which hath swallowed up their jjroperty, their liberty." When
lord Wentworth removed from this theatre of arbitrary power to be
Lord-Deputy of Ireland, he still held the appointment of President
of the North. His particular doings in the vice-regal office may
be more conveniently mentioned at a later point of his carper. It
may be sufficient to say that the Lord Deputy Wentworth and
Archbishop Laud had a perfect concord as to the principles upon
which both England and Ireland were to be governed ; as may be
perceived from the following passage of a letter from Wentworth
to Laud : " I know no reason, then, but you may as well rule the
common lawyers in England, as I, poor beagle," do here ; and yet
that I do, and will do, in all that concerns my master's service,
upon the peril of my head. I am confident that the king, being
pleased to set himself in the business, is able by his wisdom and
ministers, to carry any just and honourable action thorough all
imaginable opposition." Thorough became the watchword of
these two politicians. With thorough every thing was to be ac
complished — " You may govern as you jilease." *
During the Lord Deputy's long residence in Dublin, he had a
very indefatigable correspondent in one Reverend Mr. Garrard, a
sort of Court Newsman to the great minister, and an occasional
reporter of many curious matters of general interest, beyond the
scope of mere fashionable chroniclers. By way of finding a few
texts upon which to enlarge a little, we may as well turn to this
reverend gossip's authority, as to more serious records. We begin
with an extract of no small significance. " Mr. Prynne's cause in
the Star-chamber held the Lords three days, and the day of censure
they rose not till three in the afternoon. He is fined five thousand
pounds ; adjudged perpetual imprisonment ; to lose his ears, the
one in the Palace-yard, the other in Cheapside ; and his books to
be burnt by the hands of the hangman." f It is extremely difficult
to conceive in our days how the publication in 1633 of " Histrio-
Mastix, the Player's Scourge," by " William Prynne, an Utter-
barrister of Lin coins' Inn," should have involved the loss of his
two ears and five thousand pounds. Learned and ardent men in
those times had another mode of maintaining their opinions than
by the power of " articles " and " leaders." We take Up this book
ef 1006 closely-printed quarto pages, and our wonder is who would
ever read its arguments against " Stage Plays, the very pomps of
* Strafford's Letters, vol. i. p. 173. t /*"*> P- 207-
Vol. III.— 23
354 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the devil which we renounce in baptism," drawn from "the con
curring authorities of sundry texts of Scripture, of the whole prim
itive Church, of 55 Synods and Councils, of 71 Fathers and Chris
tian writers, of above 150 foreign and domestic Protestant and
Popish authors, of 40 heathen philosophers," &c. &c. To burn the
books by the hangman, under the nose of the author, " which had
almost suffocated him," and thus to keep enthusiasts from losing
their senses in the perusal, was indeed a public mercy in tbe gov
ernment. Unquestionably no member of the Star-chamber ever
read the book ; but it said that Laud and others read the Index,
and finding therein a very strong phrase against " Women-Actors,"
so "impudent as to act, to speak publicly on a stage (perchance in
man's apparel, and cut hair, here proved sinful and abominable) in
the presence of sundry men and women," they determined that
this was a libel upon the queen.* This marvellous book had been
seven years in preparation. Her majesty had enacted a part in a
pastoral at Somerset House, and the day after appeared this pon
derous volume. Laud and others, according to Whitelocke, " had
been angered by some of Prynne's books against Arminianism,"
and the king allowed them to revenge themselves upon what he was
told was a libel upon his lively consort. It is clear that the affair
had, in a great degree, become a personal quarrel between the arch
bishop and the learned barrister ; for in Laud's Diary we have an
entry that Mr. Prynne sent him " a very libellous letter about his cen
sure in the Star-chamber for his Histrio-Mastix." This memorandum
is dated June 11, 1634. On the previous 7th of May, Prynne had
lost one ear in Palace-yard, and on the 10th another ear in Cheap-
side. That he wrote bitterly enough we may well believe. Laud
showed the letter to the king, who gave it to Mr. Antony Noy,
who had changed his party. When Noy showed it to Mr. Prynne,
the mutilated barrister was not so bewildered by his sufferings as
not to have presence of mind to tear the letter in pieces, and throw
it out of the window, as the archbishop records, under date of June
17, 1634^ This was not the last of Prynne's misfortunes, as we
shall have to relate. Nor had he been the first who had pro
voked the vengeance of those who were rushing upon a mad career
of church-government. On the 26th of November, 1 530, Laud re
cords that "part of his sentence was executed upon Leighton."
Dr. Alexander Leighton, a Scotch divine, had written a book—
• Whitelocke.
t Diary of Laud> " A History of the Troubles, &c of William Laud," 1695, p. 56.
MASQUES AND PLAYS. 355
" Zion's plea against Prelacy." He owned the writing of the book
when brought into the Star-chamber. It will perhaps be thought
that even the "part of his sentence" was not altogether consistent
with the mercy of Christianity. Leighton was whipped ; put in
the pillory ; had one of his ears cut off ; had one side of his nose
slit ; and was branded on one cheek. But the whole process was
repeated with the necessary variations of ear, nose, and cheek a week
afterwards.* Within five weeks the archbishop was consecrating
the church of. St. Catherine Cree, with processions, and bowings,
and other ceremonies "as prescribed in the Roman pontificale."
It was the matador throwing down the red rag to enrage the bull.
And yet England was not apparently moved from its "so excellent
a composure." From the time of the offensive attack of William Prynne upon
stage-plays, in whose condemnation he included " academical inter
ludes," there was a more than usual performance of masques at
Whitehall, and of popular dramas. The four. Inns of Court, also,
"to manifest the difference of their opinion from Mr. Prynne's
new learning, and to confute his Histrio-Mastix against inter
ludes,"! got: UP a masque written by Shirley, w!iich cost them
^20,000. In his "Epistle Dedicatory," Prynne says that there
were above "forty thousand play-books printed within these two
years ; " that " they are more vendible than the choicest sermons ; "
" the multitude of our London play-haunters being so augmented
now, all the ancient devils' chapels (for so the Fathers style all
play-houses) being five in number, are not sufficient to contain their
troops, whence we see a sixth new added." He especially notes of
" the inns-of-court men," that " one of the first things they learn as
soon as they are admitted, is to see stage-plays and take smoke at a
play-house," and to this cause he ascribes that " they prove al
together lawless instead of lawyers, and to forget that little learn
ing, grace, and virtue which they had before." It must indeed be
admitted that, notwithstanding the learning of Johnson, the grace
and vivacity of Beaumont and Fletcher, the dignity of Massinger,
and the infinite variety of the pictures of real life which these and
a host of inferior dramatists present, there is a taint more or less
amongst them all, which has prevented many of these most remark
able productions of any age or country coming down with a sweet
savour to posterity. It is not merely that we find in them loose
and profane expressions,- as we sometimes find in Shakspere, but
* Dr. Leighton was imprisoned till released by the Parliament in A40. t Whitelocke.
356 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
that, wholly different from the general character of his works,
there is such an interweaving of licentiousness with the entire
dramatic structure of many of the pieces that were once the most
popular, that, as has been especially said of Fletcher, " very few of
them can be so altered as to become tolerable at present on the
stage." * And yet Beaumont and Fletcher's plays were those most
frequently acted before the king and his court. The most serious
part of the community had evidently turned with disgust from all
dramatic exhibitions ; and though Charles was personally careful
that all profane expressions should be removed from new plays, we
may believe that if the play-books indiscriminately found admission
to decent families, there were many besides the stricter Puritans
who would think that Prynne was a sacrifice to the cause of public
morals. There was a more marked distinction than had before
existed, growing up to separate society into two great classes of
the pious and the profane. This general division was as imperfect
a test of real religion and sound morality as any such sweeping
separations can be at any period. There were many amongst those
who were first pointed at as Puritans, and afterwards as Round-
Jieads, who had not that bigoted dislike of innocent amusements,
that tasteless indifference to elegant literature and the arts, which
were unjustly attributed to their religious earnestness. In the same
way there was undoubtedly an equal proportion of those who
tolerated what others held to be immoral, who were themselves of
pure lives, and sincere in their devotional observances, though they
did not call the Lord's day the Sabbath, and thought the re-publi
cation of king James' Book of Sports was a wise measure to pre
vent the hard-worked peasantry being molested in their reasonable
recreations. There was no act of the government which more dis
tinctly than this publication indicated a temper which set at nought
the opinions of a class too powerful, because too zealous, to be
crushed. Ministers might be deprived for refusing to read this
Book of Sports in their churches ; the citizen who kept his ap
prentices at home after evening service, instead of leading them to
the archery and leaping of Finsbury fields, might be disliked by
the young men of his ward ; the yeoman who was never seen on
the village-green to sanction the commands of his king, might be
suspected as a non-conformist. But the great party that was
growing daily into a visible power only acquired solidity from this
external pressure. Garrard tells his patron how the Book of Sports
* Hallam, "Literature of Europe," vol. iii. p.aSo.
THOROUGH, IN CHURCH AND STATE.
357"
was received in some churches in London : " One Dr. Dawson read
it, and presently after read the ten commandments ; then said,
'Dearly beloved, you have heard now the commandments of God
and man, obey which you please.' " * The very first Statute of the
reign of Charles expressed the growing feeling upon this subject,
when it forbade all people to go out of their own parishes for any
sports or pastimes whatsoever " on the Lord's day j " and enacted
that in their own parishes there should be no bear-baitings or bull-
baitings, common plays, or otlier unlawful exercises. The. Book
of Sports defined certain amusements as lawful. The puritans
regarded them as unlawful. It was a judicial blindness in the
rulers to intermeddle in so delicate a question.
The more important parts of the despatches of Laud and Went
worth are in cypher ; but there are occasional expressions in the
published correspondence which sufficiently show for what object
they were both striving. Laud, immediately after his translation
to Canterbury, apologises for his want of power to accomplish what
they both desired. "As for the Church, it is so bound up in the
forms of the Common Law, that it is not possible for me, or for
any man, to do that good which he would or is bound to do. * * *
And for the State, indeed, my lord, I am for Thorough, but I see
that both thick and thin stays Somebody, where I conceive it
should not." The common law was indeed some shield of the na
tion against the attempt which lord Falkland, who saw the errors;
of the Church; but was- honestly averse to its destruction, thus dei
scribed : " Some have evidently laboured to bring in an English
though not a Roman popery; I mean not only the outside dress of
it, but equally absolute,^a blind dependence of the people upon,
the clergy and of the clergy upon themselves." f This was the
Thorough which Laud contemplated. The " Somebody" who op
posed the Thorough for the State was no doubt the king. Charles
had the sense to see that he could not do much more than he was
doing, unless he had an army to compel an obedience far beyond
what the star-chamber could enforce. But he did contrive to dash
through " thick and thin," to the accomplishment of many illegal
acts, without drawing the sword. The partnership in Thorougk
between the Church and the State was so complete, that it is some
times difficult to separate the theological from the political princi-
* Strafford Letters,, vol. i. p. 166.
t Speech, Feb. 9, 1641, in Nalson's Historical Collections." It is quoted in Dr. Ar
nold's "Lectures on Modem rHisiory,"
358 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
pie of action ; and precisely in the same manner the resistance to
the united movement of power became a compound of civil and
religious enthusiasm. Whether the partners in power were out-
-wardly acting in their conjoined or several capacities, the result
was pretty much the same.
During this anomalous period, when proclamations had the
force of statutes, the general statements of historians give us little
notion of the heartburnings which were produced by these displays
of authority. When Clarendon tells us of "projects of all kinds,
many ridiculous, many scandalous, all very grievous," the "re
proach of which came to the king, the profit to other men," he
points at the barefaced introduction of monopolies, in defiance or
evasion of positive laws. Let us take one or two of these griev
ances, to see how they were borne. The whole trade of soap-boil
ing throughout the kingdom was to be extinguished or limited, that
a Company of Soapmakers might be the sole manufacturers. These
gentlemen, who were to produce better soap, and no doubt cheaper
than all the rest of the world, had given the king £10,000 for the pat
ent, and agreed to pay him £8 per ton upon all the soap produced.
Clarendon admits that the government obtained ,£200,000 by this
and similar devices, but he says that "scarce ;£l5°° came to the
king's use ; " from which we infer that the king's officers pocketed
the balance. Garrard tells us how the new soap was received in
London. " There is much ado about the soap business. * * * *
I hear a proclamation shall come forth to stop all mouths that
^ speak against it," Commissioners of rank, with the lord-mayor
and aldermen, were to report upon the soap. " They have had two
general washing days at Guildhall ; most of them have given their
verdict for the new soap to be the better, yet continual complaints
rise up that it burns linen, scalds the laundress's fingers, wastes
infinitely in keeping, being full of lime and tallow." The king is
indignant at the opposition ; commands the lord-mayor to be rep
rimanded for his " pusillanimity iu this business, being afraid of a
troop of women that clamourously petitioned him against the new
soap."* Truly, the government is in a dignified attitude. One of
the Lord Deputy's own schemes for keeping Ireland in dependence
was to make the people " to take their salt from the king." He
sets forth "the easiness of making his majesty sole merchant" of
salt — an article of "so absolute necessity as it cannot possibly stay
upon his hand, but must be had whether they will or no, and may
* Strafford's Letters, vol. p. .176.
ARBITRARY PROCLAMATIONS. 359
at all times be raised in price." To show the easiness and profit
he says, " Witness the Gabelle of salt in France." Witness, in
deed. Those who have read of the extremity of suffering to which
the unhappy peasantry of France were reduced by the Gabelle may
form some notion of the condition to which these islands were fast
drifting under the rule of Thorough. There was scarcely an in
dustrious occupation, from the sale of coals to the collection of
rags, that was not made the subject of a monopoly.
But many other ingenious devices were resorted to for the
supply of the wants of the crown beyond its large hereditary rev
enues. There had been proclamations by James and Charles
against the increase of buildings in London. The chaplain of the
Venetian ambassador, in 1617, thought that the proclamation of
James was for the intent of extorting fines, rather than with the
hope of preventing the extension of the capital when there was
abundant space for its enlargement. * There could be no doubt
of the intention of Charles, when in 1633 a Commission was har
assing every owner of a new house from St. Martin's in the
Fields to Blackwall, by levying enormous fines, or commanding
the houses to be pulled down. Garrard is very minute in his re
lation of these proceedings. Refusal to the arbitrary command
was dangerous. " Writs are gone forth from the Star-chamber
to the sheriff to pull down the houses of Mr. Moor, and to
levy ^2000 fine for not having pulled them down by Easter."
These were forty-two houses near St. Martin's Church ; and
they were " pulled down to the ground." The interference with
the supply of house room was not more arbitrary than the in
terference with the supply of food. " The taverns," writes Gar
rard, " begin to victual again ; some have got leave. 'Tis said
that the vintners within the city will give £6000 to the king to
dress meat, as they did before." f Proclamations were issued
minutely regulating the price of all provisions. There were ex
amples enough of such folly in former times which are held to be
necessarily unenlightened; but in the days when the intellect of
England was in the fullest activity, the rating of all eatables ap
pears the merest freak of individual idiotcy. " The proclamations,"
says Garrard, " have done little good. They will not bring them
[the provisions] in ; so that housekeeping in London is grown
* See article in "Quarterly Review," October, 1857, on Mr. Rawdon Brown's " Dia*
ries and Dispatches of the Venetian Embassy ' unpublished."
t Strafford Letters, vol. i. p. 262.
360 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
much more chargeable than it was before these proclamations
were published." Some of the proclamations of Charles appear
to have had no other object than that of a wanton interference
with the convenience of the people. It was the age of Hackney-
Coaches. Garrard says, that there were one thousand nine hun
dred in London and Westminster. At the beginning ,of 1635 he
writes, " There is a proclamation coming forth to prohibit all hack
ney-coaches to pass up and down in London streets ; out of town
they may go at pleasure, as heretofore." It is true that the narrow
streets were somewhat overcrowded with the coaches. The great
enemy of these vehicles, John Taylor, the water-poet, who saw the
demand for the Thames wherries grievously reduced, tells us that
"butchers cannot pass with their cattle for them; market-folks,
which bring provision of victuals to the city, are stopped, stayed, and
hindered." The streets were kept narrow by the absurd procla
mations through which the natural extension of the town was im
peded. It is clear enough that no interference of the government
could put down the coaches ; but the limitation of their use had
the effect of encouraging the system which was introduced in
1634, by a speculating traveller, of " carrying people up and down
in close chairs," called Sedans.
Whilst the Star-chamber was pulling down houses in London,
those who pulled down cottages in the country, called depopulators,
were equally fined. " Much noise is here of the depopulators that
are come into the Star-chamber; it will bring in great sums of
money." Such means of filling the Treasury were, however, small
affairs. Six years of irresponsible government have made the
administration bolder. In the spring of 1635 Garrard writes that
it was resolved in full council, "to take double rates, just as
much more as was taken before, of all goods imported - into the
kingdom." Double rates upon imports were nothing, however,
compared to an universal tax. There is gone out a special writ to
the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, requiring him, for the safe
guard of the sea and defence of the realm, to issue forth writs to
the several counties, cities, and towns, therein mentioned, to pro
vide ships, men, ammunition, provision and wages. The Lord
Mayor of London demurred to the writ ; but, being threatened, the
corporation yielded, "and instantly fell to seizing in all the wards."
The courtly Mr. Garrard, who rejoiced in all the monopolies be
cause they brought money to the king, is rather discomposed about
a tax which at last touches himself. " I had rather give," he says,
THE WRIT OF SHIP-MONEY. 361
"and pay ten subsidies in parliament, than ten shillings this new-
old way of dead Noy's." Dead Noy, the old Attorney-General,
who plagued all mankind with his writs, has in this, the last of his
performances, left a terrible bequest to the government that bought
his desertion of the popular party, as it had bought Wentworth's,
by the offer of great place. He had always a precedent ready for
an injustice, and thus Garrard calls his writ of ship-money a " new
old way." Yet Noy's scheme was a very limited one compared
with that which was afterwards adopted ; von the suggestion, it is
said, of Finch, chief justice of the Common Pleas — the courtly
Speaker whom Eliot and Hollis held in the chair, when he refused
to put a remonstrance to the vote. The original writs were only
sent to London and to the sea-port towns ; and there was some
reason in the demand, for the English navy had fallen into such a
miserable condition that Algerine pirates boldly seized upon mer
chant vessels in the Channel, and the whole commerce of England
had become insecure. These first writs required that certain mari
time places should furnish one or more ships, or their equipments,
or pay, as London had paid. In 163 J a fleet was sent to sea, for
the protection of trade. In 1636 the real writs of sbip-money were
issued ; under which the sheriffs were directed to make a general
assessment in all counties and towns specified, according to the
means of the inhabitants, to produce the proportions at which the
several places were rated. The schedules appended to these writs
enable us to form some notion of the comparative opulence of par
ticular districts. Of the counties, Yorkshire, Devonshire, Essex,
Kent, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Somersetshire, Suffolk, Wiltshire,
are assessed at the highest rate ; 1 2,000/. for York, 8000/. or 6000/.
others. Durham, Northumberland, and Monmouth are put at the
lowest rate, 2000/. or 1500/. The inland agricultural counties are
at an intermediate scale, about 4000/. Next to London, Bristol
and Newcastle are the most heavily assessed. The difference of
two centuries ago and the present time in local population can
scarcely be more strikingly shown than by these schedules ; in
which Liverpool is only rated at twenty-five pounds, whilst Bristol
is set at eight hundred pounds ; Birmingham is not rated at all,
nor Sheffield, nor Bradford, nor Sunderland, nor Manchester.
Preston and Banbury are at the same humble scale of forty-pounds
each ; Boston and Buckingham are equal ; and amongst the more
flourishing towns Nottingham is not held as wealthy as Reading.
But we must not jump to the conclusion that such places as Man-
362 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Chester, Sheffield and Birmingham, were too small and unimportant
to have a special levy apart from their counties. Birmingham in
the time of Henry VIIL was described by Leland as "a town of
smiths and cutlers," and Camden, in 1607, mentions it as " swarm
ing with inhabitants and echoing with the noise of anvils." Shef
field was always famous for its cutlery, but Camden mentions it as
"remarkable among other little towns hereabouts for blacksmiths."
Manchester was undoubtedly of importance at a much earlier
period than the 17th century. Leland calls it "the fairest, best
builded, quickest, and most populous town of Lancashire." The
statistics of the past are not more to be implicitly trusted than the
statistics of the present.
When these writs were issued by the sheriffs in their respective
districts there was a general consternation. The people, who had
been formerly accustomed to the regular collection of subsidies by
commissioners, doubted the legality of this new system. But the
greater number submitted, with the full knowledge that individual
resistance to oppression was more dangerous under king Charles
than at any previous time. The whole country was under the pres
sure of tyranny. The judges, by the royal command, put forth an
opinion, not arising out of any question before the courts, that the
king might command, for the safety of the kingdom, all his subjects
to provide such number of ships as he might think fit ; that he
might compel obedience to this command ; and that he was
the sole judge of the danger of the country, and the means of pre
venting it. Richard Chambers, who had bravely resisted the
illegal levy upon his merchandise, was again imprisoned be
cause he declined to pay his assessment of ship-money. When
the case was taken into the courts at Westminster, one of the
judges refused to hear counsel, and said there was a rule of
law and a rule of government, and that many things which could
not be done by the first rule might be done by the other. It is to
such that Clarendon alludes when he says " the damage and mis
chief cannot be expressed, that the crown and state sustained by
the deserved reproach and infamy that attended the judges, by
being made use of in this and like acts of power ; there being no
possibility to preserve the dignity, reverence, and estimation of the
laws themselves, but by the integrity' and innocency of the judges."
But if Clarendon, writing in after years, saw the damage that the
State sustained by such servility, Wentworth, at the date of the
extra-judicial opinion upon ship-money, was in raptures. He
JOHN HAMPDEN, AND THE REFUSERS. 363
declares it to be the greatest service the profession has done the
Crown in his time, and then gives this significant opinion*: " But,
unless his majesty hath the like power declared to raise a land
army upon the same exigent of state, the Crown seems to me to
stand but upon one leg at home, and to be considerable but by
halves to foreign princes abroad." Hume, in noticing the conduct
of Charles in dissolving his second parliament, observes, that if
the king had possessed " any military force on which he could rely,
it is not improbable that he would at once have taken off the mask,
and governed without any regard to parlirnentary privileges."
Wentworth, now that the mask had been taken off, desired a land-
army to effect many things that were not wholly to be accomplished
by fine and imprisonment, administered by a merciless Star-cham
ber and a corrupt bench.
England lies in a dead-sleep; except that the high-sheriffs
," bestir themselves apace in their several counties : moneys they
bring in daily, and I do not hear of any numbers that are refusers,
so that it will prove a good business." So writes hopeful Mr.
Garrard, in December, 1635. On the nth of January, 1636, there
is a public assembly at which all the persons attending, the entire
body of landowners and housekeepers of the parish, are " refusers."
The very assessors and constables are refusers. Of what was said
in the vestry of " Kimbell Magna," to make the two esquires in the
list of defaulters, and the twenty-nine yeomen, so resolute not to
pay the 21/. 15J. 6%d. assessed upon -that humble village amidst
the Chiltern hills, there is no record. But the document which
sets forth the sums assessed upon each, from 3U. 6d. to bd., is in
existence, and it records the names of those bold men as " refusing
to pay." At the head of that list is the name of " John Hampden,
Esquire." * Great Kimble is not far'distant from the manor-house
where John Hampden dwelt, in the parish called by his name.
There his forefathers had dwelt even in the Saxon days, and had
continued for six or more centuries to be lords of Great and Little
Hampden, Stoke Mandeville, and other Buckinghamshire manors.
John Hampden, who refused to pay thirty-one shillings and sixpence
to king Charles, abode under the same roof where his grandfather
entertained queen Elizabeth, in 1585, — a mansion whose front is now
modernised and vulgarised, but of which enough is left to interest
many more than the mere local antiquary. In this pleasant wood
land country, whose surrounding hills were covered with beech ;
* A fac-simile is given in Lord Nugent's " Memorials of Hampden," vol. i.
-364 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
close by an ancient well-preserved church standing in a parklike
enclosure, dwelt John Hampden. When he sent to his dear friend
Eliot, a prisoner in the Tower, a buck out of his " paddock," he
writes that it " must be a small one, to hold proportion with the
place and soil it was bred in." * Clearly not a very wealthy man
was this esquire, — a man in worldly importance not to be named
with Wentworth and his hereditary six thousand a year ; a man of
whom the Lord Deputy of Ireland, hearing of his very irregular
proceedings at Kimble Magna and other parishes — and all for some
trumpery thirty-one shillings and sixpence, or twenty shillings —
said in his grand way, " In truth, I shall wish Mr. Hampden, and
others to his likeness, were well whipped into their right senses."
A more cumbrous instrument than the " rod " for the mendicant
was necessary to bring Mr. Hampden to submit to " all that ever
authority ordains '' — the test of a good subject in Wentworth's view.
There were six weeks of solemn pleading in the Exchequer Cham
ber before all the judges — the greatest cause that ever was tried in
Westminster Hall — followed by many months of judicial delibera
tion before the king's right to enforce the tax of ship-money was
adjudged to be lawful ; " which judgment," says Clarendon,
" proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned
than to the king's service." Hampden was singled out to be pro
ceeded against by the Crown upon his refusal to pay twenty
shillings assessed upon his lands at Stoke Mandeville ; and the
formal pleadings upon the writ of Scire Facias had occupied five
months before the question came to be argued. The speeches of
the crown lawyers and of Hampden's counsel occupy one hundred
and seventeen pages in Rushworth's folio volume. After these
protracted arguments before the judges, these twelve sages of the
law occupied three terms in delivering their opinions. They were
not agreed in their judgment. Two of the number had from the
first decided that judgment should be given for the defendant.
Two others, in the next term, followed their example. One other
held that the tax was lawful, but that no portion of it ought to go
into the Privy-Purse. But on the 9U1 of June, 1637, the Chief
Justices decided against Hampden ; and the sentence was for the
king, upon the opinion of the majority. Of Sir John Finch, one
of the Chief Justices, Clarendon says, "He took up ship-money, where
Mr. Noyleftit; and, being a judge, carried it up to that pinnacle from
whence he almost broke his own neck ; having, in his journey
* Nugent's Memorials, vol, i. p. 171.
PRYNNE, BURTON, AND BASTWICK. 365
thither, had too much influence upon his brethren, to induce them
to concur in a judgment they had all cause to repent." Hampden
at once became " the most famous man in England " — " the pilot
who must steer the vessel through the temjjests and rocks that
threatened it."* After the judgment the resistance to shijj-money
was much more general. Some refusers were punished ; many
were threatened ; but in town and country the opposition became
a very resolved manifestation of the temper of the people. It was
not such " a good business " as Mr. Garrard had predicted.
Thorough for the State has not altogether succeeded. Arch
bishop Laud and the Star-chamber have meanwhile been seeing
what they can accomplish by Thorough for the Church. Ship-
money judgment for the Crown was given on the 12th of June,
1637. Two days after, William Prynne, who was brought up from
his prison, but with his ears sewed on ; Henry Burton, who had
been Clerk of the Closet to Prince Charles, and was incumbent of
a London parish ; and Robert Bastwick, a physician of Colchester,
were sentenced by the Star-chamber to be fined ^5000 each, to be
degraded from their professions, to be placed in the pillory, to have
their ears cut off and their cheeks and foreheads branded, and to be
confined for life in distant prisons. Their offences were these.
Prynne had published a book against Sabbath-breaking, in which
the clergy who had read the Book of Sports were bitterly stigma
tised ; Burton had offended in a sermon, and in a tract had accused
the Bishop of Norwich of being guilty of Romish innovation ;
Bastwick had in a book called "Elenchus Papismi," identified
prelacy and popery. Garrard has a somewhat merry statement of
an exhibition in Palace Yard, on the 30th of June, in fulfilment of
the sentence of the 14th. " They stood two hours in the pillory,
Burton by himself. . . . The place was full of people, who
cried and howled terribly, especially when Burton was cropt. Dr.
Bastwick was very-merry ; his wife, Dr. Poe's daughter, got a stool,
kissed him; his ears being cut off she called for them, and put them
in a clean handkerchief, and carried them away with her. Bastwick
told the people, the lords had collar-days at court, but this was his
collar-day." \ A more serious account mentions the solemn defi
ance of Prynne to Lambeth, calling upon the primate to show that
these practices were according to the laws of England. There are
some awkward symptoms of indignation at these barbarities, be
sides the howling in Palace Yard. The sheriff of Chester is sent
* Clarendon. t Strafford Letters, vol. ii. p. 85.
366 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
for by a poursuivant to answer a charge of having been kind to
Mr. Prynne as he passed on his way to prison at Caernarvon.
'• Strange flocking of the people after Burton, when he removed
from the Fleet towards Lancaster Castle. Mr. Ingram, sub-warden
of the Fleet, told the king that there was not less than one hundred
thousand people gathered together to see him pass by, between
Smithfield and Brown's well, which is two miles beyond Highgate.
His wife went along in a coach, having much money thrown to her
as she passed along." * Very strange flocking indeed.
Before we enter upon the stormy period which succeeded the
nine or ten years of enforced tranquillity from 1629, let us inquire
whether the possession of arbitrary power enabled the king and his
advisers to assist the people in the development of their industry,
the enlargement of the conveniences of life, or the cultivation of
arts and letters. The industry of the people was in every way op
pressed, — not only by irregular taxation, but by interferences to
tally at variance with the advancing intelligence of the time. The
merchants were unprotected from pirates ; the landowners were
harassed by inquiries into their titles, and by obsolete demands
under forest-laws. The plague was always in London, and no ex
ercise of authority was employed for its prevention ; indeed its
ravages were increased by the excessive crowding of inhabitants
caused by the proclamations against new buildings. When des
potism manifests itself to the world in erecting gorgeous palaces ;
in sweeping away miserable dwellings from narrow streets, and sub
stituting buildings that astonish by their magnificence or delight
by their commodiousness ; in turning barren wastes into beauteous
gardens, which the humblest may enjoy in common with the great
est ; in delighting the pleasure-loving multitude with displays of
military pomp, with illuminations and fireworks — the world is some
what too ready to believe that despotism is a magician that can per
form wonders far beyond the reach of limited authority or combined
popular action. To Charles the First cannot be assigned either
the praise or the blame of having expended his revenues in any
such efforts to throw a factitious splendour over the decay of pub
lic liberty. He was to some extent, indeed, a patron of the Fine
Arts. He is looked upon by many as the English monarch from
whom the Fine Arts received the highest encouragement. Charles
was a large purchaser of paintings, and his galleries were adorned
with several glorious works of Raffaelle and Titian, of Corregio
* Strafford Letters, vol ii. p. 114.
THE KING'S PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS. 367
and Guido. He brought Raffaelle's Cartoons into England, as
Cromwell saved them from going away. Vandyck was invited by
him to his court ; and his encouragement has been amply repaid by
the ideal of the king which this great painter has handed down to
us. Mytens, also the court portrait-painter, was scarcely so fa
voured. The one had ,£200 a year, the other ^40 as pension *
Rubens painted for Charles the ceiling of the Banqueting-house.
Dobson was encouraged by him, and received from him the name
of " The English Tintoret." All this is highly creditable to the
monarch ; but it must not be forgotten that no consideratipn of
public benefit influenced this elegant expenditure of revenue. In
dividual gratification was its sole end and aim. Individual vanity
was abundantly satisfied by flattering portraits ; but great original
compositions were not produced for this court. Nor was there
wanting amongst the nobility and richer commoners a desire to cul
tivate those Arts which England had in some measure neglected.
The earl of Arundel had begun the formation of his noble collec
tion of sculpture when Charles was a boy. To his " liberal charges
and magnificence," says a writer about 1634, "this angle of the
world oweth the first sight of Greek and Roman statues, with whose
admired presence he began to honour the gardens and gallery of
Arundel House, and hath ever since continued to transplant old
Greece into England." f The Arundel collection was formed by a
costly and judicious private expenditure. The royal collection
might have been increased by influences not strictly honourable to
the head of an independent kingdom. Charles was most anxious
to obtain a statue of Adonis from a private collection at Rome.
The queen's confessor urged his desire for that and other rare
works of ancient art. Cardinal Barberini seconded these efforts ;
and he wrote to Mazarine, " The statues go on prosperously ; nor
shall I hesitate to rob Rome of her most valuable ornaments, if in
exchange we might be so happy as to have the king of England's
name amongst those princes who submit to the Apostolic See." J
It is to be hoped that Charles resisted such temptations.
During this reign there were invasions enough of the subject's
liberty by proclamations against the extension of London ; but
they were for no purpose of regulating that extension upon any
systematic plan of convenience or beauty. There were still more
direct violations of the rights of property, in ordering the sheriff
* See Note at end of this chapter. t Peacham, " Compleat Gentleman."
} Quoted by Mr. D' Israeli from Panzani's Memoirs.
368 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to pull down shops and houses in the vicinity of St. Paul's, com
pelling the owners to accept any compensation that was offered to
them. Here was the vigour of despotism, but not such a vigour as
England was formed to endure. All shops also in Cheapside and
Lombard-street, except those of the goldsmiths, were commanded
to be shut up, that the great avenue to the cathedral might not ex
hibit any trace of vuigar industries ; and that when foreigners went
to the city to see the Lord Mayor's procession, they might not be of
fended by butchers' stalls and " fripperies." This was to enforce
arbitrarily the custom, which partially prevailed, that those of the
same trade should occupy the same street. The greatest thorough
fare was to display the most striking wealth. What Cheapside
then was on gala-days may be seen in a print of the entry of Mary
de Medicis, who came to England very much against the wishes
©f the king, in 1638. The print accompanies a description, in
French, by the Sieur de la Serre, historiographer of France,* of
the ceremonies that attended this visit of the queen mother, — a
visit of which Laud, in his Diary, says, " great apprehensions of
this business." She came, however, and Cheapside — " la grande
rue " — had its houses, which a previous visitor had described as
" all windows," crowded with fair city dames and portly livery-men ;
and the city companies sat on elevated platforms covered with blue
cloth ; and the lord mayor and the recorder were there, and twenty-
four aldermen, in their robes of scarlet ; and, above all, a sight that
in a few years was not so agreeable — six thousand soldiers of the
city separated in divers companies. These were trained bands,
whose numbers does not seem to have varied from that of 161 7,
when the chaplain of the Venetian ambassador could not eat his
dinner in peace from the noise of " musket and artillery exercise "
in the fields near Bishopsgate-street Without.f London was ac
customed to processions and pageants, and especially to its Lord
Mayor's shows, in which all the dignitaries of the land followed
the civic magistrate to his dinner in Guildhall, amidst a very merry
and boisterous crowd, that scarcely gave way to the " twenty sav
ages or green-men, walking with squibs or fire-works to sweep the
streets." Though the times were evil when Mary de Medicis came
to London, the love of sight-seeing and sight-performing kept the
crowd of idlers pleased, and even the discontented of the city quiet,
* " Histoire de 1' EntnSe Royale de la Reyne Mere," London, 1639. Reprinted in
"77S-- t " Quarterly Review," October, 1857, p. 411.
MARY DE MEDICIS IN LONDON. 369
though the corporation had been fined ,£70,000 by the Star-chamber,
upon a complaint that the conditions by which they held lands in
Ulster had been infringed. The city offered, by way of compensa
tion, to build the king a palace in St. James's park. The courtiers
wanted the money to squander in masques and banquets, and the
offer was refused. Charles had employed Inigo Jones to prepare
plans for a magnificent Whitehall. The Banqueting-house is the
only architectural monument of the taste of the two first Stuarts.
Vol. III.— 24
37° HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
NOTE ON THE PORTRAITS OF CHARLES I.
In the Manchester Exhibition of Art Treasures an opportunity was afforded of com
paring the portrait of Charles by each of the painters, Vandyck and Mytens, almost in
juxtaposition. There, was a family group by Mytens, and a family group by Vandyck. In
that of Mytens the king and queen are preparing to ride ; and there is Jeffrey Hudson, the
dwarf, holding a small dog in aleash, the favourite spaniels, andalarger dog with amonkey.
In the group by Vandyck the king is sitting by the side of his queen, with an infant on her
lap. The Charles of Mytens' group is younger than in that of Vandyck. There are no
decided markings of character in his face. The expression is gentle, almost feeble. The
Charles of Vandyck's group has the almost invariable countenance which this painter
gives to him — the well-known composed and reflective character, with a tinge of foreboding
melancholy, as some imagine. Near these groups hung a whole length of the king by
Mytens. The technical art of Mytens was little inferior to that of Vandyck ; and he was
more faithful in portraiture, if amongst the requirements of fidelity we ask that portraits
of the same person at different periods of life, and in different situations, should have some
variety. The portraits of Charles by Mytens show how much of the general expression
of the character of the king is due to the ideal of Vandyck, The features are the same in
both artists, but the contemplative and tender expression is wholly due to Vandyck. Mytens
gives us a sober and apathetic face, more remarkable for the want of sentiment than for
its excess — a face not wholly pleasant. The grace also belongs to the more poetical painter.
In Mytens we can see how Charles would have grown into a likeness of his father. In the
head of the king by Vandyck, in the same collection, painted in 1637, there is more anima
tion than in his other portraits. But in all of them, not to yield too much to the historical
evidences of character, tl^ere are the indications, however faint, of suspicion and mental
reservation, and an especial want of those physiognomical traits which indicate self-reli
ance. Compare the Charles of Vandyck with the Strafford of Vandyck. Strafford has
the care-worn expression, and the imagined presentiment of evil, to a far greater extent
than his master. But it is the weight of responsibility pressing upon a powerful mind.
What decision, what keenness of observation, what inflexibility, wholly wanting in the por
traits of Charles.
SCOTLAND. 371
CHAPTER XX.
Scotland. — Visit of the king in 1633 — A Service-book commanded to be used in 1637. —
The National Covenant. — Progress of the troubles in Scotland. — The General As
sembly, — The king and the Scots levy forces. — The king at Berwick. — Camp of the
Covenanters. — An English Parliament. — Suddenly dissolved. — Convocation continues
to sit. — The Scottish war resumed. — Rout of Newburn. — Council of Peers. — Cessa
tion of arms. — An English Parliament summoned. — Character of the House of Com
mons* — Strafford. — Laud.
In the summer of 1633 Charles had paid a visit to Scotland, and
was there crowned. Not only were the two nations as distinct in
their civil and ecclesiastical systems of government as if they had
been still ruled by two sovereigns, but the Scottish affairs were sep
arately managed by Charles himself, without any reference to the
English Council. One English adviser he, however, had, whose
notions upon church government wholly over-rode the prudential
considerations of civil polity. Laud, then bishop of London, ac
companied the king on this Scottish journey. Although the bishop
enters in his Diary, " King Charles crowned at Holyrood church
in Edinburgh ; — I never saw more expressions of joy than after
it ; " Laud himself gave great offence by the introduction of rites
at the coronation which the people considered as part of the sys
tem which the Reformation had overthrown. His temper was
violent; and the Scottish historians say that he thrust the arch
bishop of Glasgow from the king's side, because he refused to offi
ciate in embroidered robes. Some of the Scottish prelates were
not imbued with this love of simplicity ; and they united with the
powerful English bishop in the promotion of a plan for introducing
a Service-book in Scotland, which should supersede the extempo
raneous prayers of the presbyterian form of worship. The design
was not then carried into effect. But in 1637, when Laud had be
come archbishop, and all moderate measures for producing con
formity in England had been 'laid aside, the Scottish Church, was
suddenly called upon to receive a book of Canons approved at
Lambeth ; and a Service-book was directed to be used in all places
of divine worship. This Prayer Book varied from the English
372 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Liturgy in points which indicated a nearer approach to the Romish
ritual. The consequences of this most ignorant rashness — igno
rant, because of its utter blindness to the course of Scottish history
during the previous hundred years, and to the character of the
Scottish people — were wholly unforeseen. All political prudence
was swallowed up in the one dominant passion of the king and of
his prime adviser for an unvarying ecclesiastical uniformity, in and
through which the minutest ceremonial observances should be
rigidly enforced, as the test of orthodoxy, and therefore of loyalty.
From the date of this violent defiance of the principles and habits
of the Scottish people, the reign of Charles becomes the turning-
point of English history. Perhaps no great public event has been
without its ultimate effects upon the fortunes of a nation, although
centuries may have passed away. The stirring action that com
menced in Scotland in 1637 not only influenced all her own after-
destinies ; — " it preserved the liberties and overthrew the monarchy
of England."* Robert Baillie, Principal of the University of Glasgow, has, in
his Letters and Journals, left some of the most interesting me
morials of these times. f We find in the good man's narrative the
ominous beginning of these Scottish disturbances. By sound of
trumpet it is proclaimed that all subjects, ecclesiastical and civil.
conform themselves to the Liturgy by the next Pasch [Easter].
The books were not ready till May, and then every minister was
commanded to buy two copies. The book is lent about from hand
to hand ; its "popish points " are shown; it is imposed without
any meeting of church or state, say the dissatisfied. A letter
comes down from the king commanding its use without farther de
lay. " The whole body of the town murmurs and grudges all the
week exceedingly ; and, who can marvel, discourses, declamations,
pamphlets, everywhere." Sunday, the 23rd of June, arrives ; and
thus Principal Baillie tells us what happened : — " When the
bishop and his dean, in the great church, and the bishop of Argyle,
in the Grayfriars, began to officiate, as they speak, incontinent the
serving-maids began such a tumult as was never heard of since the
Reformation in our nation." History has preserved the name of
one turbulent heroine, who may have sat for the " Trulla " of Hudi-
bras : " Jane or Janet Geddes (yet living at the writing of this rela-
* Hallam, chap. xvii.
t " Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, A. M., edited by David Laing, Esq."
3 vols.
THE NATIONAL COVENANT. 373
tion) flung a little folding-stool, whereon she sat, at the dean's head,
saying ' Out, thou false thief ! dost thou say the mass at my lug ?' " *
A threatening outburst of popular fury followed this exhibition, but
no wounds were given. The chancellor writes to the king, and
there is "great fear for the king's' wrath." The country is getting
hot, as well as Edinburgh. Preachers who defend the Liturgy are
maltreated, and mostly by " enraged women of all qualities."
Gradually the nobles, the gentry, and " burrows " [members for
boroughs] take up the supplications against the Service-book. By
December, some of the most influential agree together to oppose
its use, and resist the further intrusion of Prelacy. They become
organised. The king, Who at first had threatened the Scottish au
thorities, now endeavours to moderate the people by proclamations
that declare his abhorrence of Popery, and his resolution to main
tain the religion then professed. But there are symptoms that
these professions are delusive. The idea of submission to the
authority of the Scottish prelates is utterly rejected. The whole
community enters into a National Covenant to abjure the doctrines,
rites, and ceremonies of the Romish Church, and to resist the in
novations which the prelates had introduced. In the High Church
of Edinburgh, on the ist of March, 1638, this Covenant was read,
and the whole congregation rose and swore to maintain what is set
forth. Copies of the deed were sent throughout the land, and
with tears and protestations the Covenant was sworn to and signed
by hundreds of thousands.
The ecclesiastical government was an anomaly, which Clarendon
describes in few words : " Though there were bishops in name, the
whole jurisdiction, and they themselves were, upon the matter,
subject to an assembly which was purely presbyterian." But when
Clarendon adds " no form of religion in practice, no liturgy, nor the
least appearance of the beauty of holiness," he speaks with a very
imperfect knowledge of the Scottish earnestness in religion, in
which the strength as well as the beauty of holiness was manifest.
The " enraged women '' of Edinburgh were not very favourable
specimens of the national spirit. But in the history of the nations
there is no grander spectacle than a whole people, for the assertion
of a principle, assembled in separate congregations, large or small,
in the crowded city and in the mountain solitude, to defend the
doctrine and discipline which their fathers had established ; and to
declare, " before God, his angels, and the world," their resolution
• " Continuation of Baker's Chronicle," edit, of 1670 ; quoted by Mr. Carlyle.
374 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to adhere to the same all the days of their life. During this won
derful movement in Scotland, the Council of England, and indeed
the people, were as men in their midnight sleep whilst their neigh
bour's house is on fire. "The truth is," says Clarendon, "there
was so little curiosity either in the court, or the country, to know
anything of Scotland, or what was done there, that when the whole
nation was solicitous to know what passed weekly in Germany and
Poland, and all other parts of Europe, no man ever inquired what
was doing in Scotland, nor had that kingdom a place or mention in
one page of any gazette." * There were gazettes in that day.
" The Weekly News," and " The Weekly Account," and little
sheets called " Currantoes," were the staple of the halfyearly
" Intelligencer." Few, indeed, and very meagre, were these peep
holes out of the prison in which public opinion was then locked up.
For tbe Star-chamber was in full activity for the regulation of the
press ; and by its decree at this very period master printers were
limited to twenty who found sureties ; and " printing in corners
without a license " was punishable by the orthodox process of
whipping and the pillory. It was seven years later when Milton
raised his eloquent voice for the " Liberty of Unlicensed Printing,"
and spoke the words which tyranny had always most dreaded to
hear, " Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely
according to conscience, above all liberties." If the petty news
papers of 1637 and 1638 had told of Janet Geddes and her doings,
they would soon have been silenced. The people had no curiosity
about Scotland, because they knew nothing about Scotland. The
king suffered no transaction of his native kingdom to be debated
or communicated to his privy-council, "but handled all these
affairs himself with two or three Scotsmen." -j- Gradually the
knowledge of the riots of Edinburgh creeps out : " Horrible ado
against the bishops in Scotland, for seeking to bring in amongst them
our Church-Service." (October, 1637.) " Small hope yet in Scot
land to bring our Church-Service into use there ; they still oppose
it with great violence." (November, 1637.) " Messengers come
weekly thence." (March, 1638.) So writes Garrard to his great
patron, but intimates that there is one who informs the Lord-Dep
uty much better than himself of the proceedings there. The
weekly messengers have told something of the truth in the court of
purlieus ; for even the king's fool has been moved to speak his
mind, poor fellow : " Archy is fallen into a great misfortune. A
* " History of the Rebellion,'' temp. 1637. -f Clarendon.
PROGRESS OF THE TROUBLES IN SCOTLAND. 375
fool he would be, but a foul-mouthed knave he hath proved himself.
Being in a tavern in Westminster, drunk he saith himself, he was
speaking of the Scottish business ; he fell a railing on my lord of
Canterbury ; said he was a monk, a rogue, and a traitor. Of this
his grace complained at Council, the king being present. It was
ordered he should be carried to the porter's lodge, his coat pulled
over his ears, and kicked out of the court, never to enter within the
gates, and to be called into the Star-chamber. The first part is
done ; but my lord of Canterbury hath interceded to the king that it
should end." * Opinions are getting troublesome in England in
higher places than taverns in Westminster. " They grow foolish
at Oxford, for they had a question about the legality of Ship-money,
as also, whether the Addita and Alterata in the Scottish liturgy
did give just cause of scandal ; but my lord's grace of Canterbury
hearing of it, forbad them such question." (July, 1638.) In an
other year the very courtiers are taking the Scottish matters to
heart : " Most certain it is, that the Scots is grown a most obstinate
rebellious people. God turn their hearts. Daily they fall more
and more from their obedience." (May 1639.)
The steps by which the Scots arrived at this " obstinate rebel
lious" condition were those of the steady march of an irritated popula
tion under experienced leaders. The first resistance of the Service-
Book was a sudden outburst. The national Covenant was a de
liberate act which was to be sustained on the battle-field. Charles
and his one fatal adviser chose to regard it as the affair of a rab
ble ; and the king commissioned the Marquis of Hamilton to re
duce " the rascally people " to obedience. The commissioner was
to allow the Scots six weeks to renounce the Covenant. If not
renounced, power was to be sent from England ; and the king
himself would hazard his life rather than suffer authority to be
contemned. In June, 1638, the Marquis of Hamilton arrived at
Edinburgh. He had written to nobles and gentlemen, the most of
note, to attend him at Haddington, previous to his entry into the
capital. Two or three only met him, and they carried him an ex
cuse in the name of all. Baillie records that huge multitudes re
ceived him at Leith — nobles, gentry, women, the town magistrates.
But, says the good minister, "we were most conspicuous in our
black cloaks, about five hundred on a brae-side in the links."
These Geneva cloaks must have suggested some serious consid
erations to the Commissioners. The discussions between Hamil-
* Straffo;d Letters.
376 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ton and the Covenanters only shewed how earnest and resolute
they were. Nothing but a General Assembly and a Parliament
would induce them to renounce their league. The Commissioner
was directed to temporise, and not to take any extreme measures
till an armed force was ready to support them. He went to Eng
land for further instructions ; but he returned with powers to an
nounce a General Assembly and a Parliament, and to propose that
the Confession of Faith, of 1 589, should be signed instead of the
Covenant. A proclamation was issued, setting forth that the Lit
urgy and the Canons should be given up, on condition that this
Confession should be adopted. The Covenanters protested against
this ; as an attempt to make them, under cover of a new oath, re
cant what they had been doing. " We thought this subscription,"
says Baillie, " a very deep and dangerous plot, and so opposed it
everywhere, what we could." In November, a General Assembly
was convened at Glasgow. " The Town did expect and provide
for multitudes of people." On the 17th the Commissioner arrived.
On the 20th there was a solemn fast. The Assembly was opened
on the 21st. Seven days did this great meeting debate and pro
test. The chief grounds of difference were the introduction of
lay members into the Assembly ; and the general determination to
remove the bishops. On the 28th the Marquis dissolved the As
sembly, and left Glasgow. It continued its sittings till the 20th of
December ; and, against the opinions of a few of the moderate,
declared the total abolition of episcopacy in the kirk of Scotland.
The determined opposition of the Scottish nobility to episcopacy
may be attributed to some motives, not unjust ones, besides a de
sire for the safety of the Reformed Church. The prelates had en
grossed some of the high civil offices ; they formed a large propor
tion of the Privy-Council ; they had Courts with very obnoxious
powers, like those of the High-Commission Court in England.
The whole system of episcopacy seemed to the people and to theic
leaders full of danger to their consciences and their liberties.
" The Canterburian faction," says Baillie, " was hayling us all away
to Rome for our religion, to Constantinople for our policy." *
At the beginning of 1639 it became clear that these contests
would end in an appeal to arms. Charles was ill-prepared for a war.
In November, 1638, Lord Cottington writes to the Lord Deputy,
" Our business of Scotland grows every day worse, so as we are
almost certain it will come to a war, and that a defensive one on
* Letters, &c. vol. i. p. 185.
THE KING AND THE SCOTS LEVY FORCES. 377
our side, and how we shall defend ourselves without money is not
under my cap The king will not hear to a Parliament."*
On the following 26th of January, Charles sent out a letter, " com
manding all the nobles and gentry of England to attend his royal
standard at York against the 1st of April, where he was to go to
the border to oppose the Scots there." f But the Scots, instead
of having a discontented commonalty to impede the exertions of
the nobles and gentry, were all firmly banded together, peer and
peasant, merchant and mechanic, to maintain a cause which they
held to be the cause of God and their country. The whole land
was full of military preparation. The nobles headed their forces
in every shire. In every great town there were frequent drill
ings ; "every one, man and woman, encouraged their neighbours."
The castle of Edinburgh was surprised by Leslie, one who had
gained a large experience in the great Protestant war in Ger
many, and in whom all confided ; for. says Baillie, " such was the
wisdom and authority of that old, little, crooked soldier, that all,
with ane incredible submission, from the beginning to the end,
gave over themselves to be guided by him." Dumbarton castle
was seized by the Earl of Argyle. Stirling was held by a Cove
nanter. Onward marched the king towards York. His army,
under the lords Arundel, Holland, and Essex, was very insufficient
for attack or defence, though formidable enough for the plunder of
their countrymen. " As for the forces of England, they failed like
the summer brooks ; the country was filled with their own griev
ances." % In the same spirit Mrs. Hutchinson writes, " the com
monalty of the nation, being themselves under grievous bondage,
were loath to oppose a people that came only to claim their just
liberties.'' Wentworth made prodigious exertions to keep down
the Scottish settlers in Ulster; and he sent some Irish to the
king's army — " a matter of fifteen hundred ragged Arabians," says
Baillie. The marquis of Hamilton sailed into the Firth of Forth ;
but his forces were quite unequal to subdue or even to awe an
armed population ; and the Scots appear to have despised his
"five thousand land-sojours, taken up in a violent press". The
marquis made war upon his countrymen in a merciful way. s He
fired no shot ; and was content with intercepting supplies. His
men, closely packed in their small ships, could obtain neither fresh
meat nor water, for the shores were closely watched ; and the old
fortune of the miserable naval enterprises of this reign attended
* Strafford Letters, vol. ii. p. 246. t Baillie. X Ibid.
378 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
them. Leslie marched towards the border. The king had ad
vanced to Berwick ; and from his camp at the English side of the
Tweed, saw " through a prospect " [telescope] twelve thousand
Scots encamped on Dunse-Law ; the hill-top crowded with cannon ;
the gentle hill-sides stirring with experienced musqueteers and
" stout young ploughmen and highlanders with their plaids, targes,
and dorlachs."* Before the tent of every captain was a colour
bearing the Scottish arms, and a legend, in golden letters, "For
Christ's Crown and Covenant." The camp was full of the kirk-
ministers ; and the soldiers were encouraged, not only by the
presence of their nobles, but by " the good sermons and prayers,
morning and even under the roof of heaven, to which their drums
did call them for bells." f The armies had looked upon each other,
and certainly the English commanders had very substantial rea
sons for not risking a battle. A small body of the royal cavalry-
had fled before a smaller body of Scots. Some advances to pa
cification were made from the Scottish side. On the 6th of June,
the earl of Dunfermline was sent to the royal camp with a petition
that a meeting might be held between a few worthy men of each
kingdom to settle the points in dispute. Charles returned an an
swer signed by his Secretary. The Covenanters required an an
swer under his own hand ; and the signature was given, assenting
to the proposal. On the nth of June, the Scottish deputies — con
sisting of four nobles, with Alexander Henderson, Moderator of
the General Assembly, and the Clerk-Register of that body, ar
rived in the camp. The king appointed his Commissioners; but
during the proceedings he suddenly appeared amongst the nego-
ciators. His lofty tone, however, did not prevent a pacification
being concluded on the 18th of June. The articles were very
loosely expressed ; and it soon became clear that the peace was a
hollow one. Charles returned to London on the 1st of August.
The Scottish army was disbanded. The fortresses were restored
to the officers appointed by the Crown. But the conditions of
the Covenant were inflexibly maintained in the General Assembly,
and in the Parliament which met in August. Moreover, that Par
liament demanded privileges which appeared to weaken the royal
authority; and the king's Commissioners decided upon its proroga
tion. The members held that such prorogation was illegal without
their own consent. On either side of the border the note of prep
aration for war was again heard.
* Baillie, p. 211-13. t Ibid.
AN ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. — SUDDENLY DISSOLVED. 379
Lowered in the eyes of his English subjects by the pacification
of Berwick ; the prestige of eleven years' pretensions to absolute
power dissipated; without financial resources for military purposes,
unless new exactions had been attempted, besides the old demands,
— Charles at length summoned an English Parliament. It met
on the 13th of April, 1640; it was dissolved on the 5th of May.
In this Session of three weeks the great question of grievances
preceding supplies was renewed with a vigour proportionate to
the invasions of public liberty since 1629. But there was a mod
eration in the language of the Commons which was perhaps
the best evidence of the steadiness of their resolves. The king
demanded twelve subsidies in three years — a sum equivalent to
about 840,000/. ; and he offered to relinquish ship-money, which
was estimated to produce 200,000/. a year. The Commons would
hear of no compromise of such a nature. Ship-money was the
opprobrium of the government; the Crown had claimed the right
of taxation independent of the Commons ; the people had been
unconstitutionally taxed ; the judgment of the Courts must be
annulled, and the judges punished. The Commons would then
enter upon the business of Supplies. The table of the House was
covered with petitions against the abuses of the State and of the
Church. The clouds were gathering all around ; and the king
thought to avert the tempest by dissolving the Parliament. The
Convocation of the Clergy continued to sit ; and large assistance
was voted to the king. In that assembly Canons were framed
which were well calculated to render the government of the Church
more and more odious. No Englishman of sense, and especially
no honest Puritan, would sanction the attack upon Laud's palace
at Lambeth on the nth of May. But they would regard his
Canons, — which preached passive obedience to the divine right of
kings and subjected Protestant dissentients to the same penalties
as Popish recusants, — as an offence against the ancient liberties
of Englishmen. Many of the Clergy would look forward to the
time when this new yoke should be shaken off, by which the
tenure of their livings was made to depend upon taking an oath
offensive to their consciences — the et catera oath as it was called.
Meanwhile, members of the Commons were again imprisoned,
Ship-money was more rigorously enforced. Citizens were punished
for refusing a loan. The counties were subjected to novel charges
for the troops that were -levied for another Scottish campaign. On
the 4th of June, a month after the dissolution of Parliament, the
380 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
earl of Northumberland, a courtier, said in a letter, " It is impossible
that things can long continue in the condition they are now in ; so
general a defection in this kingdom hath not been known in the
memory of any." *
The contest between the king and Scotland — we cannot call it
a contest between England and Scotland — had for some time as
sumed the character of a war. Trade with Scotland had been pro
hibited. The English cruisers seized Scottish merchant-ships. In
March and April levies had been called out by the Covenanters.
On the 2nd of June, the Parliament met in Edinburgh, and put
forth manifestoes which were of more effect than the royal proc
lamations denouncing the Scots as rebels and traitors. The-
Parliament imposed levies, which were not, however, very promptly
paid. They formed a Committee of Estates which held the execu
tive power of the realm. It was resolved to march to England
with a petition, supported by an army of twenty-five thousand men.
On the 20th of August they crossed the Twe ed at Coldstream,
wading through the river. Montrose, afterwards so prominent in
another cause, was the first to pass the river on foot. The marched
at leisure through Northumberland. Lord Conway, the English
general of the horse, had been in cantonments between the Tweed
and the Tyne since the end of July. On the day that Leslie crossed
the Tweed, Charles, having received news of the advance of this
great army, hastily left London for York. He called all the tenants
of the Crown to his standard. He offered by proclamation to for
give the Scots, if they would crave pardon for the past as penitent
delinquents. Strafford had raised troops in Ireland that had joined
the king's forces. Altogether twenty thousand men were in arms
under the royal standard. There was no zeal in this army. There
was little discipline. The courtiers, " merry lads," as Sir Philip
Warwick names some of them, with a ready loyalty made no inquiry
as to the principle of the war. The common soldiers " questioned
in a mutinous manner whether their captains were papists or not,"
and uttered " in bold speeches their distaste of the cause, to the
astonishment of many, that common soldiers should be sensible
of public interest and religion, when lords and gentlemen seemed
not to be." t The queen had recommended the Roman Catholics
to make contributions to carry on the war against the Scot-
tish Covenanters, and "with more noise and vanity than pru
dence admitted, they had made public collections of money to a
* " Sidney Papers," quoted by Mr. Hallam. t May.
COUNCIL OF PEERS. 38 1
considerable sum." * To oppose the old campaigner Leslie, a man
of many battles, was selected lord Conway, — one who had seen
some service, such as it was, but who is described by Clarendon as
" a voluptuous man in eating and drinking, and of great license
in all other excesses ; " and who was said by sir P. Warwick to
" lay under some reflection since the action ofthe Isle of Rhe."
Strafford (Wentworth was now earl of Strafford) was to have taken
the command ; but sickness prevented him from joining the army
till after it had sustained a perilous defeat, in what Clarendon-
terms "that infamous irreparable rout at Newburn." On the 27th
of August, the Scots had reached the left bank of the Tyne about
five miles above Newcastle, and on that night their camp fires
blazed with the coal of the adjacent pits. The next day they oc
cupied the town of Newburn. There appears to have been little
disposition to come to an engagement; and the Scots had made
some English welcome who visited their camp. But one of their
officers having been killed by a shot from the opposite bank of the
river, the artillery on both sides opened their fire. At low water
two Scottish regiments crossed the Tyne. The English horse fled,
and the whole army moved in great disorder to Newcastle. There
was only one effort made by a gallant few to oppose the passage of
the Scots across the river. Newcastle was itself abandoned at
midnight. On the morrow, writes Baillie, " Newcastle was ren
dered to us ; the soldiers and chief citizens had fled out of it in
great haste." There they found stores of provisions and of arms.
In Scotland, the Covenanters were equally successful ; and Dum
barton, "questionless the strongest place in Britain," capitulated.
The pastle of Edinburgh also surrendered to Argyle. The king
was coming on and had reached Allerton, when he heard of the
rout of Newburn ; and he returned to York. Newcastle was put
by the Scots under contribution ; and there they quietly sat down
whilst some attempts were made for a pacification.
After these occurrences, the king, having adopted what Claren
don calls " a new invention," or rather " so old that it had not been
practised in some hundreds of years," called a Great Council of
Peers to attend him at York on the 24th of September. The first
decision of the Council was to appoint a Commission of sixteen
Peers to treat with the Scots at Ripon. After various vain attempts
to come to a final understanding, a cessation of arms, for two
months, was agreed to, on the 26th of October, that the demands
* Clarendon.
382 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the Covenanters might be discussed in London by the Commis
sioners. It had become known that the king had proposed to the
peers again to summon a Parliament. During this cessation of
arms the Scottish army was to be maintained by a payment of 850/.
per day. " The Parliamenfwas to meet at Westminster on the 3rd
of November. For the fifth time during the reign of Charles the people are look
ing to a Parliament, that should establish the just distinctions be
tween an absolute monarchy and a free monarchy. The barriers be-
ween Liberty and Despotism had been rudely thrown down. It is no
vain difference about a theory. It is a vital question which has come
home to every man. There is no falling off in the popular sentiment
as to the character of those who have contended in former parliaments
against the insolent claims of prerogative. These men are returned
for county and borough, without a doubt that they have pursued
the right course. A very short time had been given between the
issue of the writs and the elections ; — an advantage to the court
party. Yet the elections had so completely gone against that party,
that Clarendon says the House was packed by decisions upon con
troverted returns. This is one of the loose assertions of that his
torian, for there were only eight returns that were contested. He
says also, " There was observed a marvellous elated countenance
in many of the members of parliament before they met together in
the house ; the same men, who, six months before, were observed
to be of very moderate tempers, and to wish that gentle remedies
might be applied." Thus, in this dreary November season, have
the Peers, and five hundred and six members of the House of
Commons, come up from every shire and borough, to take their
sides in the great battle for constitutional rights and liberty of
conscience. Travelling in those wintry days to parliament was
costly and not very agreeable. Principal Baillie, who was to go
to WestminLter from Newcastle on the Covenant business, with a
safe conduct under the Great Seal, was eight days on the road;
and on the eighth day he came from Ware to London, " all well,
horse and men, as we could wish ; divers merchants and their ser
vants with us, on little nags." The whole journey was perilous in
his eyes : " The way extremely foul and deep, the journeys long
and continued ; sundry of us unaccustomed with travel, we took it
for God's singular goodness that all of us were so preserved
We were by the way at great expenses ; their inns are all like
palaces; no marvel they extort their guests."*
* " Letters and Journals," vol. i. p. 271.
CHARACTER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 383
The complexion of the House of Commons was such as to
alarm some of those who had been concerned in the proceedings
of the absolute government of eleven years. Sir John Bramston, a
devoted loyalist, the son of one of the ship-money judges, writes
thus of the composition of the House : " Those gentlemen who had
been imprisoned about the loans, benevolences, or any other the
like matters; such citizens as had been sued, imprisoned, or mo
lested about tonnage or poundage, or the customs ; all that had
any ways appeared obstinate and refractory to the government and
the king's commands about ship-money, coat-and-conduct money,
or the Commission, were chosen either for counties or boroughs."*
There were members of the government, the chief advisers of the
king, to whom the presence in Parliament of " those gentlemen who
had been imprisoned," &c, was not a promise of halcyon days.
The Scots, before the treaty of Ripon, had demanded " the removal
of three or four persons from about the king." Strafford and Laud
were especially pointed at. Of Laud, they distinctly said that his
removal was necessary for the preservation of the Protestant
religion, " which every honest man thought at present in great dan
ger, by the exorbitant power of the Archbishop of Canterbury."
The enemy of Strafford, " more terrible than all the others," was
"the whole Scottish nation, provoked by the declaration he had
procured of Ireland, and some high carriage and expressions of his
against them in that kingdom." f Strafford, though of , undaunted
courage, saw his danger in this parliament, which had been called
at the moment when he would have fought in the north. He
wished to retire to his government of Ireland. Charles pledged
himself that not a hair of Strafford's head should be touched by
the parliament. Laud was suffering an agony of superstitious fear
in his Lambeth palace. There was real cause for alarm in the
temper of the people. On the 22nd of October, the High Com
mission Court, so tyrannical and so odious, was sitting at St.
Paul's. "Very near two thousand Brownists made a tumult at the
end of the Court, tore down all the benches in the Consistory, and
cried out they would have no bishop, nor no High Commission." J
The unhappy state of Laud's own mind, credulous as ever about
dreams and prognostications, may be judged by the following entry
*" Autobiography of Sir John Bramston," Camden Society. "Coat-and-conduct
money," the name of a particular tax for the equipment of soldiers, is misprinted " Coal,
and- conduct-money," p. 73.
t Clarendon. X Laud's Diary.
3«4 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of his Diary: "October 27, Tuesday, Simon and Jude's Eve. I
went into my upper study, to see some manuscripts, which I was
sending to Oxford. In that study hung my picture, taken by the
life ; and coming in, I found it fallen down upon the face, and
lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was hanged
against the wall. I am almost every day threatened with my ruin
in Parliament. God grant this be no omen."
The real character of Revolutions is as rarely understood as
their possible range is foreseen, by those first affected by them, —
princes and their ministers. Laud, and to a less extent Strafford,
could see nothing in the events which disturbed their power but
the malignity of personal enemies, or the influence of ambitious and
irreligious despisers of lawful authority. Laud himself writes, with
an amusing simplicity, and no doubt with a sincere expression of
his belief, that " the adverse party in the late parliament, or by and
by after before they parted, ordered things so, and filled men's
minds with such strange jealousies, that the king's good people
were almost generally possessed that his majesty had a purpose to
alter the ancient laws and liberties of the kingdom, and to bring in
slavery upon his people, — a thing which, for aught I know, his
majesty never intended." * Purblind and almost stone-blind must
that minister have been who did not see that the systematic action
of the government during the whole reign, and more' especially
from 1 629 to 1640, had been to drive such an opinion into the heads
of the whole community ; and that nothing but their loyally, which
was as strong a principle as the love of freedom, could have long
before averted some fearful outbreak of popular indignation, in the
absence of the legitimate parliamentary mode of expressing the
public voice. According to Laud's view of the matter, the Scots
did not come to England with a Covenant in their hands, sub
scribed by an indignant nation, but because " some lords and
others, who had by this time made an underhand solemn con
federacy with a strong faction of the Scots, brought an army of
them into the kingdom." Some may believe, as we do not, that
Charles " never intended to bring in slavery upon his people;"
but the people who saw the tyranny of his actions had no great
reason to rely upon his intentions. The king and the archbishop,
both weak men, were self-deceivers ; and of the nature of the
self-deceptions of both we may form an opinion from an entry in
Laud's Diary, recording that he had been fined 500/. by the Far-
* Laud's " History of the Troubles," &c. p. 83.
LAUD. 385
liament (December' 21, 1640), for the illegal imprisonment of sir
Robert Howard : " In such a case, say the imprisonment were
more than the Law allow; what may be done for Honour and
Religion sake ? " When Authority rides over Law in the name of
Honour and Religion, it becomes more dangerous even than the
brute force which knows no law but its own passionate will.
Vol. III. — 25
386 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXI.
The Long Parliament. — Difficulty of narrating its history m a limited space. — Of what
manner of men composed on its first meeting. — Opening of the Parliament. — Election
of Speaker. — Petitions from the prisoners under sentence of the Star-Chamber. —
Their triumphal entry into London. — Arrival of the earl of Strafford. — The Hr use
of Commons resolve to impeach him. — His arrest. — Arrest of archbishop Laud. — Im
peached of hizh-treason, and committed to th; Tower. — Finch, the Lord-Keeper,
and Windebank, Secretary of State, fly the country. — Tlie judges in the case o» ship-
money proceeded against. — Destruction of crosses and images. — Charges against
Strafford. — His trial. — Arrangements of "Westminster Hall. — Daily conrse of pro
ceedings. — Bill of attainder proposed in the House of Commons.— ^Disclosure of
Henry Vane. — Strafford's last speech in his defence. — Pym's reply. — Close of the
trial. — The bill of attainder passed by both Houses. — Army plots and popular clam
ours. — Protestation. — Efforts of the king to save Strafford. — He finally abandons
him. — His execution.
The Long Parliament — the most memorable Parliament that
England ever saw — the Parliament which, for two centuries, has
been the theme of the most extravagant hatred and the most ex
aggerated praise — the Parliament, whatever be its merits oj-its
faults, which has the one glory of having rendered it impossible
that the Monarchy of England could endure except in alliance
with representative freedom — this Parliament of thirteen years'
duration now claims our anxious regard. Those who are bewil
dered by the crowd of persons, the rush of events, the con
trariety of opinions, as they read the history of this Parliament in
the more important contemporary historians and memoir-writers,
will comprehend the impossibility of adequately relating the great
story in a hundred or so of pages. We must necessarily go over
the old track, without lingering by the way-side, if we would ar
rive at the end of our journey in any reasonable time. Though
this old track has been often trodden, it is still very dark and de
vious ; and it has been rendered more difficult by some of its pro
fessed guides, and by one especially, who has made very treacher-
ons stepping stones over parts of the road now known to be foul
and dangerous. We shall endeavour to pursue our wav warily but
not fearfully. What should we fear? The time is past when it was
thought necessary for a loyal subject of the British crown to deify
MEETING OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT. 387
Charles or disabolify Cromwell, In the truer and nobler spirit of
our own day, the statutes of Hampden and of Falkland now claim
our united reverence as we tread the vestibule of our Houses of
Lords and Commons. *
In the rude wood-cut which heads a newspaper of 1642, we
have a representation, almost ludicrous, of that great assemblage
to which it was given to " rough-hew " the destinies of England.
In a far more elaborate engraving of the Lower House, in 1623, we
see the five hundred members placed in five rows, tier above tier,
in that old Chapel of St. Stephen's, famous for generations, f On
the 3rd of November, 1640, there were sitting on those benches
men whose names will endure as long as England is a nation ; men
whose memories are now venerated in lands, then undiscovered, or
chiefly occupied by barbarous tribes, where the principles of repre
sentative government are sustaining the Anglo-Saxon race in their
career of liberty, whilst they fill new continents with their lan
guage and their arts. But it is not only from the more illustrious
of that Parliament that we have derived our great inheritance of
civil rights. There were men there of many varieties of opinion,
as to the extent to which reforms of the Church and of the State
should be carried. But there were very few indeed, who did not
sec that the time was come when a stand was to be made against
the arbitrary power which, whether embodied in Strafford or Laud,
in Finch or Windebank, had so long and so successfully carried
on a warfare " against our fundamental laws— against the excel
lent constitution of this kingdom, which hath made it appear to
strangers rather an. idea than a real commonwealth, and produced
the honour and happiness of this, as the wonder of every other
nation." J Those who opposed the despotic pretensions of Charles
and of his father were not the innovators, as some would pretend.
When Clarendon tells us of the House of Commons, that "the
major part of that body consisted of men who had no mind to
break the peace of the kingdom, or to make any considerable alter
ation in the government of Church or State," he correctly rep
resents the general temper of the Long Parliament in its first year.
But when he adds that " all inventions were set on foot from
the beginning to work on them and corrupt them, by suggestions
*" In our days the history of the English Revolution has changed its face
The narrative and opinions of Hume have ceased to satisfy the imagination and reason of
the public." — Guizot.
t Engraved in Lord Nugent's " Hampden," vol. i.
t Falkland's charge against Finch.
388 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the dangers that threatened all that was precious to the sub
ject in their liberty and their property, he uses the term " in
ventions " in the place of the facts which no one has set forth more
distinctly than himself in the earlier portion of his history. There
was, indeed, many a country-gentleman and citizen who went up to
this Parliament with a hatred of ship money and of all other ille
gal imposts, with a horror of the Court of High Commission and
the Star-Chamber, and with a determination to prosecute, even to
the death, the unjust judge and the tyrannical minister, who yet
had the most unshaken loyalty to the king. Charles did not under
stand the character of this Parliament. He conceded much ; but
in the very act of concession he showed his weakness rather than
his sense of right ; and there was reasonable fear enough, how
ever exaggerated by popular mistrust, that at the first favourable
moment the Parliament would be dissolved, and the old arbitrary
power resumed with new force. Treacherous schemes on one
side, and extravagant demands on the other, rendered almost hope
less any other issue than Civil War. Then, necessarily, men
chose their sides. Those '¦ who had no mind to break the peace
of the kingdom" were compelled to draw their swords, friend
against friend, and brother against brother ; and those who had no
original design " to make any considerable alteration in the govern
ment of Church or State," had all to witness, and many to promote,
the downfall of the ecclesiastical system which Augustin had
founded, and the ruin of the monarchy which Alfred had built up.
On the memorable 3rd of November Charles opened this Par
liament. He met his people with no cheerful display of royal
splendour. " The king himself did not ride with his accustomed
equipage, nor in his usual, majesty, to Westminster, but went pri
vately in his barge to the Parliament Stairs."* Very few members
were absent from their places. Charles addressed the House in
a tone of conciliation : " One thing I desire of you, as one of the
greatest means to make this a happy Parliament, that you on your
parts, as I on mine, lay aside all suspicion, one of another." It
was scarcely in the power of the representatives of the people to
have hastily accepted the renewal of a broken confidence, even if
they had been so willing. The fatal dissolution of Parliament,
six months before, had spread a spirit of resistance to the court
which was not confined to idle complainings. Sir Thomas Gardi
ner, the recorder of London, had been designed by the king to
* Clarendon.
STAR-CHAMBER PRISONERS RELEASED. 389
fill the office of Speaker in the coming Parliament. Contrary to
all precedent he was rejected by the city ; and no influence could
procure his election in any other place. On the morning of the
meeting of Parliament, the king was told that his choice was use
less. Lenthall was chosen Speaker. In a few days there was
abundant work for the Commons. Troops of horsemen arrived in
London, craving redress of grievances upon their petitions. From
the Fleet Prison came a petition from Alexander Leighton, who
had been ten years in confinement ; and another from John Lil-
burne, the sturdy London apprentice who had been whipped and
imprisoned for distributing Prynne's books. Lilburne's petition
was presented by Oliver Cromwell. From the several distant
castles in which they were confined, the petitions of Prynne, and
Burton, and Bastwick, reached the House. These prisoners were
ordered to be brought to London. Leighton, mutilated, deaf, blind,
crept out of the cell in which he expected to die, to receive some
recompense for his sufferings. Lilburne had a money compensa
tion voted to him. Prynrie and one of his fellow-sufferers made a
triumphal entry into London. "Burton and Prynne came through
fne most of the city triumphantly : never here such a like show :
aoout a thousand horse, and, as some of good note say, above four
tnousand ; above a hundred coaches, and, as many say, above two
hundred ; with a World of foot, every one with their rosemary
bianch. Bastwick is not yet corrie from Scilly." * It was voted
th*8« these sufferers should be restored to their callings ; and that
those who had unjustly sentenced them should pay high damages,
as compensation, to each of them. Bastwick returned at the be
ginning of December, with trumpets sounding, and torches burn
ing, arid a thousand horse for his: convoy. " God is making here a
new world," says Baillie.
Some days before the assembling of Parliament, two remarka
ble men met in Westminster Hall, and began conferring together
upon the state of affairs. Mr. Pym told Mr. Hyde " that they
must now be of another temper than they were the last parliament ;
that they must not only sweep the house clean below, but must
sweep down all the cobwebs which hung in the top and corners,
that they might not breed dust, and so make a foul house hereafter;
that they had how an opportunity to' rilake the country happy, by
removing all 'grievances, and pulling Up the causes of them by the
roots, if all men would do their duties." f This was not idle talk
* Bailee's " Letters aud Journal,'1 vol. i. p. 277. f Clarendon.
390 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of Mr. Pym. On the night of Monday, the 9th of November, the
earl of Strafford came to London. On the morning of Wednesday,
the nth, Pym rose in his place i.i the House of Commons, and, say
ing that he had matters of thehighest importance to propose, de
sired that strangers should be excluded and the doors of the House
be locked. The member to whom Pym discoursed of pulling up the
causes of grievances by the roots was in the House, and has pre
served an abstract of Pym's speech. He recapitulated all that the
nation had endured in the attempt to deprive them of the liberty and
property which was their birthright ; " these calamities falling upon
us in the reign of a pious and virtuous king, who loved his people,
and was a great lover of justice." Pym's praise of the king, ac
cording to Clarendon, was, that he might wound him with less sus
picion. " We must inquire," said the innpassioned speaker, " from
what fountain these waters of bitterness flowed." There was one
man more signal than the rest in bringing these miseries upon the
nation — " a man who, in the memory of many present, had sate in
that House an earnest vindicator of the laws, and a most zealous
supporter and champion for the liberties of the people ; but long
since turned apostate from those good affections, and, according to
the custom and nature of apostates, was become the greatest
enemy to the liberties of his country, and the greatest promoter of
tyranny that any age had produced." And then he named "the
earl of Strafford." Pym concluded by expressing a hope that
they would provide a remedy proportionable to the disease. The
members went on debating till the usual time of rising was come;
but an order was given that no one should leave the House. After
many hours of bitter investigation into the actions of Strafford, it
was moved, " that he might be forthwith impeached of high trea
son, which was no sooner mentioned than it found an universal ap
probation and consent from the whole House." We must not for
get that Mr. Hyde was himself in the House ; and that whatever
colour he may give, when he writes as Lord Clarendon, to the pro
ceedings against Strafford, he was one of those who gave consent
and approbation to the impeachment. Falkland, indeed, recom
mended, though fully concurring in the determination to impeach,
that there should be a farther investigation by a committee pre
vious to the impeachment ; but Pym frankly said, that the moment
their proceedings were known, Strafford would procure the Par
liament to be dissolved, or resort to some other desperate meas
ures ; whereas, if they went at once to the Lords, he would neces-
IMPEACHMENT OF STRAFFORD. 39.I
sarilybe committed to safe custody. Late as it was, the peers
were still sitting. The doors of the House of Commons 'were
thrown open, and Pym, at the head of three hundred members,
proceeded to the House of Lords, and there,- at the bar, in the
name of the Lower House, and of all the Commons of England,
impeached Thomas, earl of Strafford, of high treason, and required
his arrest. The scene which followed has been spiritedly told by
the Principal of 'Ihe University of Glasgow, who, in his visit to
London, had leisure to learn more than most men, and had ability
to relate well what he learnt or saw : " The Lords began to con
sult on that strange and unexpected motion. The word goes in
haste to the Lord Lieutenant, where he was with the king : with
speed he comes to the House ; he calls rudely at the door. James
Maxwell, keeper of the Black Rod, opens. His lordship, with a
proud glooming countenance, makes towards his place at the
board-head: but at once many bid him void the House ; so he is
forced in confusion to go to door till he was called. After con
sultation, being called in, he stands, but is commanded to kneel*
and, on his knees, to hear the sentence. Being on his knees, he
is delivered to the keeper of the Black Rod, to be prisoner till he
was cleared of these crimes the House of Commons did charge
him with. He offered to speak, but was commanded to be gone
without a word. In the outer room, James Maxwell required him,
as prisoner, to deliver his sword. When he had gotten it, he
cries, with a loud voice; for his man to carry my Lord Lieutenant's
sword. This done, he makes through a number of people towards
his coach, all gazing, no man capping to him, before whom that
morning the greatest of England would have stood discovered, all
crying, What is the matter ? he said, A small matter, I warrant
you ! They replied, Yes, indeed, high treason is a small matter !
Coming to the place where he expected his coach, it was not there ;
so he behoved to return that same way through a world of gazing
people. When at last he had found his coach, and was entering,
James Maxwell told him, your lordship is my prisoner, and must
go in my coach ; so he behoved to do." *
There were others to be dealt with by the same summary pro
cess who had rendered themselves obnoxious to the nation. Straf
ford had been committed to the Tower on the 25th of November.
On the 4th of December there is this entry in Laud's Diary :—
" The king gave way, that his Council should be examined upon
* Baillie, " Letters and Journal," vol. i. p. 272.
392
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
oath in the earl of Strafford's case ; I was examined this day."
Very shortly after, the archbishop himself had to undergo a more
severe ordeal. On the 16th of December the Canons which had
been passed in Convocation after the dissolution of the last Par
liament were, to use Land's own words, " condemned in the House
of Commons as being against the king's prerogative, the funda
mental laws of tbe realm, the liberty and propriety of the subject,
and containing other things tending to sedition, and of dangerous
consequence." He adds : " Upon this I was made the author of
them, and a Committee put upon me to inquire into all my actions,
and to prepare a charge." On the same day he was named by the
Scottish Commissioners, in the Upper House, as an " incendiary."
On the 18th, Denzel Hollis carried a message to the Lords, im
peaching the archbishop of high treason. Laud was handed over
to the custody of the usher of the Black Rod. When he left
Lambeth, there was a tribute to his private character which is
touching in itself, but has no bearing upon his public errors. He
says, " As I went to my barge, hundreds of my poor neighbours
stood there, and prayed for my safety, and return to my house.
For which I bless God and them." Ten weeks afterwards he
was committed to the Tower. Articles of impeachment were pre
pared against the lord-keeper Finch, and against sir Francis
Windebank, secretary of state. They both fled the country.
" Within less than six weeks," writes Clarendon, "for no more
time was yet elapsed, these terrible reformers had caused the two
greatest counsellors of the kingdom, and whom they most feared,
and so hated, to be removed from the king, and imprisoned, under
an accusation of high treason ; and frighted away the lord keeper
of the great seal of England, and one of the principal secretaries
of state, into foreign lands, for fear of the like." But the terrible
reformers did not rest here. Five of the judges, who had c'eclared
ship-money lawful, were visited with a just retribution for their
servility. They were compelled to give securities to abide the
judgment of parliament, whilst the most obnoxious of them, sir
Robert Berkeley, being impeached of high treason, was taken to
prison from his judgment-seat in the King's Bench, " which
struck," says Whitelocke, " a great terror in the rest of his breth
ren then sitting in Westminster Hall, and in all his profession."
A laborious and learned writer has shown how, in the times of the
Plantagenets, the judges were regarded as " indifferent arbitrators,
whose decisions on constitutional points were conclusive, and be-
DESTRUCTION OF CROSSES AND IMAGES. 393
yohd the possibility of doubt or suspicion," But he truly points
otit the difference in the times of Charles I. " One of the primary
causes of the great rebellion that overthrew the government, and
that cost the king his head, was the degradation of the bench of
justice." * Clarendon himself clearly saw this great source of the
people's discontent.! In the proceedings of the House of Com
mons which led to the arrest of Berkeley, one speaker, supposed
to be Pym, but whose name does not occur in the pamphlet which
contains the speech, uttered these remarkable words : J " Mr.
Speaker, blasted may that tongue be that shall, in the least de
gree, derogate from the glory of those halcyon days our fathers
enjoyed during the government of that ever-blessed, never-to-be-
forgotten royal Elizabeth. But certainly I may safely say, without
detraction, it was much advantage to the peace and prosperity of
her reign, that the great examples of Empson and Dudley were
then fresh in memory. The civility of our law tells us, that the
king' can do no wrong but then only is the state secure when
judges, their ministers', dare do none. Since our times have found-
the' want of suchexamples, 'tis fit we leave some to posterity ! "
Whilst the leaders of the Parliament were intent upon the
re-establishment of civil rights, and the punishment of those who'
had violated them, the great religious party carried out the princi
ples which had covered Scotland with ecclesiastical ruins, by an
order that " commissions should be sent into all counties for the
defacing^ demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars,
or tables turned altar-wise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monu
ments, and reliques of idolatry, out of all churches and chapels." §
There is an interesting passage in Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs of
her husband which illustrates the mode in which this order worked
in country parishes, such as that in which1 Mr. Hutchinson's house1
of Owthorpe was situated : " The Parliament had made orders to
deface the images in all churches. Within two miles of his house
there was a church! where Christ upon the cross, the Virgin, and
John, had been fairly set up in a window over the altar, and sundry
other superstitious pointings, of the priest's own ordering, were
drawn upon the walls. When the order for razing out those rel
iques of superstition came,' the priest only took down the heads of-
* Foss, " JodgeS of England.1" t Ante, p. 362.
X Quoted by Mr. Forster, in his " Life of 'John Pym," p. 144.
§ By a subsequent vote the crosses of Cheapside and Charing were taken down,
Evelyn, in his " Diary," May 2nd, T643, says, " I went firim Wotton'to London, wherb
I saw the furious and zealous people demolish' that stately cross in Cheapside."
394
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the images, and laid them carefully up in his closet, and would have
had the church officers to have certified that the thing was done
according to order ; whereupon they came to Mr. Hutchinson, and
desired him that he would take the pains to come and view their
church, which he did, and upon discourse with the parson, persuade
him to blot out all the superstitious paintings, and break the images
in the glass ; which he consented to, but being ill-affected, was one
of those who began to brand Mr. Hutchinson with the name of
Puritan." The so-called Puritan was then a young man of twenty-
three ; and he was in himself a faithful representation of the reli
gious English gentleman, who had been bred up in a horror of
papistical observances, and who, by study of the history of his
country, and by serious meditation on the state of public affairs,
was prepared to take an earnest part in the great struggle of his
time: "He, applied himself," says Mrs. Hutchinson, " to under
stand the things then in dispute ; and read all the public papers
that came forth, between the king and parliament, besides many
other private treatises, both concerning the present and foregoing
times. Hereby he became abundantly informed in his understand
ing, and convinced in conscience, of the righteousness of the parlia
ment's cause, in point of civil right."
On the 30th of January, the charges against Strafford were laid
before the House of Lords. These were twenty-eight in number.
The Scottish Commissioners, and a deputation from the Irish
parliament, also put forward the same charges, of endeavouring to
rule the north of England and Ireland by military power; of attempt
ing to subvert the fundamental laws of the realm ; of labouring to
overthrow parliaments and parliamentary authority. During the
anxious period between the commitment of the great earl on the 1 ith
of November, and his trial on the 22nd of March, the Commons had
laboured assiduously in the work of legislation as well as in that of
punishing the instruments of evil government. Of these legislative
labours, which they continued till the close of the Session, we shall
give a short general view before we conclude our narrative of the
first Session of this memorable Parliament. Meanwhile, let us relate,
as briefly as the importance of the subject allows, the proceedings in
the trial and attainder of " the one supremely able man the king
had," * — the man whose acquittal and restoration to power would,
in the opinion of most persons, have given the death-blow to the
liberties of England. The proceedings against that eminent
* Carlyle.
CHARGES AGAINST STRAFFORD. 395
man have been condemned by many, who fully admit, with Mr.
Hallam, " that to bring so great a delinquent to justice according
to the known process of the law was among the primary duties of
the new parliament." But, " the known process of the law " having
been set aside, it is held that justice was not rightly administered.
The proceedings have been defended, even while it is fully admitted,
as Mr. Macaulay admits, that his " attainder was, in truth, a revolu
tionary measure ; " and in the same spirit they are justified, " by
that which alone justifies capital punishment, or any punishment, by
that alone which justifies war, by the public danger." *
" In that Westminster Hall which had witnessed so many
memorable scenes ; in that hall in which, re-edified by Richard II.,
the Parliament sat which deposed him, and Bolingbroke placed
himself in the marble chair; — in that hall were More was con
demned, and Henry VIIL sentenced a heretic to the fire, and the
protector Somerset was doomed to the scaffold ; — in that hall was
to be enacted a scene more strange than any which had gone before,
— the arraignment of the great minister who was identified with the
acts of the sovereign — a virtual trial of strength between the Crown
and the People. Of this trial, May, the parliamentary. historian,
says, " So great it was that we can hardly call it the trial of the
earl of Strafford only. The king's affections towards his people
and parliament, the future success of this parliament, and the hopes
of three kingdoms dependent upon- it, were all tried when Strafford
was arraigned. * * * Three whole kingdoms were his accu
sers, and eagerly sought in one death a recompense of all their
sufferings." May speaks also, of " the pompous circumstances and
stately manner of the trial itself." The hall was fitted up in a
manner quite unusual in any previous state-trial. There was a
throne for the king at the north end ; the woolsack of the Lord-
Steward, the earl of Arundel; benches for the peers, 'who sat in
their red robes, lined with ermine ; sacks for the lord keeper and
the judges ; and, what constituted the peculiarity of this trial, a
stao-e of eleven tiers of seats on each side, of the hall, seven of
which were reserved for the members of the House of Commons,
who were all there in Committee. The king did not occupy the
throne, but sat with the queen and his family in a box on the side
of the throne. "The trellis, that made' them to be secret, the king
broke down with his own hand, so they sat in the eye of all," writes
Baillie, who was present in the seats appointed for the Scotch Com-
* Macaulay, " Essay on Nugent's Hampden."
396 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
missioners. The doors were kept, he says, " very strai% with
guards. We always behoved to be there a little after five in the
morning." The Lords were in their places daily by eight o'clock ;
the king was usually half-an-hour before them. Many ladies were
present, in galleries allotted to them. On Monday, the 22nd of
March, as on every succeeding day, the earl of Strafford was
brought to Westminster from the Tower in a barge, accompanied
by the lieutenant, with boats full of armed men ; and on his land
ing he was guarded by the trained band. He took his place below
the bar at a desk, attended by four secretaries and his counsel.
" He was always in the same suit of black, as in doole [mourning].
At the entry he gave a low courtesie ; proceeding a litde he gave a
second ; when he came to his desk a third ; then at the bar, the
fore-face of his desk, he kneeled : rising quickly, he saluted both
sides of the Houses, and then sat down. Some few of the Lords;
lifted their hats to him. This was his daily carriage."* The sit
ting each day was prolonged to two, three, or four o'clock. " It
was daily the most glorious assembly the isle could afford ; yet the.
gravity not such as I expected," writes the observant Scot. While
the earl was preparing his answers to particular charges, the Lords,
he says, " got to their feet, walking, and clattered." The Commons,
too, made loud clattering. After ten o'clock they ate and drank,
" bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth to mouth without
cups, and all this in the king's eye."
But if, in the few resting minutes of this solemn trial, the wants
of the animal man were supplied after a homely fashion, never was
the supremacy of intellect more strikingly put forth to move pity or
compel indignation. " Every day, the first week,'' writes May,
" from Monday to Saturday, without intermission, the earl was
brought from the Tower to Westminster Hall, and arraigned many
hours together ; and the success of every day's trial was the greatest
discourse or dispute in all companies." The first of these days was
occupied by reading the articles of impeachment and Strafford's
written answers to them. On the second day Pym, the greatest
orator of the Lower House — that great assembly of high thinkers
and bold doers — being commanded by the Lord-Steward to pro
ceed, thus began :— " My Lords, we stand here by the command
ment of the knights, citizens, and burgesses, now assembled, for the
Commons in Parliament ; and we are ready to make good that,
impeachment whereby Thomas earl of Strafford stands charged in
* Baillie, vol. i. p. 316.
BILL OF ATTAINDER. 397
their name, and in the names of all the Commons of England, with
high-treason." The House of Commons had passed a vote " that
the earl of Strafford had endeavoured to subvert the ancient
and fundamental laws of the realm, and to introduce arbitrary
and tyrannical government." To sustain this allegation was the
chief object of Pym and the other managers of the impeach
ment ; and although the greater number of the articles exhib
ited could not be technically brought within the Statute of Trea
sons, they contended that acts which tended to subvert the con
stitution were acts of treason against the king. Our necessary
limits will not permit us to go through the various and complicated
charges upon which this principle was to be sustained. They were,
chiefly, acts of oppression as president of the Council of the North ;
arbitrary proceedings against individuals as governor of Ireland ; a
contempt for justice, by his assertion that the Irish were a con
quered nation, and that the king might do with them as he pleased.
He was charged that, as chief minister of England, he had advised
the king, if parliament failed to give him supplies, to levy what he
needed by his prerogative ; and that after the dissolution of parlia
ment, he said the king had vainly tried the affections of his people,
and he was free to do whatever his power would admit. On all
these points Pym spoke, having constant reference to the answers
which Strafford had put in. Strafford replied; and Pym rejoined.
On the third day, Maynard, a lawyer, one of the managers, followed
up the accusations regarding Strafford's Irish administration; and
Strafford, as before, replied with wondrous readiness — wondrous
when it is considered that he was suffering from severe disease,
and was alone against a host of enemies. Day after day this con
test went on. " Many foul misdemeanors," says May, "committed
both in England and Ireland, were daily proved against him : but
that ward which the earl, being an eloquent man, especially lay at,
was to keep off the blow of high treason, whatsoever misdemean
ours should be laid upon him; of which some he denied, others he
excused and extenuated with great subtlety, contending to make
anything good, that misdemeanours, though never so many and so
great, could not, by being put together, make one treason, unless
some one of them had been treason in its own nature." On the
thirteenth day of the trial, the loth of April, Pym moved in the
House of Commons that the proceedings should take the new form
of a bill of attainder against the earl of Strafford.
There was a rising member of the House, Henry Vane, the son
398 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of sir Henry Vane, who was comptroller of the royal household in
1639, and in 1641 was secretary of state. The youthful member
for Hull, afterwards so famous as —
"Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old,"
who, in his early enthusiasm for civil and religious liberty had left
all the prospects of ambition which naturally opened to him, to join
the colony of New England, had now returned home, as his friend
Milton had returned, when the mother country required the service
of her children. He was the means of an extraordinary disclosure
connected with the counsels of Strafford to the king. On that 10th
of April Pym stood up, Henry Vane being in his seat, and produced
a paper containing " a copy of notes taken at a junto of the Privy
Council for the Scots affairs, about the 5th of May last.'' White
locke thus relates how these notes, which were in the handwriting
of old sir Henry Vane, were obtained : — " Secretary Vane, being
out of town, sent a letter to his son, sir Henry Vane the younger,
then in London, with the key of his study, for his son to look in
his cabinet for some papers there, to send to his father. The son
looking over many papers, among them alighted upon these notes ;
which being of so great concernment to the public, and declaring
so much against the earl of Strafford, he held himself bound in
duty and conscience to discover them. He showed them to Mr.
Pym, who urged him, and prevailed with him, that they might be
made use of in the evidence against the earl of Strafford, as being
.most material, and of great consequence, in relation to that busi
ness." Young Vane's breach of his father's confidence will be
judged harshly or compassionately, according to the degree in which
it is believed that the public good is the supreme law. Old Vane
wept in the House when the notes were produced. These notes
were the record of a dialogue in which Laud, Hamilton, and Straf
ford were the speakers in Council ; and the words which Strafford
addressed to the king were these : "You have an army in Ireland
that you may employ to reduce this kingdom to obedience." On
the 13th of April, Pym read these notes in Westminster Hall.
Lord Clare, Strafford's brother-in-law, contended that this kingdom
meant Scotland and not England. Strafford took up this point,
and maintained that a man's life should not depend upon a single
word. The notes were admitted as evidence against him. The
whole tenor of Strafford's correspondence can leave no doubt upon
the mind of any dispassionate person, at the present day, that
DISCLOSURES OF HENRY VANE. 399
Strafford would not have had the slightest hesitation in recommend
ing the king to let him bring the Irish army to England, for the
overthrow of the fundamental laws of the realm. The peers of
1641 had not these materials of judgment before them; but they
had ample means of knowing that such an intention was in per
fect accordance with the principles which Strafford proclaimed and
acted upon.
Whilst the bill of attainder was debated in the Commons, the
Lords continued to sit judicially in Westminster Hall, as if no such
measure were in agitation. After the notes discovered by the
younger Vane had been received, Strafford was called upon for
his general defence upon the facts, leaving the law to his counsel.
He spoke two hours and a half. The hard and prejudiced Princi
pal of Glasgow University says, " He repeated nought new but
the best of his former answers ; and, in the end, after some lash-
ness and fagging, he made such ane pathetic oration, for ane half
hour, as ever comedian did upon a stage. The matter and ex
pression was exceeding brave : doubtless, if he had grace or civil
goodness, he is a most eloquent man. The speech you have
it here in print. One passage made it most spoken of ; his break
ing off in weeping and silence, when he spoke of his first wife."
Whitelocke, to whom we owe many of the most interesting memo
rials of this great time, has preserved this peroration in a less
perishable form than that of the " Diurnal " which Baillie trans
mitted to his Scottish friends :
" My Lords, it. is hard to be questioned upon a law which can
not be shown. Where hath this fire lain hid so many hundreds of
years, without any smoke to discover it, till it thus burst forth to con
sume me and my children ? That punishment should precede pro
mulgation of a law, — to be punished by a law subsequent to the
fact, is extreme hard: what man can be safe if this be admitted ?
My Lords, it is hard in another respect, that there should be no
token set, by which we should know this offence, no admonition by
which we should avoid it. If a man pass the Thames in a boat, and
split upon an anchor, and no buoy be floating to discover it, he who
owneth the anchor shall make satisfaction ; but if a buoy-be set
there, every man passeth at his own peril. Now, where is the
mark, where the token upon this crime, to declare it to be high
treason ? My Lords, be pleased to give that regard to the peerage
of England as never to expose yourselves to such moot points, to
such constructive interpretations of laws : If there must be a trial-
4.0O HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of wits, let the subject-matter be of somewhat else than the lives
and honours of peers. — -It will be wisdom for yourselves, for your
posterity, and for. the whole kingdom, to cast into the fire these
bloody and mysterious volumes of constructive and arbitrary trea
son, as the Christians did their books of curious arts, and betake
yourselves to the plain letter of the law, that telleth us what is,
and what is not treason, without being more ambitious to be more
learned in the art of killing than our forefathers. It is now full
two hundred and forty years since any man was touched for this
alleged crime, to this height, before myself : Let us not awaken
those sleeping lions to our destructions by raking up a few musty
records that have lain by the walls so many ages forgotten or
neglected. May your Lordships please not to add this to my
other misfortunes : Let not a precedent be derived from me so dis
advantageous as this will be in the consequence to the whole king
dom. Do not through me, wound the interest of the common
wealth ; and, however these gentlemen say they speak for the
commonwealth, yet, in this particular, I indeed speak for it, and
show the inconveniences and mischiefs that will fall upon it. For,
as it is said in the statute, I Hen. IV., no man will know what to
do or say for fear of such penalties. Do not put, my Lords, such
difficulties upon ministers of state, that men of wisdom, of honour,
and of fortune, may not with cheerfulness and safety be employed
for the public: If you weigh and measure them by grains and
scruples, the public affairs of the kingdom will lie waste ; no man
will meddle with them who hath anything to lose.
" My Lords, I have, troubled you longer than I should have
done, were it not for the interest these dear pledges a saint in
heaven left me." — Here he paused and shed a few tears. — "What
I forfeit for myself is nothing ; but that my indiscretion should ex
tend to my posterity woundeth me to the very soul. Vou will par
don my infirmity ; something I should have added, but am not able,
therefore let it pass. And now, my Lords, for myself, I have been
by the blessing of Almighty God, taught that the afflictions of this
present life are not to be compared to the eternal weight of glory
which shall be revealed hereafter. And so, my Lords, even so,
with all tranquillity of mind I freely submit myself to your judg
ment ; and whether that judgment be of life or death, ' Te Deum
laudamus.' "
When we read these burning words, we can easily believe the
statement of May, that the ladies in the galleries were all on
PYM'S REPLY TO STRAFFORD. 40I
Strafford's side. "So great," he says, "was the favour and love
which they openly expressed to him, that some could not but think
of that verse, " Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses ;
Et tamen asquoreas torsit amore Deas."
Never was quotation more happy. Strafford was not beautiful, but
he was the eloquent Ulysses, who bent the sea-goddesses to his
love. After such appeals — not only to " the pity proper to their
sex,'7 which May attributes to Strafford's fair friends, but appeals
to all who could be moved by natural sympathy towards a man
bearing up so bravely in the presence of imminent danger and
under the pressure of disease, — the majestic periods of Pym's re
ply would fall dull and cold. Even now Strafford'touches the heart,
whilst Pym holds the understanding in his powerful grasp. There
never was a grander scene in the ancient world of " famous orators "
— not when Demosthenes "fulmined." against Philip, and Catiline
trembled before Cicero — than when Pym, in the presence of the
king, of England, proclaimed that treason against the people was1
treason against the throne, and intimated that the sovereign who
abetted such treason was not himself safe from "amiserable end."
We may drop a tear for the fate of Strafford; but we should ill
deserve the freedom which we enjoy under a constitutional mon
archy, if we did not feel how much we owe to the noble assertion
of the dominion of law over arbitrary power which Pym then sent
forth into the heart of England :
"The law hath a power to prevent, to restrain, to repair evils.
Without this, all kinds of mischief and distempers will break in
upon a state. It is the law that doth entitle the king to the allegi
ance and service of his people ; it entitles the people to the pro
tection and justice of the king. It is God alone who subsists by
himself ; all other things subsist in a mutual dependence and re
lation. He was a wise man that said that the king subsisted by
the field that is tilled; it is the labour of the people that supports
the crown. If you take away the protection of the king, the vig
our andi cheerfulness of allegiance will be taken away, though the
obligation remain. The law is the boundary, the measure, betwixt
the king's prerogative, and the people's liberty. Whilst these
move in their own orbs, they are a support and a security to one
another, — the prerogative a cover and defence to the liberty of the
people, and the people by their liberty enabled to be a foundation
Vol. III.— 26
402 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to the prerogative. But if these bounds be so removed that they
enter into contestation and conflict, one of these mischiefs must
ensue, — if the prerogative of the king overwhelm the people, it
will be turned into tyranny ; if liberty undermine the prerogative
it will grow into anarchy."
There was not a man in that great assembly who could refuse
assent to the truth of these words. Happy would it have been;
-much misery would have been spared ; we might have reached in
1641 what we were struggling for till 1688, had these oracular sen
tences been equally the guide of prince and people. Charles must
have started at t'.e prophetic warning which followed : —
'¦ Arbitrary power is dangerous to the king's person, and dan
gerous to his crown. It is apt to cherish ambition, usurpation, and
oppression, in great men, and to beget sedition and discontent in the
people ; and both these have been, and in reason must ever be, causes
of great trouble and alteration to princes and states. If the his
tories of those eastern countries be perused, where princes order
their affairs according to the mischievous principles of the earl of
Strafford, loose and absolved from all rules of government, they
will be found to be frequent in combustions, full of massacres, and
of the .tragical ends of princes. If any man shall look into their own
stories, in the times when the laws were most neglected, he shall
find them full of commotions, of civil distempers, whereby the
kings that then reigned were always kept in want and distress ; the
people consumed by civn wars ; and by such miserable counsels as
these some of our princes have been brought to such a miserable
end as no honest heart can remember without horror, and an
earnest prayer that it may never be so again."
Again and again Pym asserted his leading principle, that the
offences of Strafford constituted the crime of treason, inasmuch
as he had "endeavoured by his words, actions, and counsels,
to subvert the fundamental laws of England and Ireland, and to
introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government." By the wise
law ofthe reign of Edward VI., all treasons were reduced to the
standard of the statute of Edward III., under which the offence
was clearly defined as comprising seven distinct heads — 1, com
passing the death of king, queen, or their heir ; 2, the offence which
was alleged against the two wives of Henry VIIL, and those impli
cated with them ; 3 and 4, levying war against the king, and adher
ing to the king's enemies; 5 and 6, counterfeiting the king's seal,
and counterfeiting the king's money ; 7, slaying the king's chancel-
CLOSE OF THE TRIAL. 403
lor, treasurer, or justices. Pym's interpretation of treason appears,
therefore, a somewhat forced inference from the actions and coun
sels of Strafford. And yet, fanciful as it may sound, there is rea
son in this grand declamation; " Shall it be treason to embase the
king's coin, though but a piece of twelvepence or sixpence ? And
must it not needs be the effect of a greater treason to embase the
spirit of his subjects, and to set up a stamp and character of servi
tude upon them, whereby they shall be disabled to do anything for
the service of the king and commonwealth ? " It is natural that we
should question the justice of such an extension of a definite stat
ute. Mr. Hallam, however, thus qualifies our doubts : " We are
not to suppose that the charges against the minister appeared so
evidently to fall short of high treason, according to the apprehen
sion of that age, as in later times has usually been taken for
granted ; " and he points out what we shall have presently to
notice, that the judges were of opinion that, upon the articles held
by the Peers to be proved against Strafford, he deserved to undergo
the penalties of the law.
The close of this great trial in Westminster Hall was dramatic,
in the highest sense of that word. Pym wound up his speech with
this appalling denunciation.
" The forfeitures inflicted for treason, by our law, are of life,
honour, and estate, even all that can be forfeited ; and this prisoner
having committed so many treasons, although he should pay all
these forfeitures, will be still a debtor to the commonwealth. No
thing can be more equal than that he should perish by the justice
of that law which he would have subverted. Neither will this be a
new way of blood. There are marks enough to trace this law to
the very original of this kingdom ; and if it hath not been put in
execution, as he allegeth, these two hundred and forty years, it was
not for want of law, but that all that time hath not bred a man bold
enough to commit such crimes as these." *
Pym had a few more formal words to utter, but having turned
round, his eyes met those of Strafford, who was intently gazing on
his accuser — the friend of his earlier years — his associate in the
great struggle which produced the Petition of Right, which Charles
and his ministers trampled upon.f The ancient friend, whose blood
the accuser had demanded in the name of his country, had said,
* The authority for Pym's speech is Rushworth. To understand its power, it should
be read complete in Mr. Forster's " Life of Pym."
t Ante, p. 336.
404
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
in one passage of his defence, " It pierces my heai;t, though not
with guilt yet with sorrow, that in my grey hairs I should be so
misunderstood by the companions of my youth." Their eyes met
Pym faltered. The unimaginative Baillie thus describes, and ac
counts for, the sudden failure of the great orator : " To humble the
man, God let his memory fail him a little before the end. His
papers he looked on, but they could not help him to a point or two,
so he behoved to pass them." *
The Bill of Attainder of the earl of Strafford was passed by the
Commons on the 21 st of April. Fifty-nine members voted against
it out of a house of two hundred and sixty-three. Amongst them
was lord Digby, son of the earl of Bristol. Although he described
Strafford as " the grand apostate to the commonwealth who must
not expect to be pardoned in this world till he be dispatched to the
other," he said, " and yet, let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, my hand
must not be to that dispatch. I protest, as my conscience stands
informed, I had rather it were off." The Bill was carried to the Up
per House by Pym, with a message " that it was a Bill that highly
concerned the Commonwealth in the expediting of it." The king
then went to the House of Lords, and stated that he had been
present during the whole trial of Strafford ; that he could not con
demn him of high treason ; but, said he, " I must confess for mat
ter of misdemeanours, I am so clear in that, that though I will not
chalk out the way, yet let me tell you, that I do think my lord
Strafford is not fit hereafter to serve me or the commonwealth in
any place of trust, no, not so much as that of a constable." This in
terference was offensive to the Commons, who deemed it a breach
of privilege for the king to take notice of any Bill during its pass
age through Parliament. There were other circumstances ill-cal
culated to allay the temper of the Commons or the people. Rumours,
afterwards distinctly proved not to be without foundation, were rife,
of a plot to bring up the army from the north to overawe the par
liament, and to effect the release of Strafford. Preachers in the
city poured forth invectives against the "great delinquent." Mul
titudes thronged the approaches to the House of Lords, demanding*
" Justice." The names ot the fifty-nine members of the Commons
who had voted against the Bill of Attainder were placarded as
* Baillie describes this concluding oration as " one of the most eloquent, wise, true
speeches that ever we heard, or I think shall ever hear." M. Guizot, referring to the
authority of the " State Trials," says that Pym read a prepared answer, without being
listened to by any one ; and that the Inok of scom which Strafford gave him made him
falter at the beginning of his speech, " which he had great difficulty in delivering."
ARMY PLOTS. 4O3
"Straff ordians, or betrayers of their country." The Peers, conr
suiting with the judges whether some of the articles against Straf
ford, which they considered proved, amounted to treason, received
an unanimous opinion that he had incurred the penalties which the
law awarded to that crime. The articles of treason which the
Peers deemed proved, were, the fifteenth, which charged, the Lord
Deputy of Ireland with raising money on his own authority, and
quartering troops on the people of Ireland, in order to compel obe
dience to his unlawful requisitions ; and the nineteenth, that which
charged him with imposing an unlawful oath on the Scots in Ire
land. In a house of forty-five, twenty-six Peers voted Strafford
guilty, and passed the Bill of Attainder.
Whilst this question was under debate in the House of Lords,
the Commons were singularly moved by the disclosures which were
made of the king's own participation in the design "to disiffect
the army to the Parliament ; " to bring it up from the north with
the view to place absolute power in the Crown. Goring, a colcnel
in the army, having taken umbrage at some preference shown to
Percy, a brother-conspirator, disclosed the plan to lord Newark,
who revealed it to other lords, through whom it reached the inde
fatigable John Pym. He brought the whole matter before the
House of Commons. The evidence of this plot, though by no
means definite or conclusive, was sufficient to prove that the king
had listened to a proposal of appealing to a military force to control
the representatives of the people. In the Memoirs of Madame de
Motteville, whp states that she had the information from the queen
herself, there is a relation of this army plot, which is. described as
a meritorious design, carried on at the desire of the king and queen.
Henrietta's favourite, Jermyn, was deeply implicated in it. Even
with the imperfect knowledge which the Commons possessed of
this somewhat wild scheme of the courtjers, combined with the
fact that Strafford had offered twenty thousand pounds to sir Wil
liam Balfour, the lieutenant of the Tower, to permit his escape, wc
can scarcely wonder at their immediate adoption of strong meas
ures. Their first resolution was to draw up a Protestation, under
oath to defend the Protestant Church, his majesty's person and
power, the privileges of parliament, and the lawful rights and
liberties of the people. This was immediately sworn to and signed
by every member present ;' was sent to the House of Peers, who
all signed except two ; and was circulated for general signature
through the kingdom. This Protestation became a touchstone of
406 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
opinions. Some months after, four thousand Buckinghamshire
petitioners rode to London with a copy of the Protestation stuck
in each man's hat. But the Protestation was of far less conse
quence than a short bill which was carried in this moment of alarm.
Earlier in the session an Act had passed " for the prevention of
inconveniences happening by the long intermission of parliament ; "
but the Bill which immediately followed the Protestation, — " to pre
vent inconvenience which may happen by the untimely adjourning,
proroguing, or dissolving this present parliament," — made the
Parliament itself the sole arbiter of its own duration. The royal
assent was given by commission to this Bill on the loth of May.
On the same day, the same commissioners consented to the Bill
of Attainder against the earl of Strafford. On the nth of May,
the king sent a letter to the Lords by the Prince of Wales, in which
he desired that a conference might take place with the Commons,
to the intent, he said, that "both Houses of Parliament consent,
for my sake, that I should moderate the severity of the law in so
important a case." This extraordinary postscript was added : — " If
he must die, it were charity to reprieve him until Saturday." Straf
ford had generously written a letter to the king to set his " con
science at liberty," so as to allow him to pass the Bill of Attainder,
" for prevention of evils which may happen by your refusal." But
it is clear that the earl, who thus gave this last proof of his fidelity,
expected another result ; for he exclaimed, when it was announced
to him that the king had passed the Bill, " Put not your trust in
princes." It is unnecessary here to enter into the question of the
weakness or wickedness of the king in consenting to the sacrifice
of Strafford. Charles held it, in the subsequent struggle of his life,
as his one great fault, — that which was justly punished by Heaven
in his misfortunes. Strafford met his fate with the same resolution
which had characterised the public actions of his life. He walked
to the scaffold, says Rushworth, a spectator of the scene, with the
step and manner of " a general marching at the head of an army,
to breathe victory, rather than those of a condemned man, to under
go the sentence of death." As he passed the window of the room
in which Laud was confined, he asked the blessing of the arch
bishop, and moving on exclaimed, " God protect your innocency."
The firm yet modest demeanour of the great earl produced little
mitigation of the dislike of the people. " In the evening of the
day wherein he was executed, the greatest demonstrations of joy
that possibly could be expressed ran through the whole town, and
EXECUTION OF STRAFFORD. 407
countries hereabout ; and many, that came up to town on purpose
to see the execution, rode in triumph back, and with all expressions
of joy, through every town they went, crying, ' His head is off, his
head is off.'" Warwick, the zealous adherent of the court, tells
this, " to show how mad the whole people were, especially in and
about this then bloody and brutish city, London." *
•Warwick, "Memoirs," p. 164.
408 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXII.
Act for the non-dissolution of parliament. — Jealousy of the Commons — Principal legisla
tive measures — Ship-money ; Star chamber ; Local arbitrary Courts ; Court of High
Commission ; Forests ; Writs for knighthood. — English and Scottish armies dis
banded. — The king goes to Scotland. — Intrigues with Montrose. — Parliament re-as
sembles- — The Irish Insurrection. — The king's progress to London. — Debate on the
Remonstrance. — The king's entertainment in the city. — Struggle of parties. — The
Remonstrance presented. — The king at Whitehall. — Tumults. — Protest, and com
mittal of twelve bishops. — Articles of treason exhibited against lord Kimbolton and
five members of the Commons. — The king attempts to seize the five members. — The
house adjourned.
The consent of the king to the bill for the attainder of Straf
ford, and to the measure which was afterwards called " The Act
for the Perpetual Parliament," can scarcely be attributed to any
other feeling than a sense of his immediate weakness. Mr. Hal
lam imputes Charles's ready acquiescence in this parliamentary
bill, to his own shame and the queen's consternation at the dis
covery of the army plot.* Lord Clarendon says, " after the pass
ing these two bills, the temper and spirit of the people, both within
and without the walls of the two Houses, grew marvellous calm
and composed." f The Parliament now went boldly and steadily
forward in the work of reform. A subsidy and a poll-tox were
granted ; but another subsidy of tonnage and poundage was granted
for a very limited time, from May 25 to July 15 ; so that the Com
mons might exercise the right of renewal, according to circumstan
ces. This subsidy was renewed, by subsequent Acts, until July 2,
1642. It is difficult to blame them for this excessive jealousy of
the designs of the Crown. The bill for triennial parliaments was
absolutely necessary, to takeout of the hands of the king the power
to govern again without a parliament. The more unconstitutional
measure of preventing the dissolution of parliament by the king
without its own consent, thus rendering the Commons independent
of the Crown and of their own constituents, cannot be justified
upon any principle consistent with the just balance of the mon-
* " Constitutional History,!' c. 9. t " Rebellion," vol. i.p. 459. ed. 1628.
PRINCIPAL LEGISLATIVE MEASURES. 4.09
archical and democratic interests in the State. Nothing but a
well-grounded suspicion of the designs of the king could have in
duced both Houses hastily to pass such a measure, upon the sim
ple allegation that money could not be borrowed under the author
ity of parliament if there was a prospect of. its. being suddenly
dissolved. " It is impossible to think," writes sir Philip Warwick,
"how so intelligent a person as this king was, should by any
persuasions, which certainly were great on the queen's side, or
treachery, which certainly was great on the side of many of his
great courtiers, be induced thus to divest himself of all majesty and
power." * The queen, under the influence of terror, as some have
believed, but more probably with the hope of procuring the inter
ference of foreign powers to restore the absolute authority of
Charles, was preparing, to leave the country. The princess royal
was betrothed to the eldest son of the prin,:e of Orange. A secret
article of the treaty stipulated that the prince should assist the
king, if the disputes with his Parliament came to an open rupture.
The queen, a. few months later, alleging her ill-health, wished to
seek a remedy in- the Spa-waters. Upon the remonstrance of both
Houges of .Parliament she consented to remain in England. Amidst
the contradictory and obscure traces of court secrets, one thing is
manifest — that there was not the slightest approach to a real union
between the king and the Parliament for the public good. Th£
royal concessions were made with a sort of recklessness which
argues that there was a- hope and belief that they might become
nugatory under some turn of fortune. The suspicions of the Com
mons were never wholly set at rest.
In the great legislative measures of this session, the Houses
were invariably anxious to rest their reforms upon the ancient
foundations of law and liberty. Thus in the Statute granting Ton
nage and Poundage, it is declared and enacted, " That it is and
hath been the ancient right of the subjects of this realm, that no
subsidy, custom, impost, or other charge whatsoever ought or may
be laid or imposed upon any merchandise, exported or imported by
subjects, denizens, or aliens, without common consent in Parlia
ment." f . In " An Act for the declaring unlawful and void the
late proceedings touching ship-money," it is declared that, the
writs and judgments thereupon " were and are contrary to and
against the laws and statutes of the realm, the right ;of property,
theliherty of the subject, former resolutions in parliament, and the
• " Memoirs," p. 181. t 16 Car. I c. 8.
4IO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Petition of Right made in the third year ofthe reign of his majesty
that now is." * Again and again the principle of arbitrary taxation
was made to hear its death-knell. In the Act for dissolving the
Court of Star Chamber and taking away the whole of its powers,
all the ancient statutes, including the Great Charter, which declare
that no freeman shall be imprisoned or condemned but by judg
ment of his peers, or by the law of the land, are recited ; and it is
affirmed that the authority of the Star Chamber, under the Statute
of Henry VIL, has been abused, and the decrees of the Court,
have been found " to be an intolerable burthen to the subjects, and
the means to introduce an arbitrary power and government." f
This Statute not only abolishes the Court of Star Chamber, but
the jurisdiction of the Courts of the Marches of Wales, of the
Northern Parts, of the Duchy of Lancaster, and of the County
Palatine of Chester. Under these arbitrary Courts one-third of
the people had been deprived of the protection of Common-law,
and were at the mercy of such local despots as Strafford.
In the Act for abolishing the Court of High Commission, it is
maintained that, under the Statute of the first of Elizabeth " con
cerning commissioners for causes ecclesiastical," the commissioners
" have to the great and insufferable wrong and oppression of the
king's subjects used to fine and imprison them, and to exercise
other authority not belonging to ecclesiastical jurisdiction." The
Act of abolition goes farther, and takes from the Ecclesiastical
Courts the power to inflict temporal penalties for spiritual offences4
The " Act for the certainty of forests, and of the meres, meets,
limits, and bounds of the forests," goes back to the days of Ed
ward I. as to ancient boundaries, and, reprehending their real or
pretended extension confines forests within such limits as were
recognised in the twentieth year of James I. § In " An Act for pre
venting vexatious proceedings touching the order of knighthood,"
reference is made to an ancient usage that men seised of lands to
the yearly value of forty pounds might be compelled to take upon
themselves the order of knighthood, or else to make fine ; but it
declares that many have been put to grievous fines and vexations,
for declining to receive the same dignity, being wholly unfit for it
in estate or quality. In all these enactments for the removal of
great oppressions, constant reference is had to the origin of the
abuses. There is no unreasoning pretext for their abolition, as if
the subject were to be benefited by arbitrarily curtailing the preroga-
* 16 Car. I. c. 14. t Ibid., c. to. X Ibid., c. 14. § Ibid., c. 16.
PRINCIPAL LEGISLATIVE MEASURES. 4II
tive of the Crown. Clarendon fully admits all the abuses which
these enactments swept away ; and yet, in the spirit of that ignoble
belief which he has done so much to perpetuate, that justice to the
subject can only be derived from the favour of the sovereign, he
says, of these Acts of Parliament, that they " will be acknowledged
by an uncorrupted posterity, to be everlasting monuments of the
king's princely and fatherly affection to his people."* Much more
rationally do we now feel that, " in by far the greater part of the
enactments of 1641, the monarchy lost nothing that it had anciently
possessed ; and the balance of our constitution might seem rather
to have been restored to its former equipoise than to have under
gone any fresh change " f It is to the Long Parliament, in this
triumphant session, that we owe a new era of civil liberty. If they
had rested here in their great work, they would have placed the
political rights of Englishmen upon the broad foundation upon
which the national greatness and security has been since built up.
Other questions, incident to the particular crisis, prevented that
concord between the sovereign and the people upon which the
safety of the monarchy must rest.
The pacification with Scotland was concluded by Act of Par
liament ; X and by another Act, the sum of 300,000/. was agreed " to
be given for a friendly assistance and relief towards the supply of
the losses and necessities of our brethren of Scotland." § On the
10th of August the king left London for Scotland. On the 9th of
September the Parliament adjourned. Charles had manifested
great impatience to proceed to Scotland. On his journey he passed
through the English army in. the North, which was disbanding ;
and he dined at Newcastle with Lesley, the general of the Scottish
army, which was returning home. The king was accompanied by
two commissioners named by the Lords, and four named by the
Commons, amongst whom was Hampden. Clarendon calls them
"spies." ' There was no discourtesy between Charles and these
commissioners ; but they were evidently there to watch and coun
teract his secret designs. The king had met the Scottish Parlia
ment; had sanctioned all their proceedings even to the abolition
of episcopacy ; and seemed bent upon securing the affections of
the nation by swearing to the terms of the Covenant, and attending
the presbyterian worship. There can be no doubt he was plotting
to destroy those whom he chose to consider as his personal ene-
* " Rebellion," vol. i. p. 504 t Hallam, vol. ii. c 9.
X 16 Car. I. c. 17. § Ibid., c. 18.
412 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
mies. Montrose had been in correspondence with the king. Ar
gyle had intercepted a letter in cypher, and the Parliament had im
prisoned the daring man who was now the great supporter of the
old order of affairs in the Scottish Church and State. Montrose
contrived to correspond with Charles, through one of his pages',
offering to produce proofs of the secret communications of Hamil
ton and Argyle, with Hampden, Pym, and other parliamentary
leaders, to bring the Scottish army into England in 1640. Hamil
ton and Argyle, having learnt that they were in danger of liberty
or life, absented themselves. For Montrose had endeavoured to
persuade the king to arrest them, and if resistance was made, to
remove them by assassination. Such was political and religious
hatred, when mixed up with the semi-barbarism of Scottish clan
ship. Clarendon says, " the king abhorred that expedient." There
was great alarm in Edinburgh ; but the king and the Scottish par
liament thought it wise to accommodate matters ; and the nobles
returned to receive marks of honour from Charles. But Hampden
and the other commissioners saw the danger with which they might
be threatened. "The leaders," says M. Guizot, "thought their
former relations with the Scottish insurgents had been pardoned,
together with the rebellion itself, by the last treaty of peace." It
was natural that they should so think. The Act of Parliament for
the pacification has these express words : " It is expedient for
making the peace and unity of his Majesty's dominions the more
firm and faithful, and that his Majesty's countenance against all
fears may shine upon them all the more comfortably, that an Act
of Pacification and Oblivion be made in the Parliament of all the
three kingdoms for burying in forgetfulness all acts of hostility,
whether betwixt the king and his subjects or between subject and
subject, or which may be conceived to arise upon the coming of
any English army against Scotland, or the coming of the Scottish
army into England, or upon any action, attempt, assistance, counsel,
or device, having relation thereto and falling out by the occasion
of the late troubles preceding the conclusion of the treaty and the
return of the Scottish army into Scotland; that the same and what
soever hath ensued thereupon whether touching upon the laws and
liberties of the Church and kingdom, or upon his Majesty's honour
and authority, in no time hereafter may be called in question or
resented as a wrong national or personal, whatsoever be the quality
of the person or persons, or of whatsoever kind or degree civil or
criminal the injury be supposed to be, and that no mention be made
THE IRISH INSURRECTION. 413
thereof in the time coming, neither in judgment nor out of judg
ment, but that it shall be held and reputed as though never any
such thing had been thought nor wrought." The Statute for the
pacification does not expressly pass such an Act of Oblivion ; but
after the king by his royal assent had declared its expediency, this.
manifestation of duplicity could only tend to widen the breach be
tween the sovereign and the legislature.
During the parliamentary recess a Committee sat at Westmin
ster ; and they instituted inquiries, and authorized acts, which were
certainly beyond their legislative functions. The news from Scot
land led this Committee to believe, according to Clarendon, that
" there was some desperate design on foot ; " and he adds that the
Scottish business, which was called "the incident," "had a strange
influence at Westminster, and served to contribute to all the sense
less fears they thought fit to entertain." * Other news soon came
to Westminster that produced there, and throughout the kingdom,
a consternation far more intense and lasting than any "senseless
fears." The House of Commons re-assembled on the 20th of
October. On the 25th the Lords of the Council communicated to
the House that a fearful insurrection had broken out in Ireland ;
and shortly after the king sent a letter to the Parliament, apprising
them of a "formed rebellion" which must be prosecuted with a
sharp war ; " the conducting and prosecuting which he wholly
committed to their care and wisdom." A Committee of both
houses at once took upon themselves the authority thus confided
to them ; "the mischief whereof, though in the beginning little
taken notice of," says Clarendon, " was afterwards felt by the king
very sensibly." Such a voluntary concession of the executive
power to the legislature was indeed a dangerous precedent.
The Irish insurrection of 1 641 was one of the most terrible
events in the history of that unhappy country. It was an event
which long perpetuated the hatred between the Irish natives and the
English settlers, and in a series of bitter revenges kept alive the
more deadly animosity between Catholics and Protestants. The
Irish army, which had been raised by Strafford, had been kept
together against the desire of the Parliament. The king had
wished to establish that army in Flanders, to be ready for any
service under the king of Spain ; but his plan had been prevented
by a parliamentary resolution, which afterwards became a law,
against " the raising and transporting of forces of horse Or foot out
* Appendix to " History of Rebellion," vol; ii. p. 576 (ed. 1826).'
414 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of his Majesty's dominions of England or Ireland." This Catholic
army was therefore disbanded; and it became a dangerous power
in a distracted country. The vigilant rule of Strafford was at an
end. There was no resident viceroy. The government was ad
ministered by the two lords justices. The Protestant troops in
Ireland were few, and they were scattered. Charles had striven
to prevent the disbanding of Strafford's eight thousand papists ;
and after that measure was accomplished, he had intrigued to
prevent the dispersion of these men. They were told to rally round
their sovereign, and by defending the throne prevent the extirpation
of the ancient religion. A general rising was at length determined
upon amongst some Irish chieftains and some of the ancient set
tlers of the Pale, for the purpose of seizing the castle. of Dublin,
and proclaiming that they would support the sovereign in all his
rights. The plot was betrayed as far as regarded the attack upon
Dublin castle ; but Ulster was in open insurrection on the 22nd
of October. Sir Phelim O'Neal was at the head of thirty thousand
men. What was intended to be an insurrection, for the redress of
civil wrongs and the removal of religious disabilities, soon became
a general massacre of Protestants. The conspirators in Ulster
were rendered desperate by the failure of the plot for the seizure
of Dublin. The puritan settlers of the north were especially
obnoxious to those who were in arms. They were driven from
their houses in an inclement season. They fled to the hills and
morasses, where they perished of hunger. They were put to
death, with all the horrors that only savagas and fanatics can
inflict. Women. and children were murdered with relentless fury.
Multitudes fled towards Dublin as their only city of refuge. The
number of those that perished has been variously estimated.
Clarendon says that "about forty or fifty thousand of the English
Protestants were murdered before they suspected themselves to be
in any danger, or could provide for their defence by drawing them
selves into towns or strong houses." Troops at length arrived
from England ; and after months of horror the insurrection was
quelled. The king could never wholly remove the belief that he
had instigated this fearful rising, or had connived at it. The Irish
insurgents themselves pretended that they acted under the royal
authority. There is a curious illustration of this circumstance in a
manuscript relation of the " Siege of Ballgaly Castle," in the
County of Clare, at the beginning of 1642, written by one of the
besieged. " After this the enemy would daily in our sight draw
THE KING'S PROGRESS TO LONDON. 415
forth their skenes and swords, flourishing them, swearing many
dangerous oaths that ere long they would draw us forth and hack
us to pieces, terming us puritan rogues, and all the base names
that might be invented, vowing that shortly sir Phelim O'Neal, and
at least 40,000 soldiers, would come into Thomond and not leave
a Protestant living, praying heartily for them, pretending that they
then fought for them, but within a short time after they pretended
that they were wholly the queen's army, and that she and her
mother were in the north aiding them, but no Protestant admitted
to look upon her. This note suddenly altered, and then they were
all for the king, vowing deeply that they had his Majesty's com
mission for what they did, and that they were his Majesty's
Catholic forces." *
When the parliamentary commissioners quitted Edinburgh
they urged the king's speedy return to London. His intentions
were, however, kept secret. He had left the earl of Essex com
mander of the forces south of Trent ; but the earl was not in the
confidence of the court. The queen, on the 20th of November,
writes to the secretary of state that he may now tell Essex when
the king is coming; for, she adds, " the king commanded me to
tell this to my lord of Essex, but you may do it, for these lordships
are too great princes now to receive any directions from me." t
In his progress from Scotland the king was received with demon
strations of respect and affection. At York he was told by the
mayor, "our wintry woods assume spring leaves to welcome home
so indulgent a sovereign." At .Stamford the mayor alluded to
the Irish rebellion, expressing his conviction that "although
Rome's hens should daily hatch of its preposterous eggs crocodi-
liferous chickens, yet under our royal sovereign we should not
fear." The king was to reach London on the 25th, and there to
dine with the lord mayor, who was a devoted royalist. It was
natural that the people of themselves should express these senti
ments of good will to Charles. Avast number of the grievances
of the nation had .been swept away, and the people would necessa
rily attribute much of the merit to the king, and be willing to lay
aside their doubts and complainings. It is not easy to understand
why the parliamentary leaders should have chosen the moment
of the king's return to greet him, not with their professions of
love, but with the strongest remonstrance against the whole tenour
* " Narratives of the Contests in Ireland." Caindeh Society.
t Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria, ' p. 46.
416 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.-
of his past government. The only solution is that they acted
under a distinct persuasion that it was impossible, at that time,
that a just balance could be restored between the monarchic and
the democratic principle, unless one power yielded something
more than had been already conceded, or the other power gave
up some of the advantages which it had already won. The con
viction in the mind of the king that he had a right to be absolute
had never been removed or lessened by the events of the past
twelve months. The resolution of the Commons that he should
not be again absolute was as strong as ever. But at this crisis the
men who had been unanimous in 1640 divided into two great
parties, — those who held that the monarchy should be still more
abridged of its power, and those who believed that any further
assertion of parliamentary authority would be to destroy the mon
archy. With the question of the due limits of popular rights was
mixed up the equally difficult question, whether episcopacy should
be regulated or abolished ; and this question, in time, became
merged in the wider question, whether England, like its neighbour
kingdom, should become presbyterian, or whether all state religion
should come to an end, and every congregation of Christians be a
church of itself. We cannot understand the real spirit of this great
time, if we judge the parties and the individuals in an uncharitable
temper — if we believe that the cavaliers, as the loyalists were
called, meant to fight for slavery and popery ; and that the round
heads, as the parliamentarians were called, were furious anarchists
or blind fanatics. An Englishman who will now look honestly and
calmly at the events Of this period, will rejoice that he is descended
from men who, whatever be their opinions, were earnest in their
advocacy ; who were, for the most part, no trading politicians,
merely intent upon their individual advancement ; who were truly
heroic in their passionate loyalty or their passionate love of civil
or religious liberty ; who, whether vilified as profligates or as hypo
crites, displayed, each in his own way, some of the noblest traits
of human character ; for they each were fighting with a conviction
that the eye of God was upon them, and the greater number of
them, whether Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Independent, believ
ing in his conscience that he was doing God's work in the world.
The debate on the Remonstrance was the great trial of strength
in the House of Commons. That debate began at nine o'clock of
the morning of the 22nd of November. It went on through that
day till it grew dark. Candles were called for. Twelve hours of
DEBATE ON THE REMONSTRANCE. 417
passionate talk, and yet no rest. The House thinned under the
faintness and exhaustion of this unusual sitting. But the excite
ment was greater than the weariness. The Remonstrance was
adopted by one hundred and fifty-nine votes against one hundred
and forty-eight. " At three of the clock in the morning," says
Philip Warwick, "when they voted it, I thought we had. all sat in
the valley of the shadow of death ; for we, like Joab's and Abner's
young men, had catched at each other's locks, and sheathed our
swords in each other's bowels, had not the sagacity and great
calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it, and led
us to defer our angry debate till next day." The Remonstrance had
been carried, but the " angry debate " was continued on the ques
tion of printing it. As they went into the house, Falkland said to
Cromwell that " it would take some debate," which Cromwell
doubted. As they went out, Falkland asked Cromwell whether it
had been debated ? to which he answered, " he would take his
word another time ; and whispered him in the ear, with some as
severation, that if the Remonstrance had been rejected, he would
have sold all he had the next morning, and never -have seen Eng
land more ; and he knew there many honest men of the same res
olution." This statement of Clarendon has been called " a vague
report, gathered over dining-tables long after, to which the reader
need not pay more heed than it merits." * This Remonstrance is
a document of 206 articles. It may be read in Rushworth and
Rapin, and its general tone is very like a declaration of war by one
potentate against another. We do not believe what Clarendon
affirms, that " the only end of passing it was to incline the people
to sedition ; " but we may admit with Mr. Hallam, that if Charles
" were intended to reign at all, and to- reign wrth any portion either
of the prerogative of an English king, or the respect claimed by
every sovereign, the Remonstrance of the Commons could but pro
long an irritation incompatible with public tranquillity." t
The manifestations of popular feeling at this eventful period
can scarcely be regarded as indications of public opinion. There
can be no doubt that, on either side, many arts were practised to
procure such demonstrations as might influence the temper of Par
liament, or support the wishes of the king. One of the most im
portant of these was the splendid welcome that was given by the city
of London to Charles on the 25th of November. Clarendon says,
* Carlyle's " Cromwell's Letters," vol. i. p. 95.
t " Constitutional History," vol. ii, c. ix.
Vol. III.— 27.
418 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" Gourney, the lord mayor, was a man of wisdom and courage, and
expressed great indignation to see the city so corrupted by the ill
artifices of factious persons ; and therefore attended upon his
majesty, at his entrance into the city, with all the lustre and good
countenance it could show, and as great professions of duty as it
could make or the king expect." The " Ovatio Carolina," as this
reception was called in a pompous account of the ceremonial,* was
in many respects the greatest pageant that " the royal chamber" nf
London had ever witnessed. The lord mayor and aldermen, and
five hundred horsemen selected from the liveries, in velvet and
plush coats, with pendants, and footmen, and trumpeters, rode out
to Kingsland. A new way through the fields was made to Shore-
ditch, for the ordinary road was " impassable, in regard to the
depth and foulness of it." The lord mayor had a tent pitched in
the fields near Kingsland, and thither the king and queen, with the
prince of Wales, and the duke of York, and the princess Mary,
were escorted by the sheriffs. Alighting from the royal coach,
the king received an address, to which he answered, that he
was returned with as hearty and kind affection to his people in
general, and to London in particular, as could be desired by lov
ing subjects. To mark his particular affection to the city, he gave
back " that part of Londonderry " from which the citizens had
been evicted. "This, I confess," he said, "is now no great gift;
but I intend first to recover it and then to give it you whole and en
tirely." Perhaps some of that assembly might have recollected that
Londonderry was taken from the citizens because they had refused
to comply with the illegal demand of a forced loan. Onward went
the gorgeous calvalcade to Moorgate, and so on to the Guildhall ;
and the houses were' hung with tapestry, and the conduits ran with
claret-wifie, and the people cried " God bless, and long live, king
Charles and queen Mary." The banquet was of proportionate
splendour ; and the old hall was brilliant on that November day
with the gorgeous dresses of lords and ladies ; and the city dames
vied in splendour with the high-born ; and it seemed in that hour
of festival as if in that large town of seven hundred thousand
people all were of one accord of loyal content. After the banquet
the king and the court were conducted in solemn procession to
Whitehall, the footmen carrying lighted torches, "so that the night
seemed to be turned to day " But even amidst this well-arranged de
monstration, there was doubt and alarm. The multitude gazed
• " Harleian Miscellany," vol. v. p. 86, edit, of 1810.
STRUGGLE OF PARTIES. 419
from behind the rails four feet distant from the houses, and admired
the splendid array of courtiers and citizens, of footmen and whif-
flers. But "because some seditious libels were at that time dis
persed, which bred a panic fear in some, order was taken, that there
should be two companies of the city's trained bands placed in
several parts of the city upon that clay ; as also that at every door
a man .should be placed, sufficiently appointed, to be ready upon
all occasions to appease any disorders."*
The reception of the king by the city appears to have given him
confidence in making a demonstration of his disposition towards
the Parliament. He withdrew the guard which Essex had appoint
ed for the security of the two houses. The struggle of parties
quickly began to assume a more formidable character. Men of
great influence changed their sides. The earl of Holland, who
had been a successful courtier in the time of James I. ; who was
afterwards a favourite of Charles's queen ; and whom the king,
says Clarendon, " but four months before had looked on as his own*
creature, as he had good reason to account himself from the begin
ning, joined himself close to and concurred with those councils
which, with the greatest bitterness, were held against him." Hol
land House, at Kensington, one of the few mansions whose quaint
architecture carries us back two centuries anda-half, was the scene
of many a secret deliberation of the popular party. The earl of
Essex and the earl of Leicester also took their side with those who
were considered the king's enemies. On the other hand, Mr. Hyde,
though without office, had become an adviser of the king. So,
also, sir John Colepepper, one of the most able of the parliamentary
leaders. More important than either, was the subsequent acces
sion of lord Falkland to the king's councils. Colepepper became
chancellor of the exchequer ; and Falkland, in a short time after,
secretary of state. Falkland was most reluctant to accept office ;
but he yielded to the persuasions of Hyde. With this additional
support of able and moderate advisers, Charles might have at
tained the enviable position of a patriot king had he adhered to
their advice, which, without any violent compromise of their former
opinions, would have tended to the maintenance of tranquillity.
The Remonstance of the Commons was presented to Charles at
Hampton Court on the ist of December. He received it with tem
per. The Remonstance was published ; and the king's answer to it,
written by Hyde, was also published. But the king had other ad-
• " Ovatio Carolina."
420 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
visers with whom moderate measures were the last in their
thoughts. Falkland had not openly seceded from his party till
after the king, by one rash act which we shall presently have to
relate, and the Commons, by a series of demands for power which
grew more imperative as the control of the House fell into the
hands of the more violent, had each rendered it impossible that a
pacification could be effected, without unduly crippling the mon
archy, or without returning to absolutism. The battle had to be
fought out by physical force. The wordy war was coming to an
end. The two days after the Committee of the House of Commons
had been at Hampton Court with the Remonstrance, the lord
mayor and a select number of aldermen of London arrived there
with an address. It was a harmless policy thus to attempt a coun
ter manifestation of public opinion, as if to neutralise the acts of
the Commons. But the machinery was very insufficient for the
object. The lord mayor implored the king and the queen to return
to Whitehall, " to give a good quickening to the retail trade ; " and
the king said he would return. The lord mayor begged that the
king would not impute to the city, or to the better sort of citizens,
disorders which had occurred about Westminster ; for " the skirts
of the city are more populous than the city itself, fuller of the
meaner sort of people ; " and if any dwellers in the city should have
been concerned in such disorders, " as who can deny among mil
lions of people, some there may be," yet their purpose was un
known to the city magistrates. This loose way of talking of mil
lions of people, as inhabitants of the capital, long prevailed. And
so the king and his family, at the sole instance of the obedient por
tion of the corporation of London, returned to the palace of White
hall a few days after, " there to keep their Christmas," as the king had
promised. It was an awful Christmas and an awful new year. For
six centuries of occasional troubles — of kings dethroned, of the red
rose and the white alternately prevailing, of Tyler and Cade insur
rections, of papist and protestant struggles, — the State had never
been so near anarchy as in this winter of 1641. The real constitu
tional strength, both of the king and the Parliament, was so bal
anced, that military power or popular fury might each decide the
preponderance. About Whitehall gathered bands of ardent gentle
men of town and country, some of generous loyalty and unstained
life, but more of loose habits and broken fortunes, — full of con
tempt for puritans, and perfectly ignorant of the real causes of dif-
TUMULTS. ' 421
ference between the king and the Parliament. Many of them were
Romanists. Ludlow's account, however coloured, is true in the
main as to the character of those who called themselves the king's
body-guard. " The king, finding that nothing less would satisfy
the Parliament than a thorough correction of what was amiss, and
full security of their rights from any violation for the future, con
sidered how to put a stop to their proceedings ; and to that end
encouraged a great number of loose debauched fellows about the
town to repair to Whitehall, where a constant table was provided
for their entertainment. Many gentlemen ofthe Inns of Court were
tampered with to assist him in his design, and things brought to
that pass, that one of them said publicly in my hearing, ' What !
shall we suffer those fellows at Westminster to domineer thus ?
Let us go into the country and bring up our tenants to pull them
out.' " * The king gave a sanction to the opinion that he contem
plated a resort to force, in his injudicious appointment of a Roman
ist and a desperado, Colonel Lunsford, to be governor of the Tower.
Clarendon thus speaks of the appointment : — " The king, finding
that the seditious preachers every day prevailed in the city of Lon
don, and corrupted the affections and loyalty of the meaner people
towards the government of the Church and State, resolved to put
that place, which some men fancied to be a bridle upon the city,
into the hands of such a man as he might rely upon." f The Com
mons requested the Peers to join them in a petition against this
appointment ; but the king superseded Lunsford upon the private
advice of the Peers. Tire popular cry finally set in against the
bishops. A bill was before the Lords which had been carried in
the other House six months before, for taking away the votes of
bishops and removing them from the House of Peers. In August,
thirteen of the bishops had been impeached by the Commons, for
having taken part in passing the Canons of 1640. The arch
bishop of. Canterbury was still imprisoned in the Tower. The
idea of the abolition of episcopacy was become familiarised to the
people by the example of Scotland, and by the ready adhesion
which the king had given to the presbyterian establishment there
in his recent visit. There was now a change in the demonstrations
of the corporation of London. A petition of the aldermen and
common council was carried to Westminster in a procession of
sixty coaches, praying that the House of Commons would still be a
means to concur with the king and the Lords in redressing the
* " Memoires," vol- i. p. 21. t " Rebellion," vol. ii. p. 81.
422 " HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
grievances of Church and State; "and for the better effecting
thereof that the popish lords and bishops may be removed out of
the House of Peers." The apprentices of London also agreed to
a petition to the king-, -showing that they found by experience,
great mischiefs coming upon their masters' tradings, " to nip them
in the bud when they were first entering into the world ; the cause
of which they could attribute to no other but the papists and the
prelates, and that malignant party which adhered to them." Truly
enough does Clarendon call this apprentices' petition " such stuff."
But the popular cry daily gathered strength. It was a small poeti
cal exaggeration in the author of " Hudibras " thus to unite " All
cries about the town," in one " hideous shout," around the palace,
" to cry the bishops down : "
" The oyster-women lock'd their fish up,
And trudg'd away, to cry, No Bishop.
The mouse-trap men laid save-alls by,
And 'gainst evil counsellors did cry.
Botchers left old clothes in the lurch,
And fell to turn and patch the Church.
Some cry'd the Covenant, instead
Of pudding-pies, and ginger-bread.
And some for brooms, old boots and shoes,
Bawl'd out to purge the Common-house ¦
Instead of kitchen-stuff, some cry,
A Gospe!-preaching ministry :
And some for old suits, coats, or cloak,
No surplices nor Service-book." *
" The Christmas holidays giving more leave and licence to all
kinds of people, the concourse grew more numerous about West
minster." -f As the audacity of the multitude increased so did the
fury of the cavaliers. Colonel Lunstord, disappointed of his gov
ernorship of the Tower, and other officers, were now engaged in
skirmishes with the apprentices and such leaders of the daily mobs.
" From these contestations the two terms of Roundhead and Cava
lier grew to be received in discourse," says Clarendon. The hair
of the London apprentices was cut close about their ears, and
hence the name of contempt. The factions, royalist, and parlia
mentarian, were bitter in their reproaches against each other as en-
couragers of these passionate outbreaks. The dogged cries of the
multitude, the insolent speeches of the king's friends, might have
passed off without any serious results beyond a few broken heads,
had not the bishops themselves become mixed up in the affray.
* Part i. canto ii. line 540. t Clarendon.
PROTEST OF TWELVE BISHOPS 423
Clarendon, who bore a decided ill-will to Williams, the archbishop of
York, attributes the evil results to the Church, chiefly to the pride
and passion of this archbishop. Hearing a youth in the street
vociferating "no bishops," the fiery Welshman seized him, and
there was a great scuffle, in which the archbishop's robes were torn
from his back. He returned to his house, the deanery of West
minster, and having assembled twelve of the bishops, who had been
often prevented attending in their places in parliament through
these tumults, proposed " that they might unanimously and presently
prepare a protestation 'to send to the House, against the force that
was used upon them: and against all the acts which were, or should
be, done during the time that they should by force be kept from
doing their duties in the House." The archbishop soon drew this
document, which all signed ; and forthwith carried it to the king at
Whitehall, who directed the lord keeper to present it to the Peers.
The immediate result was that the Commons accused of high trea
son all those who had signed the paper ; and the whole twelve
were committed. " In all the extremity of frost, at eight o'clock
in the dark evening, are we voted to the Tower," writes Joseph
Hall, bishop of Norwich — one who suffered much persecution un
deservedly, but whose character was safe in the hands of impartial
posterity. Imprudent and illegal as was this protest, it was a bold
stretch of party-feeling to call it treasonable. In the debate on the
bishops' offence in the House of Commons, onememberonly spoke
in their behalf, and said, " he did not believe that they were guilty
of high treason, but that they were stark mad ; and therefore de
sired that they might be sent to Bedlam." *
The cry of " no bishop " was certainly not an expression of the
national opinion. Although the arrogance and indiscretions of
some of the higher clergy, and their extravagant enforcement of of
fensive ceremonies, had disgusted many sober and religious per
sons, and even at this time had called forth a petition for the ref
ormation of the episcopal order from seven hundred beneficed
clergymen, there was by no means a general sympathy with those
who sought the destruction of the establishment. The Scots who-
were in England in 1641 were dreading that the people would be
content with a modified episcopacy. " All are for the creating,"
writes Baillie, " of a kind of presbytery, and for bringing down
the bishops, in all things spiritual and temporal, so low as can be
with any subsistence ; but their utter abolition, which is the aim
* Clarendon, vol. ii. p. 121. '
424 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the most godly, is the knot of the question." By " the most
godly" the exclusive presbyterian meant those only of his own
persuasion. What was called " the root and branch party " was
especially strong in London ; and the House of Commons had
come to a resolution for the abolition of episcopacy before the ad
journment in 1 641, by a majority of thirty-one, upon a bill brought
in by sir Edward Dering. Archbishop Usher had prepared a
scheme of reformation, under which each county was to be a dio
cese, with a governing college, or presbytery, of twelve, under the
presidency of a b 'shop ; and the House also voted for this plan.
The measure for excluding the bishops from the House of Peers,
which was the cause of the popular agitation in the Christmas of
1641, was supported by many who had no desire to subvert the
church, or to establish an ecclesiastical democracy. Falkland was
one of those who went to this extent. But to minds like that of
Falkland, earnest for civil and religious liberty, but also attached
to the ancient institutions ; disliking the persecutions which the
non-conformists had endured, but also offended by the narrow and
bitter spirit of the puritans ; opposed to popish superstitions, but
yet disgusted by the desecration of holy places, and by the insults
offered to the ministers of religion — to minds of this anti-fanatical
and tolerent cast the temper of the parliamentary leaders, and of
the populace at this period, must have been the signal for their ul
timate separation from their party. In this revolution of England,
as in all other revolutions, those who halt between two opinions
can scarcely expect to be victors. It is for the Cromwells to go
forward, ever confident and self-willed, from imminent danger to
triumphant success ; but it is for the Falklands to ingeminate the
word " Peace, peace ; " and to seek death in the battle-field as the
only refuge of hearts broken through the desolation of their
country.* With these fearful contentions around the king's palace and the
houses of parliament — Lunsford and his cavaliers drawing their
swords upon the city apprentices in Westminster Hall on one day,
and the apprentices returning in great force on another day, crying
out " Slash us now" — the Commons again petitioned the king for
a guard under the command of the earl of Essex. This guard the
king refused, except it were under an officer appointed by himself.
The leaders of the Commons had too many friends about die court
not to know that some crisis was approaching. The king had, no
• See Clarendon's famous character of Falkland, vol. iv. p. 240.
CHARGES OF TREASON AGAINST MEMBERS. 425
doubt, reasonable fears that it was contemplated to deprive him of
the control of the military force of the kingdom; and this, which
was the great point of difference in all subsequent attempts at
negotiation, might have led him to the adoption of the fatal measure
which shut out all hopes of tranquillity. On the 31st of December
it was voted in the Commons "that the House be resolved into a
Committee on Monday next, January 3rd, to take into considera
tion the Militia of the kingdom." From the time of the army plot
in May, 1641, it had been the object of the Commons to vest the
command of the Militia in persons nominated by themselves. We
have several times had occasion to point out that there was no
regular military force kept up, except a few soldiers retained for
the defence of fortresses. In earlier times of danger, the people
were called out under commissions of array. When invasion was
apprehended, as on the alarm of the Spanish Armada, the sovereign
exercised the power of mustering and training the population for
the common defence. The royal authority for arming the people
in time of peace was very doubtful. Thus the Parliament, whilst
the question of the Militia was in dispute, authorised " An Act for
the better raising and levying of soldiers for the present defence
of the kingdoms of England and Ireland," in which it was declared
that, " by the laws of this realm, none of his majesty's subjects
ought to be impressed, or compelled to go out of his county to
serve as a soldier in the wars, except in case of necessity of the
sudden coming in of strange enemies into the kingdom, or except
they be otherwise bound by the tenure of their lands or posses
sions." * There appeared no legal provision for calling out the
Militia in time of peace, except by a new Act of Parliament. With
our present knowledge of the constitutional powers of the sovereign,
we can have no hesitation in affirming that the power of nomina
ting the officers of such a force was necessarily a part of the royal
prerogative ; and that the requisition of the Commons to place the
command of the Militia in the hands of lords-lieutenant of each
county, to be nominated in a bill, and to obey the orders of the
two Houses, was an undue invasion of the rights of the Crown.
But, on the other hand, we must not forget that in the case of
Charles he had manifested a disposition, which Strafford had
distinctly encouraged, to employ an army to make himself absolute.
The king and the parliament were at issue upon the vital point as
to which should wield the power of the sword. The Commons
* 16 Car. I. c. 38.
426 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
suspected the king. The king hated the Commons. The question
of the Militia, and the question of episcopacy, were the questions
that made the opening year of 1642 the most ominous in English
history. The king endeavoured to solve the grand difficulty by
what, in modern times, is called a coup-d'etat.
When Charles, at this period of tumult and alarm, had bestowed
office on Colepepper and Falkland, and had sought the councils of
Hyde, he " declared that he would do nothing that in any degree
concerned or related to his service in the House of Commons with
out their joint advice, and exact communication to them of all his
own conceptions." So writes Clarendon, adding, " which without
doubt his majesty did at this time stedfastly resolve, though in very
few days he did very fatally swerve from it." The historian then
describes the influence possessed over the king by lord Digby,
who he represents as a man of great vanity, ambition, and self-
confidence. " The king himself," he says, " was the unfittest
person alive to be served by such a counsellor, being too easily
inclined to sudden enterprises, and as easily startled when they
were entered upon." Thus, he says, "a very unhappy counsel was
proposed and resolution taken, without the least communication
with either of the three who had been so lately admitted to an
entire trust." It would have been difficult for an enemy of Charles
to have more strongly depicted the weakness, rashness, and faith
lessness of his character, than in these words of his friend and pane
gyrist. On the 2nd of January, when the king sent his refusal to the
Commons to appoint a guard for their security, he added, " We do
engage to you solemnly, on the word of a king, that the security of
all and every one of you from violence is, and ever shall be, as
much our care as the preservation of ourselves and, our children."
On the 3rd of January, the attorney-general, sir Edward Herbert,
appeared at the bar of the House of Lords, and in the king's name
accused of high-treason, lord Kimbolton. and five members of the
Commons. These members were Pym, Hollis, Hampden, Hasle-
rig, and Strode. The attorney-general desired that these persons
should be placed in custody, and a secret committee appointed to
examine witnesses. They were accused of endeavouring to subvert
the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and deprive the king of his
regal power ; of alienating the affections of the people from the
king; of drawing his majesty's late army from their obedience ; of
encouraging a foreign power, Scotland, to invade the kingdom ; of
endeavouring to subvert the rights of parliament ; of compelling the
THE KING ATTEMPTS TO SEIZE THE FIVE MEMBERS. 427
parliament to join with them in their traitorous designs ; and of
conspiring to levy war against the king. The charge of correspond
ing with the Scots, in 1640, was, as we have shown, a technical
act of treason, for-which there was a legal defence under the Stat
ute of Oblivion. The other charges had reference to their parlia
mentary conduct, as Clarendon implies. On the same clay a ser-
jeantLat-arms appeared at the bar of the House of Commons, and
required the Speaker to place five members in his custody, whom
the king had accused of high-treason. The five members were
present when the officer named them. They remained in their
places, silent. The Speaker commanded the serjeant to retire ;
and sent a deputation to the king, of which Falkland and Colepep
per formed part, to say that so important a message should receive
their most serious consideration, and that the members should be
ready to answer any legal charge. The papers of the accused had
been sealed up, at their lodgings, by the king's command. The
House ordered that the seals should be removed, and the Speaker's
warrant issued for the apprehension of those who had affixed them.
The House then adjourned. On the morning of the 4th, the five
members of the Commons were in their places. It was perfectly
well known to a few what was about to happen. The king had
acted illegally,in the first instance, by sending a serjeant-at-arms
to demand the persons of the members without any warrant of the
privy council or of a magistrate. It was now known that he was
about to follow up this despotic attempt by an act still more uncon
stitutional. The Commons sent a message to the lord mayor,
aldermen, and common council, to inform them that the privileges
of parliament were in danger ; and some members were deputed
to the inns of court to desire the law students not to come to West
minster, as it was understood that they had been tampered with.
The House then adjourned till one o'clock. In a short time, it was
made known that the king was coming down the street from White
hall, escorted by three or four hundred armed persons. Again it
was reported that the king, with his band of attendants, had entered
Westminster Hall. It was a moment of terrible suspense. Some
members drew their swords. The more prudent urged the five
accused to retire, to prevent bloodshed. An account of the scene
which ensued has been preserved in the notes of one present, sir
Ralph Verney, member for Aylesbury. It is as graphic as it is im
portant as a parliamentary precedent*
* Mr. Hallam prints it from the original note-, more correctly than it is given in Hat-
Bell's " Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons."
428 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" As soon as the House met again [after the morning adjourm
ment], it was moved, considering there was an intention to take
these five members away by force, to avoid all tumult, let them be
commanded to absent themselves ; upon this the House gave them
leave to absent themselves, but entered no order for it. And then
the five gentlemen went out of the house.
"A little after, the king came with all his guard, and all his.
pensioners, and two or three hundred soldiers and gentlemen.
The king commanded the soldiers to stay in the hall, and sent us
word he was at the door. The Speaker was commanded to sit
still, with the mace lying before him ; and then the king came to
the door, and took the palsgrave in with him, and commanded all
that came with him on their lives not to come in. So the doors
were kept open, and the earl of Roxburgh stood within the door,
leaning upon it. Then the king came upwards towards the chair,
with his hat off, and the Speaker stepped out to meet him ; then
the king stepped up to his place, and stood upon the step, but sat
not down in the chair.
" And after he had looked a great while he told us he would not
break our privileges, but treason had no privilege ; he came for
those five gentlemen, for he expected obedience yesterday, and not
an answer. Then he called Mr. Pym and Mr. Hollis by name, but
no answer was made. Then he asked the Speaker if they were
here, or where they were ? Upon this the Speaker fell on his
knees, and desired his excuse, for he was a servant to the House,
and had neither eyes nor tongue to see or say anything but what
they commanded him ; then the king told him he thought his own
eyes were as good as his, and then said his birds had flown, but he
did expect the House should send them to him ; and if they did
not, he would seek them himself, for their treason was foul, and'
such a one as they would all thank him to discover; then he as
sured us they should have a fair trial ; and so went out, pulling off
his hat till he came to the door.
" Upon this the House did instantly resolve to adjourn till to
morrow at one of the clock, and in the interim they might consider
what to do."
THE KING DEMANDS THE MEMBERS AT GUILDHALL. 429
CHAPTER XXIII.
The king demands the Members at Guildhall. — Manifestations of popular discontent.—
The king removes from Whitehall. — The Members brought back in triumph. — The
queen leaves England. — Conference at Newmarket. — The king refused entrance to
Hu'.l. — Parliamentary Ordinance for the Miiitia. — The king forms a body guard at
York. — Propositions of the Parliament. — View of society immediately before the
commencement of the Civil War. — Arming of the People. — The Cavaliers. — Influ
ence and character of the Puritans. — The Clergy. — Shutting up of the Playhouses. —
Volunteers of London. — Women petitioning. — London apprentices. — Industry af
fected by the preparations for civil war. — Disturbances in the country districts. —
Maintenance of order generally. — Influence of the Press. — The Poets. — The Jour
nalists. — Superstitions. — The king sets up his Standard at Nottingham — His
gloomy prospects. — Messages between the king and parliament. — Essex marches
from London.
When the king left the House of Commons, the members for a
few seconds sat in mute astonishment ; but the cry of " Privilege,
Privilege," then burst forth, and the House instantly adjourned.
As the members passed into the lobbies, they found themselves
amongst a crowd of their own servants and other spectators, who
were repeating the violent expressions which had been used by
the king's attendants. The accused members proceeded to the
city. The night was one of general alarm. The citizens formed
themselves into armed patrols. The cry was that the Cavaliers
were coming to fire the city. At Whitehall there was terror and
despondency. The queen, who in the morning had seen the k'ng
go forth from the palace, promising her that he would return in an
hour, master of his kingdom, saw him return under the disgrace
of having attempted an unlawful act, and failed in the attempt. In
the evening it was known that the six members were in a house in
Coleman street. Lord Digby offered, says Clarendon, "with a
select company of gentlemen, who would accompany him, whereof
sir Thomas Lunsford was one. to seize upon them, and bring them
away alive, or leave them dead in the place." The historian, who
had just related the scene in the House of Commons, adds, with
wonderful naivete", " but the king did not like such enterprises ."
The Commons assembled on the 5th, and, declaring the king 's
coming " in a warlike manner " a high breach of privilege, a i*
430 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
journed for six days, appointing Committees to sit in the city. One
Committee occupied Grocers' Hall, another occupied Merchant
Taylors' Hall. Charles himself on that morning rode into the city
without any guards. He was received by the people generally
with cold- respect, and by some with cries of " Privilege of Parlia
ment." One man threw into his carriage a paper inscribed "To
your tents, O Israel ! " The king had written to the lord-mayor
to summon a Common Council in Guildhall. He told them that
he came amongst them without a guard, to show his affection ;
" that he had accused certain men of high-treason, against whom
he would proceed in a legal way ; and therefore he presumed they
would not shelter them in the city." Clarendon adds, " he de
parted without that applause and cheerfulness which he might have
expected from the extraordinary grace he vouchsafed to them."
The king told one of the sheriffs whom he wished to conciliate,
that he would dine with him ; and having dined, he returned
homewards, hearing the cry of " Privilege of Parliament " re
peated, and looking upon faces of gloom and disquiet. It was
Twelfth Night. The old Christmas gaiety of Whitehall was in
terrupted by such occurrences as England had never before seen.
But on this Twelfth Night the one play of that Christmas was per
formed in the Cock-pit. The king and queen were not present;
the prince of Wales, then a boy of twelve, was there to laugh at
the scenes of " The Scornful Lady," one of the most popular of
the dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. This was the last dram
atic performance which Whitehall witnessed during the reign of
Charles.* There were four more days of fear and vacillation
whilst the king and his family remained in the capital. The Com
mon Council sent a petition to the king, complaining of the attempt
to arrest the members. He makes an answer which only increases
the discontent. On the 8th he issues a proclamation to arrest lord
Kimbolton and the five Commoners. The parliamentary commit
tees in the city meet the proclamation by great preparations to
bring them back in triumph to Westminster. The courtiers now
became alarmed for the personal safety of the king and queen. On
the evening of the loth Charles left Whitehall for Hampton Court.
He never again entered that palace of the English kings, till that
fatal morning when he walked across the Park from St. James's,
attended by bishop Juxon, and guarded by a regiment of foot.
* The book of the Master of the Revels furnishes this record. See Collier's " Annals
of the Stage," vol. u. p. 102.
RETURN IN TRIUMPH TO PARLIAMENT. 43 1
At two o'clock of that day se'nnight on which the king had en
tered the House of Commons, the accused members were brought
back to the Parliament-stairs, in a rude triumph which presented a
remarkable contrast to the welcome which the city gave its sov
ereign on the 25th of November. From London bridge to West
minster the Thames was covered with pleasure-barges and wher
ries filled with citizens. Lighters and long-boats, carrying pieces
of ordnance, and dressed up with streamers, surrounded the barges
of the Commons. The trained bands marched past Whitehall,
bearing on their pikes the Protestation of 1 641, and the printed
votes of the Commons declaring the king's breach of their privi
leges, pinned on their breasts. As the crowd passed the palace
they exclaimed, "Where are now the king and his cavaliers?"
The House of Commons having met, the sheriffs of London were
called in, and received the thanks of the Speaker. The masters
and officers of ships, who had formed the river-guard, were also
thanked. Then came the freeholders of Buckinghamshire, who, to
the number of four thousand, had arrived in London to offer their
services for the defence of Parliament. They came, each wearing
the famous Protestation in his hat.* A deputation from the free-
' holders went the next day with a petition to the king, in which they
prayed that their representative, Mr. Hampden, and the other mem
bers who laboured under a " foul accusation," might enjoy the
just privileges of parliament. The king replied, " that because of
the doubt that hath been raised of the manner, he would waive his
former proceedings, and proceed in an unquestionable way." This
" unquestionable way " was never tried. Another attempt of the
king's rashest partisans was as unpropitious as the breach of privi
lege. On the day when the Buckinghamshire petition was pre
sented, Lord Digby and colonel Lunsford appeared with a body of
men in arms at Kingston. The parliament proclaimed them trai
tors. Digby fled beyond sea; Lunsford and his cavaliers attended
.the king to Windsor.
In the councils of Windsor, in which we may now well believe
that better advisers were listened to than the vain Digby or the
truculent Lunsford, a sensible plan of operations was resolved
upon. The king was to refrain from all open contests with the
* Butler calls this document—
" The prototype of reformation,
Which all the saints, and some, since martyrs,
Wore in their hats, like wedding-garters." — Hitdibras, .canto 2.
432 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Parliament ; to hold out terms of conciliation, and gradually to re
tire to the north, whilst his friends were gathering s'rength,
Charles invited the houses, on the 20th of January, to reduce all
their complaints to one specific relation. The Peers hailed this as
an omen of peace ; the Commons would put no faith in the king's
desire for conciliation, unless he would transfer the military com
mands of fortresses and the Militia to those who possessed the
confidence of parliament. The king gave a decided refusal to the
Commons' "sure ground of safety." The House then directed,
by Ordinance, that Goring, the governor of Portsmouth, and
Hotham, the governor of Hull, should hold those garrisons "for
king and parliament," and surrender to no one but under the
authority of the parliament. Day by day was the contest growing
to" a fatal crisis. The Houses passed a Bill for regulating the
Militia early in February. About the same time the Bill was
carried " for disabling all persons in Holy Orders to exercise any
temporal jurisdiction or authority," the preamble of which runs
thus, " Whereas bishops and other persons in Holy Orders ought
not to be entangled with secular jurisdiction, the office of the
Ministry being of such great importance that it will take up the
whole man." * To this Bill, by which the bishops were excluded *
from the House of Lords, the king at length gave his assent. The
Bill for the Militia he rejected. The queen urged her husband to
accept the one bill and reject the other. On the 16th of February
her majesty, escorted by the king to Dover, took her departure for
Holland. She carried with her the crown-jewels ; and her real
purpose was to raise forces for resisting the demands of the Par
liament. There are many letters from the queen to the king,
during her absence, which show how she laboured to strengthen
the king's infirmity of purpose. They communicated in cipher, and
the key to the cipher was always kept in the king's pocket. " Once
again I remind you," she writes, " to. take care of your pocket, and
not let our cipher be stolen." t The breach between the king
jmd the parliament upon the question of the Militia was more
tnd more widened. Commissioners were received again and again,
And the matter could not be accommodated; nor would the king,
at the earnest entreaty of the Houses, return to London. At last,
at a conference at Newmarket, when it was asked by lord Holland
and lord Pembroke, whether the Militia might not be granted for a
lime, Charles replied, " No; by God, not for an hour ; you have asked
• 16 Car. I. c. 27. t Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 54.
THE KING REFUSED ENTRANCE TO HULL. 433
that of me, in this, which was never asked of a king, and with which I
would not trust my wife and my children." This scene, in this locality
must have suggested a contrast to the usual meetings of the court
at Newmarket, for the race-course there was established by Charles ;
and few courtiers.fell in with the opinion of lord Herbert of Cher-
bury, who said, " The exercise I do not ?pprove of is running of
horses, there being much cheating in that kind." The king, after
this stormy conference, went on to York. Royalist forces had been
raised in the north by the marquis of Newcastle. The first step
towards an actual outbreak of civil war was quickly taken. On
the 23rd of April the king suddenly appeared before Hull at the
head of a strong body of horse, and demanded admittance into the
town. There was a large store of arms and ammunition in the
fortress, The mayor was about to open the gates, when sir John
Hotham went on to the ramparts, and falling on his knees begged
the king to excuse a refusal to the demand, for that he, as gov
ernor, had sworn to keep the place at the disposition of the parlia
ment. Charles was compelled to retire", proclaiming Hotham a
traitor. He then complained to the parliament, demanding justice
against the governor of Hull, according to law. The two Houses
voted their approval of Hotham's act. The crisis had arrived.
There was nothing more to be done for reconcilement. Thirty-two
Peers,~and sixty-five members of the Commons, joined the king at
York. Those that remained no longer attempted to pass Bills for
the royal sanction. They issued Ordinances. On the 5th of May
the Parliamentary Ordinance for the Militia was directed to be
carried out. The king proclaimed this ordinance to be illegal, and
summoned the gentlemen of York to form his body-guard. But even
in this county, which was considered the stronghold of the royal
ists, opinions were divided. The lord Chancellor, Littleton, had
sent the great seal to the king, that mystic symbol of legal govern
ment. Many gentlemen of the county assembled in the town-hall
of York, and were addressed by Charles, who was received with
loud acclamations. Commissioners of the parliament, men of local
influence, who had been sent to York to observe what passed, were
threatened by the king and hooted by the cavaliers. But under
this appearance of overwhelming strength, some fifty gentlemen,
with sir Thomas Fairfax at their head, refused to join in the form
ation of a body-guard. A more important demonstration of public
feeling occurred in the gathering round the hall of several thou
sands of the middle class, who demanded admission to the meet-
Vol II I.— 28
434 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ing, and being refused, held a meeting of their own, and protested
against the acts of a close assembly. The king called another
general meeting upon a neighbouring moor ; and thither came forty
thousand men, for the purpose of presenting a petition to the king,
imploring him to be reconciled to his parliament. Charles read a
paper, and was going away, when young Fairfax pressed forward,
and on his knee presented the petition of the people. The king
indignantly rode off, and after many violent ebullitions of contempt
from the cavaliers the meeting dispersed. The councils of the
king became irresolute. The decisions of the parliament, freed
from the royalist members who had retired to York, became
bolder. The leaders prepared for open war with marvellous en
ergy. They proposed terms of accommodation which they must
have anticipated would meet with rejection. These propositions
went to the extent of stripping the monarch of the greater part of
the constitutional powers which, happily, in our times, have been
found consistent with the most perfect liberty of the people. They
contemplated, more especially, the enforcement of the principle
that the appointment of the king's council and the great officers of
state should be subject to the approbation of the two Houses. By
the gradual establishment of ministerial responsibility, and the
harmonious dependence of the executive power upon the legisla
tive, such a result has been attained. It was then sought to be
attained by such a direct curtailment of the sovereign authority as
would have made the monarch what Charles truly described, "but
the picture, but the sign of a king." The courageous and. able
men who drew up these propositions must have been satisfied that
their adoption could have led to no permanent tranquillity; that
they were incompatible with the existence of the monarchical prin
ciple ; and that the executive power, under such arrangements,
could have had no real strength to preserve domestic peace or re
sist foreign aggression. But they dreaded a return to arbitrary
power; they suspected, not without cause, the inclinations of the
king. They had the great plea of self-preservation for their ac
tions ; and they knew that if they fell themselves, public liberty
would fall with them. Neither party was in a position to regard
their rights and duties with equanimity. The most terrible ques
tion that can be put to a nation was now about to be put — to which
of two powers, each claiming to be supreme, will you render obe
dience ? On the 9th of July, three days before the Houses came
to the decisive vote, that an army shall be raised '¦ for the defence
VIEW OF SOCIETY. — THE PEOPLE ARMING. 435
of the king and parliament " (such, for some time, was the phrase
of the Ordinances), one member, sir Benjamin Rudyard, uttered
this prophetic warning: "Mr. Speaker, it now behoves us to call
up all the wisdom we have about us, for we are at the very brink of
combustion and confusion. If blood once begin to touch blood, we
shall presently fall into a certain misery, and must attend an uncer
tain success, God knows when, and God knows what. Every man
here is bound in conscience to employ his uttermost endeavours to
prevent the effusion of blood. Blood is a crying sin : it pollutes the
land. Let us save our liberties and our estates, as we may save
our souls too. Now I have clearly delivered mine own conscience,
I leave every man freely to his.i' *
Let us pause at this juncture, at which the public men of Eng
land are exhibiting the spirit of party in aspects so unusual and so
portentous, and endeavour to catch some faint glimpses of the
life of the people immediately before the commencement of the
Civil War.
" Before the flame of. the war broke out in the top of the chim
neys, the smoke ascended in every country." So writes Lucy
Hutchinson, a careful and honest observer of what was passing.
She saw around her, in many places, " fierce contests and disputes,
almost to blood, even at the first." The partisans of the king were
carrying out his commissions of array. The partisans of the par
liament were insisting upon obedience to the ordinance for the
militia. The king proclaimed Essex, the captain-general of the
parliament, and his officers, as traitors. The parliament voted the
king's commissioners of array to be traitors. Not only were the
king and parliament each struggling to obtain possession of the
munitions of war by seizing the fortified places, but each barrel of
gunpowder was contested for by opposite parties. Mr. Hutchin
son, going by chance to Nottingham, at the time when Charles was
at York, is told by the mayor's wife that the sheriff has come to
take away the ammunition belonging to the trained bands of the
country. He goes into the town-hall, and finds lord Newark, the
lord-lieutenant, and the sheriff, with two or three captains, seeing
the gunpowder weighed. The king, said the lord-lieutenant, de
sired to borrow it — it should be restored in ten days. Mr. Hutch
inson contended that such was the danger of the times that in four
days they might be ruined for the want of the powder ; there was
* His printed speech bears date July 18; It is in the " Harleian Miscellany," vol v.
p. 216.
436 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
a troop of horse in the town, committing great outrages and inso»
lencies, and calling divers honest men puritans and rogues. The
contest went on ; but lord Newark, admitting that the powder be
longing to "the country," would have it for the king. When the
c mntrymen outside the hall knew what had taken place, they de
sired Mr. Hutchinson to stand by them, and they would part with
every drop-of blood in their bodies before the lord-lieutenant should
have the powder. Lord Newark angrily gave up his demand, when
he saw the multitude gathered around the hall. But still the power
of the magistrate was respected, and it was agreed that the mayor
and the sheriff should have the powder in their joint custody. Such
cantests between those of opposite Opinions were going on through
out England. Few of the members of parliament remained in Lon
don. The zealous men of influence in their several counties were in
their own districts, raising volunteers, gathering subscriptions, drill
ing recruits, collecting arms. Each is subscribing largely " for de
fence of the kingdom." Fire-arms are scarce ; and the old weapons
of the long-bow and cross-bow are again put in use. Old armour,
long since "hung by the wall," is brought down and furbished.
The rustic, changed into a pikeman, puts on the iron skull-cap and
greaves ; and the young farmer becomes a dragoon, with his car
bine and pistols. In the parliamentary army there is every variety
of clothing. In some companies raised by gentlemen amongst
their tenants, the old liveries of each family give the prevailing
colour. Hampden's men are in green ; Lord Brook's in purple ;
Others are in blue ; others in red. The officers all wear an orange
scarf, being the colour of their general. The buff doublet, " though
not sword yet cudgel proof," is a substitute for armour. Haslerig's
Lobsters, and Cromwell's Ironsides — each so called from their
rough mail — are not formed as yet. Recruits are taken, at first,
without much reference to their opinions. Cromwell, with his su
per-eminent sagacit)', saw the danger of this course. In a later
period of his life, when he had attained supreme power, he thus
described his position at the commencement of the war : — " I was
a person who, from my first employment, was suddenly preferred
and lifted up from the lesser trust to greater ; from my first being
a captain of a troop of horse." He then relates that he " had a
very worthy friend, a very noble person, Mr. John Hampden, and he
thus spake to him : — ' Your troops are most of them old decayed
serving-men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows ; and their
troops are gentlemen's sons, younger sons, and persons of quality;
INFLUENCE OF THE PURITANS. 437
do you think that the spirits of such mean and base fellows will
ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have honour, and courage,
and resolution in them.' " What Cromwell did to meet the ar
dour of the Cavalier with a zeal equally enthusiastic, he goes on to
tell: "I raised such men as had the fear of God before them, as
made some conscience of what they did." * Cromwell did justice to
the principle upon which the honour and courage of the Cavaliers
was founded. He saw, beneath their essenced love-locks and
gilded doublets, clear heads and bold hearts. The gay was not
necessarily debauched ; the health-drinkers were not necessarily
drunkards. There were other men in the royalist ranks than —
" The bravoes of Alsatia, the pages of Whitehall.'*
There were great spirits in both armies ready to measure their
swords for "The King," or for " The Cause."
We can scarcely assume that the bulk of the population, or
even the greater number of the richer and more educated classes,
at once took their sides in this great argument. We know they
did not. Many of the best gentlemen of England withdrew from the
quarrel which promised to be fatal either to order or to liberty.
John Evelyn, whose inclinations were royalist, was one. "The
Covenant being passed," he obtained a licence, signed by the king,
to travel. He found it " impossible to evade the doing very unhand
some things." t Sir Roger Twysden, one who had refused ship-
money, dreaded on the one hand to take part with the parliament,
for he "saw, if this war continued, it would prove the ruin of the
Protestant religion and the laws of the land ;" but, on the other
hand, he " did not love to have a king armed with book-law against
me for my life and estate." Mr. Kemble, the editor of Twysden's
" Government of England," from which we quote, says " Sir
Roger Twysden was not the only gentleman who, being unable to
join either party, desired to leave England for a time." This
learned student of our history adds, by way of accounting for the
flight to other lands of some of the country gentlemen, that " they
felt it was impossible to serve a king who never spoke a word of
truth in his life ; and yet could not arm against him, or remain
neutral between the two parties." X With every respect for con
scientious halting between two opinions, we must nevertheless feel
that it is nobler to be a little wrong in the adoption of one party or
* Carlyle's >" Cromwell," vol. iii. p. 250. This remarkable speech is also in Guizot'i
" Cromwell," vol. ii. p. 316.
t Diary. X Introduction, p. lxx.
43*5 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the other, than to stand aside in philosophical or interested indif
ference to either party. No cause can be wholly good or wholly bad.
Whilst Englishmen were girding up their loins for battle in 1642,
they presented a grande/ aspect than if the Roundheads had suf
fered Charles to come back in triumph to London, to be the abso
lute king which he claimed to be ; or if the Cavaliers had suffered
the Roundheads to trample the Monarchy and the Church in the
dust, even in an honest desire to correct their abuses.
The state of opinion in the country generally is thus represented
by Mrs. Hutchinson : — " Some counties were in the beginning so
wholly for the parliament, that the king's interest appeared not in
them ; some so wholly for the king, that the godly, for those gen
erally were the parliament's friends, were found to forsake their
habitations, and seek other shelters." But in London, after the
attempt of the king to violate the sanctuary of the House of Com
mons, and his removal from the seat of government, the majority
of the people became devoted to the parliament. That the influ
ence of those distinguished as "the godly," was more effectual in
the capital than In the country, would be manifest if there were no
other evidence than the bitterness with which the Puritans, and es
pecially their preachers, are spoken of by the Royalist writers.
The " Gospel Trumpeter, surrounded with long-ear'd rout," — the
" errant saints," — the " gifted brethren, preaching by a carnal hour
glass," were the objects of Butler's ridicule. Cleaveland's coarser
wit attacks the " new teacher of the town," — " his shopboard breed
ing," — his "cozening cough and hollow cheek," — his "hands to
thump, no knees to bow." The puritan clergy were more hated
than the " preaching cobblers, pulpit praters," whom some de
fended "in a merry way," saying that, when such men first began
to " take up that duty which the prelates and great doctors had let
fall," they each had invaded the other's calling," — "that chand
lers, cutlers, weavers, and the like, preached, while the archbishop
himself, instead of preaching, was busied in projects about leather,
salt, soap, and such commodities as belonged to those tradesmen." *
In London, the influence of the popular preachers, who filled the
churches and conventicles, was irresistible. Few of the clergy
were bold enough to support episcopacy ; and those who pro
claimed high-church opinions had very incredulous auditors. This
temper began in the hatred of popery, which the people saw lurk
ing behind the most harmless ceremonials. The cause of the par-
* May.
STATE OF THE CLERGY.
439
liament became the cause of the more earnest religionists ; whilst
the party of the king, though supported by many of sincere piety,
was also the rallying point of the indifferent, the pleasure-loving,
and the licentious. In the king's court, during its season of pros
perity, the splendours of the church were more regarded than the
ministration of the working clergy. -We have mentioned the per
formance of " The Scornful Lady " on the night of the eventful
5th of January. It is perhaps significant of the real want of respect
for the ministerial office, in a co.urt which was ready to risk a civil
war in the cause of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that at this time of
alarm a play was acted, of which " the trivial, senseless, and un
natural representation of the chaplain," was, seventy years after
wards, denounced as an offence against good morals ; with the
just observation that "it is so mean a thing to gratify a loose age
with a scandalous representation of what is reputable among men,
not to say what is sacred, that no beauty, no excellence in an
author, ought to atone it." The " Spectator," in the reign of Anne,
held that the character of the chaplain in " The Scornful Lady,"
" has done more towards the disparagement of holy orders, and
consequently of virtue itself, than all the wit of that author, or any
other, could make up for in the conduct of the longest life after it."
The chaplain of "The Scornful Lady" is not represented as a
Puritan. We see only, to use the words of the essayist, " a wretch
without any notion of the dignity of his func tion." * This was the
play selected by the master of the revels with an utter unconscious
ness of its impropriety. How should he have been conscious that
it was inconsistent with the boasted decorum of the court of
Charles to ridicule the degraded condition of the clergy, when the
curates who did the work were so scandalously paid, that in
London they were to be found dining at " the threepenny ordinary,"
and in the country were glad to obtain from the churchwarden
"a barley bag-pudding for the Sunday's dinner." The country
curate is described as being " under a great prebend, and a double-
beneficed rich man," with a salary inferior to his cook or his coach
man. The London curates are represented as living "upon
citizens' trenchers ; and. were it not that they were pitiful and
charitable to them, there was no possibility of subsistence." t
The Committee of the. Commons in 1641 received many bitter com
plaints from parishes that their rectors and vicars would not
preach themselves nor allow others to preach ; and they appointed
* Spectator, No. 270, — 1712.
t'See a curious tract, "The Curates' Conference," in " Harleian Miscellany," vol. i. 8vo,
440 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. •
"The Committee of Preaching Ministers," whose business was to
remedy these neglects. We can easily understand how, out of
this laxity in regard to the real interests of religion, whilst some
ministers were disputing whether " the Lord's table " should stand
in the body of the church or at the east end, railed or without rails,
covered or uncovered ; those who denounced a liturgy, or resisted
all ecclesiastical government, grew stronger and stronger, and prin
cipally increased in London and other great towns. From this
period we cannot understand the causes and the events of the Civil
War, without steadily keeping in mind that the zeal of the Puritans,
in whateve.r sectarian differences it exhibited itself, was as much
the sustaining principle of the great conflict, as the passionate de
sire for civil liberty. These two great elements of resistance to
the Crown produced impressions upon the national character, — for
the most part salutary impressions,— which two centuries have not
obliterated. The strength of the puritanical element in the parliament of
1642 led to bold interferences with popular habits. The parlia
mentary leaders knew that they would have the support of the
most powerful of the community of London, and of many other
great towns, if not of the majority of the nation, when they dis
couraged the ordinary amusements of the people, — the bear-bait
ings, the cock-fights, the horse-races, the May-poles ; appointed a
fast on Christmas-day; and shut up the theatres. Bitter must
have been the heart-burnings amongst the actors when their voca
tion came to an end in London, in 1642. The five regular com
panies were dispersed. Their members became " vagabonds,"
under the old Statutes, hanging about the camps of the Cavaliers,
or secretly performing in inns and private houses. Old John Lowin,
who was a fellow-actor with Shakspere, went to keep " The Three
Pigeons " at Brentford ; and in that ancient hostelry, a few years
ago, some scenes were discovered painted on a wall. The parlia
ment would not have ventured upon depriving the people of their
most cherished amusement, throwing so many persons into desti
tution, had not the suppression of plays been held by them as a
matter cf religious obligation. There is a solemnity' in the words
of " An'Ordinance of the Lords and Commons concerning Stage
Plays," dated September 2. 1642, which has no sound of hypocriti
cal pretence :— " Whereas the distressed estate of Ireland, steeped
in her own blood, and the distracted estate of England, threat
ened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, call for all possible
VOLUNTEERS OF LONDON. 44 »
means to appease and avert the wrath of God appearing in these
judgments : amongst which fasting and prayer having been often
tried to, be very effectual, have been lately and are still enjoined ;
and whereas public sports do not well agree with public calamities,
nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation, this being
an exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other being spec
tacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and
levity : it is therefore thought fit and ordained by the Lords and
Commons in this Parliament assembled, that while these sad
causes and set times of humiliation do continue, public stage-plays
shall cease and be forborne."
Milton has described two of the chief aspects of the London of
this period in very eloquent words : " Behold now this vast city ; a
city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty encompassed and sur
rounded with His protection. The shop of war hath not there
more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and
instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than
there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps,
musing, searching,, revolving new notions and ideas." * London
is the shop of war ; it is the home of thought. Let us look at the
vast city under the first of these aspects. It has always had its
Trained-bands. It has now its Volunteers of every rank. Ludlow
thus relates his first introduction to "the shop of war," when he
thought it his duty, as a young man, to take part in the cause of par
liament : " Soon after my engagement in this cause, I met with Mr.
Richard Fynes, son to the lord Say,and Mr. Charles Fleetwood, son to
sir Miles Fleetwood, then a member of the House of Commons ; with
whom consulting, it was resolved by us to assemble as many young
gentlemen of the Inns of Court, of which we then were, and others,
as should be found disposed to this service, in order to be instructed
together in the use of arms." t They frequently met at the Artillery
Ground, to receive this instruction from " a person experienced in
military affairs." Many who had been in the Protestant armies of
the continent, some who had fought under Gustavus Adolphus,
were competent to become such instructors. Such a man was
Skippon, who had been appointed major-general of the London
Militia. Clarendon does justice to his character : " The man had
served very long in Holland ; and from a common soldier had raised
himself to the degree of a captain, and to the reputation of a good
officer : he was a man of order and sobriety, and untainted with
* " Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." t " Memoirs," p. 43.
442 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
any of those vices which the officers of that army are exercised
in." The parliament considered this city force as a great arm of
strength : " Ordered, that the House shall meet to-morrow at eight,
and adjourn at ten, to the end that such as please may see the Mili
tia of the city of London exercised." * Eight thousand men were
mustered on this occasion. Tents were erected for the members
of parliament, and there was a city feast, without which the review
would have been maimed of its fair proportions. There were
healths, mingled with prayers and thanksgivings, on that and other
grand occasions. Skippon and his strict brethren were obliged to
compromise with some of the profane customs which they held in
abomination. When the parliamentary Ordinance for an army
went forth, the zeal of the people was called out in a more remark
able manner than by the sights of Finsbury fields. There was a
work to be done which would require heavy payments. Four thou
sand men had enlisted in one day, and they must have wages. The
tables of Guildhall were instantly heaped up with money and plate.
The wealthy brought their bags of silver and their parcel-gilt
goblets ; the poorer, their smallest article of value — " a thimble,
bodkin, and a spoon." May says, " it was a common jeer of men
disaffected to the cause to call it ' the thimble and bodkin army.' "
" Women, that left no stone untum'd
In which the cause might be concem'd,
Brought in their children's spoons and whistles,
To purchase swords, carbines, and pistols." t
Women took part in this great question of the time with an ardour
in which there is nothing really ridiculous. The cavaliers laughed
at "the zealous sisterhood ; " but, in a juster point of view, there
is something as heroic as the royalist countess of Derby's defence
of Latham House, in the demeanour of the puritan Ann Stagg, a
brewer's wife, when she went to the door of the House of Com
mons, at the head of a great number of women of the middle class,
and presented a petition, which said,—" It may be thought strange
and unbecoming our sex to show ourselves here, bearing a petition
to this honourable assembly; but Christ purchased us at as dear a
rate as he did men, and therefore requireth the same obedience,
for the same mercy, as of men : we are sharers in the public calam
ities." Pym delivered a gracious message to Ann Stagg and her
companions ; " Repair," he said, " to your houses, we entreat, and
» " Journals," May 9, 1642. f " Hudibras," part ii. canto 2.
APPRENTICES. 443
turn your petitions into prayers at home for us." Milton, com
mending the courtesy of the parliament to such petitions, says,
" The meanest artisans and labourers, at other times also women,
and often the younger sort of servants, attending with their com
plaints, and that sometimes in a less humble guise than for peti
tioners, have gone with confidence that neither their meanness
would be rejected, nor their simplicity contemned." *
The London apprentices, so prominent in these unhappy times,
and so really formidable in their organisation, require a brief notice.
They were not a low bred or illiterate class. The greater number
were the sons of substantial citizens or yeomen ; and even the
esquire did not disdain that his boy should serve in the shop of
the London trader. Stow says, " Because the apprentices of Lon
don were often children of gentlemen and persons of good quality,
they did affect to go in costly apparel, and wear weapons, and fre
quent schools of dancing, fencing, and music." Their principle of
confederation gave them their political strength. A writer of this
period says, " There is a kind of supernatural sympathy, a general
union, which knits their hearts in a bond of fraternal affection,
under the common notion of a London 'prentice. "t The dress of
the apprentice in the reign of Charles I. was, " the flat round cap,
hair close cut, narrow falling band, close side-coat, close hose,
cloth stockings," — an antique habit which may still be seen in the
streets of London, as worn by the youths' of that noble school,
Christ's Hospital. The violence of the apprentices against epis
copacy, and their general adherence to the cause of the Parliament,
were probably influenced by the opinions of their puritan masters.
But amongst this body there were some differences of opinion.
At the beginning of 1643, there was a petition for peace, presented
by "divers " London apprentices, which was not very favourably
received ; and in their published vindication they say, " Though we
for several considerations were not, or not suffered to be, of that
number who have exposed their persons to the fury of war, yet, as
they bleed outwardly, we bleed within for the distempers of this
Church and State." They probably belonged to the households
of the minority of citizens, or were sons of royalist families. Their
assertion that when they went to present their petition, they desired
" all the subscribers to meet at the Piazzas in Covent Garden, in
complete civil habits, without swords or staves," seems to point to
a contrast with the usual truculent demeanour of their fraternity ;
* " Apology for Smectymnus." t " Honour of London Apprentices," 1647.
444 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and suggests that " the great long club " and " the long dagger "
of the " well-grown sturdy apprentices," described by Stow, were
still the weapons which made the rallying-cry of " 'Prentices and
clubs ! " a terror to civic dignitaries.
It would have been more than strange if, amidst all the excite
ments of this summer, the preparations for. civil war — the doubts
and fears of those whose property or industry would surely be
affected by the loss of internal peace,— the prosperity of the king
dom generally, and that of the Londoners as much as any portion
of the nation, had not been materially affected. There is a curious
tract, issued " in the year of disasters, 1642," which sets forth the
general stagnation of employments. It is a bitter outpouring of
wrath against " that master-piece or idea of dissimulation, which
Nature made her example to portraiture a rogue by, the Round
head." Evidently written by a lawyer, it pours forth " St. Hilary's
tears for want of a stirring Midsummer term." In Westminster
Hall " those few judges left have time enough' to get a nap, and no
noise to awake them ; " — " the lawyers, instead of perusing the
breviates, and reducing the matter in question to cases, were buy
ing up all the pamphlets, and dispersing themselves in corners to
read them." The coaches that used to rumble up and down Palace-
yard, challenging heaven with their thunder, are here and there
one. The cooks in King-street lean against their door-posts. The
lodgings in the Strand are empty. " At the Exchange, the only
question that is asked is, what news ? — not from Aleppo, Constan
tinople, the Straits, or Indies, but from York, Ireland, and the
Parliament." In the halls of the City Companies there is no feast
ing but for the maste'rs and wardens. In the shops there is no
talk amongst the tradesmen " but condoling the want of the cour
tiers' money." This is not a very touching feature of distress.
It presents us nothing of the miseries of the poor, the first to suf
fer in a time of public distraction. Yet, from all the indications of
this remarkable period, we may collect that public order was
strictly maintained in London ; that there were no attacks upon
property; that life was perfectly secure. London was the general
resort of those whose opinions exposed them to danger in the
country. Ellwood, the quaker, says, " In my infancy, when I was
but about two years old, I was carried to London." His father
"favoured the parliament side, though he took not arms. Not
holding himself safe at his country habitation, which lay too near
some garrisons of the king's, he betook himself to London." The
DISTURBANCES IN COUNTRY. DISTRICTS. 445
little boy was the playfellow of the daughter of the lady Springett ;
" being admitted as such to ride with her in her little coach, drawn
by her footman about Lincoln's-inn-Fields." * The children in the
little coach give an appearance of perfect security to Lincoln's-inn-
Fields. It was in the country that the distractions of the time
bore hard upon the richer families. Every manor-house was liable
to attack by a royalist or a parliamentary band. Lady Brilliana
Harley had to put her castle of Brompton, in Herefordshire, in a
posture of defence, whilst her husband, sir Robert Harley, was
engaged in his parliamentary vocation. The courageous woman,
who died at her post, writes to her son, " My dear Ned, I thank
God I am not afraid ; it is the Lord's cause that we have stood
for." t The people of Herfordshire were mostly for the king. In
Essex, the party of the Parliament predominated. Arthur Wilson,
in " The Tract of my Life," says, " The twentieth of August,
1642, the king having left the parliament, and thereby a loose rein
being put into the mouth of the unruly multitude, many thousands
swarmed to the pulling down of Long Melford House, a gallant
seat belonging to the countess of Rivers ; and to the endangering
of her person. She being a recusant, they made that their pre
tence, but spoil and plunder was their aim. This fury was not
only in the rabble but many of the better sort behaved themselves
as if there had been a dissolution of all government. No man
could remain in his own house without fear, nor be abrpad with
safety." X At such a time, in a country where all were arming
themselves, with the purpose, or the pretence, of joining one party
or the other, lawless bands would undoubtedly seize the occasion
of tumult and rapine. A circumstance recorded in July, 1643, may
be anticipated in point of time as an illustration of this inevitable
result of civil commotion. There was an insurrection in Kent
against the Parliament. The house of Thomas Weller, the col
lector of the subscription money for the parliamentary arm}', was
broken into and plundered ; and one Parry, a smith, of Crayford,
and another man named Smale, held the following colloquy : " We
have sped well here," says Parry : "let us go to Hadlow and Peck-
ham, and plunder there, for they are rich rogues, and so we will go
away into the woods." Smale replied, " But we must plunder none
but Roundheads." With a great oath Parry rejoined, " We will
* ' * Life of Thomas Elwood, written by himself."
t " Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley," p. 180. Camden Society.
X Peck's " Desiderata Curiosa " lib. xii. p. 23. Folio.
446 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
make every man a Roundhead that hath anything to lose : this is
the time we look for." *
Amidst scenes such as these, " in all quarters of English ground,
with swords getting out of their scabbards," there is one neutral
power not wholly cast down — " the constable's baton still struggling
to reign supreme." f That power never ceased to assert itself
amidst hostile armies. The judges went their usual circuits. The
Sessions and the County Courts were regularly held. The constable
kept watch and ward, arrested night-walkers, pursued hue and cry
after felons, apprehended vagabonds, presented disorderly ale
houses. The overseer provided the common stock to set the poor
to work, and relieved the impotent poor. The local organisation
of England might be disturbed, but it was never destroyed. The
assumption of executive authority by the Parliament, if it were some
times abused, was everywhere directed to the maintenance of or
der. Whilst the chief nobles and gentlemen, who were the natural
conservators of the peace in their several counties, were gathered
round the king at York or Oxford, the leaders of the parliament
were not only looking after the particular interests of their cause,
and that very sharply, but were keeping the people under a strict
rule, however irregular. The sons of sir John Bramston are com
ing from the king at York, in July of 1642. Near Huntingdon they
are commanded to stand by certain musketeers, who start out of
the corn, " telling us we must be searched, and to that end must
go before Mr. Cromwell, and give account from whence we came,
and whither we were going."}: Mr. Cromwell is not yet in military
command, but he is a Justice of the Peace, and his name is already
a word of strength. He is member for the town of Cambridge ;
and has there exercised a very unusual representative power, by
seizing the magazine in the Castle, and stopping the transit of the
University plate to the king's quarters. The countrv gentleman
" in a plain cloth-suit," who farmed the tithes at Ely, and culti
vated land there, felt that he had the power within him to deal with
great public exigencies. In a very startling manner did he deal
with them.
In 1623 Charles heard, in Ben Jonson 's "Prince's Masque,"
allusions to a power which was then beginning to make itself for
midable. The "press in a hollow tree," worked by "two ragged
* Mr. Weller's Narrative. " Camden Miscellany," vol. iii.,p. 31.
t Carlyle's " Cromwell," vol. i. p. 98.
t " Autobiography of Sir John Bramston," p. 86.
THE PRESS. — POETS. 447
rascals," expressed the courtly contempt of that engine which was
to give a new character to all political action. In 1642, wherever
Charles moved, he had his own press with him. His state papers,
for the most part written by Hyde, were appeals to the reason and
the affections of his people, iii the place of the old assertions of ab
solute authority. In the same way, the declarations of the Parlia
ment approached the great questions in dispute, in the like spirit
of acknowledgment that there was a court of appeal beyond the
battle-field, where truth and right would ultimately prevail- This
warfare of the pen gradually .engaged all the master minds of the
country ; some using the nobler artillery of earnest reasoning and
impassioned rhetoric ; others emptying their quivers of vehement
satire, or casting their dirty missiles of abuse, on the opponents of
their party. Milton enters upon his task with a solemn expression
of " small willingness to leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed
with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea
of noises and hoarse disputes, put from beholding the bright coun
tenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." *
Cleaveland rushes into the fray with an alacrity that suits his im
petuous nature : —
" Ring the bells backward ; I am all on fire ;
Not all the buckets in a country quire
Shall quench my rage." t
Herrick was living in his vicarage of Dean Priors in Devonshire,
disliking the " people currish, churlish as the seas," amongst whom
he lived; scarcely venturing to print till he was ejected from his
benefice ; but solacing his loyalty with the composition of the
stanzas to "the Prince of Cavaliers," and recording his political
faith in two lines, which comprehended the creed of the " thorough "
loyalists : — " The gods to kings the judgment give to sway ;
The subjects only glory to obey." t
The general tone of the poets is expressed by Lovelace : —
" Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames." §
Butler, from the time when he left his father's cottage at Stren-
sham, on the banks of the Avon, to note down those manifold
* " Reason of Church Government," book ii. t " The Rebel School."
X " Hesperides," p. 151, vol. i. ed. 1833. § " To Althea."
.448 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
characteristics of his time which furnish the best picture of its
common life, was a royalist. Cleaveland, Carew, Suckling, Den
ham, Herrick, Butler, form a galaxy of cavalier versemakers. The
dramatic poets, who were left to see the suppression of the theatres,
such as Shirley, were naturally amongst the most ardent haters of
the puritan parliament. But Milton did not quite stand alone
amongst those with whom civil and religious liberty was a higher
sentiment than loyalty to the king. George Wither was the poet
of puritanism, as ready with bitter invective as Cleaveland. But in
Wither, the exalted spirit of fervent piety, which warmed the hearts
of the religious enthusiasts, whether "sitting by their studious
lamps," or shouting " The Cause " amidst the noise of battle, im
parts a majesty to his political poems for which we look in vain
amidst the songs of the Cavaliers : —
" With fury came our armed foes,
To blood and slaughter fiercely bent ;
And perils round us did inclose,
By whatsoever way we went ;
That hadst not thou our Captain been,
To lead us on and off again,
We on the place had dead been seen,
Or masked in blood and wounds had lain.1' *
The inferior men of letters then rushed to take up the weapons
of party in the small newspapers of the time. Their name was
legion. Their chief writers, Marchmont Needham on the parlia
ment side, with his " Mercurius Britannicus," and John Birkenhead
on the royalist side, with his " Mercurius Aulicus," were models of
scurrility. The character which Aubrey gives of Birkenhead was
probably true of the greater number of the journalists : " He was
exceedingly confident, witty, not very grateful to his benefactors,
would lie damnably." f The parliament writers had evidently the
best of it, if we may judge by the hatred which Cleaveland bears to
the whole tribe of journalists : " A Diurnal Maker is the sub-almoner
of history, queen Mab's register ; one whom, by the same figure
that a north-country pedlar is a merchant-man, you may style an
author." X A London Diurnal he calls " a history in sippets." He
says, "It begins usually with an Ordinance, which is a law still
born." Its chief ingredients are "plots, horrible plots." When
the time of fighting came, Cleaveland regarded " the triumphs of a
* Song 88. t Lives, vol. ii. p. 239. X " Character of a Diurnal Maker," ed. 1657.
SUPERSTITIONS. 44'r)
Diurnal " as " so many bladders of their own blowing; " and But
ler ridicules those victories which called forth " thanksgiving day
amongst the churches," as mere vapourings, though
" registered by fame eternal
Indeatliless pages of Diuroal." *
Whatever were their demerits, the little newspapers produced a
powerful effect. They were distributed through the villages by
the carriers and foot-posts. The country-woman brought a " Diur
nal " from the market-town in her egg-basket. They gave informa
tion to individuals, without committing indiscreet friends in cor
respondence. They probably did something towards general en
lightenment in places that would have been otherwise wholly given
up to local prejudices and superstitions. In a time of such great
public troubles all men had a touch of superstition. Evelyn looks
with wonder upon " a shining cloud in the air, in shape resembling
a sword." t After the fight of Edgehill, " in the very place where
the battle was stricken, have since and doth appear strange and
portentous r-iparitions of two jarring and contrary armies."' So
records a tract, iu wljich the " apparitions and prodigious noises of
war and battles "are certified by a justice of the peace, a preacher,
and "other persons of quality" Such a relation was evidently
not an attempt at imposture ; and must be received as a remarkable
instance of the illusions of the imagination, when preternaturally ex
cited by the immediate presence of extraordinary events. During
these wars the belief in witches reached a frightful extent ; and
the astrologers, with Lilly at their head, were going beyond their
ancient vocation of discovering lost spoons and prophesying happy
marriages, to discover in the stars the certain victory for the party
which offered the best rewards for their science.
Such, then, is a very imperfect sketch of a few of the salient
points of English society, at the time when rival armies of English
men stood front to front in the midland counties. The king in
August had vainly attempted to obtain possession of Coventry. He
had then gone to Leicester with a body of cavalry. On the 21st of
August, the king's nephew, Prince Rupert, had joined him, and
received the command of the horse. The next day they rode to
Nottingham. The king's purpose was, upon Nottingham Castle,
to set up his Standard — a ceremony which had not been seen in
England since Richard III. had raised his standard in Bosworth-
* Hudibras, part i. cauto 3. t Diary.
VOL. III.— 29
45° HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
field — a ceremony which was held by some legists to be equivalent
to a declaration that the kingdom was in a state of war, and that
the ordinary course of law was at an end. Evening was coming
on. The great streamer, such as was borne by many men at a lord-
mayor's show, was placed upon the highest tower, with a red
battle-flag waving over it. The herald read a proclamation ; the
trumpets sounded ; the friends who stood around the castle cried
" God save the king." A stormy night came on ; and, omen of
disaster as many thought, the standard was blown down.
The setting-up of the Standard would appear from Clarendon's
account to have been a hasty and somewhat desperate act. The
king had previously issued a proclamation " requiring the aid and
assistance of all his subjects on the north side Trent, and within
twenty miles southward thereof, for the suppressing of the rebels,
now marching against him." He calls, in a tone of supplication
rather than of command, to invite all " whose hearts God Almighty
shall touch with a true sense and apprehension of our sufferings,"
to attend our person at our town of Nottingham, where " we intend
to erect our Standard Royal in our just and necessary defence, and
whence we intend to advance forward for the suppression of the
said rebellion." Clarendon says, " there appeared no conflux of
men in obedience to the proclamation ; the arms and ammunition
were not yet come from York, and a general sadness covered the
whole town." There is a passage in his original MS. which adds,
" And the king himself appeared more melancholic than he used to
be." The historian of " The Rebellion " further enlarges upon the
gloomy prospect that was before the king and his adherents : —
" The king received intelligence the next day that the rebels' army,
for such now he had declared them, was, horse and foot and cannon,
at Northampton ; " besides a force at Coventry. " At Nottingham,
besides some few of the trained bands, which sir John Digby, the
active sheriff of that county, drew into the old ruinous castle there,
there were not of foot levied for the service yet three hundred
men. So that they who were not over much given to fear, finding
very many places in that great river, which was looked upon as the
only strength and security of the town, to be easily fordable, and
nothing towards an army for defence but the Standard set up,
began sadly to apprehend the danger of the king's own person."
There is an interesting description of Nottingham Castle by one
who, in another year, had there to endure great anxieties, and to
show the tenderness as well as heroism of a noble woman's nature.
THE KING'S ATTEMPT- TO NEGOTIATE. 45 1
Mrs. Hutchinson thus describes this remarkable place, of which a
modern building is now also a ruin, produced not by time, but by
popular outrage : —
" The castle was built upon a rock, and nature had made it
capable of very strong fortification ; but the buildings were very
ruinous and unhabitable, neither affording room to lodge soldiers
nor provisions. The castle stands at one end of the town, upon.
such an eminence as commands the chief streets of the town. There
had been enlargements made to this castie after the first building
of it. There was a strong tower, which they called the Old Tower,
built upon the top of all the rock, and this was that place where
queen Isabel, the mother of king Edward the Third, was surprised
with her paramour, Mortimer, who by secret windings and hollows
in the rock came up into her chamber from the meadows lying low
under it, through which there ran a little rivulet, called the Line,
almost under the castle rock. At the entrance of this rock there
was a spring, which was called Mortimer's Well, and the cavern,
Mortimer's Hole : the ascent to the top is very high ; and, not
without some wonder at the top of all the rock there is a spring of
water. . Under that tower, which was the old castle,
there was a larger castle where there had been several towers and
many noble rooms, but the most of them were down ; the yard of
that was pretty large ; and without the gate there was a very large
yard that had been -walled, but the walls were all down, only it was
situated upon an ascent of the rock, and so stood a pretty height
above the streets ; and there were the ruins of an old pair of gates,
with turrets on each side."
The importance attached, in these days, to the royal act of
hoisting a streamer of unusual size upon a commanding position,
can scarcely be adequately estimated in our times. It revived all
the traditions of feudality. It was the terrible symbol of the Lord
Paramount summoning his vassals to war. The motto which the
standard displayed might be taken as an assertion of the principle
of absolute power, which the king had supposed inherent in him :
" Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." That Charles
was supported throughout this contest by the belief that he was
not accountable to any power for his actions, was sufficiently mani
fested at this critical period. His advisers urged ah attempt to
negotiate with the Parliament. Charles refused with a " composed
courage and magnanimity '' which " seemed too philosophical and
abstracted from the policy of self-preservation." -But -he was per-
452 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
suaded to negotiate — not in sincerity of heart, but in the desire to
obtain an advantage from the mere manifestation of a disposition
to negotiate : " That which prevailed with his majesty very reason
ably then to yield was, ' that it was most probable (and his whole
fortune was to be submitted at best to probabilities) ' that, out of
their pride, and contempt of the king's weakness and want of power,
the parliament would refuse to treat ; which would be so unpopular
a thing, that as his majesty would highly oblige his people by
making the offer, so they would lose the hearts of them by reject
ing it ; which alone would raise an army for his majesty.' " * The
parliamentary leaders knew that the messengers of the king came
with hollow overtures. They knew his weakness at the moment
when he sent a message to the Parliament that his only desire was
to prevent the effusion of blood ; " our provision of men, arms, and
money being such as may secure us from further violence till it
pleases God to open the eyes of our people." The Parliament re
turned this answer : " We have endeavoured to prevent, by our
several advices and petitions, the dangerous and distracted state of
this kingdom, not only without success, but that there have follow
ed those several proclamations and declarations against both the
Houses of Parliament, whereby their actions are declared treason
able, and their persons traitors ; and, thereupon, your Majesty hath
set up your standard against them, whereby you have put them,
and in them the whole kingdom, out of your protection. So that,
until your Majesty shall recall those proclamations and declara
tions, whereby the earl of Essex and both Houses of Parliament
are declared traitors or otherwise delinquents, and until the stand
ard set up in pursuance of the said proclamation be taken down,
your Majesty hath put us into such a condition, that, while we so
remain, we cannot, by the fundamental privileges of Parliament,
the public trust reposed in us, or with the general good and safety
of this kingdom, give your Majesty any other answer to this mes
sage." f The king, in new proclamations, repeated his declarations
of the treason of the earl of Essex and others ; at the moment
when he had made another proposition that he would withdraw his
proclamations if the Parliament would withdraw theirs. Neither
party would make the first concession.
There is nothing more remarkable, amidst the anger and sus
picion of this momentous period, than the evident reluctance
of both parties to proceed to extremities. In such a conflict all
* Clarendon, vol. iii. p. 205. * Ibid., vol. iii.
REJECTED BY THE PARLIAMENT. 453
•would be losers. There was so much, of reason and justice on
each side that, till the shock of arms had let loose the passions that
belong to a state of war, there was a lingering hope that a day-
spring of peace would succeed this gloomy night. Sir. Edmund
Verney, the king's standard-bearer, thus expressed himself to Hyde :
" My condition is much worse than yours, and different, I believe,
from any other man's, and will very well justify the melancholic
that I confess to you possesses me. You have satisfaction in
your conscience that you are in the right ; that the king ought not
to grant what is required of him ; and so you do your duty and
your business together. But for my part, I do not like the quarrel,
and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent to
what they desire ; so that my conscience is only concerned in hon
our and in gratitude to follow- my master. I have eaten his bread,
and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing
as to forsake him, and choose rather to lose my life (which I am
sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things which are
against my conscience to preserve and defend." However we may
feel as to the civil and religious principles involved in this fearful
quarrel, our warmest sympathies go with the noble Englishmen who
were engaged on opposing sides, though the ties of blood and
friendship might have joined them in the same ranks. How many
might truly say to his friend and brother,
" Nought I did in hate, but all in honour."
In a letter from sir William Waller, the parliamentarian, to sir
Ralph Hopton, the royalist, this principle is enforced with a feeling
which, we confess, we cannot read without deep emotion, though
the actors in this tragedy have passed from the stage two centuries
ago : " My affections to you are so unchangeable, that hostility
itself cannot violate my friendship to your person ; but I must be
true to the cause wherein I serve. The old limitation of usque ad
aras holds still The great God, who is the searcher
of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service,
and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy.
But I look upon it as opus Domini, and that is enough to silence
all passion in me. The God of peace in his good time send us
peace, and in the mean time fit us to receive it ! We are both on
the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this
tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal
animosities."
454 History of englantj.
And so, there being no alternative but war, the Parliament, oh
the 9th of September, published a declaration to the whole king
dom, setting forth the causes of the war. On that day, the earl ol
Essex marched in great state out of London to join the army in
the midland counties with the trained bands. A few weeks later
the Parliament ordered London to be fortified ; and the population,
one and all, men, women, and children, turned out, day by day, ta
dig ditches, and carry stones for their bulwarks.
beginnings of the civil war. 455
CHAPTER XXIV.
Beginnings of the Civil War. — The king marches to Shrewsbury. — Skirmish at Wor
cester.— Battle of Edgehill. — The night and day after the battle.— Richard Baxter
visits the battle-field.— The king marches upon London. — The fight at Brentford.—
The royalists retire. — The Londoners march toTumham Green. — The war spreading
through England. — The queen lands with an army. — The court at Oxford. — Adminis
tration of justice. — Reading surrendered to Essex.
The flame of war is bursting forth in many places at once.
Fortified towns are changing their military occupants. Ports
mouth had capitulated to the parliament's army a fortnight before
the king raised his standard at Nottingham. Lord Northampton, a
royalist, had seized the stores at Banbury, and marched to the at
tack of Warwick castle. That ancient seat of feudal grandeur was
successfully defended by the commander who had been left in
charge, whilst lord Brook marched with some forces to the parlia
ment's quarters. Every manor-house was put by its occupiers
into a posture of defence; The heroic attitude of the English
ladies who, in the absence of their husbands, held out against at
tacks whether of Cavaliers or Roundheads, was first exhibited at
Caldecot manor-house, in the north of Warwickshire. Mrs. Pure
foy, the wife of William Purefoy, a member of the House of Com
mons, defended her house against prince Rupert and four hundred
Cavaliers. The little garrison consisted of the brave lady and her
two daughters, her son-in-law, eight male servants, and a few
female. They had twelve muskets, which- the women loaded as
the men discharged them from the windows. The out-buildings
were set on fire, and the house would have been burnt, had not the
lady gone forth, and claimed the protection of the Cavaliers.
Rupert respected her courage, and would not suffer her property
to be plundered. This young man, who occupies so prominent a
part in the military operations of the Civil War, was only twenty-
three when Charles made him his general of horse. He had served
in the wars for the recovery of the Palatinate, and had exhibited
the bravery for which he was ever afterwards distinguished. But
in his early warfare he had seen life unsparingly sacrificed, women
456 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and children put to the sword, villages and towns burnt, the means
of subsistence for a peaceful population recklessly destroyed. His
career in England did much to make the king's cause unpopular,
though his predatory havoc has probably been exaggerated. The
confidence which the king placed in him as a commander was not
justified by his possession of the high qualities of a general. The
queen who, dangerous as she was as a counsellor of the king, had
remarkable abilities, thus described the nephew of Charles when
he was about to sail for England : " He should have some one to
advise him, for, believe me, he is yet very young and self-willed.
I have had experience of him. This is why I thought it fitting to
warn you of it. He is a person that is capable of doing anything
that he is ordered, but he is not to be trusted to take a single step
out of his own head." *
About the middle of September, Charles marched with his small
army from Nottingham to Derby. Essex, with the forces of the
parliament, was at Northampton. The king's plans were very vague ;
but he at last determined to occupy Shrewsbury. He halted his
army on the 19th at Wellington, where he published a " Protesta
tion," in which, amongst other assurances, he said, " I do solemnly
and faithfully promise, in the sight of God, to maintain the just priv
ileges and freedom of parliament, and to govern by the known
laws of the land to my utmost power ; and, particularly, to observe
inviolably the laws consented to by me this parliament." There is
a remarkable letter of the queen to the king, dated the 3rd of No
vember, in which she expresses her indignant surprise that he
should have made any such engagement. " You promise to keep
all that you have passed this parliament, which, I confess, had I
been with you I should not have suffered it." She intimates that
there are persons about him, " who at the bottom of their hearts, are
not well disposed for royalty. * * * As to believing that they
wish you to be absolute, their counsels plainly show the contrary.
They must be made use of, notwithstanding." t The only notion
that the queen had of "royalty" was that it was to be "absolute."
Who can believe that Charles ever resigned that fatal idea ?'¦ Clar
endon says the king's protestation " gave not more life and en
couragement to the little army than it did to the gentry and
inhabitants of these parts, into whom the parliament had infused,
that if his majesty prevailed by force, he would, with the same
power, abolish all those good laws which had been made this par-
* Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 97. t Ibid., p. 144.
SKIRMISH AT WORCESTER. 457
liament."* Their comfort and satisfaction might have been less,
if the queen's letter, now amongst the Harleian Manuscripts, and
another of the same import, had been as public as the king's pro
testation. The discovery and publication of other such letters
produced unbounded- evil to the royal cause whilst the issue of the
contest was doubtful. Time has revealed many more secrets of
the same nature, which may somewhat qualify the enthusiasm of
those who, after the lapse of two centuries, read the history of the
Civil War in a spirit more cavalier than that of the Cavaliers.
On the 22nd of September, Essex moved his army to Worcester.
Here the first rencounter took place between the cavalry of Rupert
and the parliamentary cuirassiers. The royalists had a decided
advantage. Ludlow, who was in the skirmish, gives a ludicrous
account of the inexperience, and something worse, of the parlia
ment's raw troops. The lieutenant " commanded us to wheel
about ; but our gentlemen, not yet well understanding the differ
ence between wheeling, about and shifting for themselves, their
backs being now towards the enemy whom they thought to be close
in the rear, retired to the army in a very dishonourable manner ;
and the next morning rallied at head-quarters, where we received
but cold welcome from our general, as we well deserved." f After
remaining at Shrewsbury about twenty days, Charles resolved to
march towards London. He expected that, as the armies ap
proached each other, many soldiers would come over to the royal
standard. . He was almost without money, except a sum of six
thousand pounds which he received by "making merchandise of
honour," to use Clarendon's expression — being the price for which
he created Sir Richard Newport a baron. His foot-soldiers were
mostly armed with muskets ; but three or four hundred had for
their only weapon a cudgel. Few of the musketeers had swords,
and the pikemen were without corslets. The royal army moved
from Shrewsbury on the 12th of October, on to Wolverhampton,
Birmingham, and Kenilworth. Two days after, the earl of Essex
marched from Worcester in the direction which Charles had taken.
They were- only separated by twenty miles when the king first
moved from Shrewsbury, but it was ten days before they came
near each other. "Neither army," says Clarendon, "knew whera
the other was." On the night of the 22nd of October, the king was
at Edgcot, a villagb near Banbury. The council broke up late.
There was disunion in the camp. The earl of Lindsey by his com-
* " Rebellion," vol. iii. p. 222. t " Memoirs," p. 46.
458 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
mission was general of the whole army ; but when Charles ap*
pointed prince Rupert his general of horse, he exempted him from
receiving orders from any one but the king himself — to such extent
did this king carry his over-weening pride of blood. Rupert inso
lently refused to take the royal directions through lord Falkland,
the secretary of state. In the same spirit, when a battle was ex
pected, Charles took the advice of his nephew, rejecting the opin
ion of the veteran Lindsey. At twelve o'clock on the night of the
22nd Rupert sent the king word " that the body of the rebel army
was within seven or eight miles, and that the head-quarters was at
a village called Keinton, on the edge of Warwickshire." On Sun
day morning, the 23rd, the banner of Charles was waving on the
top of Edgehill, which commanded a prospect of the valley in which
a part of the army of Essex was moving. The greater portion of
the parliament's artillery, with two regiments of foot and one of
horse, was a day's march behind. The king, having the advantage
of numbers, determined to engage. He appeared amongst his
ranks, with a black. velvet mantle over his armour, and wearing his
star and garter. He addressed his troops, declaring his love to
his whole kingdom, but asserting his royal authority "derived from
God, whose substitute, and supreme governor under Christ, I
am." * At two o'clock the royal army descended the hill. Clar
endon, in noticing the dissensions created by Rupert's exclusive
appointment, says, it "separated all the horse from any depend
ence upon the general." Lindsey went into the battle, pike in
hand, at the head of the foot guards, in the centre of the first line.
"Sir Jacob Astley," writes Warwick, "was major-general of the
army under the earl of Lindsey ; who, before the charge of the
battle at Edgehill, made a most excellent, pious, short, and sol
dierly prayer ; for he lifted up his eyes and hands to heaven, say
ing, ' O Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day ; if I
forget thee, do not Thou forget me.' And with that rose up, cry
ing ' March on, boys.' " f
Between the town of Keinton and Edgehill was " a fair cam
paign, save that near the town it was narrower, and on the right
hand some hedges and inclosures." Ludlow, who was in the bat
tle, confirms this description of the ground, given by Clarendon :
Colonel Weston's letter, quoted in Lord Nugent's " Hampden," vol. ii. p. 239.
t Warwick is the sole authority for this. It has been questioned, from the construc
tion of the sentence, whether the " who" applies to Lindsey or AsHey. See Warburton**
" Rupert and the Cavaliers," vol. ii. p. 21.
THE NIGHT. AND DAY AFTER THE BATTLE. 459/
"The great shot was exchanged on both sides, for the space of an
hour or thereabouts. By this time the foot began to engage ; and
a party of the enemy being sent to line some hedges on our right
wing, thereby to beat us from our ground, were repulsed by our
dragoons." The foot soldiers on each side engaged with little
result. But Rupert, at the head of his horse, threw the parlia
ment's left wing into complete disorder. The disaster was mainly
attributable to the desertion of Sir Faithful Fortescue, who went
over with his. troop to the royalists, when he was ordered to charge.
The fiery prince pursued the flying-squadrons for three miles; and
in the town of Keinton he was engaged, in- plundering the parlia
mentary baggage-waggons, whilst the main body of the king's
forces was sorely pressed by the foot and horse of Essex. The
king's standard was taken. Sir Edmund: Verney; the standard-
bearer, was killed. The standard was afterwards recovered by a
stratagem of two royalist officers, who put on the orange-scarf of>
Essex, and demanded the great prize from his secretary, to whom
it had been entrusted. It was yielded by the unfortunate penman
to those who bore the badge of his master. Brave old Lindsey
was mortally wounded and taken prisoner. Other royalists of dis
tinction were killed. " When Prince- Rupert returned from the
charge," writes Clarendon, "he found this great alteration in the
field, and his majesty himself with few noblemen and a small ret
inue about him, and the hope of so glorious a day quite banished."
Many around the king counselled a retreat ; but Charles, with equal.
courage and sagacity, resolved to keep his ground. " He spent
the night in the field, by such a fire as could be made of the little
wood and bushes which grew thereabouts." When the day ap
peared, the parliamentary army still lay beneath Edgehill. "The,
n-ight after the battle," says Ludlow, " our army quartered upon the-
same ground that the enemy fought on the day before. No man-
nor horse got any meat that night, and I had touched none since
the Saturday before, neither could I find my servant who had my.
cloak, so that having nothing to keep me warm but. a suit of iron,
I was obliged to walk about all night, which proved, very cold by:
reason of a sharp frost. Towards morning, our army having re
ceived a reinforcement of Colonel Hampden's and several other
regiments, to the number of about four thousand men, who had not
been able to join us sooner, was drawn up ; and about day-light we
saw the enemy upon the top of the hill ; so that we had time to;
bury our dead,, and theirs too if we thought fit. That day- was
460 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
spent in sending trumpeters to inquire whether such as were miss
ing on both sides were killed, or prisoners." * It was, in most re
spects, a drawn battle. Gradually each army moved off, one to
attack London, the other to defend it. There is a little incident of
this Edgehill fight which has been told by the gossiping chronicler,
Aubrey, of the famous Harvey, the physician. "When king
Charles I., by reason of the tumults left London, he attended him,
and was at the fight of Edgehill with him ; and during the fight,
the prince and duke of York were committed to his care. He told
me that he withdrew with them under a hedge, and took out of his
pocket a book and read ; but he had not read very long before a
bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made
him remove his station."
The number of the slain at Edgehill was variously estimated by
the two parties. Ludlow very impartially says, " it was observed
that the greatest slaughter on our side was of such as ran away,
and on the enemy's side of those that stood." There was no gen
eral desire in either army to renew the struggle. In the royal camp
there was so visible an averseness " to re-engage in most officers,
as well as soldiers, that the king thought not fit to make the at
tempt."! In 'he parliamentary army, Hampden and others vainly
urged that their reinforcements would enable Essex to attack with
decided success. " We hoped," says Ludlow, " that we should
have pursued the enemy, who were marching off as fast as they
could, leaving only some troops to face us upon the top of the hill ;
but, instead of that, for what reason I know not, we marched' to
Warwick." +
The great events of the Civil War are to be traced in the pro
ceedings of Parliament, the state-papers, the histories and me
moirs of the politicians and soldiers who were engaged on either
side, and the letters of the actors in the busy scenes. But we oc
casionally meet with the relations of some who were scarcely more
than lookers-on, and were, not committed to very strong opinions.
Such a witness was Richard Baxter. He was, at one and the same
time, a royalist and a puritan. It is most interesting to follow this re
markable observer in those details of his life, which, in afew graphic
touches, exhibit the general state of society far more distinctly
than the laboured narratives of the contemporary historians. We
see. him, in his twenty-seventh year at the beginning of the war,
driven from his ministry at Kidderminster by those he calls " the
* " Memoirs," p. 50. t Clarendon, vol. iii. p. 283. X " Memoirs," p. 52.
RICHARD BAXTER AT EDGEHILL. 46 1
rabble ; " who reviled all the religious of the place as Roundheads ;
where " every drunken sot that met them called out, ' We shall
take an order with the puritans ere long.' " He says, " it was the
undoing of the king and bishops that this party was encouraged by
the leaders in the country against the civil religious party
The fury of the rabble was so hot at home that I was fain to with
draw." He goes to Worcester, where a body of the parliamentary
troops were lying in a meadow. "I had a great mind to go see
them, having never seen any part of an army." He there looks
upon the scattering of the parliamentary forces by Rupert's horse.
"This sight quicldy told me the vanity of armies, and how little
confidence is to be placed in them." Essex marches into Wor
cester " with many lords and knights, and a flourishing army, gal
lantly clothed, but never tried in fight." The young divine had no
safety in staying at home ; but '• the civility of the earl of Essex's
army was such that among them was no danger, though none of
them knew me ; and there was such excellent preaching among
them at Worcester that I stayed there among them a few days, till
the marching of the king's army occasioned their remove." Bax
ter preached at Alcester on the Lord's day following. " As I was
preaching, the people heard the cannon play, and perceived that
the armies were engaged ; when sermon was done, in the .after
noon, the report was more audible." At sun-setting many troops
fled through the town, and said that all was lost on the parliament's
side. The people sent a messenger to Stratford-upon-Avon to
know the truth. At four o'clock in the morning the messenger re
turned. He gave an account of the battle which corresponds in a
remarkable manner with the authentic narratives. " The next
morning, being willing to see the field where they had fought, I
went to Edgehill, and found the earl of Essex with the remaining
part of his army keeping the ground, and the king's army facing
them upon a hill a mile off, and about a thousand dead bodies in
the field between them ; and I suppose many were buried before."
The armies drew off. The poor wanderer says, " I knew not what
course to take. I had neither money nor friends : I knew not who
would receive me in any place of safety." He went at last to Cov
entry, to the minister there, an old acquaintance, "with a purpose
to stay there till one side or other had got the victory, and the
war was ended, and then to return home again. For so wise in
matters of war was I, and all the country besides, that we com
monly supposed that a very few days or weeks by one other
4f)2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
battle would end the wars ; and I believe that no small number of
the parliament-men had no more wit than to think so too." *
After the battle of Edgehill the king wasted a few days in oc
cupying Banbury and other small places, and on the 26th was with
his army at Oxford. Essex was slowly advancing with his army
towards London, and at the end of the month was at Northamp
ton. The people of the metropolis had been greatly agitated by
the uncertain rumours of the great fight in Warwickshire. On the
night of the battle of Edgehill, the beacons had been lighted — a
pre-arranged signal of the parliament's success. But the fugitives
whom Rupert had chased from the field filled the roads, and pro
claimed a royalist victory. But at the beginning of November the
king's army was decidedly known to be marching upon London.
Rupert was quartered at Maidenhead with the advanced guard.
Two days after Essex arrived, and received the thanks of the two
Houses. On the nth of November Charles was at Colnbrook.
Thither went a deputation from the Parliament, under a safe con
duct, to propose that the king should appoint some convenient
place to reside, near London, "until committees of both Houses
of Parliament may attend your majesty with some propositions for
the removal of these bloody distempers and distractions." The
king met the deputation favourably, and proposed to receive such
propositions at Windsor. " Do your duty," he said, "we will not
be wanting in ours. God in his mercy give a blessing." Ludlow
records the duplicity which followed this negotiation : " Upon which
answer the parliament thought themselves secure, at least against
any sudden attempt ; but the very next day the king, taking the ad
vantage of a very thick mist, marched his army within half a mile
of Brentford before he was discovered, designing to surprise our
train of artillery (which was then at Hammersmith), the parliament,
and city." Clarendon endeavours to throw the blame of this dis
honour upon Rupert. The king, he says, resolved to have gone to
Windsor, if the parliament had removed their garrison there, "or at
least to have stayed at Colnbrook till he heard again from the parlia
ment. But prince Rupert, exalted with the terror he heard his
name gave to the enemy, trusting too much to the vulgar intelli
gence every man received from his friends at London — who, ac
cording to their own passions and the affections of those with
whom they corresponded, concluded that the king had so great a
party in London, that, if his army drew near, no resistance would
* " Reliauia? Baxterianx," 1691s, part i. pp. 42 and 43.
THE FIGHT AT BRENTFORD. 463
be made — without any direction from the king, the very next morn
ing after the committee returned to London, advanced with the
horse and dragoons to Hounslow, and then sent to the king, to de
sire him that the army might march after ; which was, in that case,
of absolute necessity ; for the earl of Essex had a part of his army
at Brentford, and the rest at Acton and Kingston."
From the time of the battle of Edgehill there was a general
feeling in London that the king's army, not materially discomfited,
would advance to strike a blow at the capital. The parliamentary
earls, Pembroke, Holland, and Say and Sele, made speeches at
Guildhall, to stir up the ardour of the citizens. They spoke elo
quently, especially Say and Sele. " Let every man shut up his
shop ; let him take his musket ; let him offer himself readily and
willingly. Let him not think with himself who shall pay me ? but
rather think this, I will come forth to save the kingdom, to serve
my God, to maintain his true religion, to save the parliament, to
save this noble city." An ordinance of parliament declared that
any apprentices who should enlist should be secured from forfeit
ure of their bonds, and that their masters should receive them
back again. Milton heard the din of preparation in his quiet house
in Aldersgate-street ; and had perhaps slight assurance of safety
from the trained bands of the neighbouring artillery ground, when
he sat within his " defenceless doors," and implored protection for
"the Muses' bower."* The "assault intended for the city "at
last became a reality. On the morning of the 12th of November,
the sound of distant guns was heard in London. Two traders who
had been seized by the royalist pickets afterwards related that they
saw the king and prince Rupert together on Hounslow-heath,
marching towards Brentford, and that Rupert " took off his scarlet
coat, which was very rich, and gave it to his man, and buckled on
his arms, and put a grey coat over it." Before noon Rupert was
charging in the streets of Brentford. *The regiment of Hollis was
quartered there, and they were not unprepared for the attack. The
long and narrow street was barricaded. The contest was obsti
nately maintained for three hours by Hollis's regiment. Hampden
was at Acton, and Brook in a neighbouring cantonment. Again
and again the parliamentary forces charged the Cavaliers. But
the main body of the royal army now invested Brentford. The
fighting went on till evening, when the royalists had a decided ad
vantage, and compelled their enemy to retire from the town. They
* Sdnhet viii.
464 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
took many prisoners, amongst whom was John Lilburne, who be>
gan his career, when an apprentice, by calling down stripes and
imprisonment upon his contumacy, and was now a captain of the
drained bands. The old enemies of " sturdy John " did not forget
his offences. He was tried for his life, and was about to be exe
cuted as a rebel, when Essex threatened that for every one of the
Parliament's officers thus put to death, he would execute three roy
alist prisoners. Lilburne was released, to be always foremost in
opposition, whether to Charles or to Cromwell. Many of the Par
liament's men were drowned in the Thames ; but the greater num
ber made their way in boats down the stream. Essex had arrived
at Turnham Green with some trained bands, who, whilst the fight
ing was going on, had been exercising in Chelsea fields. To un
derstand this scene we must figure to ourselves a London with
houses extending little beyond St. James's palace ; the western
roads from St. Giles's to Acton, and from Hyde Park Corner to
Brentford, dotted only with scattered houses or petty hamlets,
standing amidst broad- pasture lands and gardens. It was dark
when the trained bands, with the parliamentary regiments then re
cruited, advanced again to Brentford, and the royalists fell back to
the king's quarters at Hounslow. That Saturday evening was one
of confusion and alarm. " All that night the city of London
poured out men towards Brentford, who every hour marched thith
er ; and all the lords and gentlemen that belonged to the parlia
ment army were there ready by Sunday morning, the 14th of No
vember."* Skippon, the general of the city trained bands, came
out with his well-disciplined shopkeepers and apprentices ; talking
now with one company, now with another, and calling them about
him to make that famous oration which is more telling than all the
rhetoric of Livy's Romans. " Come, my boys, my brave boys, let
us pray heartily and fight heartily. I will run the same fortunes
and hazards with you. Remember the cause is for God, and for
defence of yourselves, your wives, and children. Come, my hon
est brave boys, pray heartily and fight heartily, and God will bless
us." Twenty-four thousand of the parliamentary army were mar
shalled on that Sunday on Turnham Green. They were subjected
to no very serious privations in their short campaign. The good
housewives of London sent out abundant provisions of meat and
beer ; and the wine-cups were filled and the tobacco smoked, as if
those thousands were assembled for a fair, instead of a battle.
* May.
THE LONDONERS MARCH TO TURNHAM GREEN. 465
" The soldiers were refreshed and made merry," says Whitelocke,
"and the more, when they understood that the king and his army
were retreated." Pacific councils again prevailed. Hampden was
recalled, when, in pursuance of a settled plan of attack, he was
about to march by Acton and Osterley Park to take the royal army
in the rear. Essex remained inactive, instead of advancing to
Hounslow as had* been agreed. The war, according to some wri
ters, might have been brought to a conclusion in one day of cer
tain triumph if the irresolution of Essex had yielded to the coun
sels of bolder spirits. The men were not yet in the field who were
resolved to make war in earnest, whatever might be the conse
quences. Essex was brave and skilful ; but, like many other good
men, he fought with reluctance against his countrymen and his
familiar friends. Sir Philip Warwick has a passage, in which he
has a gentle sneer at Essex for his indecision. At Hounslow, he
says, " there was a large fair heath for the two armies to have tried
once again their courage and their fortunes." The king "marched
off towards a summer house of his own at Oatlands, betwixt
Windsor and Hampton Court, where there were still fair heaths
for the two armies to have engaged, if the parliament forces would
have made the adventure."* Charles rested at this pleasant seat
of royalty for two days ; then went on to Reading, where he fixed
a garrison ; and on the 29th of November was in winter quarters
at Oxford. After the royal army had withdrawn from the neighbourhood of
London, the citizens, who had seen war so close at their doors,
began to talk more earnestly of peace. The peace party comprised
many persons who could not be classed amongst the thorough roy
alists ; for their petitions to the parliament expressed as strongly
as ever their hatred of popery and arbitrary power. But the exer
tions of this moderate party produced a corresponding determina
tion of " the pious and movement party " that the war should be
carried on with renewed energy. The Guildhall was the scene of
many an angry debate. At length, on the 2nd of January, a peti
tion from the common council was carried to the king at Oxford,
in which he was, asked to return to the capital, when all disturb
ance should be suppressed. Charles replied, that they could not
maintain tranquillity amongst themselves. He sent a gentleman
to read his formal answer to the people in the Guildhall. It was
full of reproaches, and breathed any language but that of concilia-
* " Memoirs," p. 234.
Vol. III.— 30
466 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tion. Amidst an immense uproar, Pym and lord Manchester ad
dressed the multitude, and the prospect of peace faded from the
people's view. Some attempts were made in the northern and
western counties to preserve a neutral attitude in the struggle ; but
these were regarded with equal disfavour by Cavalier and Round
head. Yorkshire and Cheshire, Devon and Cornwall, counties
that had tried this impossible policy, soon became foremost in the
strife. The eastern counties adopted a much more efficient course
of action. They formed themselves into an " Association," in the
organisation of which Cromwell was the master-spirit. Under his
vigorous direction, Norfolk. Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, Herts,
not only kept the war away from their own localities, but furnished
the most efficient support to its vigorous conduct in other quar
ters. The counties of Lincoln and Huntingdon soon joined this
Eastern Association, with the like results. In the Seven Associ
ated Counties the Cavaliers were never of any importance. Dur
ing the winter a partisan warfare was going on in many places.
The most important incident of these minor contests was the death
of lord Brook at Lichfield. A royalist party had obtained pos
session of the Close of the cathedral, which was walled and
moated. Lord Brook was in the command of a body of horse
and foot, with artillery, brought to Lichfield to dislodge the occu
piers of the Close. Sitting in a house, with the window open, he
was shot in the eye, and instantly died. Laud, in his Diary, de
scribes this death of lord Brook as a special wonder, for his bea
ver was up, and as a judgment: "he having ever been fierce
against bishops and cathedrals."
The war, as it proceeded, gradually assumed a fiercer character.
It became, to some extent, a war of classes. Clarendon says,
" The difference in the temper of the common people on both sides
was so great, that they who inclined to the parliament left nothing
unperformed that might advance the cause, and were incredibly
vigilant and industrious to cross and hinder whatsoever might
promote the king's ; whereas they who wished well to him thought
they had performed their duty in doing so, and that they had done
enough for him, in that they had done nothing against him." * We
may be perfectly sure that the " common people on both sides " had
great reason to be dissatisfied with the temper of the Cavaliers and
their followers. " Thousands," says Baxter, " had no mind to
meddle with the wars, but greatly desired to live peaceably at home;
* " Rebellion," vol. iii. p. 452.
THE QUEEN LANDS WITH AN ARMY. 467
when the rage of soldiers and drunkards would not suffer them ;
some stayed till they had been imprisoned; some till they had been
plundered, perhaps twice or thrice over, and nothing left them ;
some were quite tired out with the abuse of all comers that quartered
on them." * But if " the common people " were puritans, " noted
for praying and hearing sermons," they, as Baxter's father ex
perienced, " were plundered by the king's soldiers, so that some
of them had almost nothing but lumber left in their houses." In
the beginning of 1643, the national feeling was exasperated by
the landing of the queen with a foreign army. During a year she
had been indefatigable in making the most of the funds she had
acquired by the sale of the crown jewels, to purchase arms and
ammunition, and to raise men. On the 22nd of February she
arrived with four ships, and landed at Burlington. The admiral of
the parliament had failed in intercepting her convoy ; but he adopted
measures of greater vigour than generosity when he arrived two
days after the queen and her men had disembarked. These pro
ceedings are described in the following characteristic letter of
Henrietta Maria to Charles : —
" As soon as I landed in England, I sent Progers to you ; but
having learned to-day that he was taken by the enemy, I sent you
again this man to give you an account of my arrival, which has been
very fortunate, thanks be to God ; for just as stormy as the sea was
the first time I set sail, just so calm was it this time till I was with
in some fifteen hours of Newcastle, and on the coast, when the
wind changed to the north-west, which forced us to make for
Burlington Bay, and after two hours waiting at sea, your cavalry^
arrived. I landed instantly, and the next day the rest of the army
came to join me.
" God, who took care of me at sea, was pleased to continue his
protection by land, for that night, four of the Parliament ships
arrived at Burlington without our knowledge, and in the morning
about four o'clock", the alarm was given that we should send down
to the harbour to secure our ammunition boats, which had not yet
been able to be unloaded ; but, about an hour after, these four
ships began to fire so briskly, that we were all obliged to rise in
haste, and leave the village to them : at least the women, for the
soldiers remained very resolutely to defend the ammunition. In
case of a descent, I must act the captain, though a little low in
stature, myself. * " Reliquis Baxteriana?," p. 44.
46S" HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" One of these ships had done me the favour to flank my house
which fronted the pier, and before I could get out of bed, the balls
were whistling upon me in such style that you may easily believe I
loved not such music. Everybody came to force me to go out, the
balis beating so on all the houses, that, dressed just as it happened,
I went on foot to some distance from the village, to the shelter of
a ditch, like those at Newmarket ; but before we could reach it,
the balls were singing round us in fine style, and a serjeant was
killed twenty paces from me. We placed ourselves then under this
shelter, during two hours that they were firing upon us, and the
balls passing always over our heads, sometimes covering us with
dust. At last the Admiral of Holland sent to tell them, that if they
did not cease, he would fire upon them as enemies ; that was done
a little late, but he excuses himself on account of a fog he says
there was. On this they stopped, and the tide went down, so there
was not water enough for them to stay where they were." *
The admiral, Batten, was denounced as a traitor by the royalists.
The earl of Newcastle, who came to escort the queen to York, had.
been authorised by the king to raise men. for his service, " without
examining their consciences ; " and thus his army was styled by the
parliament " the queen's army," and " the Catholic army." The
prejudice against foreigners and Romanists thus came into renewed
activity. .Subsequent tamperings with the more violent papists in
Ireland led to the belief that the king was not sincere in his pro
fessions of regard for the Protestant cause ; and thus the two
parties of Cavaliers and Roundheads came to be more widely
separated by religious as well as political differences ; and those
who held the most extreme opinions became the most powerful —
the general course of all great revolutions.
The spring of 1643 was passed by the court at Oxford. The
noble city of academical palaces must have presented the most
singular contrasts of gown and cuirass crowding the streets; of
grave doctors and ardent students talking the most impassioned
loyalty to throngs of ladies in those ancient halls ; of outward
splendour amidst secret want, and of gay hearts struggling with
anxious fears. Lady Fanshawe, one of the most interesting of
royalists, — at that time unmarried, — has given the following pic
ture of the Oxford of 1643 :
"My father commanded my sister and myself to come to him
to Oxford, where the Court then was, but we, that had till that
* " Green's Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 166.
ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE. 469
fiour lived in great plenty and great order, found ourselves like
fishes out of the water, and the scene so changed, that we knew
not at all how to act any part but obedience, for, from as good a
house as any gentleman of England had, we came to a baker's
house in an obscure street, and from rooms well furnished, to lie
in a very bad bed in a garret, to one dish of meat, and that not the
best ordered ; no money,_for we were as poor as Job ; nor clothes
more than a man or two brought in their cloak bags : we had the
perpetual discourse of losing and gaining towns and men ; at the
windows the sad spectacle of war, sometimes plague, sometimes
sickness of other kind, by reason of so many people being packed
together, as, I believe, there never was before of that quality;
always in want, yet I must needs say that most bore it with a
martyr-like cheerfulness. For my own part, I began to think we
should all, like Abraham, live in tents all the days of our lives."
, To this Oxford came Commissioners from the parliament, to
wards the end of March, authorised to negotiate a suspension of
arms, and a treaty of peace. The earl of Northumberland, the
chief of the commission, made the somewhat miserable city bril
liant with his feasts. He had a magnificent retinue. His table
was covered with luxurious dishes and rich wines. His plate was
sumptuous. The royalists accepted his feasts — and persuaded
the king to reject his propositions. Charles displayed his usual
vacillation. He made concessions one day, and revoked them an
other. The queen's especial friends were always about him. The
queen wrote to him, " Why have you taken arms ? You are be
trayed. I will let you see it. Never allow your army to be dis
banded till it [the parliament] is ended, and never let there be a
peace till that is put an end to." * The officers of the garrison, in
a petition to the king, opposed a suspension of arms. Charles had
instigated them to petition. The parliament peremptorily recalled
its commissioners. The battle must be fought out.
We have mentioned that during the Civil War the judges went
their usual circuits. In the spring of 1643 this local administra
tion of justice was temporarily suspended. The two Houses of
Parliament, embarrassed by the king's possession of the. Great
Seal, ordered that the Session of Oyer and Terminer should not
be proceeded with "until it shall please God to end these distrac
tions between the king and people." Charles issued a proclama
tion, commanding that the Easter term should be held at Oxford
* Green's " Letters of Henrietta Maria," p. 182.
470 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
instead of Westminster. The judges were ordered there to attend*
the king. Had this state of things continued, a greater evil would
have ensued than the bloodshed and plunder of the war. But, by-
what' was a practical compromise for the remedy of an enormous
social mischief — one that might have led to a general.insecurity of
life and property — the Parliament resolved to establish a Great
Seal: and under this authority, and that of the king, judges ex
ecuted their functions as usual, after a suspension of a few months.
No doubt, according to their political prepossessions, they re
garded the king either as deriving his power from divine right, or
as a trustee for his people. At a later period, we find a judge of
assize laying down as a principle, "that kings, rulers, and govern
ors, and particularly the king of this realm, should be accountable,
to the people for their misgovevnments ; " and, on the other hand,
there were, we may conclude; judges who maintained the position:
which this judge controverts, "that the king had an original right
to rule over men upon earth ; and that God had not given power to
earthly men to call him to account." These were the two great
theories with regard to "a pure monarchy," and "a political mon
archy, or monarchy governed by laws." * But whatever was con
sidered the original foundation of government, none of the admin
istrators of justice relaxed the principle that the law should be
rigidly maintained, as regarded all private transactions. During
these unhappy times England was in a great degree exempt from
crimes of violence, except those committed under the pretence of
martial necessity. No bands of plunderers infested the country;
no lawless and ferocious spirits who, as many passages of the his
tories of other countries record, considering a time of public com
motion as their opportunity, held the peaceful in terror. England
was safe from those massacres and spoliations which characterise
a nation when the reins of just government are loosened. This
immeasurable blessing she owed to her ancient civil organisation,
and to that respect for law which has made the constable's staff
the efficient representative of the sovereign's sceptre.
The repose of Oxford was soon broken up by new military en
terprises. The suspension of arms contemplated in the negotia
tions which commenced to the end of March, were, on the 15th of
April, declared by the parliament to be at an end. On that day
Essex marched his army to the siege of Reading. The town had
been fortified; and the garrison there, although wanting provisions
• Sergeant Thorpe's Charge to the Grand Jury. Harleian Miscellany, vol. vi. p. 113.
READING SURRENDERED TO ESSEX. 47 T
and ammunition, was composed of resolute men. The approaches
were regularly constructed, batteries erected, and trenches dug.
The possession of Reading was considered of great importance.
The king himself, on the 24th of April, set out from Oxford to
head a force for the relief of the besieged. The army which he
led was numerous and well appointed. At Caversham bridge the
royalist forces were repulsed by those of the parliament, and fell
back upon Wallingford. That day Reading was surrendered to
Essex. The cavaliers were indignant that the commander of the
garrison had not longer held out ; and he was tried, and sentenced to
death. The king reprieved him. Hampden, who had taken an
active part in the siege of Reading, now urged Essex to follow up
their success by an attack upon Oxford. The bold counsels were
overruled. The parliamentary commander gradually became dis
trusted by his party. His honour and his capacity were unquestion
able ; but he was too inclined to forego present good in the con
templation of uncertain evils. He could not make war upon his
king and his fellow-countrymen as if he were in a foreign land.
Such a man should not have drawn the sword at all. Meanwhile,
the war was proceeding with doubtful fortune in other quarters.
Sir William Waller was successful against the royalists in the
.south and West. Fairfax was disputing with lord Newcastle the
supremacy of the north. The Cornish men, in arms for the king,
had gained a battle over lord Stamford. What could not be ac
complished in the open field by the Cavaliers was sought to be
effected by a secret plot. The lady Aubigny had received a per
mission from the parliament, with a pass, to proceed to Oxford to
transact some business arising out of the death of her husband,
who was killed at Edgehill. On her return to London she was
commissioned by the king to convey a box thither, with great care
and secrecy. His majesty told her " it much concerned his own
service." This is Clarendon's account, who represents the box
to have contained a commission of array to certain persons in the
city, for the promotion of the king's service. Ludlow says, " The
king, to encourage his friends in the city to rise for him, sent them
a commission for that purpose by the lady Aubigny, which she
brought, made up in the hair of her head." Oh the 31st of May,
the members of the two Houses were listening to a sermon in St.
Margaret's church, when a note was delivered to Pym. He hastily
left. That night Edmund Waller, once famous as a poet, but whose
'•' smooth " verse we now little regard, was arrested. His brother-
472 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
in-law, Mr. Tomkins, Mr. Challoner (a citizen), and other per.
sons, were also taken into custody. Waller was a member of parlia
ment, and had been at Oxford, in March, with the commissioners.
There was unquestionably a plot to arm the royalists in London, to
seize the persons of the parliamentary leaders, and to bring the
king's troops into the capital. Waller, in a base spirit which contrasts
with the conduct of most of the eminent of either party, made
very abject confessions, with exaggerated denunciations of others,
to save his own life. The parliament behaved with honourable
moderation. Five persons were condemned by court-martial ; two,
Challoner and Tomkins, were executed. Waller was reserved,
to exhibit in his hterary character a subserviency to power which
has fortunately ceased to be an attribute of poets — to eulogise the
happy restoration of Charles IL, as he had eulogised the sovereign
attributes of the Protector Cromwell. " He had much ado to save
his life," says Aubrey, " and in order to do it sold his estate in
Bedfordshire, about 1300/. per annum, to Dr. Wright for 10,000/.
(much under value), which was procured in twenty-four hours'
time, or else he had been hanged. With this money he bribed the
House, which was the first time a House of Commons was ever
bribed." *
Important events succeeded each other rapidly during this sum
mer. Rupert's trumpet sounded to horse in Oxford street on the
17th of June. After the occupation of Reading, the troops of
Essex were distributed in cantonments about Thame and Wy
combe. Rupert dashed in amongst the small towns and villages
where these troops were quartered. Hampden had been visiting
the scattered pickets, and urging upon Essex a greater concentra
tion of his forces. Lord Nugent, with accurate local knowledge.
has described the localities into which Rupert had made his irrup
tion. " Hampden had obtained in early life, from the habits of
the chase, a thorough knowledge of the passes of this country. It
is intersected, in the upper parts, with woods and deep chalky
hollows, and in the vales, with brooks and green lanes ; the only
clear roads along the foot of the hills, from east to west, and those
not very good, being the two ancient Roman highways, called the
upper and lower Ickeneld way." Hampden had expected some
attack, and immediately he heard of Rupert's movement, he was
in the saddle. On the morning of the 19th the prince was with a
large force in Chalgrove Field, near Thame. Hampden, with a small
* " Lives," vol. iii. p. 564.
CHALGROVE FIELD. 473
detachment, attacked the cavaliers ; expecting the main body of the
parliamentary army soon to come up with reinforcements. The man
who had triumphed in so many civil victories fell in this skirmish.
On the first charge he was shot in the shoulder. The parliamentary
troops were completely routed before Essex came up. Rupert re
treated across the Thames to Oxford. The news of the great lead
er having received a serious wound soon reached Oxford: "One
of the prisoners taken in the action said, ' that he was confident
Mr. Hampden was hurt, for he saw him ride off the field before
the action was done, which he never used to do, with his head
hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of his horse.'"*
He was alone. The troops of Rupert were in the plain between
the battle field and Thame, where the wounded man desired to go
for help. A brook crossed the grounds through which he must
pass. By a sudden exercise of the old spirit of the sportsman he
cleared the leap, and reached Thame ; there to die, after six days
of agony. " O Lord, save my bleeding country," were his last
words. Clarendon has done justice, though not full justice, to the
character of the man with whom he was so intimately associated
in the struggle against despotism. " He was of that rare affability
and temper in debate, and of that seeming humility and submis
sion of judgment, as if he brought no opinion of his own with him,
but a desire of information and instruction ; yet he had so subtle
a way of interrogating, and, under the notion of doubts, insinua
ting his objections, that he infused his own opinions into those
from whom he pretended to learn and receive them. * * * * He
was indeed a very wise man, and of great parts, and possessed
with the most absolute spirit of popularity, and the most absolute
faculties to govern the people, of any man I ever knew. For the
first year of the parliament, he seemed rather to moderate and
soften the violent and distempered humours, than to inflame them.
* * * * After he was among those members accused by the king
of high treason, he was much altered; his nature and carriage
seeming much fiercer than it did before. * * * * He was very tem
perate in diet, and a supreme governor over all his passions and
affections, and had thereby a great power over other men's. He
was of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by
the most laborious ; and of parts not to be imposed upon by the
most subtle or sharp ; and of a personal courage equal to his best
parts ; so that he was an enemy not to be wished wherever he
* Clarendon, vol. iv. p. 88.
474 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
might have been made a friend ; and as much to be apprehended
where he was so, as any man could deserve to be. And therefore
his death was no less pleasing to the party, than it was condoled
in the other." * * " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 92.
THE QUEEN JOINS HER HUSBAND 475
CHAPTER XXV.
The queen joins her husband. — Various incidents of the war. — Bristol taken by assault.—
Proposals for peace rejected by a small majority of the Commons. — Popular disturb
ances in London. — The siege of Gloucester. — Defence of Gloucester. — Essex marches
to its relief. — The king and' his army retire. — The Parliamentary army march towards
London. — The battle of .Newbury. — Prowess of. the Trained Bands. — Death of lord
Falkland. — The Sortes Virgilianae. — The royal success becoming more doubtful. —
Negotiations for ari alliance between the Scots and "the Parliament. — The solemn
League and .Covenant. — Essex returns to London. — Growing importance of Crom
well. — Skirmish of Winceby — Death of Pym. — The Covenant severely enforced. —
Ejected ministers.
Four months had elapsed between the landing of the queen in
England and her return to her royal husband. However Charles
might have been personally affected by her counsels, his best ad
visers, the moderate men who desired peace, were afraid of her
influence, and she was suspicious of their fidelity. Her dominant
idea was to restore the absolute power of the king. Her ruling
passion was -hatred ofthe Parliament. She writes to Charles, "to
die of consumption of royalty is a death which I cannot endure,
having found by experience the malady too insupportable." *
Again, " I do not see the wisdom of these Messieurs rebels, in
being able to imagine that they will make you come by force to
their object, and to an accommodation ; for as long as you are in
the world, assuredly England can have no rest nor peace, unless
you consent to it, and assuredly that cannot be unless you are
restored to your just prerogatives;" f She was a bold and de
termined woman, who aspired to direct councils and to lead
armies. On the 27th of May she writes to the king from York,
" I shall stay to besiege Leeds at once, although I am dying to
join you; but I am so enraged to go away without having beaten
these rascals, that, if you will permit me, I will do that, and then will
goto join you ; and if I go away I am afraid that they would not be
beaten." X She had her favourites, especially Jermyn and Digby)
whose advancement she was constantly urging. The scandalous
Chroniclers of the time did not hesitate in casting the most de-
• Greeks "Letters," p. 117. t Ibid.,p. 108. X Ibid, p. 202.
470 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
grading suspicions upon the queen in connection with one of
these. Jermyn was made a peer. He is pointed out as " some
what too ugly for a lady's favourite, yet that is nothing to some ;
for the old lady [Mary de Medicis] that died in Flanders regarded
not the feature." * At length Henrietta Maria determined to leave
the north, and join the king at Oxford. On the nth of July she
entered Stratford-upon-Avon, at the head of four thousand horse
and foot soldiers. She slept at the house in which Shakspere
lived and died, — then in the possession of his daughter, Mrs.
Hall. On the 13th she met Charles where his first battle had been
fought; and from Keinton they proceeded to Oxford. The tidings
of a victory on the 15th over the parliamentary forces at Roundway
Down, in Wiltshire, greeted their arrival. A previous victory over
Sir William Waller at Lansdown, in Somersetshire, filled the roy
alists with the most sanguine hopes. Such partial successes on
the other side as the brave defence of Nottingham Castle by
colonel Hutchinson had no material influence upon the state of
affairs. The feelings of the adverse parties were growing more
bitter. We see the proud Cavaliers and the stern Puritans hating
and hated. Female tenderness and courage shine out as sunny
gleams in a dark day. On each side there were women as noble
as Lucy Hutchinson, who thus describes what she was doing in the
spirit of Christian love, whilst the so-called teachers of religion
were cruel and revengeful : —
" There was a large room, which was the chapel, in the castle;
this they had filled full of prisoners, besides a very bad prison,
which was no better than a dungeon, called the Lion's den ; and
the new captain Palmer and another minister, having nothing else
to do, walked up and down the castle-yard, insulting and beating
the poor prisoners as they were brought up. In the encounter,
one of the Derby captains was slain, and five of our men hurt,
who for want of another surgeon, were brought to. the governor's
wife, and she having some excellent balsams and plaisters in her
closet, with the assistance of a gentleman that had some skill,
dressed all their wounds, whereof some were dangerous, being all
shots, with such good success, that they were all well cured in con
venient time. After our hurt men were dressed, as she stood at her
chamber-door, seeing three of the prisoners sorely cut, and carried
down bleeding into the Lion's den, she desired the marshal to
bring them in to her, and bound up and dressed their wounds also :
* " Character of an Oxford Incendiary," Harleian Miscellany, vol. v. p. 346.
BRISTOL TAKEN BY RUPERT. 477
which while she was doing, captain Palmer came in and told her
his soul abhorred to see this favour to the enemies of God ;
she replied, she had done nothing but what she thought was her
duty, in humanity to them, as fellow-creatures, not as enemies."*
In the summer of 1643 the power of the Parliament is visibly
in danger. On the -27th of July. Bristol, a city only exceeded by
London in population and wealth, is surrendered to Rupert, after
an assault, with terrible slaughter on both sides. Nathaniel Fiennes,
its governor, was described by Clarendon as "for root and branch "
in 1640; but one whose courage being had " in disesteem," en
couraged the plan of assaulting this important place. He was sub
sequently tried and condemned " for not having defended Bristol
so well, and so long, as he ought to have done." He had interest
enough to obtain a pardon; but he quitted the country. A design
of sir John Hotham to surrender Hull to the king was detected.
He and his son were committed to the Tower on a charge of be
traying the cause of the Parliament. London was in a state of
unusual agitation. The Lords came to resolutions, upon a propo
sal of peace, of a far more moderate character than had previously
been determined on. There was a conference between the two
Houses, in which the upper House urged that " these unnatural
dissensions " would destroy all the former blessings of peace and
abundance." The Commons, by a majority of nineteen, decided
that the proposals of the Lords should be considered. The city
was in an uproar. A petition from the common-council called for
the rejection of the proposals. Multitudes surrounded the Houses
to enforce the same demand. The proposals were now rejected
by a majority of seven. An attempt was then made to enforce the
demand for peace by popular clamour. Bands of women, with
men in women's clothes, beset the doors of the House of Com
mons, crying out, " Give us up the traitors who are against peace.
We'll tear them in pieces. Give us up that rascal Pym." The
military forced them away; but they refused to disperse. They
were at last fired upon, and two were killed, one of whom was an
old ballad-singer of the London streets. Many peers now left
Parliament and joined the king at Oxford, amongst whom was lord
Holland. Those who remained, peers or commoners, saw that the
greatest danger was in their own dissensions. The royalist army
was growing stronger in every quarter. London was again in
peril. There was one man of extraordinary vigor who felt the
* Hutchinson's "Memoirs," vol. i. p. 274.
478 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
immediate danger of his own district. There is not a more charac
teristic letter of Cromwell than the following to the Commissioners
at Cambridge, dated from Huntingdon on the 6th of August: —
"You see by this enclosed how sadly your affairs stand. It's no
longer disputing, but out instantly all you can. Raise all your
bands; send them to Huntingdon; — get up what volunteers you
can ; hasten your horses. Send these letters to Norfolk, Suffolk,
and Essex, without delay. I beseech you spare not, but be expe
ditious and industrious ! Almost all our foot have quitted Stam
ford; there is nothing to interrupt an enemy but our horse, that is
considerable. You must act lively; do it without distraction.
Neglect no means ! " *
Had there been unanimity in the councils of the king at this
period of dissensions in London amongst the people ; with the
two houses divided amongst themselves ; men of influence desert
ing the parliamentary cause ; no man yet at the head of the parlia
mentary forces who appeared capable of strikihg a great blow, — it
is probable that if he had marched upon the capital the war would
have been at an end. There would have been peace, — and a mili
tary despotism. Charles sent sir Philip Warwick to the earl of
Newcastle to propose a plan of co-operation between the armies
of the south and north. " But I found him very averse to this,"
Warwick writes, " and perceived that he apprehended nothing
more than to be joined to the king's army, or to serve under
prince Rupert ; for he designed himself to be the man that
should turn the scale, and to be a self-subsisting and distinct army,
wherever he was." f With this serious difficulty in concentrating
his forces, Charles determined upon besieging Gloucester. The
garrison consisted of fifteen hundred men, under Edward Massey,
the parliamentary governor. The inhabitants were under five
thousand. On the loth of August the king's army was stationed
" upon a fair hill, in the clear view of the city, and within less than
two .miles of it." Charles sent a summons for its surrender, by a
trumpet to the town, offering pardon to the inhabitants, and requir
ing an answer within two hours. Clarendon has described, with
more than his accustomed attention to details which regard the
common people, how the answer was brought: " Within less than
the time prescribed, together with the trumpeter returned two
citizens from the town, with lean, pale, sharp, and bad visages, in
deed faces so strange and unusual, and in such a garb and posturej
* Carlyle's " Cromwell Letters," vol. i. p. ng. -f " Memoirs," p. 243.
GLOUCESTER RELIEVED BY ESSEX. 475
that at once made the most severe countenances merry, and the
most cheerful hearts sad ; for it was impossible such ambassadors
could bring less than a defiance. The men, without any circumi
stances of duty, or good manners, in a pert, shrill, undismayed ac
cent, said, ' they had brought an answer from the godly city of
Gloucester to the king ; ' and were so ready to give insolent and
seditious answers to any question, as if their business were chiefly
to provoke the king to violate his own safe conduct.' * The
answer was in writing, to the effect that the inhabitants and soldiers
kept the city for the use of his majesty, but conceived themselves
"wholly bound to obey the commands of his majesty, signified by~
both Houses of Parliament." The people of Gloucester immedi
ately set fire to all the houses outside the walls. From the 10th of
August till the 6th of September these resolute people, in spite of
their strange and unusual faces, and their uncourtly manners, de
fended their city with a resolution and bravery unsurpassed in this
warfare. The king dreaded the loss of men in an assault ; and it
was therefore resolved to compel a surrender by cutting off all sup
plies. The continued possession of Gloucester was most import
ant to the Parliament. All differences having been reconciled in
London, the earl of Essex took the command of a force destined
for the relief of " the godly city." At the head of fourteen thousand
men he set out from London on the 24th of August. On the 5th
of September he had arrived by forced marches within five miles
of Gloucester. The king sent a messenger to him with pacific pro
posals. The answer was returned in a spirit of' sturdy heroism:
" The Parliament gave me no commission to treat, but to relieve
Gloucester; I will do it, or leave my body beneath its walls." The
soldiers shouted, "No propositions." Gloucester was relieved.
From the Prestbury hills Essex saw the flames of burning hut's
rising from the king's quarter. The royal army had moved away.
On the 8th the parliamentary general entered the beleaguered city,
bearing provisions to the famished people, and bestowing the due
meed of honour upon their courage and constancy. On the 10th
he was on his march back to London.
Of the arn.y of fourteen thousand men which marched to the
relief of Gloucester, fquf regiments were of the London militia.
These regiments were mainly composed of artisans and appren
tices. They had been drilled and reviewed iii Finsbury fields and
Chelsea fields for twelve months; and they had looked upon the
* " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 176.
480 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
approach of real war when Rupert was at Brentford. But
they had seen no actual service. Their forced march to Glouces
ter, though scarcely exceeding a rate of ten miles a day, was a re
markable feat. They had, in the latter days of their march
by Bicester, Chipping-Norton, and Stow-in-the-Wold, to pass
through an enemy's country, in which the people were hostile,
and the royalist cavalry were hanging on their rear. At Prest-
bury they had to fight their way through Rupert's squadrons;
and to try how pikemen could stand up against a charge of horse.
In less than a fortnight their prowess was to be proved in a
pitched battle field. Charles and his army were lying round
Sudeley Castle, to the north-east of Gloucester. Essex marched
to the south. In Cirencester, which he surprised, he found
valuable stores for his men. The king's army moved in the same
direction. Essex had passed Farringdon, and was rapidly advanc
ing upon Newbury, on his road to Reading, when his scattered
horse were attacked by Rupert and his Cavaliers. According to
Clarendon, the prince, " with near five thousand horse, marched
day and night over the hills, to get between London and the enemy,
before they should be able to get out of those enclosed deep coun
tries in which they were engaged between narrow lanes, and to
entertain them with skirmishes till the whole army should come
up." * Essex had marched over Amborne Chase, intending to
have quartered at Newbury that night. There was a sharp con
flict for several hours, and Essex was compelled to halt at Hunger-
ford. The king marched at the head of his foot soldiers ; " though
his numbers, by his exceeding long and quick marches, and the
licence which many officers and soldiers took whilst the king fey at
Evesham, were much lessened." t When Essex came near to
Newbury on the 19th of September, he found the royal army in
possession of the town. The king had come there two hours be
fore him. Essex was without shelter, without provisions. Charles
had a good town to refresh his men in, whilst the enemy lodged in
the field." X It was absolutely necessary that Essex should haz
ard a battle. The road to London was barred against him. He
" must make his way through or starve." In the king's quarters it
was resolved not to fight, except upon such grounds as should en
sure victory. On the morning of the 20th, Essex being camped
upon Bigg's hill, about a mile from Newbury, the outposts of each
force became engaged, and the battle was soon general. It was
• " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 232. t /***, p. 234. X Ibid.
PlIKITANS. AND ifiAVALIERS. — Vol. iii. 476.
PROWESS OF THE TRAINED BANDS. 481
fought all day " with great fierceness and courage ; " the Cavaliers
charging " with a kind of contempt of the enemy ; " and the Round
heads making the Cavaliers understand- that a year of discipline
had taught them some of the best lessons of warfare. "The Lon
don Trained Bands and auxiliary regiments (of whose inexperience
of danger, or any kind of service, beyond the easy practice of their
postures in the Artillery Garden, men had till then too cheap an
estimation), behaved themselves to wonder ; and were, in truth, the
preservation of that army that day. For they stood as a bulwark
and rampire to defend the rest ; and, when their wings of horse
were scattered and dispersed, kept their ground so steadily, that
though prince Rupert himself led up the choice horse to charge
them, and endured their storm of small shot, he could make no im
pression upon their stand of pikes, but was forced to wheel
about."* The men of London, taken from the loom and the an
vil, from the shops of Ludgate or the wharfs of Billingsgate, *stood
like a wall, as such men have since stood in many a charge of for
eign enemies. The contempt of the Cavaliers for the "base me
chanicals " was one great cause of the triumph of the Roundheads.
The base mechanicals, in their turn, had an equal contempt for the
Cavaliers. Of the two men who went out from Gloucester, and
spoke to the king "in a pert, shrill, undismayed accent," one was a
bookbinder. Such enthusiasts knew no fear, and had small respect
for rank and power, as far as outward demeanour was concerned.
" Their backs turned scarce thirty yards,, on clap they their caps in
the king's presence, with orange ribbons in them." f But they
had an ever present belief that they were doing "the Lord's work ; "
and whether starving in a fortress, or ridden down by men in steel,
they would not be moved
" With dread of death to flight or foul retreat.
On the night of the battle of Newbury, each army remained in
the position it had occupied before that day of carnage. The loss
of royalists of rank was more than usually great. Three noblemen
fell, for whom there was lamentation beyond the ranks of their
party — lord Carnarvan, lord Sunderland, and lord Falkland. Falk
land, especially, still lives in our memories, as one of the noblest
and purest — the true English gentleman in heart and intellect.
* " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 235.
t Journal of the Siege, quoted in Warburton's " Rupert and Cavaliers," vol. ii. p. 280.
Vol. III.— 31
482 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
What is called his apostacy has been bitterly denounced, and not
less intemperately justified, by historical partisans. One whose in
tellect was as clear as his feelings were ardent in the cause of just
liberty, has thus written of Falkland : — " A man who leaves the
popular cause when it is triumphant, and joins the party opposed
to it, without really changing his principles and becoming a rene
gade, is one of the noblest characters in history. He may not have
the clearest judgment or the firmest wisdom ; he may have been
mistaken, but as far as he is concerned personally, we cannot but
admire him. But such a man changes his party not to conquer but
to die. He does not allow the caresses of his new friends to make
him forget that he is a sojourner with them and not a citizen : his
old friends may have used him ill, they may be dealing" unjustly
and cruelly : still their faults, though they may have driven him
into exile, cannot banish from his mind the consciousness that with
them Is his true home : that their cause is habitually just and
habitually the weaker, although now bewildered and led astray by
an unwonted gleam of success. He protests so strongly against
their evil that he chooses to die by their hands rather than in their
company ; but die he must, for there is no place left on earth where
his sympathies can breathe freely ; he is obliged to leave the coun
try of his affections, and life elsewhere is intolerable. This man
is no renegade, no apostate, but the purest of martyrs : for what
testimony to truth can be so pure as that which is given uncheered
by any sympathy ; given not against enemies amidst applauding
friends ; but against friends, amidst unpitying or half-rejoicing
enemies. And such a martyr was Falkland ! " *
Aubrey says of this most interesting of the heroes of the Civil
War: "At the fight of Newbury, my lord Falkland being there,
and having nothing to do to charge, as the two armies were en
gaging rode in like a madman, as he was between them ; and was,
as he needs must be, shot." Clarendon tells another and more
consistent story : " In the morning before the battle, as always
upon action, he was very cheerful, and put himself in the first ranks
of lord Byron's regiment, then advancing upon the enemy, who had
lined the hedges on both sides with musketeers ; from whence he
was shot with a musket in the lower part of the belly, and in the
instant falling from his horse, his body was not found till the next
morning." It was not Falkland's duty to be in the battle. He
was urged to stay away. " No," he said, " I am weary of the times ;
* Arnold's " Lectures on Modern History," p. 238.
DEATH OF LORD FALKLAND. 483
I foresee much misery to my country, but I believe I shall be out of it
before night." Clarendon tells us why his life had become a burthen
to Falkland : " Fron the entrance into this unnatural war, his natural
cheerfulness and vivacity grew clouded, and a kind of sadness and
dejection of spirit stole upon him, which he had never been used to.
But after the king's return from Brentford, and the furious reso
lution of the two Houses hot to admit any treaty for peace, those
indispositions which had before touched him, grew into a perfect
habit of uncheerfulness ; and he, who had been so exactly easy and
affable to all men, that his iace and countenance was always present,
and vacant to his company, and held any cloudiness and less
pleasantness of the visage a kind of rudeness or incivility, became,
on a sudden, less communicable ; and thence, very sad, pale, and
exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habit,
which he had minded before always with more neatness, and in
dustry, and expense, than is usual to so great a soul, he was not
only incurious, but too negligent ; and in his reception of suitors, and
the necessary or casual addresses to his place, so quick, and sharp,
and severe, that there wanted not some men (strangers to his .nature
and disposition), who believed him proud and imperious, from which
no mortal man was ever more free. * * * * When there was any
overture or hope of peace, he would be more erect and vigorous,
and exceedingly solicitous to press any thing which he thought
might promote it ; and, sitting among his friends, often, after a
deep silence and frequent sighs, would, with a shrill and sad ac
cent, ingeminate the word Peace, Peace; and would passionately
profess, ' that the very agony of the war, and the view of the ca
lamities and desolation the kingdom did and must endure, took his
sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart.' " *
The untimely death of lord Falkland must have been to some
of the cavaliers, probably to the king himself, a presage of greater
disaster; if we may credit the well-known anecdote which Dr.
Welwood thinks not " below the majesty of history to mention."
Agreeing with him, we repeat it in his own words :
" The king being at Oxford during the Civil Wars, went one
day to see the public library, where he was shewn among other
books a Virgil nobly printed and exquisitely bound. The lord
Falkland, to divert the king, would have his majesty make a trial
of his fortune by the Sortes Virgilianm, which every body knows
* " Rebellion," vol. iv. p. 231.
484 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
was an unusual kind of augury some ages past. Whereupon the
king opening the book, the period which happened to come up
was that part of Dido's imprecation against .rEneas ; which Mr.
Dryden translates thus :
' Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes,
His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose ;
Oppressed with numbers in th' unequal held,
His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd,
Let him for succour sue from place to place,
Tom from his subjects, and his son's embrace,
First let him see his friends in battle slain,
And their untimely fate lament in vain ;
And when at length the cruel war shall cease,
On hard conditions may he buy his peace.
Nor let him then enjoy supreme command,
But fall untimely by some hostile hand,
And lie unbury'd on the barren sand.' *
It is said king Charles seemed concerned at this accident ; and
that the lord Falkland observing it, would likewise try his own
fortune in the same manner ; hoping he might fall upon some pas
sage that could have no relation to his case, and thereby divert the
king's thoughts from any impression the other might have upon
him. But the place that Falkland stumbled upon, was yet more
suited to his destiny than the other had been to the king's ; being
the following expressions of Evander, upon the untimely death of
his son Pallas, as they are translated by the same hand.
' O Pallas ! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word,
To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword ;
I wam'd thee, but in vain ; for well I knew
What perils youthful ardour would pursue :
That boiling blood would carry thee too far :
Young as thou wert in danger, raw to war !
O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom,
Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come ! ' " t
The relief of Gloucester and the battle of Newbury was fatal to
many of the sanguine hopes of a speedy victory over disunited
rebels which the royalists up to this time had entertained. They
had seen how the despised Trained Bands has been disciplined
into good soldiers. They had seen how such men as held the
" godly city of Gloucester " for a whole month against the best
troops of the king would die rather than surrender. There was a
fatal concurrence of events to render it certain that, although the
• " iEneid," iv. 1. 880 t Ibid., xi. 1. 230.
THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT. 485
queen was bestowing places upon her favourite courtiers, as if
Oxford were Whitehall — offering the marquis of Newcastle to be
Chamberlain or lord of the bedchamber, and intriguing to make the
faithless lord Holland groom of the stole, — the real power of the
monarchy was fading away. The royalists called the battle of
Newbury "a very great victory."* Before this issue had been
tried the Parliament had appointed commissioners to negotiate a
(treaty of alliance with the Scots ; for the Parliament felt weak and
dispirited. Sir Henry Vane, the chief negotiator, had acceded to
the imperative demand of the Scots parliament that the religious
system of Scotland should be adopted as that of England. Vane,
who was an Independent, and a supporter of toleration, contrived,
after great debate, to satisfy the zealous Presbyterians, who pro
posed " a Covenant." Vane stipulated for " a solemn league and
covenant." This obligation was to be taken by both nations. The
Scots proposed a clause " for the preservation of the king's person."
Vane added, " in preservation of the laws of the land and liberty
of the subject." To the clause for " reducing the doctrine and
discipline of both churches to the pattern of the best reformed,"
Vane added " according to the word of God." t This solemn
League and Covenant was to bind those who subscribed it, " to
endeavour, without respect of persons, the extirpation of popery
and prelacy." A passage from Baxter shows how earnestly it was
sought to reconcile the moderate party to this declaration : " This
Covenant was proposed by the Parliament to the consideration of
the Synod at Westminster ; the Synod stumbled at some things in
it, and especially at the word prelacy. Dr. Burges the prolocutor,
Mr. Gataker, and abundance more, declared their judgments to be
for episcopacy, even for the ancient moderate episcopacy, in which
one stated president, with his presbyter, governed every church ;
though not for the English Diocesan frame, in which one bishop,
without his presbytery, did, by a lay chancellor's court, govern all
the presbyters and churches of"a diocese, being many hundreds;
and that in a secular manner by abundance of upstart secular
officers, unknown to the primitive church. Hereupon grew some
debate in the assembly : some being against every degree of
¦bishops (especially the Scottish divines), and others being for a
moderate episcopacy. But these English divines would not sub
scribe the Covenant, till there were an alteration suited to their
judgments : and so a. parenthesis was yielded to, as describing that
* Letter of the queen to Newcastle. t * See Ludlow's " Memoirs," p. 65.
486 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sort of prelacy which they opposed, viz., that is, Church govern
ment by archbishops, bishops, deans and chapters, archdeacons, and
all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy. All
which conjoined are mentioned as the description of that form of
church government which they meant by Prelacy, as not extending
to the ancient Episcopacy. When the Covenant was agreed on,
the Lords and Commons first took it themselves, and Mr. Thomas
Coleman preached to the House of Lords, and gave it them with
this public explication, " That by Prelacy we mean not all Episco
pacy, but only the form which is here described." * Mr. Hallam
says, " These controversial subtleties elude the ordinary reader of
history." But history cannot be understood unless some reference
be made to them. Without regarding these subtleties, we might
conclude that the Parliament and the people of London were unan
imous for the unconditional adoption of the same form of church
government as that which was established in Scotland. The Scots
no doubt expected that this would be the result. The exultation
of their commissioners in London must have been unbounded
when, on the 25th of September, all the members of Parliament,
assembled in St. Margaret's church, swore to maintain "the solemn
League and Covenant." The oath was signed by two hundred and
twenty-eight members of the Commons. It was adopted in the
city with enthusiastic demonstrations of religious fervour. On the
next day Essex was received in London with a warmth that may
have consoled him for some previous complaints of his want of
energy, and for annoyances which he had received in his command.
The Lords and Commons gave him an assurance of their confi
dence : and he remained the general-in-chief, without the divided
powers which had created a jealousy between himself and sir Wil
liam Waller.
Whilst the members of parliament in London are lifting up their
hands in reverent appeal to Heaven as they accept the Covenant,
and the people are shouting around the earl of Essex as the ban
ners are displayed which he won in Newbury fight, there is one
man fast growing into one of the most notable of men, who is rais
ing troops, marching hither and thither, fighting whenever blows
are needful — work which demands more instant attention than the
ceremony of St. Margaret's church. In the early stages of his
wonderful history nothing is more interesting than to trace the
steps of this man, now Colonel Cromwell. Whatever he says 01
* " Reliquiae Baxtcrianae," p. 48.
GROWING IMPORTANCE OF CROMWELL. 487
does has some mark of the vigour of his character, — so original,
so essentially different in its manifestations from the customary
displays of public men. In Cromwell's speeches and writings we
must not look for the smooth and equable movement of common
diplomatists and orators. His grand earnestness makes the arti
fices of rhetoric appear petty by comparison. The fluency of the
scholarly writer is weak by the side of his homely phrases. He is
urging some great friends in Suffolk to raise recruits, and choose
captains of horse : " A few honest men are better than numbers.
* # * * j ijacj rather have a plain russet-coated captain, who
knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that
which you call ' a Gentleman,' and is nothing else. I honour a
Gentleman that is so indeed." * In this spirit Cromwell is form
ing his " Ironsides," and at this period is heading them in the ear
liest of those famous charges which determined so many battles.
On the 10th of October, in the skirmish of Winceby, near Horn-
castle, his career is well nigh ended. His horse was killed at the
first charge ; and as he rose, he was knocked down by sir Ingram
Hopton, who led the royalists. He seized another horse, and the
enemy was routed. Denzil Hollis, in his Memoirs, more than in
sinuates doubts of Cromwell's personal courage. He calls him
"as errand a coward, as he is notoriously perfidious, ambitious,
and hypocritical ; " and states, of his own knowledge, that he
basely " kept out of the field at Keinton battle, where he, with his
troop of horse, came not in, impudently and ridiculously affirming,
the day after, that he had been all that day seeking the army and
place of fight, though his quarters were but at a village near hand " f
We must receive this testimony for what it is worth, as coming
from one who had become a bitter enemy of Cromwell, as the
leader of the Independents. For the ambition of such a man as
Cromwell, whether as a soldier or a politician, there was, now ample
room. His religious party was fast rising into importance. The
sectaries of all denominations eagerly gathered under the standard
of a leader who insisted that his men should be religious, but left
the particular form of religion to their own choice. The religious
principle of the Civil War thns became more and more prominent,
when enthusiasts of every denomination regarded it as a struggle
* Mr. Carlyle has done inestimable service for the historical student by his publica
tion of " Oliver Cromwell's Speeches and Letters, with Elucidations." For the first
time Cromwell is presented to us as a real man.
t " Memoirs," p. 17.
488 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
for the right of private judgment in matters of faith, and despised,
every authority but that of the Bible. Such a leader as Cromwell
had tougher materials to conquer with than Hampden, with his
green-coated hunters of the Chilterns. He had themes to dis
course upon in his oratory, so forcible, however regardless of
proem and peroration, which, far more than Pym's eloquent dec
lamation, stirred the hearts of a parliament that had come to con
sider " the power of godliness " to be a higher cause than " the
liberties of the kingdoms." Cromwell's opportunity was come.
The man who had destroyed arbitrary taxation, and the man who
had sent the counsellors of a military despotism to the block, were
no more. The year 1643 was memorable for the deaths of three
of the greatest of the early patriots of the Long Parliament — •
Hampden, Falkland, and Pym. We have seen how two of Ihe
illustrious three died on the battle-field. Pym died on the Sth of
December, having sunk under a lingering illness. He was buried
in Westminster Abbey, his body being carried to its resting place
on the shoulders of ten of the leading speakers and influential
members of the House of Commons. The men who now came
upon the scene as the chief actors were of a different stamp than
these earlier tribunes of the people. Henceforward the war will
assume a broader character and a fiercer aspect. The prospect
of accommodation will grow more and more faint. The religious
element will go forward into what all who look impartially upon
those times must consider as relentless persecution by one domi
nant party, and wild fanaticism amongst sectaries not yet banded
into a common purpose. The arbitrary imposition of the Cove
nant upon every minister of the Anglican Church was the first great
result of the alliance with the Scots. The Presbyterian Parlia
ment of England became more violent for conformity than the
Court of High Commission which the Parliament had destroyed.
The Canons of Laud had fallen lightly upon men who were indif
ferent about the position of the altar, or the precise amount of
genuflexions; but the imposition of the Covenant upon all the
beneficed clergy was the declaration of an intolerant tyranny
against the most conscientious. The number of incumbents
ejected from their livings, for their refusal to sign this obligation,
has been variously reckoned. According to Neal, the historian of
the Puritans, it was sixteen hundred ; according to Walker, an ex
treme high churchman, it reached eight thousand. The statement
of Walker is evidently a gross exaggeration. The sixteen hun-
THE COVENANT SEVERELY ENFORCED. 489
dred of Neal was about a fifth of the benefices of England. What
ever was the number of ejected ministers, and however some
might have been, as was alleged, of evil lives, the tyranny of this
measure is most odious, as coming from men who had themselves
struggled against religious persecution. " The remorseless and
indiscriminate bigotry of Presbyterianism might boast that it had
heaped disgrace on Walton, and driven Lydiat to beggary ; that it
trampled on the old age of Hales, and embittered with insult the
dying moments of Chillingworth." * Amongst the eminent public
men who advocated the Covenant as a political measure, there
were some who abhorred it as an instrument of persecution. The
younger Vane, the chief promoter of it, declared upon the scaffold,
that " the holy ends therein contained I fully assent to, and have
been as desirous to observe ; but the rigid way of prosecuting it,
and the oppressing uniformity that hath been endeavoured by it, I
never approved." * Hallam, " Constitutional History," vol. ii.
490 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Scots enter England — The Irish army defeated at Nantwich. — A Parliament sum
moned to meet at Oxford. — Combined armies besiege York. — Lathom House. — Battle
of Marston Moor. — The queen leaves England — Essex defeated in the West. — Second
battle of Newbury. — Differences between the Parliamentary Commanders. — Laud con
demned for treason by ordinance of parliament. — Treaty of Uxbridge. — Montrose's
victories in the Western Highlands. — Self-denying Ordinance — Fairfax lord-general of
the re-modelled army. — Cromwell lieutenant-general. — The battle of Naseby. — The
king's Cabinet opened.— Surrender of Bristol by Rupert. — Basing House taken.
The year 1644 opened with great events. On the 19th of
January the Scottish army entered England. They marched from
Dunbar, " in a great frost and snow " — " up to the knees in snow,"
say the narratives. Lesley, now earl of Leven, commanded them.
The marquis of Newcastle was not strong enough long to oppose
them. He had given up his attempt to take Hull, and was in winter-
quarters at York. Lesley's army marched on to Newcastle, which
they summoned to surrender. The governor and garrison were
faithful to their trust. The Scots were straitened for provisions;
and the royalist army of fourteen thousand men was intercepting
their supplies. They determined to advance further into the heart
of the country. At this juncture the English regiments that had
been recalled by the king from Ireland, were besieging the parlia
mentary garrison at Nantwich. Sir Thomas Fairfax hurried to the
relief of the place, and totally defeated this Anglo-Irish army(
which was under the command of Sir John Byron. The recall by
the king of those troops who had been sent to repress the rebellion
in Ireland, was preceded by the conclusion of a truce with the
rebels themselves. The Irish protestants were alarmed for their
safety. The English protestants became more than ever suspi
cious of Charles, and especially of his queen, who had always main
tained a correspondence with the Irish papists. Many of these
had come over with the English troops. The cessation of arms in
Ireland, says Clarendon, " was no sooner known in England, but
the two Houses declared against it, with all the sharp glosses upon
it to his majesty's dishonour that can be imagined." He goes on
to say, with reference to Irish affairs, that " the calumnies and
THE IRISH ARMY DEFEATED AT NANTWICH. 49 1
slanders raised to his majesty's disservice and dishonour made a
more than ordinary impression upon the minds of men, and not
only of vulgar-spirited people, but of those who resisted all other
infusion and infection.'' * The historian of the rebellion seeks to
acquit the king of all underhand proceedings with the Romanists of
Ireland. But he must have had a difficult task for a conscientious
man to perform, in slurring over in this and other instances of his
master's willingness to adopt covert and dishonourable measures.
The next year, when Charles was engaged in the most dangerous
projects with Herbert, earl of Glamorgan, for raising a great army
of Irish to invade England under the auspices of the pope and
foreign princes, he kept these matters a profound secret from his
council. Of these Irish transactions there is the conclusive evi
dence against the king of Clarendon himself, in a letter addressed
by him to the secretary Nicholas. " I must tell you, I care not
how little I say in that business of Ireland, since those strange
powers and instructions given to your favourite Glamorgan, which
appears to me so inexcusable to justice, piety, and prudence. And
I fear there is very much in that transaction of Ireland, both be
fore and since, that you and I were never thought wise enough to
be advised " with in. Oh, Mr. Secretary, those stratagems have
given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war which
have befallen the king, and look like the effects of God's anger to
wards us." f
Negotiation after negotiation between the king and the parlia
ment having failed, and the appeal to the sword still remaining of
doubtful issue, some strong measure was thought expedient to
lower the character of the two Houses sitting at Westminster. The
king's notion was to issue a proclamation declaring the parliament
to be dissolved ; forbidding them to meet ; and requiring all per
sons to reject their authority. Hyde told the king his honest
opinion upon this project: " I cannot imagine that your majesty's
forbidding them to meet any more at Westminster will prevent one
man the less going there. * * * It was the first powerful re
proach they corrupted the people with against your majesty, that
you intended to dissolve this parliament ; and, in the same way,
repeal all the other acts made by that parliament, whereof some are
very precious to the people. As your majesty has always disclaimed
any such thought, such a proclamation now would confirm all the
jealousies and fears so excited, and trouble many of your true sut>'
* " Rebellion," vol.- iv. p. 364. t " Clarendon Papers," quoted in Lingard.
492 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
jects." * Charles very unwillingly accepted Hyde's own counter-
proposition. It was that of summoning the peers and commons
that had adhered to the royal cause to meet him in parliament at
Oxford. On the 22nd of December, 1643,- the proclamation con
voking this Parliament was issued. On the 22nd of January, 1644,
the parliament, or more truly convention, met at Oxford. A letter
written from this assembly to the earl of Essex, expressing a
desire for peace, was signed by forty-three peers, and one hundred
and eighteen commoners. Others were absent on the king's ser
vice. In the same January, according to Whitelocke, two hundred
and eighty members appeared in the House of Commons, besides
those absent on the parliamentary services. A large majority of
the Commons were with the Westminster parliament; a large,
majority of Peers with that of Oxford. The measure might have.
been productive of advantage to the royal cause, had it not soon
been manifest that the king and queen were impatient under any
interference with the authority of royalty. This was more fatal
than the absolute refusal of the parliament at Westminster to rec
ognise "those persons now assembled at Oxford, who, contrary to
their duty, have deserted your parliament," as they wrote to the
king on the 9th of March. The parliament at Oxford continued to
sit till the 16th of April, voting taxes and loans, passing resolutions
of fidelity, but irritating the king in their refusal to be mere instru
ments for registering his edicts. But they produced no visible
effect upon public opinion ; and Charles congratulated the queen
upon their being " freed from the place of all mutinous motions,
his mongrel parliament," when he had willed its adjournment.
Whilst at Oxford the king's " mongrel parliament " only proved
a hindrance to the vigorous prosecution of the war, the parliament
at Westminster had adopted the rational course of strengthening
their executive authority. A council was formed under the title of
" The Committee of the Two Kingdoms," consisting of seven
Lords, fourteen members of the Commons and four Scottish com
missioners. The entire conduct of the war, the correspondence
with foreign states, whatever belongs to the executive power as
distinguished from the legislative, devolved upon this Committee.
In the spring of 1644 the Parliament had five armies in the field,
paid by general or local taxation, and by voluntary contributions.
Including the Scottish army there were altogether 56,000 men
under arms ; the English forces being commanded, as separate
* Clarendon's Life.
LATHOM HOUSE. 493
armies, by Essex, Waller, Manchester, and Fairfax. Essex and
Waller advanced to blockade Oxford. The queen, who was in a
situation that made the thought of remaining in a city exposed to
siege very irksome, determined to go to a place of greater safety.
She went to Exeter in April, and never saw Charles again. He
remained shut up in Oxford. Its walls were surrounded by lines
of defence ; but the blockading forces had become so strong that
resistance appeared to be hopeless. On the night of the 3rd of
June the king secretly left the city, and passed safely between the
two hostile armies. There had been jealousies and disagreements
between Essex and Waller. The Committee of the two kingdoms
had assigned to Waller the command of the army of the west, in
the event of the separation of the two armies. Essex, supported
by the council of war, resolved to march to the west himself. He
was directed by the Committee to retrace his steps, and go in pur
suit of the king. Essex replied to the Committee that their orders
were opposed to military discipline : and he marched on. Waller,
meanwhile, had gone in pursuit of the king into Worcestershire.
Charles suddenly returned to Oxford ; and then defeated Waller at
Cropredy Bridge, near Banbury, who had hastened back to en
counter him. Essex was before the walls of Exeter, in which city
the queen had given birth to a princess. The king hastened to
the west. He was strong enough to meet either of the parliament
ary armies, thus separated. Meanwhile the north of England be
came the scene of the most momentous conflict that distracted
England had yet beheld. The dashing enterprise of Rupert in the
relief of Lathom House, so bravely held by Charlotte de la Tre-
mouille, countess of Derby, became of small importance amidst
the greater event that was to follow in the north. The moated
house of the Stanleys had been defended by the heroic countess
for eighteen weeks against a detachment of the army of Fairfax.
Their artillery could produce little impression upon the thick walls
and lofty towers ; and the demand to submit herself, her children,
and followers to the mercy of Parliament, produced from the lady,
immortalised by history and romance, the reply, that " the mercies
of the wicked are cruel." Rupert hung the walls of Lathom House
with the parliamentary banners which he had captured in a fierce
battle at Bolton ; and he went on towards York to a fiercer strife
and a perilous defeat. The combined English and Scottish armies
were besieging York. Rupert received a letter from the king,
containing these words : " I command and conjure you, by the
494 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
duty and affection which I know you bear me, that all new enter
prises laid aside, you immediately march, according to your first
intention, with all your force to the relief of York." He did march.
Marston Moor saw the result.
As Rupert advanced towards York with twenty thousand men,
the allied English and Scots retired. Their councils were not
unanimous. Some were for fighting, some for retreating, and at
length they moved from Hessey Moor, near York, to Tadcaster.
Rupert entered York with two thousand cavalry. The earl of
Newcastle was in command there. He counselled a prudent delay.
The impetuous Rupert said he had the orders of the king for his
guidance, and he was resolved to fight. Newcastle was a man of
ceremony ; jealous of interference, for he had ruled the north with
vice-regal magnificence : raising large bodies of troops, and paying
them with the coinage of the York mint. He was indignant with
the prince ; but he left him to his own course. On the 2nd of July,
having rested two days, in and near York, and enabled the city to
be newly provisioned, the royalist army went forth to fight. They
met their enemy on Marston Moor. The two armies looked upon
each other for two hours, with scarcely a cannon-shot fired. New
castle asked Rupert what office he was to take. He replied that
the earl might repose, for he did not intend to begin the action till
the morrow. Newcastle went to his carriage, and left the prince
to his supremacy. The sun Was in the west on that July evening
when the battle began. The sun had scarcely set when the battle
was finished ; and there were four thousand one hundred and fifty
bodies lying dead on that plain. The issue would have been more
doubtful, but for Cromwell, who for the first time had headed his
Ironsides in a great pitched battle. The right wing of the parlia
mentary army was scattered. Rupert was chasing and slaying the
Scottish cavalry. The centre of each army, each centre composed
of infantry, were fighting with the sturdy resolution of Englishmen,
whatever be the quarrel. The charges of Fairfax and Cromwell
decided the day. The flight of the Scottish horse proclaimed that
the victory of the Cavaliers was complete ; and a messenger who
reached Oxford from Newark announced such news to the enrap
tured courtiers as made the gothic pinnacles red with bonfires. In
another day or two the terrible truth was known. The victory of
the parliamentary armies was so complete, that the earl of New
castle had left York, and had embarked at Scarborough for the
continent. Rupert marched away also, with the wreck of his army
THE QUEEN LEAVES ENGLAND. 495
to Chester. Each had announced his determination to the other,
as they gloomily entered York on the night of the battle. Fifteen
hundred prisoners, all the artillery, more than a hundred banners,
remained with the victors. And the men who had achieved this suc
cess were the despised Puritans ; those who had been a laughing
stock for half a century. " We had all the evidence," writes Crom-
. well to his brother-in-law, colonel Valentine Walton, " of an absolute
victory obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the godly party prin
cipally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. The left
wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving afew Scots
iii our rear, beat all the prince's horse. God made them as stub
ble to our swords." Cromwell had to tell his brother-in-law of a
calamity that would most touch a father's heart. " Sir, God hath
taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg.
We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died." He
expatiates upon this sorrow with no vain attempts at ordinary con
dolence. " The Lord be your strength," is his emphatic conclu
sion. When Cromwell's character came to be judged, first in an
age of profligacy, and then in an age of religious indifference, np
one could comprehend that he had any higher sustaining principles
than craft and selfishness.
The queen, sinking under a serious illness, unable to call back
the high spirit which had made her so determined in her councils
and her actions, now fled to France. Essex was approaching with
his army towards Exeter. She asked a safe conduct from him to
go to Bath or Bristol. He offered to wait upon her himself to
London ; but he could not obey her desire to go to any other place
without directions from the Parliament. On the 9th of July she
wrote a letter from Truro, to bid her husband adieu. " I am
hazarding my life that I may not incommode your affairs." She
embarked from Falmouth on the 14th, and landed at Brest. Hence
forth her letters to Charles will continue to show how keen was
the interest she took in his proceedings, and how strenuously she
field to her original idea of never conceding anything to rebels.
Soon after her departure the king's arms had a considerable suc
cess over lord Essex in Cornwall. The parliamentary party are in
alarm. Cromwell writes, " we do with grief of heart resent the sad
condition of our army in the west, and of affairs there. That busi
ness has our hearts with it ; and truly had we wings we would fly
thither." * The army was indeed in a " sad condition." Essex
* Carlyle, vol. i. p. 156.
496 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
wrote in vain for assistance; in vain urged a diversion, to take off
the pressure of the royalist army by which he was surrounded. A
letter from the king was delivered to him, calling upon him to give
peace to his country. Essex replied to his nephew, lord Beau
champ, who brought the letter, that he should give no answer ; his
advice to the king was to return to his Parliament. Another at
tempt was made to win Essex to a treaty. He had no authority
to treat, he said, and could not treat without a breach of trust. By
the latter end of August he was encompassed by the royalists.
The greater part of his army desired to capitulate, though his cav
alry had succeeded in passing the enemy's posts. Essex hastily
left the camp to avoid that humiliation, leaving Skippon in com
mand. The old campaigner proposed to his officers to follow the
example of the cavalry, at all risks. But Charles offered honour
able terms of capitulation, only requiring the surrender of the
artillery, arms, and ammunition. .The army of Essex returned as
fugitives to London, or dispersed through the country. He wrote
from Plymouth an account of " the greatest blow that ever befel
our party." His fidelity to the cause he had adopted not only
saved him from reproach, but the Parliament hastened to give him
a new mark of their confidence. The king was resolved to march
to London from the west. Montrose was in arms in Scotland, and
had gained two battles. The time for a great blow was thought to
have arrived. Three armies under Essex, Manchester, and Waller
were called out for the defence of the capital. Essex, though re
taining his authority, did not join the troops which fought the
second battle of Newbury on the 27th of October. Manchester
was there in command. This battle was hotly contested without
any decisive results. The king withdrew to Oxford, renewing his
project of advancing to London. The serious differences between
the Presbyterians and the Independents were brought to an issue
by this second battle of Newbury. There were no rejoicings in the
city that the king had been checked in his approach. There was
gloom and dissatisfaction amongst the people, which was evidently
encouraged by men of bolder resolves than those who had the con
duct of military affairs. In November, Cromwell, in his place in
parliament, brought forward a charge against the earl of Man
chester, of having "always been indisposed and backward to en
gagements, and the ending of the war by the sword." He renewed
his attack in December. " It is now time to speak, or for ever
hold the tongue * * * I do conceive if the army be not put
LAUD CONDEMNED AND EXECUTED. 497
into another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the
people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dis
honourable peace." In a few months^ the army was put " into an
other method."
The Presbyterian party, including the Scottish Commissioners,
were now at open hostility with the Independents. At a meeting at
the house of the lord-general Essex, the Scottish chancellor pro
posed that Cromwell should be proceeded against as " an incen
diary." Whitelocke and Maynard, two eminent lawyers, were
consulted. Whitelocke advised that they should be prepared with
specific proofs before they brought forward such a charge.
Whilst the supporters of Essex and the other generals were seek
ing for proofs against their dangerous rival, it was moved in the
Commons, by Zouch Tate, a man of no great mark, "that no
member of either House shall, during the war, enjoy or execute
any office or command, civil or military, and that an ordinance be
brought in accordingly." Long and furious debates followed this
proposition. It was passed by the Lower House on the 21st of
December, and transmitted to the Lords. The Presbyterian party
saw their strength passing away from them. They endeavoured
to rekindle all the violence of religious intolerance, by resuming
proceedings against archbishop Laud. In the previous March his
trial had commenced upon specific charges, founded upon those
which had first been brought forward on his impeachment. He
defended himself with skill and courage. The arbitrary power of
the ecclesiastical courts which he had upheld was at an end.
There was meanness and cruelty in his prosecution, after four
years of imprisonment. It was the triumph of a bigotry far more
odious than his own attempt to tyrannise in matters of religious
opinion. His most active persecutor was William Prynne, who
never relaxed in his thirst for vengeance upon the intolerance
which he now repaid in tenfold measure. By an ordinance of Par.
liament, voted by a few lords — some say seven only — he was con
demned for high-treason. There might be the plea of state neces
sity for the execution of Strafford ; but to send this aged prelate
to the block, whose power for good or evil was wholly gone, was
atrocious in a higher degree, for this shedding of blood was useless.
He was beheaded on the 10th of January, 1645. On the 3rd the
Liturgy of the Church of England, which had been previously
tolerated, was abolished by ordinance. Four others were sent to
the scaffold at the same time for political offences ; — Sir John
Vol. Ill— 32
498 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Hotham and his son : lord Macguire ; and Sir Alexander Carew.
The Presbyterians were left to these courses of severity, whilst
their opponents were urging the adoption of "the Self-denying
Ordinance." It was rejected on the 13th of January, by the Lords.
The reason for the rejection was that they did not know "what
shape the army will now suddenly take." But the agitation of this
question had rendered a great change necessary On the 21st of
January, Fairfax was nominated general ; and, within a month, a
new model for the army was arranged and carried. The Self-
denying Ordinance, with modifications, was ultimately passed.
The most strenuous attempt at pacification between the king
and the Parliament was made at the beginning of 1645. Ludlow -
has briefly recorded the main facts : " It was agreed that Commis
sioners should be sent from the Parliament to treat with others to
be sent from the king, about conditions of peace. The place of
their meeting was at Uxbridge. * * * The king had owned the two
Houses as a parliament, to which he was not without difficulty
persuaded, though he had by an act engaged that they should
continue to be a parliament till they had dissolved themselves,
which they had not done.''* Charles wrote to his queen, " As
for my calling those at London a parliament, I shall refer thee
to Digby for particular satisfaction ; this in general ; if there had
been but two besides myself, of my opinion, I had not done it ;
and the argument that prevailed with me was, that the calling
did no ways acknowledge them to be a parliament." f This was
his apology to Henrietta Maria, when she bitterly reproached him,
saying, " When you were resolved to make a little council of four,
you showed me a paper in which were many things about which you
would never relax, of which this was the first." J A negotiation en
tered upon in such a spirit was not likely to end in any agreement
for the public good. Clarendon, who was one of the king's commis
sioners at Uxbridge, has left the amplest details of the progress
of this treaty. The commissioners sent by the" Parliament were
chiefly of the more moderate party. Men who had been united
in the first days of the Long Parliament, but had since become
political enemies, now met in a common hope that once more they
might become friends. Sir Edward Hyde and lord Colepepper
renewed their intercourse with Mr. Hollis and Mr. Saint John.
* " Memoirs," p. 149.
t " King's Cabinet Opened," Harleian Miscellany, vol. v. p. 513.
+ Green's " Letters," p. *
TREATY OF UXBRIDGE. 499
The chancellor of Scotland, lord Loudon, and the parliamentary
lords Pembroke and Denbigh, had private discussions with Hyde
and others, in which they imparted their mutual hopes and fears.
"There was a good house at the end of the town, which was pro
vided for the treaty, where was a fair room in the middle of the
house, handsomely dressed up for the commissioners to sit in." *
Each party ate in its own inn, for there were " two. great ones
which served very well to that purpose." The duke of Richmond
presided at the table of the king's commissioners. Their debates
were at first grave and courteous ; seldom disturbed by any acri
monious reflections upon the past ; always difficult and protracted
for many hours. The three great points which they had to discuss
were, the Church, the state of Ireland, the Militia. They took
each separately. The Presbyterians, with the Scottish divines,
were as strenuous for the abolition of episcopacy, as the Episco
palians, with the learned doctors from Oxford, were resolute for
its maintenance. Some trifling concessions were made on either
side ; and an approach to an agreement did not stem absolutely
hopeless. The question of Ireland was not so difficult. That of the
Militia, — the question which of two parties should hold the great
instrument of power — was at one period of the discussion resolv
ing itself into a manageable shape. Lord Southampton was de
puted to proceed to Oxford to see if he could obtain some conces
sion from the king that would place the military authority under
the joint control of the Crown and the Parliament, each naming
half of the leaders, for a limited number of years. Dr. Welwood
has a remarkable story connected with this mission : " Though the
Parliament's demands were high, and the king showed a more than
ordinary aversion to comply with them ; yet the ill posture of the
king's affairs at that time, and the fatal consequences they feared
would follow upon the breaking off of the treaty, obliged a great
many of the king's friends, and more particularly that noble person
the earl of Southampton, who had gone post from Uxbridge to
Oxford for that purpose, to press the king again and again upon
their knees, to yield to the necessity of the times ; and by giving
his assent to some of the most material propositions that were
sent him, to settle a lasting peace with his people. The king
* That " fair room," with its black oak panels, quaintly carved, was, within the last
twelve years, the principal room of the "Treaty-house Inn." We have often rested
there, to indulge, over a traveller's meal, in reveries of that discussion of twenty dayi
which made this room famous.
KOO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
was at last prevailed with to follow their counsel; and the next
morning was appointed for signing a warrant to his commissioners
to that effect. And so sure were they of a happy end of all differ
ences, that the king at supper complaining his wine was not good,
one told him merrily, he hoped that his majesty would drink better
before a week was over, at Guildhall with the lord mayor. But so it
was, that when they came early the next morning to wait upon him
with the warrant that had been agreed upon over night, they found
his majesty had changed his resolution, and was become inflexible,
in these points." This sudden change in the king's resolves might
have been ascribed to the capricious vacillation which he often dis
played, whether from the changing moods of his own mind, or the
influence of the queen and other secret advisers. In the instance
before us, the altered temper is referred to a letter from Montrose,
which had been received by Charles during the night. In the
middle of December that daring chieftain had forced an entry into
the country of the Campbells, wasting all before him. The moun
tains were covered with snow ; the passes were imperfectly known ;
yet Montrose made his way, burning and slaughtering, till at
length Argyle himself fled from his castle of Inverary, and left the
unhappy clans to the vengeance of his deadly enemy. Montrose
having sated his revenge till the end of January, marched towards
Inverness. Argyle had returned with some forces from the Low
lands to the Western Highlands ; and was in a position near the
castle of Inverlochy, when Montrose suddenly came dawn upon
him from the mountains. The battle was a decisive victory on the
part of the royalist leader, who wrote an account of his exploits to
Charles, which letter Dr. Welwood prints, having " seen a copy
under the duke of Richmond's hand." Montrose says that after
he had laid waste the whole country of Argyle, "my march was
through inaccessible mountains, where I could have no guides but
cowherds, and they scarce acquainted with a place but six miles
from their own habitations. * * * * The difficultest march of all
was over the Lochaber mountains, which we at last surmounted,
and came upon the back of the enemy when they least suspected
us." Having described his victory over "the rebels," he then pro
ceeds to offer Charles his advice. His exultation at his triumph
was so unbounded, that he concluded a few victories in Scotland
would again place the king, with uncontrolled power, upon the
thrones of both kingdoms. He has heard news, he says, "as if
your majesty was entering into a treaty with your rebel Parliament
THE RE-MODELLED ARMY. 501
in England. The success of your arms in Scotland does not more
rejoice my heart, as that news from England is like to break it.
* * * * The more your majesty grants, the more will be asked ;
and I have too much reason to know, that they will not rest satis
fied with less than making your majesty a king of straw. * * * *
Forgive me, sacred sovereign, to tell your majesty, that in my poor
opinion, it is unworthy of a king to treat with rebel subjects while
they have the sword in their hands. And though God forbid I
should stint your majesty's mercy, yet I must declare the horror I
am in, when I think of a treaty, while your majesty and they are
in the field with two armies ; unless they disband, and submit
themselves entirely to your majesty's goodness and pardon. * * *
Give me leave, with all humility, to assure your majesty, that
through God's blessing, I am in the fairest hopes of reducing this
kingdom to your majesty's obedience. And if the measures I have
concerted with your other loyal subjects fail me not, which they
hardly can, I doubt not but before the end of this summer, I shall
be able to come to your majesty's assistance with a brave army;
which, backed with the justice of your majesty's cause, will make
the rebels in England, as well as in Scotland, feel the just rewards
of rebellion." *
The treaty of Uxbridge was to last twenty days. The last day
expired on a Saturday, and nothing was concluded. " They hav
ing on Sunday performed their usual visits to each other, parted
with such coolness, as if they scarce hoped to meet again." t
When the parliamentary commissioners returned to London, they
found that Fairfax had received his commission as sole general.
The new model for the army was being practically carried into ef
fect. Argyle arrived from Scotland, stung by defeat and disgrace ;
and agreed with the extreme party, in urging forward whatever
measures would lead to the active prosecution of the war. The
Peers withdrew from their opposition to the self-denying ordinance,
and it was finally passed on the 3rd of April. The military services
of Cromwell were of such importance that Fairfax and his officers
urged that, without regard to the ordinance, he might be tempo
rarily appointed lieutenant-general, chief commander of the horse.
The earls of Essex, Manchester, and Denbigh, gave in their resig
nations. There was a great change in the operations of the Parlia
ment. There was to be an equal change in the councils of the king.
It was resolved that the prince of Wales should be sent into the
* Welwood's " Memoirs," p. 306, ed. 1736. t Clarendon, vol. i. p. 81
502
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
western counties with the title of generalissimo, and that the most
discreet advisers of Charles should accompany the prince, yet only
fifteen years old, to direct all measures in his name. The more
violent of the Cavaliers now formed the advisers of Charles. Ox
ford resounded with songs of mockery against the pestilent Round
heads. The royalist newspapers derided the folly which had dis-
missed.the old parliamentary leaders, to place in their room untried
and obscure men. The followers of such were fanatical mechanics,
who would fly at the first sound of their cannon. As the summer
approached the king's affairs were rapidly mending. He had taken
Leicester by storm. Taunton was besieged by the royalists. Fair
fax was surrounding Oxford, but inactive. Cromwell was active in
the counties of the Eastern Association. Those who had opposed
the re-modelling of the army complained that the new organization
had produced no effective results. Fairfax, on the 5th of June, re
ceived commands to raise the siege of Oxford, and go to the mid
land counties after the king. The general sent a requisition to the
Parliament that Cromwell might be permitted to join him. He
was indispensable, Fairfax and his colonels said, as commander of
the cavalry. There is alarm in the eastern counties. Cromwell
writes from Cambridge to the deputy lieutenants of Suffolk : " The
cloud of the enemy's army hanging still upon the borders, and
drawing towards Harborough, make some supposals that they aim
at the Association." A postscript adds, " Since the writing hereof
we received certain intelligence that the enemy's body, with sixty
carriages, was on his march towards the Association, three miles
on this side Harborough, last night at four of the clock." Crom
well calls for " horse and dragoons " — all your horse and dragoons
to hasten to Newmarket. The foot are to rendezvous at Bury.
On the 13th of June, Fairfax and Cromwell were marching after
the king, who went before them from Daventry to Harborough.
On the 14th of June was fought the battle of Naseby.
Cromwell wrote the dispatch announcing the result of this battle
to the Speaker of the House of Commons. This letter was written
on the evening of that day which was fatal to the hopes of the roy
alists. " He [the king] drew out to meet us. Both armies en
gaged. We, after three hours' fight very doubtful, at last routed
his army ; killed and took about 5000 — very many officers, but of
what quality we yet know not. We took also about 200 carriao-es,
all he had; and all his guns, being 12 in number, whereof two were
demi-cannon, two demi-culverins, and I think the rest sackers. Wa
THE BATTLE OF NASEBY. 503
pursued the enemy from three miles short of Harborough to nine
beyond, even to the sight of Leicester, whither the king fled. Sir,
this is none other but the hand of God ; and to him alone give the
glory, wherein none are to share with Him."* Minuter chroni
clers than the man who had the chief share of the work have given
us ample details of this victory. f The Cavaliers were so confident
of their strength that they were amusing themselves with hunting
during the five days that their head-quarters were near Daventry.
On the 1 2th the king was encamped on Burrough Hill, and had
been hunting that day. Fairfax was near him, and saw from a
place near Weedon, at four o'clock in the morning of the 13th, the
huts of the royal camp on fire, for the army was moving off. At
six o'clock that morning Cromwell arrived with his Ironsides from
the Associated Counties ; and he was received with shouts ; " the
horse gave a mighty shout for joy of his coming to them." The
united parliamentary forces now marched forward towards Har
borough. The king had taken up his quarters for the night at the
" Hall House," at Lubenham, near Harborough, where his van was
stationed. His rear was at Naseby. Late that evening, Ireton
and his troopers suddenly dashed in amongst the royalists there.
Some fled to the old Hall, where the king was gone to rest. He
set off instantly to Rupert's quarters at Harborough ; and in a mid
night council of war it was determined not to retire to Leicester, as
had been previously agreed, but to fight Fairfax. " They would
not stay to expect his coming," says Clarendon, " but would go
back to meet him." The parliamentary army was on its march at
three in the morning of the 14th, and at five was at Naseby. . Of
this old hamlet on a hill in the centre of England there is a rough
sketch in a curious book by a chaplain of Fairfax. X Mr. Carlyle
has given the present aspect of the place in a few words : " A
peaceable old hamlet of some eight hundred souls ; clay cottages
for labourers, but neatly thatched and swept; smith's shop, sad
dler's shop, beer-shop, all in order; formingakind of square which
leads off southwards into two long streets : the old church, with its
graves, stands in the centre. * * * The ground is upland, moor
land, though now growing corn ; was not enclosed till the last gen
eration, and is still somewhat bare of wood." According to
Clarendon the king's army was drawn up early in the morning of
the 14th in order of battle, about a mile from Harborough, there
* Carlyle, vol. i. p. 176. t See Carlyle, vol. iii- Appendix, No vii.
X Sprigge, " Anglia Rediviva."
504 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to wait for the enemy. The several commands were thus assigned :
prince Rupert commanded the left wing ; sir Marmaduke Langdale
the right wing ; lord Ashley the main body. The reserves were
with the king. The scout-master came in and reported that he had
been three or four miles, and could gain no intelligence of any
enemy near. Rupert then went forward with his horse ; and indis
tinctly seeing the van of the Parliament's troops, fancied they were
retreating, and sent a messenger to desire that the royalist main
body should immediately move up. When Fairfax saw the king's
army advancing, he formed his troops in a large fallow field north
west of Naseby, the brow of the hill running east and west for
about a mile. The centre was commanded by Fairfax himself and
Skippon; the right wing by Cromwell; the left wing by Ireton.
The reserves were commanded by Pride, Hammond, and Rains-
borough. On Rupert hurried. " Thus," says Clarendon, " the
army was engaged before the cannon was turned, or the grounds
made choice of upon which they were to fight." The hill on which
the parliamentary army was drawn up bears the name of " Mill
Hill." The king's army was on a hill opposite. A wide table-ground
known as " Broad Moor " was between them. Here was the chief
point of the deadly struggle. Rupert charged up the hill against
the left wing of Fairfax. Cromwell charged from the extreme right
down the hill upon Langdale's squadrons. Rupert is carrying all,
before him with his battle-cry of " Queen Mary." He has beaten
Ireton's left wing back to Naseby; but there he has been tempted
to lose time in taking a survey of his enemy's baggage. Cromwell
has scattered the left wing of the royalists. Langdale's horse have
fled through the furze-bushes and rabbit-warrens, before the battle-
cry of " God is our strength." But Fairfax in the centre is hotly
pressed. The king's foot have come over the hill, and poured in
volley after volley upon the parliamentary ranks. They have
closed. Fairfax is riding from division to division bare-headed.
His helmet has been lost in the first charge. Old Skippon is
wounded, but he " will not stir while a man will stand." But help
is at hand. The Ironsides now turn from their flying enemies on
the right ; and retrieved the day by their assaults on the king's
main battle. When Rupert returns he sees the royal army in utter
confusion. Fairfax has rallied his men ; and the royalists yield.
But the king's reserve of horse, consisting of his own guards,
what are they doing ? A panic fear seizes them, whicli Clarendon
thus explains :— " The king was even upon the point of charging
THE KINGS CABINET OPENED. 505
the enemy, in the head of his guards, when the earl of Carnewarth,
who rode next to him, (a man never suspected for infidelity, nor
yet one frora whom the king would have received counsel in such,
a case,, on a sudden, laid his hand on the bridle of the king's horse,
and swearing two or threefull-mouthed Scottish oaths, (for of that
nation he was,) said, ' Will you go upon your death in an instant ?'
and before his majesty understood what he would have, turned his
horse round ; upon which a word ran through the troops, ' that
they should march to the right hand ; ' which led them both from
charging the enemy, and assisting their own men. Upon this they
all turned their horses, and rode upon, the spur, as if they were
every man to shift for himself." * Rupert's men, says Clarendon,.
" having, as they thought, acted their parts, could never be brought
to rally themselves again in order, or to charge the enemy. That
difference was observed all along, in the discipline of the king's
troops, and of those which marched under the command of Fair
fax and Cromwell, (for it was only under them, and had never
been remarkable under Essex or Waller,) that, though the king's
troops prevailed in the charge, and routed those they charged, they
seldom rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to
make a second charge the same day." t
The battle was at an end. The most precious spoil of that day
was "the king's cabinet," which, when "opened," disclosed se
crets which more injured his cause than any victory of his enemies.
When the banners taken at Naseby were hung up in Westminster
Hall, there was joy and pride ; but there was bitter indignation
when the letters taken in the cabinet at Naseby were read aloud in
Guildhall. There was no sincerity in the king's desire for peace ;
there was no abatement of his determination to govern by absolute
power. Foreign princes were asked to send their soldiers to
conquer rebel England. The dreaded Papists were to be freed
from every restraint on the condition of such assistance. The best
blood of the Cavaliers had been shed on the Broad Moor near
Naseby. J Other defenders of the king's standard might arise ;
* " Rebellion," vol. v. p. 184. t Ibid., p. 185.
X The slaughter of the 14th of June was terrific, both on the battle ground and in
Cromwell's charge of the fugitives beyond Harborough. Mr. Thorne, in his charming
" Rambles by Rivers," has well described the battle, and says, that " the field itself still
retains evidence of the event. The bodies were collected and buried in several huge pits
that were hastily dug ; and the earth with which they were covered has sunk considerably,
so that now they form large hollows — some of the deeper, from the water collecting in
them, except in very dry weather, form ponds, and being left waste round the borders,
have become fringed with brambles and weeds. The plough is not carried over any o
506 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
but these letters were the damning evidence of deceit ; and those
who saw that the word " loyalty " had ceased to charm, could only
complain that domestic confidence was violated when the private cor
respondence of a king and queen was published to the whole
world. " Naseby being not far from Coventry where I was," writes
Baxter, " and the noise of the victory being loud in our ears : and
I having two or three that of old had been my intimate friends in
Cromwell's army, whom I had not seen of above two years ; I was
desirous to go see whether they were dead or alive. And so to
Naseby-field I went two days after the fight, and thence by the
army's quarters before Leicester, to seek my acquaintance." * The
worthy man whose curiosity thus took him amongst scenes of hor
ror, has left us no description of the traces of carnage here. But
he has given. a vivid picture of the men by whom the work was
done. In his despatch of the 14th of June to the Speaker of the
Commons, Cromwell did not neglect even in his brief rest after
the battle and the pursuit, to call attention to these men — the
flower of the new-modelled army. " Honest men served you faith
fully in this action. Sir, they are trusty ; I beseech you, in the
name of God, not to discourage them. I wish this action may be
get thankfulness and humility in all that are concerned in it. He
that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust
God for the liberty of his conscience," and you for the liberty he
fights for." " The liberty of his conscience " thus proclaimed in the
hour of Cromwell's triumph, was a startling notion to the majority of
public men at that time. When Baxter found his old acquaintance
in the camp, he stayed with them a night. He had been " unfeign-
edly for king and Parliament." He had thought "that the war
was only to save the Parliament and kingdom from papists and
delinquents." He understood the Covenant to be " against papists
and schismatics." He thought it a mere lie when " the court news-
book told the world of the swarms of anabaptists in our armies."
He came amongst Cromwell's soldiers, and " found a new face of
the graves, and they have a solemn effect when it is known what they are. In cultivating
the soil, bullets, cannon-balls, and fragments of arms, are frequently turned up. The
man I had with me when examining the place had been a servant of Mr. Mastin's [the
historian of Naseby], and had dug for him in several of the pits. The bodies, he said,
were not more than eighteen inches or two feet from the surface. The arms are usually
rusted to pieces, but not always ; my man had dug up ' a swoard not very long ago, and
polished her up as broight as bran-new.' "
" Reliquix Baxterianae," p. 56.
BAXTER IN THE PARLIAMENTARY CAMP. 507'
things which I never dreamt of." Sectaries in the highest places
" were Cromwell's chief favourites, and by their very heat and ac
tivity bore down the rest." He says, "they were far from think
ing of a moderate episcopacy, or of any healing way between the
Episcopal and the Presbyterians. They most honoured the Sepa
ratists, Anabaptists, and Antinomians ; but Cromwell and his Coun
cil took on them to join themselves to no party, but to be for the
liberty of all." Shortly after, Baxter, whose reputation as a
preacher was very high, was invited by colonel Whalley to be chap
lain to his regiment. Whalley was "orthodox by religion, but
engaged by kindred and interest to Cromwell." Baxter went.
" As soon as I came to the army, Oliver Cromwell coldly bid me
welcome, and never spake one word to me more while I was there."
The good man was ridiculed : " There was a reformer come to the
army to undeceive them, and to save Church and State." Thus
discountenanced, the zealous minister pursued what he thought his
duty. " I set myself day by day to find out the corruptions of the
soldiers ; and to discourse and dispute them out of their mistakes,
botli religious and political. My life among them was a daily con
tending against seducers, and gently arguing witli the more tract
able." He was ever disputing with them about Civil government,
or Church order and government. " But their most frequent and
vehement disputes were for liberty of conscience, as they called it;
that is, that the civil magistrate had nothing to do to determine of
anything in matters of religion, by constraint or restraint; but
every man might not only hold, but preach and do in matters of
religion what he pleased ; that the civil magistrate hath nothing to
do but with civil things ; to keep the peace, and protect the Church's
liberties." Amidst all this vehemence — amidst the ignorance^
pride, and self-conceitedness which Baxter reprehends— it is im
possible not to be struck by the fact of a great army, after a mighty
victory, being occupied with discussions which appear more prop
erly to belong to parliaments and synods. But without a due per
ception of the zeal which, whether rightly or wrongly directed,
counted an earnest faith the one thing needful, we cannot compre
hend the events of these times, and more especially those events
which placed, ultimately, the monarchy and the Parliament under
the power of the army.
During the summer of 1645 singular confederacies had been
formed in some places, avowedly for protecting their property against
both parties. Those who belonged to them were known as " Club-
508 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
men." They were to some extent neutrals ; but they were prirr
cipally called into activity by royalist gentry. They were not " club
bable " men in Johnson's sense of the term. Their business was
to use their clubs as valiantly as they might. They became annoy
ing in the south-west to the parliamentary army ; and Cromwell, in
a march towards Shaftesbury, encountered about two thousand of
them. They fired upon a party of his horse, but of course were
soon routed. "We have taken about three hundred," Cromwell
writes to Fairfax, " many of which are poor silly creatures, whom
if you please to let me send home, they promise to be very dutiful
for time to come, and will be hanged before they come out again."
Fairfax had taken some of the Clubmen previously ; and Cromwell
told those who interceded for them that " they were to be tried
judicially for raising a third party in the kingdom." *
King Charles had fought his last battle at Naseby. The mili
tary career of prince Rupert in England was now fast coming to
an end. Bristol, which Rupert was charged to defend, was invested
by Fairfax and Cromwell on the 22nd of August. The positions
taken by the several divisions of the parliamentary army are
minutely described in a letter from Cromwell to the Speaker. On
the 1 oth of September the city was stormed. The royalists caused
the city to be set on fire at three places. Whilst the parliamentary
commanders "were viewing so sad a spectacle," Rupert sent a
trumpet to propose a surrender. The articles were agreed upon;
and the prince marched out with a convoy of two regiments of
horse. He went to Oxford. Charles wrote him a bitter letter of
reproach from Hereford : " My conclusion is, to desire you to seek
your subsistence until it shall please God to determine of my con
dition, somewhere beyond seas." A royal proclamation was issued
the same day, revoking and disannulling all commissions of mili
tary authority given to "our nephew prince Rupert." The sur
render of Bristol was perhaps the wisest act of Rupert's life ; for
he had no chance of holding it against the parliamentary forces,
and the king was utterly unable to render him assistance. But
Charles would not learn from the bitter lessons of adversity. It
is justly said, " after his defeat at Naseby his affairs were, in a
military sense, so irretrievable that, in prolonging the war with as
much obstinacy as the broken state of his party would allow, he
displayed a good deal of that indifference to the sufferings of the
* Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 184.
BASING HOUSE TAKEN. 509
kingdom, and of his adherents, which has been sometimes imputed
to him." *
At the beginning of October, Winchester surrendered to Crom
well ; and he then went on to the siege of Basing House. Of the
many memorable places of the Civil War there is none more in
teresting than this. It was amongst the strongest of those private
houses of the nobility which offered such strenuous resistance to
the progress of the parliamentary troops. It had endured siege
after siege for four years. The traveller on the South Western
railway looks down upon a great ruined pile, not far from Basing
stoke, lying on the other side of a little stream. The ruin will
repay a closer inspection. This was the house called " Loyalty "
which Cromwell battered from the higher ground till he had made
a breach ; and then stormed with a resolution which made all resist
ance vain. Never was such a rich plunder offered to the Round
heads, as was found in the mansion " fit to make an emperor's
court," of the magnificent Pawlet, marquis of Winchester.
* Hallam, vol. ii. p. 182.
510 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Destruction of the Manor Houses. — Miseries of Sieges. — Montrose defeatedat Philip.
haugh. — Defeat of Digby. — His Cabinet taken. — The King in Oxford. — Overtures
for Pacification. — Termination of the War in the West. — Prince of Wales leaves for
Scilly.— The King negotiates with the Scots.— The King's Flight from Oxford.—
Adventures of the King on his way to the Scottish Army. — The King with the^
Army before Newark. — State of Parties. — Negotiations. — The King surrendered to
English Commissioners. — Capitulation of Oxford. — End of first Civil War.
The traces of the Civil War in England are to be found in the
existing ruins of several old mansions, besides those of Basing
House. Amongst the most interesting and picturesque are the
remains of the manor-house of South Winfied. This was one of
the estates of the Shrewsbury family ; and here Mary, Queen of
Scots, resided for some time under the care of the earl, who is as
sociated with her unhappy story. Sir John Gell, who was very
active in the parliamentary interest in Derbyshire, here placed a
garrison. In 1643 the place was taken by the Royalists.
But it was retaken by Sir John Gell ; and Colonel Dalby, the
governor, was killed in the storming. In 1646 the Parliament
ordered the place to be dismantled. Such was the course with
regard to other great mansions of historical interest. Of the
various conflicts for the possession of detached castles and ma
nor-houses, that of Basing House is .amongst the most memora
ble. The rapine and slaughter there were probably greater than
at any other of such strongholds. It was a post of importance,
which had held out against the Parliament so long that it was
deemed almost impregnable. Its large garrison was amply sup
plied by the rich surrounding country. The roads between London
and the " Western Parts " were entirely commanded by this forti
fied mansion, and by Donnington Castle, near Newbury. At the
siege of Basing House was present Hugh Peters, a chaplain in the
parliamentary army, and at that time secretary to Cromwell. After
the storm he " took a view of the works, which were many, the cir-
cumvallation being above a mile in compass." He then looked
about him to see the extent of the victualling department ; finding
" provisions for some years rather than months ; four hundred
DESTRUCTION OF MANOR HOUSES. 51 1
quarters of wheat ; bacon, divers rooms-full, containing hundreds
of flitches ; cheese proportionable ; with oatmeal, beef, pork ; beer,
divers cellars full, and that very good." Seventy-four persons, ac
cording to Mr. Peters, were slain in the house ; amongst whom
was one . lady " who by her railing provoked our soldiers, then in
heat, into a further passion." Amongst the slain was " Robinson
the player, who a little before the storm was known to be mocking
and scorning the Parliament and our army."* Some of the details
of the plunder and destruction, as given by Peters, will furnish an
idea of the havoc of this terrible Civil War : " The plunder of the
soldiers continued till Tuesday night ; one soldier had a hundred
and twenty pieces in gold for his share ; others plate, others jewels ;
among the rest, one got three bags of silver, which (he being not
able to keep his own counsel) grew to be common pillage amongst
the rest, and the fellow had but one half-crown left for himself at
last. The soldiers sold the wheat to country-people, which they
held up at good rates awhile ; but afterwards the market fell,
and there were some abatements for haste. After that, they sold
the household stuff, whereof there was good store, and the country
loaded away many carts ; and they continued a great while fetching
out all manner of household stuff, till they had fetched out all the
stools, chairs, and other lumber, all which they sold to the country-
people by piecemeal. In all these great buildings there was not
one iron bar left in all the windows (save only what were on fire)
before night. And the last work of all was the lead ; and by
Thursday morning they had hardly left one gutter about the house.
And what the soldiers left, the fire took hold on, which made more
than ordinary haste, leaving nothing but bare walls and chimneys
in less than twenty hours ; — being occasioned by the neglect of the
enemy in quenching a fire-ball of ours at first. We know not how
to give a just account of the number of persons that were within.
For we have not quite three hundred prisoners ; and, it may be,
have found a hundred slain, whose bodies, some being covered
with rubbish, came not at once to our view. Only, riding to the
house on Tuesday night, we heard divers crying in vaults for
quarter ; but our men could neither come to them, nor they to us."
* From the construction of a sentence in the report of Peters, it does not seem quite
clear that Robinson was slain by Harrison, as Sir Walter Scott assumes in " Wood-
Stock : " " There lay dead upon the ground Major Cufne, a man of great account amongst
them, and a notorious Papist, slain by the hands of Major Harrison, that godly and gal-
lant gentleman ; and Robinson, the player, who," &c (See Carlyle, vol. i. p. 194.)
512 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The details of horror in sieges of large towns ; the misery of
blockades ; the more sudden distress of assaults and bombard
ments ; are generally passed over slightingly in the official narra-.
fives of such scenes. But some notion of the sufferings of the
people, to whichever party they belonged, may be derived even
from such a formal document as an Ordinance of Parliament.
Taunton had been besieged three times by the Royalists. It was
undergoing the horrors of a siege on the 3rd of July, when Fairfax,
after the great victory of Naseby, came to its relief. But, a month
before this, the Parliament, having regard to its calamities, had
ordered " that a collection be made of all well-affected persons "
for the relief of " the poor distressed inhabitants of the town of
Taunton," and adjacent places. This Ordinance is written with
remarkable unction : " It is notoriously known to all the kingdom,
that the said town hath for these two years past, endured all the
calamities almost that war (the sharpest of all outward judgments)
can bring upon a people They endured three as
sharp and cruel sieges from a bloody enemy as ever any place hath
suffered since the wars began ; in which their houses were con
sumed by fire, their persons slain, the famine and the sword con-
tendeth which should prey upon them first; poor mothers looking
when the time would come that they should hear the children cry
for bread, and there would be none to give them ; when ' they
should see them swoon in the top of every street,' as Lam. ii. 11.
However, God upholds their spirits with unshaken resolution in
the midst of fire and blood But yet, by these calami
ties and troubles, the estates of those who have escaped the sword
are utterly exhausted and consumed, five hundred of their houses
burnt down to the ground (being one-half of the town), by which
almost one thousand families are turned harbourless and helpless
to the mercy of their neighbours, who can only melt upon them,
and weep over them, but are not able to relieve them. And there
fore, you that have escaped these miseries are earnestly besought
to look upon this sad distressed town (sometimes the most emi
nent of those parts for 'building and situation, and, which is more,
for Piety and true Religion), now by the just displeasure of the
Lord against it raked in its own ashes, reduced almost to the
extremity of misery and want, for the defence of that Cause which
you profess, and take upon you to maintain : listen, and hear it
crying to you in the Churches' Lamentations, ' See if there be any
sorrow like to my sorrow, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me iq
MONTROSE DEFEATED AT PHILIPHAUGH. 5 13
the day of his fierce anger ; ' and do not stop your ears against
their cry for pity from you, lest the Lord deal accordingly with
you, and stop his ears against your crys for mercy, when you have
most need of it. In such a singular and extraordinary case as this,
stir up yourselves to do some extraordinary thing : do not draw
out your purses only to your poor distressed brethren, but your
very souls too, as the Prophet speaks This is your duty, and this
will be your policy, if you desire to save your persons, houses, and
estates from that heavy misery which hath exposed them to your
mercy." *
With the exception of a few conflicts for the possession of gar
risoned towns and detached manor-houses, the war, during the
autumn of 1645, was wholly in the west. The great royalist army
was utterly broken and dispersed. After the surrender of Bristol
all reasonable hope was gone of once more matching the Cavaliers
of Rupert against the Ironsides of Cromwell. But in Scotland
there was a royalist leader whose name had become a terror to
the Covenanters. Wherever Montrose led his Highlanders he
was victorious. As he carried the war into the Lowlands he was
joined by many who had formerly dreaded to declare themselves.
It was no longer a war of clanship, but a great national contest.
On the 15th of August the Covenanting army, commanded by
Baillie, was utterly defeated. It was the seventh great victory of
Montrose; and it laid Scotland, for a few weeks, at his feet.
Edinburgh surrendered to him. In the king's name he summoned
a parliament at Glasgow. Before the surrender of Bristol, Charles
had conceived the possibility of joining Montrose. The hope re
turned even after Bristol was lost. He decided to attempt the
relief of Chester, then besieged by the Parliament's forces ; for at
that port only could he receive succours from Ireland. He was at
Hereford, anxious and undecided, when, after a week's delay, he
marched, with five thousand men, over the Welsh mountains ; and
on the 24th of September was within view of Chester. Poyntz, the
parliamentary commander, was watching the king's movements;
and he suddenly came upon the1 rear-guard of the Royalists, at
Rowton Heath. Sir Marmaduke Langdale,— he who had fought at
Naseby,— vigorously charged the parliamentary forces ; but a de
tachment of the besieging troops came upon his rear, and decided
the day. The king retired again to the mountains. His chance of
joining Montrose was gone. But at this juncture, if Charles had
* Husband's '• Ordinances in Parliament," 1642 to 1646, p. 651.
Vol. III.— 33
514 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
x
defeated Poyntz and relieved Chester, this last faint hope would
have been destroyed. On the 24th of September, Montrose was
himself a fugitive. He had advanced towards the English border,
with diminished followers His Highlanders had dispersed ; his
Lowland adherents had fallen off. Lesley had moved from Eng
land to encounter him. On the 13th of September, at Philiphaugh,
on the left bank of the Ettrick, Montrose was surprised by the
veteran Covenanter. There was a thick mist. No scout gave no
tice of Lesley's approach. The camp of Montrose was attacked
on each flank. The great leader himself was in the town of
Selkirk, on the right bank of the Ettrick. He hastened upon the
first alarm to cross the river with his cavalry. But it was impos
sible to rally the main body of his followers. He retreated to the
Highlands. Instead of being the commander of a victorious army,
he was now only the leader of a few bands of mountaineers.
Lesley re-established the Covenanting power in the Lowlands.
His victory was disgraced by a cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners ;
and by the subsequent execution of many of the royalist leaders.
One, who was a true Scotsman in his nationality, but whose genius
was too high to make him blindly partial, has thus compared his
countrymen with the English during this warfare : " Greatly to the
honour of the English nation, — owing, perhaps, to the natural gen
erosity and good-humour of the people, or to the superior influence
of civilization, — the civil war in that country, though contested with
the utmost fury in the open field, was not marked by any thing ap
proaching to the violent atrocities of the Irish, or the fierce and
ruthless devastation exercised by the Scottish combatants The
days of deadly feud had been long past, if the English ever fol
lowed that savage custom, and the spirit of malice and hatred which
it fostered had no existence in that country. The English parties
contended manfully in battle, but, unless in the storming of towns,
when a,n evil passions are afloat, they seem seldom to have been
guilty of cruelty or wasteful ravage. They combated like men who
have quarrelled on some special point, but, having had no ill-will
against each other before, are resolved to fight it out fairly, with
out bearing malice." *
When Charles reached Denbigh Castle after the defeat near
Chester, he rested there three days. After much debate it was de
cided to go to Newark, which was held by a royalist garrison of
%bout two thousand horse and foot. The excesses of these men,
* Scott's " Tales of a Grandfather."
DEFEAT OF DIGBY. — HIS CABINET TAKEN. 515
in a time of so general calamity, had excited the indignation of all
the country. * News now came that Montrose had recovered his
defeat, and that his army was again victorious. The king again
set forward with an ill-conditioned Newark garrison to the aid of
Montrose. On the way they learnt the truth of his final ruin.
The king returned to Newark, but Digby, with the presumption
that marked his character, went on to the north. At Sherborne,
in Yorkshire, he was overtaken by the parliamentary troops, and
utterly routed. Amongst Digby's baggage his private papers were
taken; and these, being published by order of Parliament, "ad
ministered afterwards so much occasion of discourse." Thus
Clarendon glances at their contents. But the Parliament, when
publishing them in the spring of 1646, took care to set forth the
policy that was to be collected from this secret correspondence be
tween the queen's favourite, Jermyn, and the king's chief adviser,
Digby: "The reader, comparing Cabinet with Cabinet, the king's
with the lord Digby's, will easily observe how the unnatural ene
mies to this their native country (imitating their General, the great
enemy to mankind) have gone about seeking how they may de
vour it, by their restless endeavours to bring in foreign aid from
Holland, Couiiand, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, France, and from
Rome itself, of shipping, arms, ammunition, men, money, horse and
foot, ani that in no small proportions : 4000 foot and 1000 horse
expected from France, [0,000 men from Ireland, and 10,000 more
from Lorraine ; a strange conjuncture, to concur in the ends pre
tended ! The king and pope to defend the Protestant religion,
Denmark and Lorraine to maintain laws and liberties, bloody rebels
in Ireland to uphold the privileges of Parliament in England ! But
blessed be God, who hath discovered the counsels of the enemies,
and thereby hath in a great part opened the eyes, and undeceived not
only multitudes of their principal adherents at home, but also for
eign princes and states abroad, and have withal defeated their forces
and expectations both abroad and at home. This is God's work,
and it is marvellous in our eyes." f
The stormy meeting between the king and prince Rupert at
Newark ; the half-mutinous conduct of the royal garrison there, — •
events minutely related by Clarendon — are indicative of the fallen
fortunes of the unhappy king. " He must undergo a new kind of
mortification from his friends much sharper than any he had under
gone from his enemies." Rupert and his brother Maurice left
* Clarendon, vol. v. p. 289. t Husband, " Ordinances of Parliament," 1646, p. 860.
516 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Charles for ever. He was alone ; no one to counsel him. His
troops were reduced to a few hundreds. Poyntz and Rossiter, the
parliamentary generals, were closing round Newark, which had so
long been for him a place of security. To wait there was no longer
safe. At eleven o'clock on the night of the 3rd of November, the
king, with four or five hundred cavaliers, set out for Oxford. After
a wearisome march, with hostile- troops all around, they reached
the loyal city in safety on the 6th. " So he finished the most tedi
ous and grievous march that ever king was exercised in ; having
been almost in perpetual motion from the loss of the battle of
Naseby to this hour, with such a variety of dismal accidents as
must have broken the spirits of any man who had not been truly
magnanimous." * There is another magnanimity besides endur
ance of fatigue and privation without loss of heart — the magna
nimity of refusing to employ dishonourable means of averting dan
ger and overcoming difficulty. On the day after his arrival at Ox
ford, the king wrote to prince Charles, desiring him to leave Eng
land ; "I have resolved," he says, "to propose a personal treaty
to the rebels at London ; in order to which a trumpet is by this
time there, to demand a pass for my messengers, who are to carry
my propositions ; which, if admitted, as I believe it will, then my
real security will be your being in another country." t Beaten in
open warfare, the king now resorted to the more dangerous weapons
of craft and intrigue. His ultimate destruction may in a great de
gree be attributed to the fatal course of endeavouring to win by
stratagem what he despaired of attaining by arms — a course which
he pursued through so many winding paths after the decisive sum
mer of 1645.
During the long vacation of this year the Commons had resolved
to fill up the vacancies in their House, caused by the absence of
the royalist members, by issuing out writs for the election of repre
sentatives to supply their places. Denzil Hollis complains of the
artifices that were employed to procure the return of members fa
vourable to the policy of the Independents ; but he adds, "that far
the greater part of these new members deceived the expectations
of these men." J Many persons of eminence came into parlia
ment through this election. The " certain mean sort of people
in the House, whom to distinguish from the more honourable
gentlemen they called Worsted-stocking men," § became of less
• Clarendon, vol. v. p. 302. t Ibid., p. 277. } Memoirs, p. 43.
5 Mrs. Hutchinson's "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 71.
OVERTURES FOR PACIFICATION. 517
importance, when Hutchinson, Ireion, Blake, Algernon Sidney,
Fleetwood, Ludlow, Fairfax, and others of mark, were returned
for counties and boroughs. But such men were not likely to
yield the great points of difference for which they had so long
fought. The Independents were unquestionably strengthened.
They were fast becoming a real power, as much opposed to the
narrower views of the Presbyterians, as to the re-establishment of
the sovereign without adequate securities. The controversy be
tween the king and the Parliament was becoming more perplexed.
The Scottish army in the north was discontented through the want
of pay. The Parliament complained that an army which had
entered England as allies should ravage the district in which they
were quartered. Charles meditated upon these distractions, and
sought to take his advantage of them. But his overtures for peace
were suspected to be hollow by the men who were now gradually
assuming the lead in public affairs. The king on the 5th of
December wrote to the Speaker of the House of Lords, offering to
send a deputation to Westminster with propositions that should be
" the foundation of a happy and well-grounded peace." He received
no immediate answer; and he then proposed to proceed to West
minster, to treat in pers >n. Meanwhile a reply had been returned
to his first proposal, declining to receive his negotiators. He again
wrote on the 29th of December, urging the plan of a personal treaty.
This proposition was also rejected. To justify this rejection
certain papers that had been found in the carriage of the Catholic
archbishop of Tuam, who was killed in a skirmish in October, were
laid before Parliament, and then published. They proved that the
king had concluded a treaty of alliance with the Irish rebels, in
which as the price of their landing in England with ten thousand
men, under the earl of Glamorgan, popery was to be re-established
in Ireland, and the Protestants brought under subjection. But
Charles had gone further than these papers proved. The treaty
was concluded with the Irish papists by Glamorgan, under a secret
authority from the king himself to make any conditions Glamorgan
pleased, whicli should be righteously observed. The marquis of
Ormond, the lord-lieutenant, committed Glamorgan to prison ; but
he produced two royal commissions as his justification. Charles
repudiated his agent in a letter to the Parliament, maintaining that
he had given no power to make conditions in the matter of religion
or church property, but merely to raise men for his service. Tha
518 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Parliament disbelieved the king ; and documents, then undiscovered,
prove that the Parliament was right.*
The overtures for pacification, so earnesly repeated by Charles,
were probably held by the sagacious and incredulous men with
whom he had to treat, as containing in themselves evidence of the
want of that straightforwardness which could alone be successful.
In the remarkable collection of letters brought to light in 1855,!
we have one to the queen, dated Oxford, January 1 Sth, 1646, in
which Charles says, "Though I have stretched my wits to persuade '
them to accept of my personal treaty, yet examine my words well,
and thou wilt find that I have not engaged myself in anything against
my grounds. For, first, I am sure that there can be no scruple
as concerning the Church. Then, for Ireland and the militia, it is
true that it may be I give them leave to hope for more than I
intended, but my words are only, to endeavour to give them satis
faction in either." It has been remarked by Mr. Hallam that,
''• Charles had unhappily long been in the habit of perverting his
natural acuteness to the mean subterfuges of equivocal language."
There was this folly about his cunning that he fancied others would
not examine his words well. In proposing to treat at Westminster
he was clearly without any real expectation of there effecting a
"happy and well-grounded peace." He was gratifying himself
with the belief that he was able to triumph through the dangerous
principle of " divide and govern." He writes to the queen : " Now,
as to points which I expected by my treaty at London. Knowing
assuredly the great animosity which is betwixt the Independents
and Presbyterians, I had great reason to hope that one of the
factions would so address themselves to me, that I might without
great difficulty obtain my so just ends, and questionless it would
have given me the fittest opportunity. For, considering the Scots
treaty that would be besides, I might have found means to have
put distractions amongst them though I had found none." X Li
following out the remainder of this unhappy king's story for two
years, we shall always trace this ruling principle of his actions ; at
every turn of his affairs having the same confident belief that the
day would come wlien the monarchy " would spring up again as
fair as ever." The root was left, he said ; there were only "lop^
* See ante, p. 491.
t " Charles I. in 1646. Letters of King Charles I. to Queen Henrietta Maria, edited
by John Bn-.ce, Esq." Camden Society, 1856.
X " Charles I. in 1646," p. n
TERMINATION OF THE WAR IN THE WEST.
5*9
pings." In seven years the very loppings " being to return as
entirely to the crown as if I had entered London at a breach." *
The military events of the spring of 1646 brought the contest in
the west to a termination. The remnant of the royalist army was
completely demoralised. It was, says Clarendon, " terrible in
plunder and resolute in running away." Lord Hopton very reluc
tantly accepted the command of this western army, at the express
desire of the prince of Wales. A braver man could not have been
chosen ; a more high-minded friend of the royal cause ; a leader
who carried on war in the spirit most opposed to the rapacity of
those he was expected to change from brigands into soldiers. As
might have been foreseen, this honourable man utterly failed, when
he brought these bands face to face with the orderly troops of
Fairfax. Hopton had possession of Torrington, and his main body
was placed on a common at its east end. When Fairfax forced the
barricade, horse and foot took to flight, leaving their general and a
few of his friends to shift for themselves. Shortly after, Hopton
collected some of his runaways ; and, with accessions of strength
as he went on, marched to Truro, with Fairfax closely following.
Hopton would have fought another battle ; but his officers of horse
declared that their men would never be brought to fight ; and pro
posed to capitulate. Fairfax offered conditions that involved no
dishonour ; but the general would not yield ; and at last a treaty
was concluded without him, and the western army was dissolved.
On the 22nd of March, lord Astley, marching from Worcester to
join the king at Oxford, was defeated at Stow-in-the-Wold, and his
three thousand cavaliers were kilied, captured, or dispersed. The
brave old general was himself taken prisoner. The soldiers brought
him a drum to sit down upon. The Parliamentary captains respect
fully surrounded the veteran : " Gentlemen," he says, " you have
done your work, and may now go to play, — unless you will fall out
among yourselves." These disasters at length determined the prince
of Wales and his council to obey the king's injunctions to leave
the country. The prince's governorship in the west was no longer
a protection to his person. He first sailed to Scilly. Two days
after his landing he sent lord Colepepper to France to acquaint the
queen "with the wants and incommodities of the place," and to
-desire " a supply of men and moneys." Lady Fanshawe, whose
husband acted as secretary to the Council, 1 \nded in miserable
plight, having Tjeen pillaged by the seamen with whom they sailed
* " Charles I. in 1646," p. 21.
520
HISTORY OF ENGLAND
from the Land's-end. The poor lady, sick, and far advanced in
pregnancy, was set on shore almost dead ; and from her narrative
we may obtain some notion of " the incommodities of the place."
She says, When we had got to our quarters near the castle, where
the prince lay, I went immediately to bed, which was so vile, that
my footman ever lay in a better, and we had but three in the whole
house, which consisted of four rooms, or rather partitions, two low
rooms and two little lofts, with a ladder to go up : in one of these
they kept dried fish, which was his trade, and in this my husband's
two clerks lay, one there was for my sister, and one for myself,
and one amongst the rest of the servants. But, when I waked in
the morning, I was so cold I knew not what to do, but the daylight
discovered that my bed was near swimming with the sea, which the "
owner told us afterwards it never did so but at spring tide. With
this, we were destitute of clothes ; and meat and fuel, for half the
Court to serve them a month, was not to be had in the whole island ;
and truly we begged our daily bread of God, for we thought every
meal our last. The Council sent for provisions to France, which
served us, but they were bad, and a little of them." * From Scilly, ¦
after three weeks of privation, the prince sailed for Jersey ; and in
the summer proceeded to France, and afterwards to Holland.
Three months had elapsed since the proposals of the king had
been rejected by the Parliament. They were three months of re
peated disaster. The royalist cause had never fallen so low.
Charles endeavoured to carry out his hope of dividing his enemies
by propitiating the Independents through their leading statesman,
the younger Vane. Asburnham, in the king's name, wrote to Vane
to propose that the Independents and the Royalists should unite
to put down " the tyrannical domination " of the Presbyterians.
It is not known whether Vane returned an answer. The king
then addressed a message to Parliament, offering to come to
Whitehall, and proposing much the same terms as had been re
jected by him during the treaty at Uxbridge. His great object
was to produce such an effect by his presence in London as would
cause a popular re-action in his favour. Three days after he had
sent this message to the Parliament, he wrote to Digby, " I am
endeavouring to get to London, so that the conditions may be such
as a gentleman may own, and that the rebels may acknowledge me
king ; being not without hope that I shall be able so to draw either
the Presbyterians or Independents to side with me for externum*
* " Memoirs," p. 74.
THE NEGOTIATES WITH THE SCOTS. 52 1
ting the one or the other, that I shall be really king again." * The
leaders of both paities agreed to prevent this by a very strong
ordinance, which gave the Committee of the Militia power to raise
forces to prevent tumult in case of the king's coming ; to appre
hend any who should come with him or resort to him ; and which
commanded all who had ever borne arms for the king immediately
to depart from London, upon the penalty of being proceeded
against as spies. Meanwhile the army of Fairfax was advancing
towards Oxford. Montreuil, a special ambassador from France,
had been negotiating with the Scottish commissioners in London
to induce the Scots to take up the cause of the king. His offers
were received with civility, but with no distinct promises. He
then proceeded to Edinburgh, and afterwards to the Scottish
army. As might be expected, the question of establishing the
Church in England according to the Scottish model was the great
apparent difficulty. The real danger, which was perhaps most
borne in mind, was the certainty of being involved in a serious
quarrel with the English Parliament by a separate treaty. There
were already sufficient causes of disunion ; the principal being the
sufferings of the people of the north, from the long presence of
the Scottish troops amongst them. Hollis, who extenuates the
conduct of these troops, says : " I must be very ignorant of the
carriage of an unpaid army, if I did not believe that many disor
ders were committed ; many a poor countryman exceedingly op
pressed and abused by the unruly soldiers ; and more by half
taken and spoiled by them than would have sufficed for their pay
and entertainment, if it had been orderly raised and provided by
the authority and care of the state, which was to pay them." f The
State did not pay them promptly, and the soldiers took their main
tenance into their own hands. After two months of tedious nego
tiation, Montreuil at last saw that the first advice which he had
given to the king to go to the Scottish army was not borne out by
any definite promises, and he then dissuaded him from the at
tempt. On the 22nd of April Charles wrote to the queen from
•Oxford, complaining that his condition was much worse than ever
-" by the relapsed perfidiousness of the Scots." He so little sus
pected it from the previous advices from Montreuil, that, he says,
" I did not care what hazard I undertook for the putting myself
into their army. .... And that no time might be. lost, I
wrote a letter to Montrose to make him march up and join with
* .Carte's " Ormond," quQted in Brodie and Hallam. t " Memoirs," p. 49.
522 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
them, in case he found by Montreuil, by whom I sent the letter,
that they were really agreed with me Thou wilt as
plainly see, by what secretary Nicholas sends thee, their base un
worthy dealing, in retracting of almost all which was promised
Montreuil from London, even to the being ashamed of my com
pany, desiring me to pretend that my coming to them was only in
my way to Scotland." * Nearer and nearer Fairfax was drawing
his troops round Oxford. In a few days the blockade would be
complete. Whither was the unhappy king to fly ? He would get
privately to Lynn ; he would go by sea to Scotland, if Montrose
were in a condition to receive him ; he would make for Ireland,
France, or Denmark. He would go anywhere "to eschew all kind
of captivity." t If he who thus breathes out his sorrows to the
only being in whom he has absolute confidence were a private man,
who could refuse him pity ?¦ His very errors claim our pity. He
has been trained to take the most dangerous view of his own posi
tion. " I am a king." — " They cannot do without me." He holds
his sovereignty to be an inherent possession, and not a sacred
trust. He sees only rebels ; not a people that he has misgov
erned. But there is a solemn pathos even in his egoism : " I con
jure thee," he says to his wife in this his saddest hour; "I con
jure thee by thy constant love to me, that if I should miscarry,
whether By being taken by the rebels or otherwise, to continue the
same active endeavour for prince Charles as thou hast done for
me, and not whine for my misfortunes in a retired way, but, like
thy father's daughter, vigorously assist prince Charles to regain
his own." X
There were two persons in attendance upon the king at Oxford
upon whom he bestowed his most secret confidences. One was
his chaplain, Dr. Michael Hudson; the other, a groom of his
bedchamber, Ashburnham, commonly called by Charles, Jack Ash-
burnham. Each of these have left relations of the manner of the
king's escape from Oxford. After noticing some ineffectual at
tempts to induce Ireton to accept and protect the king's person,
upon the conditions proposed to the Parliament of going to Lon
don, Ashburnham thus continues : " And now his majesty con
ceiving himself to be discharged from all obligation, which by any
way could be fastened upon him by his Parliament, or by any au
thority derived from them, settled his thoughts upon his journey
to the Scots army ; and in order thereunto did acquaint some of
*_" Charles I. in 1646," p. 37. t Ibid., p. 38.' X Ibid. , p. 39.
THE KING'S FLIGHT FROM OXFORD. 523
his Privy Council, as he was pleased to tell me, with his intentions to
leave Oxford, if they should approve of that course to be best for
his affairs, and their preservation ; but did not impart the truth of
his design with the Scots, conceiving that most of them would have
opposed with some unreasonable heat his conjunction with them,
and therefore chose rather to put the design of London upon it."*
In no situation of danger or difficulty could this unfortunate king
give up his system of double-dealing and half-confidence. The
groom of the bedchamber then very briefly relates how the journey
from Oxford began and ended. Dr. Hudson, however, has amply
filled up the details. He was arrested and brought before the
House of Commons, and his examinations present a very circum
stantial account of nine days of wandering and peril." j On
Sunday, the 26th of April, Hudson was desired by Ashburnham
to come to his chamber at eleven o'clock at night. About twelve
o'clock the king came with the duke of Richmond. Ashburnham
"cutoff his lock, and some part of his beard," the lovelock, the
well-known badge of the cavalier. Hudson was then sent to call
the governor of Oxford, who arrived about two o'clock. To him
the king confided his intention to leave the city ; the governor
went for the keys ; and just as the clock struck three they passed
over Magdalene-bridge. The king then commanded the governor
that no gate of Oxford should be opened for five days. Onward
rode the three — the king, Hudson, and Ashburnham — by Dorches
ter, Benson, Henley, Maidenhead, and Slough. They then turned
out of the road towards Uxbridge, and rested not until they reached
a tavern at Hillingdon, between ten and eleven o'clock. They en
countered several parties of horse on the road ; but Hudson had
obtained an old pass that had been granted to another person, and
he was liberal of his money when he came to any guard. He was
the master, the king and Ashburnham were his servants. " One
of Colonel Ireton's men," says Hudson, "rid in our company from
Nettlebed to Slough ; and seeing me give money always at the
guards, asked him, the king, if his master was not one of the Lords
of the Parliament? He answered, No ; his master was one of the
Lower House." During their short rest at Hillingdon, " the king
was much perplexed what course to resolve upon, London or north
ward." He at length determined " to go northward, and through
Norfolk, where he was least known," and there to stay whilst
* Ashburuham's " Narrative," vol. ii. p. 72.
t See Peck's " Desiderata Curiosa."
524 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Hudson ascertained from Montreuil if he had effected any ar-
rangement with the Scots. They slept that Monday night at St.
Alban's. Such is Hudson's account in his examination before the
parliamentary committee. But, in a previous examination before
the deputy-mayor of Newcastle, he stated that he was commanded
by the king not to reveal the place where they lodged on Monday
night; he declined to answer whether the king was in London or
no; and said, "that when they turned their face about for the
north, his majesty lodged at Wheathamstead, near unto St. Alban's ;
but the time when, he is commanded by his majesty to conceal."
This would indicate far greater indecision about the movements of
the king than Hudson's other narrative. It is cleai'that no energetic
course of action presented itself to him after he had ridden over Mag
dalene-bridge on that spring morning. Clarendon says that the king
" had wasted time in several places, whereof some were gentlemen's
houses (where he was not unknown, though untaken notice of),
purposely to be informed of the condition of the marquis of Mon
trose, and to find some secure passage that he might get to him." *
On the Tuesday, according to Hudson's circumstantial narrative,
he separated from the king and Ashburnham, as they rode upon
their way towards Baldock; he to go in search of Montreuil, they
to stay at the White Swan at Downham till he returned to them.
Here they remained till the Friday, when Hudson returned with 'a
statement that the Scots would condescend to all the demands
which the king had made for the security of his person and the
satisfaction of his conscience ; that they would declare for him if
the English Parliament should refuse to restore him to his rights
and prerogatives ; but that they would give nothing under their
hands. " I came to the king on Friday night," says Hudson, " and
related all ; and he resolved next morning to go to them." There is a
relation from Miles Corbet and Valentine Walton, addressed to the
Speaker of the House of Commons, which takes up the adventures
of Charles at this point. Hudson and a friend, Ralph Skipwith, on
the Saturday morning, " did ride to Southrie Ferry, a private way to.
wards Ely ; and went, by the way, to Crimplesham, and there
were the other two ; one in a parson's habit, which, by all descrip
tions, was the king. Hudson procured the said Skipwith to get 9
gray coat for the doctor, as he called the king, which he did. And
there the king put off his black coat and long cassock, and put on
Mr. Skipwith his gray coat. The king bought a new hat at Down-
* "History," vol. v. p. 294.
THE KING WITH THE ARMY BEFORE NEWARK. 525
ham, and on Saturday went into the isle of Ely. Wherever they
came they were private, and always writing. Hudson tore some
papers when they went out of the house. Hudson did enquire for
a ship to go to the north, or Newcastle, but could get none." There
was nothing left for Charles but to go to the Scots' army at all
risks. On the Tuesday night, the 4th of May, they met Mon
treuil at Southwell. Commissioners from the Scottish army also
met the king t' ere. Their troops were spread about the district,
surrounding the castle of Newark, which was held for the king.
Ashburnham says that when Charles arrived at the Scots' army be
fore Newark, " many lords came instantly to wait on his majesty with
professions of joy, to find that he had so far honoured their army, as
to think it worthy his presence after so long an opposition." On the
6th of May, lord Leven, the Scots' general, and the Committee of
Estates at Southwell, wrote to the Committee of both kingdoms, in
the following terms : " The earnest desire which we have to keep a
right understanding between the two kingdoms, moves us to ac
quaint you with that strange Providence wherewith we are now
surprised, together with our carriage and desires thereupon. The
king came into our army yesterday in so private a way, that after
we had carefully made search for him, upon the surmises of some
persons who pretended to know his face, yet we could not find him
out in sundry houses. And we believe your lordships will think it
was matter of much astonishment to us, seeing we did not expect
he would come into any place under our power. We conceived it
not fit to inquire into the causes which persuaded him to come
hither; but to endeavour that his being here might be improved to
the best advantage, for promoting the work of uniformity, for set
tling of religion and righteousness, and attaining of peace according
to the League and Covenant and Treaty, by the advice of the Par
liaments of both kingdoms, or their commissioners authorised for
that effect." Not a night passed before the king was made to un
derstand his position. A guard, called a guard of honour, was
placed at his door. He claimed to give out the watchword for the
night. Pardon me,. sire," said Leven, "I am the oldest soldier
here. Your majesty will permit me to undertake that duty." The
king consented to sign an order that his governor of Newark
should give up the place to the Scots, for the Committee of both
kingdoms. They rendered it to Poyntz, the English parliamentary
commander ; and very shortly after, the Scottish army, with the
king, was on its march to Newcastle.
526 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
From the 6th of May, 1646, till the 30th of January, 1647, the
king remained in the hands of the Scots. It was a time of un
wearied political intrigue and agitation, more complicated than
ever with the great question of religion. The Presbyterian party
had a considerable majority in Parliament. They had carried ordi
nance upon ordinance for the exclusive establishment of their
Church. In this great point they were completely in accord with
the Scots, who held the king at their disposal. But a compact and
firm minority is often more really powerful than a disjointed major
ity. The men of the greatest intellect and energy had the strong
est hold upon public opinion. The liberty of conscience which
they proclaimed had produced its effect upon many who chose to
think for themselves, without being fanatics ; and upon more who
had reached the extremes of fanaticism. The eloquent reasoning
of Milton had not been published in vain. The impassioned ha
rangues of Vane had not fa'len upon barren ground. The Presby
terian rule in spiritual affairs was slowly and imperfectly established
The great hold of that church was in London. It was also established
in Lancashire. In other provinces the beneficed clergy were
chiefly Presbyterian ; but many pulpits were filled with sectaries of
various denominations, agreeing in few things beyond the common
claim of the right of men to toleration ; Papists only were excepted
from the operation of this principle. Whatever was their partic
ular creed, the Independents maintained the claim of every sepa
rate congregation to be a church ; held that the exercise of the
ministry was warranted by a call of the congregation; and denied
that any spiritual powers were conferred in ordination by those
who asserted their apostolical succession. But the Independents
were far more powerful than the talkers in Parliament, from a su
periority that had grown naturally out of the struggles of four
years. The army was composed of earnest men, who had fought
for a cause in which all their religious enthusiasm had been called
forth. They were as formidable in their opinions as citizens, as in
their unequalled bravery and discipline as soldiers. The. Inde
pendent leaders had the entire control of this army. Whilst the
Scottish commissioners were urging the king to adopt the Presby
terian rule of church government, and the parliamentary majority
was tending to the same conclusion ; the army, at the slightest sig
nal from their chiefs, would have been ready to oppose its power
to any such settlement. It had only to abide its time. For eight
months there was interminable discussion and negotiation between
NEGOTIATIONS. 537
Westminster and Newcastle. The Scots, who thought they pos
sessed a preponderating influence in retaining the person of the
king, were growing more and more unpopular in the sentiments of
the English people. Petitions were sent to Parliament against
their exactions. They came to be regarded as enemies rather than
as allies. A vote was at length carried in the Commons, in June,
that their presence was no longer required ; and they were re
quested to return home, on receiving a payment of a hundred
thousand pounds, on account of what might be due to them. They
made no sign of removing. Their great object was to induce
Charles to consent to the abolition of Episcopacy, and to the es
tablishment of Presbyterianism in both kingdoms. They assailed
him with reiterated solicitations, and even with menaces. On the
10th of June, he wrote to the queen : " I never knew what it was
to be so barbarously treated before ; and these five or six days last
have much surpassed, in rude pressures against my conscience, all
the rest since I came to the Scotch army."* They required the
king to sign the Covenant himself, and command all his subjects to
sign it. They sent for the learned and eloquent Henderson to
convert the king. Charles maintained a theological controversy
with the great preacher with equal temper and ability. But whilst
he was asserting his devotion to the Anglican Chuich, and reject
ing the Presbyterian form as zealously as the Scots pressed it upon
him, he was writing to Glamorgan that he would place himself, if he
could do so by any means, in the hands of the pope's nuncio and
his secret adviser in Ireland. His hatred of the Covenant was not
altogether a religious conviction. He writes to the queen on the
26th of August : " Less will not serve them than the establishing
of the Covenant in all my kingdoms, which, if it be, will ruin this.
monarchy." f Charles clung with a tenacity approaching to fa
naticism to the Episcopal principle ; but the maxim of his father,
" no bishop, no king," was probably at the root of his inflexible
resolution. The English Parliament, still governed by the Pres
byterian party, sent him proposals in July. He was to adopt the
Covenant ; he was to abolish the Episcopal Church ; he was to
give up the command of the military arm for twenty years ; he
was to exclude seventy of his adherents from a general amnesty.
The queen urged him to accept even these proposals. Without an
absolute rejection of these hard terms, he prepared again to come
to London. The Scottish commissioners told the king that unless
» " Charles I. in 1646," p. 45. t Ibid., p. 58.
528 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
he accepted the conditions, though higher in some particulars than
they could have wished, he must not be expected to be received in
Scotland." * The money question between the Scots and the Par
liament then occupied many weeks of controversy. Four hundred
thousand pounds were at last voted ; and a loan was raised fir the
immediate payment of half the amount. The terms were accepted.
Another difficult question then presented itself. Which nation was
to retain the king? It was at last voted " that to the Parliament
alone belongs the right of disposing of the king's person." In
November the Scottish Parliament had met, and evinced a dispo
sition to advocate the re-establishment of Charles in both king
doms, with honour and safety. But the General Assembly inter
fered. The obstinacy of the king upon the question of Episcopacy
was quite sufficient to excite the most violent popular feeling, and
the Scottish Parliament then took another tone. The treaty was
completed for the retirement of the Scottish army. On the 16th
of December there was a singular procession from London to the
north. Thirty-six carts, laden with two hundred cases of silver,
were guarded on the road to Newcastle by an escort of infantry, un
der the command of Skippon. The money and the men arrived at
York on the 1st of January, 1647. In three weeks the payment
was made. " I am sold and bought," said the king. Nine com
missioners arrived from London. On the 30th of January the
Scots marched from Newcastle, and Charles remained with the
English commissioners. He was treated by them with marked
respect. On the 9th of February he left Newcastle, escorted by a
regiment of horse, and reached Holmby House, in Northampton
shire, his appointed residence, on the 16th.
The first Civil War was at an end. Oxford had been surren
dered to Fairfax on the 22d of June, under the terms of a treaty
which allowed the garrison to " march out of the city of Oxon with
their horses and complete arms that properly belong unto them, pro
portionable to their present or past commands ; flying colours, trum
pets sounding, drums beating, matches lighted at both ends, bullet
in their mouths, and every soldier to have twelve charges of pow
der, match and bullet proportionable." Those who desired to go
to their houses or friends were to lay down their arms within fif
teen miles of Oxford, and then to have passes, with the right of
free quarter ; and a careful provision was made for those who
wished to go beyond sea to serve any foreign power. The Royal-
" Ludlow," p. 184.
END OF THE FIRST CIVIL WAR. 529
ists and the parliamentary troops had met as honourable enemies ;
and in this surrender of the loyal city they each went their way as
men whom happier times might make willing friends. When Fair
fax entered Oxford he secured the Bodleian Library from spolia
tion, as Aubrey records : " When Oxford was surrendered (24th
of June, 1646), the first thing general Fairfax did was to set a good
guard of soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. 'Tis said
there was more hurt done by the Cavaliers (during their garrison)
by way of embezzling and cutting off chains of books, than there
was since. He was a lover of learning, and had he not taken this
special care, that noble library had been utterly destroyed, for there
were ignorant senators enough who would have been contented to
have had it so. This I do assure you from an ocular witness."
All the royalist garrisons had yielded before the end of 1646.
Great changes had taken place since Charles fought his first battle
of Edgehill. Essex, who there brought his undisciplined troops
into conflict with the Cavaliers, died on the 16th of September.
Other men and other influences were now to be paramount.
Vol III.— 34
530 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The King at Holmby House. — Army Independents. — Cromwell.— The Army proposed ta
be disbanded. — Petitions from Officers. — Adjutators — The King removed from
Holmby by Comet Joyce. — Commissioners at Triploe Heath. — The Army advances
towards London.— The King's treatment in the Army. — Proposals of the Independents
to the King.— The King rejects the Proposals.— Tumults in London.— The Army ad
vances. — The Speakers and Members go to the Army. — London submits. — The King
at Hampton Court.— Cromwell.— The intercepted Letter of the King.— Charles
makes his escape from Hampton Court-
Holmby House (or Holdenby), a mansion within six miles of
Northampton, built by sir Christopher Hatton, no longer exists.
We cannot judge of its capacity for the accommodation of a fallen
king ; but we have ample evidence that it was considered as a
palace rather than a prison. There is an order of " the Committee
of the Revenue " for fitting Holdenby House with hangings, bed
dings, and other wardrobe stuff and necessaries ; and, with the
Puritan contempt of the externals of religious worship, for melting
the altar plate at Whitehall for the use of the king's table in his
new abode. Seventy-six officers of the household and domestic
servants are to be chosen by the earl of Northumberland, with
Yeomen of the Guard. The king's diet was to be supplied at the
cost of 30/. a day; and the estimate for the whole cost of the
household amounted to 3000/. for twenty days. * During this
spring and early summer the king was not deprived of any of the
trappings of royal state.- Nor was his liberty much controlled. He
rode to Althorp, and to more distant places, to enjoy his favourite
game of bowls. He read, and he played at chess. He was at
tended by two gentlemen selected by the Parliament, Thomas Her
bert and James Harrington, who became his fast friends. Of Har
rington, Aubrey says, " The king loved his company, only he would
not endure to hear of a Commonwealth; and Mr. Harrington pas
sionately loved his Majesty. Mr. Harrington and the king often
disputed about government." f To have " a genius which lay chiefly
* These orders and estimates are in Peck's " Desiderata Curiosa."
\ " Lives," vol. iii. p. 370.
THE KING AT HOLMBY HOUSE. 53 1
towards the politics and democratical government," as Aubrey de
scribes the author of the " Oceana," was not then held a dangerous
quality in a philosophical theorist. " Democratical government "
in the abstract was not regarded as incompatible with the order of
a well-regulated State. Charles might contend for the security de
rived, from absolute monarchy, such as he believed ought to exist
in England ; and Harrington might point to the republics of Hol
land and Switzerland, without offending royalty by the comparison.
Had Charles seen how the safety of the crown would be best pre
served by the largest enjoyment by the subject of civil liberty and
the rights of conscience, Harrington and other republicans might
have been more readily compelled to believe that freedom and tol
eration could be best secured under the free monarchy which was
the basis of the English constitution. But Charles was impracti
cable with his convictions of divine right; and honest advocates of
democratical government were equally impracticable in regard to a
due balance of constitutional power. It is time only that has recon
ciled these apparent anomalies ; and has rendered the hereditary
crown of England the best type of republican freedom in the strict
est alliance with monarchical solidity. But through what perils
has this consummation been accomplished ! Those who would
properly value what we have attained, must steadily follow the dif
ficult and uncertain steps of the people towards its attainment.
Harrington at a later period is recorded to have found fault with
" the constitution of our government, that it was by jumps." * He
said, "When no Parliament, then absolute Monarchy; when a
Parliament, then it runs to Commonwealth." It was long before
the " jumps " were converted into steady progress ; and Monarchy
and Commonwealth were reconciled into a Constitution whose
practical excellence is best demonstrated by that slowness of ma
turity which has rendered a successful imitation almost impossible.
If the Presbyterian party, with whom were the powers of the
executive government, treated the king with the respect due to his
great station, they had little regard to the rights of conscience which
he properly asserted. He required to have chaplains of the Epis
copal church. The Parliament sent two Presbyterian ministers to
Holmby; but the king refused even to let them ask a blessing upon
his meals. The controversy of the dominant party with the rep
resentatives of the various religious sects, was growing more and
more fierce. " Liberty of conscience was now the common argu-
* " Lives," vol. iii. p. 374.
532 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ment and quarrel," says Clarendon. The Presbyterians held the
sectaries, as well as the prelatical party, " enemies to all godli
ness ; " and they relied upon their parliamentary majority to effect
another remodelling of the army. Cromwell, on the other hand,
was bringing the army into a more general dislike of the narrow
views of their Presbyterian rulers. Chaplains were in his camp
who contended that all attempts to fetter men to the dogmas and
ceremonies of any Church were " to restrain the Spirit." Crom
well preached and prayed with his officers and his men. The
soldiers prayed and preached amongst themselves. The Ironsides,
who had the Bible with them as constantly as their powder and
bullet, and who in their night-watches meditated upon all the events
of the Jewish history, and repeated every inspiriting verse that had
reference to the fall of tyrants and the glory of the saints, — these
gradually got banded together in a common enthusiasm which only
required an influential head to obtain a victory more difficult even
than Marston-Moor or Naseby. Cromwell gradually became that
leader, although Fairfax was the commander of the army. The
indignation of the Presbyterians against those " who were called
by a new name, fanatics,"* was therefore principally directed
against him who was considered their military chief. Soon after
the death of the earl of Essex, Cromwell, walking with Ludlow in
sir Robert Cotton's garden, inveighed bitterly against the Presby
terian party; saying, "that it was a miserable thing to serve a
Parliament, to whom let a man be never so faithful, if one prag
matical fellow amongst them rise up and asperse him, he shall
never wipe it off. " f Ludlow considers that Cromwell "had already
conceived the design of destroying the civil authority and setting
up for himself," when, in this conversation, he concluded by .say
ing, " When one serves under a general he may do as much ser
vice, and yet be free from all blame and envy." This, we appre
hend, is an opinion resulting from the republican convictions of
Ludlow, which were firmly opposed to Cromwell's later career. Be
that as it may, the rapid course of events threw a power into the hands
of Cromwell which rendered the subsequent months of 1647 the
most difficult and dangerous period of his life. That he should have
come out of such a whirlwind of contending interests and passions
with safety to himself, and without witnessing universal confusion
if not anarchy, is one of the most striking proofs of the extraordi
nary sagacity of -the man who saw, at every turn of affairs, a demand
* Clarendon. t Ludlow, vol. i. p. 185.
THE ARMY PROPOSED TO BE DISBANDED. 533
upon his common sense rather than upon any philosophical theory;
and whose dominant will was sustained by the conviction that he
was chosen to do the work appointed for him by a Power higher
than that of man, whose aid he invoked on every occasion in which
human doubts prevailed over habitual confidence. In the sense in
which the new word of opprobrium was used then, and has con
tinued in use, Cromwell was termed, from the religious bias of his
character, the most fanatical of " the fanatics." But this remark
able man's principles and conduct are fast passing out of the narrow
limits of historical partisanship ; and we shall therefore be careful
to speak of him without the flippant prejudice with whicli his name
has been surrounded by the continued violence of the most oppo
site opinions. His revilers have disagreed on every point except
tlTat of calling this great Englishman, fanatic and regicide, hypo
crite and tyrant.
At the period when the war had terminated, the leading men of
the Independent party were in thorough agreement. As to civil
rights, they held that an appeal having been made to the God of
battles, and the issue having been decided against the king, he
ought not to be restored except upon conditions which would ren
der the public liberties no longer insecure. They held that such a
restoration ought to be accompanied by the most complete' provis
ion for liberty of conscience. Their conviction of the king's insin
cerity was fatal to any hasty re-acknowledgment of his authority.
Their dislike of the Presbyterian exclusiveness prevented a cordial
union with that party to rebuild the Constitution in its ancient har
mony of king and parliament. The Presbyterian majority in the
Houses wished to dissolve the army, from which they had to appre
hend the only effectual resistance. The Independents, headed by
Cromwell, Ireton, Vane, St. John, were equally determined that
the army should remain intact. The City was in accord with the
parliamentary majority; and in the subsequent events the two
great parties seemed to resolve themselves into the City party and
the Army party. There is one view of this conflict, — of which wa
have only the most obscure, prejudiced, and contradictory details,
— which has been so justly and forcibly put, that we shall not at.
tempt to add to its impressiveness : " Modern readers ought to
believe that there was a real impulse Of heavenly Faith at work in
this Controversy; that on both sides, more especially on the
Army's side, here lay the central element of all, modifying all other
elements and passions ; — that this Controversy was, in several re-
534 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
spects, very different from the common wrestling of Greek with
Greek for what are called 'political objects.' Modern readers,
mindful of the French Revolution, will perhaps compare these
Presbyterians and Independents to the Gironde and the Mountain.
And there is an analogy ; yet with differences. With a great dif
ference in the situations; with the difference, too, between English
men and Frenchmen, which is always considerable ; and then with
the difference between believers in Jesus Christ and believers in
Jean Jacques, which is still more considerable." *
Within three days after the king had arrived at Holmby House,
the Commons voted that the army should be disbanded, with the
exception of the troops required for the suppression of rebellion in
Ireland, and for the service of the garrisons. This motion was
adopted upon a division in which there was a majority of twelve.
It was also voted that there should be no officers under Fairfax of
higher rank than colonel ; that every officer should take the Cove
nant, and conform to the Presbyterian church. There were large
Arrears of pay due to the army, and a loan was raised in the City
to satisfy a portion of them. What was proposed to be paid was
very insufficient. There were murmurings amongst men and offi
cers. On the 25th of March, a petition, signed by fourteen officers,
was presented to parliament on the subject of arrears ; asking that
auditors should report upon what was due to them for their ser
vice ; and submitting some conditions with regard to their employ
ment in Ireland. The anger of the parliamentary majority is ex
pressed by a passage in the Memoirs of Hollis : " For an army, or
any part of it, to join in a petition, though but for pay, when their
superiors — that authority which they are to obey — require any duty
to be performed, or service to be done by them, as the present
relieving of Ireland was, — this, I think, by the rules of war, has in
all armies been held a mutiny, and the authors at least punished
with death." f The House, on the 30th of March, declared that
whoever had a hand in promoting this petition, or other such peti
tions, was "an enemy to the State, and a disturber of the pub
lic peace." The declaration became in itself a cause of hostil
ity between the army and the parliament. It was "a blot of
ignominy." Deputations from the House went to the army. Offi
cers were examined at the bar. On the 30th of April, Skip
pon produced in his place in parliament a letter which had
been brought to him by some troopers, expressing the com-
* Carlyle ; " Cromwell," vol. i. p. 222. t " Memoirs," p. 77.
PETITIONS FROM OFFICERS. 535
plaints and demands of eight regiments of horse. " They saw
designs upon them, and upon many of the Godly Party in the king
dom." Three troopers who brought the letter were examined as
to the meaning of certain words which it contained. They were
only the agents of their regiments, they said. Did their officers
approve of their proceedings ? Very few knew anything about
them. The more violent Presbyterian members were very indig
nant. Cromwell whispered to Ludlow, " These men will never
leave till the army pull them out by the ears." * A new class of
malcontents had arisen, more dangerous than the officers, who said
to the parliamentary commissioners, " We hope, by being soldiers
we have not lost the capacity of subjects, nor divested ourselves
thereby of our interests in the Commonwealth." The army had
organised itself into a Council of Officers, and a Council of Adju-
tators. The Adjutators, who came to be called Agitators, were
delegates named by the common soldiers. The difficulties of re
concilement are now growing very formidable. The servants are,
fast advancing to become masters. Meanwhile the king has writ
ten to the Parliament, with reference to the proposals made to him
at Newcastle. He still declared against Presbytery ; and his ap
plication was unheeded. The army Councils grow more and more
resolved to have greater concessions than the Parliament is dis
posed to make. They are voted eight weeks' pay. A committee goes
to the army at Saffron Walden to see it disbanded. That is not so
easy. We want eight times eight weeks' pay, say the Adjutators.
There are disturbances in some of the military quarters. Will this
contest end in something anarchical ? Fairfax is told, that if their
officers refuse to take part with them in asserting their rights, they
know how to meet and act without them. They petition again
through their general. It is in vain that "when the House, wearied
with long sitting, was grown thin, Mr. Denzil Hollis, taking that
opportunity, drew up a resolution on his knee, declaring the peti
tion to be seditious. It is in vain that there have been London
petitions against the Army, and that the getters-up of counter-peti
tions in its favour have been imprisoned. There is a great gath
ering of Adjutators to confer with the general ; and it is agreed
that on the 4th of June there shall be a rendezvous of all the sol
diers at Newmarket. Two days before that general assembly, an
event has taken place which goes much farther to decide the ques
tion between Army and City, than resolutions at St. Stephen's, or
* Ludlow, vol. i. p. 189.
536 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
petitions at Guildhall. A great crisis is impending. " It was pri
vately resolved," says Clarendon, "by the principal persons of the
House of Commons, that when Cromwell came the next day into
the House, which he seldom omitted to do, they would send him
to the Tower ; presuming, that if they had once severed his person
from the Army, they should easily reduce it to its former temper
and obedience When the House expected every min
ute his presence, they were informed that he was met out of the
town by break of day, with one servant only, on the way to the
army." * That same morning that Cromwell left London, there
was a memorable scene in Northamptonshire, also about " break
of day " according to Clarendon.
On the afternoon of the 2nd of June the king is playing bowls
on Althorpe Down. The parliamentary commissioners and his ac
customed attendants are looking on. There is a man standing
amongst them, in the uniform of Fairfax's regiment. He is asked
questions as to news from the army, which he answers civilly but
somewhat proudly. A report spreads that a party of cavalry is in
the neighbourhood. About midnight there is a tramping of horse
around Holmby House'; and entrance is demanded by the man
who was looking at the game of bowls on Althorpe Down. He
was a cornet, he said, in the general's guard ; his name was Joyce,
he desired to speak with the king. The commissioners had di
rected the garrison to hold themselves in readiness to repel the
presumptuous soldiers ; but the men on duty greeted their old
comrades, and the gates were opened. The day wore on, amidst
the alarm of the commissioners, who saw that armed resistance
was impossible. At night Joyce requested to be taken to the king.
He was in bed ; but the inflexible cornet was conducted to the door
of the royal apartments. By the king's desire he was at length ad
mitted. Charles had a long conference with him, in the presence
of the commissioners, who had been sent for ; which ended in his
cheerfully saying " Good night, Mr. Joyce," adding that he would
readily go with him if the soldiers confirmed what the cornet had
promised. The next day the king asked Joyce under what author
ity he acted. He was sent, he said, by authority of the army, to
prevent the designs of its enemies, who would once more plunge
the kingdom in blood. " Where is your commission ? " said the
king. " There, behind me," pointing to the soldiers. " Believe
me," replied Charles, " your instructions are written in a very legible
character." f
COMMISSIONERS AT TRIPLOE HEATH. 537
The king th»n said that force must be employed to remove him,
unless he was promised that nothing should be required of him
against his conscience or honour. " Nothing," exclaimed the men
as one voice. The commissioners asked if they all agreed in what
Mr. Joyce had said. "All, all." In a few hours, the king and the
unwilling commissioners were on their way towards the army.
Whilst the king has been journeying towards the head-quarters
of Fairfax, the appointed Rendezvous has taken place on Kentford
Heath, near Newmarket. Another meeting of this military parlia
ment is arranged for the 10th, at Triploe Heath, near Cambridge.
The king arrives at Royston on the 7th. " Fairfax and Cromwell
wait on him both together. He asks them whether they commis
sioned Joyce to remove him : they deny it. ' I'll not believe you,'
says the king, " unless you hang him.' "* Colonel Whalley had been
sent by Fairfax, when he learnt of the king's seizure at Holmby, to
take him back ; but Charles refused to go. When in presence of Fair
fax and Cromwell he expressed the same desire to remain with the
army. He preferred ' the air ' of Newmarket to' the air ' of Holm
by. Cromwell went to London ; and took his place in the House.
There is no very reliable account of what occurred when he who
was held to be the chief manager of the great coup-d itat, appeared
in his seat. Hollis represents Cromwell, as well as Ireton, Fleet
wood, and Rainsborough, who were members of the House as well
as officers of the army, "blaming the soldiers at that distance, as
Cromwell did openly in the House, protesting, for his part, he
would stick to the Parliament."- \ He then, continues the wrathful
Presbyterian, " did steal away that evening, I may say run away
post down to the Army, and presently join in the subscription of
a rebellious letter." The narrative of a more candid chronicle
says, that Cromwell got hastily and secretly out of town, and without
stop or stay rid to Triploe Heath, his horse all on a foam, and there
was welcomed with the shouts of the whole Army, to whom he de
clared the actions and designs of the Parliament." X Commissioners
were again coming to the Army on the 10th ; and Cromwell has
arrived a little before them. Twenty-one thousand men are drawn
up on Triploe Heath ; not an ordinary body of soldiers, but men,
as they described themselves in one of their petitions, " who had
abandoned their estates, trades, callings, and the contentments of
a quiet life, for the perils and fatigues of war in defence of the
public liberty." Fairfax and the commissioners ride to each regi
* Warwick, p. 299. t Hollis, p. 84. X " Perfect Politician," p. 22. 1
538 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ment. The votes of parliament are first read to the general's own
regiment. An officer stands forth, saying that the regiment would
determine upon an answer when the votes had been submitted to a
Council of Officers and Adjutators. The men" are asked if that is
their answer ? " All, all." This is not a tumultuous reply ; they
speak when leave is given. The question is also put, if any be of
a contrary opinion to say " No." Not a voice is heard. The same
formality is observed towards every regiment, with a similar result ;
and a cry goes up from each, as the commissioners pass on, of
"Justice, Justice." In the afternoon, this Army is on its march
towards London; and the "rebellious letter; " of which Hollis
speaks, is sent to the lord-mayor and aldermen. It is remarkable
letter, the composition, as Mr.- Carlyle thinks, of Cromwell ; signed
by Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and other chief officers — in number
thirteen. " We desire," a settlement of the peace of the kingdom and
of the liberties of the subject, according to the votes and declara
tions of Parliament which, before we took arms, were, by the Par
liament, used as arguments and inducements to invite us and divers
of our dear friends out, some of whom have lost their lives in this
war For the obtaining of these things we are drawing
near your city ; professing sincerely from our hearts, that we in
tend not evil towards you ; declaring, with all confidence and assur
ance, that if you appear not against us in these our just desires, to
assist that wicked Party which would embroil us and the kingdom,
neither we nor our soldiers shall give you the least offence
And although you may suppose that a rich city may seem an entic
ing bait to poor hungry soldiers to venture far to gain the wealth
thereof, — yet, if not provoked by you, we do profess, rather than
any such evil should fall out, the soldiers shall make their way
through our blood to effect it." * This is'plain speaking. The
Army has reached St. Alban's ; and a respectful answer is con
veyed thither by a deputation from the City. On the 16th the
Army demands the impeachment of eleven members of the Com
mons, Hollis, Stapleton, Massey, and eight others of the leading
Presbyterians — the men of whom Cromwell spoke when he whis
pered about the army pulling them out by the ears. The City is in
consternation. The Parliament is incapable of acting with any
vigour. Messages are daily going between St. Alban's and West
minster with the interminable arguments of each of these o-reat
powers. But the one possesses a strength more immediately effect-
* " Letters of Cromwell." vol. i. p. 230.
THE ARMY ADVANCES TOWARDS LONDON. 539
ive than the highest ability of the pen. If the parliamentary
negotiators appear obstinate, the Army advances. On the 25th of
June it is at Uxbridge. The shops in the City are shut. The
Army has received a month's pay, as it demanded. But it has
continued to advance. The effect is instantaneous. On the 26th
the eleven obnoxious members retire from Parliament ; the Com
mons vote for the adoption of all the proceedings of the Army ;
and commissioners are appointed on each side to regulate the
affairs of the kingdom. There is no longer any talk of defending
London ; and the Army falls back a few miles.
For more than three months have these serious differences be
tween Parliament and Army gone on. There is a pause of nearly
another month, in which the kingdom does not seem approaching
to a settlement. We have lost sight of the monarch during the
busy two months in which London lies under the shadow of that
eagle's wing. Is he a guest or a prisoner amidst that Army, so dif
ferently composed from his own roystering Cavaliers ? He is cer
tainly not an ill-used prisoner. " His majesty," says Clarendon,
" sat still, or removed to such places as were most convenient for
the march of the army; being in all places as well provided for and
accommodated, as he had used to be in any progress." All persons
were allowed to resort to him — " the best gentlemen of the several
counties through which he passed." His own chaplains had leave
to attend upon him for his devotions, and " performed their func
tion at the ordinary hours, in their accustomed formalities." Roy
alists of rank visited him without restraint ; " and many good offi
cers who had served his majesty faithfully were civilly received by
the officers of the army, and lived quietly in their quarters." The
king lodged at great houses in the neighbourhood of the. army; —
at the earl of Salisbury's at Hatfield, when the troops were at- St.
Alban's ; at Caversham, the earl of Craven's, when the army had
moved further from London. Sir Philip Warwick has a curious
passage, implying that there was some general belief that the king's
disgust at the harsher treatment he had received from the Presby
terians would moderate his own desire for episcopal uniformity, and
lead him to look with approbation upon that liberty of conscience
which the Independents professed and demanded : * "At Causham
[Caversham] I had the honour to come into his presence, though I
staid not there ; but, by all I could perceive either from himself or
* At p. 506 we gave an extract from the letter of Cromwell, in which, on the very day of
the Battle of Naseby. he asserts this ruling principle of his mind.
540 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. _
any other, he was very apprehensive in what hands he was, but was
not to let it be discerned. Nor had he given that countenance to
Dr. Taylor's ' Liberty of Prophesying ' which some believed he
had." * The prejudices of his education, and the principles of his
government, were too exclusive to allow Charles to admit the doc
trine of Toleration, although proclaimed by his own favourite chap
lain. When Jeremy Taylor from his lowly retreat in Wales sent
forth this plea for religious liberty into an unquiet world, he said,
" I thought it might not misbecome my duty and endeavours to
plead for peace, and charity, and forgivenness, and permissions
mutual ; although I had reason to believe that such is the iniquity
of men, and they so indisposed to receive such impresses, that I
had as good plough the sands or till the air as persuade such doc
trines." f It was reserved for a happier age to understand and act
upon these principles. Taylor had been favoured by Laud ; but
he had broken away from Laud's narrow estimate of what was neces
sary for the security of an established Church. The problem that
its power and dignity and usefulness might be upheld in connection
with the most absolute spiritual freedom beyond its pale, required
to be practically worked out for two centuries before it could be
held to be solved. The reasoners in steel, who were as impatient
of the denomination of " New Presbyter " as of " Old Priest," } were
dealing more practically with this question of toleration than any
previous set of men who had so advocated the rights of conscience.
Few had advocated those rights, having strong religious convictions
of their own. Cromwell was the great expositor of their principle ;
and he probably went as far as the spirit of Protestantism would
then permit. Charles hated the Presbyterians, but he gave no con
fidence to the Independents. The king and his conqueror now
sometimes met. The king had been allowed by Fairfax, with an
instant attention to his request, to have an interview with his
children, the dukes of York and Gloucester, and the princess
Elizabeth. Sir John Berkeley, who came over from the queen
when Charles had informed her of his reception by the army, had
many conferences with Cromwell; who, although "wishing that
the king was more frank, and would not tie himself so strictly to
narrow maxims," told Berkeley " that he had lately seen the
tenderest sight that ever his eyes beheld, which was the interview
between the king and his children ; and wept plentifully at the
* " Memoirs," p. 301. t " Epistle Dedicatory to Lord Hatton."
X " New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." — Milton.
PROPOSALS OF THE INDEPENDENTS TO THE KING. 541
remembrance of it, saying, that never man was so abused as he in
his sinister opinions of the king, who, he thought, was the upright-
est and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms." And yet
Berkeley, whilst he records this trait of Cromwell's character,
which, after the accustomed fashion, we must call hypocrisy, writes,
" I was of his majesty's sense, that men whose hands were yet hot
with the blood of his most faithful subjects, ought not entirely to be
trusted ; but thought they ought absolutely to be well dissembled
with, whilst his majesty was in their hands at least, that he might
the better get out of them."*
It was towards the end of June that the king and the Inde
pendents, — Cromwell and Ireton, Vane and Henry Marten, —
appeared to have come to such an understanding as promised a
termination to the miseries of the kingdom ; an understanding that
would have restored the king to those just rights which were com
patible with the existence of civil and religious liberty. Whether
such an arrangement would have endured, had it been affected,
may justly be questioned. But the proposals which were made by
the leaders of the Army to Charles at this juncture, were far more
moderate than any which had been previously tendered or sug
gested. They were to the effect that the Long Parliament should
be dissolved within a year ; that future Parliaments should be
biennial, and not to be dissolved or adjourned except by their own
consent, unless they had sat a hundred and twenty days ; that the rep
resentation should be made more equal, by disfranchising decayed
and inconsiderable towns, and giving a greater number of members .
to counties or other divisions of the kingdom ; that the judicial
power of both Houses should be limited ; that grand jurymen
should be chosen in some equal way, and not at the discretion of
the sheriff. These were national reforms, not materially affecting
the royal prerogative ; reforms which have been gradually estab
lished in the working of the constitution. The great question of
the power of the sword was proposed to be settled, upon the prin
ciple that the royal authority over the militia should be subject to
the advice of Parliament and a Council for ten years. The other
great subject of difference, that of religion, was provided for by the
proposition that an Act should be passed, taking away all eccle
siastical jurisdiction extending to civil penalties ; that there be a
repeal of all Statutes enjoining the use of the Common Prayer
under penalties, as well as of those that imposed penalties for not
* " Memoirs of Sir John Berkeley," 1699.
542 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
attending the service of the Church ; and, further, that the taking-
of the Covenant should not be enforced upon any, and all penalties
taken away that had been imposed upon the refusers. These prop
ositions being received as the basis for securing the rights, liber
ties, peace, and safety of the kingdom, it was to be provided that
" his majesty's person, his queen and royal issue, may be restored
to a condition of safety, honour, and freedom in the nation, without
diminution of their personal rights, or further limitation to the
exercise of the legal power." How the proposals were received by
the king is minutely detailed by sir John Berkeley. Charles ap
pears to have mainly objected to the minor condition which ex
cepted seven of his adherents from a general amnesty, and from
the privilege of compounding for their estates ; and to that which
stipulated that royalists should not sit in the next Parliament. " I
procured his Majesty a sight of the Army's Proposals six or eight
days before they were offered to him in public. His Majesty was
much displeased with them in general, saying, That, if they had a
mind to close with him, they would never impose so hard terms
upon him. I replied, That, if they had demanded less than they
had done, I should have suspected them more than I now did of
intending not really to serve his Majesty, but only to abuse him;
since it was not likely that men who had, through so great dangers
and difficulties, acquired so great advantages, should ever sit down
with less than was contained in the Proposals ; and, on the other
side,. never was a crown (that had been so near lost) so cheaply re
covered, as his Majesty's would be, if they agreed upon such terms.
His Majesty was of another advice, and returned, That they could
not subsist without him, and therefore he did not doubt but that he
should see them very shortly be glad to condescend farther ; and
then objected to three particular points ot the Proposals. The
first was. The exception of seven, not named, from pardon. The
second, The excluding his party from being eligible in the next
ensuing Parliament. And the third, That though there was
nothing done against the Church-government established, yet there
was nothing clone to assert it. To these, I replied, That after his
Majesty and the Army were accorded, it would be no impossible
work to make them remit in the first point ; and, if he could
not, when his Majesty was re-instated in his throne, he might
easily supply seven persons beyond the seas, in such sort as
to make their banishment supportable to them. To the second ;
That the next Parliament would be necessitated to lay great
TUMULTS IN LONDON. 543
burdens upon the kingdom ; and it would be a happiness to
the king's Party, to have no voice in them. To the third,
That the Law was security enough for the Church, and it was
happy that men, who had fought against the Church, should be re
duced (when they were superiors), not to speak against it. His
Majesty broke from me with this expression, 'Well! I shall see
them glad ere long to accept more equal terms.' " The king re
jected the proposals ; and he did so in a manner that sufficiently
showed his resolution to persevere in his course of endeavouring to
profit by the dissensions of the two great parties, but to concede
nothing of importance to either. Berkeley attributes his danger
ous resolve to the secret advice of Ashburnham, and to "the en
couraging messages which his majesty had, by my lord Lauder
dale and others, from the Presbyterian party and the City of
London, who pretended to despise the Army, and to oppose them
to death." He says, " his majesty seemed very much excited, in
somuch that, when the proposals were solemnly sent to him, and
his concurrence most humbly and heartily desired, his majesty, not
only to the astonishment of Ireton and the rest, but even to mine,
entertained them with very tart and bitter discourses." The king
said, " You cannot be without me ; you w»tll fall to ruin if I do not
sustain you." Those leaders of the Army who were present
looked with wonder upon the scene. Berkeley at last went •*¦? f"
the king and whispered, " Sir, your majesty speaks as if yo^1 had
some secret strength and power that I do not know of ; ar.1/? since
your majesty hath concealed it from me, I wish you had concea'e"
it from these men too." The king " soon recollected himself, and
began to sweeten his former discourse with great power of lan
guage and behaviour. But it was now of the latest." This re
markable interview took place at Woburn. The cause of this de
portment of the king — the " secret strength and power " which he
believed himself to possess — was the expectation that the City
would be too powerful for the Army. Bands of apprentices had
surrounded Westminster Hall, clamorously demanding the return
of the king. An engagement, signed by thousands, was entered
into, pledging those who signed it to make all efforts to accom
plish the king's return to London. This was at the exact period
when Berkeley had shown Charles the proposals of the Army ;
but before the interview with Ireton and the otlier officers. Upon
the news of these proceedings in London, Fairfax and his army
had moved towards the capital The tumults grew more serious.
544 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
On the 26th of July, all the avenues of the Houses were beset
with a violent multitude. They brought a Petition, which was re
ceived at the door of the Commons. No answer was returned,
and shouts arose of " Let us go in." Members drew their swords,
and drove back those who were crowding in the lobby. Some of
the rioters climbed up to the windows of the House of Peers, and
threw stones into the Chamber. The door of the House of Com
mons was at last forced open ; and a body of men rushed in, call
ing out "Vote, Vote." They demanded that a resolution of the
previous day, carried by the Independents, declaring those traitors
who voted for the city " engagement," should be rescinded. The
Speaker left the chair, and went into the lobby, after the House
had voted as the rioters desired. Ludlow thus records the scene
when the Speaker "was forced back into the chair by the violence
of the insolent rabble." " It was thought convenient to give way
to their rage ; and the Speaker demanding what question they de
sired to be put, they answered, That the king should be desired to
come to London forthwith : which question being put, they were
asked again what further they would have. They said that he
should be invited to come with honour, freedom, and safety: to
both which I gave a loud negative, and some of the members as
loud an affirmative, rather out of a prudential compliance than any
a/T«>rtion to the design on foot" * This was on a Monday. The
army ]av at Windsor, Maidenhead, Colnbrook, and adjacent places.
The ,^.-)USes adjourned to Friday, the 30th of July. The Speakers
°f- the Lords and Commons have withdrawn, and many members
have withdrawn with them. The eleven members whose impeach
ment the Army had demanded, have now returned. The Presby
terian party appears to be triumphant. New Speakers are elected.
The king has had his interview with Ireton and the Council of
Officers, and has indiscreetly shown his reliance upon agitations
which he is more than suspected of having excited. Suddenly
the whole course of the political movement is changed. A train
of carriages arrives from London with lord Manchester and Mr.
Lenthall, the Speakers ; and they are accompanied by fourteen of
the Peers, and about one hundred members of the Commons. f
Those who remain at Westminster have not been idle. Troops
are to be enlisted. The army is commanded not to advance. But
* " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 206.
t These numbers are given by Rushworth aud Whitelock. Hollis says eight 'ords
and fifty-eight commoners.
THE SPEAKERS AND MEMBERS GO TO THE ARMY. 545
it does advance. On the 3rd of August, Hounslow Heath, then a
vast unenclosed space, is appointed for a Rendezvous of this for
midable force. It is now something more than a power strug
gling against a parliamentary majority. The Speaker of the
Lords, and the Speaker of the Commons, — the Sergeatit-at-Arms
with the mace — the most energetic of the Members — the visible
authority and the real potency of Parliament are with the Army.
" They appeared at the head of them," says Ludlow, " at which
the Army expressed great joy, declaring themselves resolved to
live and die with them." There is yet a hope that the king will
still endeavour to retain the only power that can really help him.
It was clear that London will succumb without a blow. Fairfax
and his twenty thousand pause for a day or two, communicating
with the authorities of the City. With the party at Westminster
and their new Speakers, they have no intercourse. The army is
quartered about Brentford, Hounslow, Twickenham, and adjacent
villages ; " without restraining any provisions, which, every day,
according to custom, were carried to London ; or doing the least
action that might disoblige or displease- the city: the army being,
in truth, under so excellent discipline, that nobody could complain
of any damage sustained by them , or any provocation by word or
deed." * Berkeley says that Cromwell, Ireton, and the rest of the
superior officers of the army, knew that London would certainly be
theirs ; and " therefore sent an express to Mr. Ashburnham and
to me, to express that, since his majesty would not yield to the
proposals, yet he should, at least, send a kind letter to the army,
before it were commonly known that London would submit." A
meeting of the friends and advisers of the king was held at Wind
sor, and a letter of this nature was prepared. But -Charles would
not sign the letter till it was too late ; and when he reluctantly sent
it, "it had lost all its grace and efficacy." The City had yielded.
There was no longer a present hope of profiting by dissensions
between Parliament and Army. Oh the 6th of August, Fairfax,
surrounded by four of his regiments, and conducting the Mem
bers of Parliament who had fled to the Army, proceeded to West
minster. At Hyde Park they were met by the Lord Mayor and
Aldermen ; at Charing Cross by the Common Council. The In
dependents, now supreme in parliament, took their seats. The
mace was again laid on the table. Two days after, the whole
army, horse, foot, and artillery, marched through Westminster and
* Clarendon, vol. v. p. 466.
Vol. III.— 35
546 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the City, and over London Bridge to their various quarters in
Surrey. They marched, says Clarendon, "without the least dis
order, or doing the least damage to any person, or giving any dis-
respective word to any man." Denzil Hollis, one of the eleven
members whose little hour of supremacy had so quickly passed,
describes with more than his usual bitterness, this march of the
Ironsides : " Sir Thomas Fairfax and the whole Army marched in
triumph, with laurel in their hats as conquerors, through.the sub
dued city of London, to show it was at his mercy ; which was an
airy vanity, I confess above my understanding, and might have
raised a spirit of indignation, not so easily to have been laid. But
a higher insolency of an Army composed of so mean people, and
a more patient humble submission and bearing of a great and
populous city, but a little before so full of honour and greatness,
was, I think, never heard of." The king was lodged at Hampton
Court. The head-quarters of the Army were at Putney.
The king remained at Hampton Court for three months. The
spacious quadrangles of the old palace of Wolsey were well
adapted for comfort. He Jiad dwelt there with his young queen
in the first year of their marriage ; and ten years had scarcely
passed since he was surrounded by his brilliant court at the Revels
in the Great Hall, and had listened in freedom and security to the
dramas of Shakspere and Fletcher, of Davenant and Cartwright.
Some of the old familiar faces came about him in this autumn of
1647. His children were frequently with him. " Persons of all
conditions repaired to his majesty of all who had served him ; with
whom he conferred without reservation ; and the citizens flocked
thither, as they had used to do at the end of a progress." * Evelyn
has this entry in his Diary of October: " On the 10th to Hampton
Court, where I had the honour to kiss his majesty's hand, and give
him an account of several things I had in charge, he being now in
the power of those execrable villains who not long after murdered
him." They were very frequently with his majesty, "those ex
ecrable villains." They were really intent upon doing him as much
service as lay in their power, if he could have trusted them, and
they could have trusted him. Cromwell and Ireton endeavoured
to serve the king, even with great danger to themselves. Charles
was constantly sending messages to them at Putney by Ashburn
ham, as Berkeley states ; Cromwell had many conferences with the
king, according to Clarendon. " They had enough to do," says
* Clarendon.
CROMWELL. 547
Berkeley, " both in Parliament and Council of the Army, the one
abounding with Presbyterians, the other with Levellers, and both
really jealous [suspicious] that Cromwell and Ireton had made a
private bargain with the king." * Lilburne, now in violent oppo
sition to his old friends, was printing the most bitter denunciations
against these betrayers of the people. The Presbyterians gave out
that Berkeley had told lady Carlisle that Cromwell was to be earl
of Essex, which statement Berkeley explicitly denied. Silly royal
ists about the king tried to persuade him that it would be for his
interest "to divide Cromwell and the Army." These wheels
within wheels required some chief motive power which Charles
was incapable of furnishing. His natural want of decision of char
acter was rendered more prominent by these complications. He
had to deal with men who were the very opposite to himself in that
simplicity of purpose which we recognise as the foundation of de
cision of character. Cromwell and Ireton had strong convictions
of the value of democratic government ; but they knew how infinite
were the risques of democracy btfcoming universal licence, if the
liberties of the people were attempted to be raised upon any other
than the ancient foundations. They would therefore endeavour to
save the king, if they could do so with security to the [lOpUlar
rights. None but the most prejudiced judges can trace in their
actions, at this crisis, the sl'ghtest manifestation of a desire to be
tray the king. They were "faithful to their trust, and to the' peo
ple's interest; " but they believed "that the king might have been
managed to comply with the public good of his, people after he
could no longer uphold his own violent will." Mrs. Hutchinson,
who expresses this confidence in Cromwell and Ireton,. shows how
the king destroyed these expectations. " Upon some discourses
with him, the king uttering these words to him, ' I shall play my
game as well as I can ; ' Ireton replied, ' If your majesty have a
game to play, you must also give us the liberty to play ours.'" The
foremost men of the Independent party still endeavoured to second
the reasonable wishes of the king. The Presbyterians had again
pressed upon him the terms of the treaty at Newcastle, slightly
modified. Charles desired a personal treaty with the Parliament,
and thought the proposals which had come from the Army ap-
peared a better ground of settlement. Cromwell," Vane, Ireton,
and their friends strenuously supported his desire for a personal
treaty. "The suspicions were so strong in the House," says
* "Memoirs."
548 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Berkeley, " that they lost almost all their friends there ; and the
Army that lay then about Putney, were no less ill satisfied."
In the course of the autumn an incident occurred, which
has so much of romance in it that historians have been some
what doubtful of repeating a story so admirably calculated for
stage effect. The scene is the Blue Boar inn in Holborn. There
it still stands in the parish of St. Andrew, pretty much the
same as it stood in the beginning of the seventeenth century — a
well-preserved specimen of an ancient hostelry. The yard is dedi
cated to all the purposes of traffic. -The buildings of the quad
rangle form stables or common tap-rooms on the ground level. On
the upper floors are the sitting-rooms and dormitories, with gal
leries carried all round, forming a corridor to the first floor. To
this quaint old place come two men in trooper's clothes on an
October evening. They enter by the wicket in the inn gate, leaving
an attendant in the street. These jolly troopers go into a "drinking-
stall : " and calling for the drawer, " sit drinking cans of beer till
ten of the clock." They expect an arrival. Their watcher at the
gate gives them notice that " the man with the saddle " is come.
Their eyes are upon him from their drinking-stall. He goes into
a stable ; saddles his horse ; and as he leads the steed forth,
the troopers draw their swords, and tell him their duty is to
search all those who go in or out. They say, however, that he
looks like an honest fellow, and therefore they would only search
his saddle. Into their drinking-stall they return ; cut open " the
skirts of the saddle ; " take out a letter which they suspected to be
therein concealed ; and send the horseman on his way. The two
troopers are Cromwell and Ireton. Cromwell told the story him
self to lord Broghill, afterwards earl of Orrery, when they were
serving together in Ireland. The two, with Ireton, were ridingout
of Youghal, when they fell into discourse about the king's death.
Cromwell said that they had once " a mind to have closed with
him ; " but something happened, and they " fell off from that
design." Broghill was curious to know the reason of this change.
Cromwell told him that, finding the Scots and Presbyterians were
growing more powerful, and were likely to agree with the king " and
leave them in the lurch," they thought it best to offer first to come
in upon reasonable conditions. " But," continued Cromwell,
" whilst cur thoughts were taken up with this subject, there came a
letter to us from one of our spies, who v>as of the king's bedcham*
ber, acquainting us that our final doom was decreed that very day;
THE INTERCEPTED LETTER OF THE KING. 549
that he could not possibly learn what it was, but we might discover
it if we could but intercept a letter sent from the king to the queen,
wherein he informed her of his resolution : that this letter was
sown up in the skirt of a saddle, and the bearer of it would come
with the saddle upon his head about ten of the clock that night to
the Blue Boar in Holborn, where he was to take horse for Dover.
The messenger knew nothing of the letter in the saddle, though
some' in Dover did. We were at Windsor when we received this
letter, and immediately upon the receipt of it, Ireton and I resolved
to take one trusty fellow with us, and to go in troopers' habits to
that inn. We did so." Cromwell then related the adventure;
and further told what the discovery was that changed their purpose
of closing with the king : "We found in the letter, that his majesty
acquainted the queen that he was courted by both factions, the
Scotch Presbyterians and the army ; and that those which bade the
fairest for him should have him: but yet he thought he should
close with the Scots sooner than with the other. Upon this we return
ed to Windsor ; and finding we were not like to have good terms
from the king, we from that time vowed his destruction." This
well-known story is told by the reverend Thomas Morrice, as re
lated to him by the earl of Orrery, to whom he was chaplain. The
contents of the letter thus described do not appear to us sufficiently
important to have caused the resolution of Cromwell and Ireton for
the king's destruction. They already knew that he was courted by
both factions. They knew that " those who bade the fairest for
him would have him." Orrery became a cabinet-counsellor of
Charles IL, and might have prudently generalised the contents of
the letter which is. said to have caused the final separation of
Cromwell from the interests of Charles I. There is another story
of a letter, which Hume thinks contradictory to the character of
the king, and therefore rejects it as " totally unworthy of credit."
It is thus related by Richardson, the painter : " Lord Bolingbroke
told us, June 12, 1742, (Mr. Pope, lord Marchmont, and myself),
that the second carl of, Oxford had often told him that he had seen
and had in his hands, an original letter that Charles I. wrote to his
queen, in answer to one of hers that had been intercepted, and then
forwarded to him ; wherein she had reproached him for having
made those villains too great concession, viz, that Cromwell should
be lord-lieutenant of Ireland for life without account ; that that
kingdom should be in the hands of the party, with an army there
kept which should know no head but the lieutenant ; that Cromwell
550 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
should have a garter, &c. That in this letter of the king's it was
said that she should leave him to manage, who was better informed
of all circumstances than she could be ; but she might be entirely
easy as to whatever concessions he should make them ; for that he
should know in due time how to deal with the rogues, who, instead
of a silken garter, should be fitted with a hempen cord. So the
letter ended ; which answer as they waited for so they intercepted
accordingly, and it determined his fate. This letter lord Oxford
said he had offered 500/. for." *
Those who carefully examine the intricate and discordant nar
ratives of this exact period will probably come to the conclusion,
that there were more imperative motives for Cromwell breaking off
his intercourse with the king than his own personal mortification at
being promised a hempen cord instead of a silken garter. He was
fast losing his influence over the Army. The conqueror at Naseby
was now held to be the traitor at Hampton Court. The Agitators
had become unmanageable. They issued pamphlets, setting forth
the most extreme principles. They became violent against monar
chy in general, and especially furious against those who appeared
to favour the cause of Charles in any degree. Cromwell has
ceased his visits at Hampton Court. He is alarmed for the king's
safety ; or, as some hold, he pretends to be alarmed. His cousin,
colonel Whalley, commands the guard about the king. Cromwell
writes to him in November, " There are rumours abroad of some
intended attempt on his majesty's person. Therefore, I pray, have
a care of your guards. If any such thing should be done, it would
be accounted a most horrid act." Charles yields to the fears
natural enough in his helpless condition. He has unhappy dreams.
His night-lamp going out is a presage of evil. About the 3rd of
November Berkeley and Ashburnham, who had been removed from
about the king's person, meet at Ditton at the desire of major Legg,
who waited in the king's bed-chamber. They tell Berkeley " that
his majesty was really afraid of his life by the tumultuous part of
the army, and was resolved to make his escape." Berkeley after
wards saw the king, and was asked to assist in the project. Where
to go was yet a question. It was no especial weakness in Charles,
but a credulity belonging to the age, that William Lilly, the astrol
oger, was consulted by a female agent of the king, wno paid a
heavy sum to the " Sidrophel," who was ready to prophesy for all
*, " I have been informed that a memorandum nearly conformable to Richardson's
anecdote is extant, in the handwriting of Lord Oxford." — Hallam.
THE KING ESCAPES FROM HAMPTON COURT. 55 1
parties. Some plan was at last determined upon. On the evening
of the 1 ith of November, the commissioners and Colonel Whalley,
missing the king at supper, went into his chamber and found him
gone. A newspaper of the time, " the Moderate Intelligencer,"
has a far more interesting notice of the event (as was the way of
newspapers even then) than the offichl entries of Lords' Journals,
and Commons' Journals : " November 11 — This day will be famous
in after times because towards the end of it his majesty escaped a
kind of restraint under which he was at Hampton Court : and
according to the best relation, thus : — He, as was usual, went to
be private-a little before evening prayer ; staying somewhat longer
than usual, it was taken notice of ; yet at first without suspicion ;
but he not coming forth suddenly, there were fears, which increased
by the crying of a greyhound again and again within ; and upon
search it was found the king was gone ; and by the way of Paradise,
a place so called in the garden ; in probability suddenly after his
going in, and about twilight. He left a paper to the Parliament,
another to the commissioners, and a third to colonel Whalley."
The faithful greyhound of Charles I. whining for the absence of
his master, is a pretty contrast to Froissart's story of the unfaithful
greyhound of Richard 1 1.; " who always waited upon the king,
and would know no man else : " but who, in the hour of his adver:
sity, " left the king and came to the earl of Derby, duke of Lan.
caster, and made to him the same friendly countenance and chee*
as he was wont to do to the king."
552 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Narratives of the king's Escape. — He goes to the Isle of Wight. — The Levellers in the
Army. — Their meeting suppressed. — Berkeley's unsuccessful mission to Fairfax and
Cromwell. — Scotch and English Commissioners at Carisbrook. — Parliament declares
agai.ist any further treaty with the king. — Royalist Re-action. — Riots in London. —
Revo ts in many districts. — The king attempts to escape from Carisbrook. — Insurrec
tions quelled. — Cromwell in Wales. — Scottish Army in England. — Cromwell's march
from Wales. — Battle of Preston — Cromwell in Edinburgh. — Note on the party-jpirit
during the Royalist reaction.
There are two minute relations of the circumstances that im
mediately succeeded the flight of the king from Hampton Court —
the narratives of Berkeley and Ashburnham. Each of these was
written with the intention of justifying its author from the charge of
having betrayed the king, which the Royalists affirmed; and for
this purpose they were circulated in manuscript after tbe Restora
tion. * Each tries to fix the unfortunate issue of the adventure
upon the other adviser of the king. The interest of this contro
versy has long since passed ; and we may therefore accept Claren
don's opinion "that neither of them were, in any degree, corrupted
in their loyalty or affection to the king, or suborned to gratify any
persons with a disservice to their master." f In the main points
of the story both these companions in the flight of Charles do not
materially differ.
The night of Thursday, the nth of November, was dark and
stormy. Berkeley and Ashburnham were waiting with horses by the
-Thames' side, and when Charles came out, accompanied by major
Legg, they immediately rode towards Oatlands. Cromwell had been
sent for, upon the escape being discovered ; and at midnight he
wrote a letter to the Speaker of the Commons, announcing the
withdrawal of the king; who " had left his cloak behind him in the
gallery of the private way ; and had passed by the backstairs and
vault towards the water-side." The four rode " through the
forest," X the king being their guide ; but they lost their way, and
* Berkeley's Narrative was printed in 1699- Ashbumham's not till 1S36.
t " Histor\," vol. v. p. 497.
X The route from Oatlands into Hampshire would lead through Windsor Forest, then
comprising a vast circuit of many parishes.
CHARLES GOES TO THE ISLE OF WIGHT. 553
were busied in discussions about the ultimate course they were to
pursue. Ashburnham says that previous to their departure the king
had told him, " he had some thoughts of going out of the kingdom,
but for the shortness of the time to prepare a vessel to transport
him ; and for the other reasons I had sent him by major Legg he
was resolved to go to the Isle of Wight." At day-break of that
dark November morning they were at Sutton in Hampshire, where
they had sent a relay of horses ; and they immediately continued
their way towards Southampton. As they walked down a hill
with their horses in their hands, they again discussed what to do ;
and then Berkeley says he heard for the first time anything of the
Isle of Wight. It was arranged that the king and Legg should
proceed to a house of lord Southampton at Tit.chfield ; that Berke
ley and Ashburnham should go into the Isle of Wight to colonel
Hammond, the governor. Robert Hammond was connected with
the royalist as well as with the parliamentary party. One of his
uncles was chaplain to the king. Through the friendship of Crom
well he had himself married a daughter of Hampden. The two com
panions of the king slept at Lymington ; and the next morning
reached Carisbrook. They delivered to Hammond a message of
the king, that he had been under the necessity of providing for his
own safety, but would confide himself to the governor of the island,
as one who had prosecuted the war against him without any ani
mosity to his person; asking if he would promise protection to his
majesty and his attendants to the best of his power. Berkeley
.says that Hammond grew so pale, and fell into such a trembling,
that he expected him to fall from his horse, exclaiming, •' O gentle
men, you have undone me by bringing the king into this island, if
you have brought -him." After much discussion, Hammond en
gaged " to perform whatever could' be expected from a person of
honour and honesty ; " and, being then partly informed where the
king was, proposed to go with them. They reached Cowes, and
here took boat to Titchfield, Hammond having the captain of Cowes
Castle with him. The scene which followed is related by Ashburn
ham, as if. it were something very creditable to himself and to the
king. The king was alarmed, and said that he was sure the gov
ernor would make him a prisoner; and then Ashburnham said, " I
was happy that I had provided an expedient ; so that if he would
say what other course he would steer,. I would take order that the
governor should not interrupt him,. His majesty asked me how that
could possibly be, since the governor was come with us ? I an-
554
HISTORY OF ENGLAND
swered that his coming made any other way more practicable than
if he had stayed behind. He then told me, that he had sent to
Hampton for a vessel, to transport him into France, and was in
good hope to be supplied, and that he expected news of it every
moment, but very earnestly pressed to know how I would clear him
of the governor. I answered that I was resolved and prepared to
kill him and the captain with my own hands." The valiant Jack
Ashburnham who, in his fever of loyalty, proposed to slay the man
whom he believed worthy of all confidence, was not discarded by
the king upon this proof that he had a treacherous nature. His re-
, lation thus continues : " His majesty walking some few turns in
the room, and, as he was afterwards pleased to tell me, weighing
what I had proposed to him, and considering that if the ship should
not come, it would not be many hours before some, in pursuance of
him, would seize him, the consequence whereof he very much ap
prehended, resolved he would not have execution done upon the
governor, for he intended to accept of what he had proposed and
to go with him, and therefore commanded he should be called up,
sir John Berkeley being not yet come to the king." There was no
news of the expected ship ; orders had arrived at Southampton
that the port should be closed; and in two hours the king was in
a boat sailing to the Fair Isle. That night he slept at Carisbrook
Castle. The inevitable tendency of all revolutions to call into action
violent bodies of men professing principles that strike at the foun
dation of secure and orderly government, was now clearly visible.
The Levellers had become conspicuous in the army — those, accord
ing to Clarendon, who declared " that all degrees of men should
be levelled, and an equality should be established, both in titles
and estates throughout the kingdom." * The historian of the Re
bellion doubts "whether the raising of this spirit was a piece of
Cromwell's ordinary witchcraft, in order to some of his designs, or
whether it grew amongst the tares which had been sowed in that
confusion." Had Clarendon lived through a period of sixty years
of far more terrible revolutions in another kingdom, he would have
known that it needs no " witchcraft " to evoke such a spirit out of
the passions of the enthusiastic and the rapacity of the dishonest.
Whatever the historian believes of Cromwell's witchcraft, he does
full justice to his human powers of " dexterity and courage," by
which " he totally subdued that spirit in the army." which would
* " Rebellion," vol. v. p. 486.
THE LEVELLERS IN THE ARMY. 555
otherwise " have produced all imaginable mischief in the parlia
ment, army, and kingdom." * Four clays after the king has quitted
Hampton Court, Cromwell is dealing very summarily— in " a rough
and brisk temper," as Clarendon has it — with some of those against
whom he had warned colonel Whalley, in regard to the safety of
Charles's person. A rendezvous is appointed at Corkbush field,
between Ware and Hertford, for seven regiments. But there are
nine regiments on the ground. Harrison's regiment of horse, and
Lilburn's cf foot, have come without orders. Lilburn himself has
been sent to the Tower ; but being permitted to ride out, for his
health, has come to the rendezvous. His regiment is without its
officers, for the Agitators have expelled all above the rank of lieu
tenant, with the exception of one captain. They have papers in
their hats, of " Liberty for England, their rights for the soldiers."
Fairfax and Cromwell read to the seven regiments a remonstrance
against the proceedings of the Agitators, and they are received with
acclamations. Fairfax addresses Harrison's cavalry, and the
troopers exclaim that they will live and die with their general, and
they tear the inscriptions from their hats. Lilburn's regiment reply
to Fairfax with derisive shouts. Cromwell exclaims " Take that
paper from your hats." They refuse. He rushes into the ranks ;
orders fourteen of the mutineers to be seized ; a drum-head court-
martial is assembled, and three are condemned to death. The
Council of Officers order that they shall draw lots which shall de
termine the fate of one. The immediate execution of that one re
stored the army to its wonted discipline . But such remedies can
not frequently be repeated. The most violent of the fanatics are
preaching against the severity exercised towards their " saints."
The Presbyterians look coldly upon the energy of the great military
Independent ; the republican politicians begin to fear and distrust
him. Ludlow cries " No," when a vote of thanks to Cromwell is
proposed in parliament. They do not see as clear as he does the
line which separates liberty from anarchy.
Colonel Hammond, according to Berkeley's relation, had many
private conferences with the king ; and was earnest that some author
ised person should proceed from Charles to the generals who hadput
down the violence of the Agitators. Berkeley set out with letters
from the king and also from the governor, and arrived at the head
quarters at Windsor. He delivered his letters to Fairfax at,a general
meeting of officers. Being desired to withdraw, .he was soon after-
* "Rebellion," vol. v. p. 506.
556 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
wards called in ; and was sternly told by Fairfax that they were
tbe Parliament's officers, and must refer the king's letters to the
Parliament. Cromwell and Ireton looked coldh. upon him, as well
as other officers with whom he was acquainted. His servant went
out to find some one to whom Berkeley could speak ; and a general
officer sent him a message to meet him in a close behind the Garter
Inn, at twelve at night. They met ; and his friend urged him to
persuade the king to escape ; for that it was resolved to seize his
person and bring him to trial. The Agitators, he said, were not
quelled; and had been repeatedly with Cromwell and Ireton to tell
them that they would bring the whole army to the conviction that the
king should be broug'it to trial. The general further said that he
hazarded his own life in this interview ; for it was agreed that no
one should speak with Berkeley, under pain of death. Cromwell
had despaired of bringing the army to his sense, and must make
his peace with those who were most opposed to the king. "He
was re-instated in the fellowship of the faithful." Berkeley the
next day sent colonel Cook to Cromwell, to say that he had letters
and papers for him from the king. " He sent me word, by the
same messenger, that he durst not see me, it being very dangerous
to us both ; and bid me be assured that he would serve his majesty
as long as he could do it without his own ruin ; but desired that I
would not expect that he should perish for his sake." Cronrwell was
on the edge of a precipice. There was a belief that he was privy
to the escape of the king. Ludlow, the republican says, " it was
visible that the king made his escape by the advice of Cromwell."
It is certainly not improbable that Cromwell, knowing the dangers
of the king, might sincerely desire that he might escape out of the
kingdom. The notion of Hollis, that he recommended the flight
to the Isle of Wight, " because he had there provided a gaoler," is
irreconcileable with the facts. Charles during the first month
might have escaped from Carisbrook without any difficulty, had
proper means been supplied. A ship only was wanting. Berkeley
went back to the king to recommend this course, which he had
urged by letter ; but the false hope of dealing with another party
again prevailed over the natural fears of Charles for his own life,
Berkeley's first words to the king were, " Why was he still in the
island, where he could not long promise himself the liberty he now
had ?" Charles replied, "that he would have a care of that, time
enough ; and that he was to conclude with the Scots, because from
their desire to have him out of the Army's hands they would listen
SCOTCH AND ENGLISH NEGOTIATING WITH CHARLES. 557
to reason." The Scottish commissioners came to Carisbrook to
wards the end of December. It had been voted in the House of
Lords at the end of November, that propositions should again be
offered to the king in the shape of four bills, far more stringent as
to the power of Parliament and the Militia than the offers at
any previous time, but leaving the religious question untouched.
The Scottish commissioners in London had secretly advised the
king to reject these bills. Their own proposals were, that a Scot
tish army should come into England to restore him to his rights,
provided that he confirmed the Presbyterian establishment in Eng
land for a period of three years, and then the constitution of the
Church to be finally settled. " In that season of despair," says
Clarendon, " they prevailed with him to sign the propositions he
had formerly refused ; and having great apprehensions, from the
jealousies they knew the army had of them, that they should be
seized upon and searched on their return to London, they made up
their precious contract in lead, and buried it in a garden in the Isle
of Wight, from whence they easily found means afterwards to re
ceive it." Having concluded this dangerous alliance, Charles de
livered his answer to the English commissioners. He had in vain
endeavoured to prevail upon lord Denbigh and the others to take
back his determination in a sealed envelope. He rejected the
propositions. That evening the gates of Carisbrook Castle were
closed, guards surrounded the fortress ; and the greater number of
the king's servants, including Berkeley and Ashburnham, were or
dered to quit the island. An escape meditated for the next night
was no longer practicable. The commissioners of the Parliament
returned to Westminster, to proclaim what was, in truth, the com
plete triumph of the republicans. The last manoeuvre of the un
fortunate king rendered his difficult condition utterly desperate.
Ludlow, speaking of the English and Scottish negotiations at Ca
risbrook, says, " Whilst these two sorts of commissioners were one
day attending the king as he walked about the castle, they observed
him to throw a bone before two spaniels that ¦ followed him, and to
take great delight in seeing them contending for it ; which some of
them thought to be intended by him to represent that bone of con
tention he had cast between the two parties." * It was a delight
that was to come, to a fatal issue. Cromwell wrote to colonel
Hammond on the 3rd of January, " The House of Commons is
very sensible of the king's dealings, and of our brethren's [the
* " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 232.
558 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Scots], in this late transaction.'' He tells his "dear Robin," that
" now, blessed be God, I can write and thou receive freely." He
alludes to some struggle of the governor in favour of his unhappy
prisoner, — "thou in the midst of thy temptation, which, indeed, by
what we understand of it, was a great one." The letter-writer ex-
ultingly communicates the result of the proceedings at Carisbrook:
"The House of Commons has this day voted as follows: — ist.
They will make no more Addresses to the^king; 2nd. None shall
apply to him without leave of the two Houses, upon pain of being
guilty of high treason ; 3rd. They will receive nothing from the
king, nor shall any other bring anything to them from him, nor re
ceive anything from the king." The Lords adopted the resolution,
after some debate. Unless there be some speedy change, the end
will be accomplished that the majority in Parliament contended for,
" to settle the commonwealth without the king." That majority in
the Commons was a very formidable one — 141 to 91 ; and their
resolution is justly described by Mr. Hallam as " a virtual renun
ciation of allegiance."
But, however' the notion of a sovereign representative assem
bly as the government suited for England might please the politi
cal enthusiasts and the military fanatics, the great body of quiet
people, who desired the protection of the law under a limited
monarchy, were not prepared to endure that a democracy should
be thrust upon them at the point of the sword. Discontent was
very generally spread. Murmurings would shortly grow into re
volts. Cromwell, who saw better than most men the inevitable
result of political and religious discords, whilst the supreme author
ity was so unsettled, tried to effect some reconciliation between
Presbyterians and Independents. The dinner at which Cromwell
assembled them was given in vain. " One would endure no supe
rior, the other no equal." Ludlow, who thus describes the result
of this attempt, relates more minutely the proceedings of another
meeting at which he was present. The Grandees of the House
and Army, of whom he terms Cromwell the head, "would not
declare their judgments either for a monarchical, aristocratical, or
democratical government ; maintaining that any of them might be
good in themselves, or for us, according as Providence should
direct us." The Commonwealth's men boldly declared against
monarchy ; that the king had broken his oath, and dissolved their
allegiance ; maintained that he had appealed to the sword, and
should be called to account for the effusion of blood; after which
ROYALIST RE-ACTION. 559
an equal Commonwealth, founded upon the consent of the people.
The discussion, solemn as it was, had a ludicrous termination.
" Cromwell," says Ludlow, " professed himself unresolved ; and
having learned what he could of the principles and inclinations of
those present at the conference, took up a cushion and flung it at
my head, and then ran down the stairs ; but I overtook him with
another, which made him hasten down faster than he desired." *
Cromwell told Ludlow the next day that " he was convinced of the
desirableness of what was proposed, but not of the feasibleness of
it." There was a meeting some time after, conducted in a very
different mood by Cromwell — a meeting of officers of the Army at
Windsor Castle, as reported by adjutant-general Allen. These
zealous men spent one whole day in prayer. They were exhorted
by Cromwell to a thorough consideration of their actions as an
Army, and of their ways as private Christians. They became con
vinced that the Lord had departed from them, through " those car
nal conferences which they held in the preceding year with the
king and his party." They, with bitter weeping, took sense and
shame of their iniquities. They came to a clear agreement that
it was their duty to go forth and fight the enemies that had ap
peared against them. They finally came to a resolution, " That it
was our duty, that, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peacfe,
to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that
blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against
the Lord's cause and people in these poor nations." f These men,
not hypocrites, not wholly fanatics, are very terrible in their stern
resolves. They will go forth to fight '• the enemies that had ap
peared against them" — and then! There is a re-action in many
quarters in England. The Scots are preparing to invade. A sec
ond Civil War is fast approaching.
When the Parliament passed their resolution to receive no
more communications from the king, and to forbid all correspond
ence with him, they published a declaration imputing all the mis
fortunes of his reign to himself personally, and not to evil coun
sellors, as had been the custom before monarchy had lost its
respect even in the eyes of those who were opposed to its evil
government. Clarendon ascribes the partial re-action of public
opinion in a great degree to what he calls "this monstrous declara
tion." But he wholly misconceives or misrepresents the temper
of the people, when he sets forth "a universal discontent and
» " Memoirs," p. 239. t Somcrs' Tracts, given in Carlyle's " Cromwell," vol. i.
560 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
murmuring of the three nations, and almost as general a detesta
tion both of parliament and army, and a most passionate desire
that all their follies and madness might be forgotten in restoring
the king to all they had taken from him, and in settling that blessed
government they had deprived themselves of."* Nations have
sometimes unaccountable fits of oblivion ; but the memory of
eleven years of the unmitigated despotism of " that blessed gov
ernment " was too deeply written upon the volume of the people's
brain, though Edward Hyde might choose to forget it. Neverthe
less, the nation was tired of its distractions. It wearied for some
permanent settlement that might end the hoarse disputes and
subtile intrigues of Parliament and Army, of Presbyterian and
Independent ; that might free the possessors of rank and property
from the dread of wild men with notions of social equality ; that
might restore industry to its healthful functions, and put an end
not only to the cost of a standing military force, but to its fearful
resistance to civil power. The desire of the peaceful portion of
the nation was feebly heard amidst the surrounding clamour. The
attempt to express their impatience of existing evils by riot and re
volt was necessarily a vain attempt. This spirit was displayed in
the city of London, at the beginning of April. Cromwell and some
of the other leaders attend a Common-Council ; but they find the
Presbyterians indisposed to listen to what they call " their subtle
ties." The next day there is a formidable riot. It is Sunday. The
puritan strictness in religious observances, and in minor matters,
has come to be less respected than before the close of the war.
Royalists, amidst their contempt for what they deem fanaticism, are
now mixing again in the ordinary intercourse with the despised
Roundheads. The theatre is now not wholly proscribed. • Evelyn
writes in his Diary, " 5th February, saw a tragi-comedy acted in the
Cockpit, after there had been none of these diversions for many years
during the war." On that Sunday, the 9th of April, there are ap
prentices playing at bowls in Moorfields during church-time. They
are, ordered todisperse by the militia guard ; but they fight with the
guard, and hold their ground. Soon routed by cavalry, they raise
the old cry of " Clubs ; " are joined by the watermen, a numerous
and formidable body ; fight on through the night ; and in the morn
ing have possession of Ludgate and Newgate, and have stretched
chains across all the great thoroughfares. There are forty hours
of this tumult, in which the prevailing cry is " God and king
* " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 1.
REVOLTS IN MANY DISTRICTS. 561
Charles." At last a body of cavalry arrive from Westminster;
there is an irresistible charge of the men who had rode down far
more terrible assailants ; and that movement is at an end. But in
many towns there are similar riots. In Wales some Presbyterian
officers of the parliamentary army, with colonel Poyer at their
head, have raised a far more formidable insurrection. Pembroke
Castle is in their hands. They soon have possession of Chepstow
Castle. The gentry have proclaimed the king. It is a Presbyte
rian-royalist insurrection, allied in principle with the purposes of
the moderate Presbyterians of Scotland, who are organising their
army for the march into England. The Welsh outbreak is some
what premature ; but nevertheless it is very formidable. It is
alarming enough to demand the personal care of lieutenant-general
Cromwell. He leaves London on the 3rd of May, with, five regi
ments. The Londoners are glad to be freed from his presence ;
for a rumour has been spread that the army at Whitehall are about
to attack and plunder the city. Petitions were addressed to
the Commons that the army should remove further ; and that the
militia should be placed under the command of Skippon. The
re-action gave the Presbyterians again the command in Parlia
ment ; and it was voted on the 28th of April, that the fundamental
government of the kingdom by King, Lords, and Commons, should
not be changed ; and that the resolutions forbidding all communi
cation with the king should be rescinded. Popular demonstrations
immediately followed the departure of Cromwell. Surrey gentle
men, freeholders, and yeomen, came to Westminster with a peti
tion that the king should be restored with all the splendour of his
ancestors. . A broil ensued between the parliamentary guard and
these petitioners, who asked the soldiers, " Why do you stand here
to guard a company of rogues ? " Several of the Surrey men, and
one of the guard, were killed. The Royalists of Kent organised
themselves in a far more formidable shape. They secured Sand
wich and Dover; appointed as general, Goring, earl of Norwich;
and assembled at Rochester to the number of seven thousand.
Troops were raised for the royal service in the eastern and mid
land counties. More dangerous to the ruling powers than all these
demonstrations, was the defection of the fleet. Clarendon has thus
described the mariners of his time : " The seamen are in a manner
a nation by themselves; a humorous, brave, and sturdy people ;
fierce and resolute in whatsoever they are inclined to ; somewhat
unsteady and inconstant in pursuing it ; and jealous of those to-
Vol. III.— 36
562 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
morrow by whom they are governed to-day." If Clarendon's de
scription be correct, it must be taken solely with reference to a
reign when the maritime power of England had been allowed to
fall to the lowest condition. It could not apply to the sailors of
Drake and Frobisher. Less could it apply to the sailors of Blake
and Penn. The unsteadiness and the inconstancy, the jealousy of
the government under which they served, belonged to a period
when the government had long been indifferent to the national
honour. These characteristics altogether passed away when the
first thought of the English fleet was how " not to be fooled by the
foreigner." The sailors of 1648 put their admiral on shore, and
carried their ships to Holland, to place them under the command
of the prince of Wales, who appealed in the Channel, — and did
nothing. The Royalists were in the highest exultation. They ex
pected the king soon to be again at their head. The earl of Hol
land had turned once more to what he thought would be the win
ning side ; and his mansion at Kensington was again the resort of
Cavaliers. But the king does not appear amongst them. An at.
tempt at escape from Carisbrook has a second time failed. On the
6th of April, Cromwell had written to Hammond, " Intelligence
came to the hands of a very considerable person, that the king had
attempted to get out of his window ; and that he had a cord of silk
with him whereby to slip down, but his breast was so big that the
bar could not give him passage. This was done in one ofthe dark
nights about a fortnight ago. A gentleman with you led him the
way and slipped down. The guard, that night, had some quantity
of wine with them. The same party assures that there is aqua
fortis gone down from London, to remove that obstacle which hin
dered ; and that the same design is to be put in execution on the
next dark nights." He then points out that " Master Firebrace "
was the gentleman assisting the king ; and mentions captain
Titus, and two others, " who are not to be trusted." It is prob
ably to this time that the statement of Clarendon must be re
ferred, when he says that the king " from thenceforth was no
more suffered to go out of the castle beyond a little ill garden
that belonged to it." His pleasant walks, upon the beautiful
green ramparts looking out upon the sea beyond the fertile valleys
about Carisbrook, were at an end. If the local traditions are to be
trusted, the barred windows of his apartment had no prospect
beyond the spacious court-yard. On the 31st of May, Hammond
wrote to the Parliament that the king had again nearly effected his
INSURRECTIONS QUELLED. — CROMWELL IN WALES. 563
escape. Another dread now came over the Presbyterian party.
They would negotiate with the king ; but they would take strong
measures against the Royalists. All papists and malignants were
banished from London under more severe penalties than before.
Fairfax was directed to proceed with all his forces against the
insurgents in Kent and Essex and the other counties around Lon
don. They issued new ordinances against heresy, which affected
the Independents; and against swearing, which touched the Cav
aliers very nearly. The general and the army marched into Kent ;
dispersed the insurgents after an obstinate fight at Maidstone ;
and by rapid successes, wherever else there was resistance, put
down the rising spirit. Lord Goring, after having led several
thousand men to Blackheath, expecting assistance in London, was
compelled to see the desertion of his followers, and he crossed the
Thames into Essex. There the contest was more prolonged,
Lord Capel and Sir Charles Lucas had collected a large force,
with which they intended to march from Colchester upon London.
Fairfax invested the town ; and for two months there was a
renewal of the former work of blockade and siege, until the place
was surrendered on the 27th of August. The triumph of Fairfax
was tarnished by an exception to his usual humanity. Sir
Charles Lucas and sir George Lisle>were tried by court-martial,
and were shot. The earl of Holland and the young duke of
Buckingham broke out in revolt at Kingston-upon-Thames, when
the main army of the Parliament was investing Colchester. There
was an action near Kingston, in which they were defeated ; and
passing into Hertfordshire, the remnant was cut up at St. Neot's
by a detachment from the army of Fairfax, and Holland was taken
prisoner. In all. these movements, we see the absence of any
supreme organizing power. They were isolated efforts, which
were quickly suppressed. Whatever miseries England had still
to endure, it was freed from the misery of a long partisan warfare.
In Wales, where the resistance to the Parliament was more con
centrated, the presence even of Cromwell was not at first success
ful. He is before Pembroke, but he has no artillery to make short
work of the siege. It was not till the 10th of July that the town
and castle of Pembroke were surrendered to him. Six days before
the capitulation the Scottish army entered England, under the
duke of Hamilton. He was joined by five thousand English,
under sir Marmaduke Langdale. The English general, Lambert,
was retreating before them, having been directed by Cromwell to
564 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
avoid an engagement, and to fall back. Two days after the sur
render of Pembroke, Cromwell was on his march from the west.
He waited not for orders. He knew where he was wanted. At
this juncture a charge of treason had been preferred against him
by major Huntington, an officer of the army, which had been coun
tenanced by some members of both Houses. He was accused of
endeavouring, by betraying the king, parliament, and army, to
advance himself. The occasion was not opportune for such an
attempt. When he left London he was equally distasteful to the
Presbyterians and the Commonwealth's men, — who, with some,
went by the general name of Levellers. Mrs. Hutchinson says,
" The chief of these Levellers followed him out of the town, to
take their leaves of him, received such professions from him, of
a spirit bent to pursue the same just and honest things that they
desired, as they went away with great satisfaction, till they heard
that a coachful of Presbyterian priests coming after them, went
away no less pleased : by which it was apparent he dissembled
with one or the other, and by so doing lost his credit with both."*
The Presbyterians suppressed their dislike to Cromwell in terror
of the Scoto-royalist invasion. The Commonwealth's men were
compelled to lay aside their jealousies. Ludlow speaks plainly
about this : — " Some of us who had opposed the lieutenant-gener
al's arbitrary proceedings, when we were convinced he acted to
promote a selfish and unwarrantable design, now thinking ourselves
obliged to strengthen his hands in that necessary work which he
was appointed to undertake, writ a letter to him to encourage him,
from the consideration of the justice of the cause wherein he was
engaged, and the wickedness of those with whom he was to
encounter, to proceed with cheerfulness, assuring him, that not
withstanding all our discouragements we would readily give him
all the assistance we could."
The Scottish army that entered England could not be regarded
as the army of the Scottish nation. The treaty which had been
concluded with the king at Carisbrook gave satisfaction only to a
portion of the Presbyterians. The Scottish Parliament, influenced
by the duke of Hamilton and others, who professed moderate prin
ciples of ecclesiastical government, gave the engagements of that
treaty their zealous support, especially that clause which provided
* " Memoirs," p. 129. Mrs. Hutchinson refers this to the time when "he was sent
down, after his victory in Wales, to encounter Hamilton in the north." This is an
evident mistake, for Cromwell marched from Pembroke by Gloucester and Warwick.
CROMWELL'S MARCH FROM WALES. 565
that a military force should be sent to England to reinstate the
king in his authority. They were in consequence called the
" Engagers." But the Clergy generally proclaimed that Charles
had nbt conceded enough for the establishment of their form of
worship in England to warrant a war for his assistance. Themar-
quis of Argyle, and other powerful chiefs who had fought against
Montrose, were burning with resentment against -the Royalists of
their own country, and were strenuously opposed to what was
meant as an aid to the Royalists of England. An army was how
ever raised : and the Engagers, with a raw and ill-disciplined
force, crossed the Border.
The march of Cromwell, from the extremity of South Wales to
the heart of Lancashire, was accomplished with a rapidity which
belongs only to the movements of great commanders. He had to
gather scattered forces on his way, and to unite himself with Lam
bert in Yorkshire. He was determined to engage with an enemy
whose numbers were held to double his own. Through the whole
breadth of South Wales, then a pastoral country, but now present
ing all the unpicturesque combinations of mining industry, he
advanced to Gloucester. This forced march of some hundred
and fifty miles through Wales was an exhausting commencement.
" Send me some shoes for my poor tired soldiers," wrote Cromwell
to the Executive Committee in London. At Leicester he received
three thousand pairs of shoes. At Nottingham he confers with
colonel Hutchinson and leaves his prisoners with him. His cav
alry have pushed on, and haye joined Lambert at Barnard Castle.
All Cromwell's forces have joined the northern troops by the 12th
of August. The Scots, who, having passed Kendal, had debated
whether they would march direct into Yorkshire, and so on towards
London, have decided for the western road. The duke of
Hamilton thinks he is sure of Manchester. Sir Marmaduke Lang-
dale is their guide through the unkown ways into Lancashire, and
lead the vanguard. There is very imperfect communication be
tween the van and the rear of this army.- On the 16th of August
the duke is at Preston. The same night Cromwell is at Stonyhurst.
Langdale, to the left of Hamilton's main body, has ascertained that
the dangerous enemy is close at hand ; and sends notice to the
duke. "Impossible," exclaims Hamilton ; "he has not had time
to be here." The next morning Cromwell has fallen upon sir
Marmaduke, and utterly routed him, "after a very sharp dispute."
Hamilton's army is a disjointed one. His cavalry, in considerable
566 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
numbers, are at Wigan, under the command of Middleton. When
the affair was settled with Langdale, there was a skirmish close by
Preston town between Hamilton himself and some of Cromwell's
troopers. The duke was separated from his main force of infantry,
under Baillie, but rejoined them only to see the bridge of the Rib-
ble won by the enemy in a general battle. Cromwell describes the
first four hours' fighting in a country all enclosures and miry ground,
as " a hedge dispute." This being ended, the Scots were charged
through Preston ; and then not o-l/ was the bridge of the Ribble won,
but the bridge of Darwen. Night was approaching, which put an
end to any further fighting en the 17th. The Scottish generals in a
council of war determined to march off, as soon as it was dark,
without waiting for Middleton and his cavalry. The weather was
rainv; the roads heavy; their men were wet, weary, and hungry.
They left their ammunition behind ; and the next morning were at
Wigan Moor, with half their number. No general engagement
took place that day ; and the Scots held Wigan. Cromwell writes,
"We lay that night in the field close by the enemy; being very
dirty and weary, and having marched twelve miles of such ground
as I never rode in all my life, the day being very wet." The next
day the Scots moved towards Warrington ; and after some hard
fighting, general Baillie surrendered himself, officers, and soldiers,
as prisoners of war. The duke, with three thousand horse, was
gone towards Nantwich. His course was undetermined. The
country people were hostile. His own men were mutinous. He
surrenders to Lambert, and is sent prisoner to Nottingham.
The Scottish army was now utterly broken and dispersed. The
news of Hamilton's complete failure in the invasion of England
was the signal for the great Presbyterian party that had opposed the
policy of the Engagers to rise in arms. Argyle assembled his
Highland clans. In the Western Lowlands large bodies of peas
antry, headed by their preachers, marched to Edinburgh. The
memory of this insurrection has endured to this hour in the name of
Whig. It was called " the Whiggamore Raid," from a word used in
the west of Scotland when the carter urges forward his horses with
Whig, whig (get ort) ; as the English carter says, Gee, gee (go).
Argyle was restored to power. The most zealous Covenanters
were again at the head of the executive authority. Cromwell en
tered Scotland on the 20th September, and was received at Edin
burgh, not as the man to whose might their brave countrymen
had been compelled to yield ; but as the deliverer from a royalist
faction that might again have put the national religion in peril.
PARTY-SPIRIT. 567
NOTE ON THE PARTY-SPIRIT DURING THE ROYAL-
1ST RE-ACTION.
We have shown the temper of the Presbyterians and Commonwealth's men towards
Cromwell when he was fighting in Wales and Lancashire. There was a general confusion
of political principles in the dread of individual supremacy. May says that the chief
citizens of London, and others called Presbyterians, wished good success to the Scots no
less than the Malignants did. Mr. Hallam has observed that "the fugitive sheets of
this year, such as the Mercurius Aulicus, bear witness to the exulting and insolent tone
of the royalists. They chuckle over Fairfajuand Cromwell, as if they had caught a couple
of rats in a trap." As a curious specimen of the "fugitive sheets," we give an extract
from "The Cuckow's Nest at Westminster ; printed at Cuckow-time in a hollow tree,
1648." * The chief wit consists in a dialogue between Queen Fairfax and Lady Crom
well . Fairfax had been ill, and was reported to have died : —
" Enter Queen Fairfax and Madam Cromwell.
" Mrs. Cromwell. Cheer up, madam, he is not dead, he is reserved for another end ;
these wicked malignants reported as much of my Noll, but I hope it is otherwise ; yetthe
profane writ an epitaph, as I think they call it, and abused him most abominably, as
they will do me, or you, or any- of the faithful saints, if we but thrive by our occupations
in our husbands* absence ; if we but deck our bodies with the jewels gained from the
wicked, they point at us, and say, those ate plunder. But the righteous must undergo the
scoffs cf the wicked ; and let them scoff on. I thank my Maker, we lived, before these
holy wars were thought on, in the thriving profession of brewing, and could, of my vails
of grain and yeast, wear my silk gown, and gold and silver lace too, as well as the proudest
minx of them all. I am not ashamed of my profession, madam.
ftQu. Fair. Pray, Mrs. Cromwell, tell not me of gowns or lace, nor no such toys!
Tell me of crowns, sceptres, kingdoms, royal robes ; and, if my Tom but recovers, and
thrives in his enterprise, I will not say, pish, to be queen of England. I misdoubt noth
ing, if we can but keep the wicked from fetching Nebuchadnezzar's home from grass in
the Isle of Wight. Well, well, my Tom is worth a thousand of him, and has a more
king'y countenance ; he has such an innocent face, and a harmless look, as if he were born
to b^ emperor over the saints.
" Mrs- Cromwell. And is not Noll Cromwell's wife as likely a woman to be queen of
England as you? yes, I warrant you, is she; and that you shall know, if my husband
were but once come out of Wales, lt is he that has done the work, the conquest belongs
to him. Besides, your husband is counted a fool, and wants wit to reign ; every boy
scoffs at him : my Noll has a head-piece, a face of brass, full of majesty, and a nose will
light the whole kingdom to walk after him. I say he will grace a crown, being naturally
adorned with diamonds and rubies already ; and for myself, though I say it, I have a
person as fit for a queen as another."
The- dialogue is broken off by a servant running in, and exclaiming, " O, madam,
cease your contention, and provide for your safeties ; both your husbands are killed, and
all their forces put to the sword *, all the people crying like mad, long live King Charles I n
•Reprinted in *¦ Harleian Miscellany," 8vo vol. vL
568 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXX.
Treaty of Newport. — Concessions of the King. — Remonstrance of the Army. — Crom
well's Letter to Hammond. — The King earned to Hurst Castle.— Members ejected-
from the Commons' House. — The king removed to Windsor. — Ordinance for ihe
king's trial — The High Court of Justice appointed. — The king before the High
Court. — The king sentenced to death. — The king after his condemnation.- — The king's
execution. When the news of Cromwell's victory at Preston came to the
Isle of Wight, " the king said to the governor that it was the worst
news that ever came to England." Colonel Hammond replied,
that if Hamilton had beaten the English he would have possessed
himself of the thrones of England and Scotland. " You are mis
taken," said the king ; " I could have commanded him back with a
wave of my hand." * It was evil news to the king that the last
appeal to arms had failed. The Parliament now looked with as
much alarm as the king might entertain at the approaching return
of that victorious Army of the North. The Lords, especially, saw
that their own power was imperilled by the dangers that beset the
Crown; and they united with those who now constituted a major
ity in the Commons, to conclude a treaty with the king. There
were violent debates; but it was at length agreed that commission
ers should proceed to the Isle of Wight. The discussions were
to take place in Newport. The commissioners for the treaty ar
rived there on the 15th of September. Clarendon says that those
who wished ill to the treaty interposed every delay to prevent it
being concluded during the absence of Cromwell ; and that those
who wished well to it pressed it forward for the same reason. Yet
there were men left behind who had formed as strong resolutions
against the restoration of Charles to power as rYomwell himself.
Ludlow had been to Fairfax at Colchester whilst the treaty was
debated in Parliament, to urge upon him that it was not intended
by those who pressed it on most vehemently, that the king should
be bound to the performance of it; but that it-was designed prin
cipally to use his authority to destroy the Army. Fairfax was
* Ludlow, vol. i. p. 261.
TREATY OF NEWPORT. 569
irresolute. Ireton agreed with Ludlow that it was necessary for
the Army to interpose ; but did not think that the time was come
for such a demonstration. With an Army ready to step in to
break through the meshes of any agreement disapproved by them
—with a king who in the midst of the negotiation was secretly
writing, " my great concession this morning was made only to
facilitate my approaching escape " — the Treaty of Newport can
scarcely be regarded as more than " a piece of Dramaturgy which
must be handsomely done." * For the opening of the last Act of
this tragic history, the scene on the bank of the Medina is as im
pressive as any pageant, " full of state and woe," that the imagina
tion could devise to precede a solemn catastrophe.
A house has been prepared in Newport for the king's recep
tion ; and its hall has been fitted up for this great negotiation,
which might extend to forty days. The first day was the i8lh of
September. The king is seated under a canopy at the upper end
of the hall. The parliamentary commissioners are placed round a
table in advance of the royal chair. These are fifteen in number,
five peers, and ten members of the Lower House. Behind the
king are ranged many of his most confidential friends and advisers ;
of whom there are four peers, two bishops and other divines ; five
civilians ; and four of his trusted attendants. Sir Philip Warwick,
who was one of the privileged number, says : — " But if at any time
the king found himself in need to ask a question, or any of his
lords thought fit to advise him in his ear to hesitate before he an
swered, he himself would retire into his own chamber ; or one of
us penmen, who stood at his chair, prayed him from the lords to do
so." The king was in a position favourable to the display of his
talent for discussion ; and he left upon the assembly during these
tedious debates, a deep impression of his abilities, his knowledge,
and his presence of mind. Nor could the sympathies of even the
most prejudiced of his auditors on this occasion be withheld from
his general appearance and deportment. His hair had become
gray ; his face was care-worn ; " he was not dejected," writes Clar
endon, "but carried himself with the same majesty he had used
to do." Certainly if it be held somewhat an unequal trial to place
one man to contend alone against fifteen disputants, some of ex
traordinary ability, such as Vane ; on the other hand the rank of
him who was thus pleading for what he believed to be his inalien
able rights — his misfortunes — his display of mental powers, for
* Carlyle.
570 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
which few had given him credit— would produce impressions far
deeper than if the advisers around his canopy had been allowed to
argue and harangue, each after his own fashion. " One day," says
Warwick, " whilst I turned the king's chair when he was about to
rise, the earl of Salisbury came suddenly upon me, and said, ' The
king is wonderfully improved : ' to which I as suddenly replied,'
' No, my lord, he was always so ; but your lordship too late dis
cerned it.' " Vane bore testimony to the talent of Charles ; but he
considered his "great parts and abilities" as a reason for very
stringent terms. In this manner was the prolonged discussion
of Newport conducted, from the 18th of September to the 29th of
November, the original term of forty days for the duration of the
treaty having been three times extended. All was in vain. Charles
had conceded the questions of military command and of nomina
tion to the great offices of state ; he had even consented to ac
knowledge the legitimacy of the resistance to his power. But he
had not conceded enough upon the question of religion to satisfy
the more violent of the Presbyterians. There was unwise perti
nacity on both sides, in the hour of a coming storm that would
sweep away this paper-fabric of a Newport treaty like straws in a
whirlwind. The commissioners had no absolute power to con
clude a Treaty ; the parliament discussed every point with a scru
pulosity that foreboded no good result. Warwick records a speech
of the king to Mr. Buckley, one of the commissioners, which shows
how impracticable was a speedy agreement ; " Consider, Mr. Buck
ley, if you call this a Treaty, whether it be not like the fray in the
comedy ; where the man comes out, and says, there has been a
fray, and no fray ; and being asked how that could be, why, says
he, there hath been three blows given, and I had them all. Look,
therefore, whether this be not a parallel case. Observe, whether
I have not granted absolutely most of your propositions, and with
great moderation limited only some few of them : nay consider,
whether you have made me any one concession, and whether at
this present moment you have not confessed to me, that though
upon any proposition you were all concurrently satisfied, yet till
you had remitted them up to vour superiors, you had not authority to
concur with me in any one thing." * The conferences were broken
up, after the most violent demonstrations had been made to Par
liament of the temper of the Army. On the 28th of November
the commissioners left Newport with the definitive propositions.
* " Memoirs,'' p. 323.
CONCESSIONS OF THE KING. 57 1
In forty-eight hours it had become evident that two months had
been wasted in vain contentions ; that an inexorable fate was dri
ving on to a dismal end of the long struggle between king and
people. Warwick has recorded that, during the progress of the Treaty,
" every night, when the king was alone about eight of the clock,
except when he was writing his own private letters, he commanded
me to come to him ; and he looked over the notes of that day's
treaty, and the reasons upon which it moved ; and so dictated the
heads of a dispatch, which from time to time he made concerning
the treaty, unto his present majesty, then prince." Clarendon drew
up his minute account of the negotiation from these pipers ; and
he gives a long and very interesting extract of a letter from the
king to prince Charles, which he says, " deserves to be preserved
in letters of gold." The sentiments which it breathes are certainly
high-minded ; but they also proclaim to what an extent the king was
a self-deceiver. He writes, " by what hath been said, you see how
long we have laboured in search of peace." He had solemnly prom
ised during the negotiations that all hostilities in Ireland for his
cause should be put an end to. At the very same time he wrote to
the earl of Ormond, " Obey my wife's orders, not mine, until I shall
let you know I am free from all restraint ; nor trouble yourself
about my concessions as to Ireland ; they will lead to nothing."
Charles goes on to say to his son, " Censure us not for having
parted with so much of our own right ; the price was great, but the
commodity was security to us, peace to our people." In his heart
he felt that he had really not parted with anything. " We were
confident," he says, " another parliament would remember how
useful a king's power is to a people's liberty ; of how much thereof
w-? divested curself, that we and they might meet once again in a
due parlimentary way, to agree the bounds of prince and people."
The unhappy monarch appears to have forgotten that " the bounds
of prince and people " were agreed, " in a due parliamentary way,"
by the Petition of Right; and that from the day in 1629 when he
declared that he would depart from that due way, making the free
monarchy of EngJand absolute, the terrible misfortunes that he
had endured during seVen years of Civil War were the price that
he had to pay for eleven previous years of despotism. He draws a
true lesson from the tyranny of others : " These men, who have
forced laws which they were bound to preserve, will find their
triumphs full of troubles." His prayer for his subjects " that the
572 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ancient laws, with the interpretation according to the known
practice, might once more be a hedge about them," might have
been more opportune when the ancient hedge was first broken
down by the ministers of his own aggressions. But, with all this
forgetfulness of the errors of the past, its sad lessons are not
wholly forgotten, when he says, " Give belief to cur experience,
never to affect more greatness or prerogative than that which is
intrinsically and really for the good of subjects, not the satisfaction
of favorites." *
A week before the termination of the conferences at Newport,
the Army from St. Alban's sends a " Remonstrance " to the Com
mons, — an unmistakable document, — calling upon the Parliament
to bring the king to trial ; and to decree that the future king should
be elected by the representatives of the people. It was distinctly
intimated that if the Parliament neglected the interests of the nation
the Army would take the matter into their own hands. There was
naturally a great commotion in the House ; and the debate upon
this " Remonstrance " was adjourned for a week. At about the end
of that time the commissioners from Newport have made their
report ; and after twenty- four hours of debate it is voted that the
king's concessions offered a ground for a future settlement. On
the 25th of November the army of Fairfax is at Windsor. Crom
well had returned from Scotland, to the north of England, on the
nth of October. He is busily engaged in military affairs. The
royalist governor of Pontefract refuses to surrender. A party from
the garrison have sallied out on the 29th of October, and assassi
nated the parliamentary colonel Rainsborough, in his lodging at
Doncaster. The Northern Army is badly off for shoes, stockings,
and clothes, as Cromwell writes ; but they are all full cf zeal, and
petition the General of the Army against the Treaty at Newport,
which petition Cromwell forwards to Fairfax on the 20th of Novem
ber, saying, " I find in the officers of the regiments a very great
sense of the sufferings of this poor kingdom ; and in them all a
very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon offenders."
There are nevertheless doubts and misgivings in the breasts of
some Army men, as we may judge from a letter of Oliver to that
" ingenuous young man," his friend colonel Hammond, at Caris
brook, who has expressed- his dissatisfaction at the principle that
" it is lawful for a lesser part, if in the right, to force a numerical
majority." The king told sir Philip Warwick that the Governor
* Clarendon, vol. vi. p. 189 — 191.
CROMWELL'S LETTER TO HAMMOND. 573
was such a rogue that he could not be in worse hands. Though
the Governor was faithful to. his trust, he yet had a conscientious
doubt whether the Army had a right to determine the great ques
tion at issue. The letter of Cromwell is dated from Pontefract on
the 25th of November. It is altogether so characteristic of this
extraordinary man, and moreover so strikingly illustrative of the
nature of the principles by which he and many others were driving
forward to perpetrate acts of violence and illegality, under a belief
that they were moved by holy and just inspirations, that we may not
unprofitably peruse one or two of its more striking passages: —
'¦ You -say : ' God hath appointed authorities among the na
tions, to which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This
resides, in England, in the Parliament. Therefore active or pas
sive resistance,' &c. Authorities and powers are the ordinance
of God. This or that species is of human institution, and limited,
some with larger, others with stricter bands, each one according to
its constitution. But I do not therefore think that the Authorities
may do anything, and yet such obedience be due. All agree that
there are cases in which it is lawful to resist. If so, your ground
fails, and so likewise the inference. Indeed, dear Robin, not to
multiply words, the query is, Whether ours be such a case ? This
ingenuously is the true question. To this I shall say nothing,
though I could say very much ; but only desire thee to see what
thou findest in thy own heart to two or three plain considerations.
First, Whether Salus Populi be a sound position ? Secondly,
Whether in the way in hand, really and before the Lord, before
whom conscience has to stand, this be provided for ;— or if the
whole fruit of the War is not like to be frustrated, and all most
like to turn to what it was, and worse ? And this, contrary to En
gagements, explicit Covenants with those who ventured their lives
upon those Covenants and Engagements, without whom perhaps,
in equity, relaxation ought not to be ? Thirdly, Whether this
• Army be not a lawful Power, called by God to oppose and fight
against the king upon some stated grounds ; and being in power
to such ends, may not oppose one Name of Authority, for those
ends, as well as another Name, — since it was not the outward Au
thority summoning them that by its power made the quarrel lawful,
but the quarrel was lawful in itself ? If so, it may be, acting will
be justified in foro humano. But truly this kind of reasonings
may bei'but fleshly, either with or against: only it is good to try
what truth may be in them. And the Lord teach us."
574 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" We in this Northern Army were in a waiting posture ; desiring
to see what the Lord would lead us to. And a Declaration [Re
monstrance] is put out, at which many are shaken : — although we
could perhaps have wished the stay of it till after the treaty, yet
seeing it is come out, we trust to rejoice in the will ot the Lord,
waiting His further pleasure. Dear Robin, beware of men ; look
up to the Lord. Let Him be free to speak and command in thy
heart. Take heed of the things I fear thou hast reasoned thyself
into ; and thou shall be able through Him, without consulting flesh
and blood, to do valiantly for Him and His people." ..." Dost
thou not think this fear of the Levellers (of whom there is no fear)
'that they would destroy Nobility,'&c, has caused some to take
up corruption, and find it lawful to make this ruining hypocritical
Agreement, on one part ? Hath not this biassed even some good
men ? I will not say the thing they fear will come upon them ;
but if it do, they will themselves bring it upon themselves. Have
not some of our friends, by their passive principle (which I judge
not, only I think it liable to temptation as well as the active, and
neither of them to be reasoned into, because the heart is deceitful),
— been occasioned to overlook what is just and honest, and to think
the people of God may have as much or more good the one way
than the other ? Good by this Man, — against whom the Lord hath
witnessed : and whom thou knowest ! "
On the 25th of November, the day on which Cromwell's letter
is dated, colonel Hammond was directed to give up his post in the
Isle of Wight to another officer, and return to the Army. The
king had remained in the house at Newport in which the Treaty
was conducted when the commissioners quitted the town. On the
evening of the 29th of November, the king was surrounded by sev
eral of the noblemen and others who had been with him during the
conferences. A report came to them that troops had landed in the
island ; and the fact was ascertained by one of Charles' attendants,
colonel Cook. He had ridden to Carisbrook and to the coast.-
When he returned about midnight the king's house was surrounded
by soldiers ; and its very passages were filled with armed men,
their matches lighted. Cook entered the king's apartments, wet
and wearied. The king's friends were persuading him to attempt
to escape, at all risks ; and Cook told him that horses were at hand
and a vessel off the coast. Charles now hesitates to break his pa
role ; yet he had givt-.n it to Hammond, and had attempted to break
it on several occasions. The resignation of despair had now come
MEMBERS EJECTED FROM THE COMMONS- HOUSE. 575
over the unhappy king. He went to bed. At daybreak there was
an alarm at his door. A colonel was there with a guard ; and
when the door was opened, the king was told by him that he had
orders to remove him to Hurst Castle. They could not have named
a worse place, said Charles. He apprehended assassination; and
this castle at the mouth of the Solent, — which Warwick describes
as "a place which stood on the sea, for at every tide the water
surrounded it, and contained only a few dog-lodgings for soldiers,"
— was more fitted for a deed of darkness than Berkeley or Ponte
fract, where deposed kings had perished. On that 30th of Novem
ber, the Parliament had voted that they would not take the " Re
monstrance " of the Army into consideration. The army is at
Windsor. On Saturday, the 2nd of December, it is on its march
to London ; and before night is quartered in Whitehall, St. James's,
and the suburbs. That Sunday must have been a clay of fear and
anxious curiosity. Presbyterian preachers setting forth the atro
city of the seizure of the king. Zealous soldiers, gifted with the
power of eloquence, haranguing crowds in the parks. " For To-
phet is ordamed of old ; yea, for the king it is prepared," was the
text of many a field-preaching of that Sabbath. On the Monday
the Commons are debating all day — they are debating till five
o'clock on Tuesday morning the 5th, — whether the king's conces
sions in the Treaty of Newport are a ground of settlement. The
practised orators have been heard again and again on this great
question. There is an old man amongst them — one who has only
been a member three weeks — who boldly stands up for the cause
of fallen majesty. He is no royal favourite, he says. The favours
he has received from the king and his party were, the loss of his
two ears, — his pillorihgs, his imprisonments, his fines. It was
.Prynne, who spoke for hours ; with honest energy,, but with no
great prudence when he described the Army at their very doors as N
" inconstant, mutinous, and unreasonable servants." Yet, what
ever might have been the effect of this learned man's courageous
effort for reconciliation, the very recital of his ancient sufferings
must have revived in some a bitter recollection of past tyrannies,
and a corresponding dread of their return. The House decided,
by one hundred .and twenty-nine to eighty-three, that the king's
concessions are a ground of settlement. There was another as
sembly on the same day whose resolutions at that moment were of
more importance even than a vote of the Commons. " Some of
the principal officers of the Army came to London with expectation
576 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 1
that things would be brought to this issue, and consulting with
some members of parliament and others, it was concluded, after a
full and free debate, that the measures taken by the Parliament
were contrary to the trust reposed in them, and tending to contract
the guilt of the blood that had been shed, upon themselves and the
nation ; that it was therefore the duty of the Army to endeavour to'
put a stop to such proceedings." * They went about this work in a
very business-like manner. " Three of the members of the House,
and three of the officers of the Army, withdrew into a private room
to attain the ends of our said Resolution ; when we agreed that the
army should be drawn up the next morning, and guards placed in
Westminster hall, the Court of Requests, and the Lobby; that
none might be permitted to pass into the House but such as con
tinued faithful to the public interests. To this end we went over
the names of all the members, one by one. . . . Commissary-
general Ireton went to sir Thomas Fairfax, and acquainted him
with the necessity of this extraordinary way of proceeding." f
Lieutenant-general Cromwell is still in the North.
What was thus deliberately resolved on the 6th of December
was as promptly. effected on. the 7th. An order is given that the
trained bands of the city shall withdraw from their accustomed
duty of guard at Westminster. Colonel Rich's regiment of horse
take up a position on that morning in Palace Yard. Colonel Pride's
regiment of foot throng Westminster Hall, and block up every
entrance to the House of Commons. Colonel Pride Has a written
list of names in his hand, — the names of those against whom the
sentence of exclusion has been passed. As the members of the
House approach, lord Grey of Groby, who stands at the elbow of
colonel Pride, gives a sign or word that such a one is to pass, or to
be turned back. Forty-one were ordered that day to retire to " the-
Queen's Court." It is easier to imagine than to describe the in
dignation expressed by the ejected. They are kept under restraint
all the day ; and in the evening are conducted to a tavern. There
were two taverns abutting upon and partly under, the Hall known
as " Heaven " and " Hell,"— very ancient places of refreshment
much used by the lawyers in term-time ; mentioned by Ben Jonson ;
and which, with a third house called " Purgatory," are recited in a
grant of the time of Henry VII4 To " Hell," perhaps withoutthe
intention of a bad joke, these forty-one of -the parliamentary
* Ludlow, " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 269. , /wi| p. IJOi
I Gifford. Notes to " Alchemist,"— Jonson's Works, vol. iv. p. 174.
Execution of Charles I. — Vol. iii. 585.
THE KING REMOVED TO WINDSOR. 577
majority were led, and lodged for the night. The process went on
for. several days; till some hundred members are disposed of.
Before the minority have obtained an entire ascendancy, colonel
Pride is questioned for his conduct ; but no satisfaction is given.
The House makes a show of disapprobation ; but the Serjeant-at-
arms has brought a message that the excluded members are de
tained by the Army ; and business proceeds as if the event were of
small consequence. Cromwell has arrived on the night after the
sharp medicine known as " Pride's purge " has been administered ;
and " lay at Whitehall, where, and at other places, he declared that
he had not been acquainted with this design ; yet since it was done
he was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it." * Vane,
who had spoken vehemently in the great debate of the 4th, against
accepting the king's concessions as a ground of settlement, even
boldly proclaiming himself for a republic, appears to have taken no
part in the illegal proceedings which laid the Parliament at the feet
of the Army. He retired to his estate, and did not come again to
Parliament till a month after the final blow against monarchy had
been struck. " Young Vane " has had justice done to his lofty
capacity in being classed with the " great men " who " have been
among us '' — " hands that penned and tongues that uttered wis
dom." t Yet his conduct in this crisis can scarcely be attributed to
his high-mindedness : and probably Mrs. Hutchinson points to
him, in saying, " I know upon certain knowledge that many, yea
the most part of them, retreated not for conscience, but for fear
and worldly prudence, foreseeing that the insolence of the Army
might grow to that height as to ruin the cause, and reduce the
kingdom into the hands of the enemy ; and then those who had been
most courageous in their country's cause should be given up as
victims. These poor men did privately animate those who ap
peared most publicly." X The parliamentary minority, being now
almost unanimous in their resolve to overthrow the existing govern
ment, though perhaps not yet agreed as to the mode of accomplish
ing this as far as regarded the person of the king, voted to rescind
all the votes which had recently passed as to the grounds of a
settlement. Another act of military power soon marshalled the
way to a resolution of such doubts.
The drawbridge of Hurst Castle is lowered during the night of
the 17th of December, and the tramp of a troop of horse is heard
by the wakeful prisoner. He calls for his attendant Herbert, who
* Ludlow, vol. i. p. 272. t Wordsworth. X " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 185.
Vol. III.— S7
578 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
is sent to ascertain the cause of this midnight commotion. Major
Harrison is arrived. The king is agitated. He has been warned
that Harrison is a man chosen to assassinate him. He is re-assured
in the morning, in being informed that the major and his troop are
to conduct him to Windsor. Two days after, the king sets out,
under the escort of lieutenant-colonel Cobbett. At Winchester he
is received in state by the mayor and aldermen ; but they retire
alarmed on being told that the House has voted all to be traitors
who should address the king. The troop commanded by Cobbett
.ias been relieved on the route by another troop, of which Harrison
has the command. They rest at Farriham. Charles expresses to
Harrison, with whose soldierly appearance he is struck, the sus
picions which had been hinted regarding him. The major, in his
new buff coat and fringed scarf of crimson silk, told the king " that
he needed not to entertain any such imagination or apprehension ;
that the Parliament had too much honour and justice to ch-rish so
foul an intention ; and assured him, that whatever the Parliament re
solved to do would be very public, and in a way of justice, to which
the world should be witness ; and would never endure a thought
of secret violence." This, adds Clarendon, " his majesty could not
persuade himself to believe ; nor did imagine that they durst ever
produce him in the sight of the people, under any form whatsoever
of a public trial." * The next day the journey was pursued to
wards Windsor. The king urged his desire to stop at Bagshot,
and dine in the Forest at the house of lord Newburgh. He had
been apprised that his friend would have ready for him a horse of
extraordinary fleetness, with which he might make one more effort
to escape. The horse had been kicked by another horse the day
before, and was useless. That last faint hope was gone. On the
night of the 23rd of December the king slept, a prisoner surround
ed with hostile guards, in the noble castle which in the days of his
youth had rung with Jonson's lyrics and ribaldry ; and the Gipsy of
the Masque had prophesied that his " name in peace or wars,
nought should bound." f But even here he continued to cherish
some of the delusions which he had indulged in situations of far
less danger. He was still surrounded with something of regal
pomp. He dined, as the ancient sovereigns had dined, in public —
as Elizabeth, and his father, and he himself had dined, seated
under a canopy, the cup presented to him on the knee, the dishes
solemnly tasted before he ate. These manifestations of respect he
• " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 323. t " Gipsies Metamorphosed."
ORDINANCE FOR THE KING'S TRIAL. 579
held to be indicative of an altered feeling. But he also had an Un-
doubting confidence that he should be righted, by aid from Ireland,
from Denmark, from other kingdoms : " I have three more cards to
play, the worst of which will give me back everything." After three
weeks of comparative comfort, the etiquette observed towards him
was laid aside; and with a fearful sense of approaching calamity
in the absence of " respect and honour, according to the ancient
practice," is there anything more contemptible than a despised
prince ? "
During the month in which Charles had remained at Windsor,
there had been* proceedings in Parliament of which he was imper
fectly informed. On the day he arrived there, it was resolved by
the Commons that he should Le brought to trial. On the 2nd of
January, 1649, it was voted that, in making war against the Parlia
ment, he had been guilty of treason ; and a High Court was ap
pointed to try him. One hundred and fifty commissioners were to
compose the Court, — peers, members of the Commons, aldermen
of London. The ordinance was sent to the Upper House, and
was rejected. On the 6th, a fresh ordinance, declaring that the
people being, after God, the source of all just power, the repre
sentatives of the people are the supreme power in the nation ; and
that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in
Parliament hath the force of a law, and the people are concluded „
thereby, though the consent of King or Peers be not had thereto.
Asserting this power, so utterly opposed either to the ancient con
stitution of the monarchy, or to the possible working of a republic,
there was no hesitation in constituting the High Court of Justice
in the name of the Commons alone. The number of members of
the Court was now reduced to one hundred and thirty-five. They
had seven preparatory meetings, at which only fifty-eight members
attended. "All men," says Mrs. Hutchinson, "were left to their
free liberty of acting, neither persuaded nor compelled ; and as
there were some nominated in the commission who never sat, and
others who sat at first,but durst not hold on, so all the rest might
have declined it. if they would, when it is apparent they should
have suffered nothing by so doing."* Algernon Sidney, although
bent upon a republic, opposed the trial, apprehending that the pro
ject of a commonwealth would fail, if the king's life were touched.
It is related that Cromwell, irritated by these scruples, exclaimed,
" No one will stir. I tell you, we will cut his head off with the
* " Memoirs," p. 158.
580 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
crown upon it." Such daring may appear the result of ambition,
or fear, or revenge, or innate cruelty, in a few men who had ob
tained a temporary ascendancy. These men were, on the con
trary, the organs of a widespread determination amongst thousands
throughout the country, who had long preached and argued and
prophesied about vengeance on " the great delinquent ; " and who
had ever in their mouths the text that " blood defileth the land, and
the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but
by the blood of him that shed it." * They had visions of a the
ocracy, and were impatient of an earthly king.
Do we believe, as some, not without reasonable*grounds, may
believe, that the members of the High Court of Justice expressed
such convictions upon a simulated religious confidence ? Do we
think that, in the clear line of action which Cromwell especially. had
laid down for his guidance, he cloaked his worldly ambition under
the guise of being moved by some higher impulse than that of
taking the lead in a political revolution ? Certainly we do not.
The infinite mischiefs of assuming that the finger of God directly
points out the way to believers, when they are walking in danger
ous and devious paths, may be perfectly clear to us, who calmly
look back upon the instant events which followed upon Cromwell's
confidence in his solemn call to a fearful duty. But we are not the
more to believe, because the events have a character of guilt in the
views of most persons, that such a declared conviction was altogeth
er, or in any degree, a lie. Those were times in which, more for good
than for evil, men believed in the immediate direction of a special
Providence in great undertakings. The words, " God hath given
us the victory," were not with them a mere form. If we trace
amidst these solemn impulses the workings of a deep sagacity — the
union of the fierce resolves of a terrible enthusiasm with the fore
sight and energy of an ever-present common sense — we are not the
more to conclude that their spiritualism, or fanaticism, or whatever
we please to call their ruling principle, was less sincere by being
mixed up with the ordinary motives through which the affairs of
the world are carried on. Indeed, when we look to the future
course of English history, and see — as those who have no belief in
a higher direction of the destiny of nations than that of human wis
dom can alone turn away from seeing — that the inscrutable work
ings of a supreme Power led our country in the fullness of time to
internal peace and security after these storms, and in a great degree
• Ludlow uses this text from " Numbers," c. xxxv., in explaining his convictions.
THE KING BEFORE THE HIGH COURT. 58 1
in consequence of them, can we refuse our belief that the tragical
events of those days were ordered for our good ? Acknowledging
that the overthrow of a rotten throne was necessary for the build
ing up of a throne that should have its sole stable foundation in
the welfare of the people, can we affirm that the men who did the
mightier portion of that work, — sternly, unflinchingly, illegally, yet
ever professing to " seek to know the mind of God in all that chain
of Providence," — are quite correctly described in the Statute for
their attainder, as " a party of wretched men, desperately wicked,
and hardened in their impiety."
On the 19th of January, major Harrison appeared again at Wind
sor with his troop. There was a coach with six horses in the court
yard, in which the king took his seat ; and, once more, he entered
London, and was lodged at St. James's palace. The next day, the
High Court of Justice was opened in Westminster-hall. The king
came from St. James's in a sedan ; and after the names of the mem
bers of the court had been called, sixty-nine being present, Bradshaw,
the president, ordered the serjeant to bring in the prisoner. Silently
the king sat down in the chair prepared for him. He moved not
his hat, as he looked sternly and contemptuously around. The
sixty-nine rose not from their seats, and remained covered. It is
scarcely eight years since he was a spectator of the last solemn
trial in this hall — that of Strafford. What mighty events have
happened since that time ! There are memorials hanging from the
roof which tell such a history as his saddest fears in the hour of
Strafford's death could scarcely have shaped out. The tattered
banners taken from his Cavaliers at Marston-moor and Naseby are
floating above his head. There, too, are the same memorials of
Preston. But still he looks around him proudly and severely.
Who are the men that are to judge him, the king, who " united in
his person every possible claim by hereditary right to the English
as well as the Scottish throne, being the heir both of Egbert and
William the Conqueror ? " * These men are, in his view, traitors
and rebels, from Bradshaw, the lawyer, who sits in the foremost
chair calling himself lord-president, to Cromwell and Marten in
the back seat, over whose heads are the red-cross of England and
the harp of Ireland, painted on an escutcheon, whilst the proud
bearing's of a line of. kings are nowhere visible. Under what law
does this insolent president address him as " Charles Stuart, king
of England," and say, "The Commons of England being deeply
sensible of the calamities that have been brought upon this nation,
* Blackstone, book i. c. iii., p. 196, Kerr's edition.
582 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
which are fixed upon you as the principal author of them, have re
solved to make inquisition for blood ? " He will defy their au
thority. The clerk reads the charge, and when he is accused
therein of being tyrant and traitor, he laughs in the face of the
Court. " Though his tongue usually hesitated, yet it was very
free at this time, for he was never discomposed in mind," writes
Warwick. " And yet," it is added, " as he confessed himself to
the bishop of London that attended him, one action shocked him
very much ; for whilst he was leaning in the Court upon his staff,
which had a head of gold, the head broke off on a sudden. He
took it up, but seemed unconcerned, yet told the bishop it really
made a great impression upon him." It was the symbol of the
treacherous hopes upon which he had rested, — golden dreams
that vanished in this solemn hour. Again and again contending
against the authority of the Court, the king was removed, arid the
sitting was adjourned to the 22nd. On that day the same scene
was renewed ; and again on the 23rd. A growing sympathy for
the monarch became apparent. The cries of "Justice, justice,"
which were heard at first, were now mingled with " God save the
king." He had refused to plead ; but the Court nevertheless em
ployed the 24th and 25th of January in collecting evidence to prove
the charge of his levying war against the Parliament. Coke, the
solicitor-general, then demanded whether the Court would proceed
to pronouncing sentence ; and the members adjourned to the
Painted Chamber. On the 27th the public sitting was resumed.
When the name of Fairfax was called, a voice was heard from the
gallery, " He has too much wit to be here." The kingwas brought
in ; and, when the president addressed the commissioners, and
said that the prisoner was before the Court to answer a charge of
high treason, and other crimes brought against him in the name of
the people of England, the voice from the gallery was again heard,
" It's a lie — not one half of them." The voice came from lady
Fairfax. The Court, Bradshaw then stated, had agreed upon the
sentence. Ludlow records that the king " desired to make one
proposition before they proceeded to sentence ; which he earn
estly pressing, as that which he thought would lead to the recon
ciling of all parties, and to the peace of the three kingdoms, they
permitted him to offer it : the effect of which was, that he might
meet the two Houses in the Painted Chamber, to whom he doubted
not to offer that which should satisfy and secure all interests."
Ludlow goes on to say, " Designing, as I have been since in
formed, to propose his own resignation, and the admission of his
THE KING SENTENCED TO DEATH. 583
son to the throne upon such terms as should have been agreed
upon." * The • commissioners retired to deliberate, " and being
satisfied, upon debate, that nothing but loss of time would be the
consequence of it, they returned into the Court with a negative to
his demand." Bradshaw then delivered a solemn speech to the
king, declaring how he had through his reign endeavoured to sub
vert the laws and introduce arbitrary government ; how he had at
tempted, from the beginning, either to destroy Parliaments, or to
render them subservient to his own designs ; how he had levied
war against the Parliament, by the terror of his power to discour
age for ever such assemblies from doing their duty, and that in
this war many thousands of the good people of England had lost
their lives. The clerk was lastly commanded to read the sen
tence, that his head should be severed from his body; "and the
commissioners," says Ludlow, " testified their unanimous assent by
standing up." The king attempted to speak; "but being ac
counted dead in law, was not permitted."
On the 29th of January, the Court met to sign the sentence of
execution; addressed to " colonel Francis Hacker, colonel Huncks,
arid lieutenant-colonel Phayr, and to every one of them." This is
the memorable document : —
" Whereas Charles Stuart, king of England, is and standeth
convicted, attainted and condemned of High Treason and other
high Crimes : and Sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced
against him by this Court, to be put to death by the severing of
his head from his body ; of. which Sentence execution remaineth
to be done :
" These are therefore to will and require you to see the said
Sentence executed, in the open street before Whitehall, upon the
morrow, being the thirtieth day of this instant month of January,
between the hours of ten in the morning and five in the afternoon
with full effect. And for so doing, this shall be your warrant.
"And these are to require all Officers and Soldiers, and others
the good People of this Nation of England, to be assisting unto
you in this service.
"Given under our hands and seals,
"JOHN BRADSHAW.
"THOMAS GREY.
" OLIVER CROMWELL."
And fifty-six others.
• " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 280.
584 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The statements of the heartless buffoonery, and the daring
violence of Cromwell, at the time of signing the warrant, must be
received with some suspicion. He smeared Henry Marten's face
with the ink of his pen, and Marten in return smeared his, say the
narratives. Probably so. With reference to this anecdote it has
been wisely observed, " Such ' toys of desperation ' commonly
bubble up from a deep flowing stream below." * Another anec
dote is told by Clarendon ; that colonel Ingoldsby, one who signed
the warrant, was forced to do so with great violence, by Cromwell
and others ; "and Cromwell, with a loud laughter, taking his hand
in his, and putting the pen between his fingers, with his own hand
writ ' Richard Ingoldsby,' he making all the resistance he could."
Ingoldsby gave this relation, in the desire to obtain a pardon after
the Restoration ; and to confirm his story he said, " if his name
there were compared with what he had ever writ himself, it could
never be looked upon as his own hand." Warburton, in a note
upon this passage, says, " The original warrant is still extant, and
Ingoldsby's name has no such mark of its being wrote in that
manner." The king knew his fate. He resigned himself to it with calm
ness and dignity ; with one exceptional touch of natural human
passion, when he said to bishop Juxon, although resigning himself
to meet his God, " We will not talk of these rogues, in whose
hands I am ; they thirst for my blood, and they will have it, and
God's will be done. I thank God, I heartily forgive them, and I
will talk of them no more." He took an affectionate leave of his
daughter, the princess Elizabeth, twelve years old ; and of his son,
the duke of Gloucester,- of the age of eight. To him he said ; —
" Mark, child, what I say ; they will cut off my head, and perhaps
make thee king ; but thou must not be king so long as thy brothers
Charles and James live." And the child said, " I will be torn in
pieces first." There were some attempts to save him. The Dutch
ambassador made vigorous efforts to procure a reprieve, whilst the
French and Spanish ambassadors were inert. The ambassadors
from the States nevertheless persevered ; and early in the day of
the 30th obtained some glimmering of hope from Fairfax. " But
we found," they say in their despatch, " in front of the house in
which we had just spoken with the general, about two hundred
horsemen ; and we learned, as well as on our way as on reaching
home, that all the streets, passages, and squares of London were
* Forster. " Life of Marten," p. 314.
THE KING'S EXECUTION. 585
occupied by troops, so that no one could pass, and that the ap-
. proaches of the city were covered with cavalry, so as to prevent
any one from coming in or going out. . . . The same day, be
tween two and three o'clock, the king was taken to a scaffold cov
ered with black, erected before Whitehall."*
To that scaffold before Whitehall, Charles walked, surrounded
by soldiers, through the leafless avenues of St. James's Park. It was
a bitterly cold morning. Evelyn records that the Thames was frozen
over. The season was so sharp that the king asked to have a shirt
more than ordinary, when he carefully dressed himself. He left
St. James's at ten o'clock. He remained in his chamber at White
hall for about three hours, in prayer, and then received the sacra
ment. He was pressed to dine, but refused, taking a piece of
bread and a glass of wine. His purposed address to the people
was delivered only to the hearing of those upon the scaffold, but
its purport was that the people " mistook the nature of govern
ment ; for people are free under a government, not by being
sharers in it, but by due administration of the laws of it. "t His
theory of government was a consistent one. He had the misfor
tune not to understand that the time had been fast passing away
for its assertion. The headsman did his office ; and a deep groan
went up from the surrounding multitude.
It is scarcely necessary that we should offer any opinion upon
this tremendous event. The world had never before seen an act
so daring conducted with such a calm determination ; and the few
moderate men of that time balanced the illegality, and also the
impolicy of the execution of Charles, by the fact that " it was not
done in a corner," and that those who directed or sanctioned the act
offered no apology, but maintained its absolute necessity and jus
tice. " That horrible sentence upon the most innocent person in
the world ; the execution of that sentence by the most execrable
murder that was ever committed since that of our blessed
Saviour ; " X forms the text which Clarendon gave for the rhapso
dies of party during two centuries. On the other hand, the elo
quent address of Milton to the people of England has been in the
hearts and mouths of many who have known that the establishment
of the liberties of their country, duly subordinated by the laws of
a free monarchy, may be dated from this event : " God has endued
* Despatch from the Ambassador Extraordinary of the States General ; in the Appen
dix to Guizot's " English Revolution."
t Warwick, p. 345. X " Rebellion," vol. vii. p. 236.
586 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
you with greatness of mind to be the first of mankind, who, after
having conquered their own king, and having had him delivered
into their hands, have not scrupled to condemn him judicially, and,
pursuant to that sentence of condemnation, to put him to death." *
In these times in England, when the welfare of the throne and the
people are identical, we can, on the one hand, afford to refuse our
assent to the blasphemous comparison of Clarendon (blasphemy
more offensively repeated in the Church Service for the 30th of
January), and at the same time affirm that the judicial condemna
tion which Milton so admires was illegal, unconstitutional, and in
its immediate results dangerous to liberty. But feeling that far
greater dangers would have been incurred if " the caged tiger had
been let loose," and knowing that out of the errors and anomalies
of those times a wiser Revolution grew, for which the first more
terrible Revolution was a preparation, we may cease to examine
this great historical question in any bitterness of spirit, and even
acknowledge that the death of Charles, a bad king, though in some
respects a good man, was necessary for the life of England, and
for her "teaching other nations how to live." We must accept as
. just and true Milton's admonition to his countrymen in reference
to this event, which he terms " so glorious an action," with many
reasonable qualifications as to its glory ; and yet apply even to
ourselves his majestic words: — "After the performing so glorious
an action as this, you ought to do nothing that is mean and little,
not so much as to think of, much less to do anything but what is
great and sublime. Which to attain to, this is your only way : as
you have subdued your enemies in the field, so to make appear,
that unarmed, and in the highest outward peace and tranquillity,
you of all mankind are best able to subdue ambition, avarice, the
love of riches, and can best avoid the corruptions that prosperity is
apt to introduce (which generally subdue and triumph over other
nations), to show as great justice, temperance, and moderation in
the maintaining your liberty, as you have shown courage in freeing
yourselves from slavery." * " Defensio pro populo Anglicano.
PROCLAMATION AGAINST A NEW KING. 587
CHAPTER XXXI.
Proclamation against a new king. — The Icon Basilike. — Council of State appointed. —
Trial and Execution of Royalists. — The Levellers. — The Levellers in the Army sup
pressed. — Trial of Lilburne. — Charles II. at St. Germain's. — Ireland — Cromwell
Lord Liei tenant. — Cromwell's Campaign. — Drogheda. — Wexford. — Cromwell's Ac
count of the Slaughters. — Waterford. — Rupert driven from the Coast. — Surrender of
Cork. — Cromwell's Policy in Ireland. — Cromwell returns to Londo.i.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, the 30th of January, the Serjeant-
at-arms accompanied by poursuivants, and surrounded by cavalry,
appears at Cheapside. Trumpets sound, and crowds gather about, to
hear a proclamation, that whoever shall proclaim a new king, with
out authority of parliament, shall be deemed a traitor. An hour
only has passed, since the last king, upon the scaffold at White
hall, " bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed." *
What a night of curiosity and fear in the public haunts and private
chambers of the great city ! That afternoon the House of Commons
order " that the Post be stayed until to-morrow morning, ten of the
clock." That Post, which under the Parliament has become
general, instead of being irregularly despatched upon a few roads,
is now a weekly conveyance of letters into all parts of the nation.
On that morning of the 31st it will go out of London with letters
and little newspapers that will move terror and pity throughout the
land. A few will rejoice in the great event ; some will weep over
it ; others will vow a fearful revenge. " The more I ruminate upon
it," writes Howell seven weeks afterwards, " the more it aston-
isheth my imagination, and shaketh all the cells of my brain ; so
that sometimes I struggle with my faith, and have much ado to
believe it yet." J There was, at the time of the king's execution,
a book being printed which was to surround his life with the
attributes of a saint, and to invest him in death with the glory of a
martyr. The " Icon Basilike, or Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty
in his Solitudes and Sufferings," purported to be written by Charles
* Andrew Marvel. t " Letters," vol. iii. p. 36.
588 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the first himself. Milton, who was directed by the Parliament to
answer this Icon, or Image, treats it in his Iconoclastes, or Image-
breaker, as if the king had "left behind him this book as the best
advocate and interpreter of his own actions ; " but at the same time
Milton is careful to add, " as to the author of these soliloquies,
whether it were the late king, as is vulgarly believed, or any secret
coadjutor (and some stick not to name him), it can add nothing,
nor shall take from the weight, if any be, of reason which he
brings." The question of the authorship of this book has now
passed out of the region of party, violence ; the controversy on
that matter lias almost merged, as a literary problem, into the
belief that it was written by Dr. Gauden, afterwards bishop of
Exeter. This divine probably submitted it to Charles during his
long sojourn in the Isle of Wight ; he published it as the work of
the king; but he claimed the authorship after the Restoration.
Mr. Hallam remarks upon the internal evidence of its authenticity
that "it has all the air of a fictitious composition. Cold, stiff,
.elaborate, without a single allusion that bespeaks the superior
knowledge of facts which the king must have possessed, it contains
little but those rhetorical commonplaces which would suggest them
selves to any forger." But these "rhetorical commonplaces" are
the best evidence, not of the genuineness of the book, but of the
skill of the author. They were precisely what was required to make
" attachment to the memory of the king become passion, and re
spect, worship ; " — so M. Guizot describes the effect of the Icon.
It was an universal appeal to the feelings, in a style moving along
with a monotonous dignity befitting royalty, though occasionally
mingled with cold metaphors. It set forth the old blind claims to
implicit obedience — or, as Milton has it, maintained "the common
grounds of tyranny and popery, sugared a little over," — amidst the
manifestations of a sincere piety and a resigned sadness. In one
year there were fifty editions of this book sold. " Had it appeared
a week sooner it might have preserved the king," * thinks one
writer. That may be doubted. But it produced the effect which
those so-called histories produce which endeavour to fix the im
agination solely upon the personal attributes and sorrows of kings
and queens, instead of presenting a sober view of their relations to
their subjects. Sentiment with the majority is always more power
ful than reason ; and thus Milton's ' Iconoclastes,' being a partisan's
view of Charles's public actions — a cold though severe view, in the
* Laing.
COUNCIL OF STATE APPOINTED. 589
formal style of a state-paper, — produced little or no effect upon the
national opinions, and is now read only for the great name of the
author. On the 6th of February the Commons, now reduced to little
more than a hundred members, by their vote declared the House
of Lords " useless and dangerous." On the 7th another vote was
recorded : "It hath been found by experience, and this house doth
declare, that the office of a king, in this nation, and- to have the
power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burthensome,
and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the peo
ple of this nation, and therefore ought to be abolished." The body
of king Charles, on this day, when the abolition of the royal office
had'been thus decreed, was removed to Windsor. On the 8th the
duke of Richmond, the marquis of Hertford, and the earls of South
ampton and Lindsey, arrived at the Castle, "to perform the last
duty to their dead master, and to wait upon him to his grave."
Amidst a fall of snow the corpse was borne from the great hall of
the Castle to St. George's Chapel ; and it was deposited " in a
vault, where two coffins were laid near one another, supposed to
contain the bodies of king Henry VIIL and queen Jane Seymour."*
The governor of the Castle forbad the Church Service to be per
formed, through his bigoted resolve that, the Common Prayer hav
ing been put down, he would not suffer it to be read in the garri
son where he commanded.
A due provision for the Exercise of the Executive authority
was speedily made by the Parliament, in the appointment of a
Council of State, consisting of forty-one persons. This Council
comprised the three chief judges ; the three commanders of the
army; five peers, and thirty members of the House. It was re
quired of the individuals composing the Council that each should
sign a document expressing approbation of the proceedings by
which the monarchy had been overthrown. Twenty-two refused to
enter into such an engagement. There were violent debates ; but
moderation ultimately prevailed. The past was to remain unnoticed,
in a pledge of fidelity for the future. Sir Henry Vane has left his
testimony to the course which he took under these circumstances :
" When required by the Parliament to take an oath, to give my
* " Herbert's Memoirs." Charles II. caused a search to be made for the vault,
when the parliament had voted a large sum for a public interment. The search was
fruitless, and the king put the money in his pocket. George .V. wished to gratify a rea
sonable curiosity, and the vault with its coffins was readily found.
59° HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
approbation, ex post facto to what was done, I utterly refused, and
would not accept of sitting in the Council of State upon those
terms, but occasioned a new oath to be drawn, wherein that was
omitted." * Vane became an active member, of the Council. He
and others who had refused to sanction the deeds of the regicides,
did not shrink from labouring with them in the public service.
Bradshaw was chosen President of the Council, and Milton was
appointed its. Latin secretary. The members chosen saw the ne
cessity of holding together in the great duty of saving the country
from intestine commotion and foreign assault. The Courts of
Law were re-opened ; the command of the navy was put into able
hands, who soon made the flag of England respected in every sea.
But although the vigilance of the Council was sufficient for the
repression of anarchy, with a powerful army at its command, it was
not sufficient for establishing a willing obedience to the Parlia
mentary Act, " That the People of England, and of all the do
minions and territories thereunto belonging, are and shall be, and are
hereby constituted, made, established, and confirmed, to be a Com
monwealth, or Free State." It was the 30th of May before the
Commonwealth was proclaimed in the City, and the late king's
statutes thrown down at the Exchange, and at the Portico of St.
Paul's. The Lord Mayor had been deprived of his office, and a
new chief magistrate appointed, before the scruples of the muni
cipal body could be overcome. There was a like indisposition
amongst the beneficed Clergy, the members of the Universities,
and many civil functionaries, to accept the oath of fidelity as the
condition of retaining office or privilege. But those who refused
were exempt from any punishment, and thus the new government
gradually acquired consistency by its abstinence from any measures
of general violence. There was one striking exception to its
course of moderation. Five state prisoners, royalists whom the
fortune of war had thrown into the hands of the Parliament, were
to be sacrificed to what was called justice upon delinquents. The
duke of Hamilton, who had been in confinement since his defeat
at Preston ; the earl of Holland, to whom an opportunity of chang
ing his side was not again to be permitted ; the earl of Norwich ;
lord Capel ; and sir John Owen, were brought to trial before a new
High Court of Justice, in sittings which lasted from the loth of
February to the 6th of March. Of these royalist leaders lord
Capel was the most eminent in courage and ability, and therefore
* Speech on his trial ; given in Mr. Forster's Life.
TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF ROYALISTS. 59 1
the most dreaded by the republicans. On the day after the House
had resolved upon bringing these adherents of the late king to
trial, lord Capel made his escape from the Tower, by dropping
from his window into the ditch of the fortress ; but he was discov
ered the same evening, and conveyed back to his prison. The
High Court condemned all the five to be beheaded. The honest
Welch squire, sir John Owen, gave the Court thanks, saying "it
was a very great honour to a poor gentleman of Wales to lose his
head with , such noble lords, and swore a great oath that he was
afraid they would have hanged him." * The Court, however, re
ferred the execution of the sentence to the decision of Parliament.
For the duke of Hamilton's reprieve there were few votes. The
sentence of lord Holland was confirmed by a majority of one.
The earl of Norwich was saved by the casting vote of the speaker,
Lenthall. Cromwell spoke upon the petition in favour of lord
Capel. He bore testimony to his high qualities ; but his affection
for the public, he said, weighed down his private friendship — -" the
question now is, whether you will preserve the most bitter and the
most implacable enemy you have." When Cromwell alluded to
private friendship, he looked back upon the time when Capel was
the first in the Long Parliament to complain of grievances. He
was reserved for execution, with Hamilton and Holland. Owen
escaped through the intervention of Colonel Hutchinson. Mrs.
Hutchinson relates the circumstance in a very interesting passage :
" While there was such mighty labour and endeavour for these
lords, colonel Hutchinson observed that no man spoke for this poor
knight, and sitting next to colonel Ireton, he expressed himself
to him arid told him, that it pitied him much to see that, while all
were labouring to save the lords, a gentleman that stood in the
same condemnation should not find one friend to ask his life ; and
so, said he, am I moved with compassion that, if you will second
me, I am resolved to speak for him, who, I perceive, is a stranger
and friendless. Ireton promised to second him, and accordingly
inquiring further of the man's condition, whether he had not a pe
tition in any member's hands, he found that his keepers had brought
one to the clerk of the house, but the man had not found any one
that would interest themselves for him, thinking the lords' lives of
so much more concernment than this gentleman's. This the more
stirred up the colonel's generous pity, and he took the petition,
deliveredit, spoke for him so nobly, and was so effectually seconded
* Clarendon, vol. vi. p. 256.^
592 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
by Ireton, that they carried his pardon clear." * The three con
demned noblemen were executed on the 9th of March in Palace-
yard. Capel, as Whitelocke records, carried himself " much after
the manner of a stout Roman." Public indignation was loudly ex
pressed against this severity. The time was not yet arrived when
political offences against the reigning power could be dealt with
mercifully. But the English republicans of 1649 abstained from
any more such blood-shedding, the case of colonel Poyer except
ed. He was tried by court-martial, and shot in Covent Garden.
After these demonstrations of power the public excitement appears
generally to have calmly settled down into a submission to the new
order of things ; in spite of the violent demonstrations of the fa
mous John Lilburne. He published several pamphlets, one being
entitled " England's new chains discovered," and he was committed
to the Tower to be tried in due time. Meanwhile, whilst the men
of station and property, the nobles and the gentry, the citizens and
the yeomen, are settling into their accustomed course of life,' a spirit
is getting loose which appears to be born of all great revolutions ;
and which in modern times has rendered revolutions very terrible
to the apprehensions of all those who have anything to lose. The
" Levellers " of 1649 were, in a small way, the precusors of the " So
cialists "of 1849. At St. Margaret's HiU, and at St. George's
Hill, in Surrey, — a sandy district, now " a silent sea of pines," —
appeared a band of thirty men, headed by one formerly in the army
who called himself a Prophet. They took possession of the ground,
and began digging it, and dibbling beans, in that sowing-time.
They said they should shortly be four thousand in number ; that
they should pull down park -pales and lay all open. The residents
near these Surrey hills were alarmed ; and requested Fairfax to
send a troop of horse for their protection. The Diggers, as they
called themselves, were brought before the general ; when the
Prophet declared that a vision had appeared to him and said,
" Arise, and dig and plough the earth, and receive the fruits there
of ;" that their intent was to restore the creation to its former con
dition ; that they only meant to meddle with what was common and
unfilled ; but that the time was at hand, when all men shall willingly
come in and give up their lands and estates, and submit to this
community of goods, f These men, and many others who were
adverse to the existing republic, having various schemes of per
fectibility, came to be known by the general name of Levellers.
* " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 164. t Whitelocke.
LEVELLERS IN THE ARMY SUPPRESSED. 593
They were only really formidable when they had arms in their
hands. But it required the utmost vigilance and decision to en
counter the mutinous temper which was again breaking forth
amongst the military class. The civil war had burst out again in
Ireland ; and it was decided that twenty-eight regiments should be
sent thither, under the command of lieutenant-general Cromwell.
The regiments to go are chosen by lot ; but the common men have
no inclination for the service. Lilburne's pamphlets are circulating
amongst them. They are brooding over his wild declamations in
their London and country-quarters. A troop of Wlialley's regi
ment lies at the Bull inn, at Bishopsgate ; and although not ordered
for Ireland they refuse to leave London ; rise in open mutiny.
Their conduct is sufficiently alarming to demand the instant pres
ence of Fairfax and Cromwell. The ringleaders are seized and tried
by court-martial. Five are condemned ; and one is the next day
shot in St. Paul's Churchyard — a strange place for a military exe
cution ; but not so strange when compared with the uses to which the
grand old Gothic cathedral was now applied. It had become a stable
for cavalry. " It was a bitter taunt for the Italian who passing by
Paul's Church, and seeing it full of horses, ' Now I perceive,' said
he, 'that in England men and beasts serve God alike.' " * The
same amusing letter-writer says, " The air of this city is not sweet,
specially in the heart of the city, in and about Paul's Church, where
horse-dung is a yard deep." So amidst this filth was trooper
Lockyer shot — and in a week after the tragedy of the 27th of April,
thousands of people are following his corpse to the grave — a corpse
" adorned with bunches of rosemary, one half-stained in blood " —
thousands of men and women, rank and file, with sea-green and
black ribbons on their hats and on their breasts. Something there
is very serious in this, not only to the Commonwealth, but to any
stable order of society. Lilburne, not under much restraint in
the Tower, sends out another pamphlet full of crude notions of
what the people were to do to establish a perfect government upon
Bible principles, under which all men were to gather unheard-of
happiness. A review takes place in Hyde Park, where some of the
men wear the sea-green ribbon, the symbol of disaffection; but
Cromwell frightens or pacifies them. Lilburne is now committed
to close confinement. But there are portions of the army in distant
quarters, and at Banbury two hundred men are in revolt ; at Salis
bury a thousand. Fairfax and Cromwell march with all haste to
* Howell, vol. iii. Letter xix.
Vol. III.— 38
594 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Salisbury. The mutineers have hurried away to join their com
panions in Oxfordshire. Fairfax and Cromwell are rapidly on
their track ; having marched fifty miles in one day. The mutineers
halt at Burford. It is midnight when Cromwell comes suddenly
upon their quarters. A few shots are fired; but there is no escape
for these men, who are without a head to guide them. There is no
slaughter ; but the principle of military obedience is sustained, now
and henceforward, by justice mingled with mercy. A Court-Mar-
tial has been held ; and ten out of every hundred of the mutineers
have been set aside for death. They are placed on the leads of the
church, whilst a cornet and two corporals are shot. They are
awaiting their own fate, when Cromwell calls them before him in
the church. He speaks to them in one of his peculiar harangues,
apparently so involved, but always keeping the main point in view.
The men weep. They are pardoned. In a few weeks they are on
tieir way to serve in Ireland. " Levelling, in the practical civil or
military provinces of English things, is forbidden to be.' * Crom
well had said to the Council of State, "You must make an end of
this party or it will make an end of you." He accomplished the
work with a moderation that shows that severity is not more
powerful than mercy, in the generality of cases. The nation felt
that it had escaped a great danger. There was a solemn thanks
giving-day ; the House of Commons was invited to a civic feast ;
and Fairfax and Cromwell were presented with services of platg by
the Corporation of London. The terror of anarchical disturbances
had almost wholly passed away. The Council of State laboured to
reconcile differences ; to render the administration of the law more
speedy and certain ; to remove the impediments to a free exercise
of religious observances amongst various denominations of Protes
tants. Evelyn heard the Commons Prayer read in St. Peter's
church at Paul's wharf, and listened to a sermon from archbishop
Usher, in Lincoln's Inn chapel. But still there was danger to be
apprehended in the intrigues of the more restless of the Cavaliers
with the remnant of the Levellers ; and unnatural as was such an
alliance, one of those wrote to Lord Cottington, who was with
Charles in France, "his majesty's friends have no possibility of
embodying, unless the Levellers lead the way." Their hopes
rested upon Lilburne, who was again busy with his pamphlets.
Conciliation was tried in vain with this man, who possessed none
of the qualifications for a popular leader but those of reckless
* Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 29.
TRIAL OF LILBURNE. 595
vanity and indomitable courage. The Parliament at length re
solved to send him to trial. He was to be tried by a common
Jury, though a Commission of members of parliament was appointed
to determine his sentence. That office was spared them by his ac
quittal. Towards the close of the second day's proceedings at
Guildhall, Lilburne, who had defended himself with great spirit,
suddenly addressed the jury with these solemn words : " You are
my sole judges, the keepers of my life, at whose hands the Lord
will require my blood. And therefore I desire you to know your
power, and consider your duty, both to God, to me, to your own
selves, and to your country ; and the gracious assisting spirit and
presence of the Lord God Omnipotent, the governor pf heaven and
earth, and all things therein contained, go along with you, give
counsel and direct you to do that which is just, and for his
glory." And then all the spectators cried out " Amen ! Amen!"
The Chief Justice charged the Jury, amidst the dread of a popular
disturbance. After three quarters of an hour the verdict was that
John Lilburne was not guilty of all the treasons, or of any of the
treasons charged upon him. A shout went up from all the people
as the shout of one voice ; bonfires were lighted throughout the
City ; and after a vain attempt to hold him in custody Freeborn
John was set free. This event took place in October. It is satis
factory to contrast the independence of a jury at this revolutionary
period, with the servile compliance to the behests of the power by
juries in the Tudor and Stuart times. Amidst the manifold evils of
the Civil War, the people had learned to know the foundations of
their liberties; and in the 'case of Lilburne and his Levellers,
jurors were not carried away by a panic about property to yield to
the desire of the government without a just sense of their own re
sponsibility. Though in succeeding days of corrupt rulers juries
were again the worst instruments of tyranny, the verdict of twelve
men was to become the ultimate safeguard for an honest judgment
in times of political excitement, when ministers have been as dis
posed to stretch the laws as subjects have been inclined to regard
even their wholesome administration with jealousy and impatience.
Six months have elapsed since the death of Charles I. Charles
II. is an exile at St. Germain's. He has Hyde and other ex
perienced counsellors about him ; and he has also more agreeable
associates in adversity — frivolous and profligate courtiers who en
courage his indolence and sensuality. English royalists resort to
him, and to the queen dowager, who consoled herself in the society
596 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of lord Jermyn for the loss of her husband and her great station.
The course of life of mother and son was regarded with com
placency even by royalists of sober conduct. The staid Mr.
Evelyn, on the 19th of August, "went to St. Germain's to kiss his
majesty's hand : in the coach, which was my lord Wilmot's, went
Mrs. Barlow, the king's mistress and mother to the duke of
Monmouth, a brown, beautiful, bold, but insipid creature." The
next day he went to Paris, "to salute the French king and the
queen dowager." The French king was Louis XIV., then a boy of
about eleven years old ; and at that time there was a brief suspen
sion to the civil war of La Fronde. Though the Stuarts had an asy
lum at the French court there was no substantial aid to be expected
in that quarter. Previous to his residence at St. Germain's
Charles had been at the Hague, under the protection of his bro
ther-in-law, the prince of Orange. He had been proclaimed king
of Scotland, at Edinburgh, on the 5th of February, and Commis
sioners had come to him from the Scottish parliament to invite his
return to his kingdom. They did not offer him an unconditional
invitation. He was to proceed to Scotland, without Montrose and
those other friends who were obnoxious to the Presbyterians ; and
he was to agree to the Covenant of 1638. He was urged by the
sounder Scotsmen about him to accept the terms. He was coun
selled by Montrose to win his dominions by the sword. The great
leader of the Scottish ultra-royalists was consistent. His one idea
was to revenge the death of Charles I. : —
" I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds.
And write thine epitaph in blood and wounds."
So wrote Montrose when he heard of the execution of his master,
and so he continued to believe was his own destiny in connexion
with the son. The followers of Montrose carried out his feverish
notions of loyalty by an act which can only find its defence in
political fanaticism. On the 3d of May, whilst the Scottish com
missioners were at the Hague, Dr. Isaac Dorislaus, a native of
Holland, who had assisted as counsel at the trial of Charles I., and
who had been sent by the parliament as one of the embassy to the
United Provinces, was murdered in his inn, by six men in masks.
They were Scotsmen, of the party of Montrose. This event was
not calculated to smooth the difficulties of Charles's position with
the Presbyterian Commissioners ; and he dismissed them, with a
negative upon their proposals. At this period, he was also es-
IRELAND. — CROMWELL LORD LIEUTENANT. 597
penally urged by the marquis of Ormond to show himself in Ire
land, where three-fourths of the nation were his faithful adherents.
It is not easy to describe the state of parties in Ireland at this
time. The majority of the people and their leaders were violent
Papists — those with whom Charles I. had so often and so fatally in
trigued to punish his rebellious subjects and establish the Anglican
church. The Protestant portion of the population, English or
Irish, lived in dread and hatred of those who had perpetrated the
frightful massacre of 1641 ; and they, in common with some of the
more moderate Catholics, had no disposition to welcome the king
for whom the large body of the Papists had declared. Ormond
rallied under his banner any leader who was a royalist, and who
would join the strange confederacy of Episcopalians, Presbyterians,
Catholics of the Pale, Catholics of wild regions beyond the Pale —
some for freedom of religion, — most for exterminating all creeds
but their own. Ormond had concluded a special treaty with the
Irish Catholics, on the part of Charles II., by which they agreed to
maintain a large army to serve against the Commonwealth of Eng
land, on condition that the free exercise of the Catholic worship
should be permitted. Ireland appeared thus on the point of being
separated from English control ; ready to take a prominent part
in another English Civil War. The king had been proclaimed.
Dublin, Belfast, and Londonderry were the only garrisons held
by English commanders ; and prince Rupert was in St. George's
Channel with a formidable fleet. At this juncture it was deter
mined that Cromwell should proceed to Ireland with full military
and administrative powers — General-in-chief and Lord Lieutenant.
It was the 10th of July when Cromwell left London, "in that
state and equipage as the like hath hardly been seen," said the
newspapers. He proceeded to Bristol ; and there he remained
several weeks. Whether he lingered there to watch the course of
events in London, or to make the requisite preparations for a diffi
cult enterprise, is not very clear. Before he left London, one oi
the French ministers wrote to Cardinal Mazarin, " It can hardly
be possible that Cromwell, who, according to the belief of many,
carries his ideas beyond even the suggestions of the most undis
ciplined ambition, can resolve to abandon this kingdom to the
mercy of the plots which may be formed in his absence, and which
his presence can prevent from being so much as undertaken."*
* Letter of June 14th. 1649, " Archives des Affaires Etrangeres de France," quoted
by M. Guizot, iu " History of Cromwell," vol. i. p. 88.
J98 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Cromwell by the end of July had gone towards Milford-Haven ;
and he embarked on the 13th of August. Meanwhile the news
had reached him of a great victory obtained over the forces of the
marquis of Ormond, who was besieging Dublin. Before the end
of July a portion of Cromwell's army had landed ; and thus re
inforced, Lieutenant-General Jones, the governor of Dublin, had
sallied forth and utterly routed the besiegers at the village of
Rathmines. Cromwell himself arrived in Dublin on the 15th of
August. He was received, say the contemporary narratives, with
the firing of guns and the acclamations of the people. The multi
tude that gathered about him was very great. They were anxious
to see one '' whom before they had heard so much of." He spoke
to the crowd, "in an humble posture, having his hat in his hand,"
telling them "that as God had brought him thither in safety, so he
doubted not but, by his divine Providence, to restore them all to
their just liberties and properties ; " promising the favour and
gratitude of the Parliament of England to " all those whose hearts'
affections were real for the carrying on of the great .work against
the barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish, and their adherents and con
federates ; for the propagating of the Gospel of Christ, the estab
lishing of truth and peace, and restoring that bleeding nation to
its former happiness and tranquillity." "Answer was returned by
many hundreds that they would live and die with him."*
It is clear from this speech that Cromwell was preparing for
some terrible work ; and it is also manifest that the Protestant
people of Dublin were well disposed to second his endeavours
against " the barbarous and blood-thirsty Irish." It was in the
minds of many that the time was come to avenge the massacre
which had desolated so many homes. But the Lord Lieutenant
contemplated no general waste and destruction ; and he issued a
proclamation requiring all officers and soldiers, at their utmost
perils, " not to do any wrong or violence towards country people,
or persons whatsoever, unless they be actually in arms or office
with the enemy." The farmers and others were invited to come to
the camp and sell their commodities for ready money. Neverthe
less the Lord Lieutenant went forth to fight in a sterner mood than
he ever showed in the English Civil Wars. He went to try his
strength, not only against the hordes of half-savage men who,
during the whole course of the war between the king and the par
liament, had been burning and plundering and murdering, with
• " Perfect Politician," p. 53, ed. of 1680 (originally printed in 1660).
DROGHEDA. 599
slight regard to any common principle of actiori ; but he went to do
battle wherever, under the banner of the royalists, were gathered
Catholics, English or Irish — Protestants, English, Scotch, or Irish,
¦ — captains who had fought at Naseby, or wild chieftains who came
from their woods to exercise all the cruelties of partisan warfare.
Ireland was in such a condition that the coming of this man in his
wrath was eventually a real blessing. To follow this Irish war
through its terrible details would be as wearisome as repulsive.
But it has a strange interest, as recorded in the letters of the chief
instrument in events which were decisive as to the future destiny
of that kingdom, so long unhappy, so capable of happiness.
Tredah, now called Drogheda, in Leinster, was garrisoned by
three thousand men under the command of sir Arthur Ashton, an
old English royalist, who had lost a leg; and whose troops were
chiefly English. Cromwell setting down before the place, sum?
moned the governor to surrender. The governor refused. In a
similar summons sent afterwards to the commander in Dundalk,
Cromwell writes, " I offered mercyto the garrison at Tredah, in
sending the governor a summons before I attempted the taking of
it ; which being refused brought their evil upon them. If you,
being warned thereby, shall surrender your garrison to the use of
the Parliament of England, which by this I summon you to do, you
may prevent effusion of blood. If, upon refusing this offer, that
which you like not befalls you, you will know whom to blame." * We
give this brief threat before we recount " their evil " at Drogheda,
to show that the horrible " effusion of blood " there was not the effect
of any sudden impulse. On the 10th of September, then, surrender
having been refused, the place was stormed, after bombardment.
The first attacking party were driven back. The second, headed by
Cromwell himself, carried all the intrenchments. "Being'thus
entered,"^ writes the General to the President of the Council of
State, " we refused them quarter, having, the day before, summoned
the town. I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the
defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped
with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody for the Bar-
badoes." He then relates that Trim and Dundalk have surren
dered; and adds, with reference to the slaughter of Drogheda,
where only one officer escaped, " The enemy upon this were filled
with much terror. And truly I believe this bitterness will save
much effusion of blood, through the goodness of God." We look
* Carlyle,- (from an Autograph,) vol. ii. p. 48.
''OO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
with horror upon such wholesale butchery ; and yet its perpetrator
was in his nature the very opposite of cruel. He feels that some
defence is necessary for such severities ; and in a more detailed
despatch to the Speaker, he repeats his belief " that it will tend to
prevent the effusion of blood for the future ; which are the satis
factory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work
remorse and regret." We must follow this resolute man to Wex
ford. There again was a terrible slaughter; but it was not set
about with a deliberate purpose. It was such a slaughter as has
too often been the result of a storm by an infuriated soldiery.
There had been negotiations for the surrender of the castle and
town, upon merciful and honourable conditions, going on from the
3rd to the nth of October. The castle was surrendered; but the
town being supposed to hold out, and armed men advancing towards
the castle, the troops of Cromwell stormed it; and "when they
were come into the market-place, the enemy making a stiff resist
ance, our forces brake them ; and then put all to the sword that
came in their way." Cromwell then adds,to this account, " it hath
not, without cause, been deeply set upon our hearts, that, we in
tending better to this place than so great a ruin, hoping the town
might be of more use to you and your army, yet God would not
have it so ; but by an unexpected providence, in his righteous
justice, brought a just judgment upon them ; causing them to
become a prey to the soldier, who in their piracies had made prey
of so many families, and now with their bloods to answer the
cruelties which they had exercised upon the lives of divers poor
Protestants." This confidence that an accidental and unnecessary
slaughter was a divine judgment, is consistent with the whole char
acter of Cromwell's mind. He did not express such opinions with
out a_strong conviction. The slaughter at Drogheda, set about
with a stern determination to make such a beginning of the war as
should shortly bring it to an end, was perfectly comprehensible by
Cromwell's contemporaries. Ludlow, no friend of Cromwell, re
marks of this "extraordinary severity," that he presumes "it was
used to discourage others from making opposition."* Another
writer of the time says, "Yet cruelty could not be laid to his
charge, for, like a politic state-physician, he here opens one vein,
to preserve the whole body of the nation from a lingering war;
and by this course likewise he wrought such a terror in the enemy,
that ever after he made but short work of any siege, and in small
* '* Memoirs," vol. i. p. 303.
RUPERT DRIVEN FROM THE COAST. 6oi
fime reduced the whole nation."* The Jacobite historian of the
next age denounces "the execrable policy of that Regicide, which
had the effect he proposed." An enlightened and truly pious
minister of our own day writes of this Irish campaign, " For nine
years a most insane war has been raging. Cromwell, by merciful
severity, concludes it in nine months."! The view which dispas
sionate persons take of these events will always be a mixed one.
They will regard them somewhat, but not altogether, in the spirit
of M. Guizot, when he says, " It is the ordinary artifice of bad
passions to impute the cruel satisfaction with which they glut them
selves, either to some great idea whose accomplishment they are
earnestly pursuing, or to the absolute necessity of success ; " and
they will feel with this writer, whose philosophy is so connected
with a vast experience, that " human fanaticism also lies, or allows
itself to be deluded by pride, when it pretends to be the executor
of the high decrees of Divine justice." But, whilst they remem
ber many incidents of later times in which " bad passions "' and
"human fanaticism" have perpetrated cruelties and injustice, they
will not, without due examination of the character of Cromwell,
agree with M. Guizot, that "he was determined to succeed rapidly,
and at any cost, from the necessities of his fortune, far more than
for the advancement of his cause ; " or admit that " he denied no
outlet to the passions of those who served him." M. Guizot, well
read as he is in English history, is pointing these remarks nearer
home — a mode of expressing political opinions which may be safe
in its immediate purposes, but not altogether consistent with his
torical impartiality.
Charles II. was at St. Germain's when he received the news of
Ormond's defeat before Dublin. In the heroic vein, which little
suited his nature, he exclaimed, "Then must I go there to die."
He went as far as Jersey, where the news of the fall of Drogheda
reached him. It produced the same effect upon his spirits as upon
the courtiers he had left at St. Germain's. In Evelyn's Diary of
the 15th of October we have this entry: "Came news of Drogh
eda being taken by the rebels, and all put to the sword ; which
made us very sad, fore-running the loss of all Ireland." Cromwell
marched on, taking town after town, until he met with a stout
resistance at Waterford ; and the weather being very tempestuous
* " Perfect Politician," p. 56.
t " Lectures on Great Men," by the late Frederick Myers, M.A. p. 259.
X " History of Cromwell," vol/ i. p. 98.
602 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
he went into winter-quarters. But his rapid marches from fortress
to fortress have changed the whole aspect of affairs. General
Blake has interrupted the operations of prince Rupert in the Irish
seas. Cork Harbour is now the victualling-place for the fleet,
instead of Milford Haven. Rupert, with the ships which he has
commanded since the revolt of the sailors in 1648, has taken refuge
in Kinsale, instead of making rich prizes of English merchantmen.
Lady Fanshawe, who at this time was at Cork, writes that Crom
well "so hotly marched over Ireland, that the fleet with prince
Rupert was forced to set sail." This was an indirect consequence,
in a little time after, of Cromwell's hot marches. A more imme
diate consequence was the submission of Youghal and of Cork to
the authority of the Parliament. There is a passage in the Memoirs
of Lady Fanshawe, which presents a vivid picture of the mode in
which such warlike operatious affect individuals; an interesting
episode amidst graver matters of wars and bitter hatreds. The poor
lady had been residing at Red Abbey, in Cork, for six months with
her husband, who was waiting " his majesty's commands how to dis
pose himself." Sir Richard Fanshawe had gone for a day to Kinsale.
His wife, by the fall of a stumbling horse, had broken her left
wrist ; which was ill set, and put her to great pain. She was in
bed on a night early in November : " At midnight I heard the great
guns go off, and thereupon I called up my family to rise, which I
did as well as I could in that condition. Hearing lamentable
shrieks of men, women, and children, I asked at a window the
cause ; they told me they were all Irish, stripped and wounded, and
turned out of the town, and that colonel Jefferies, with some others,
had possessed themselves of the town for Cromwell. Upon this,
I immediately wrote a letter to my husband, blessing God's provi
dence that he was not there with me, persuading him to patience
and hope that I should get safely out of the town, by God's assist
ance, and desired him to shift for himself, for fear of a surprise,
with promise that I would secure his papers. So soon as I had
finished my letter, I sent it by a faithful servant, who was let down
the garden wall of Red Abbey, and, sheltered by the darkness of
the night, he made his escape. I immediately packed up my hus
band's cabinet, with all his writings, and nearly ^1000 in gold and
silver, and all other things both of clothes, linen, and household
stuff that were portable, of value ; and, then, about three o'clock in
the morning, by the light of a taper, and in that pain I was in, I
went into the market-place, with only a man and maid, and passing
SURRENDER OF CORK. 603
through an unruly tumult with their swords in their hands, searched
for their chief commander Jefferies, who, whilst he was loyal, had
received many civilities from your father. * I told him it was ne
cessary that upon that change I should remove, and I desired his
pass that would be obeyed, or else I must remain there : I hoped
he would not deny me that kindness. He instantly wrote me a pass,
both for myself, family, and goods, and said he would never forget.
the respect he owed your father. With this I came through thou
sands of naked swords to Red Abbey, and hired the next neigh
bour's cart, which carried all that I could remove ; and myself,
sister, and little girl Nan, with three maids and two men, set forth
at five o'clock in November, having but two horses amongst us all,
which we rid on by turns. In this sad condition I left Red Abbey,
with as many goods as were worth 2^100 which could not be re
moved, and so were plundered. We went ten miles to Kinsale, in
perpetual fear of being fetched back again ; but; by little and little,
I thank God, we got safe to the garrison, where I found your father
the most disconsolate man in the world, for fear of his family,
which he had no possibility to assist : but his joy exceeded to see
me and his darling daughter, and to hear the wonderful escape we,
through the assistance of God, had made. But when the rebels
went to give an account to Cromwell of their meritorious act, he im
mediately asked them where Mr. Fanshawe was. They replied,
he was that dav gone to Kinsale. Then he demanded where his
papers and his family were ? At which they all stared at one an
other, but made no reply. Their General said, ' It was as much
worth to have seized his papers as the town ; for I did make ac
count to have known by them what these parts of the country are
worth.' '' •
The policy of Cromwell in Ireland was all throughout most in
telligible and consistent ; and we are not to conclude from the
course of events during two centuries that it was not a wise policy.
He wrote to the Parliament, " I hope, before long, to see Ire
land no burden to England, but a profitable part of the Common
wealth." He sought to make it profitable by freeing it, in the first
place, from ecclesiastical tyranny, and thus fitting it for civil free
dom. In a most remarkable Declaration, which he composed in
his winter-quarters, " in answer to certain late Declarations and
Acts, framed by the Irish Popish prelates and clergy in a Conven-
^ tick at Clonmacnoise," he makes a furious onslaught upon the prin-
* Lady Fanshawe addressed her Memoir to her only son.
604 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ciple which, he says, begins to be exploded, " that people are for
kings and churches, and saints are for the pope or churchmen." He
goes on in this impassioned strain : " How dare you assume to call
these men your flocks, whom you have plunged into so horrid a rebel
lion, by which you have made them and the country almost a ruinous
heap ? And whom you have fleeced, and polled, and peeled hitherto,
and make it your business to do so still. You cannot feed them.
You poison them with your false, abominable, and anti-christian
doctrines and practices. You keep the word of God from them ;
and instead thereof give them your senseless orders and traditions."
He tells them, when they allege against him, as a design to extir
pate the catholic religion, his letter to the governor of Ross, — in
which he says, " If by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to
exercise the Mass, that will not be allowed of," — that by the rebel
lion of 1 641 alone did they recover the public exercise ofthe Mass,
which had not been heard of for eighty years. He will not have the
Mass ; but " as for the people, what thoughts they have in matters
of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach ; but shall think it
my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in
the least to suffer for the same ; and shall endeavour to walk pa
tiently, and in love towards them, to see if at any time it shall please
God to give them another or a better mind." This is, indeed, a very
limited toleration ; but we must acknowledge that in those times it
was the onlv practical toleration. He would not relax the old penal
laws against one form of worship ; but he would not apply new
penal laws to force men into another form of worship against their
consciences. The priest accused him of massacre, destruction, and
banishment. He replies, " Give us an instance of one man since
my coming into Ireland, not inarms, massacred, destroyed; or ban
ished ; concerning the massacre or the destruction of whom justice
has not been done, or endeavoured to be done." He rises into ab
solute eloquence when he sets forth the motives which have brought
him and his army to Ireland: "We are come to ask an account
of the innocent blood that hath been shed ; and to endeavour to
bring to an account, — by the blessing and presence of the Almighty,
in whom alone is our hope and strength, — all who, by appearing in
arms, seek to justify the same. We come to break the power of a
company of lawless rebels, who having cast off the Authority of
England, live as enemies to Human -Society ; whose~principles, the
world hath experience, are, to destroy and subjugate all men not
complying with them. We come, by the assistance of God, to hold
CROMWELL RETURNS TO LONDON. 605.
forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English Liberty in a
Nation where we have an undoubted right to do it ; — wherein the
People of Ireland (if they listen not to such seducers as you are)
may equally participate in all benefits ; to use their liberty and for
tune equally with Englishmen, if they keep out of arms." *
Cromwell did not seek an)' long repose from his military labours.
On the 15th of February, 1650, he writes to the Speaker, "having
refreshed our men for some short time in our winter-quarters, and
health being pretty well recovered, we thought fit to take the field."
The House send the Lord-Lieutenant their thanks for all he had
done ; and resolve that he " have the use of the Lodgings called
the Cockpit, of the Spring Garden and St. James's House, and the
command of St. James's Park." His return to London was de
sired ; but he had work to do, and rather turned a deaf ear to the
wishes of the Parliament. It is not necessary that we should fol
low his course of success during the spring of 1650. His boldest
and most sagacious stroke of policy was that of proclaiming
throughout the country that the men who had been in arms, and
were now scattered and utterly destitute, had full liberty to serve
abroad. The ministers in London of France and Spain availed
themselves of this permission, and forty-five thousand men of Ire
land were levied for the service of these powers. Clarendon
speaks with bitterness of hfart of this wise expedient for freeing
the land from those who would have been the principal hindrance
to its quiet settlement. The king's lieutenant, he says, could not,
after all the promises and contracts of the confederate Roman
Catholics, draw together a body of five thousand men ; whilst
" Cromwell himself found a way to send above forty thousand men
out of that country for service of foreign princes ; which might
have been enough to have driven him from thence, and to have
restored it to the king's entire obedience." Cromwell left Ireton
as Deputy to complete the work which he had begun, and he ar
rived himself in London on the 31st of May, ready for other ser
vices to the Commonwealth.
* This document, which Mr. Carlyle terms " one of the remarkablest State Papers
ever published in Ireland since Strongbow, or even St. Patrick appeared there," occupies
sixteen pages of tbe Cromwell Letters, p. 103 to 119, vol. ii.
606 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXXII.
Charles II. negotiates with the Scottish Parliament. —His commission to Montrose.—
Montrose in Scotland.— Execution of Montrose.— Charles goes to Scotland.— War
with Scotland — Cromwell General.— Cromwell's Advance.— His Danger.— Position
of the two Armies at Dunbar. — Battle of Dunbar. — Charles crowned at Scone. —
Perth taken by Cromwell.— Charles and the Scotch Army in England.— The Battle
of Worcester.— Escape and Adventures of Charles.— Charles returns to France.—
Note.— Whitelocke's Description of Cromwell's Army, in a Conversation with
Christina, queen of Sweden.
Charles II., essentially different in character from his father,
had inherited that quality of his family which mainly led to the
tragedies of Fotheringay and Whitehall. He was a double-dealer.
When the affairs of Ireland became hopeless, he listened to the
proposals of the Parliament of Scotland. He received an envoy
from the Presbyterian authorities while at Jersey ; and appointed
them to meet him at Breda to conclude a treaty for his reception
in Scotland. He was urged by his warmest friends to close with
their offers, although there was no relaxation of the terms upon
which the support of the great religious party, speaking the voice
of the Scottish nation, was offered to him. Whilst he was thus
negotiating with the Parliament, he gave Montrose a commission
to levy troops in foreign countries, and wage war against the
powers with whom he was bargaining. He wrote to the mortal
enemy of the Covenanters, " I entreat you to go on vigorously, and
with your wonted courage and care, in the prosecution of those
trusts I have committed to you ; and not to be startled with any re
ports you may hear, as if I were otherwise inclined to the Presby
terians than when I left you. I assure you I am upon the same
principles I was, and depend as much as ever upon your undertak
ing and endeavours for my service." Urged thus, and by his own
passionate loyalty, the exile of Philiphaugh was indefatigable in
gathering followers, though with no great success. In the autumn
of 1649 he had collected about twelve hundred men at Hamburg
and Gottenburg, and he dispatched a portion of them, who perish
ed at sea. A second body arrived safely at Kirkwall. With five
MONTROSE IN SCOTLAND. 607
hundred more, Montrose himself landed in the Orkney^ early in
March, 1650. He then crossed to the northern extremity of the
main land ; and, says Clarendon, " quickly possessed himself of an
old castle ; which, in respect of the situation in a country so impos
sible for an army to march in, he thought strong enough for his
purpose: thither he conveyed the arms, ammunition, and trcops
which he had brought with Mm." Caithness, in which district he
landed, has numerous ruins of old castles — grim monuments of
days of cruel feuds and- lawless rapine. Here Montrose was ccme
with his threatening banners — one of the two royal ones exhibiting
the bleeding head of Charles I., with the motto, "Judge and re
venge my cause, O Lord ; " and his own banner painted with a
naked arm and a sword dripping with gore. Onward he marched
into Sutherland. Few adherents joined him. The natives fled from
him as from a public enemy, of whose military excesses the Scots
had received terrible lessons. Some cavalry, under the command
of colonel Strachan, were proceeding against Montrose, in advance
of a main body of troops under David Lesley ; and they came sud
denly upon him near a pass in the parish of Kincardine. The
place is now called Craigchonichen, or the Rock of Lamentation.
Here Montrose's last battle was soon ended. His Orkney re
cruits quickly ran ; his Germans and his Scottish companions
fought valiantly, but without effect. The ill-compacted force was
wholly broken ; and he himself fled from the field, throwing away
his ribbon and George, and changing clothes with a peasant.
Wandering amongst the Highlands for many days, he was at last
taken on the 3rd of May.
Clarendon's narrative of the last enterprise of Montrose and its
fatal termination is regarded as one of the finest passages of his
history. It should be read as a whole * to do justice to its merits
as a composition. The facts which it relates, compared with other
relations, lie in a short compass. After his capture, Montrose and
the other Scottish prisoners were delivered to David Lesley ; the
foreigners were set at liberty. There was a ferocious exultation
over the fall of the capital enemy of the Covenanters, which showed
itself in such acts of meanness as carrying him frbm town to town
in the unseemly garb with which he was disguised, and thus ex
posing him to the jeers of the populace. An Act of Attainder had
been passed by the Parliament against Montrose in IL144; and
upon that Act he was now sentenced to death, before he reached
* " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 408, to 422.
608 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Edinburgh. When he arrived at the Watergate of the city he was
delivered to the magistrates, and was conveyed to the Tolbooth,
bound with cords, in an open cart, the common hangman riding
before the cart, and wearing the livery of the fallen marquis.
Thirty-four of his officers, tied together, formed part of the caval
cade. The great object of popular curiosity sat serene amidst his
indignities ; and his proud composure moved pity in the beholders,
instead of the demonstrations of hate which were anticipated.
Argyle looked ./upon his illustrious enemy from a window in the
house of the eafl of Mcray,* From the first scene of this tragedy
to the last, Montrose acted his heroic part to perfection. His de
meanour was somewhat more theatrical than the mode in which
the highest species of heroism would care to exhibit itself; but it
was well calculated to dazzle those who are most taken with the
showy virtues. When he alighted from the cart, he gave the
hangman a reward " for driving his triumphal chariot so well."
When he was brought, two days after, before the Parliament, he
was splendidly dressed ; and looked around him with an air of
studied haughtiness and contempt. The Chancellor Loudon spoke
bitterly to him — "he had committed many horrible murders, trea
sons, and impieties, for all which he was now brought to suffer
condign punishment." When permitted to speak, Montrose said
that " since the king had honoured them so far as to treat with
them, he had appeared before them with reverence and bare
headed, which otherwise he would not willingly have done. He
had done nothing of which he was ashamed, or had cause to
repent." He had withdrawn himself from the first ¦ Covenant,
when he saw that it was intended to take away the king's just
power and lawful authority. He had never taken the second Cov
enant. He defended himself from the charge of cruelty ; and
maintaining that having again entered the kingdom by his majesty's
command, he advised them to consider well of the consequence
before they proceeded against him. His- sentence was then pro
nounced : — that on the morrow, the 21st of May, he should be
hanged on a gallows thirty feet high; that his head should then be
cut off and ^et on Edinburgh Tolbooth ; and that his legs and arms
should be hung up in other towns of the kingdom. After he was
conveyed back to prison he was beset by ministers and magis
trates ; who only stirred his spirit to its loftiest mood. He told
them that he had rather his head were stuck upon the "Tolbooth
* Guizot : upon the authority of a letter of the French agent to Mazarin-
Montrose in Edinburgh. — Vol. iii. 608.
EXECUTION OF MONTROSE. 609
than that his picture should be hung in the king's bedchamber ;
that it troubled him not that his limbs should be exposed in other
towns ; " and that he heartily wished that he had flesh enough to
be sent to every city in Christendom, as a testimony of the cause
for which he suffered." In the same spirit he went to the scaffold.
When the hangman, by way of adding to his indignities, hung about
his neck the narrative of his military exploits, "the marquis smiled
at this new instance of their malice, and thanked them for it, and
said he was prouder of wearing it than ever he had been of the
Garter." Clarendon's character of the great chieftain is .not an
unmixed eulogium : " He was a gentleman of a very ancient ex
traction, many of whose ancestors had exercised the highest
charges under the king in that kingdom, and had been allied to the
crown itself. He was of very good parts, which were improved by
a good education : he had always a great emulation, or rather a
great contempt, of the Marquis of Argyle (as he was too apt to
contemn those he did not love), who wanted nothing but honesty
and courage to be a very extraordinary man, having all other good
talents in a very great degree. Montrose was in his nature fear
less of danger, and never declined any enterprise for the difficulty
of going through with it, but exceedingly affected those which
seemed desperate to other men, and did believe somewhat to be in
himself above other men, which made him live more easily towards
those who were, or were willing to be, inferior to him (towards
whom he exercised wonderful civility and generosity), than with his
superiors or equals. He was naturally jealous, and suspected
those who did not concur with him, in any way, not to mean so well
as he. He was not without vanity, but his virtues were much su
perior, and he well deserved to have his memory preserved, and
celebrated amongst the most illustrious persons of the age in which
he lived." Charles came to a conclusion with the Scottish commissioners
at Breda before the death of Montrose, although he was acquaint-
'ed with the failure of his rash expedition. He consented to every
proposition. He was to swear to be faithful to the Covenant; he
was to submit himself to the advice of the Parliament and the
Church ; he was never to permit the exercise of the Catholic relig
ion in any part of his dominions. He even denied that he had
authorised the enterprise of Montrose. When he heard of his
friend's execution, he manifested a disposition to draw back ; but
his courtiers " persuaded the king, who was enough afflicted with
Vol. III.— 39
6lO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the news, and all the circumstances of it, that he might sooner
take revenge upon that people by a temporary complying with them
and going to them." Upon this righteous principle " his majesty
pursued his former resolution of embarking for Scotland." This
is Clarendon's account ; who makes no remark in his History upon
this miserable policy. But he says, in a private letter to secretary
Nicolas, "If the king puts himself into the hands of the Scots,
they cannot justly be accused of deceiving him ; for, on my con
science, they will not use him worse than they promise, if he does
all they require him to do in this last address. I wish, with all my
heart, they who advise the king to comply, and join with them,
would deal as clearly, and say that the king should now take the
Covenant, and enjoin it to others, and all observe it ; but to say he
should put himself into their hands, and hope to be excused tak
ing it, and be able to defend others from submitting to it, — or that
he and we should take it and break it afterwards, — is such folly
and atheism that we should be ashamed to avow or think it."
Such was the political morality by which Charles was guided when
he was twenty years old — a season of life in which deliberate un
truth and purposed treachery are rarely the governing principles of
actions. We have little sympathy for him in his humiliations and
adversities among the Scots. We rejoice to know that, before he
had landed in Scotland on the 16th of June, he was compelled to
sign the Covenant ; that few of his English friends were permitted
to be about him ; and that if he were still free to listen to the
ribaldry of Buckingham and Wilmot, he had to do daily penance
in being compelled to attend the long prayers and longer sermons
of the clergy who were placed about him. Charles probably cared
little for these restraints; for he had a good table, horses to ride,
and the outward shows that belong to a king; but it has been sen
sibly conjectured that the gloomy austerity of these preachers
"strengthened that indifference to religion and that proneness to
dissipation by which his whole life was unhappily distinguished."*
Cromwell had arrived in London on the 31st of May. He was
received with every honour that Parliament and City could bestow ;
and by the enthusiastic acclamations of the people. He did not
despise popular applause : but he knew something of its intrinsic
value. To the remark, " What a crowd come to see your lord
ship's triumph," he replied, " If it were to see me hanged how
many more would there be ! " He was soon called to other sen-
* Cook, " History of the Church of Scotland," quoted by Sir Walter Scott.
WAR WITH SCOTLAND. — CROMWELL GENERAL. 6 II
ous work. The Parliament had been preparing forces for a war
with Scotland, having no great hope of repose in the presence there
of a covenanted king. The Scots are also making some prepara
tion for ^ war with England, the ministers of the Commonwealth
not having taken in good part their remonstrance as to the course
of civil and religious policy, and their negotiations with Charles.
It is a question which shall strike the first blow. Fairfax was un
willing to invade the Scots ; although, says Ludlow, " we laboured
to persuade him of the reasonableness and justice of our resolu
tion to march into Scotland, they having already declared them
selves our enemies, and by public protestation bound themselves
to impose that government upon us which we had found necessary
to abolish." * Cromwell pressed that Fairfax, notwithstanding his
resolution, should be continued as General of the Army, " profess
ing for himself that he would rather choose to serve under him in
his post than to command the greatest army in Europe." A Com
mittee, upon Cromwell's motion, was appointed to confer with the
General ; and Ludlow adds that the Lieutenant-General "acted his
part so to the life that I really thought he was in earnest." Ulti
mately Fairfax resigned his commission, receiving a large pension,
and Cromwell was called to the great office. " I really thought he
was in earnest," says Ludlow. There is another version from one
who took a part in these events : " To speak the truth of Cromwell,
whereas many said he undermined Fairfax, it was false ; for in Col
onel Hutchinson's presence, he most effectually importuned him to
keep his commission, lest it should discourage the army and the peo
ple in that juncture of time, but could by no means prevail, although
he laboured it almost all the night with most earnest endeavours.-
But this great man was then as unmoveable by his friends as pertina
cious in obeying his wife ; whereby he then died to all his former
glory, and became the monument of his own name, which every
day wore out." f And so Cromwell set forth to lead an army into
Scotland ; declaring in a private conversation with Ludlow, " that
he looked upon the design of the Lord on this day to be the free
ing of his people from every burden, and that he was now accom
plishing what was prophesied in the i loth Psalm; from the con
sideration of which he was often encouraged to attend the effect
ing those ends."- On the 26th of June, the Act was passed for
constituting " Oliver Cromwell Captain General and Commander-
in-Chief of all the forces raised and to be raised within the Com-
* " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 314. t Hutchinson's "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 172.
6l2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
monwealth of England." On the 29th he left London. On the
22nd of July, with about sixteen thousand horse and foot, he
marched through Berwick ; and setting his foot on Scottish ground
he addressed a " large discourse " to his troops, " as a Christian
and a soldier : " "I exhort you," he said, " to be wary and worthy,
for sure enough we have work before us. But have we not had
God's blessing hitherto. Let us go on faithfully, and hope for the
like still." " The most dangerous of hypocrites," cries Hume.
" I have asked myself," says one who has studied Oliver some
what more deeply than the popular sceptic, " if anywhere in mod
ern European history, or even in ancient Asiatic, there was found
a man practising this mean world's affairs with a heart more filled
by the Idea of the Highest ? " *
Charles, as a measure of policy, was taken to the Scottish camp.
It was composed of men of very different opinions, and of no
opinions at all, in matters of religion ; and the young king soon
ingratiated himself with royalists of loose thoughts and irregular
lives. The Presbyterian leaders weeded the camp of those they
called malignants ; and compelled Charles to sign a declaration
against Popery and Heresy, condemning the evil deeds of his
father and the idolatry of his mother, and protesting and promising
all that he had been required to subscribe for the Parliament and
the Church. He winced, refused, consented ; and then sent a
message to Ormond that the declaration was extorted from him,
and that he remained firm to 'his first principles as a true child of
the Church of England, and a true Cavalier.
The advance of Cromwell into Scotland was met by a vigorous
measure on the part of Lesley. The population of the border dis
tricts were commanded to leave their villages ; to drive their cattle
from the fields, and to go with their goods towards Edinburgh.
From every Presbyterian pulpit the English army was denounced
as composed of sectaries and blasphemers, who would put all the
men to the sword, and abuse the women with frightful tortures.
The country was bare of all supplies ; and Cromwell was compelled
to march by the coast, to receive provisions from English vessels.
At Dunbar he got " some small pittance from our ships. On the
29th he was encamped at Musselburgh. Lesley's army was lying
between Edinburgh and Leith, " entrenched by a line flankered
from Edinburgh to Leith." There was a sharp skirmish on that
day ; but Cromwell writes, " I did not think it advisable to attempt
* Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 157.
Cromwell's danger. 6r3
upon the enemy, lying as he doth." He conjectured that they
desired to tempt him to attack them in their fastness ; or else
hoping that his army would famish for want of provisions — " which,"
he coolly adds, "is very likely to be, if we be not timely and fully
supplied." ' The Scottish army has a very secure position, en
trenched from Leith to the Calton Hill ; well supplied, and the city
protected. For a month there is little done besides letters and dec
larations passing between the two armies. There was more skir
mishing and manoeuvring towards the end of August, when Crom
well had marched westward of Edinburgh towards Stirling ; but on
the 30th he fell back to Musselburgh, and on the 21st retired to
Dunbar. Lesley followed him. On the ist of September the
English army was lying round the old fortress, near their ships.
Cromwell is in a position of no common danger. On the 2nd he
writes to. Sir Arthur Haselrig, at Newcastle or elsewhere, " The
enemy hath blocked up our way at the pass at Coppers-path through
which we cannot get without almost a miracle. He lieth so upon
the hills that we know not how to come that way without great
difficulty ; and our lying here daily consumeth our men, who fall
sick beyond imagination. * * * Whatever becomes of us, it
will be well for you to get what forces you can together. * * *
The only wise God knows what is best." Oliver has written this
letter of the 2nd ; he has gone into the town of Dunbar about four
o'clock to take some refreshment; and he comes back to his camp,
which extends from Belhaven Bay to Brockmouth House — occupy
ing the peninsula " about a mile and a half from sea to sea." On the
Doon Hill, on the edge of Lammermoor, Lesley's army of twenty
thousand men is strongly placed. At Brockmouth House, a rivu
let which skirts the Doon Hill enters the sea. " It runs in a deep
grassy glen, which the South country officers in the old pamphlets
describe as a ' deep ditch, forty feet in depth, and about as many in
width,' — ditch dug out by the little brook itself, and carpeted with
greensward, in the course of long thousands of years. It runs
pretty close by the foot of Doon Hill : forms, from this point to
the sea, the boundary of Oliver's position : his force is arranged
in battle order along the left bank of this Brockburn and its grassy
glen." * Early on the morning of the 2nd. Lesley's horse had
come down from the hill, and occupied the right bank of the rivu-'
let. On that autumn afternoon Cromwell, walking in the garden
* Carlyle. The description of this battle-field, from which we derive our brief details,
is a master-piece of that true picturesque which is derived from accurate observation.
614 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of Brockmouth House, sees the whole Doon Hill alive with the
movement of Lesley's main force, — coming down to the edge of
the Brock, and occupying the confined ground which lies between
it and the Hill. The right wing has moved out to the open space.
The quick military eye sees that one false move has changed the
whole aspect of affairs. He tells his plan to Lambert and Monk :
¦ — Attack the right wing with our whole force ; drive it into the
narrow space where the main force lies ; let the men stand to their
arms all night, and begin the attack before dawn. The night is
wet. The Scots are lying in the harvest-fields amongst the corn-
sheaves ; they have no tents ; they have put out their matches,
all but two in a company. To the left, by the pass over the Brock,
several regiments march quickly, by break of day. At six o'clock
in the morning, Lambert, the major-general, had joined with his
force to lead the attack. It was a fierce contest, in which the ad
vanced guard was repulsed; but it was not long before the infantry
had broken the Scottish lines " at push of pike." Cromwell writes,
" The best of the enemies' horse being broken through and through,
in less than an hour's dispute, their whole army being put into confu
sion, it became a total rout." There were three thousand slain on the
field, and ten thousand taken prisoners. The prisoners were a
serious trouble. Four or five thousand were dismissed. As many
were sent to Newcastle. Cromwell on the 9th wrote to Haselrig,
the governor of that town, " I hope your northern guests are come
to you by this time. I pray you let humanity be exercised towards
them ; I am persuaded it will be comely." These poor creatures
were not treated as the General desired. Many died from eating
raw cabbages at Morpeth ; many of pestilence in Durham. Others
were sent to New England ; and John Cotton, the minister of
Boston there, writes to Oliver in 1651, describing that they were
then kindly used, having been sold for a limited servitude in a
country where their labour was welcome, and not ill-rewarded.
The dispatch of Cromwell on the 4th of September, in which
he addresses to the Speaker of the Parliament a minute account of
the victory of Dunbar, contains a remarkable paragraph, singularly
illustrative of the character of the writer, and of his influence over
the authority under which he is serving. He points out that this
victory is " one of the most signal mercies God hath done to Eng
land and his people." He is writing with all the horrors of the
recent battle around him ; having just proclaimed that the inhabit
ants may come to the field with carts to carry away their wounded
BATTLE OF DUNBAR. 615
countrymen. But in the very thick of this turmoil he tasks his
mind to tell the Parliament that success calls upon them to do
their duty at home. " Disown yourselves, but own your Authority ;
and improve it to curb the proud and the insolent, such as would
disturb the tranquillity of England, though under what specious
pretence soever. Relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor
prisoners in England. Be pleased to reform the abuses of all
professions ; and if there be any one that makes many poor to
make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth." This is extraor
dinary language from a servant to his master, and he takes an
extraordinary occasion to use it. Ludlow speaks of this advice as
very seasonable ; and the victory itself not more welcome than the
General's letter to the Parliament, urging them "to do real things
for the common good." Cromwell had left London, two months
before, with these convictions full in his mind. He had told Lud
low during the short interval between his return from Ireland and
his departure for Scotland, " That it was his intention to contribute
the utmost of his endeavours to make a thorough reformation of
the Clergy and the Law : but, said he, the sons of Zeruiah are yet
too strong for us.; and we cannot mention the reformation of the
Law but they presently cry out, we design to destroy property:
whereas the Law, as it is now constituted, serves only to maintain
the lawyers, and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor." * We
have here the first clear indication that this remarkable man, felt
that he had other work before him than directing such attacks as
those of the gray dawning of the 3rd of September. Before the
days of Dunbar and Worcester, Milton's "chief of men" had
decided that " peace hath her victories,
No less renown' d than war ; "
and that upon him was laid the task of their achievement.
On the 5th of September, Cromwell marched away from the old
fortress of Dunbar and the Burn of Brock. He had now the com
mand of ample supplies, for Edinburgh and the country around
were in his power, with the exception of Edinburgh castle.
Charles, with the Scottish authorities, had retired to Perth. Lesley
was gathering the wreck of his army about him at Stirling. The
young king, utterly wearied with the Presbyterian statesmen and
ministers, who had sent away all his Cavaliers except Buckingham,
* " Memoirs," Vol. ii. p. 319.
6l6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
attempted to escape from them to join his more ardent friends in
the Highlands. He got away fifty miles from Perth ; but was
quickly brought back. The Presbyterian leaders then somewhat
relaxed their intolerant demeanour towards Charles ; but this gave
offence to the more violent. The Presbyterian party became
divided ; and the royalists obtained a higher influence in the
direction of the national policy. Charles, without further question
of his real intentions, was crowned at Scone on the ist of January,
1651. Cromwell was not warring upon the Scottish people, but
was endeavouring to conciliate the religious party, by attending
the sermons of their ministers, and expressing no resentment at
their attacks upon himself. He has not been idle in his rougher
work. After a three months' blockade, and then a bombardment,
Edinburgh castle was surrendered to him on the 18th of December.
Cromwell has little to do to make himself master of Scotland on
the south of the Forth — some battery of detached castles, and
some skirmishes with mosstroopers. On the 4th of February the
army marched towards Stirling, but returned without any result,
driven to the good quarters of Edinburgh by terrible storms of
sleet and snow. The Lord-General became seriously ill through
this exposure. On the day after Dunbar he wrote to his wife, " I
assure thee I grow an old man, and feel infirmities of age marvel
lously stealing upon me." In March, in reply to the solicitude
expressed by the Council of State, he says, " I thought I should
have died of this fit of sickness; but the Lord seemeth to dispose
otherwise." In May his illness assumes a more dangerous ap
pearance. The Parliament give him liberty to return home. But
on the 5th of June he is out again ; and at the end of the month is
vigorously prosecuting the campaign. The Scottish army was
entrenched at Stirling. The king had been invited to take its com
mand in person. Cromwell, on the 2nd of August, had succeeded
in possessing himself of Perth. At that juncture the news reached
him that the royal camp at Stirling was broken up, on the 3rst of
July ; and that Charles was on his march southward, at the head
of eleven thousand men, his Lieutenant-General being David
Lesley. Argyle was opposed to this bold resolution ; and had
retired to Inverary. The letter which Cromwell wrote to- the
Parliament upon the receipt of this intelligence is frank and manly.
He anticipated blame in leaving the road to England free for
invasion, and he thus meets the certain imputation of neglect : " I
do apprehend that if he goes for England, being some few days
CHARLES AND THE SCOTCH ARMY IN ENGLAND. 617
march before us, it will trouble some men's thoughts ; and may
occasion some inconveniences ; — which I hope we are as deeply
sensible of ; and have been, and I trust shall be, as diligent to
prevent as any. And indeed this is our comfort, that in simplicity
of heart, as towards God, we have clone to the best of our judg
ments ; knowing that if some issue were not put to this business,
it would occasion another winter's war : to the ruin of your sol
diery, for whom the Scots are too hard in respect of enduring the
winter difficulties of this country ; and to the endless expense of
the treasure of England in prosecuting this war. It may be sup
posed we might have kept the enemy from this, by interposing
between him and England. Which truly I believe we might : but
how to remove him out of this place, without doing what we have
done, unless we had had a commanding army on both sides of the
river of Forth, is not clear to us ; or how to answer the inconve
niences afore mentioned, we understand not. We pray therefore
that (seeing there is a possibility for the enemy to put you to some
trouble) you would, with the same courage, grounded upon a con
fidence in God, wherein you have been supported to the great
things God hath used you in hitherto, — improve, the best you can,
such forces as you have in readiness, or as may on the sudden be
gathered together, to give the enemy some check, until we shall be
able to reach up to him ; which we trust in the Lord we shall do
our utmost endeavour in."
Cromwell was not mistaken in supposing that the march of
Charles towards England would "trouble some men's thoughts."
There were " pale and unmanly fears in some who directed the
nation's councils. " Some raged and uttered discontents against
Cromwell, and suspicions of his fidelity." Mrs. Hutchinson so
describes this time of1 alarm. But bolder spirits went in earnest,
upon Cromwell's advice, to gather forces together "to give the
:enemy some check, until we shall be able to reach up to him."
Charles had the advantage of the start in this race for a kingdom.
He took the western road by Carlisle ; and when on English
ground'issued a proclamation offering pardon to those who would
return to their allegiance — excepting from his promised amnesty
Bradshaw, Cromwell, and Cook. He was also proclaimed king of
England, at the head of his army ; and similar proclamation was
made at Penrith and other market-towns. Strict discipline was
preserved ; and although the presence of Scots in arms was hate
ful to the people, they were not outraged by any attempts at phi*
618 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
der. " I dare say," writes lord Lauderdale, " we have not taken the
worth of a sixpence." Charles, however, had few important
accessions of strength. Lord Howard of Escrick came with a
troop of horse, and was knighted. The earl of Derby, coming to
join him, was defeated at Wigan, and taken prisoner ; but he then
escaped. There was no general rising in his favour. There was
no eager surrender of walled towns to the king. The gates of
Shrewsbury were shut against him. At Warrington, his passage
of the Mersey was opposed by Lambert and Harrison, who had
got before him with their cavalry. Cromwell was coming on with
his main force, having left six thousand men under Monk in Scot
land. On the 22d of August Charles reached Worcester, the par
liamentary garrison having evacuated the city. He there set up
his standard. On that day nine years his father had set up his
standard at Nottingham. With the same solemnity attached to
this act, a summons went forth for all male subjects of .due age to
gather round the banner of their Sovereign Lord, at the general
muster of his forces on the 26th of August. An inconsiderable
number of gentlemen came, with about two hundred followers.
Meanwhile Cromwell had marched rapidly from Scotland with ten
thousand men. As he advanced through Yorkshire, and onward
by Nottingham, Coventry, Stratford, Evesham, the Militias of the
Counties joined him with a zeal which showed their belief that
another Civil War would not be a national blessing. On the 28th
of August the General of the Commonwealth was close to Worces- .
ter, with thirty thousand men.
Clarendon has described, in general terms, the advantages
which Worcester offered as a resting-place for the royalist army,
and as a point at which a resolute stand might be made : " Wor
cester was a very good post, seated almost in the middle of the
kingdom, and in as fruitful a country as any part of it ; a good city
served by the noble river of Severn from all the adjacent counties ;
Wales behind it, from whence levies might be made of great num
bers of stout men. It was a place where the king's friends might
repair, if they had the affections they pretended to have ; and it
was a place where he might defend himself, if the enemy would
attack him, with many advantages, and could not be compelled to
engage his army in a battle, till Cromwell had gotten men enough
to encompass him on every side : and then the king might choose
on which side to fight, since the enemy would be on both sides the
river, and could not come suddenly to relieve each other."* No
* " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 500.
THE BATTLE OF WORCESTER. 619
1
doubt these were very sagacious considerations ; but Charles had
to deal with a commander who thought that skill and daring might
overcome disadvantages of position. Cromwell's despatch to the
Parliament, written at ten o'clock of the night of the battle, tells
the story of his strategy with sufficient precision to be intelligible :
" Being so weary, and scarce able to write, yet I thought it my
duty to let you know thus much. That upon this day, being the
3d of September (remarkable for a mercy vouchsafed to your forces
on this day twelvemonth in Scotland), we built a bridge of boats
over Severn, between it and Teme, about half a mile from Worces
ter ; and another over Teme, within pistol-shot of our other bridge.
Lieutenant-General Fleetwood and Major-General Dean marched
from Upton on the southwest side of Severn up to Powick, a town
which was a pass the enemy kept. We passed over some horse
and foot, and were in conjunction with the Lieutenant-General's
forces. We beat the enemy from hedge to hedge till we beat him
into Worcester. The enemy then drew all his forces on the other
side the town, all but what he had lost ; and made a very consider
able fight with us, for three hours' space ; but in the end we beat
him totally, and pursued him to his royal fort, which we took, —
and indeed have beaten his whole army." We see from this rapid
narrative that the Lord-General did not regard the risk of his forces
being " on both sides the river." Clarendon says, " Cromwell had
used none of the delay and circumspection which was imagined ;
but directed the troops to fall on in all places at once." About
noon, according to the same authority, " everybody being upon
the post they were appointed, and the enemy making such a stand
that it was concluded he meant to make no attempt then, and if he
should he might be repelled with ease, his majesty, a little before
noon, retired to his lodging to eat and to refresh himself, where he
had not been near an hour when the alarm came that both armies
were engaged." Another account says that Charles, and his
Council of War, from the top of the cathedral, had beheld the
building of the bridge of boats over Teme, and the bridge of boats
over Severn ; and then came down to attack Cromwell's men on
the side from which he had crossed. But Cromwell was soon back
again over his bridge of boats, and now the battle raged with
desperate fury. " Indeed, it was a stiff business," writes pithy
Oliver. Clarendon briefly describes this fight ; and quickly comes
to the catastrophe : "In no other part was there resistance made;
but such a general consternation possessed the whole army, that
620 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the rest of the horse fled, and all the foot threw down their arms
before they were charged. When the king came back into the
town, he found a good body of horse which had been persuaded to
make a stand, though much the major part passed through upon
the spur. The king desired those who stayed, that they would
follow him, that they might look upon the enemy, who, he believed,
did not pursue them. But when his majesty had gone a little way,
he found most of the horse were gone the other way, and that he
had none but a few servants of his own about him. Then he sent
to have the gates of the town shut, that none might get in one way,
nor out the other : but all was confusion ; there were few to com
mand, and none to obey : so that the king stayed till very many of
the enemy's horse were entered the town, and then he was per
suaded to withdraw himself." The 3d of September was a night
of terror in the district round Worcester — the Scottish horsemen
flying in every direction — their foot-soldiers scattered amongst the
harvest-fields, or hiding in woods from the fury of the country
people. Baxter, who dwelt in Kidderminster, has described a
scene at his own doors : " I was newly gone to bed when the noise
of the flying horse acquainted us of the overthrow : and a piece of
one of Cromwell's troops that guarded Bewdley bridge having
tidings of it, came into our streets, and stood in the open market
place before my door, to surprise those that passed by : And so
when many hundreds of the flying army came together, when the
thirty troopers cried stand, and fired at them, they either hasted
away, or cried quarter, not knowing in the dark what number it was
that charged them : and so as many were taken there, as so few
men could lay-hold on : and till midnight the bullets flying towards
my door and windows, and the sorrowful fugitives hastening by for
their lives, did tell me the calamitousness of war." *
The prisoners taken at the battle of Worcester, and in the
subsequent flight, exceeded seven thousand. They included some
of the most distinguished leaders of the royalists in England and
Scotland. Upon the entry of Charles into England, the Parliament
had declared his adherents to be rebels and traitors to the Com
monwealth. Upon this principle, courts-martial were held upon
nine of the most distinguished of the prisoners ; and three, amongst
whom was the earl of Derby, were executed. The duke of Hamil
ton, also a prisoner, died of his wounds. But there was one who
escaped from the slaughter of Worcester, for whose apprehension
* " Life," p. 59.
ESCAPE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES. 62 1
a reward was proclaimed throughout the country— a reward of a
thousand pounds to the person who should " bring in to the Parlia
ment Charles Stuart, son of the late tyrant." The narrative of
Charles Stuart's hidings and escapes during six weeks has been
transmitted to us in many trustwortliy accounts — one of which, in
Magdalen College, Cambridge, purports to be " dictated to Mr.
Pepys by the king hirnself." This escape is one of those episodes
of history which relieves its weightier details ; and which has- a
peculiar interest as exhibiting the faithfulness of high and humble
to the sanctity of misfortune — a faithfulness as much to be ascribed
to natural generosity under great temptation to selfishness, as to
any passionate loyalty to the fallen prince. Not only was a large
reward offered for his apprehension, but it was proclaimed that
those who should knowingly conceal him or his adherents should be
held " as partakers and abettors of their traitorous and wicked
practices and designs."
Charles, on the night of the battle, when he had ridden in hot
haste from Worcester, found himself suddenly in the midst of a
party of horse. Buckingham was with him, with Derby, Lauder
dale, Wilmot, and others Charles says,- " We had such a number
of beaten men with us, of the horse, that I strove, as soon as it was
dark, to get from them, and though I could not get them to stand
by me against the enemy, I could not get rid of them, now I had
a mind to it." At last, with about sixty gentlemen and officers, he
slipt away by a bye-road, when it was dark ; and by daybreak had
got to a place called White Lady's. They then learnt that there
were some three thousand of Scotch cavalry on an adjoining heath,
all in disorder ; and the king's friends urged him to join them, and
endeavour to go into Scotland. Clarendon says that " scarce any
thing could worse befall the king." He resolved therefore to dis
guise himself " with a pair of ordinary gray cloth breeches a leathern
doublet, and a green jerkin." His notion was to walk to London,
where Wilmot was to meet him. His other friends joined the
Scots, who were soon routed by English horse ; " which shows,"
says Charles, " that my opinion was not wrong, in not sticking to
men who had run away." A " country fellow," Richard Penderell,
a Catholic, was recommended to him as a guide. They rested a
very short time at White Lady's ; and spent all that day in a wood,
without meat or drink. ' At night they got some bread and cheese ;
and Charles having changed his mind about London, they walked
in the direction of the Severn. ._ In the middle of the night they
622 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
were in danger from a miller, who raised an outcry of " Rogues !
rogues ! " when they refused to stand at his bidding. At last
Charles found a shelter in the house of Mr. Woolfe of Madeley, a
gentleman " who had hiding-holes for priests." Mr. Woolfe being
told that one who had escaped from Worcester asked his protection,
said he would not venture his neck for any man unless it were the
king himself. Penderell told the secret. Mr. Woolfe was faithful ;
and secreted them in his barn. But the locality was a dangerous
one ; for the ferry was guarded at Madeley, where they expected
to cross the Severn. Charles therefore resolved to return to the
neighbourhood of White Lady's, hoping to hear some news of Wil
mot. He went to Boscobel, the house of Richard Penderell's bro
ther William, a farmer ; and there he found a royalist officer, Major
Careless. They agreed to leave the house the next day ; and instead
of hiding in the wood near Boscobel, to get up into a great tree
standing in an open plain, where they might see around them.
The king thus continues : " Of which proposition of his, I approv
ing, we (that is to say, Careless and I) went, and carried up with
us some victuals for the whole day, viz. : 'bread, cheese, small beer,
and nothing else ; and got up into a great oak, that had been lopped
three or four years before, and being grown out again, very bushy
-and thick, could not be seen through, and here we stayed all the
day. * * * Memorandum : That while we were in this tree
we see soldiers going up and down in the thickest of the wood,
searching for persons escaped ; we seeing them, now and then
peeping out of the wood." The Royal Oak, the glory of sign-
painters and school-boys, thus had its origin in Charles's simple
narrative. Clarendon gives the story a dramatic point, in saying
they saw many from " that blessed tree," who came purposely to
look after the king; and that Charles "heard all their discourse,
how they would use the king himself if they could take him." The
battle of Worcester was fought on Wednesday ; the day of hiding
in the oak was Friday. On the Saturday and Sunday Charles was
concealed at Boscobel by William Penderell and his wife ; but on
that afternoon he received a message from Wilmot, that he was at
the house of Mr. Whitgrave, a Catholic recusant, at Moseley ; and
desired the king to join him. There were six brothers of the Pen-
derells ; and they formed the royal body-guard, as Charles rode
upon a jolting horse to this new place of refuge. Mr. Whitgrave
left a MS. account of his participation in the king's escape^* min-
* First published in " Retrospective Review," vol. xiv. p. 62.
ESCAPE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES. 623
ute and somewhat-tedious, but containing one or two interesting
passages. The arrival of Charles is thus related : " His lordship
[Wilmot] said to me, this gentleman under disguise, whom I have
hitherto concealed, is both your master, mine, and the master of
us all, to whom we all owe our duty and allegiance ; and so, kneel
ing down, he gave me his hand to kiss, and bid me arise, and said
he had received from my lord such a character of my loyalty and
readiness in those dangers to assist him and his friends, that he
would never be unmindful of me or mine ; and the next word after
was, where is the private place my lord tells me of ? which being
already prepared and showed him, he went into it, and when come
forth, said it was the best place he was ever in. Then he return
ing to his chamber, sitting down by the fire-side, we pulled off his
shoes and stockings, and washed his feet, which were most sadly
galled, and then pulled off likewise his apparel and shirt, which
was of hurden cloth, and put him on one of Mr. Huddleston's
[a priest], and other apparel of ours ; then after he had refreshed
himself a little by eating some biscuit, and drinking a glass of
wine, he grew very cheerful, and said, if it would please Almighty
God to send him once more an army of 10,000 good and loyal sol
diers and subjects, he feared not to expel all those rogues forth of
his kingdom." At Moseley, Charles was again in danger from the
presence of the Commonwealth's soldiers ; and it was determined
that he'should leave in a new character. The countryman in the
leathern doublet was now transformed into a decent serving-man ;
who was to convey his mistress, the daughter of colonel Lane, of
Bentley, to a relation near Bristol. The lady rode on a pillion be
hind him. It was fortunate for her reputation that a male cousin
was of the party. Having a pass, they reached Bristol in three
days without interruption. On their way, the king's horse cast a
shoe. " What news ? " said the serving-man to the smith.
" None, since the beating of those rogues, the Scots ; he didn't
hear that that rogue Charles Stuart had been taken yet." Charles
thought that rogue ought to be hanged, and the smith applauded
him as an honest man for his opinion. At Bristol, there was no
vessel in which the fugitive could embark, and he had to seek an
other place of refuge. After a day's rest, he went to Trent House,
the residence of colonel Wyndham, a devoted royalist ; and his
faithful Miss Lane and her cousin accompanied him. Here he re
mained till a vessel was engaged at Charmouth, near Lyme, to
convey to St. Malo a nobleman and his servant. In other dis.
624 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
guises Charles proceeded to the coast ; but the- master of the ves«
sel was locked in his room by his wife, who declared that she and
her children should not be ruined for the sake of any royalist. He
now hurried, with Wyndham and Wilmot, to Bridport. The town
was filled with soldiers, about to embark for Jersey. The king, in
his old quality of servant, led the horses through a crowd of troop
ers, thrusting them out of the way with many a coarse word.
There was now no immediate expedient but to return to Trent
House. A second ship was engaged at Southampton ; but was
taken up for the transport of troops. His abode with colonel
Wyndham now became unsafe. Another retreat was found in
Wiltshire ; and in a week a vessel was engaged to sail from Shore-
ham. The king and his friends again started on the 13th of Octo
ber, with dogs, as a coursing party, proceeding to the Sussex
Downs. They stopped that night at the house of a brother-in-law
of one of Charles' friends ; and the next day were at Brightbelm-
stone. This town of marine luxury was then a-mean village ; and
there, at supper, the captain of the engaged vessel recognised the
king ; and said he would venture his life and all for him. The
landlord also said to him — " God bless you. I shall be a lord, and
my wife a lady, before I die." At five o'clock on the morning of
the 15th the proscribed Charles Stuart went on board : and on the
afternoon of the 16th he and Wilmot were landed at Fecamp.
The secret of the royal fugitive had been entrusted to forty-five
persons, whose names are recorded ; and with no one of them was
he ever in danger through treachery or want of caution.
Charles and Wilmot, in the travel-stained disguises which they
had been compelled to adopt in the place of silks and love-locks,
reached Rouen. Their miserable appearance made it difficult for
them even to obtain the shelter of an inn. The king managed to
obtain some money ; and it soon became known that the fugitive
of Worcester was safe. On the 29th of October he left Rouen;
and, met by his mother and his brother James, he was once more
safe in the Louvre. In a dispatch of the ist of November, we
have a glimpse of Charles and Henrietta Maria : " The queen
keeps altogether at the Louvre since the king's coming hither.
* * * * She is constantly wonderful merry, and seemeth to
be overjoyed to see the king safe near her ; but he is very sad,
and sombre for the most part. That cheerfulness which, against
his nature, he strove to show at his first coming hither, having
lasted but a few clays ; and he is very silent always, whether he be
CHARLES RETURNS TO FRANCE. 6^5
with his mother, or in any other company." * Certainly his con
dition was not a pleasant one. It "was very deplorable," says
Clarendon. " France was not at all pleased with his being come
thither, nor did quickly take notice of his being there. The queen
his mother was very glad of his escape, but in no degree able to
contribute towards his support ; they who had interest with her
finding all she had, or could get, too little for their own unlimited.
expense." The queen's pension from the French court was ir
regularly paid ; " nor had the king one shilling towards the sup
port of himself and his family."!
* Sir Richard Brown's dispatch. — Green's " Letters," p. 373.
t " Rebellion," vol. vi. p. 542.
Vol III.— 40
626 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
WHITELOCKE'S DESCRIPTION OF CROMWELL'S
ARMY, IN A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTINA,
QUEEN OF SWEDEN.
We shall have occasion, in^ts due place in the text, to notice the embassy of White
locke to Sweden, at the end of 1653. His conversations with the famous queen, Chris
tina, the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, are singularly interesting ; far more so than the
ordinary records of diplomacy. We select one conversation, in which the Ambassador
Extraordinary describes to the accomplished sovereign — who had an admiration of Crom
well very unusual amongst crowned heads — the composition of that Army with which the
General won his great victories. At the first private interview between the queen of
Sweden and the English minister, Whitelocke having presented her with his instructions
which he saw she perfectly understood, her majesty went at once to matters in which she
expressed her personal opinions, and sought for information beyond the ordinary range of
state discussions : — ¦
"Queen. Your General is one of the gallantest men in the world : never were such
things done as by the English in your late war. Your General had done the greatest things
of any man in the world j the Prince of Conde" is next to him, but short of him. I have
as great a respect and honour for your General, as for any man alive ; and I pray, let him
know as much from me.
" Whitelocke. My General is indeed a very brave man ; his actions shew it ; and I
shall not fail to signify to him the great honour of your majesty's respects to him ; and I
assure your majesty, he hath as high honour for you as for any prince in Christendom.
" Queen. I have been told that many officers of your army will themselves pray and
preach to their soldiers ; is that true ?
" Whitelocke. Yes, madam, it is very true. When their enemies are swearing, or de
bauching, or pillaging, the officers and soldiers of the parliament's army used to be encour
aging and exhorting one another out of the word of God, and praying together to the Lord
of Hosts for his blessing to be with them ; who hath shewed his approbation of this mili
tary preaching, by the success he hath given them.
" Queen- That's well. Do you use to do so too ?
" Whitelocke. Yes, upon some occasions, in my own family j and think it as proper
for me, being the master of it, to admonish and speak to my people when there is cause, as
to be beholden to another to do it for me, which sometimes brings the chaplain into more
credit than his lord.
" Queen. Doth your General and other great officers do so ?
" Whitelocke. Yes, madam, very often, and very well. Nevertheless, they maintain
chaplains and ministers 111 their houses and regiments ; and such as are godly and worthy
ministers have as much respect, and as good provision in England, as in any place in
Christendom. Yet 'tis the opinion of many good men with us, that a long cassock, with
a silk girdle and a great beard, do not make a learned or good preacher, without gifts of
the Spirit of God, and labouring in his vineyard ; and whosoever studies the Holy Scrip
ture, and is enabled to do rood to the souls of others, and endeavours the same, is no
where forbidden by that Word, nor is it blameable. The officers and soldiers of the parlia-
WHITELOCKE AND QUEEN CHRISTINA. 627
ment held it not unlawful, when they carried their lives in their hands, and were going to ,
adventure them in, the high places of the field, to encourage one another out of His Word
who commands over all ; and this had more weight and impression with it than any other
word could have ; and was never denied to be made use of but by the popish prelates,
who by no means would admit lay people (as they call them) to gather from thence that
instruction and comfort which can no where else, be found.
" Queen. Me thinks you preach very well, and have now made a good sermon. I as.
sure you I like it very well.
" Whitelocke. Madam, I shall account it a great happiness if any of my words please
you. f* Queen. Indeed, sir, these words of yours do very much please me ; and I shall be
glad to hear you oftener on that strain. But I pray tell me, where did your General, and
you his officers, learn this way of praying and preaching yourselves ?
" Whitelocke. We learnt it from a near friend of your majesty, whose memory all the
Protestant interest hath cause to honour.
" Queen. My friend ! who was that ?
*' Whitelocke. It was your father, the great king Gustavus Adolphus, who upon his
first landing in Germany (as many then present have testified), did himself in person upon
the shore, on his knees, give thanks to GocL for his blessing upon that undertaking ; and
he would frequently exhort his people out of God* s word ; and God testified his great
liking thereof, by the wonderful successes he was pleased to vouchsafe to that gallant
king." * * " Journal oil tho Swedish Ambusey in 1653-4."
England.
Scotland.
France.
Spain.
Germany.
Sweden.
Papal States.
155S Elizabeth
1567 James VI.
1559 Francis II.
1560 Charles IX,
1574 Henry III.
1589 Henry IV.
1599 Philip III.
1564 Maximilian II.
1576 Rudolph II.
1559 Pius IV.
1566 Pius V.
1572 Gregory XIII.
1585 Sixtus V.
1590 Urban VII.
1590 Gregory XIV.
1591 Innocent IX.
1592 Clement VIII.
1603 James I.
1604 Charles IX.
1605 Leo XI.
1610 Louis XIII.
1621 Philip IV.
1612 Matthias.
1619 Ferdinand II.
1611 Gustavus Adol
phus
1605 Paul V.
1621 Gregory XV,
1625 Charles I.
1623 Urban VIII.
*•
1643 Louis XIV.
1637 Ferdinand III.
1632 Christina
1644 Innocent X.
Hrw
ono
.H w S
o
>o<2o3
England.
France.
Germany.
Papal States
Spain.
Russia.
1625
Charles I.
Louis XIIL
Ferdinand II.
Urban VIII.
Philip III.
Michael Federowitch,
1037
-
-
Ferdinand III.
-
-
-
1043
-
Louis XIV
-
-
-
-
1044
-
-
-
Innocent X.
-
-
J045
-
-
-
-
-
Alexei Michaelowitch.
1049
f Charles II. , King dejure.
\ Commonwealth.
-
-
-
-
-
>tor1 w
o"J
ooas HMgo>O< w
S 35S
THE POPULAR
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHARLES KNIGHT.
VOLUME IV.
FROM THE COMMONWEALTH TO THE REIGN OF WILLIAM
AND MARY.
First American Edition.
NEW YORK:
JOHN WURTELE LOVELL
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.— a.d. 1651 to A.D. 1653.
Cromwell's return to London. — Reforming policy of Cromwell. — Conference on the Settle
ment of the Nation. — Foreign Relations of the Commonwealth.— Differences with the
United Provinces. — Dutch War.— Commerce.— The Navigation Act.— The Navy of
England. — Blake.— Battles of Blake and Van Tromp. — Petition of the Army to the
Parliament. — Dialogue between Cromwell and Whitelocke. — The question of future
Representation. — Dissolution of the Long Parliament. — Public Opinion on- the Dis
solution. — Summons for a Parliament. » . . . • Page 13 — 33
CHAPTER II.— A.D. 1653.
Defeat of Van Tromp. — Character of the Little Parliament.— Cromwell's Address to this
Assembly. — Its Provisional Constitution. — Their proceedings and tendencies. — Res
ignation of the Little Parliament. — Oliver inaugurated as Protector. — Social Condi
tion of the Kingdom. ..... . .. • • 34 — 51
CHAPTER III.— a.d. 1653 to a.d. 1655.
The Protectorate. — Incentives to assassinate the Protector. — Royalist Plot concocted in
France.— Cromwell's deportment to the French Government. — His Foreign Policy
generally. — First Parliament of the Protectorate. — Cromwell's speech on opening the
Session. — Parliament questions the Protector's authority. — The Parliament House
losed. — Cromwell requires a Pledge from Members. — Recusant Members excluded-—
Subsequent Temper of the Parliament.— Cromwell dissolves the Parliament. —
Royalist Risings organised- — Failure of Risings in the West and North. — Resistance
to Taxation. — The Major-Gene rals. — Severities against Papists and Episcopalians.
—Tolerance to Sects 52 — j\
CHAPTER IV.— a.d. 1655 to a.d. 1658.
Greatness of Cromwell in his Foreign Policy. — Naval armaments. — Blake's exploits.—
Jamaica taken. — Cromwell's interference for the Vaudois. — He attempts to procure
6 CONTENTS.
the re-admission of the Jews to settle in England.-Hostility of the Republicans to
the Protector.— Cromwell requires a pledge from Republican leaders.— Meeting of
the Protector's Second Parliament.— Cromwell's opening Speech.— Members ex
cluded from the Parliament.— Case of James Nayler.— Sindercomb's plot.— The
Parliament votes that Cromwell shall be offered the Crown.— Conferences on the
subject of Kingship.— Cromwell declines to accept the title.— Blake's victory at Santa
Cruz.— Cromwell inaugurated as Protector under a new Instrument of Government.
—Second Session of Parliament.— The Upper House.— The old secluded Members
admitted to sit.— Cromwell's Speech.— Violent dissensions.— The Parliament dis
solved.— Projected rising of Royalists.— Aliied War in the Netherlands.-Dunkirk.
—Cromwell's family afflictions.— His illness and death 75— >°3
CHAPTER V. — a.d. 1658 to a.d. 1660.
Richard Cromwell proclaimed Protector.— General calm upon his succession to power.—
Funeral of Oliver Cromwell.— A Parliament called.— Different Constitution of
Parliament.— Conflicts between the Republican leaders and the majority.— Demands
of the Army.— Richard Cromwell yields to their pretensions.— He is compelled by
the Officers to dissolve the Parliament.— End of the Protectorate.— Assembly of the
Long Parliament.— Resolutions that the Military power should be under the Civil.—
Discussions as 10 the form of Government.— The Rota Club.— Disunion of Parties.—
Royalist insurrection.— Sir George Booth defeated by Lambert.— Petitions of the
Officers.— The Parliament, subjected to the Armj-, ceases to sit.— Committee of
Safety.— Monk in Scotland.— Resolves to restore the Parliament.— Lambert sent
against Monk.— The Parliament restored by the Council of Officers.— Monk marches
to London.— Movements of the Royalists.— Disaffection in the City, which Monk is
ordered to suppress.— His demand that a Parliament shall be called.— Popular exul
tation. — Monk restores the secluded Members. — The measures of the Parliamentary
majority.— Charles's Court.— The Long Parliament .finally dissolved. — Monk agrees
to act for Charles.— Lambert's insurrection. — Meeting of the New Parliament.— The .
King's Letter.— Debates on the Bill of Indemnity.— Charles the Second proclaimed.
— He lands at Dover. — His entry into London. .... 104 — 133
CHAPTER VI.— a.d. 1660 to a.d. 1661.
Statutes again present materials for history. — Long Parliament declared to be dissolved.
— Tonnage and Poundage. — Excise. — Knight service and Purveyance abolished. —
The Army disbanded. — Church Livings. — Church Lands and Crown lands. — Act of
Indemnity. — Exceptions of the regicides, and of others. — Executions. — Insults to the
dead. — Episcopacy. — King's Declaration. — Convention Parliament dissolved. — Ana
baptist Insurrection. — Conferences at the Savoy. — New Parliament.— Marriage of
the Duke of York. — Prerogatives of the Crown. — Corporation Act. — Act of Uni
formity 134 — 15a
CHAPTER VII.— a.d. 1661 to A.D. 1665.
Scotland. — The Scottish Parliament. — Execution of Argyle. — Episcopacy restored in
Scotland.— Temper of the English Parliament. — Trial of Vane and Lambert.—
Execution of Vane. — Catherine of Braganza. — Marriage of the King. — Profligacy of
the King and his Court. — Insurrection in the North. — Conventicle Act. — Repeal of
the Triennial Act.— Dutch War.— The Plague.— The Five Mile Act.— The Settle
ment Act 153—173
CONTENTS. 7
CHAPTER VIII.— ad. 1665 to a.d. 1666.
Naval affairs. — Annus Mirabilis. — France joins the Dutch against England-— The sea-
fight of four days. — The London Gazette.-r-Restraints upon the Press. — Ravages of
the English' fleet on the Dutch Coast. — The Great Fire of London. — Note, on Wreir's
Plan for rebuilding the City. . ¦ Page 173 — 1S5
CHAPTER IX.— A.D. 1666 to A.D. 1667.
Meeting of Parliament. — Discontents. — Public Accounts. — Insurrection of Covenanters
in Scotland.— State cf the Navy.— Dutch Fleet at the Nore. — Ships burnt in the
Medway, — Blockade of London. — Peace with the Dutch. — Clarendon deprived of
Office.— He is impeached. — He leaves England. — The Cabal Ministry. — Treaty of
Triple Alliance. — Secret Negotiations of the king with Louis the Fourteenth. 186 — 207
CHAPTER X.— a.d. 1668 to a.d. 1673
Visit to England of the Duchess of Orleans. — Secret Negotiations of the king Louis XIV.
— Renewed persecutions of Non-comformists. — Trial of. William Penn. — The Coventry
Act. — Assault on the Duke of Ormond. — Blood attempts to steal the Regalia. — The
mystery of his pardon. — Shutting-up of the Exchequer. — Alliance with France. —
War with Holland. — Naval War — Invasion of the United Provinces. — Murder of
the De Witts.-^The Prince of Orange. — Shaftesbury Lord Chancellor. — Declaration
of Indulgence.— The Test Act 208—222
CHAPTER XI.— a.d. 1673 to A.D. 1678.
The Danby Ministry. — State of Parties. — Separate Peace with Holland. — Charles pen
sioned by Louis XIV. — Popular Discontents. — Coffee-houses closed by Proclama
tion. — Re-opened. — Meeting of Parliament after fifteen months' prorogation. — Four
Peers committed to the Tower. — Marriage of the Prince of Orange to the Princess
Mary. — Violent contentions between the king and the Parliament. — Intrigues with
France of the Parliamentary Opposition. — The Popish Plot. . ¦ . 223 — 243
CHAPTER XII.— a.d. 1678 to a.d. 1679.
Discovery of the intrigues of the king with France. — Impeachment of Danby. — Dissolu
tion of Parliament. — Elections. — The duke of York goes abroad. — Pretensior.s of
Monmouth to legitimacy. — The king's declaration as to his marriage. — The new
Council upon Temple's plan. — The Exclusion Bill passed in the Commons. — The
Habeas Corpus Act. — Continued trials for the Popish Plot. — Analysis of Payments
to the Witnesses. — Persecutions of Covenanters in Scotland- — Murder of archbishop
Sharp. — Claverhouse defeated at Drumclog. — Monmouth sent to Scotland as General.
—Battle of Bothwell Bridge. — Whig and Tory. — York and Monmouth rivals for the
Succession. — Proclamation against Petitions. — Abhorrers. . • . 244 — 262
CHAPTER XIIL— a.d. 1680 to a.d. 1682.
Charles the Second's alterations at Windsor. — The Duke of York presented as-a Rom
ish Recusant. — Progress of the Duke of Monmouth. — James leaves for Scotland.—
Parliament. — The Exclusion Bill. — Trial and execution of Lord Stafford. — The Par
liament dissolved. — The Oxford Parliament.— Its sudden dissolution. — The King's
^ Proclamation.— The Whig Vindication. — State Prosecutions. — Stephen College.—
8 CONTENTS.
Shaftesbury indicted for high treason. — The Ignoramus. — Court manoeuvres for the
choice of a sheriff of London.— Shaftesbury flies to Holland.— Persecutions of tha
Scotch Covenanters Page 263—280
CHAPTER XIV.— a.d. 1682 to a.d. 1683.
The army establishment.— Quo Warranto Information against the Corporation of Lon
don. — Surrenders of the Charters of other Corporations. —The Rye-House Plpt.—
Arrests of Russell, Essex, and Sidney.— Trial of Russell.— Russell's Execution. —
Trial of Sidney. — Scottish persecution.— The duke of York's power in England.—
Decree of the University of Oxford.— Repeal of the Test Act.— Death of Charles
the Second in the faith of the Romish Church.— William Penn.— Settlement of
Pennsylvania.— Penn's Treaty with the Indians. ... . 281—294
CHAPTER XV.— a.d. 1685.
Address of James the Second to his Council.— He is proclaimed.— He goes openly to
Mass. — Illegal levying of Customs. — The king's ministers. — Roman Catholic coun
sellors. — Roman Catholics and Quakers released from prison. — Renewed severities
against Covenanters. — Elections in England. — Money from France. — Constitution of
Parliament. — Its meeting. —Conviction and punishment of Titus Oates. — Conviction
of Richard Baxter. — Argyle lands in Scotland. — Disastrous result of his expedition.—
His execution.— Monmouth lands at Lyme. — His Declaration. — He enters Taunton
in triumph. — He is proclaimed king. — March to Bristol. — Skirmish of Philip's-
Norton. — Monmouth returns to Bridgewater. — Battle of Sedgemoor. — Flight of
Monmouth. — His apprehension. — His abject submission to the king. — His execution,
— Military executions in the Western Counties. — The legal massacres under Jeffreys.
— Transportations. — The Court traffic in convicts. — The legal traffic in pardons. 295—319
CHAPTER XVI.— A.D. 1685 to A.D. 1686.
Tendencies to Absolutism. — Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. — Meeting of Parliament.
— James announces his appointments of Romish Officers. — Address of the Commons.
Dissatisfaction of the Peers. — Parliament prorogued-— Trials for treason.— Repeated
prorogations, and final dissolution of the Parliament. — Preponderance of the Jesuit
party in the government. — Embassy to Rome. — Dispensing power of the king.—
Court of King's Bench affirms the royal power to dispense with the Test Laws.—
Roman Catholics appointed to benifices. — The Ecclesiastical Commission. — The
bishop of London suspended from spiritual functions. — Monastic bodies settle in
London. — Mass at Oxford. — Trial of the Rev. Samuel Johnson. — Massey, a Roman
ist, Dean of Christchurch. — Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge deprived. — Fellows of
Magdalen College, Oxford, ejected. . ..... 320 — 337
CHAPTER XVII.— a.d. 16S7 to a.d. 1688.
Fall of the Hydes. — Tyrconnel Lord Deputy in Ireland. — Declarations in Scotland and
England for Liberty of Conscience. — Abolition of Penal Tests. — Effects of the
Declaration of Indulgence. — The camp at Hounslow Heath. — The Papal Nuncio
publicly received by the King. — 'The King's policy towards Dissenters. — Dryden's
Poem of " the Hind and the Panther "—The Declaration commanded to be read in
Churches. — The Petition of the Seven Bishops. — They are committed to the Tower.—
The public sympathy.— The trial and acquittal of the Bishops. — Birth of the Prince of
Wales 338—356
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XVIII.— a.d. 1688 to A.D. 1689.
William, Prince of Orange.— His character and position with regard to English affairs.—
The Princess Mary, and the Succession — Invitation to the Prince of Orange. — Prep
arations of William. — His Declaration. — Hopes of the English people. — Alarm of
the king. — William sails from Helvoetsluys. — The voyage.— Landing at Torbay. —
Public entry at Exeter.— The king goes to the army at Salisbury.— Desertions of his
officers. — The Prince .of Denmark and the Princess Anne. — James calls a Meeting
of Peers. — Commissioners to negotiate with the Prince of Orange. — The queen and
child sent to France. — The king flies. — Provisional Government.— Riots.— The Irish
night— James brought back to London. — The Dutch guards at Whitehall.— The king
again leaves London. — The Prince of Orange enters.— The Interregnum. — The Con
vention.— William and Mary King and Queen — The revolution the commencement
of a new era in English history. . . , Page 357 — 381
CHAPTER XIX.— a.d. 1689 to a.d. 1714.
View of the National Industry from the Revolution of 1688 to the Accession of the House
of Brunswick. — Population. — the South-Western Counties. — The Woollen Manu
facture.— Clothing trade of the West-— Domestic Character of the Manufacture. —
Foreign Trade.— Bristol. — Watering-places of the Coast. — Travelling for pleasure. —
Inland Watering-places. — Bath. — Arsenal of Plymouth. — Iron Manufactures. — For
est of Dean,— South Wales.— Tin Mines of Cornwall. — Copper Mines. — Welsh Coal
Field.— Varieties of Employment in the West of England. • . . 382—399
CHAPTER XX.— A.D. 1689 to a.d. 1714.
The West-Midland and North-Midland Counties. — Birmingham. — Hardware. — The
Potteries.— Glass. — Nottingham. — Stockings. — Lace. — Derby. — Silk. — Lead Mines.
— Lincolnshire. — Salt. — Soda. — Soap. — Lancashire before the Cotton era. — Man
chester. — Liverpool. — Linen Trade. — Yorkshire. — The Clothing Villages. — Leeds.—
Sheffield.— Hull.— The Greenland Trade.— Newcastle.— Cumberland and Westmor
land. — Scotland. — Agricultural Counties. — Norwich. — South-Eastern Coasts.—
Cinque Ports. — Brighton. — Dover. — Portsmouth. — Southampton, . 400 — 423
CHAPTER XXI.— a.d. 1689 to a.d. 1714.
Gregory King's Scheme of the Income of the several families in England. — Degrees of
Society. — Town and Country Populations. — London. — Its Population. — Commerce.
— Trading Companies. — Banking. — Unemployed Capital. — Projects for New Com
panies. — Lotteries. — Tradesmen. — Their character and habits. — Extent of London.
— Progress of Fashion Westward. — Street Economy, and Police. — Robberies and
Outrages 424—438
CHAPTER XXII.— a.d. 1689 to a.d. 1714.
Fixed position of the various Classes. — Difficulty of passing from one position to another.
— The Rural Population. — The Cottager. — The Agricultural Labourer. — Character
of the Agricultural Labourer. — The Farmers and Small Freeholders. — The Gentle
men and Esquires. — Character of the Country Gentleman. — Kis Animosities. — The
Nobility. — The NobiUty and Esquires in London. — The Clergy. — Great Social Evils.
—Neglect. — The Press. — Liberal Arts and Sciences 439 — 456
10 CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XXIII.— A.D. 1689. /
Resolution and conduct of the Prince of Orange set forth in the Proclamation of William
and Mary. — Character of Wiliiam. — Aspirants for office. — The king's ministers. —
The judges. — Jealousy of William's Dutch friends. — The Convention declared to be
a Parliament. — Oath of Allegiance. — Refused by some spiritual and lay peers. — Non
jurors. — A Supply voted. — The principle of appropriation established. — Comprehen
sion Bill. — Reform of the Liturgy. — The Test Act. — The Toleration Act. — High and
Low Church.— Mutiny at Ipswich. — The first Mutiny Act. — Suspension of the Ha
beas Corpus Act. — Bill of Indemnity postponed. — The Coronation Oath. — The Cor
onation. —War with France. ....... Page 457 — 473
CHAPTER XXIV.— a.d. 1689.
King James lands at Kinsale. — Schemes of Tyrconnel. — Condition of the Protestants in
Ireland. — James enters Dublin. — Siege of Londonderry. — The Siege raised. — The
Revolution in Scotland.— The Highlanders. — Dundee. — Battle of Kiiliecrankie.—
Death of Dundee 474 — 493
CHAPTER XXV.-A.D. 1689 to a.d. 1690.
Close of the first Session of the English Parliament. — The Insh Parliament. — Second
.Session of the English Parliament. — The Bill of Rights. — The Princess Anne.—
Whig and Tory Factions. — Parliament dissolved. — State of the Army in Ireland. —
Abuses in Government Departments. — Opening of the New Parliament. — Corrup
tion. — Jealousy in settling the Revenue. — Act of Recognition. — Act of Grace. — Wil
liam goes to Ireland.— Landing and March of William.— The Boj'ne.— William
slightly wounded. — Battle of the Boyne. — Flight of James. — His Speech at Dublin. —
Naval defeat at Beachy Head — Energetic Conduct of the Queen. . . 494 — 515
CHAPTER XXVI.— a.d. 1690.
James embarks for France.— William enters Dublin.— The French devastate Teign-
mouth.— William's march to Limerick.— Siege of Limerick. — The siege raised.—
William goes to England.— Parliament — War supply.— England and Continental
Politics.— William leaves for Holland.— Congress at the Hague.— Mons capitulates
to the French.— Vacant sees in England filled up.— Plot of Preston and Ashton.—
Treason laws. —Marlborough in I< landers. — Limerick surrenders to Ginkeil.—
Treaty of Limerick 516 537
CHAPTER XXVII.— a.d. 1690 to a.d. 1695.
Scotland.— Affairs of Religion.— Plots.— The Highland Clans dispersed.— State of High
lands in 1691.— Breadalbane.— Proclamation of the Government.— The Master of
Stair — Tardy submission of Maclan.— Order as to rebels not submitted.— Older for
Maclan of Glencoe, and his tribe.— Letters of the Master of Stair.— Highland troops
arrive in Glencoe.— The Massacre of the MacDtmalds.— Inquiry into the Massacre
in 1695.— Resolutions of the Scottish Parliament.— Master of Stair dismissed —
The other persons implicated.— Breadalbane.— Misconceptions connected with the
Massacre.— Character of William unjustly assailed 538—556
CONTENTS. 1 1
CHAPTER XXVIII.— a.d. 1692 to a.d. 1693.
Marlborough dismissed from office. — Parliamentary debates. — Independence of the
Judges. — The king leave* for Holland. —Threatened invasion. —Declaration of James.
— Battle of La Hogue. — Siege of Namur. — Grandval's plot to assassinate William. —
Battle of Steinkirk. — Parliament. — Crime and public distress. — Commencement of the
National Dcbtl — The Licensing Act expires. — Place Bill. — Bill for Triennial Par
liaments. — The King's Veto. — Murder of Mountfort. — Trial of Lord Mohun.
Page 557—576
CHAPTER XXIX.— a.d. 1693 to a.d. 1694.
Ministerial Changes. — Preparations for the Campaign.— Louis and William with their
Armies. — Louis returns to Versailles. — Battle of Landen. — Naval miscarriages. — A
Ministry formed. — Government by Party. — Preponderance of the Whigs. — Financial
difficulties. — Establishment of the Bank of England.— Expedition against Brebt. —
Illness of the Queen. — Her death 577 — 595
Table of Contemporary Sovereigns 1 . . . 596
POPULAR HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER I.
Cromwell's return to London. — Reforming policy of Cromwell.— Conference on the Settle
ment of the Nation.— Foreign Relations of the Commonwealth. — Differences with the
United Provinces.— Dutch War. — Commerce. — The Navigation Act.^-The Navy of
England. — Blake. — Battles of Blake and Van Tromp.— Petition of the Arrny to the
Parliament.— Dialogue between Cromwell and Whitelocke.— The question of future
Representation. — Dissolution of the Long Parliament. — Public Opinion on the Dis
solution. — 'Summons for a Parliament.
The Parliament and people of England felt that Cromwell had
saved the Commonwealth. He had done more than maintain a form
of government. He had stopped the triumphant return to unlimited
power of a prince who, once seated at Whitehall by military supe
riority, would have swept away every vestige of the liberty and
security that had been won since 1640. The greater part of Europe
was fast passing into complete despotism ; and the state vessel of
England would have been borne along helplessly into that shore
less sea. The enemies of Cromwell — the enthusiastic royalists and
the theoretic republicans — saw, with dread and hatred, that by the
natural course of events, the victorious General would become the
virtual head of the Commonwealth. He probably could not sup
press the same conviction in his own breast. Ludlow thus writes
of Cromwell's return to London after the battle of Worcester : " The
General, after this action, which he called the crowning victory,
took upon -him a more stately behaviour, and chose new friends ;
neither must it be omitted, that instead of acknowledging the ser
vices of those who came from all parts to assist against the common
enemy, though he knew they had deserved as much honour as him
self and the standing army, he frowned upon them, and the very
next day after the fight dismissed and sent them home, well know
ing, that a useful and experienced militia was more likely to ob-
14 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
struct than to second him in his ambitions designs. Being on his
way to London, many of the Members of Parliament, attended by
the City, and great numbers of persons of all orders and conditions,
went some miles out of the town to meet him, which tended not a
little to heighten the spirit of this haughty gentleman. * * * In
a word, so much was he elevated with that success, that Mr. Hugh
Peters, as he since told me, took so much notice of it, aslo say in
confidence to a friend upon the road in his return from Worcester,
that Cromwell would make himself king."* Again and again
Ludlow dwells upon the expression used by Cromwell in his letter
to the Parliament, as if it were a foreshadowing of his own " crown
ing." Later writers accept it in the same sense. Cromwell's real
phrase is this : "The dimensions of this mercyare above my thoughts :
it is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy." To one who was as
familiar with Scripture phraseology as Ludlow was, it seems ex
traordinary that he should attach any more recondite sense to this
epithet than that of a perfeclingmercy or victory. " Thou crownest
the year with thy goodness " is the same as " Thou completest the
year with thy goodness."
The authority of the Commonwealth being supreme in every
quarter — England tranquil; Ireland subdued; Scotland incapable
of attempting any further enterprise of a .royalist character ; the
Channel Islands now garrisoned by a parliamentary force ; — the
reduction of the army was a natural policy. The Militia had been
disbanded ; but the great body of men in arms, who had so largely
influenced the course of military and civil events, were still all-"
powerful. The regular army was reduced to twenty-five thousand
men. The General made no opposition to a measure which in
some degree arose from a jealous apprehension of his power. He
was now most strenuous for the advancement of two great measures
— an Act of Amnesty, and a Law for the Election of future Parlia
ments. These subjects had been often discussed, and as often
laid aside. Upon Cromwell's return to London, he urged both
measures forward with his wonted energy. They were just and
salutary measures ; yet evil motives were ascribed to him by
the republicans. " He grew," says Ludlow, " most familiar with
those whom he used to show most aversion to ; endeavouring to
oblige the royal party, by procuring for them more favourable con
ditions than consisted with the justice of the Parliament to grant,
uncler colour of quieting the spirits of many people." \ The Law
• " Memoirs," vol. i. p. 365, and vol. ii.-p. 447. 't Ibid., vol. ii. p. 447-
CONFERENCE ON THE SETTLEMENT OF THE NATION. 1$
for the Election of future Parliaments was passed,' by the House
voting that it would not continue its sittings beyond the 3rd of
November, 1654. Even this half measure was only carried by a
small majority. It became manifest that the Parliament did not
rest on very secure foundations. The old question of a Settlement
of the Nation was very forcibly revived in many minds. How
difficult a question it was may be collected from Whitelocke's re
port of a Conference held at Speaker Lenthall's house, by request
of Cromwell. We do not attempt to abridge this account, which
has been termed "dramaturgic " — " of a date posterior the Restora
tion " — but which, at any rate, shows us how these solid puritanical
statesmen conducted their business : —
" Upon the defeat at Worcester, Cromwell desired a meeting
with divers members of Parliament, and some chief officers of the
army, at the Speaker's house. And a great many being there, he
proposed to them, That now the old king being dead, and his son
being defeated, he held it necessary to come to a Settlement of the
Nation. And in order thereunto, had requested this meeting ; that
they together might consider and advise what was fit to be done,
and to be presented to the Parliament.
' Speaker. My Lord, this company were very ready to attend
your Excellence, and the business you are pleased to propound to
us is very necessary to be considered. God hath given marvellous
success to our forces under your command ; and if we do not im
prove these mercies to some settlement, such as may be to God's
honour, and the good of this Commonwealth, we shall be very much
blameworthy. ' Harrison. I think that which my Lord General hath pro
pounded is, To advise as to a settlement both our Civil and Spirit
ual Liberties ; and so, that the mercies which the Lord hath given
unto us may not be cast away. How this may be done is the great
question. ' Whitelocke. It is a great question indeed, and not sudden
ly to be resolved ! Yet it were pity that a meeting of so many able
and worthy persons as I see here, should be fruitless. I should
humbly offer, in the first place, Whether it be not requisite to be
understood in what way this Settlement is desired ? Whether of .
an absolute republic, or with any mixture of monarchy.
' Cromwell. My Lord Commissioner Whitelocke hath put us
upon the right point ; and indeed it is mv meaning, that we should
consider, Whether a Republic, or a mixed Monarchical Govern-
1 6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ment, will be best to be settled ? And if anything Monarchical,
then, in whom that power shall be placed ?
' Sir Thomas Widdrington. I think a mixed Monarchical
Government will be most suitable to the Laws and People of this
nation. And if any Monarchical, I suppose we shall hold it most
just to place that power in one of the sons of the late king.
' Colonel Fleetwood. I think that the question, Whether
an absolute Republic, or mixed Monarchy, be best to be settled in
this nation, will not be very easy to be determined.
' Lord Chief-Justice St. John. It will be found, that the
Government of this nation, without something of Monarchical
power, will be very difficult to be so settled as not to shake the
foundations of our laws, and the liberties of the people.
' Speaker. It will breed a strange confusion to settle a
Government of this nation without something of Monarchy.
' Colonel Desborow. I beseech you, my Lord, why may not
this, as well as other nations, be governed in the way of a Republic ?
' Whitelocke. The laws of England are so interwoven with
the power and practice of Monarchy, that to settle a Government
without something of Monarchy in it, would make so great an
alteration in the proceedings of our Law, that you will scarce have
time to rectify it, nor can we well foresee the inconveniences which
will arise thereby.
' Colonel Whalley. I do not well understand matters of
Law : but it seems to me the best way, not to have anything of
Monarchical power in the settlement of our Government. And if
we should resolve upon any, whom have we to pitch upon ? The
king's eldest son hath been in arms against us, and his second son
likewise is our enemy.
' Sir Thomas Widdrington. But the late king's son, the
duke of Gloucester, is still among us ; and too young to have been
in arms against us, or infected with the principles of our enemies.
' Whitelocke. There may be a day given for the king's
eldest son, or for the duke of York, his brother, to come into the Par
liament. And upon such terms as shall be thought fit and agree
able, both to our Civil and Spiritual Liberties, a Settlement may be
made with them.
' Cromwell. That will be a business of more than ordinary
difficulty ! But really I think, if it may be done with safety, and
preservation of our rights, both as Englishmen and as Christians,
That a settlement with somewhat of Monarchical power ii: it would
be very effectual.' "
foreign relations of the commonwealth. 17
"•Vhether in this Conference the Grandees, as they were called,
believed that when Cromwell expressed his thought " that a settle
ment with somewhat of monarchical power in it would be very
effectual," he was consulting only his own ambition; or whether
they felt that he was propounding a principle of which most men
saw the practical wisdom, although " a business of more than or
dinary difficulty '' — this is not so clear as some have set forth.
Whitelocke himself thought that Cromwell was " fishing for men's
opinions " — a sort of angling in which he was generally successful.
The foreign relations of the English Commonwealth with the
other European States here demand a brief notice ; especially
those which led to a great naval war with the Dutch.
The privateering hostilities of prince Rupert were necessary to
be met by the Republican Parliament with no common energy.
The navy was in the lowest condition of inefficiency in 1648; in
three years it had become a most formidable force in every sea.
The Packet-boat from Dover could now sail without being " pil
laged," unless it had "a convoy,'' as in 1649, when Evelyn writes,
" We had a good passage, though chased for some hours by a
pirate ; but he durst not attack our frigate, and we then chased him
till he got under the protection of the castle of Calais ; it was a
small privateer belonging to the -prince of Wales." Rupert had
been driven by Blake from the Irish coast. The English Channel
was well guarded by an adequate force. There was a Committee
for the navy, of which Vane was President ; and his zealous ac
tivity showed he was a man of action as well as of speech. English
squadrons were cruising wherever there was a privateering enemy
who could make commerce insecure ; for as yet there was no actual
war with a foreign nation. When Rupert had escaped from the
blockade of Kinsale, he sailed to the coast of Portugal. Blake fol
lowed himto the mouth of the Tagus. The royal freebooter had ob
tained favour at the Court of Lisbon, as might have been expected
from a Catholic king, incensed at republican audacity. The stout
hearted Captain who represented the honour of England demanded
of king John IV. that he should expel from his ports the enemies
of commerce between friendly nations ; or that he, Robert Blake,
should be allowed to enter the harbour and assert the demands of
his government. The required admittance was refused. Blake, at
tempting to pass the bar, was fired on by the Portuguese forts ;
and he immediately made reprisals upon the ships of king John.
Rupert escaped to the coast of Spain ; and after similar demands
Vol. IV.— 2
1 8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and refusals from the Spanish government, Blake destroyed the
greater number of the privateering fleet. France and Spain were
each under very doubtful relations to England, although Spain had
recognised the Commonwealth. The time had not arrived when
it was necessary to make any strict alliance, or to come to a de
cided rupture, with either of these great powers — Spain essentially
weak in the decay of national spirit ; France embarrassed by in
testine commotions. The relations of the Commonwealth with the
United Provinces were changed by the death of the prince of
Orange in 1650. Had he lived his influence would have probably
excited a war with the republicans, who had put his father-in-law to
death, and abolished monarchical government There was large
commercial intercourse between England and these Provinces.
They were both Protestant. The Council of State of the Common
wealth conceived the ambitious project of " a more intrinsical and
mutual interest of each other than has hitherto been, for the good
of both." Two ambassadors, Oliver St. John and Walter Strick
land, were sent to the Hague to accomplish this alliance ; which
really meant that the two republics should form one nation. This
scheme was decidedly unpopular, as it deserved to be. At the
Hague there were many English Cavaliers with the duke of York
and his sister, the widow of the- prince of Orange. The Dutch
populace and the English royalists joined in insults to the suite of
the ambassadors. Oliver St. John and the duke of York nearly
came to crossing swords in the public park. These proceedings
took place before the issue of affairs in Scotland. The ambas
sadors were at length recalled by the Parliament. It was manifest
that the rival commercial states would not long remain at peace.
A war was unavoidable, when the House carried the Navigation
Act, under which no vessel could enter an English port with a
cargo not produced or manufactured in the country to which the
vessel belonged. This Act went to destroy the Dutch carrying
trade. When the royalist cause was finally overthrown by the
victory of Worcester, all the smaller states of Europe manifested
the greatest eagerness for the alliance of the triumphant Common
wealth. The States-General now sent ambassadors to London.
They were received with all outward manifestations of respect ;
but the Englisli statesmen were resolved to restore the flag of
their country to that supremacy which Elizabeth had asserted, but
which her successors had suffered to pass awav. The Great Seal
of the Commonwealth ostentatiously exhibited the defences of
THE DUTCH WAR. 19
" The British Sea." The salute of the English flag, the right of
search, the limits of the fisheries, became the subjects of ardent
contention between England and the States-General. Whilst
these differences continued to be agitated in state papers ; whilst
the Dutch statesmen were demanding the repeal of the Navigation
Act, and the English Council as strenuously refusing even a tem
porary suspension of that measure, so long considered the great
foundation of our commercial prosperity ; the fleets of Blake and
the Dutch admiral, Van Tromp, came to a conflict on the 19th of
May, 1652. The Dutchman had come into the Downs, with a
fleet of forty-two vessels. Blake thought it right to look after them,
and appeared with twenty-three ships. He fired three signal guns,
to summon Van Tromp to lower his flag. Tromp paid no regard
to the summons, and sailed on. He suddenly turned round, and
sent a broadside into Blake's flag-ship. An engagement immediately
took place which lasted four hours. Van Tromp lost one ship ;
and when morning dawned, the gazers from the heights of Dover
saw no trace of a hostile fleet. There were conflicting statements
from each nation. It was a premeditated attack, said the English ;
he came to insult us on our own seas. Stress of weather drove
our admiral to your coasts, said the Dutch ; he could have de
stroyed your fleet if he had meant war. The United Provinces
appear to have been anxious to remain at peace ; although there
were party-divisions amongst their rulers. The English Council
was probably not indisposed for a naval war. There was an end
of land victories ; and the popular excitement might find in mari
time successes some occupation more safe than agitations for new
reforms. War was declared against the States-General on the 8th
of July. The great naval power of the Dutch was founded, as naval
power must necessarily be founded, upon the extent of their com
merce. The industrial spirit of the reign of Elizabeth, the maritime
discoveries, the bold but imperfect attempts at colonization, crea
ted the material force and called out the national spirit, that swept
the Spanish galleons from the seas over which they asserted-a—
haughty dominion. A year or two before the Long Parliament,
the commerce of England appears to have been in a languid condi
tion. The East India company, the Turkey Company, the Mer
chant Adventurers, had been long contending, with doubtful suc
cess, against the inevitable encroachments of private enterprise.
The interlopers, as they were called, were sometimes permitted or
20 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
connived at ; and sometimes repressed by stringent proclamations.
Individual energy during the palmy days of the Star-Chamber was
sufficiently retarded by small monopolies, in the shape of licenses
and patents. Nevertheless the trade of the country went on in
creasing ; and the plantations of America and the West Indies
furnished new commodities in exchange for English produce. King
James's " Counterblast to Tobacco " was forgotten ; and many a
good ship was now laden with the weed once sold for its weight in
silver. The Civil War necessarily interfered with some mercantile
operations ; but if we look to the sums which were contributed by
London and other commercial cities for the exigencies of the Par
liament, we may be assured that in spite of fears and animosities,
of civil and religious dissensions, the aggregate exchange of the
country suffered no ruinous interruption. Under the Common
wealth there was undoubtedly a revival of commercial enterprise.
A writer after the Restoration, complaining of the low condition of
trade at that time (1668), attributes it to the mistaken foreign policy
of Cromwell: " When this late tyrant, or Protector as some call
him, turned out the Long Parliament, the kingdom was arrived at
the highest pitch of trade, wealth, and honour that it, in any age,
ever yet knew. The trade appeared by the great sums offered
then for the customs and excise, nine hundred thousand pounds a
year being refused." * There can be no doubt that upon the ter
mination of the Civil War all industry recovered the check that it
must have necessarily received. It was felt that property was se
cure ; that a political revolution had been accomplished without
any uprooting of the great principles of social order. The nation
was prosperous ; its rulers were proud of their triumphs and the
peaceable results of their arduous contests. The Navigation Act,
which was as real a manifestation of hostility to the Dutch as a
declaration of war, originated in that increasing commerce which
was grown powerful enough to contend with a long-established ri
valry. The Dutch trade was founded upon many monopolies offen
sive to the English spirit of free adventure. A bold struggle was
4g_be_made for disputing their rivals possession of the carrying-
trade of the world. The Navigation Act was a rude invention
suited to the infancy of commerce ; and it long held its influence
over us, like many other political superstitions. Whether its im
mediate results were beneficial to the country may be doubted.
The statesmen of that period and long after did .not understand
* " The World's Mi:t:k: in Oliver Cromwell ;" reprinted in Harl. Mis. vol. vii.
THE NAVY QF ENGLAND. 21
that buying and selling, freighting and unloading vessels, bringing
home useful or luxurious products of foreign countries to exchange
with our own growth or manufacture — that these complex opera
tions were not of national benefit merely as conducing to the en
richment of merchants, but chiefly beneficial as they supplied the
necessities, or increased the enjoyments, of the great mass of the
people. And yet they had glimpses of this truth. In 1649 France
prohibited all trade with England. On the 23rd of August, as
Whitelocke reports, the House voted, that no wines, wool, or silk,
of the growth of France, should be imported into England. But
upon the question whether linen should be prohibited, "it was
resolved in the negative, in regard of the general and necessary
use thereof." But the Council of State could dispense with luxu
ries. The French minister in London wrote to Mazarin that when
he told the Council " that they could not do without our wines, they
answered jocosely that men soon got accustomed to anything ;
and that as they had without inconvenience dispensed with a king,
contrary to the general belief, so they could also dispense with our
French wines." *
In the spirit of commercial rivalry, — with sailors in both fleets
that were sometimes serving in the mercantile marine, but always
trained to fight, for there were sea-robbers hovering about every
rich cargo, — Van Tromp and Blake were to try the mettle of
their crews. In every material of naval warfare the Dutch were
superior to the English. Their ships were far more numerous ;
their commanders were more experienced •. their men better dis
ciplined. Blake, and Deane, and Popham, and other sea-captains,
were land-officers. When Cromwell writes from Ireland to the
Council of State, he mentions " Colonel Blake " in one letter, and
" General Blake " in another. The Dutch had a more practised
body of naval tacticians, who had been educated for a special ser
vice connected with the rich commerce of their Indian and Amer
ican settlements. But in the English fleet there was a devoted
zeal which feared no encounter however unequal, and was indiffer
ent to the grounds of a quarrel in the determination to uphold the
national honour. In 1652, in anticipation of the Dutch war, Blake
was appointed sole admiral and general of the fleet. The charac
ter which Clarendon gives of this great commander is candid and
discriminating; and it shows how a resolute will, seconding nat-
* Guizot's "Cromwell," vol. i. p. 221; quoted from the despatch in Archives des
Affaires Estrangeres de France.
22 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ural talents, may triumph over the impediments of traditionarj
habits and imbecile routine : " Having done eminent service to
the Parliament, especially at Taunton, at land, Jie then betook
himself wholly to the sea; and quickly made himself signal there.
He was the first man that declined the old track, and made it man
ifest that the science might be attained in less time than was im
agined, and despised those rules which had been long in practice,
to keep his ship and his men out of danger ; which had been held
in former times a point of great ability and circumspection ; as if
the principal art requisite in the captain of a ship had been to be
sure to come home safe again. He was the first man who brought
the ships to contemn castles on shore, which had been thought
ever very formidable, and were discovered by him to make a noise
only, and to fright those who could rarely be hurt by them. He
was the first that infused that proportion of courage into the sea
men, by making them see by experience what mighty things they
could do, if they were resolved ; and taught them to fight in fire as
well as upon water : and though he hath been very well imitated
and followed, he was the first that gave the example of that kind
of naval courage, and bold and resolute achievements." * The
great men of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth were called
out by the circumstances of the times. The genius of Blake, in
the chases and battles of the sea, was the same creation of a strong
necessity as the genius of Cromwell in his land-fights. The great
admiral was made out of an idle country gentleman ; the great gen
eral was made out of a plain follower of rural industries. The
statesmen of the time were fashioned by the same rough teaching.
Howell, who was a sagacious observer of men's actions, and whose
judgment was not much obscured by his political feelings, writes
thus of the men of this period : " The world stands in admiration
of the capacity and docibleness of the English,' that persons of or
dinary breeding, extraction, and callings, should become statesmen
and soldiers, commanders and councillors, both in the art of war
and mysteries of state, and know the use of the compass in so
short a tract of time." f
The sea-fights between the English and the Dutch in that war
of two years have no great historical interest, for they originated
in no higher principle than commercial rivalry. Nevertheless they
abound in traits of individual heroism ; and certainly, whatever
have been her subsequent naval glories, England may still be
* "Rebellion," vol. vii. p. 216. t " Letters," vol. iv. 1655, p in.
BATTLE OF BLAKE AND VAN TROMP. 23
proud of the fame of Blake. Never were her great admirals op
posed to one more worthy than Van Tromp. Costly as this war
was to the nation, — impolitic in the leaders of the republic — it re
vived that popular spirit of reliance on the navy which even the
base humiliations of the next reign could not extinguish. The
maritime glories of the Commonwealth could be referred to with
honest pride when Englishmen blushed for the disgraces of the
Restoration. We must tell the story very briefly. In June, 1652,
Blake had a fleet of a hundred and five ships ; carrying nearly four
thousand guns. Van Tromp had a hundred and twenty ships.
Blake's first business was to assert the bounds of the English fish
ery. In the seas of the north of Scotland he dispersed six hundred
herring busses ; capturing or sinking twelve ships of war that were
protecting the fishermen's operations. Sir George Ayscough was
defending the Channel. Van Tromp came out of the Texel with
seventy-nine men of war and ten fire-ships, to engage with Ays-
cough's inferior squadron. He was becalmed, and unable to en
gage. He turned to the North Seas ; and Blake met him between
the Orkneys and Shetland. A tempest came on ; the Dutch ves-i
sels were scattered and much damaged ; and Van Tromp returned
to Holland, pursued by Blake. The Dutch admiral was unjustly
blamed for his misfortunes as if they had been faults. He resigned
his command, and was succeeded by De Ruyter. This bold sailor
came into the Channel with thirty vessels ; and drove Ayscough
into Plymouth. De Ruyter was joined by Cornelius De Witt ;
and, with a fleet of sixtv-four sail, encountered Blake in the Downs.
After a severe engagement on the 28th of September, the Dutch
were driven back to their own coasts. Van Tromp was again re-
• instated in command ; and he took the sea as winter was approach
ing, with a fleet cf seventy-three sail. The possibility of a hostile
navy appearing off the English coast at the end of November was
little calculated upon. Blake had only thirty-seven ships to meet
the Dutch admiral. But he resolved not to shrink from battle.
The issue was a conflict off the Naze, which ended in the necessity
of a retreat, with great loss, to the Thames. Van Tromp sailed
up and down the Channel with a broom at his mast head, to man
ifest that he would sweep the seas of the proud islanders ; and the
States-General proclaimed England under a blockade. The Par
liament was not disheartened ; and they were just to the merits of
their admiral. They sent him again to sea in February, 1653, with
a fleet of eighty sail, having Penn and Lawson under his command.
24 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
He met the Dutch fleet, on the 18th of February, between Port
land Hill and Cape La Hogue. It consisted of seventy-five men
of war, convoying two hundred and fifty merchantmen. The battle
lasted all day, without any decided success. It was renewed on the
following noon. Van Tromp made all sail for his own coasts, with
Blake following him. The same running fight was maintained for
two more days, with equal courage and obstinacy on both sides.
It was not a decisive victory, though the Dutch lost many ships.
Each government bestowed rewards upon its brave captains ; and
the English parliament appointed a General Thanksgiving. The
broom was not again set up at the Dutch mast-head during the war
between the two republics.
The large expenses of this Dutch war drove the Parliament
and their Council of State to resort to very arbitrary and oppres
sive measures. The Act of Amnesty afforded some security to
the persons of royalists, but that indemnity was not extended to
their property. Search for " delinquents " was to be strictly made.
Those who had been spared were now called upon to compound
for the possession of their estates. Of many Cavaliers all their real
and personal property was confiscated. Hundreds of others were
required to pay one-third of their property's value within very limited
time. Cromwell was opposed to these proceedings. He might, as
some may imagine, have desired to embarrass the government of
which lie was contemplating the overthrow ; but we must do him the
justice to believe, that, speaking in the face of his contemporaries,
he was not making a pretence of moderation, when he thus de
clared his opinion in 1654: " Poor men, under this arbitrary power,
were driven like flocks of sheep, by forty in a morning, to the con
fiscation of goods and estates, without any man being able to give
a reason why two of them had deserved to forfeit a shilling. I
tell you the truth. And my soul, and many persons' whom I see
in this place, were exceedingly grieved at these things ; and knew
not which way to help them, except by our mournings, and giving
our negatives when occasion served.''* The victorious General
of the armies of the Commonwealth had put himself into the posi
tion of the leading reformer of the tyrannies and neglects of the
rulers of the Commonwealth. He necessarily had a large body of
supporters in the people generally ; but his strength was in that
body of men whom he had led to conquest — whom he had moulded
into a conviction that he was yet to be -their instrument in com-
* Speech to the First Parliament of the Protectorate. Carlyle, vol. iii. p. 44.
DIALOGUE BETWEEN CROMWELL AND WHITELOCKE. 25
pleting the national deliverance from the evils which were still to
be striven against. Whilst the English and Dutch were fighting
in the Channel in the autumn of 1652, a Petition was presented to
the Parliament by " the Officers of my Lord-General's Army.
They craved Reform of the Law ; they asked for a Gospel minis
try ; they most especially urged a swifter progress to the Bill for a
new Representation in Parliament. Upon this very expressive in
timation that there was something going on which was not to be
despised, the lawyers applied themselves to settle some very intri
cate questions as to the possession of estates, so disturbed by the
late intestine commotions ; and the House voted that "the Com
mittee for regulating the Law be revived." Subsequently they
appointed a Commission "to take into consideration what incon
veniences there are in the Law ; and how the mischiefs that grow
from the delays, the changeableness, and the irregularities in law
proceedings may be prevented, and the speediest way to reform
the same." The demand for a Gospel ministry — a vague demand
— was only met by strong laws against " atheistical, blasphemous,
and execrable opinions," and by continuing severities against
Catholics and Episcopalians. The question of a new Representa
tion went on very slowly to a solution. The undisguised hostility
of Cromwell to the existing order of things seemed to make the
prediction of Hugh Peters not unlikely to be realised. The nation
began to feel the embarrassments occasioned by the union of the
legislative and executive powers in an Assembly, not numerous
enough to be the interpreters of opinion, and too numerous for
salutary and consistent action. T/here is a well-known dialogue
between Cromwell and Whitelocke which, although recorded with
a little more elaboration thai-, seems natural to the relation of an
evening's talk in St. James's Park, may be received as a trust
worthy notion of the state of affairs, and of the temper of the man
who was destined to change the mode of government. Cromwell
complains of " jarrings and animosities one against another ; " he
points out " the dangerous condition we are in." Whitelocke
agrees with him : " My lord, I look upon our present danger as
greater than ever it was in the field ; and, as your Excellency
truly observes, our proneness is to destroy ourselves, when our
enemies could not do it." It is "the factions and ambitious de
signs " of the army to which he is pointing. Cromwell admits
that " their insolency is very great ; " but, he continues, " as for
the members of Parliament, the army begins to have a strange dis-
26 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
taste against them, and I wish there were not too much cause for
it. And really their pride and ambition, and self-seeking, engross
ing all places of honour and profit to themselves ; and their daily
breaking forth into new and violent parties and factions ; their
delays of business, and designs to perpetuate themselves, and to
continue the power in their own hands; their meddling in private
matters between party and party, contrary to the institution of
Parliaments, and their injustice and partiality in those matters ;
and the scandalous lives of some of the chief of them;— these
things, my lord, do give too much grounds for people to open their
mouths against them, and to dislike them. Nor can they be kept
within the bounds of justice, and law or reason ; they themselves
being the supreme power of the nation, liable to no account to any,
nor to be controlled or regulated by any other power; there being
none superior, or co-ordinate with them. So that, unless there be
some authority and power so full and so high as to restrain and
keep things in better order, and that may be a check to these ex
orbitances, it will be impossible in human reason to prevent our
ruin." Whitelocke somewhat defends the members of Parlia
ment : " Too many of them are much to blame in those things you
have mentioned, and many unfit things have passed among them ;
but I hope well of the major part of them, when great matters come
to a decision." Cromwell does not quite agree : " Some course must
be thought on, to curb and restrain them, or we shall be ruined by
them." There is a difficulty in this, as Whitelocke judges : " We our
selves have acknowledged them the supreme power, and taken our
commissions and authority in thehighest concernments from them;
and how to restrain and rule, them after this, it will be hard to find
out a way for it." The reply is startling : " What if a man should take
upon him to be King ? " Whitelocke replies as if there could be no
doubt that the Lord-General meant himself : " As to vour own per
son, the title of king would be of no advantage, because vou have the
full kingly power in you already concerning the militia, as you are
General. As to the nomination of civil officers, those whom you
think fittest are seldom refused : and, although vou have no nega
tive vote in the passing of laws, yet what you dislike will not easily
be carried ; and the taxes are already settled, and in your power to
dispose the money raised. And as to foreign affairs, though the
ceremonial application be made to the Parliament, yet the expecta
tion of good or bad success in it is from your Excellency, and
particular solicitations of foreisrn ministers are made to you only.
THE QUESTION OF FUTURE REPRESENTATION. 27
So that I apprehend indeed less envy, and danger, and pomp, but
not less power and real opportunities of doing good, in your being
General, than would be if you had assumed "the title of King."
This bold declaration of Cromwell was met by what appears a
singular mode in Whitelocke to propitiate a man who had such
power to carry his day-dreams into realities. " What if a man
should take upon him to be King," was answered by him with an
expedient which he propounds with very considerable alarm. He
is re-assured when the Lord-General says, " There shall be no
prejudice come to you by any private discourse between us. I
shall never betray my friend." The expedient is this : " I propound
for your Excellency to send to the king of Scots, and to have a
private treaty with him.'' Cromwell postponed the consideration
of this expedient to a further time ; and Whitelocke adds, " My
Lord-General did not in words express any anger, but only by looks
and carriage; and turned aside from me to other company."
During the winter and spring the great question at issue
between the Parliament and the man described by Whitelocke as
having kingly authority in all but the name, was the long debated
question of future representation. In February it was determined
that the existing Parliament should dissolve on the 3rd of Novem
ber of that year. The future number of Representatives was to be
four hundred, to be elected by freeholders in counties, and owners
or tenants in boroughs. But this was not to be wholly a new
Parliament. The members then sitting were to remain as the
Representatives of the counties or boroughs for which they then
sat ; and it was resolved that a general Committee should pronounce
upon the validity of the new returns. Against the proposal "for
the perpetuating the same men in Parliament," as Cromwell after
wards described this Bill, he gave his most strenuous opposition.
On the 19th of April, 1653, there was great conference of members
of the House, and of officers of the Army, at Cromwell's residence of
Whitehall. One party pressed the necessity of the Bill ; the other
desired that "they would devolve the trust over to some well-
affected men, such as had an interest in the nation, and were known
to be of good affection to the Commonwealth."* "At parting,"
continues the same narrator of these proceedings, — Cromwell him
self — " one of the chief " of the members, and " two or three more,
did tell us, that they would endeavour to suspend farther proceed
ings about their Bill for a new Representation until they had
* Cromwell's Speech to the " Little Parliament," Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 317.
28 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
another conference with us. And upon this we had great satisfac
tion." * What the morrow brought forth is one of the strangest
events in English history.
It was late at night when the conference on the 19th of April,
at Cromwell's house, the Cockpit at Whitehall, was come to an
end. It was understood that the discussion was to be renewed on
Wednesday, the 20th. The Lord General is ready to receive the
members of Parliament, he and his officers. Some few members
are come ; but the leaders have not made their appearance.
Reports arrived that the Parliament was sitting ; then, that Vane,
and Algernon Sidney, and Henry Martyn, were urging the immedi
ate passing of the Biil for their dissolution and a new Representa
tion. Colonel Ingoldsby now came in haste, and said that there
was not a moment to lose. The obnoxious Bill was about to
become Law. Cromwell instantly went forth, followed by Lambert
and several other officers. A detachment of soldiers was ordered to
march to the House of Commons. The Lord General placed his men
in the lobby, and then entered the House alone. " The Parliament
sitting as usual, and being in debate upon the Bill with the amend
ments, which it was thought would have been passed that day, the
Lord General Cromwell came into the house, clad in plain black
clothes and gray worsted stockings, and sat down as he used to do, in
an ordinary place." The scene which ensued has been described by
Algernon Sidney, by Whitelocke, and by Ludlow. Sidney and
Whitelocke were present. Ludlow was in Ireland ; but he was in
a position to obtain information, and he has put his details together
in a very coherent narrative, little coloured by the wrath which he
ever afterwards felt towards the formidable man " in plain black
clothes and gray worsted stockings." '"He sat down and heard the
debate for some time. Then calling to Major-General Harrison,
who was on the other side of the House, to come to him, he told
him, that he judged the Parliament ripe for a dissolution, and this
to be the time of doing it. The Major-General answered, as he
since told me ; ' Sir, the work is very great and dangerous, there
fore I desire you seriously to consider of it before you engage in
it.' ' You say well,' replied the General, and thereupon sat still
for about a quarter of an hour : and then the question for passing
the Bill being to be put, he said again to Major-General Harrison,
' This is the time — I must do it ;' and suddenly standing up, made
a speech, wherein he loaded the Parliament with the vilest
* Cromwell's Speech to the " Little Parliament," Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 317.
DISSOLUTION OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT.
29
reproaches, charging them not to have a heart to do anything for
the public good, to have espoused the corrupt interests of Presby
tery, and the lawyers, who were the supporters of tyranny and
oppression, accusing them of an intention to perpetuate them
selves in power, had they not been forced to the passing of this
act, which he affirmed they designed never to observe, and there
fore told them, that the Lord had done with them, and had chosen
other instruments for the carrying on his work that were more
worthy. This he spoke with so much passion and discomposure
of mind, as if he had been distracted. Sir Peter Wentworth stood
up to answer him, and said, That this was the first time that ever
he had heard such unbecoming language given to the Parliament,
and that it was the more horrid in that it came from their servant,
and their servant whom they had so highly trusted and obliged :
but as he was going on, the General stepped into the midst of the
House, where continuing his distracted language, he said, ' Come,
come, I will put an end to your prating ; ' then walking up and
down the House like a madman, and kicking the ground with his
feet, he cried out, ' You are no Parliament, I say you are no
Parliament ; I will put an end to your sitting ; call them in, call
them in.' Whereupon the serjeant attending the Parliament opened
the doors, and Lieutenant-Colonel Worsley with twq files of
musketeers entered the House ; which Sir Henry Vane observing
from his place, said aloud, ' This is not honest ; yea, it is against
morality and common honesty.' Then Cromwell fell a railing at
him, crying out with a loud voice, 'O Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry
Vane ; the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane.' Then looking
upon one of the members, he said, ' There sits a drunkard ; ' and
giving much reviling language to others, he commanded the mace
to be taken away, saying, ' What shall we do with this bauble ?
here, take it away.' Having brought all into this disorder, Major-
General Harrison went to the Speaker as he sat in the chair, and
told him, that seeing things were reduced to this pass, it would not
be convenient for him to remain there. The Speaker answered,
that he would not come down unless he were forced. ' Sir,' said
Harrison, ' I will lend you my hand ; ' and thereupon putting his
hand within his, the Speaker came down. Then Cromwell applied
himself to the members of the House, who were in number between
eighty and a hundred, and said to them, ' It's you that have forced
me to- this, for I have sought the Lord night and day, that he
would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work.'
30 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Hereupon Alderman Allen, a member of parliament, told him, that
it was not yet gone so far, but all things might be restored again ;
and that if the soldiers were commanded out of the House, and the
mace returned, the public affairs might go on in their former
course ; but Cromwell having now passed the Rubicon, not only
rejected his advice, but charged him with an account of some
hundred thousand pounds, for which he threatened to question
him, he having been long treasurer for the Army, and in a rage
committed him to the custody of one of the musketeers. Alderman
Allen told him, that it was well known that it had not been his
fault that his account was not made up long since ; that he had
often tendered it to the House, and that he asked no favour from
any man in that matter. Cromwell having acted this treacherous
and impious part, ordered the guard to see the House cleared of
all the members, and then seized upon the records that were there,
and at Mr. Scobell's house. After which he went to the clerk,
and snatching the Act of Dissolution, which was ready to pass, out
of his hand, he put it under his cloak, and having commanded the
doors to be locked up, went away to Whitehall."*
The Council of State, in spite of the remonstrance of Bradshaw,
its President, was dismissed the same afternoon by the same strong
hand. In a newspaper of the following day, Mercurius Polilicus,
appeared this semi-official paragraph : " The Lord General delivered
yesterday in Parliament divers reasons wherefore a present period
should be put to the sitting of this Parliament, and it was accord
ingly done, the Speaker and the members all departing; the ground
of which proceedings will, it is probable, be shortly made public."
The French minister in London, writing to his government on the
3d of May, describes this humiliating end of the famous Long
Parliament. "The people," he writes, " universally rejoice, and
the higher ranks (la noblesse) equally so, in the generous action oi
General Cromwell, and the fall of the Parliament, which is reviled
by every mouth. There is written on the House of Parliament —
' This house is now to be let, unfurnished,' " t
The forcible expulsion of that Parliament which had become
supreme through a similar unconstitutional violence, that of Colonel
Pride's Purge, appears to have produced very little public excite
ment. Cromwell exclaimed, " We do not hear even a dog bark at
* " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 455. .
t M. de Bordeaux to M. Servien, in Guizot, Appendix xxiii.
PUBLIC OPINION ON THE DISSOLUTION. 3 1
their going." The republican leaders were indignant; but they
were powerless. This great change had been effected without a
single drop of blood- being shed. It was followed by no severities
against those who were known -to be most hostile to the one man
who was regarded in many things as the real ruler of England.
Many knew and avowed, as he himself knew, " that a settlement
with somewhat of monarchical power in it would be very effectual."
Speaker Lenthall, who was handed down from his chair, on the
20th of April, had expressed his opinion that " something of
monarchy " was wanting for the government of this nation.* Many
rejoiced at this approach to an authority more direct, less vacillating
and less contentious, than the supreme government by a Par
liament. Even the republicans, who had a natural dread of Crom
well's ambition, acquiesced in the instant change which had been
produced by his commanding will. Mrs. Hutchinson writes of
her husband, who for nearly a year had been absent from his place
in the House • " He was going up to attend the business of his
country alone, when news met him upon the road, near London,
that Cromwell had broken the Parliament. Notwithstanding, he
went on, and found divers of the members there, resolved to sub
mit to the providence of God ; and to wait till He should clear their
integrity, and to disprove these people who had taxed them of
ambition ; by sitting still, when they had friends enough in the
Army, City, and country, to have disputed the matter, and probably
vanquished these accusers. They thought that if they should vex
the land by war among themselves, the late subdued enemies,
royalists and presbyterians, would have an opportunity to prevail
on their dissensions, to the ruin of both. If these should govern
well, and righteously, and moderately, they should enjoy the
benefit of their good government ; and not envy them the honoura
ble toil." f The republican Colonel and Independent submitted,
as the majority submitted, to an usurpation which seemed not
wholly unlikely to increase "good government." Suspected as
Cromwell was of aspiring to monarchical power, there was nothing
in his character to make the people dread that he would rule cruelly
and tyrannously instead of '' righteously and moderately." The
government went on without the slightest interruption. " The
Lord-General and his Council of Officers " issued two declarations,
in which it was promised that a certain number of persons should
be summoned from all parts of the kingdom — God-fearing men, and
* See ante, p. 15- t " Memoirs," voi. ii. p. 205.
32 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of approved integrity, — who should have the direction of affairs.
Meanwhile, a Council of State, consisting of thirteen, was appointed,
— nine military men and four civilians, with Cromwell as their
president. The country remained in perfect tranquillity. The four
Commissioners to whom the government of Ireland had been
entrusted since the death of Ireton in November, 1651, "continued
to act in their places and stations as before," Ludlow, one of them,
recording their hope that all would be for the best. Blake called
together the puritan captains of his fleet to consider their change
of masters. He was urged by some to take part against Cromwell.
" No," was his reply, "it is not for us to mind affairs of state, but
to keep foreigners from fooling us." Amidst this general sub
mission to what was regarded as a probable blessing, or an inevita
ble evil, there was sent out, on the 6th of June, a summons to serve
as a Member of Parliament, addressed to each of one hundred and
thirty-nine persons. These had been selected, some after consul
tations of ministers with their congregations, others by their known
public qualifications, and all by the approval of Cromwell and his
Council. Very different was this from a Representation^; but it
was such an Assembly as had been proposed by Cromwell and his
officers at the conferences which preceded the dissolution of April
20th. " That the government of the nation being in such condi
tion as we saw, and things being under so much ill-sense abroad,
and likely to end in confusion, we desired they would devolve the
trust over to some well-affected men, such as had an interest in the
nation, and were known to be of good affection to the Common
wealth. Which, we told them, was no new thing when this land
was under the like hurlyburlies. And we had been labouring to
get precedents to convince them of it ; and it was confessed by
them it was no new thing " * The following is the Summons by
which the members of " the Little Parliament " were called to
gether : —
" Forasmuch as, upon the dissolution of the late Parliament, it
became necessary, that the peace, safety, and good government of
this Commonwealth should be provided for : And in order there
unto, divers persons, fearing God, and of approved fidelity and
honesty, are, by myself with the advice of my council of officers,
nominated ; to whom the great charge and trust of so weighty af
fairs is to be committed : And having good assurance of your love
to, and courage for, God and the interest of His cause, and 'that'
* Cromwell's Speech, July ). Carlyle, vol. ii. p. 346.
SUMMONS FOR A PARLIAMENT. 33
of the good people of this Commonwealth : I, Oliver Cromwell,
Captain General and Commander in Chief of all the Armies and
Forces raised and to be raised within this Commonwealth, do
hereby summon and require you, , being one of the per
sons nominated, personally to be and appear at the Council-
Chamber, commonly known or called by the name of the Council-
Chamber at Whitehall, within the city of Westminster, upon the
fourth day of July next ensuing the date hereof ; Then and there
to take upon you the said trust ; unto which you are hereby called,
and appointed to serve as a member for the county of And
hereof you are not to fail.
" Given under my hand and seal the 6th day of June, 1653,
"Oliver Cromwell."
Vol. IV.— 3
34 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER II.
Defeat of Van Tromp. — Character of the Little Parliament.— Cromwell's Address to this
* Assembly. — Its Provisional Constitution. — Their proceedings and tendencies. — Res
ignation of the Little Parliament. — Oliver inaugurated as Protector. — Social Condi
tion of the Kingdom.
The summons which Cromwell sent throughout the country
for the assembling of a body of men that should, in some degree,
though not wholly as a parliament, represent the interest of Eng
land, Scotland, and Ireland, was made public at a propitious sea
son of national triumph. On the 4th of June, Blake and Monk
had sent a despatch to Cromwell, announcing a great victory over
the Dutch fleet. Monk and Dean were cruising, with a portion of
the English fleet, between the North Foreland and Nieuport;
Blake was on our northern coasts. Van Tromp decidecL to en
counter the fleet thus separated from their great admiral. The
engagement continued all through the day of the 2nd of June.
Dean had been killed by a cannon-shot at the first broadside.
Each of the fleets had been sorely crippled when night separated
them. The action re-commenced on the 3rd. On that morning
the sound of cannon from the north told the welcome news to
Monk that the Sea-king was at hand. Blake's ships broke through
the Dutch line. Van Tromp fought with desperation. His ship,
the Brederode, was boarded by the crew of Penn's flag-ship, the
James, after having repulsed Van Tromp's boarders. The Dutch
admiral, resolved not to be a prisoner, threw a lighted match into
his own powder-magazine. The explosion blew up the deck, but
he himself escaped, to renew the battle in a frigate. He at last
felt that he was beaten ; retreated to his own coasts ; and left with
the triumphant English eleven vessels and thirteen hundred and
fifty prisoners. The Council of State ordered a thanksgiving for
the victory. Cromwell's Little Parliament met, on the 4th of July,
under prosperous auspices.
The character of this Little Parliament has been studiously
misrepresented. We are taught to believe, especially in histories
addressed to the youthful understanding, that " the persons pitched
CHARACTER OF THE LITTLE PARLIAMENT. 35
upon for exercising this seemingly important trust were the lowest,
meanest, and most ignorant among the citizens, and the very dregs
of the fanatics."* Clarendon's statement, "there were among
them divers of the quality and degree of gentlemen," is. wholly
suppressed in the usual narratives. Hume's chief objection to
them is a characteristic one — " They began with seeking God by
prayer." The great scandal of this Assembly was that amongst
them " was Praise-God Barebones, a leather-seller of Fleet Street ; "
as Clarendon mentions, to enable men to form a judgment of the
rest. It has no great historical interest to discuss, as some have
done, whether the leather-merchant was named Barebones, or Bar-
bone. There he is, sitting by the side of Robert Blake, when
Robert has no fighting on his hands ; and with Francis Rouse,
Provost of Eton, and sundry men, not altogether the lowest, mean
est, and most ignorant, bearing the aristocratic names of Montagu,
Howard, and Anthony Ashley Cooper. To Cromwell's Summons
only two answered by non-attendance. Whitelocke, not at that ex
act time in good humour with Cromwell, expresses his surprise
that " many of this Assembly being persons of fortune and knowl
edge " they would accept the supreme authority of the nation from
such hands. The "persons of fortune and knowledge " — even the
leather-seller of Fleet Street — might justly think that it became
them, at a crisis when most men perceived that it would have been
dangerous to summon a regular Parliament, to accept a trust which
might avert the two extreme evils of military despotism or popular
outrage. And so, on the 4th of July, they came to the Council-
Chamber at Whitehall ; and sitting in chairs round a table, the
Lord-General, surrounded by his officers, made- a speech to the
Assembly — "full of the same obscurity, confusion, embarrassment,
and absurdity, which appear in almost all Oliver's productions,"
says Hume: "All glowing with intelligibility, with credibility;
with the splendour of genuine veracity, and heroic depth and man-
fulness," says one who is not scandalised, as Hume is, at Crom
well's words of rejoicing that a body of men was there come to
supreme authority upon the principle of "owning God and being
owned by Him." That this principle was to involve the exercise
of justice and mercy to the people, according to Oliver's notion,
mav be collected from a passage or two in his speech, which is
characteristic enough of his style of oratory. " He was an entire
stranger to oratorical art, to harmony of composition, and to ele-
* Goldsmith.
36 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
gance of language," says a great writer and orator ; but he adds,
" he impelled his auditors with resistless force towards the object
which he wished to attain, by exciting in their minds, at every step,
the impression which it was his object to produce."* What, we
ask, can the highest oratorical art effect beyond this ?
After going through a narrative of the circumstances which
preceded the dissolution of the Long Parliament, and accounted
for his participation in that act, Cromwell says, " Having done that
we have done upon such ground of necessity as we have declared,
which was not a feigned necessity but a real, — it did behove us, to
the end we might manifest to the world the singleness of our hearts
and our integrity who did these things, not to grasp at the power,
ourselves, or keep it in military hands, no, not for a day ; but, as
far as God enabled us with strength and ability, to put it into the
hands of proper persons that might be called from, the several
parts of the nation. This necessity, and I hope we may say for
ourselves, this integrity of concluding to divest the Sword of all
power in the Civil Administration, — hath been that that hath
moved us to put you to the trouble of coming hither ; and having
done that, truly we think we cannot, with the discharge of our
own conscience, but offer somewhat to you on the devolving of the
burden on your shoulders. * * *
" I think, coming through our hands, though such as we are, it
may not be ill taken if we do offer somewhat as to the discharge
of the trust which is now incumbent upon you. And although I
seem to speak of that which may have the face and interpretation
of a charge, it's a very humble one; and if he that means to be a
servant to you, who hath now called you to the exercise of the
supreme authority, discharge what he conceives to be a duty to
you, we hope you will take it in good part. And truly I shall not
hold you long in it ; because I hope it's written in your hearts to
approve yourselves to God. * * *
" It's better to pray for you than to counsel you in that matter,
that you may exercise the judgment of mercy and truth. It's bet
ter, I say, to pray for you than counsel you ; to ask wisdorn from
Heaven for you; which I am confident many thousands of Saints
do this day, and have done, and will do, through the permission of
God and His assistance. I say it's better to pray than advise ;
yet truly I think of another Scripture, which is very useful, though
it seems to be for a common application to every man as a Chris-
* Guizot, vol. ii. p. 16.
cromwell's address. 37
tian, — wherein he is counselled to ask wisdom ; and he is told what
thatis. That's 'from above,' we are told; it's 'pure, peaceable,
gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits ; '
jt's ' without partiality and without hypocrisy.' Truly my thoughts
run much upon this place, that to the execution of judgment (the
judgment. of truth, for that's the judgment) you must have wisdom
'from above,' and that's 'pure.' That will teach you to exercise
the judgment of truth ; it's ' without partiality.' Purity, impar
tiality, sincerity ; these are the effects of ' wisdom,' and these will
help you to execute the judgment of truth. And then if God give
you hearts to be ' easy to be entreated,' to be 'peaceably spirited,'
to be ' full of good fruits,' bearing good fruits to the nation, to men
as men, to the people of God, to all in their several stations, — this
will teach you to execute the judgment of mercy and truth. And
I have little more to say to this. I shall rather bend my prayers
for you in that behalf, as I said ; and many others will.
" Truly, the ' judgment of truth,' it will teach you to be as just
towards an Unbeliever as towards a Believer ; and it's our duty to
do so.- I confess I have said sometimes, foolishly it maybe: I
had rather miscarry to a Believer than an Unbeliever. This may
seem a paradox ; but let's take heed of doing that which is evil to
either ! Oh, if God fill your hearts with such a spirit as Moses
had, and as Paul had, — which was not a spirit for Believers only,
but for the whole people ! Moses, he could die for them ; wish
himself ' blotted out of God's Book :' Paul could wish himself
' accursed for his countrymen after the flesh : ' so full of affection
were their spirits unto all. And truly this would help you to exe
cute the judgment of truth, and of mercy also. * * * In my
pilgrimage, and some exercises I have had abroad, I did read that
Scripture often, forty-first of Isaiah ; where God gave me, and
some of my fellows, encouragement 'as to ' what He would do
there and elsewhere ; which he hath performed for us. He said,
' He would plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah-tree, and
the myrtle and the oil-tree ; and He would set in the desert the
fir-tree, and the pine-tree, and the box-tree together.' For what
end will the Lord do all this ? That they may see, and know, and
consider, and understand together, that the hand of the Lord hath
done this ; — that it is he who hath wrought all the salvations and
deliverances we have received. For what end ? To see, and
know, and understand together, that he hath done and wrought all
this for the good of the Whole Flock. Therefore, I beseech you,
38 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
— but I think I need not, — have a care of the Whole Flock! Love
the sheep, love the lambs ; love all, tender all, cherish and coun
tenance all, in all things that are good. And if the poorest Chris
tian, the most mistaken Christian, shall desire to live peaceably and
quietly under you, — I say, if any shall desire but to lead a life of
godliness and honesty, let him be protected."
We shall not often have occasion to introduce passages of this
serious character into our text. It is necessary in this place to
exhibit the sort of exhortations addressed by Cromwell to those
described by Hume as "low mechanics, fifth monarchy men, ana
baptists, antinomians, independents, — the very dregs of fanatics;"
and although the style of oratory may differ from modern usage
when parliaments are addressed, it may not be regarded as wholly
inappropriate and ineffectual.
The constitution of Cromwell's Assembly was provisional.
The supreme authority was devolved upon them by an instrument
signed by the Lord-General and his officers, but they were to
engage not to retain it beyond the 3rd of November, 1654; three
months before that time they were to choose their successors; and
these were not to sit longer than a year, and then to determine
upon a future constitution of government. This was an arrange
ment not altogether consistent with the theory that Cromwell
aimed at an arbitrary government in his own person ; and is only
explained by the assertion that he adopted a temporary expedient
which he knew could not stand in the way of his own ambitious
designs. Upon this principle it is held that it was "the deep
policy of Cromwell to render himself the sole refuge of those who
valued the laws, or the regular ecclesiastical ministry, or their own
estates, all in peril from the mad enthusiasts who were in hopes to
prevail "*— that he therefore chose the mad enthusiasts, "ming
ling them with a sufficient proportion of a superior class whom he
could direct." A deep policy, no doubt, but also a policy of very
uncertain result. When we look back upon the earnestness with
which Cromwell had advocated the reform of the law ; his zeal for
amending the condition of the poor; his eager pleadings against
the oppressions of prisoners for debt ; his desires for the promo
tion of education, — it appears somewhat unlikely that if he meant
these men to do nothing, and thus ultimately to throw the popu
larity of remedial measures into his hands, they should at once
have applied themselves to these objects with a vigour that con-
* Hallam, " Constitutional History," Chap. x.
CROMWELL S ASSEMBLY. 39
trasted with the comparative torpor of the last days of the Long
Parliament. They formed Committees to examine these questions,
and others of political importance, such as Union with Scotland,
the division of lands in Ireland, and the financial condition of the
kingdom. They did, however, some things which gave offence ,to
two powerful classes — the clergy and the lawyers. They abolished
the Court of Chancery, and they decreed by a majority of two,
that tithes should be abolished. The abolition of tithes, before a
maintenance by law should have been otherwise provided, was
against a report of their own Committee. The more enthusiastic
of the religious party had gained the ascendancy over those who
despised this world's wisdom. Cromwell did not despise it; and
he saw the real evils that had developed themselves in an authority
of which the majority, led by Major-General Harrison, held that
" the Saints shall take possession of the kingdom and keep it."f
These extreme doctrines were preached in the meetinga of sec
taries. Two anabaptists, Feake and Powell, were most violent in
urging great social changes, at which the more moderate became
alarmed. The men of station and property began to regard Crom
well as the only power interposed between order and anarchy. In
the next year, when he called a general Parliament, he spoke very
clearly upon these dangers of the Commonwealth. He pointed to
" the ranks and orders of men, whereby England had been known
for hu'ndreds of years ; — a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman — -
that is a gobd interest of the nation, and a great one. For the
orders of men and ranks of men, did not that Levelling principle
tend to the reducing of all to an equality ? What was the pur
port of it but to. make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the land
lord — which, I think, if obtained, would not have lasted long. The
men of that principle, after they had served their own turns, would
then have cried up property and interest fast enough." With
reference to the most fanatical of the sectaries, those who believed
in the approach of the Fifth Monarchy,, when the Saints of Christ
should alone reign in the earth, Cromwell says, " When more ful
ness of the Spirit is poured forth to subdue iniquity, and bring in
everlasting righteousness, then will the approach of that glory be.
The carnal divisions and contentions among Christians, so com
mon, are not the symptoms of that kingdom. But for men, on
this principle, to betitle themselves, that they are the only men
to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to the people, and
* Sec Ludlow, " Memoirs," p. 565.
40 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
determine of property and liberty and everything elie, upon such a
pretension as this is, — truly they had need to give clear manifesta
tions of God's presence among them, before wise men will receive
or submit to their conclusions. Cromwell, the hypocrite, or Crom
well, the fanatic, or Cromwell, the statesman and natural ruler of
men — whatever we please to call him — saw that the Fifth Monarchy
men, with Major-General Harrison at their head, were too strong
in their enthusiasm, to make a stable government of the people a
practicable thing. There were many of his adherents of the same
opinion. On the 1 2th of December, colonel Sydenham rose in his
place, and forthwith accused the majority of desiring to take away
the laws of the land, and substitute a Mosaic code ; of seek
ing to remove a regularly appointed Christian ministry; of op
posing all learning and education. He proposed that they should
repair in a body to the Lord-General, and resign the trust which
had been committed to them. The motion was seconded by sir
Charles Wolseley. The accusations were earnestly pronounced to
be unjust ; and the meritorious labours of the Assembly were
dwelt upon. The Speaker suddenly left the chair, followed by
about forty members. Leaving a number of members behind, not
sufficient to constitute a House, they repaired to Whitehall, and
there hastily wrote a paper resigning their authority into the hands
of Cromwell. In the course of the next four days it was signed
by eighty members, constituting a majority of the whole House.
The resignation of the Little Parliament is quickly followed
by the event to which it was, without doubt, a pre-arranged pre
lude. " The perfidious Cromwell," writes Ludlow, " having forgot
his most solemn professions and former vows, as well as the blood
and treasure that had been spent in this contest, thought it high
time to take off the mask, and resolved to sacrifice all our victories
and deliverances to his pride and ambition, under colour of taking
upon him the office as it were of a High Constable, in order to
keep the peace of the nation, and to restrain men from cutting one
another's throats." * This honest republican does not, however,
inform us that such an office was altogether unnecessary. Look
ing calmly back upon this great issue of a Civil War, we can
scarcely doubt that a High Constable was absolutely wanted, and
that if the man of due vigour had not been at hand, worse evils
might have ensued than this — that on the 16th of December, 1653,
Oliver Cromwell was inaugurated " Lord Protector of the Com-
* " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 471.
OLIVER INAUGURATED AS PROTECTOR. 41
monwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland." On that day
Oliver Cromwell, then fifty-four years of age, dressed in a plain
suit of black velvet, sat clown on a Chair of State in the Court of
Chancery, when Major-General Lambert prayed him to accept the
office of Protector; and Cromwell consented "to take upon him
the protection and government of these nations, in the manner
expressed in the form of government." That form was an instru
ment of forty-two articles. It was anything but an instrument con
stituting the Protector a Dictator. The *overeignty was to reside
in the Parliament. He was not to have the power of a negative on
their laws. He had a power of making temporary ordinances until
the meeting of a Parliament. A Council of State was to assist
the Protector in the government. And so, v" having taken the oath
as directed in the close of the said instrument," writes Ludlow,
" Major-General Lambert kneeling, presented him with a Sword in
the scabbard, representing the Civil Sword ; which Cromwell
accepting, put off his own, intimating thereby that he would no
longer rule by the military sword." * The indignant Ludlow adds,
"though like a false hypocrite, he designed nothing more."
Before this great change in the government of England, White
locke had set forth on an embassy for the conclusion of a treaty
with Sweden. Cromwell had especially urged this mission upon
the reluctant Commissioner, but at last he had prevailed, f We
here notice this embassy, to point to two remarkable passages in
the conversations between queen Christina and the ambassador of
the English Commonwealth, which have reference to Cromwell.
In an interview, before the news of the event of the 16th of De
cember had reached Sweden, the following dialogue took place : —
" Queen. Much of the story of your general hath some parallel '
with that of my ancestor, Gustavus the First, who, from a private
gentleman of a noble family, was advanced to the title of marshal
of Sweden, because be had risen up and rescued his country from
the bondage and oppression which the king of Denmark had put
upon them, and expelled that king ; and for his reward, he was at
last elected king of Sweden ; and I believe that your general will
be king of England in conclusion.
" Whitelocke. Pardon me, madam, that cannot be, because Eng
land is resolved into a Commonwealth ; and my general hath
• Ludlow, " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 480. t See vol. iii. p. 626.
42 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
already sufficient power and greatness, as general of all their
forces by sea and land, which may content him.
" Queen. Resolve what you will, I believe he resolves to be
king : and hardly can any power or greatness be called sufficient,
when the nature of man is so prone (as in these days) to all am
bition." But very shortly the news reached the Swedish Court of the
altered relations of the English government with foreign states ;
and then Christina asks these pertinent questions : —
" Queen. Is your new government by => protector different from
what it was before as to monarchy, or is the alteration in all
points ?
" Whitelocke. The government is to be the same as formerly,
by successive representatives of the people in parliament; only
the protector is the head or chief magistrate of the common
wealth.'' The queen is still curious upon several difficult points which
arise out of her meditations upon this novel form of chief magis
tracy : —
" Queen. Why is the title protector, when the power is kingly ?
" Whitelocke. I cannot satisfy your majesty of the reasons of
this title, being at so great a distance from the inventors of it.
" Queen. New titles, with sovereign power, proved prejudicial
to the state of Rome.
" Whitelocke. One of your majesty's ancestors was not per
mitted to keep the title of marshal of Sweden.
" Queen. He was afterwards king, and that will be nextsfor
your protector.
" Whitelocke. That will not be so consonant to our Common
wealth as it was to your crown. * * *
" Queen. Is your protector sacred as other kings are ?
" Whitelocke. He is not anointed and crowned; those ceremo
nies were not used to him.
" Queen. His power is the same with that of king, and why
should not his title have been the same ?
" Whitelocke. It is the power which makes the title, and not
the title which makes the power ; our protector thinks he hath
enough of both.
" Queen. He is hardly a mortal man then ; but he hath brought
his business notably to pass, and hath done great things. I give
you my hand for it, that I have a great value for him."
SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGPOM. 43
Before we enter upon a narrative of the public events of the
Protectorate, let us endeavour, out of very imperfect materials, to
present a brief view of the social condition of the kingdom, in
continuation of those "glimpses of the life of the people " which
we gave at the commencement of the Civil War. * The changes
of a decade are not very marked in ordinary times. But those who
had lived through the fierce struggles of this decade, — had seen
the fall of the Monarchy, and of the Anglican Church ; the almost
utter subjection of the Cavaliers ; the growing power of the Army ;
the triumphs of the Independents over the Presbyterians ; the dis
solution of the Long Parliament ; and the approach once again to
a monarchical form of government — these must have looked upon
great vicissitudes. More than this, those who were boys when the
Puritan William Prynne stood in the pillory in 1633 must have
beheld an entire revolution in the domestic framework of society
when the Puritan Oliver Cromwell sat in the Chair of State in 1653.
Such phases of common life are rarely observed in the whirl of
public events. A casual notice here and there of a letter-writer or
a diarist enables us to piece together a few fragments. Such
mosaic work could not be elaborated into a picture with any pre
tension to verisimilitude. It can scarcely aspire to any symmetri
cal proportion.
The rapidity with which some nations, after they have been
harassed and devastated by foreign invasion or intestine wars, re
cover and become prosperous, mainly depends upon the fact of
nations being constituted of an industrious or slothful race. But
it also in no small degree depends upon their political institutions,
— the amount of individual liberty, the seciwity of property. From
a comparison of all accounts we may judge that England recovered
with wonderful ease from the destruction of capital, from the taxes,
the cdnfiscations of Civil War. Mrs. Hutchinson's account may
be received with little qualification, that the Parliament before its
dissolution " had restored the Commonwealth to such a happy,
rich, and plentiful condition, as it was not so flourishing before the
war ; and although the taxes that were paid were great, yet the
people were rich, and were able to pay them." The forfeitures of
property, so calamitous to individuals, had thrown extensive estates
into the hands of the middle classes, who cultivated them to greater
profit than their hereditary proprietors. The war itself, calling
forth a remarkable union of religious enthusiasm with sober in-
* Vol. iii. p. 435.
44 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
dustry, gave an elevation to the pursuits of the trading classes,
which made the dignity of work more appreciated by themselves
and by others. There was a general desire for religious knowledge
which created an aspiration for higher things than money even in
the humblest mechanical pursuits. It was not a period of very
unequal distribution of wealth amongst those who lived by their
industry, except in the larger operations of commerce. Baxter,
speaking of his parishioners at Kidderminster, says, " my people
were not rich. There were among them very few beggars, because
their common trade of stuff-weaving would find work for all, men,
women, and children, that were able. * * * * The generality of
the master-workmen lived but a little better than their journeymen,
from hand to mouth, but only that they laboured not altogether so
hard." Yet amongst this humble community, according to this
good man, " it was a great advantage to me that my neighbours
were of such a trade as allowed them time enough to read or talk
of holy things. * * * * As they stand in their loom they can set
a book before them." *
Whatever might be the contrarieties of doctrine and discipline
amongst the great body of Puritans, the time of scoffing and reviling
them was entirely passed. There might be secret mutterings against
fanatics amongst the old Cavaliers, but the great religious body was
too powerful, their influence was too universal, to meet with violent
resistance or open contempt. The more extreme sectaries neces
sarily provoked much suppressed ridicule ; but the great body of
the puritan Clergy were too orderly in their lives, too active in
their zeal for godliness and sobriety, and in many cases had estab
lished so great a reputation for sound learning, that the most de
voted Episcopalians and staunchest Royalists could not pretend
to despise them, as in the times of Laud. The toleration which
was imperfectly carried out by the republican Independents,
but which Cromwell made 'the ruling principle of his ecclesi
astical policy, had a tendency to mitigate some of the old feuds
of the surplice and the Geneva gown. Evelyn, the most devoted
of men to the past system of government, spiritual and tempo
ral, is naturally disgusted when, on the 4th of December, 1653,
" going this day to our church, I was surprised to see a tradesman, a
mechanic, step up ; I was resolved yet to stay and see what he would
make of it." The mechanic inferred from his text that " now
the Saints were called to destroy temporal governments ; " and
* " Life," pp. 89 and 94.
SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 45
Evelyn remarks that "with such feculent stuff, so dangerous a
crisis were things grown to." Cromwell rather averted the dan
ger of the crisis, as we have seen. Evelyn is severe upon " the
usurper " being feasted at the Lord Mayor's on Ash Wednesday ;
though he expresses no grateful sense of the change which per
mitted him "to hear the famous Dr. Jeremy Taylor, at St. Greg
ory's." This true English gentleman has unconsciously given his
testimony that the kingdom was not in a very wretched condition
when " the usurper " began openly to take the regulation of affairs.
He saw indeed, at Caversham, in 1634, lord Craven's woods being
felled "by the rebels," — the confiscation of this- property having
been an expiring act of the despotism of the Rump Parliament of
which Oliver complained. But in this summer tour, he enjoys
"the idle diversions " of Bath ; " trifling and bathing with the com
pany whojfrequent the place for health." He goes to Bristol, " a
city emulating London, not for its large extent, but manner ot
building — shops, bridge, traffic, exchange, market-place "—stand
ing "commodiously for Ireland and the Western world." He was
welcomed with old hospitality at Oxford ; and heard the famous
Independent, Dr. Owen, preach, " perstringing [glancing Upon]
Episcopacy." Cromwell was Chancellor of Oxford, and Dr. Owen
Vice-Chancellor ; yet Evelyn heard excellent orations ; and was
delighted at All Souls, with " music, voices and theorbos, performed
:by some ingenious scholars." Some of the roaring habits of the
Cavaliers were not yet banished by Puritanism; for his party's
coachmen, at Spie Park, the seat of sir Edward Baynton, were
made " exceeding drunk " by that " humourous old knight," who
ordered all gentlemen's servants to be so treated. At Wilton
House, the earl of Pembroke's, he beholds the mansion and gar
dens in the most beautiful order. He finds at Coventry " the
streets full of great shops, clean and well-paved." In Rutlandl
shire he meets an exception to the general neatness of English
villages : " Most of the rural parishes are built of mud, and the
people living as wretchedly as in the most impoverished parts o(
France, which they much resemble, being idle and sluttish." In
Leicestershire the gentry are "free drinkers." With these ex-
ceptions, wherever he travels he finds stately houses, fair gardens,
ample parks, orderly and contented people. He sees very few evi-
dences of the ravages of war. The country seems quiet and pros
perous—hot altogether a bad country to live in, though "an usurp
er ' does rule it. And so Mi. Evelyn completes his purchase ol
46 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Sayes Court ; and sets out his oval garden ; and trims his holly
hedge, afterwards so famous ; and is not wanting for amusements
even in this strict age ; for " my lady Gerrard treated us at Mul
berry Garden, now the only place of refreshment about town for
persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at." There
are indications that some of the levities are creeping in that pre
ceded the coming age of licentiousness : " I now observed how the
women began to paint themselves."
The healthful influence upon the morals of tbe rural population,
through the exertions and examples of the religious gentry, is well
illustrated by the course of life which colonel Hutchinson pursued :
" He had for about a year's time applied himself, when the parlia
ment could dispense with his absence, to the administration of
justice in the country, and to the putting in execution those whole
some laws and statutes of the land provided for the orderly regu
lation of the people. And it was wonderful how, in a short space,
he reformed several abuses and customary neglects in that part of
the country where he lived, which, being a rich fruitful vale, drew
abundance of vagrant people to come and exercise the idle trade
of wandering and begging. But he took such courses that there
was very suddenly not a beggar left in the country ; and all the
poor in every town so maintained and provided for, as they never
were so liberally maintained and relieved before nor since. He
procured unnecessary alehouses to be put down in all the towns :
and if any one that he heard of suffered any disorder or debauch
ery in his house, he would not suffer him to brew any more. He
was a little severe against drunkenness, for which the drunkards
would sometimes rail at him ; but so were all the children of dark
ness convinced by his light, that they were in awe more of his vir
tue than his- authority." In the instance of colonel Hutchinson,
an accomplished gentleman of the Independent party, Puritanism
is thus exhibited in its mildest mood. It is suppressing vagrancy
and assisting honest poverty. It is putting down unnecessary ale
houses, and is a little severe against drunkenness. But Puritanism
as exhibited in such a man is not playing the fantastic tricks which
made it odious to the great body of the people, and drove the na
tion into the disgusting sensuality and base self-seeking of the
Restoration. Puritanism naturally offended the large remaining
body who were attached to the ceremonial of the Anglican Church,
when it fasted on Christmas Day, and feasted on Ash Wednes
day. It took this course upon the old principle, that the greater
SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 47
was the remove from Roman Catholicism the nearer was the ap
proach to true religion. The people generally did not take these
sour protestations against old customs very much to heart. Salt-
fish and mince-pie were not banished from their boards, although v
the orthodox seasons for their consumption had a little varied.
They had no great reverence for those who opposed Christmas
carols and mummeries ; to whom the Yule-log and the Boar's head
were abominations. But in spite of them they had their dances
and their health-drinkings ; and wished their neighbours a merry
Christmas after the good old fashion. But when Puritanism put
itself into a rampant attitude, as it did in many districts, the peo
ple began to loath a power which was so intermeddling and so mo
rose. The neglect of public worship in a few was not likely to be
remedied by fines and the stocks. " Katherine Bartlett, widow,
upon her own confession, did absent herself from Church the last
Lord's day, contrary to the law, in the morning; was ordered to
pay zs. bd., and in default of paying was ordered to be set in the
stocks," says a record of the Dorchester justices.* From the
same authority, we learn that John Samwages, not having been to
Church for five weeks, and having not money to satisfy the law,
was ordered to be stocked for his said offence. Nor was the just
observance of Sunday likely to be greatly promoted by informa
tions against husbands and wives, and also, — cruel Puritans, —
against " sweethearts," for walking abroad in sermon time. One
unhappy victim is stocked three hours for the heinous offence of
going to Charminster immediately after dinner on Easter day, and
eating milk and cream with some lads and lasses, upon which en
tertainment they spent twopence each.f Even the plea that the
moving about on the Sabbath-day was to hear a preacher in an
other parish was no mitigation of the offence of taking a longer
walk than to the Church at the offender's own door. Working on
Sunday was punished by the rigid in the most exemplary manner.
A tailor is brought up for labouring at two o'clock on a January
morning, to have a piece of his manufacture completed in due time
for some orthodox church-goer. Children were punished for play
ing at nine-stones . Hanging out clothes to dry on the Sabbath
was an especial offence. Swearing had been a statutable crime
since the time of James I. ; but the extreme Puritans not only vis-
* Hearn's MS. Book of Proceedings, quoted in "Roberts's Southern Counties," p.
344- t Hearn's MS. Book of Proceedings:
48 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ited profane cursing with fine and the stocks, but punished even
such as followed lady Percy's example of " good sooth," and " God
shall mend me." To swear " like a comfit-maker's wife " * was a
grievous sin. " Plague take you " was finable. The magisterial
interference with private affairs was unceasing. Alice Hill " is
found to keep company with Philip Bartlett, in unseasonable
time ; " and William Steevens is sent to gaol for frequenting the
company of Christian, the wife of Edward Coles, " in a very suspi
cious manner."
That the extreme severity of some Puritans not only made
them hateful but ridiculous when their doctrines were in the as
cendant, we maj' readily believe. But at the same time we cannot
fail to discover that many of the imputations against them gen
erally were gross exaggerations. They did not give their children
such names as " Fight the good fight of Faith," and "Stand fast
on high." When Hume solemnly records that the brother of
Praise-God Barebone had for a name, " If-Christ-had not-died-for-
you,-you-had-then-been-damned,-Barebone," Hume is hoaxed by a
joke invented half-a-century after Barebone had terminated his
career of politics and leather-selling. Neither were the Puritans,
after the rantings of Stubbes and Prynne against every species of
recreation were forgotten, distinguished for any capricious dislike
of music, or any contempt of secular knowledge. No man was
more eager than Cromwell himself to protect learning and learned
men. He sought out scholars for public employments. But, what
is more to our present purpose, his house, during the Protector
ate, was as remarkable for its refined amusements as for its decor
ous piety. The love of music was with him almost a passion, as
it was with Milton. But we can nowhere find a more complete
refutation of the idle belief that all the Puritans were opposed to
every harmless pleasure, than in Lucy Hutchinson's description of
her own household. Her husband, after his retirement from pub
lic affairs, was occupied with the improvement of his estate in the
vale of Belvoir. He was a sportsman, and recreated himself, for
a little time, with his hawks; "but when a very sober fellow, that
never was guilty of the usual vices of that generation of men, rage
and swearing, died, he gave over his hawks, and pleased himself
with m-asic, and again fell to the practice of his viol, on which he
pWed excellently well ; and, entertaining tutors for the diversion
anr.i education of his children in all sorts of music, he pleased him-
* Henry IV., Part 1, Act iii. sc. i.
SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 49
self in these innocent recreations during Oliver's mutable reign.
As he had great delight, so he had great judgment, in music, and
advanced his children's practice more, than their tutors: he also
was a great supervisor of their learning, and indeed himself a tutor
to them all, besides all those tutors which he liberally entertained
in his house for them. He spared not any cost for the education
of both his sons and daughters in languages, sciences, music,
dancing, and all other qualities befitting their father's house. He
was himself their instructor in humility, sobriety, and all godliness
and virtue, which he rather strove to make them exercise with love
and delight than by constraint. As other things were his delight,
this only he made his business, to attend the education of his chil
dren, and the government of his own house and town. This hp
performed so well that never was any man more feared and loved
than he by all his domestics, tenants, and hired workmen. He was
loved with such a fear and reverence as restrained all rtrde famil
iarity and insolent presumptions in those who were under him, and
he was feared with so much love that they all delighted to do his
pleasure. As he maintained his authority in all relations, so he
endeavoured to make their subjection pleasant to them, and rather
to convince them by reason than to compel them to obedience, and
would decline even to the lowest of his family to make them enjoy
their lives in sober cheerfulness, and not find their duties burden
some. * * * * As he was very hospitable, and his conversa
tion no less desirable and pleasant than instructive and advan
tageous, his house was much resorted to, and as kindly open to
those who had in public contests been his enemies, as to his con
tinued friends ; for there never lived a man that had less malice
and revenge, nor more reconcileableness and kindness and gener
osity in his nature than he."
Aubrey records that Hollar told him that when the Civil Wars
broke out he went to the Low Countries, where he stayed till
1649: "When he first came to- England, which was a serene time
of peace, the people, both poor and rich, did look cheerfully ; but
at his return he found the countenances of the people all changed,
melancholy, spiteful, as if bewitched." * It is not an unfavourable
attribute of the English character that the people did take to heart
their strife and bloodshed, their uncertainty as to the present and
their dread of the future. Aubrey has no direct record that the
old cheerful looks ' had returned; but we may well conceive, that
* " Lives," vol. iii. p. 402.
Vol. IV.— 4
50 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
in spite of the Puritan rigour occasionally breaking out, the nation
was gradually resuming the habits, if not wholly of merry England,
of stirring and well-employed England. Prosperous industry al
ways brings its own cheerfulness, if it is moderate in its desires;
and not inordinate in its cravings for wealth and luxury. We see
the stir of inventive genius at this period. We trace the begin
nings of that experimental philosophy which was to put England
at the head of all industrious nations. " Honest and learned Mr.
Hartlib," the friend of Milton, has made " an ink that would give
a dozen copies, moist sheets of paper being pressed on it." Robert
Boyle, " that excellent person and great virtuoso," is improving
the air-pump, and prosecuting his studies in chemistry. Colonel
Blount invites philosophers to inspect his new-invented ploughs.
Sir P. Neale is famous for his optic-glasses. Greatorex, the
mathematical-instrument maker, has an invention to quench fire.
The no less important principles of commerce are come to the aid
of all science and industry. The City Goldsmiths have opened
Bankirig establishments. Superfluous money has ceased to be
buried or locked in chests. Agriculture feels the influence of the
general stir of the national mind. The turnip-husbandry is teach
ing the farmer that the earth can bear as useful produce as corn ;
and the cultivation of clover is making a valuable addition to the
"meadows trim with daisies pied," upon which the flocks of
England have been hitherto sustained.
Amidst the many evidences that we occasionally meet with of
the intellectual and industrial activity of the people, we also en
counter many proofs of their subjection to superstitious fears. Even
the learned and the scientific are not free from singular fancies,
engendered in the atmosphere of fanaticism. Mr. Oughtred, " that
renowned mathematician," says Evelyn in 1655, " had strong appre
hensions of some extraordinary event to happen the following
year, from the calculation of coincidence with the diluvian period ;
and added that it might possibly be to convert the Jews by our
Saviour's visible appearance, and to judge the world." The Al
manac makers of that time were deluding the people with those
prophecies, which they continued to swallow for two centuries.
Lilly was still in vogue ; and Francis Moore had joined the ranks
of imposture. The most remarkable of their exploits was to
frighten the isle from its- propriety, on the 29th of April, 1652, by
the terrors of an eclipse of the sun. This fatal day was called
Mirk Monday; and the dread of it "so exceedingly alarmed the
SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE KINGDOM. 5 1
whole nation that hardly any one would work, or stir out of their
houses." As regards the material prosperity of the country, we may con
clude this sketch with the testimony of Howell, a devoted royalist,
to the fact that the restorative powers that were possessed by an
energetic people in their insular security and their ancient and re
newed freedom, were the providential compensations for long
years, first of tyranny and then of universal disturbance. " The
calamities and confusions, which the late wars did bring upon us,
were many and manifold, yet England may be said to have gained
one advantage by it ; for whereas before she was like an animal
that knew not his own strength, she is now better acquainted with
herself, for her power and wealth did never appear more both by
land and sea." *
If the immediate effect of the Civil Wars was such that England
"became better acquainted with herself," so that she increased in
power and wealth, the more lasting consequence was that the whole
nation became more earnest in its regard for the higher obligations
of religion — that the great body of the people, amidst all the ex
travagances of sectaries, came to have a more elevated sense of
the responsibilities that belonged to a condition approaching to
religious liberty. The indifference and profaneness that came
in with the return of the Stuarts were chiefly manifest amongst
the upper classes, — the sycophants of a debauched Court, and the
herd of writers who thought that wit and immorality were neces
sary companions. The fanaticism and intolerance died out ; but
the best portions of the Puritan spirit were never extinguished.
When the Anglican Church again became oppressive and worldly,
the principle of religious liberty asserted itself in strenuous non
conformity, and kept alive the zeal which ultimately placed the
Church itself upon the only safe foundation for a wealthy estab
lishment, that of emulation in the duty of diligently teaching, and
kindly watching^ over, the congregations entrusted to its charge.
Baxter, the Puritan, who was persecuted when the Episcopalians
returned to power, is now regarded by -English churchmen as the
model of a parish priest ; and we may well conclude this view of
the period of his ministry immediately following the establishment
of the Commonwealth, by his just account of the advantage to re
ligion, through "the change that was made In public affairs by the
success of the war : " * " Letters," vol. iv. p. 11c.
52 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" For before, the riotous rabble had boldness enough to make
serious godliness a common scorn, and call them all Puritans and
Precisians that did not care as little for God and Heaven and their
souls as they did ; especially if a man were not fully satisfied with
their undisciplined, disorderly churches, or Lay Chancellor's ex
communications, &c, then no name was bad enough for him. And
the Bishop's Articles enquiring after such, and their courts and the
High Commission grievously afflicting those that did but fast and
pray together, or go from an ignorant drunken reader, to hear a
godly able preacher at the next parish, &c. This kept religion
among the vulgar under either continual reproach or terror, en
couraging the rabble to despise it and revile it, and discouraging
those that else would own it. And experience telleth us, that it is
a lamentable impediment to men's conversion, when it is a way
everywhere spoken against, and prosecuted by superiors, which
they must embrace ; and when at their first approaches they must
go through such dangers and obloquy as is fitter for confirmed
Christians to be exercised with, than unconverted sinners or young
beginners : Therefore, though Cromwell gave liberty to all sects
among us, and did not set up any party alone by force, yet this
much gave abundant advantage to the Gospel, removing the pre
judices and the terrors which hindered it ; especially considering
that godliness had countenance and reputation also, as well as
liberty; whereas before, if it did not appear in all the fetters and
formalities of the times, it was the way to common shame and
ruin." * * " Life," p. 86.
THE PROTECTORATE. 53
CHAPTER III.
The Protectorate. — Incentives to assassinate the Protector. — Royalist Plot concocted in
France. — Cromwell's deportment to the French Government. — His Foreign Policy
generally. — First Parliament of the Protectorate. — Cromwell's speech on opening the
Session. — Parliament questions the Protector's authority. — The Parliament House
closed Cromwell requires a Pledge from Members. — Recusant Members excluded —
Subsequent Temper of the Parliament. — Cromwell dissolves the Parliament. —
Royalist Risings organised — Failure of Risings in the West and North. — Resistance
to Taxation. — The Major-Generals. — Severities against Papists and Episcopalians.
— Tolerance to Sects.
The Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, who had been in
augurated on the 1 6th of. December, 1653, had, some four months
afterwards, entered upon the occupation of the royal palaces of
Whitehall and of Hampton Court. Warwick, the Cavalier, who, in
1640, had looked upon a gentleman speaking in Parliament " very
ordinarily apparelled," yet lived as, he records, to see this very
gentleman, " having had a better tailor, and more converse among
good company," appear at Whitehall "of a great and majestic
deportment and comely presence."* The same courtier says,
speaking of a period when the dignity of Oliver was further con
firmed, " And now he models his house, that it might have some
resemblance unto a Court ; and his liveries, and lacqueys, and yeo
men of the guard are known who they belong to by their habit."f
There was something more went to the making of the Protector
Oliver than " a better tailor ; " or than " liveries and lacqueys and
yeomen of the guard ; " something higher even than " more con
verse among good company." There had been fourteen years of
such experience as belonged to no other man in his time. " I was
by birth a gentleman ; living neither in any considerable height,
nor yet in obscurity. I have been called to several employments
in the nation." More than this : ". My manner of life, which was to
run up and down the nation, had given me to see and know the
temper and spirits of all mer.'1 Thus he spoke to his first Parliament
with a dignified modesty. Out of his own courage, sagacity, and
abiding sense that his destiny was in the hands of a supreme di-
• " Memoirs," p. 248. t Ibid., p. 382.
54 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
recting power, had a great ruler been made — one who " alone re
mained to conduct the government and to save the country." Such
is the panegyric of Milton. When our most eloquent historian
described Cromwell as " the greatest prince that has ever ruled
England,"* we had reached that state of historical counter-balance,
that we could stop to inquire whether the familiar words of usurper,
traitor, hypocrite, fanatic, dissembler, as applied to this prince,
were not the merest echoes of the united hatred of cavalier and
republican, of libertine and sceptic, which it would be well to lay
aside after two centuries of abuse and misrepresentation. We shall
endeavour to relate the events of the Protectorate, without being
wholly carried away by our sense of the unquestionable superiority
of this man over the most eminent of his contemporaries. We
shall seek to regard him as the man best qualified to stand between
the restoration of the monarchy and unmitigated despotism ; as one
who in his own manifestations of arbitrary power was ever striving
to establish a system of constitutional liberty ; as one who upheld
the supremacy of the laws at a time when in the absence of such a
ruler the State might have been plunged into the depths of anarchy
and bloodshed. Oliver did many things that are repugnant to the
principles of just freedom under an established government ; but
it may be honestly asked whether his example can justify that
species of revolutionary despotism which seeks only to govern by
the sword, without a persistent struggle to make the civil authority
ultimately supreme. The Protectorate of Oliver was a constant
attempt to unite the executive authority of one with the legislative
control of many. He laboured to accomplish in his own day what
time only could perfect, after many reverses. Had he lived long
enough to have founded a dynasty, the problem might have been
more quickly solved. The partial and temporary despotism of the
Protectorate is gone ; the liberty and toleration which it proposed
as its final objects remain. We may apply to the history of this
crisis the words of Cromwell's own earnest conviction : " What
are all our Histories, and other traditions of actions in former times,
but God manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken, and tumbled
down, and trampled upon, everything that he hath not planted ?" f
We may especially apply these memorable words, so characteristic of
their utterer, and yet so universal in their truth, to the whole history
of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. After the
* Macaulay, " History," vol. i. c. ii.
f Cromwell — Speech iv. " Carlyle," vol iii. p. 89.
INCENTIVES TO ASSASSINATE ,THE PROTECTOR. 55
first great contest was over, The Divine Right of Kings came back
upon England with unforgotten insolence in its pretensions, al
though with somewhat diminished power of working immediate
evil. But it perished; for the Divine Right had to stand a test
which its most powerful enemy had proposed as a test of all polit
ical action : " If it be of God, He will bear it up : If it be of man it
will tumble." *
In the remarkable conversation between Cromwell and White
locke, which preceded the dissolution of the Long Parliament,!
Whitelocke, with great sagacity, had pointed out that in the as
sumption by Cromwell of monarchical power, "that question,
wherein before so great parties of the nation were engaged, and
which was universal, will by this means become in effect a private
controversy only. Before it was national, what head of government
we should have ; now it will become -particular, who shall be our
governor, whether of the family of the Stuarts, or of the family of
the Cromwells." Cromwell replied, " I confess you speak reason
in this." The acceptance by Cromwell of the office of Protector
immediately gave this character to the controversy. The great ob
ject of all the discontented Republicans or Cavaliers ; the support
ers of prerogative or the enemies of all government but that of the
reign of the Saints ; those who would have re-entered into posses
sion of the property which had changed hands, or those who sought
a division of all property whatsoever ; intolerant Episcopalians,
equally intolerant Presbyterians, frantic Anabaptists ; — all these
classes now saw an enemy in the one man in whom the ruling power
was concentrated. That power had become more vigilant, more
far-seeing, more difficult to shake, than the distracted authority of
the Long Parliament, or of the Little Parliament. Foreign govern
ments recognised and dreaded this commanding power, well de
scribed by the great minister of the next century : " Oliver Crom
well, who astonished mankind by his intelligence, did not derive it
from spies in the cabinet of every prince in Europe : he drew it
from the cabinet of his own sagacious mind. He observed facts,
and traced them forward to their consequences. From what was,
he concluded what must be, and he never was deceived." X Foreign
governments might therefore have rejoiced to see the downfall of
this man, whose soul was bent upon sustaining the glory of his
country, as well as consolidating its internal peace. But he was as
* Cromwell— Speeoh iv. " Carlyle," vol. iii. p. 89. t See ante, f-2j.
X Chatham's Speech on Spain, November 2, 1770.
56 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
prudent as he was watchful. He was surrounded with conspirators
of every degree. The doctrine of assassination was openly preached
by the Royalists abroad* From Paris, on the 23rd of April, 1654,
came out a Proclamation in the name of Charles the Second, setting
forth that " a certain base mechanic fellow, by name Oliver Crom
well — after he had most inhumanly and barbarously butchered our
dear father, of sacred memory, his just and lawful sovereign — hath
most tyrannically and traitorously usurped the supreme power over
our said kingdoms." It thus proceeds : "These are therefore, in
our name, to give free leave and liberty to any man whomsoever,
within any of our three kingdoms, by pistol, sword, or poison, or by
any other way or means whatsoever, to destroy the life of the said
Oliver Cromwell ; wherein they will do an act acceptable to God
and good men, by cutting so detestable a villain from the face of
the earth." It further promises all sorts of rewards to "whosoever,
whether soldier or other, who shall be instrumental in so signal a
piece of service." This proclamation has been attributed to Hyde
— perhaps unjustly. It is not clear that this incentive to assassi
nation " on the word and faith of a Christian king " really came
from Charles Stuart, though undoubtedly it came from his " Court
at Paris." But it was extensively circulated, openly abroad, secretly
in England ; and it produced its natural effects. On the 20th of
M'ay, being Saturday — a day on which the Protector usually went
to Hampton Court — his guards were to be attacked by thirty stout
men, and then and there was the deed to be done, of which the per
petrator was to be honoured with knighthood, and five 'hundred
pounds a year in land, and honourable employment. But the Pro
tector escaped the ambuscade ; for five of the royalist projectors
of the plot were arrested in their beds a few hours before its in
tended accomplishment. Forty persons were subjected to exami
nation as confederates with colonel John Gerard, Peter Vowell, a
schoolmaster, and Somerset Fox. These three were tried before a
High Court of Justice. Fox pleaded guilty, and was pardoned.
The other two were executed. Of their guilt the evidence is suf
ficiently clear ; and it is equally manifest that the plan had been
communicated to Prince Rupert at Paris. Hyde protested, in a
letter to Secretary Nicholas, that of the "whole matter the king
knows no more than you do." There is one point connected with
this plot which we give in the words of M. Guizot, who has pub
lished the documents upon which it is established: "Whatever
may have been the amount of his participation in the plan for the
ROYALIST PLOT CONCOCTED IN FRANCE. 57
assassination of the Protector, and whether Charles was aware of it or
not, the fact itself was incontestable, and probably even more serious
than Cromwell allowed it to appear ; for there is reason to believe
that M. de Baas, — at that time an envoy extraordinary of Mazarin
to London, and temporarily connected with the embassy of M. de
Bordeaux, — was not unacquainted either with the conspirators or
their design. Cromwell was so convinced of this that he summoned
M. de Baas before his council, and sharply interrogated him on the
subject. But he had too much good sense to magnify the affair
beyond what was required by a due regard for his own safetyfor by
laying too much stress on this incident, to interrupt, for any length
of time, his friendly relations with Mazarin and the Court of France,
which manifested the greatest anxiety to remain on good terms with
him. He merely sent M. de Baas back to France, openly stating
to Louis XIV. and Mazarin his reasons for so doing, and showing
in this the same moderation which had induced him to bring to
trial only three of the conspirators. He had escaped the danger ;
made known to England and Europe the active vigilance of his
police ; and proved to the royalists that he would not spare them.
He attempted nothing further. He possessed that difficult secret
of the art-of governing whichconsists in a just appreciation of what
will be sufficient in any given circumstance, and in resting satisfied
with it." * Cromwell had made known to Europe, and especially
to France, out of whose bosom the assassins came, the vigilance of
his own police. He did not complain that France did not go be
fore him to restrain and punish assassination, and to set a mark of
reprobation upon such an incentive to the crime as the Proclama
tion issued in the name of Charles the Second. When it was indis
putable, even, that an envoy of the French king had employed the
name of Mazarin to encourage this scheme of murder, Cromwell
was not diverted from what he regarded as the true national policy,
an alliance with France, by his own personal resentment. He sent
M. de Baas back to his own Court. He imputed blame to him
alone. He writes to Louis XIV. with the true magnanimity of
one who could lay aside all meaner considerations in a strong'
sense of public duty, " It has seemed advisable to us to assure
your majesty that, in dismissing de Baas, we had no thought or
wish to interrupt in any way the negotiations now pending ; desir
ing, on the contrary, in all candour and simplicity of soul, that
false interpretations and subjects of evil suspicions may be cast
aside." f
* "Cromwell," vol. ii. p. 51. t Ibid., Appendix ii. p. 420.
58 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Whilst France and Spain were each employing all the resources
of their diplomacy to secure the alliance of England, Cromwell,
after tedious negotiations, had concluded a peace with the United
Provinces. The naval power of the Dutch had been finally broken
by the victory of Blake, in July, 1653, when Van Tromp was him
self killed by a musket-ball. The conditions of peace which Crom
well exacted were moderate ; and he was reproached by his enemies
with having sacrificed the advantages gained in the war for the
greater popularity of his rule at home. The nation wanted peace,
and rejoiced at the termination of hostilities so injurious to its
commerce. The Protector, moreover, accomplished his great
desire of promoting the union of the Protestant States of Europe.
In the treaty with Holland, which was signed on the 5th of April,
1654, were comprehended Denmark, the Hanseatic Towns, and
the Swiss Protestant Cantons. A treaty of friendship and alliance
with Sweden was concluded in the same month as that with Hol
land. In the foreign relations of England there was no comparison
between the delays of a Parliament and the decision of the Pro
tector. When the responsibility of determining great questions
involving peace or war was in the hands of a supreme ruler and
his council, the policy of the country was settled upon fixed prin
ciples, which, whether or not they were safe and profitable, were at
any rate, not timid or vacillating. Cromwell decided that the
I alliance of France was preferable to that of Spain. His opinions
were opposed by many of his own officers. He had taken his own
view of the question ; but for a short time held himself aloof from
any final measure, whilst he was assiduously courted by the am
bassadors of these rival powers. Of Spain he demanded that the
navigation of the West Indies should be free ; and that English
men in Spain should be protected in the exercise of their religion
against the interference of the Inquisition. The Spanish ambas
sador said that such a demand was to ask for the two eyes of his
master. From France he required the expulsion of the Stuarts ;
and, in a nobler spirit, liberty and security for the French Protes
tants. No treaty with France was concluded in the first year of
the Protectorate, and no hostilities were offered to Spain ; but it
became manifest that the disposition of Cromwell was to reject the
alliance of the power that was the most devoted adherent to Rome.
With Portugal he concluded a commercial treaty. But on the
very day this treaty was signed, he caused the law to be unflinch
ingly executed upon the brother of the Portuguese ambassador,
FIRST PARLIAMENT OF THE PROTECTORATE. 59
who had killed two Englishmen, and raised a tumult with the
armed servants of the embassy, at the Exchange in London. No-
plea of diplomatic privileges could prevent Don Pantaleon de Sa
from being tried, convicted, and executed for the offence. The
foreigner beheld with dread and wonder the stern and fearless
justice of the Commonwealth.
Under the Instrument of Government by which Cromwell was
appointed Protector, it was provided that a Parliament should be
elected to meet on the 3rd of September, 1654: but that in the
interim the Protector, assisted by his Council of twenty-one mem
bers, should be entitled to issue Ordinances having the force of
Laws, as well as to do all acts necessary for the public service.
We have seen how vigorously Cromwell applied himself, during
these nine months, to establish the foreign relations of the country
upon a satisfactory foundation. But he devoted himself no less
energetically to accomplish a series of domestic reforms, some of
which have presented models to succeeding reformers ; others
have been pronounced crude and impracticable ; but all have the
merit of seeking the public good, though by courses which have
that tincture of despotism which essentially belongs to a revolu
tionary period. When the first Parliament of the Protectorate met
on the 4th of September, the Lord Protector went into an elaborate
explanation of his measures, domestic and foreign. The one
measure of his government that was all important was this : " It
hath been instrumental to call a free Parliament ; which, blessed •'.
be God, we see here this day. I say, a free Parliament." There
had. been no election to a Parliament in England for fourteen years. ^
This Parliament was to include Representatives of the three king
doms : "You are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe,
England ever saw ; having upon your shoulders the interests of
three great nations, with the territory belonging to them." The
Parliament was composed of four hundred and sixty members. ^
Of four hundred for England and Wales, two hundred and fifty- \
one were to be returned by counties, and a hundred and forty-nine
by cities and boroughs. Scotland, which had been declared united •>>
to England by an Ordinance of the 12th of April, was to send N
thirty members ; Ireland was to send also thirty members. The
right of voting for representatives was in those who possessed real
or personal property to the value of two hundred pounds. Roman
Catholics, and those who had been in arms against the Parliament
during the Civil Wars, were excluded from voting, or from being
60 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
returned as members. But by the instrument of government, and
in the terms of the writ for election, it was a condition " That the
persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it
is settled in one single person and a parliament."
The 3rd of September, the day appointed for the assembling of
Parliament, falling on a Sunday, the House adjourned to the next
day, after meeting the Protector in the Painted Chamber. On
that Monday the Parliament was opened with almost regal pomp.
" The Protector rode in state from Whitehall to the Abbey Church
in Westminster. . . . His highness was seated over against
the pulpit, the members of the Parliament on both sides. . . .
After the sermon, which was preached by Mr. Thomas Goodwin,
his highness went in the same equipage to the Painted Chamber,
where he took seat in a chair of state set upon steps, and the
members upon benches round about." The long speech which
Cromwell addressed to this Parliament was reported " by one who
stood very near;" and was published "to prevent mistakes."
Studied no doubt it was ; for its sentences, however involved, are
full of meaning, — but it was not delivered from a written paper.
In its .wide range, and careful explanations, it has a considerable
resemblance to the speeches of the American Presidents. The
Protector had a very difficult assembly to address. His own
Council had been elected, with one exception. Some of the
republican leaders, who were indignant at the whole course of
governmenf since the dissolution of the Long Parliament, were
again returned. A large body of the Presbyterians were also
members, with the ever-prevailing desire to maintain their own
form of Church government. There was a peculiar significance
in the Protector's words when he said that the great end of their
meeting was " Healing and Settling I trust it is in the
minds of you all, and much more in the mind of God, to cause
Healing." He would not touch upon past transactions too par
ticularly, for the remembrance of such, instead of healing, "might
set the wound fresh a-bleeding." The oblivion of past animosities
was scarcely yet to be accomplished. The social improvements
which were to grow out of a happy concord were nevertheless to
be earnestly striven for. Briefly the Protector referred to what
had been done in the way of Ordinances — "for the interest of the
people alone, and for their good, without respect had to any other
interest." The administration of finance had been regulated ; the
hardships of prisoners for debt, an old grievance, had been les-
CROMWELL'S SPEECH ON OPENING THE SESSION. 6 1
sened ; prison-discipline had been reformed ; highways had been
improved. These were matters at which the Protector onJy
glanced. But upon more important reforms he delivered himself
without reserve. And first of Law Reform : " The government
hath had some things to desire ; and it hath done some things
actually. It hath desired to reform the Laws. I say to reform
them : — and for that end it hath called together persons, without
offence be it spoken, of as great ability and as great interest as
are in these nations, to consider how the laws might be made plain
and short, and less changeable to the people ; how to lessen
expense for the good of the nation. And those things are in
preparation, and bills prepared ; which in due time, I make no
question, will be tendered to you. In the meanwhile there hath
been care taken to put the administration of the Laws into the
hands of just men ; men of the most known integrity and ability.
The Chancery hath been reformed, I hope, to the satisfaction of all
good men ; such as for the things depending there, which made the
burden and work of the honourable persons intrusted in those
services too heavy for their ability, it hath referred many of them
to those places where Englishmen love to have their rights tried,
the Courts of Law at Westminster." The Ordinance "for reform
ing the Court of Chancery " consisted of sixty-seven articles.
That Court before its reform was in full possession of the character
which it long strove to preserve, in spite of law or ordinance, of
public contempt and senatorial reprobation. It had twenty-three
thousand causes before it, which had been depending for long
years ; it was in the pleasing exercise of its power " of undoing
many families." Cromwell's desire that " the Laws might be made
plain and short, and less chargeable to the people," has been the
desire of all honest rulers and legislators from that time to our
own. But there was a task still more difficult than the reform of the
Law, which the Protector had endeavoured to accomplish by Or
dinances : " This Government hath endeavoured to put a stop to
that heady way of every man making himself a Minister and
Preacher. It hath endeavoured to settle a method for the approv
ing and. sanctioning of men of piety and ability to discharge that
work. And I think I may say, it hath committed the business to
the trust of persons, both of the Presbyterian and Independent
judgments, of as known ability, piety, and integrity, as any, I be
lieve, this nation hath." . . .7 "The Government hath also taken
62 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
care, we hope, for the expulsion of all those who may be judged
any way unfit for this work ; who are scandalous, and the common
scorn and contempt of that function."
In thus describing his measures for securing " men of piety and
ability " to discharge the duties of ministers and preachers, the
Protector referred to the Commissions which he had instituted —
the Commission of Triers, and the Commission of Expurgation.
Such measures were the necessary results of an endeavour to rem
edy the evils which had been produced by the total suspension of
an authorised ecclesiastical jurisdiction. _ The episcopal authority
had long ceased. The presbyterian authority was not established.
Church government was wholly at an end. With all his love of
toleration, his strong sense perceived the necessity of something
better than what he described as the " heady way of every man
making himself a minister and a preacher." His Commission for
the trial of public preachers comprised nine laymen and twenty-
nine of the clergy. His other Commission consisted of gentry and
clergy in every county, to inquire into the conduct, and eject from
their livings, if necessary, " scandalous, ignorant, and insufficient "
ministers. It is impossible that such Commissions should not have
been in many cases arbitrary, perhaps prejudiced and unjust. But
even Baxter has given his testimony to the general benefit of these
irregular attempts to remedy the absence of a competent ecclesias
tical authority for providing religious instruction for the people.
" Because this Assembly of Triers is most heavily accused and re
proached by some men, I shall speak the truth of them, and sup
pose my word will be the rather taken, because most of them took
me for one of their boldest adversaries, as to their opinion, and be
cause I was known to disown their power. . . . The truth is,
that though their authority was null, and though some few over-
busy and over-rigid Independents among them were too severe
against all that were Arminians, and too particular in inquiring
after sanctification in those whom they examined, and somewhat
too lax in their admission of unlearned and erroneous men, that
favoured Antinomianism or Anabaptism ; yet to give them their
due, they did abundance of good to the Church : They saved many
a congregation from ignorant, ungodly, drunken teachers. . . All
those that used the Ministry but as a common trade to live by, and
were never likely to convert a soul ; all these they usually rejected ;
and in their stead admitted of any that were able serious preachers,
THE PARLIAMENT-HOUSE CLOSED. 63
and lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion soever they
were." *
The exhortations of Cromwell to labour for " settling and heal
ing " were addressed to unwilling listeners. There was one sore
that, in the thoughts of a large number, would admit of no healing.
In their view the great ulcer of the State was the supremacy of
one man. They would not recognise the co-ordinate power of
legislative and executive. Their idea of a Commonwealth was
that of a permanent Assembly, in which all the elementary princi
ples of government should be perpetually discussed ; all the rela
tions of the State to foreign powers debated and re-debated; all
the religious animosities of unnumbered sects continually inflamed
by alternations of intolerance and liberality, according to the vote
of the hour. Their complaint was, not that Cromwell and his
Council had ruled unwisely ; but that he should be exalted above
his fellows to rule at all. The royalist lampooners said that the Pro
tector's escvitcheon should exhibit
" The Brewers', with King's arms, quartered." t
Those who had been saved from the annihilation of all their hopes
of civil and religious liberty by the Colonel from Huntingdon, now
joined with the most infuriate of the Cavaliers in abuse of the
" base mechanic fellow " — the " Cajsar in a Clown " before whom
they were prostrate when he returned in triumph from Dunbar and
Worcester. Roundhead and Cavalier had now found a common
principle of action. The Parliament had ample powers under the
Instrument of Government. The authority of the Protector was
great, but with very stringent limitations. The conjoined authority
was, as described by the Protector himself, "likely to avoid the
extremes of monarchy on the one hand, and of democracy on the
other. "J Nevertheless, the very first occupation of the represen
tatives assembled on the 3rd of September, 1654, was to proceed
to the discussion of the question whether the House shall approve
of the system of government by a Parliament and a single Person.
Fo'r three days this elementary question had been debated ; and by
a majority of a hundred and forty-six votes against a hundred and
forty-one, the House resolved to go into Committee to deliberate
still further upon this fundamental proposition. On the morning
when the Committee was to meet, the doors ofthe Parliament were
found closed. The member for Lynn, Mr. Goddard, has given
• "Life," p. 7a. t " Cleveland's Poems." X Speech of aand January, 1655.
64 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
some details of the incidents of this Tuesday morning : " Going by
water to Westminster, I was told that the Parliament doors were
locked up, and guarded with soldiers , and that the barges were to
attend the Protector to the Painted Chamber." He attempted to
pass up the Parliament Stair, but was repulsed by soldiers ; and was
required, if he was a Member, to go into the Painted Chamber.
" The Speaker and all the Members were walking up and down the
Hall, the Court of Requests, and the Painted Chamber, expecting
the Protector's coming." The Protector did come, with his guards ;
and took his seat in a chair of state ; and he then spoke for an hour
and a half to the bare-headed assembly, with an earnestness to
which a feeling of wounded pride gave unwonted emphasis. He
had told them, not long before, that they were a free Parliament —
'.' And so you are, whilst you own the government and authority
which called you hither There was a reciprocity implied
and expressed I called myself not to this place. I say
again, I called myself not to this place If my calling be
from God, and my testimony from the People, God and the People
shall take it from me, else I will not part with it." He then went
over many passages of the past. " Having had some occasions to
see, together with my brethren and countrymen, a happy period
put to our sharp wars and contests with the then common enemy,
I hoped, in a private capacity, to have reaped the fruit and benefit
of our hard labours and hazards I hoped to have had
leave to retire to a private life. I begged to be dismissed of my
charge. I begged it again and again ; and God be judge between
me and all men if I lie in this matter." His dissolution ofthe Long
Parliament is referred to as a measure of inevitable necessity. His
summoning of the Little Parliament was " to see if a few might
have been called together, for some short time, who might put the
nation in some way of certain settlement." He adds, with the
same solemn appeal to Heaven, "a chief end to myself was to lay
down the power which was in my hands." In the unlimited con
dition of General of all the forces.— that " boundless authority "
conferred by Act of Parliament,— he " did not desire to live, a
single day." The Little Parliament resigned the power and au
thority which had been committed to them. "All things being
again subject to arbitrariness," he was himself " a person having
power over the three nations without bound or limit." At the re
quest of that Assembly he accepted the office of Protector ; he
took the oath to the government. In obedience to that trust, he
CROMWELL REQUIRES A PLEDGE FROM MEMBERS. 65
and his Council had been " faithful in calling this Parliament." He
maintained that the people, in the expression of their voices by
Grand Juries, by addresses from Counties and Cities, were his
witnesses of approbation to the place he filled. But the climax of
his speech was that they, the members of Parliament, were his last
witnesses. They came there by his writs directed to the sheriffs.
To these writs the people gave obedience, having had the Act of
Government communicated to them, by printed copies, it being also
read at the places of election. The writ of return was signed with
proviso " that the person so chosen should not have power to alter
the government as now settled in one single Person and a Parlia
ment." Certainly Oliver Protector has very conclusively settled
the question which the Parliament had been three clays debating;
and he can scarcely be called tyrannous, when he required "some
owning of your call and of. the authority which brought you
hither I must deal plainly with you : What I forbore upon
a just confidence at first, you necessitate me unto now." This
thing (he produces a parchment) when assented to and subscribed
is " the means that will you let in'' — (through those doors which
are now locked) "to act those tilings as a Parliament which are
for the good of the People." The parchment to be signed at the
lobby-door bore these words : " I do hereby freely promise, and
engage myself, to be true and faithful to the Lord Protector and
the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland ; and shall
not (according to the tenor of the Indenture whereby I am returned
to serve in this present Parliament) propose, or give my consent, to
alter the government as it is settled in a Single Person and a Par
liament." Many Members signed at once. Three hundred had
signed before the end of the month. But the republican leaders
refused to give any pledge ; and the Parliament was thus reduced
to little more than two-thirds of the members returned. Ludlow,
who was thenabsentin Ireland, deeply sympathises with his brother
republicans : " So soon as this visible hand of violence appeared to
be upon them, most of the eminent assertors of the liberty of their
country withdrew themselves; being persuaded they should better
discharge their duty to the nation by this way of expressing their
abhon-ence of his tyrannical proceedings, than by surrendering
their liberties under their own hands, and then treating with him who
was possessed of the sword, to recover some part of them again."
The Parliament, thus mutilated, resumed its duties. Its first act
was an assertion of some independence in resolving that the pledge
Vol. IV.— 5
66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
not to make any change in the government did not apply beyond
the first article under which the Protectorate had been constituted
— that which referred to a Single Person and a Parliament ; and it
adopted that article in a resolution of its own. Cromwell had con
quered the Parliament into a show of effecting by its own act what
was the result of his strong will. He had said to them, "The wil
ful throwing away of this government, — I can sooner be willing to
be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, than I can give my
consent unto."
When the destinies of a nation hang upon the life of a single
man, tbe importance that is attached to the slightest accidents be
falling him extend from his contemporaries to history. Cromwell
soon after this great trial of his strength was taking a little relaxa
tion after his own simple fashion. He had been dining under the
trees in Hyde Park — he might have sat under the ancient elm
which still tells of a time long past. A new set of six horses had
been given him by the duke of Oldenburg; and with his old coun
try habits, he took the reins to drive home. The horses plunged, and
my Lord Protector was thrown from the box. Marvellous to relate,
a pistol went off in his pocket, — he carried a pistol, at a time when
most men went armed ; and grave historians duly notice how appre
hensive he must have been of his life to bear about with him such
a weapon. His life was certainly unsafe. His aged mother, who
died in the following November, " at the sound of a musket would
often be afraid her son was shot, and could not be satisfied unless
she saw him once a day at least." The good old lady died at the
age of ninety-four, blessing that son, and saying " The Lord cause
his face to shine upon you, and comfort you in all your Adversi
ties." Yes, Adversities. The height of his power was truly an
adversity ; and we may well believe him to have been sincere,
when in a burst of disappointment amidst the contentions around
him, he said of the task of governing, " I had rather keep a flock
of sheep." But his genius was fitted for governing, however Lud
low underrated it, in pointing the moral of the runaway horses :
" He would needs take the place of his coachman, not dou'btingbut
the threo pair of horses he was about to drive would prove as tame
as the three nations which were ridden by him ; and therefore not
contented with their ordinary pace he lashed them very furiously."
By his fall, says the republican philosopher, "he might have been
instructed how dangerous it was to intermeddle with those things
in which he had no experience." Oliver's system of government
TEMPER OF THE PARLIAMENT. 67
was really founded upon his experience, and not upon refined the
ories aiming at impracticable perfection. He drove the state car
riage for some years without tumbling from the box ; and though
he knew the use of the bit and the whip, he rarely " lashed very
furiously." Only when the state-carriage stood still, was he moved
out of his wonted calmness. For three months the first free Par
liament, although the recusant Members had retired to their
homes, made small progress in "settling." From the 21st of Sep
tember till the 20th of January, the Instrument of Government was
in a constant course of amendments and additions. It was natural
enough that attempts should be made to apply every check to arbi
trary authority in the Protector ; but the mistrust was too marked ;
and the disposition to nullify the existing constitution of the Pro- I
tectorate too apparent, not to produce a corresponding restless
ness in the nation. Very large questions were depending with
foreign powers ; but the function of the executive was stultified by
the perpetual discussion as to the authority in which should be
confided the right of declaring war or making peace. The legisla
tive power of the Parliament was absolute ; for if the Protector did
not give his consent to any Bill within twenty days of its passing,
it became Law without his consent. And yet the Assembly could
not see the necessity of its legislative sanction to the necessary
reforms which had been proposed, and partly effected, by Cromwell
and his Council. These measures were suspended, and referred to
Committees for revision. Other propositions of public importance,
such as the celebration of marriage ; the treatment of. lunatics ; the
relief of prisoners for debt; the equalisation of taxes; were intro
duced as Bills, but none were adopted. They triumphed over Crom
well's supposed ambition in deciding that the Protectorate should be
elective and not hereditary. They outraged his principles of tolera
tion, which had been recognised in the Instrument of Government,
by appointing a Committee to define what was " faith in God by
Jesus Christ ; " and to settle what were "damnable heresies." They
went farther, and ordered that several heretics, amongst whom was
John Biddle, a Socinian schoolmaster, should be imprisoned. The
supplies were voted as tardily, and with as impolitic an economy,
as if the foreign affairs of the country had been conducted with
dishonour instead of a dignity which all nations bowed before.
The government under a Parliament and a Single Person was
becoming impossible. The crisis arrived. The Parliament was to
sit five months. Five calendar months would have expired on the
68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
3rd of February. Five lunar months expired on the 22nd of
January. On that day the Protector summoned the House to attend
him in the Painted Chamber. Another long speech— and the
Parliament is dissolved. The Protector could be angry, and speak
harsh truths. " Dissettlement and division, discontent and dis
satisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole, have been
more multiplied within these five months of your sitting than in
some years before. Foundations have also been laid for the future
renewing of the troubles of these nations by all the enemies of
them abroad and at home." And so, concluded Oliver Protector,
" I think it my duty to tell you that it is not for the profit of these
nations, nor for common and public good, for you to continue here
any longer." He has a difficult task before him. His army is
unpaid : the people are wretched with soldiers at free quarters ;
royalists are encouraged to undertake new plots ; the old Com
monwealth men are ready to join with them. But Oliver keeps up
his heart, though he must find his only resource in the same species
of despotism against which he fought. " If the Lord take pleasure
in England, and if He will do us good, He is very able to bear us
up. Let the difficulties be whatsoever they will, we shall in His
strength be able to encounter with them. And I bless God I have
been inured to difficulties ; and I never found God failing when I
trusted to Him. I can laugh and sing, in my heart, when I speak
of these things to you or elsewhere. And though some may think
it a hard thing to raise money without parliamentary authority upon
this nation ; yet I have another argument to the good people of
this nation, if they would be safe, and yet have no better principle :
Whether they prefer the having of their will, though it be their
destruction, rather than comply with things of necessity ? " Neces
sity, the tyrant's plea in all ages, cannot be avoided even by this
man who had so few of the qualities of a tyrant besides the ener
getic will. It is manifest that if the Parliament had not blindly set
itself to obstruct the honest exercise of that will in its labours to
keep " the good people of this nation safe," any systematic display
of arbitrary power would have been as impossible as it would liave
been impolitic on his part, even if not alien to his nature. He is
conscious of his own strength ; and he will front alone the storms
that are gathering around him. But he had faithful public servants,
whose devotion to their countiy was not weakened by the quarrels
of factions. Blake, one of the noblest of these, thus answered
Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary, when informed of the dissolution of
ROYALIST RISINGS ORGANISED. 69
the Parliament : " I was not much surprised with 'the intelligence;
the slow proceedings and awkward motions of that assembly giving
great cause to suspect it would come to some such period. And I
cannot but exceedingly wonder that there should yet remain so
strong a spirit of prejudice and animosity in the minds of men who
profess themselves most affectionate patriots, as to postpone the
necessary ways and means for preservation of the Commonwealth,
especially in such a time of concurrence of the mischievous plots
and designs both of old and new enemies, tending all to the de
struction of the same. But blessed be God, who hath hitherto
delivered, and doth still deliver us ; and I trust will continue so to
do, although He be very much tempted by us."
Blake writes this letter from the Mediterranean, where he is
doing some memorable things which we shall presently have to
notice. Meanwhile "the mischievous plots and designs " to which
the admiral refers, are making England very unquiet in this Spring
of 1655. Charles the Second, who, after some wandering, has set
tled himself at Cologne ; has gone with the Marquis of Ormond lo
Middleburg, that he may be ready for a landing in England. Wil
mot, now earl of Rochester, is in London, organising a general
insurrection. "There cannot be," says Clarendon, "a greater
manifestation of the universal prejudice and aversion in the whole
kingdom towards Cromwell and his government, than that there .
could be so many designs and conspiracies against him, which
were communicated to so many men ; and that such signal and
notable persons could resort to London, and remain there, without
any such information or discovery as might cause them to be
apprehended." * It was the policy of Cromwell, as it is of all really
sagacious rulers, not to be too prompt with measures of repression
— not to alarm and irritate the peaceful portion of the community
by fears and suspicions, which are generally the sparks to explode
combustible materials instead of being the safety lamps for their
discovery. Cromwell left the "signal and notable persons" to
pursue the course of their own rashness — even to the organisation
of a conspiracy which Rochester represented as so sure of success,
that the king's hopes " were so improved, that he thought of
nothing more than how he might with the greatest secresy trans
port himself into England ; for which he did expect a sudden
occasion." f The narrative which Clarendon gives of the result of
the enterprise which was to place Charles at the head of an Eng-
* " Rebellion," vol. vii. p. 137. t Ibid., p. 138.
70 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
lish army, sufficiently shows how justly the Protector measured
his own strength and that of these sanguine Cavaliers. The
assizes were being held at Salisbury. The city was full of grand
jurymen and petty jurymen, of magistrates and witnesses, all sleep
ing quietly in their beds, before the dawning of another day on
which the law should assert its wonted majesty in the judgment
seat, whatever might be the political differences of republican or
royalist. At five o'clock on the morning ofthe nth of March, a
party of two hundred horsemen rode into the streets of Salisbury,
headed by sir Joseph Wagstaff, " a stout man, who looked not far
before him," — a jolly Cavalier, much beloved by the roaring set
that Puritanism had not been able to tread out. Their first opera
tion was to seize the sheriff and the two judges, and to break open
the gaols. Clarendon recounts the proceedings of these loyal
adherents of king Charles, with a solemn unconsciousness that he
is showing how necessary was the government of a Cromwell to
save England from utter lawlessness and bloodshed : " When the
judges were brought out in their robes, and humbly produced their
commissions, and the sheriff likewise, Wagstaff resolved, after he
had caused the king to be proclaimed, to cause them all three to
be hanged." There was a country gentleman amongst these insane
royalists, John Penruddock, who had some sense of decency,
although Clarendon rather blames his scrupulousness : " Poor
Penruddock was so passionate to preserve their lives, as if works
of this nature could be done by halves, that the major-general durst
not persist in it." The judges were dismissed, their commissions
being taken from them ; but the sheriff was to be hanged because
he refused to proclaim the king. This likewise was resisted ; though
very many of the gentlemen were much scandalised at the tender
heartedness. To have hanged the sheriff " would have been a
seasonable act of severity to have cemented them to perseverance
who were engaged in it." No one stirred to help these valiant
supporters of the true monarchy and its attributes. In a few hours
they left Salisbury, and carrying the sheriff with them, went
forwards into Hampshire and Devonshire. There were none to
join them. They were hungry and wearied ; and a single troop of
Cromwell's horse, being by chance in the country, dispersed them
almost without a blow, three days afterwards. Some of the leaders,
and about fifty of their followers, were taken prisoners. Wagstaff
escaped to France. Penruddock, Grove, and others, were tried at
Exeter. The two gallant Cavaliers, brave men who deserved much
FAILURE OF RISINGS IN THE WEST AND NORTH. 7 1
commiseration, were beheaded ; a few others were hanged ; the
larger number were transported to Barbadoes. In the north, Wilmot
had gone to take the command of the insurrectionary army. That
army never extended beyond a few rash partisans. Wilmot got
back to his master, out of heart; and Charles and his court sat
down again at Cologne, to wait for times when the existing
government might not be quite so strong or so popular as was
manifested by the town-crier of a Dorsetshire town refusing, at the
peril of his life, to utter the words " Charles the Second, king of
England," when Penruddock dictated a royal proclamation.
The complex machine for governing England by a Single Person
and a Parliament being again out of working condition, the sim
pler and ruder machine of the Single Person must work as it
best may to prevent all government from coming to an end. This
is despotism. But despotism, however odious as a principle, has
many degrees of evil, and is only rendered tolerable by the desire
of a despot to perform a bad office in the least mischievous way.
Burke has truly described the government of Cromwell as " some
what rigid, but for a new power no savage tyranny." * The period at
which his despotism put on its most rigid form was in the year that
followed the dismissal of the Parliament at the beginning of 1655.
He was left without a legal revenue, for the maintenance of the
civil and military powers of the government. A merchant named
Cony had refused to pay custom duties, as illegally levied by ordi
nance. Cromwell tried to soothe the sturdy citizen, who reminded
him that he himself had said in the Long Parliament, that the sub
ject who yields to an illegal impost is more the enemy of his coun
try than the tyrant who imposes it. The Protector sent the mer
chant to prison; and then more arbitrarily imprisoned the Counsel,
who had, in pleading for his writ of Habeas Corpus, used argu
ments which went to deny altogether the legality of the authority
of the existing government. There was a compromise in which
Cony at length withdrew his opposition to the impost, and his
legal defenders were released. Sir Peter Wentworth refused to
pay the taxes levied upon him, and was brought before Cromwell
and his Council. He was required to withdraw an action which he
had commenced against the tax-collector. " If you command it I
must submit," said Wentworth to the Protector. He did com
mand it, and the resistance was at an end. Clarendon, who re
cords these acts of oppression, and especially Cromwell's lecture
* "Policy of the Allies."
72 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the judges " that they should not suffer the lawyers to prate
what it would not become them to hear," yet says, " in all other
matters, which did not concern the loss of his jurisdiction, he
seemed to have great reverence for the law, rarely interposing be
tween party and party." In his fiscal measures the most invidious
was the imposition of an especial tax upon a limited number of
royalists — a property tax, under which all those of the king's party
who were considered disaffected, and who either possessed an in
come of a hundred a year from land, or a personal estate of fifteen
hundred pounds in value, were called upon for a contribution of
one-tenth. To assess and collect this tax it was necessary to call
forth some new instruments. The Protector divided the country
into ten districts, each under the authority of a Major-General, who
had various large powers, and who had especially under his com
mand the Militia of the Counties. The Militia was a force essen
tially different from the regular army ; a force not without strong
popular instincts, and not so manageable in carrying through acts of
oppression. It was a military police, especially appointed to en
force a system of partial repression. There was no resistance to
the acts of the Major-Generals and their Commissioners, and there
was no large amount of murmuring. The decimation of the richer
royalists,- who had already been so harassed by sequestrations,
and for whose relief Cromwell had himself laboured to carry
through the Act of Oblivion, was truly described by Ludlow as
calculated to render its victims " desperate and irreconcileable, they
being not able to call anything their own, whilst by the same rule
that he seized one-tenth, he might also take away the other nine
parts at his pleasure."* There is a worse evil in despotic courses
than that of making men " desperate and irreconcileable " — that of
making them time-serving, slavish, and apathetic. A passage in
Baxter's life is illustrative of this: "James Berry was made Ma
jor-General of Worcestershire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, and
-North Wales, — the counties in which he had formerly lived as a
servant, a clerk of iron-works. His reign was modest and short;
but hated and scorned by the gentry that had known his inferiority,
so that it had been better for him to have chosen a stranger place.
And yet many of them attended him as submissively as if they had
honoured him ; so significant a thing is power and prosperity with
worldly minds." f That these Major-Generals meddled with other
royalists than those of good property is shown by the arrest of
* " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 519. t " Life," p. 97.
SEVERITIES AGAINST PAPISTS AND EPISCOPALIANS. 73
John Cleveland, "that incomparable son of Apollo" according to
the creed of the Cavaliers, for whose cause he has been writing
bitter satires since the first days of the Long Parliament. Colo
nel Haynes has arrested him at Norwich, and sent him to prison
at Yarmouth. Cleveland addressed a petition to the Protector,
though he had ridiculed his " copper-nose," in which the unfortunate
poet says, " I am inclined to believe that next to the adherence to the
royal party, the cause of my confinement is the narrowness of my
estate, for none stand committed whose estate can bail them. I
only am the prisoner who have no acres to be my hostage. Now
if my poverty be criminal, with reverence be it spoken, I must im
plead your highness, whose victorious arms have reduced me to it,
as accessory to my guilt." The Petition, an elaborate composition
far more laudatory than insulting, procured the poet's release.*
At this period the government of the Protector was more than
usually harsh towards the Catholics and the Clergy of the Anglican
Church. The plots against the Commonwealth were generally
mixed up with the intrigues of Papists, and the harshness towards
them was the practical continuance of the spirit of the severe penal
laws. The Episcopalians were harassed at the instance of the
Presbyterians, in spite of Cromwell's own ardent desire for tolera
tion. One of the most odious measures against them was an
ordinance prohibiting them to be received in private families as
preceptors. Archbishop Usher, for whom the Protector had a
deep respect, remonstrated with him against his injustice. He did
not withdraw the ordinance, but it remained inoperative. Preju
dices were too strong to allow him to act up to his own principles.
But with the great Puritan body, and the various sectaries that
sprang from them, he was determined to keep their animosities
under the control of an equal justice. " If a man of one form," he
declared to the Parliament in 1656, " will be trampling upon the
heels of another form ; if an Independent, for example, will de
spise him who is under Baptism, and will revile him, and will re
proach and provoke him, I will not suffer it iii him." Neither
should the Independent censure the Presbyterian, nor the Presby
terian the Independent. This toleration made him many enemies :
" I have borne my reproach ; but I have, through God'.s mercy,
not been unhappy in hindering any one religion to impose upon
another." The Quakers, who were hunted and persecuted by every
other sect, found a friend in Cromwell. George Fox, who had
* Printed with the Poems, edit. 1657.
74 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
been seized in his preachings, and carried to London, managed to
see the Protector, and exhorted him to keep in the fear of God ;
and Cromwell, having patiently listened to his lecture, parted with
him, saying " Come again to my house. If thou and I were but an
hour of the day together, we should be nearer one to the other. I
wish no more harm to thee than i clo my own soul." * George
and some of his brethren had been dispersing " base books against
the Lord Protector," as major-general Goffe informed Thurloe.
Cromwell sent the Quaker unharmed away, having received from
him a written promise that he would do nothing against his govern
ment. * Fox's "Journal," quoted in Carlyle's " Cromwell," vol. ii. p. r2i.
CROMWELL S FOREIGN POLICY. 75
CHAPTER IV.
Greatness of Cromwell in his Foreign Policy. — Naval armaments.— Blake's exploits.—
Jamaica taken. — Cromwell's interference for the Vaudois. — He attempts to procure
the re-admission of the Jews to settle in England. — Hostility of the Republicans to
the Protector. — Cromwell requires a pledge from Republican leaders. — Meeting of
the Protector's Second Parliament. — Cromwell's opening Speech. — Members ex
cluded from the Parliament. — Case of James Nayler. — Sindercomb's plot. — The
Parliament votes that Cromwell shall be offered the Crown. — Conferences on the
subject of Kingship. — Cromwell declines to accept the title. — Blake's victory at Santa
Cruz. — Cromwell inaugurated as Protector under a new Instrument of Government.
¦ — Second Session of Parliament. — The Upper House. — The old secluded Members
admitted to sit. — Cromwell's Speech. — Violent dissensions. — The Parliament dis
solved — Projected rising of Royalists. — Allied War in the Netherlands. — Dunkirk.
— Cromwell's family afflictions. — His illness and death.
" His greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had
abroad." So writes Clarendon of him who, he says, " will be looked
upon by posterity as a brave bad man." The mere courtiers of
Charles II. used to talk of the Protector as "that wretch, Crom
well."* It is something for Clarendon to acknowledge that "he
had some good qualities." He had the highest of all qualities in a
prince — a sense of public duty. He was an Englishman, bent
upon sustaining the honour of his country amongst the nations.
In this great design his genius luxuriated. He was not beset with
difficulties, as at home, when he sent forth his fleets to sweep the
Barbary pirates from the Mediterranean, or employed his diplo
matists to express in distinct terms, that the Protestants of the
Piedmontese valleys should not be massacred by a duke of Savoy,
although supported by a king of France. He went straight to his
object, when he concluded the P'rench alliance, and rejected that
of Spain, because " there is not liberty of conscience to be had
from the Spaniard, neither is there satisfaction for injuries nor for
blood." f " Elizabeth, of famous memory, that lady, that great
queen," as Cromwell terms her, was the load-star of his foreign
policy; "nothing being more usual than his saying 'that his ships
in the Mediterranean should visit Civita Vecchia, and that the
* Letter of Henrietta Maria ; Green, p. 380. t Speech, 17th September, 1656.
76 , HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sound of his cannon should be heard at Rome.' "* He raised his
country out of the pitiful subjection to which the Stuarts had re
duced it, to be again amongst the most respected of Christian
powers. " It was hard to discover which feared him most, France,
Spain, or the Low Countries, where his friendship was current at
the value he put upon it." f The price which he demanded for his
friendship was, that the liberties of Englishmen, their personal
security, and their rights of conscience, should be respected through
out the world ; that no sea should be closed against English com
merce ; that no combination of crowned heads should attempt to
control the domestic government of these kingdoms. He made no
pretensions to national supremacy inconsistent with the rights of
other countries ; but not a tittle would he abate of that respect
which was due to his own country and his own government. He
was raised to supreme power by a revolution upon which all mon
archical rulers must have looked with dread and suspicion and
secret hatred ; but he made no efforts to imbue other kingdoms
with a revolutionary spirit. His moderation commanded a far
higher respect than if he had formed schemes of European con
quest ; or had attempted to conciliate discontented colonels and
murmuring troopers, by leading them in person against Conde or
Don John of Austria. Truly has it been said, " He was a soldier;
he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of an impure or self
ish kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his country
into continental hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle the rest
less factions which he ruled, by the splendour of his victories." X
He left to Blake the glory of making the flag of England tri
umphant on the seas, satisfied to counsel and encourage him.
His practical spirit of doing everything for utility, and nothing for
vain glory, was so infused into his officers, that when Turenne sent
to Lockhart, Cromwell's general in the Netherlands, an explana
tion of the plan of the battle they were to fight with their allied
forces, the Englishman, with a noble common sense that could lay
aside the morbid vanity which too often mars the success of joint
enterprises, exclaimed, " Very good : I shall obey M. de Turen'ne's
orders, and he may explain his reasons after the battle, if he
pleases." §
The maintenance and increase of the naval arm ot our strength
was the especial care of the Protector. " I went," writes Evelyn
* " Clarendon," vol. vii. p. 297. t Ibid. t Macaulay, " Essays," vol. i.
§ Guizot, " Cromwell," vol. ii. p. 383.
BLAKE S EXPLOITS. — JAMAICA TAKEN. 77
in his Diary of the 9th of April, 1655, " to see the great ship newly
built by the usurper, Oliver, carrying ninety-six brass guns and
1000 tons burthen." Some months before, two armaments were
being fitted out at Portsmouth. Their destination was unknown.
Cromwell was one day surrounded in the streets by a large num
ber of sailors' wives. "Where are our husbands to be sent?"
they demanded. " The ambassadors of France and Spain would
each give me a million to know that," answered the Protector.
Whilst France and Spain were each under apprehensions when
Blake's fleet of twenty-five ships had sailed, the admiral appeared
before Leghorn, and demanded from the grand duke of Tuscany
redress for the owners of three merchant vessels, which had been
captured by prince Rupert in 1650, and sold in Tuscan ports and
in the Papal States. The grand duke and the pope paid the in
demnity. Blake then presented himself on the coast of Africa, to
demand the relief of Christian captives from the Barbary States.
His terms were complied with at Algiers and Tripoli. At Tunis,
the Dey pointed to his fortresses, and told the English to do their
worst. Blake battered the Tunisian works, and burnt the piratical
fleet in the harbour. A hundred and sixty years after this example
England had again " to break the oppressor's chain, and set the
captives free." The war with Spain had not yet been proclaimed,
but the second armament had sailed with secret orders. Blake
was waiting to take his share in the warfare, after he had chastised
the African pirates. He was off Malaga, where some of the sail
ors who had landed had shown disrespect to a procession of the
host. A priest incited the Spanish populace to outrage, and the
sailors were beaten and chased to their ships. They told their
story to the admiral, who demanded that the priest should be
brought to justice. The authorities replied that the civil power
could not touch an ecclesiastic. "Send him on board the St.
George within three hours or I will burn your city," was the ad
miral's demand of the governor of Malaga. The priest was sent.
The story of both sides was heard on the justice-seat of the quar
ter-deck. The sailors were found to be in the wrong, and the
priest was put ashore with all civility. " I would have punished
the men had I been appealed to," said the admiral ; " but I would
have you and all the world to know that an Englishman is not to
be judged and punished except by Englishmen." The other fleet
under Venables and Penn had gone for the West Indies. On the
14th of April it was before Hispaniola. There was no attempt at
78 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
once to take St. Domingo; but a portion of tbe badly assorted
army landed about ten leagues to the westward of the town, and
marched "through woods of incredible thickness, receiving little
or no opposition except the excessive heat of the sun, and intol
erable drought that oppressed them, having not had, in many
miles' march, one drop of water." * The other portion of the ar
mament had landed nearer the city ; and when a junction was ef
fected, the whole force fell into ambuscades, and were eventually
driven back to their ships. The commanders, who had lost every
thing by their disputes and feeble arrangements, sailed away, and
possessed themselves of Jamaica. The value of this conquest was
then little estimated ; and the fertility of the island was thought
small compensation for the loss of the supposed treasures of His-
paniola. Cromwell was somewhat cast down by this his first fail
ure ; and he sent Penn and Venables to the Tower when they
came home with the tale of their disasters. But he soon saw that
Jamaica gave England a solid footing in the West Indies, and was
a most important acquisition, although " it produces not any mines
of gold and silver, as doth Hispaniola " — a defect which the jour
nalist much laments. The two unfortunate commanders were soon
released. The Protector is unremitting in his watchfulness over
the West Indian possessions, as his letters show, and if possible
he will strike at the root of such miscarriages as that of His
paniola. He writes to major-general Fortescue at Jamaica, " As
we have cause to be humbled for the reproof God gave us at St.
Domingo, upon the account of our own sin as well as others', so,
truly, upon the reports brought hither to us of the extreme avarice,
pride and confidence, disorders and debauchedness, profaneness
and wickedness, commonly practised amongst the Army, we can
not only bewail the same, but desire that all with you may do so ;
and that a very special regard may be had so to govern, for time
to come, as that all manner of vice may be thoroughly discounte
nanced, and severely punished ; and that such a frame of govern
ment may be exercised that virtue and godliness may receive due
encouragement." The power and influence of -h ; Commonwealth was at this
period signally called forth by an occurrence that was no especial
injury or affront to the nation, but which more deeply moved the
heart of Puritan England than any event since the Irish massacre.
For many centuries there had dwelt in three small valleys of Pied-
* "Journal of the English Army," Harl. Miscellany, vol. vi. p. 372.
CROMWELL S. INTERFERENCE FOR THE VAUDOIS. 79
mont a race known as the Vaudois, or Valdenses — the people of
the valleys — who from the earliest times had kept separate from
the Church of Rome. Before the principles of the Reformation
had been disseminated by Luther or Calvin, the Pope, Innocent
VIII., had issued a bull for the extirpation of the pernicious sect
of the Waldenses. When they declared that their ancient faith
was similar to that of the Reformers, persecutions became more
frequent against tjiem. They were proscribed, first by France and
then by Savoy; and then sometimes tolerated, and sometimes
molested. In 1655 the government of the young duke Charles
Emmanuel II., having been irritated by tumults between some
Vaudois of one of the valleys and a convent of Capuchins, alleged
that those who had been tolerated in their religion within certain
districts, prescribed by edicts, had settled upon lands beyond their
proper boundaries. All the Vaudois families inhabiting eight
communes in the lower part of the valley of the Pelice, were com
manded to abandon, their fields and houses ; to sell their property
within twenty days ; or to become Roman Catholics. This com
mand was resisted ; and the duke of Savoy sent the marquis of
Pianezza to enforce the manifesto. The Vaudois deserted their
villages and sought refuge in the mountains. There were severe
contests between the troops and the suffering people ; in which
fearful cruelties were committed by the Piedmontese soldiers, and
by mercenary Irish and French in the service of the duke of
Savoy. An officer who was in the command of a French regiment
in Piedmont that had been placed under the orders of the marquis
of Pianezza, threw up his commission, " in order," he says, " that
I might not assist in such wicked actions." A declaration of this
brave man, captain du Petit-Bourg, is in the University Library at
Cambridge, wherein he says, " I was the witness of numerous acts
of. great violence and extreme cruelty, practised by the soldiers
towards all ages, sexes, and conditions, whom I saw massacred,
hanged, burned, and violated, and I also witnessed several terrible
conflagrations." He adds that the marquis of Pianezza ordered
all the prisoners to be killed, " because his highness would not
have any of their religion in all his dominions." The instant that
Cromwell heard of the preliminary harsh measures of the duke of
Savoy towards the Vaudois, he wrote to the English resident in
Switzerland to advise the persecuted people to appeal to England.
The news of the massacre arrived before any request was made
for succour. The Protector immediately sent an envoy extraor-
80 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
.dinary to Louis XIV. and to the duke of Savoy, with letters of re
monstrance. Upon all the Protestant princes he called for assist
ance in demanding justice for the Vaudois. A collection through
out England was made for these poor people, and Cromwell him
self gave two thousand pounds. His language was as moderate
as it was firm. But his meaning could not be mistaken. France
was most anxious to conclude a treaty of peace and commerce
with England ; but Cromwell declared that he would not sign it
till the French Court had procured from the Piedmontese govern
ment the Restoration of the Vaudois to their ancient liberties.
The French minister at Turin now insisted on an immediate pa
cification, which should restore the Vaudois to their civil and re
ligious liberties, as of old. The business was hastily concluded by
the French agents, and some harsh conditions were connected
with this settlement, which again caused the interference of the
Protector in 1658. The earnest thought of Cromwell went through
Europe clothed in the eloquent Latin of Milton ; and even those
who hated the Commonwealth acknowledged that England never
stood higher than when she demanded justice for a few poor cul
tivators of the Alps — those who had kept the truth
" When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones-"
The efforts of the Protector to procure safety and liberty of
Conscience for a race of Christians dwelling in three small valleys
of the Alps, were more successful than his endeavours to give a
legal home in England to a persecuted race, scattered through
every land. The Jews were banished, and their immoveable goods
were- confiscated, in 1290. In 1655 Cromwell assembled his Coun
cil, and " divers eminent ministers," to consider the petition of
Rabbi Manasseh-Ben-Israel of Amsterdam, that the Jews might
have liberty to settle again in England. Three hundred and sixty-
five years of obstinate prejudice might probably have sufficed to
exhaust the bigotry of a Christian community. Cromwell thought
the term quite long enough ; and so the matter of allowing the
Jews to reside again amongst us, and trade, and have public syn
agogues, and a cemetery out of the town to bury their dead, was
discussed in four conferences ; and the Protector advocated the
measure ; and one present says, " I never heard a man speak so
well." But there were then, as there always will be. grave divines
and learned lawyers who patch a rag of ancient intolerance into
HOSTILITY OF THE REPUBLICANS TO THE PROTECTOR. 8 1
their modern garments, to show the colour and substance of the
old material that all men once proudly wore. Of this species was
William Prynne, who headed the cry of Christianity in danger, by
publishing a manifesto against the Jews, in which " their ill-deport
ment, misdemeanours, condition, sufferings, oppressions, slaugh
ters, plunders by popular insurrections, royal exactions, and final
banishment," were brought forward in connection with Laws and
Scriptures, " to plead and conclude against their re-admission into
England." The old clamour against the Jewerie was revived, es
pecially in the city, where the merchants were jealous of the wealth
of the Hebrews ; and the Protector, seeing it was in vain to expect
any agreement on this question, sought for no legal sanction to
their settling here, but raised no objection to a Portuguese syna
gogue being opened in 1656.
The government of the Protectorate had ample public business
to engage its attention, during the twenty months in which a Single
Person, without a Parliament, was the supreme director of the af
fairs of three kingdoms. The alliance with France, and the war
with Spain, gave occasion to new movements of royalists, and new
combinations of republicans. Charles the Second was living in
dissolute poverty at Cologne, caring little for state concerns, and
laying no burden upon his conscience when he had to make some
contrary pledge to Protestant or Papist, openly to the one, or in
secret to the other. He was a little roused from his exclusive at
tention to his mistresses when the war with Spain induced him to
believe that he might obtain some assistance from that power
against their common enemy. Colonel Sexby, a furious republi
can, prepared with schemes of conspiracy and assassination, joined
the Councils of Charles and the Spanish ministers. In April, 1656,
a treaty of alliance was concluded between Philip IV. and the ex
iled king of England, by which the Spanish monarch promised
Charles a pension and an army, and Charles engaged that with the
aid of the Irish serving in France he would make a landing in
England. The government of the Protector was more effectually
endangered by the attitude ofthe great republican leaders at home,
than by preparations for war and assassination. Sir Harry Vane
had come forth with a pamphlet, which Thurloe described in a
letter to Henry Cromwell, as " a new form of government, plainly
laying aside thereby that which now is. . At the first coming out
of it, it was applauded ; but now, upon second thoughts, it is re
jected as being impracticable, and aiming in truth at the setting up
Vol. IV.— 6
82 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the Long Parliament again." Cromwell, in July, had issued writs
for a new Parliament. A second pamphlet, more exciting than the
first, was also published, and extensively circulated. The influence
of such appeals to the people, setting forth " infringed rights"—" in
vaded properties " — "imprisoned friends " — would be full of danger
in the result of the elections ; and Cromwell was placed in an atti
tude of more determined hostility against the republican party. The
elections were fiercely contested, amidst many popular tumults. The
government, had secured a majority, but many of its declared op
ponents were elected. Cromwell and his Council tried to persuade
Vane, Harrison, and other opponents, to pledge themselves not to
commit any act to the prejudice of the government. They refused ;
and were imprisoned. The nature of the pledge required may be
judged from a remarkable conference between Cromwell and Lud
low, recorded by the sturdy republican, who had been dismissed
from his employment in Ireland. When Ludlow drew near to the
Council Table, Cromwell charged him with dispersing treasonable
books in Ireland. He denied that they were treasonable. Crom
well said that he was not ignorant of many plots to disturb the
present power, and that he thought it his duty to secure such as he
suspected. Ludlow replied that whether his actions were good or
bad he was ready to submit to a legal trial. Cromwell then re
quired him to give assurance not to act against the government.
" I desired," says Ludlow, " to be excused in that particular, re
minding him of the reasons I had formerly given him for my re
fusal." The reasons were thus given at the previous interview
referred to : " If Providence open a way, and give an opportunity
of appearing in behalf of the people, I cannot consent to tie my
own hands beforehand, and oblige myself not to lay hold on it
* * * My dissatisfactions were not grounded upon any animosity
against his person ; and that if my own father were alive, and in
his place, they would, I doubted not, be altogether as great." * At
this second conference Ludlow maintains the same resolute mind,
and Cromwell exhibits the same desire to conciliate him : " Pray
then, said he, what is it that you would have ? May not every man
be as good as he will ? What can you desire more than you have ?
It were easy, said I, to tell what we would have. What is that, I
pray, said he ? That which we fought for, said I, that the nation
might be governed by its own consent. I am, said he, as much
for a government by consent as any man ; but where shall we find
* "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 554-5.
CROMWELL REQUIRES A PLEDGE FROM REPUBLICANS: 83
that consent ? Amongst the Prelatical, Presbyterian, Independent,
Anabaptist, or Levelling Parties ? I answered, amongst those of
all sorts who had acted with fidelity and affection to the public.
Then he fell into the commendation of his own government, boast
ing of the protection and quiet which the People enjoyed under it,-
saying, that he was resolved to keep the nation from being im
brued in blood. I said, that I was of opinion too much blood had
been already shed, unless there were a better account of it. You
do well, said he, to charge us with the guilt of blood ; but we think
there is a good return for what hath been shed ; and we under
stand what clandestine correspondences are carrying on at this
time between the Spaniards and those of your party, who make use
of your name, and affirm that you will own them and assist them.
I know not, said I, what you mean by my party, and can truly say,
that if any men have entered into an engagement with Spain, they
have had no advice from me so to do, and that if they will use my
name I cannot help it. Then in a softer way he told me, that he
desired not to put any more hardships on me than on himself ;
that he had been always ready to do me all the good offices that
lay in his power, and that he aimed at nothing by this proceeding
but the public quiet and security. Truly Sir, said I, I know not
why you should be an enemy to me who have been faithful to you
in all your difficulties. I understand not, said he, what you mean
by my difficulties. I am sure they were not so properly mine as
those of the public ; for in respect to my outward condition I have
not much improved it, as these gentlemen, pointing to his Council,
well know. To which they seemed to assent, by rising from their
chairs ; and therefore I thought not fit to insist farther on that
point, contenting myself to say, that it was from that duty which I
owed to the public, whereof he expressed such a peculiar regard,
that I durst not give the security he desired, because I considered
it to be against the liberty of the People, and contrary to the
known law of England." * After this bold manifestation Ludlow
went quietly away ; to maintain that Cromwell was a usurper, and
that the only legitimate authority was the Long Parliament. " In
general there is as much difference between a usurper and an he
reditary king, as there is between a wild boar and a tame one ;
but Cromwell had nothing in him ferocious." f
* " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 570.
t Landor, " Imaginary Conversations." — Works, vol. i. p. 554.
84 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The Parliament assembled on the 17th of September — a crowded
meeting in the Painted Chamber on a hot day — so hot, that the
Protector seems to imply that he will not detain them by a long
speech, seeing " that condition and heat that you are now in." But
he does speak at great length, with abundant words, although he
says " Truly our business is to speak things " . . . " things
that concern the glory of God, and his peculiar interest in the
world." A large subject, — but one which Oliver mainly associates
with " the being and subsistence of these nations with all their de
pendencies." Of their present dangers he chiefly speaks; — of
"your great enemy, the Spaniard;" of the circumstances which
" justify the war which has been entered upon with the Spaniard ; "
of the danger of "any peace with any State that is Popish, and
subject to the determination of Rome and the Pope himself," for
then "you are bound and they are loose." France was not "un
der such a tie to the pope." Spain, he says, " hath espoused that
interest which you all along hitherto have been conflicting with —
Charles Stuart's interest." He adds, " as there is a complication
of these interests abroad, so there is a complication of them here.
Can we think that Papists and Cavaliers shake not hands in Eng
land. . . . Your danger is so great, if you will be sensible of
it, by reason of persons who pretend other things." He points
to past dangers — to assassination plots, and insurrections in the
preceding year. The present great danger was from " a generation
of men in this nation who cry up nothing but righteousness, and
justice, and liberty; and these are divided into several sects and
sorts of men. They are known to shake hands with, — I should be
loath to say with Cavaliers — but with all the scum and dirt of this
nation." To meet such dangers " we did find but a little poor in
vention, which I hear has been much regretted — the erecting of
your Major-Generals. . . . Truly I think if ever anything were
justifiable as to necessity, this was." He then proceeds to Reme
dies : — First to consider all that ought to be done in order to Secur
ity ; next doing all things that ought to be done in order to Refor
mation. For outward security join heartily in the prosecution of
the war. " If you can come to prosecute it, prosecute it vigor
ously, or not at all." As to the distempers of people that pretend
' religion, " our practice since the last Parliament hath been, to let
all this nation see that whatever pretensions to religion would con
tinue quiet, peaceable, they should enjoy conscience and liberty to
themselves, and not to make religion a pretence for arms and
MEETING OF THE PROTECTOR'S SECOND PARLIAMENT. 85
blood." He points to the means which have been adopted " for
the ejecting of scandalous ministers, and for the bringing in of
them that have passed an approbation." He calls for Reforma
tion of Manners. " In my conscience, it was a shame to be a
Christian, within these fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen, years in this
nation — whether in Cassar's house, or elsewhere. It was a shame,
it was a reproach to a man, and the badge of Puritan was put upon
it. We would keep up Nobility and Gentry ; and the way to keep
them up is, not to suffer them to be patronisers or countenancers
of debauchery and disorders." These are wise words ; and there
were other words altogether as wise, which statesmen heeded not
for more than a century and a half ; holding, with learned Black-
stone, the necessity of entirely disregarding as unworthy of notice
"the crude and abortive schemes for amending the laws in -the
times of confusion which followed " the times of Charles I.* Let
us conclude our brief notice of this remarkable speech of 1656, with a
passage which contains, according to a high authority, " stronger in
dications of a legislative mind than are to be found in the whole range
of orations delivered on sucli occasions, before or since." f " There
are some things which respect the estates of men ; and there
is one general grievance in the Nation. It is the Law. Not that
the laws are a grievance, but there are laws that are ; and the great
grievance lies in the execution and administration. I think I may-
say it, I have as eminent judges in this land, as have been had, as
the Nation has had, for these many years. Truly I could be par
ticular, as to the executive part of it, as to the administration of
the Law; but that would trouble you. The truth of it is, there are
wicked and abominable laws, which it will be in your power to
alter. To hang a man for six-and-eightpence, and I know not
what ; to hang for a trifle, and acquit murder, — is in the ministra
tion of the Law, through the ill-framing of it. I have known in my
experience abominable murders acquitted. And to see men lose
their lives for petty matters ; this is a thing God will reckon for.
And I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you
have an opportunity to give a remedy ; and I hope I shall cheer
fully join with you in it. This hath been a great grief to many
honest hearts and conscientious people ; and I hope it is in all your
hearts to rectify it."
The legislative mind of Cromwell could rarely find adequate
encouragement in his legislators. We have seen how earnestly he
* Bookiv. Chap. 33. , t Macaulay, " Essays," vol. i.
86 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
was always calling, even from the battle-field, for reform of the
laws. Surely Mr. Hallam must have been strangely prejudiced
against the man and his principles, when, in his " Parallel between
Cromwell and Napoleon," he says, " In civil government there can
be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked only the
dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of
reason and philosophy were open. But it must here be added that
Cromwell, far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of a
legislative mind, or any desire to fix his renown on that noblest
basis, the amelioration of social institutions." Such a passage is
unworthy of the usual calm and impartial tone of the " Constitu
tional History." It might have been better suited to the historian
who designates Cromwell as " a barbarian." It would have been
better suited to that historian, David Hume, to speak of "the dregs
of a besotted fanaticism," as opposed to "the stores of reason and
philosophy," who had little sympathy with, if not positive hatred
to, the man or the race of men, who sought to live in the. "great
Task-master's eye." Cromwell, the barbarian, did not aspire to go
down to posterity with a Code in his hand. He had not to build
up new laws out of chaos, but to clear away the rubbish whicli en
cumbered the old laws. " If he erected little that was new, it was
because there had been no general devastation to clear a space for
him." *
The strong declamation of the Protector against men who cry
up nothing but righteousness and justice and liberty — the men of
several sects — the levelling party — the Commonwealth's men —
seemed to point at some extraordinary course with this Parliament.
About three hundred members had received a certificate in the fol
lowing form : " These are to certify that is returned by inden
ture one of the Knights [or Burgesses] to serve in this present
Parliament for the county [city or borough] of , and approved
by his Highness's Council," which certificate was signed by the
" Clerk of the Commonwealth in Chancery." This was a manifest
violation of the ancient parliamentary privileges, — a violation upon
the broadest scale. A hundred and two members, who had re
ceived no certificate, were prevented entering the House. Sixty-
five sent a letter of remonstrance to the Speaker. The Clerk of
the Commonwealth produced his instructions from the Council;
and the House having then demanded of the Council why certain
duly elected had not been admitted to sit, Nathaniel Fiennes, one
* Macaulay's " Essays," vol. i.
MEMBERS EXCLUDED FROM THE PARLIAMENT. 87
of the Commissioners of the Great Seal, attended, and showed that
according to the Instrument of Government " no persons could be
elected to serve in Parliament but such as were of known integrity,
fearing God, and of good conversation ; " and that, by the same
Instrument, the Council was authorised and directed " to examine
whether the persons elected were agreeable to the above-mentioned
qualifications." The formal letter of the Constitution had been
adhered to ; its application was a bold exercise of arbitrary power.
The excluded members protested against this total infraction of
the conditions of a free Parliament ; and denounced all the mem
bers who should continue to sit as " betrayers of the liberties of
England; and adherents to the capital enemies of the Common
wealth." The public indignation was great and general; but a
national success came opportunely to qualify it. A squadron of
Blake's fleet off Cadiz had captured two Spanish galleons returning
home with the treasures of the Indies ; and the people crowded
the roads and streets from Portsmouth to the Tower to look upon
a procession of thirty-eight waggons laden with ingots and piastres.
The treasury was replenished. The Parliament became tranquil-
ised. The power of the Protector seemed established on a firm
basis. He felt that he could relax in some measures of repression ;
and the Major-Generals were abolished. There was a mutilated
Parliament ; but the government of a Single Person was again
coming within the bounds of constitutional liberty. The powers of
the Parliament and the Protector now worked harmoniously togeth
er. Acts were passed for the security of his person : and for dis
annulling the title to the Crown of Charles Stuart and his descend
ants. The war with Spain was declared to be just and necessary ;
and four hundred thousand pounds were.voted for the expenses of
the war. The ordinances which the Protector had issued were
for the most part confirmed. His appointments to judicial offices
were approved. The revolution was thought by many to have
passed its period of disturbance and experiment. It was even pop
ularly considered to be probable and desirable that the Protector
should assume a higher title, and with the. powers of a king should
receive the name. Poetical flattery talked of the Spanish gold
being made into a crown and a royal sceptre. Amidst all sorts of
speculations upon such an event, an incident which appeared to
have little connection with a matter of such importance brought
into view the necessary antagonism between the executive author
ity of the Protector, and the ill-defined and ill-understood executive
88 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
power of the Parliament. Amongst the new sect of Quakers was
James Nayler, who, in his frantic enthusiasm, had proclaimed that
the Redeemer was incarnate in his person ; and he had moreover
given a great public scandal in going about in a state of nudity.*
'I he quaker was arrested at Bristol ; and brought up to the bar of
the House of Commons. There were ten days of wearisome de
bate, in which it was maintained that the House possessed the
right of life and death. The madman narrowly escaped hanging;
for eighty-two voted for his execution. He was finally condemned
to be put in the pillory, to have his tongue bored through with a
hot iron, and to be whipped through the streets. Cromwell saw,
as the more fanatical members had not seen, that the whole course
of legal government was threatened by this procedure of the House
— that this assumption of judicial power was incompatible with the
due course of justice. He addressed this letter to the Speaker :
" Right trusty and well-beloved, we greet you well. Having taken
notice of a judgment lately given by yourselves against one James
Nayler : although we detest and abhor the giving or occasioning
the least countenance to persons of such opinions and practices, or
who are under the guilt of the crimes commonly imputed to the
said person ; yet we, being intrusted in the present government,
on behalf of the people of these nations ; and not knowing how far
such proceeding, entered into wholly without us, may extend in the
consequence of it, — Do desire that the House will let us know the
grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded." Part of
Nayler's sentence had been inflicted when this letter was received.
The House immediately rejected a proposition for deferring the
completion of the punishment. The people became more and
more convinced that in a due balance of the executive and legisla
tive functions they must look for safety. The obstinacy of the
Parliament was Cromwell's triumph with the sober part of the na
tion. But his very pertinent desire to know " the grounds and
reasons " for a " proceeding entered into wholly without Us," led
* There is a curious passage in the very interesting autobiography of Thomas Ellwood
which somewhat explains this. Ellwood's father violently opposed, even by blows and
horsewhippings, his son's determination to be a Quaker. The old squire said, "they
held many dangerous principles ; that they were an immodest shameless people ; and
that one of them stripped himself stark naked, and went in that unseemly manner about
the streets, at fairs, and on market-day at great towns." The young man replied to his
father by citing " the example of Isaiah, who went naked among the people for a long
time." Isaiah was a prophet, said the father. " How know we but this Quaker may be
a prophet, too?" rejoined the son.
SINDERCOMB'S PLOT. 89
to inquiries about the due apportionment of power, which had very
remarkable results. Meanwhile a new assassination plot excited a
general interest in the life of the Protector ; and, like all such abor
tive schemes, made the authority stronger which it was intended
to overthrow. Charles the Second was residing at Bruges at the beginning of
1657. He had obtained money from Spain, with which he was
making some show of preparation for an expedition to England.
- But Cromwell — there is the difficulty. Colonel Sexby has been in
England, and is again with the king. He has left a trusty agent
behind him, and a certain service is to be well rewarded. Miles
Sindercomb was one of the Levellers of the army, who was sen
tenced to be shot at Burford in 1650. But he escaped then ; was
received as quartermaster into Monk's army in Scotland ; got in
volved in new plots ; and was cashiered. Sexby has left this man
a large sum for the conduct of his operations. He hired a house
at Hammersmith, and provided deadly combustibles of a sort to
blow the Protector and his carriage into atoms as he took his Sat
urday ride to Hampton Court. Sindercomb arranged, moreover,
to fire Whitehall, and have a safe blow at the Protector in the con
fusion. On the night of the 8th of January, the sentinel at the
Palace finds a basket of wildfire, and a slow match gradually burn
ing onwards to explode it. A life-guardsman comes before the
Council, and proclaims that Miles Sindercomb is the man who has
made these midnight arrangements. Sindercomb is taken ; is
tried; and convicted by a jury in the King's Bench : the day of ex
ecution is fixed ; but he is found dead in his bed. His sister has
conveyed poison to him. The author of "Killing no Murder" —
whether Colonel Titus or Colonel Sexby — says that Sindercomb
was smothered and not poisoned. With the wonted rant of politi
cal fanatics, he exclaims, " The brave Sindercomb hath shown as
great a mind as any old Rome could boast of ; and, had he lived
there, his name had been registered with Brutus and Cato, and he
had had his statues as well as they." This assassination plot was
extinguished as quickly as the lighted match at Whitehall. The
Parliament went in a body to congratulate the Protector on his
escape ; and his Highness made an appropriate reply. A Thanks
giving day followed ; and two sermons at " Margaret's Church ; "
and a princely entertainment to the House by the Protector, and
after dinner, " rare music, both of voices and instruments, till the
evening."
9°
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
When Secretary Thurloe, on the 19th of January, related the
discovery of Sindercomb's plot to the Commons, and the House
resolved to congratulate the Protector on his escape, Mr. Ashe, a
member of no great mark, moved that it be added to the congratula
tory add/ess, that his Highness would be pleased to take upon him
the government according to the ancient constitution. Great was
the clamour. The ancient constitution was Charles Stuart's in
terest. Was a kingly government now to be set up, against which
the Lord had borne testimony. The matter was dropped. On the
23rd of February, alderman Pack requested leave to read a paper
" tending to the settlement of the nation." The House was again
in most disorderly condition. But the alderman did read his paper,
in accordance with the desire of a large majority. Thurloe de
scribed the occurrence in a letter to Monk : " Yesterday we fell
into a great debate in Parliament. One of the aldermen who serve
for the city of London, brought in a paper called a Remonstrance,
desiring my Lord Protector to assume kingly power, and to call
future Parliaments, consisting of two Houses. * * * * I do
assure you it ariseth from the Parliament only ; his Highness knew
nothing of the preambles until they were brought into the House."
Four days after Pack's Remonstrance had been read, a hundred
officers, with several of the Major-Generals, amongst whom was
Cromwell's son-in-law, Fleetwood, waited upon the Protector, to
say' that they had heard with great dismay that there was a project
in hand to make his Highness King — a hazardous project — a scan
dal to the people of God. Cromwell somewhat resented this inter
ference. He had not been caballing about this project, either for
or against it. They need not, however, start at this title King, a
feather in a hat, for they had themselves pressed it upon him when
this government was undertaken. He thought the Instrument of
Government did need mending. That a House of Lords, or some
other check upon the arbitrary tendencies of a single House might
be useful. Look at the case of James Nayler. May it not be any
one's case some other day ? The deputation went their way ; and
the debate upon the great question proceeded in the House with
little interruption. Through the whole of March it was debated;
and it was at last voted, by a majority of sixty-one, to address the
Protector in these words : " That your Highness will be pleased to
assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office, of King of Eng.
land, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective dominions and
territories thereunto belonging; and to exercise the same according
THE PARLIAMENT VOTE THAT CROMWELL SHALL BE KING. 91
to the' laws of these nations." On the 31st of March, the House
proceeded to Whitehall, to present the document which they now
called " Petition and Advice." It was an Instrument of eighteen
articles, — touching Kingship, second House of Parliament, mode
of electing members, permanent public revenue, exclusive Protest.
ant religion, provision for tender consciences, — with lesser matters.
The Speaker presented these articles for the Protector's accept
ance, saying that they requested that all should be adopted — the
rejection of one article might make all the rest impracticable.
Cromwell's reply was to the effect that he asked time for con
sideration : ' That seeing you have made progress in this business,
and completed the work on your part, I may have some short time
to ask counsel of God and of my own heart."
Three days after this interview Cromwell requested that a Com.
mittee might be appointed to receive his answer to the Petition and
Advice. He spoke briefly, and with a tone somewhat different
from his usual decision. " You do necessitate my answer to be
categorical ; and you have left me without a liberty of choice save
as to all" — alLof the articles. " It is a duty not to question the
reason of anything you have done, * * * * But I must needs say,
that that may be fit for you to offer which may not be fit for me to
undertake. * * * * I must say I have been able to attain no
farther than this, seeing that the way is hedged up so as it is to me,
and I cannot accept the things offered unless I accept all, I have
not been able to find it my duty to God and you to undertake the
charge under that Title." The deputation returns to the House;
reports the reluctant negative of his Highness — perhaps not exactly
in the words of Casca, " There was a crown offered him, and being
offered him, he put it by with the back of his hand, thus."* The
House will prepare reasons for adhering to its Petition and Advice,
and will go again to Whitehall. On the 8th of April they declare,
in a body, to his Highness, that they do so adhere as "the Great
Council and Representative of the three nations," and again de
sire his assent thereto. He still hesitates. " I had, and I have,
my hesitations as to that individual thing. If I undertake anything
not in faith, I shall serve you in my own unbelief ; and I shall then
be the most unprofitable servant that the People or Nation ever
had." He wishes for more particular information upon certain
points. Casca again comes in to interpret this " coy, reluctant,
amorous delay : ' — " He put it by again ; but, to my thinking, he'
* Shakspere, "Julius Cassar," Act i. sc. 2.
g2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
was very loth to lay his fingers off it." The next day, Londoi
is in a tumult upon other questions of monarchy — not the pool
temporary question of protector or king, but whether the Fifth
Monarchy — the Assyrian Monarchy, the Persian, the Greek, and
the Roman, being all four extinct — the greatest monarchy of
all — the reign of the Saints on earth for a thousand years,—
be not visibly, at hand. It is to be proclaimed this day the 9th
of April, on Mile-end Green, by its great herald, Thomas Venner
the wine-cooper ; with its standard of the Lion of the Tribe of
Judah. A troop of horse settles the Fifth Monarchy with small
difficulty ; and, without bloodshed, its lieges are lodged in the
Tower. This attempt to put down all carnal Sovereignties passes
quietly away, without trial or punishment. The Parliament has to
debate the question of real Kingship with his Highness, which it
does, for many days, by the voices of a Committee of ninety-nine,
talking, and listening to my Lord Protector at Whitehall. Lord
Whitelocke, and Chief Justice Glynn, and Lord Commissioner
Fiennes, and lord Broghill, all have their say ; and Cromwell has
his comment. He still wants a little more lime to consider. He
takes counsel about this business of the kingship, with Broghill,
Pierpoint, Whitelocke, Wolseley, and Thurloe — as Whitelocke re
cords — and "would sometimes be Very cheerful with them; and,
laying aside his greatness, he would be exceedingly familiar; and
by way of diversion would make verses with them, and every one
must try his fancy. He commonly called for tobacco, pipes, and a
candle, and would now and then take tobacco himself. Then he
would fall again to his serious and great business." On the 13th
of April, he speaks at much length ; but he still hesitates : " I have
nothing to answer to any arguments that were used for preferring
Kingship to Protectorship. . . I am ready to serve, not as a
King, but as a Constable. For truly I have, as before God, often
thought that I could not tell what my business was in the place I
stood in, save comparing myself to a good Constable set to keep
the peace of the Parish. And truly this hath been my consent and
satisfaction in the troubles I have undergone that you yet have
peace." The real objection which Cromwell had to a higher dig
nity than that of Protector-Constable is very manifest : "If I know,
as indeed I do, that very generally good men do not swallow this
Title, — though really it is no part of their goodness to be unwilling
to submit to what a Parliament shall settle over them, — yet I must
say, it is my duty and my conscience to beg of you that there may
CONFERENCES ON THE SUBJECT OF KINGSHIP. 93
be no hard- things put upon me, — things, I mean, hard to them,
which they cannot swallow." Another conference in another week.
The same reluctance to accept ; the same unwillingness to offend
by a refusal. It is a tedious farce, say some ; — and yet a farce with
something serious about it ; quite enough of pressing solicitation
to make a vain ambitious man put the precious diadem in his
pocket; — not enough to make Cromwell peril' many interests, in
cluding his own, by a rash consent. His Highness and the Com
mittee now go into discussion of the other articles of the Petition
and Advice, to which the Protector has offered a paper of amend
ments. Long are the discussions ; though full of real meaning
amidst a maze of words. The Parliament adopts most of the
Amendments ; and, at last, again attends my Lord Protector in a
body, to receive his final answer upon the great question. There
was no mistaking his meaning now : " I think the Act of Govern
ment doth consist of very excellent parts, in all but that one thing
of the Title to me. ... I am persuaded to return this answer
to you, that I cannot undertake this Government with the Title
of King." The other parts of the Instrument of Government
were adopted, the term Protector being substituted for that of
King. "The Protector," says Whitelocke, "was satisfied in his
private judgment that it was fit for him to accept the Title of King,
and matters were prepared in order thereunto. But afterwards, by
solicitation of the Commonwealth's men, and many officers of the
army, he decided to attend some better season and opportunity in
the business, and refused at this time." Ludlow tells a little anec
dote of this interference of "officers of the army," which may con
clude this somewhat tedious relation of the discussions about
Kingship, which had gone 011 from the 23rd of February to the 8th
of May : — Cromwell, says Ludlow, whilst " he scrupled to take
upon him the Title of King, as a thing scandalous and of great
hazard " — yet " in the meantime he endeavoured by all possible
means to prevail with the officers of the army to approve his de
sign, and knowing that lieutenant-general Fleetwood and colonel
Desborough were particularly averse to it, he invited himself to
dine personally with the colonel, and carried the lieutenant-general
with him, where he began to droll with them about Monarchy, and
speaking slightly of it, said it was but a feather in a man's cap, and
therefore wondered that men would not please the children, and per
mit them to enjoy their rattle. But he received from them, as colonel
Desborough since told me, such an answer as was not at all suitable
94 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to his expectations or desires. For they assured him that there
was more in this matter than he perceived ; that those who put
him upon it were no enemies to Charles Stuart ; and that if he
accepted of it, he would infallibly draw ruin on himself and friends.
Having thus sounded their inclinations, that he might conclude in
the manner he had begun, he told them they were a couple of
scrupulous fellows, and so departed. The next day he sent a mes
sage to the House, to require their attendance in the Painted
Chamber the next morning, designing, as all men believed, there
to declare his acceptation of the crown. But in the meantime
meeting with colonel Desborough in the great walk of the Park,
and acquainting him with his resolution, the colonel made answer,
that he then gave the cause and Cromwell's family also for lost;
adding, that though he was resolved never to act against him, yet
he would not act for him after that time."
The public mind of England is kept sufficiently alive during the
early summer of 1657. First, the long deliberations about King
ship, and the unexpected refusal of the Title — unexpected by most
men, for the story went that the crown was made, and was ready at
Whitehall for the coronation. Then came out the daring pamphlet
of "Killing no Murder," recommending the duty of putting the
tyrant to death, and threatening that, in imitation of Sindercomb,
" there is a great roll behind, even of those that are in his own
muster-rolls, and are ambitious of the name of the deliverers of their
country ; and they know what the action is that will purchase it.
His bed, his table, is not secure ; and he stands in need of other
guards to defend him against his own." Such words made men
anxious and alarmed. But the bitterest enemies of Cromwell felt
tha_t his reign was not an indolent one. The news' came of a great
victory by Blake over the Spanish navy at Santa Cruz — one of
those daring exploits in which there is the greatest safety in what
the timid call rashness. Under the fire of tremendous batteries
the great admiral attacked the Spaniards in their own harbour, and
burnt their entire fleet. Oliver sent Blake a jewel in the name of
the Parliament and the Protector, with instructions to return home.
The noble sailor, — the true successor of Elizabeth's heroes, — the
honoured predecessor of a long file of England's bravest sons —
died on board his ship within sight of Plymouth. Then, six thou
sand English troops land in May near Boulogne, and a fleet is
cruising off that coast — an army and a fleet to co-operate with the
French in an attack upon the Spanish power in the Netherlands.
CROMWELL INAUGURATED AS PROTECTOR. 95
Meanwhile the Session of Parliament is coming to a close : but
first is to be performed a great national ceremony — the inaugura
tion, under the new Instrument of Government, of him who, with
out the Title of king, is to be clothed with regal honours and
powers. In Westminster Hall there is a gorgeous assembly on
the 26th of June. The coronation chair, with the famous stone of
Scotland, is placed beneath a canopy of state. The Protector
stands up under his canopy; surrounded by his Council and for
eign ambassadors ; the Speaker is seated beneath him ; the mem
bers of Parliament in seats built like an amphitheatre ; the Judges
on his right hand; the Corporation of London on his left; the
great hall crowded with spectators. The Speaker invests the Pro
tector with the Robe of Purple, " emblem of Magistracy ; " pre
sents him first with a Bible, the book of books, which " doth con
tain both precepts and examples for good government ; " then with
the Sceptre, " not unlike a staff, for you are to be a staff to the
weak and poor; " lastly, with the sword, " not a military, but civil
sword." Then Cromwell takes this oath : " I do in the presence
and by the name of Almighty God promise and swear, that to the
uttermost of my power I will uphold and maintain the true Re
formed Protestant Christian Religion, in the purity thereof, as it is
contained in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament,
to the uttermost of my power and understanding ;' and encourage
the profession and professors of the same ; and that to the utmost
of my power I will endeavour, as Chief Magistrate of these three
nations, the maintenance and preservation of the peace and safety,
and just rights and privileges, of the people thereof ; and shall in
all things,according to my best knowledge and power, govern the
people of these three nations according to law." A prayer was
then made ; the heralds proclaimed Oliver Cromwell Protector of
England, Scotland, and Ireland ; and the people shouted " God
save the Lord Protector." In all but the name, these three nations
were now a kingdom.
The second Session of Parliament is to assemble in January.
It is to be of a different composition from that of the first Session.
The excluded members are to be now admitted. There is to be a
" Second House." England appears approaching very nearly to
its old form of government — one supreme man, by whatever name
called — Lords, Commons. Still there is one something wanting —
that something which lord Broghill especially pointed out in the
conference about Kingship : " By your Highness bearing the title
96 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of King, all those that obey and serve you are secured by a law
made long before any of our differences had a being — in the nth
of Henry VII. — where a full provision is made for the safety of
those that shall serve whoever is king." It was this want of the
ancient title in the head of the government of which the lawyers
availed themselves at the Restoration of Charles 1 1., when they held
that his regnal years must be computed from the death of his father,
because no one had in the interval between the 30th of January,
1649, and the 29th of May, 1660, assumed the title of king. The
same absence of the ancient designation of the supreme governor
unquestionably influenced the aristocracy during the life of the
Protector, and compelled him to form a " Second House " of a
very anomalous character. He had, however, strengthened his
interest with the old nobility to some extent. In November, 1657,
lord Falconbridge married his daughter Mary ; and Robert Rich,
grandson of the earl of Warwick, married his daughter Frances.
But of the members of the old House of Lords only seven accepted
the Protector's writ of summons. He filled up its number of six
ty three with great civil officers, generals, and some eminent
country gentlemen and citizens. Ludlow tells us of the neglect
which sir Arthur Haslerig paid to the summons to be a member
of the Upper House, and of the anxiety of the old Speaker, Len-
thall, to be a lord. Only one of those Peers who had accepted the
writ took their seats. " The earl of Warwick himself," says Lud
low, " though he ventured to marry his grandson to one of Crom
well's daughters, could not be persuaded to sit with colonel Hew
son and colonel Pride, whereof the one had been a shoemaker,
and the other a drayman : and had they driven no worse trade, I
know not why any good man should refuse to act with them.
Divers of the gentry did not appear; yet others, and particularly
such as were related to those in power, were prevailed with to be
of this assembly."
The scheme of A Second House was not favourable to the
disposition of the Commons to uphold the Protector's government.
Forty members took their seats as quasi-lords, who would other
wise most probably have been in the Commons, and have given
their support to the existing authority. The members who had
been excluded in the first Session were competent to sit in this
second Session, if they took the oaths. They did take them ; and
were ready for a vigorous opposition. On the 20th of January the
Parliament met. His Highness is now in the House of Lords,
A SECOND HOUSE. 97
and the Commons are duly summoned thither by Black Rod, as of
old; and the protector begins his speech, as of old, with "My
Lords, and Gentlemen of the House of Commons." He made a
short speech. "I have some infirmities upon me. I have not
liberty to speak more unto you ; but I have desired an honourable
person here by me to discourse a little more particularly what may
be more proper for this occasion and this meeting." Nathaniel
Fiennes, one of the commissioners of the Great Seal, made a
figurative speech, recommending unanimity. The Commons, upon
their return, went at once upon heady debate — day by day — as to
what the new House should be called. Haslerig will not be a
member of " the other House." He will obey no writ of summons.
He will sit as an elected Representative. Clearly the new Con
stitution is going very fast to pieces. Cromwell summons the
Parliament to the Banqueting House, five days after the opening
of the Session. He addresses the members in a manly speech.
He speaks firmly and boldly, and says some truths that are univer
sal : " Misrule is better than no rule ; and an ill-government, a,
bad government, is better than none .... I know you are rational,
prudent men. Have you any frame or model of things that
would satisfy the minds of men, if this be not the frame, which
you are now called together upon, and engaged in, — I mean the
two Houses of Parliament and myself ? What hinders this nation
from being an Aceldama, if this dolh not ?....! never look to
see the people of England come into a just Liberty, if another
Civil War overtake us. I think, at least, that the thing likely to
bring us into our liberty, is a consistency and agreement at this
meeting I shall be ready to stand or fall with you, in
this seemingly promising Union, which God hath wrought among
you, which I hope neither the pride nor envy of men shall be able
to make void. ... I trust, by the grace of God, as I have taken
my oath to serve this Commonwealth on such an account, I shall
— I must — see it done, according to the articles of government.
That every just interest may be preserved ; that a godly Min
istry may be upheld, and not affronted by seducing and seduced
spirits ; that all men may be preserved in their just rights,
whether civil or spiritual, — upon this account did I take oaths and
swear to this Government." This appeal — "the words as of a
strong great captain addressed in the hour of imminent shipwreck " *
— was in vain. The discontented are powerful in the Commons.
* Carlyle, vol. iii. p. 247.
Vol. IV.— 7
gg HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
No real business can proceed, whilst the question of " the other
House " is daily debated. Oliver Protector will bring the matter
to an end. The Commons are again summoned by the Black Rod.
" What care I for the Black Rod ? " cries Haslerig. But they
obey the summons. And then the Protector speaks with an an
grier voice than was his wont, even in former disquietudes : "You
have not only disjointed yourselves but the whole nation, which is
in likelihood of running into more confusion in these fifteen or six
teen days that you have sat, than it hath been from the rising of
the last Session to this day — through the intention of devising a
Commonwealth again — that some people might be the men that
rule all. . . . It hath not only been your endeavour to pervert the
army while you have been sitting, and to draw them to state the
question about a Commonwealth ; but some of you have been listing
of persons, by commission of Charles Stuart, to join with any insur
rection that may be made. ... If this be the end of your sitting,
and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an end be put
to your sitting. And I do dissolve this Parliament. And let God
be judge between you and me."
The Parliament is gone ; but the Protector is not left to repose.
There are dangers around him of no common magnitude. He
meets them bravely. The Parliament is dismissed in the morning
of the 14th of February. In the afternoon Oliver is writing to his
captains of militia in the country, to " be most vigilant for the sup
pressing of any disturbance which may arise from any party what
soever." He summons his officers to Whitehall, and asks if they
are willing, with him, to maintain the Instruments of Government?
Most answer, they will live and die with him. A few look gloomy,
and are silent. In a day or two he removes suspected officers from
the army. "The cavaliers," says Mrs. Hutchinson, "had not
patience to stay till things ripened of themselves ; but were every
day forming designs, and plotting for the murder of Cromwell, and
other insurrections ; which, being contrived in drink, and managed
by false and cowardly fellows, were still revealed to Cromwell, who
had most excellent intelligence of all things that passed, even in
the king's closet. And by these unsuccessful plots they were the
only obstructors of what they sought to advance, while to speak
truth, Cromwell's personal courage and magnanimity upheld him
against all enemies and malcontents."* Lambert encouraged the
disaffected officers, who desired to set him up in Cromwell's place :
v " Memoirs,"" vol-ii.p. 214.
PROJECTED RISING OF ROYALISTS. 99
"His ambition had this difference from the Protector's; the one
was gallant and great ; the other had nothing but an unworthy
pride, most insolent in prosperity, and as abject and base in ad
versity." * Mrs. Hutchinson says that the disaffected officers—
"some of the Lambertonians "—proposed to gain admission to
Cromwell with a petition, and then, whilst he was reading it, throw
him out of a window at ' Whitehall into the Thames. Colonel
Hutchinson became acquainted with the plot by chance ; and re
vealed it to the Protector, "judging that Lambert would be the
worse tyrant of tbe two." Hutchinson warned Cromwell against
petitioners ; but could not be prevailed upon to give any more in
formation than was necessary to prevent the design. Royalists
and fanatics, republicans and levellers, were all ready to assail the
man who would not suffer them " to imbrue their hand's in blood."
On the 1 2th of March Cromwell received the Corporation of Lon
don at Whitehall, and explained the reasons which had induced
him to dissolve the Parliament, in order to avert the dangers with
which the government was threatened — invasions and insurrections
— the Spaniard and the exiled being in league, — Royalists and
Anabaptists plotting together. The marquis of Ormond only left
London on Tuesday last, he told them ; — the marquis of Ormond,
who had come disguised to London on a mission from Charles Stu
art. Ormond had gone away " on Tuesday last," upon a very in
telligible hint. "There is an old friend of yours in town," said
Cromwell to lord Broghill. " The marquis of Ormond lodges in
Drury Lane, at the Pajiist surgeon's. It would be well for him if
he were gone." Ormond was very soon at Bruges, and reported
to Charles that Cromwell had better be left alone for the present.
Nevertheless, London is ready for trying insurrection upon a lim
ited scale. There was to have been a great outbreak on the 15th
of May. The royalist leaders have lost heart now Ormond is gone ;
but there are malcontents ready for a rising — wild apprentices and
other rash persons, who propose to fire houses, and do a consid
erable amount of slaughter. The Lieutenant of the Tower comes
out with five pieces of artillery, and the apprentices get within their
masters' houses as fast as possible. The ringleaders of this in
tended insurrection are seized at "the Mermaid in Cheapside."
Others are arrested in the country. A High Court of Justice, ap
pointed by Act ofthe last Parliament, is summoned for trial of the
conspirators. Fifteen were arraigned; amongst whom were sir
* " Memoirs,'' vol. ii. p. 214.
I OP HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Henry Slingsby, and Dr. Hewit, an episcopal divine. These two
were condemned and executed ; although the highest interest was
made to save their lives. Six of the insurrectionists were also
condemned, of which number three suffered. There were no more
insurrections during the life of Cromwell.
That life, like a brilliant sun-set in a 'stormy sky, has its parting
glories. The foreign policy of the Protectorate was triumphant.
The alliance with France was not a mere pretext for combined
action rendered impossible by national jealousies on our part.
When the English troops landed at Boulogne, .the young king
Lewis XIV. came to review them. Lockhart, Cromwell's ambas
sador, said : " Sire, the Protector has enjoined both officers and
soldiers to display the same zeal in the service of your majesty, as
in his own." The French government construed this too literally,
and thought that England was to have an equal share of danger
and expense but a very disproportionate amount of advantage.
The English were employed by France in securing fortresses in
the interior, instead of in combined operations against Gravelines,
and Mardike, and Dunkirk, on the coast, as stipulated by treaty.
Cromwell was not a man to be duped. He ordered his ambassa
dor to see that the treaty was carried out, or send the English
troops home. Mazarin was not inclined to quarrel with the Pro
tector, and so Mardike was besieged, and delivered provisionally
to the English general. The next spring, amidst all his home dis
tractions, Cromwell renewed the treaty of offensive alliance with
France, and sent more troops. On the 25th of May Dunkirk was
invested by the allied French and English army. Turenne was
the commander. The town was defended by the marquis of Ley-
den. Don John of Austria marched from Brussels with a Span
ish force to drive back the besiegers. Cond£ was with this army,
and also the dukes of York and Gloucester. The Spaniard per
sisted in giving battle, against the advice of Conde. " Did you
ever see a battle fought ? " said Conde to the young duke of Glou
cester. He had not. " Well : you will soon see a battle lost."
The English, commanded by Lockhart, fought for four hours, and
carried the most difficult posts. They were often opposed to their
own countrymen, headed by the duke of York. This battle on the
Dunes was a complete victory. On the 25th of June, Dunkirk
surrendered ; and the town was placed in the hands of the English.
It was a compensation for the Joss of Calais, as the nation thought.
To have a footing on foreign ground was a proud thing for Eng-
CROMWELLS FAMILY AFFLICTIONS. IOI
land — a mistaken pride, but not an impolitic one in those days.
Dunkirk was an English garrison, till — but it is unnecessary to
anticipate the coming time of national degradation.
Triumphant abroad ; freed from insurgents at home ; Cromwell
again looked towards a Parliament. Were the popular desires for
monarchy to be gratified by a change of name ? Was the nation
to accept the subtle argument of Lord Broghill, " there is at pres
ent but a divorce between the pretending king and the imperial
crown of these nations, and we know that persons divorced may
marry again ; but if the person be married to another it cuts off all
hope." Such might have been the Protector's thoughts, until
something more absorbing than worldly power or dignity obtruded
itself to make him as anxious and wretched as the lowliest of those
he ruled. His daughter, lady Claypole, was dying. In every
domestic relation, son, husband, father, we see the tenderness of
this man's nature. In 1648 his eldest son was killed in battle.
There is not a trace of his father's sorrow in any letter or mem
orandum of the time ; till the new affliction calls up bitter remem
brances out of the sacred depths. Lady Claypole died on the 6th
of August, her father having been fourteen days watching by her
bedside at Hampton Court, " unable to attend to any public busi
ness whatever." A few days after, says Harvey, groom of his
bedchamber, "he called for his Bible, and desired an honourable
and godly person there, with others present, to read. unto him that
passage in Philfppians fourth: 'Not that I speak in respect of
want : for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to
be content. I know hSwtobe abased, and I know how to abound :
everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to
be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things
through Christ which strengtheneth me.' Which read, said he, to
use bis own words as near as I can remember them : ' This Scrip
ture did once save my life, when my eldest son died ; which went
as a dagger to my heart, indeed it did.' " A few months before,
Cromwell had lost his son-in-law, Rich; and then Rich's grand
father, the earl of Warwick, the Protector's one constant friend
amongst the nobility, also died. Oliver's stout heart was sorely
bowed down by public cares and private griefs. He roused himself,
however, and was out again at his duties. George Fox tells us
something about the Protector's looks, at this season, soon after
the time when London was gay with ambassadors extraordinary
from France ; and Mazarin's nephew was there to assure the Pro-
102 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tector of the profound veneration his uncle had for him — " the
greatest man that ever was." The day was past for pomps and
flatteries. "Taking boat I went to Kingston," says Fox, " and
from thence to Hampton Court, to speak with the Protector about
the sufferings of Friends. I met him riding into Hampton Court
Park ; and before I came to him, as he rode at the head of his
Lifeguards, I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him ;
and when I came to him, he looked like a dead man. After I had
laid the sufferings of Friends before him, and had warned him, ac
cording as I was moved to speak to him, he bade me come to hi:;
house. So I returned to Kingston ; and the next day went up to
Hampton Court, to speak further with him. But when I came,
Harvey, who was one that waited on him, told me the doctors were
not willing that I should speak with him. So I passed away, and
never saw him more." On the 24th of August, Cromwell left
Hampton Court for Whitehall. Ten days of acute suffering, and
then the end.
On the 30th of August, a mighty storm of wind filled the land
with dismay. There is deeper cause for alarm to most men, for
the Protector is dying. What is to come next ? By the Instru
ment of Government he is to name his successor. His eldest son,
Richard, is an idle country-gentleman, harmless, but somewhat
incapable. Thurloe puts the question of Succession to the dying
man. There is a sealed-up paper in a certain place at Hampton
Court. The paper is not to be found. On the night of the 2nd of
September, the question is put again. The answer, faintly breathed
out, was said to be "Richard." That night, again one of terri
ble storm, was to usher in Cromwell's " Fortunate Day," the 3rd
of September, the anniversary of Dunbar and Worcester. The
prince and soldier passed away, in a state of insensibility, in the
afternoon of that 3rd of September. The prayer which he ad
dressed to Heaven a night or two befjore his death has a consistent
reference to his public life ; in connexion with his religious belief:
" Lord, though I am a miserable and wretched creature, I am in cov
enant with Thee through grace. And I may, I will come to thee, for
Thy people. Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean
instrument to do them some good, and Thee service ; and many of
them have set too high a value upon me, though others wish and
would be glad of my death. Lord, however Thou do dispose of me,
continue and go on to do good for them. Give them consistency
of judgment, one heart, and mutual love ; and go on to deliver them,
DEATH OF CROMWELL.
103
and with the work of reformation ; and make the name of Christ
glorious in the world. Teach those who look too much on Thy
instruments, to depend more upon Thyself. Pardon such as de
sire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are Thy
people too. And pardon the folly of this short prayer : — Even for
Jesus Christ's sake. And give us a good night if it be Thy pleas
ure. Amen." At this time, " wherein his heart was so carried
out for God and His people," says Harvey, "he seems to forget
his own family and nearest relations." His last notion, — a wrong
or right notion as men may differently conclude, — was that Fe had
been an instrument of good to England. The night before his
death he said, " I would be willing to live to be further serviceable
to God and His people : but my work is done. Yet God will be
with His People.
T.Q4 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER V.
Richard Cromwell proclaimed Protector.— General calm upon his succession to power.—
Funeral of Oliver Cromwell.— A Parliament called.— Different Constitution of
Parliament. — Conflicts between the Republican leaders and the majority. — Demands
of the Army.— Richard Cromwell yields to their pretensions.— He is compelled by
the Officers to dissolve the Parliament.— End of the Protectorate.— Assembly of the
Long Parliament.— Resolutions that the Military power should be under the Civil.—
Discussions as to the form of Government.— The Rota Club.— Disunion of Parties.—
Royalist insurrection.— Sir George Booth defeated by Lambert.— Petitions of the
Officers. — The Parliament, subjected to the Army, ceases to sit. — Committee of
Safety. — Monk in Scotland. — Resolves to restore the Parliament. — Lambert sent
against Monk. — The Parliament restored by the Council of Officers. — Monk marches
to London. — Movements of the Royalists. — Disaffection in the City, which Monk is
ordered to suppress. — His demand that a Parliament shall be called. — Popular exul
tation. — Monk restores the secluded Members. — The measures of the Parliamentary
majority. — Charles's Court. — The Long Parliament finally dissolved. — Monk agrees
to act for Charles. — Lambert's insurrection. — Meeting of the New Parliament. — The -
King's Letter. — Debates on the Bill of Indemnity. — Charles the Second proclaimed.
— He lands at Dover. — His entry into London.
The death of Oliver Cromwell was followed by no popular
agitation — scarcely by any immediate demonstration of party dis
sensions. The Council was summoned. Evidence was given of
the verbal declaration of the Protector that his son Richard should
be his successor. Fleetwood, the lieutenant-general of the army,
was thought by some to have been nominated to the succession in
the paper which could not be discovered ; but he gave his pledge
to respect the appointment of Richard. On the 4th of September
the new Protector was solemnly proclaimed ; and he took the oath
contained in the Instrument of Government. The ready accept
ance by the nation of the son of the late ruler offers a proof that,
during the contests of the Protectorate, its power had been grad
ually consolidating ; and that the great name of the Protector
remained as a shield for the weakness of his son. Richard was
weak in all the essential qualities necessary for preserving an
authority as legitimate not recognised by many. Mrs. Hutchinson
describes him as " a peasant in his nature, yet gentle and virtuous,
but became not greatness." If, yielding to the flattering idea of
hereditary succession, his father had really nominated him, that
nomination must have been against his own previous convictions
RICHARD CROMWELL PROCLAIMED PROTECTOR. 105
of his eldest son's unfitness for government. On the contrary, his
son Henry had displayed very high qualities as Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland. He had shown firmness with conciliation ; he had kept
the land at peace and in subjection to the laws. Yet the accession
of Richard Cromwell, if it excited no confidence in the people,
produced no distrust. They saw a quiet and unambitious young
man quietly take his father's seat; they scarcely thought that the
mild indifference of authority may be more dangerous than its
severe watchfulness. Abroad, the royalists were vexed and sur
prised at the calm in England. Hyde thought there would be great
changes : " I cannot believe," he writes, " that all will submit to
the government of this young coxcomb." Henrietta Maria, how-'
ever, doubted whether any great advantages could accrue from
" the death of that wretch," as she writes to Madame de Motteville.
Three months after that important event, Hyde almost lost heart :
" We have not yet found that advantage by Cromwell's death as
we reasonably hoped ; nay, rather, we are the worse for it, and the
less esteemed, people imagining by the great calm that has fol
lowed that the nation is united, and that the king has very few
friends.'' Foreign governments readily gave their adherence to
the Commonwealth. The Court of France put on mourning to do
honour to Oliver's memory. Nevertheless "the great calm " was
gradually becoming disturbed. Within six weeks of his accession,
a body of officers, headed by Fleetwood, presented a petition to
Richard for such organic changes in the military constitution as
would have placed all control of the army out of his hand. He
mildly but firmly refused his assent, as contrary to the " Petition
and Advice " on which the Protectorate was founded. Henry
Cromwell saw the coming danger; and wrote to his brother, "I
thought those whom my father had raised from nothing would not
so soon have forgot him, and endeavour to destroy his family
before he is in his grave." Richard was not only harassed by the
ambition of the officers, but had to encounter the greatest peril of
governments, financial difficulties. His father had left no wealth
—contrary to the belief of most persons. He had higher thoughts
than those of making his family rich. Richard was soon embar- .
rassed, the more so as the pompous funeral of the late Protector
absorbed all his immediate resources, and left him greatly in debt.
That funeral was deferred till the 23rd of November. The prepa
rations for this public solemnity were upon an extravagant scale,
utterly unsuited to the simple grandeur which the Protector had
106 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
affected in his life-time. Evelyn has briefly described this cere
monial: " Saw the superb funeral of the Protector. He was car
ried from Somerset House on a velvet bed of state, drawn by six
horses, housed with the same ; the pall held by his new Lords ;
Oliver lying in effigy, in royal robes, and crowned with a crown,
sceptre, and globe, like a king. The pendants and guidons were
carried by the officers of the army ; the imperial banners, achieve
ments, &c, by the heralds in their coats ; a rich caparisoned horse,
embroidered all over with gold ; a knight of honour armed cap-a-
pied ; and, after all, his guards, soldiers, and innumerable mourn-
> ers." Evelyn adds, " in this equipage they proceeded to West
minster • but it was the joyfuUest funeral I ever saw ; for there
were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with
a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as
they went." Ludlow, speaking with similar contempt of this
pageantry, says, of the lying in state, " This folly and profusion so
far provoked the people, that they threw dirt in the- night on his
escutcheon that was placed over the great gate of Somerset
House." In the middle of November, Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell
that when the funeral was over the Council would begin business,
" if troubles do not begin before." The Council met on the 29th
and resolved on calling a Parliament. It was not to be such a
Parliament as Oliver had called. The old Representative system
was to be restored. Small and decayed Boroughs, which had been
disfranchised, were again to elect burgesses. Commercial towns,
such as Manchester, which had grown into importance, were again
to cease to have members. The loss of ancient privileges by petty
communities had given more offence than the gain of new fran
chises by large sections of the people had afforded satisfaction.
The government strove as much as possible to exclude the Repub
licans from Parliament ; but it was not successful to a great
extent. Many in the service of the government obtained seats.
The Royalists influenced many of the elections, but few declared
Royalists offered themselves as candidates. The Parliament,
"\which met on the 29th of January, appeared to contain more moder
ate men than violent partisans. There was nothing in its com
position to indicate that the Protectorate would become insecure
tli rough legislative action. The Lords, or Upper House, were
summoned by the Protector's writ, as the Lords of Oliver had been
summoned. The members of both Houses were required to take
HOSTILITY OF THE ARMY. 107
the oath to the government. Some few republicans refused, and
did not take their seats. Ludlow, and probably others, evaded
the oath ; and, after some dispute, were permitted to sit. The
passions of various factions soon manifested themselves. A bill
having been proposed "for a recognition of the Protector," no
dislike was exhibited towards Richard Cromwell. On the contrary,
even the strong Republicans spoke kindly of him : " If you think
of a Single Person, I would have him sooner than any man alive."
said Scott, — one of the most violent against the late Protector.
But the Republicans came back to their old assertion of the right
of Parliament alone to exercise the government, as it had been
exercised before the dissolution of the Long Parliament. By that
action, said Vane, they lost their possession, not their right. " The
chief magistrate's place was assumed without a law." It was dan
gerous to confess a title in being that was not of their own giving,
maintained Vane. After long and violent debates, the Bill for the
recognition of the Protector was passed. The Royalists looked
on rejoicingly at these conflicts ; believing that they would end in
confusion. There was still greater disagreement when the question
came to be debated, whether there should be two Houses. The
Commons voted that the Parliament should consist of two> Houses ;
but then proceeded to discuss the bounds and powers of the other
House. After weeks of debate, it was resolved, by a consider
able majority, that the House would treat with the persons now
sitting in the other House, as a House of Parliament ; and that such
Peers as had been faithful to the Parliament might be summoned
to serve as Members of that House. The Republicans and the
Royalists were beaten.
But, however triumphant at Westminster, as to these material
points, there was a power yet unpropitiated, which Oliver could
opntrol, but which was wholly unmanageable by the gentle hand of
Richard. Soon after his accession he said to the officers who came
to him with a petition, " It is my disadvantage that I have been so
little amongst you, and am no better known to you." He now began to
feel how great was this disadvantage. There were some regiments,
commanded by his friends, of whose fidelity the young Protector
had no doubt. The armies of Scotland and Ireland were equally
faithful. But the violent sectarian soldiers disliked his moderation.
He was threatened by Desborough that the army would desert him
it he attempted to conciliate the Royalists. It was objected against
him that he preferred others beside "the godly." The Parliament
I08 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and the Army were secret antagonists. Their mutual hostility
soon became manifest. Looking merely at their legislative influ
ence, it was no serious evil that the most signal strokes of the
policy of the late Protector had been condemned by the few Repub
lican members; that they reprobated the peace jvith the Dutch;
the alliance with France ; the war with Spain. They were insen
sible to the real triumphs of Oliver; they were indifferent to the
high position in which he had placed his country amongst the na
tions. They made no allowance for the difficulties he had expe
rienced in restraining contending factions at the least expenditure
of blood. They hated the participation of one Single Person in
the power of a Parliament ; and that hatred made them little careful
to avoid the old strifes. But there was a serious danger when the
Army fell in with this humour ; and saw, with jealousy, a majority
of the Parliament inclined to peace and moderation. Richard in
discreetly consented to the appointment of a general Council of
Officers. Five hundred assembled at Wallingford House. A vio
lent test was proposed, which was indeed laid aside, but they came
to resolutions which aimed at separating the command of the Army
from the Civil Power. The Parliament soon saw its danger. A
member, Jord Falkland, said, " You have been a long time talking
of three Estates ; there is a fourth which, if not well looked-to,
will turn us all out of doors." The House of Commons then voted
that no general Council of Officers should be held without permis
sion of the Protector and the Parliament ; and that every officer
should sign an engagement that he would not disturb the free
meetings or proceedings of Parliament. Richard was urged to
be firm. He went amongst the officers at Wallingford House; and
told them that he would see their complaints righted in Parliament,
but that he dissolved their Council. The Council obstinately con
tinued to sit. Those officers who were devoted to the Protectqr
urged him to adopt some strong measure. Richard shrank from
the responsibility : " I have never done anybody any harm," he
exclaimed, "and I never will : I will not have a drop of blood spilt
for the preservation of my greatness, which is a burden to me."
Broghill, and Howard, and other faithful friends, saw that one
course alone was possible to avert military despotism or anarchy —
to restore the legitimate king. Richard himself was solicited to
assist in this object ; but he refused to forsake the cause to which
he was committed. It was soon manifest that the power of the
Protector was coming to an end. His brother-in-law, Fleetwood,
THE LONG PARLIAMENT RESTORED. 1 09
his relative, Desborough, deserted him. The few officers who
were faithful were abandoned by their men. Desborough came
from St. James's to Whitehall — from St. James's, where the whole
army was ordered to rendezvous, to Whitehall, where Richard had
been deserted by his own guards — and demanded that the Parliament
should be dissolved. Richard at length yielded, making it a con
dition that he should not be required to dissolve the House in per
son. An ordinance was issued, which Fiennes, as Commissioner
of the Great Seal, was ordered to communicate to Parliament. On
the 22nd of April the Commons was summoned to the Upper
House. Very few went. Those who remained behind passed va
rious resolutions, violent in proportion to their impotence. In the
evening a Proclamation for dissolving the Parliament was issued,
and upon the doors of the House of Commons padlocks were fast
ened. The Army was supreme, with no master-mind to direct its
supremacy. With the fall of the Parliament fell Richard Cromwell. " His
Highness," wrote Thurloe to Lockhart, " is now excluded from
¦having any share in the government, and must retire as a private
gentieman." He still continued to reside at Whitehall. But all
real government was at an end. The army became insubordinate.
All power of directing the affairs of the nation seemed lost. In
this emergency, the officers and the republican leaders of the Com
mons coalesced ; and it was determined to restore the Long Par
liament. After much difficulty forty-two of the old Members were
gathered together ; and that anomalous authority commenced, which
was destined ignominiously to expire under the name of "The
Rump." Richard Cromwell soon after left Whitehall. Henry
Cromwell took no part in public affairs. The wife of Cromwell —
the " domestic drudge " as she was called in the lampoons of the
time — had made little provision for a transition from Whitehall to
a plain country-house. The whole family passed into obscurity —
humbled, but not disgraced.
A sufficient number of members of the Long Parliament hav
ing been assembled to form a House, " We went," says Ludlow,
" to take our places, Mr. Lenthall, our Speaker, leading the way ;
and the officers of the Army lining the rooms for us, as we passed
through the Painted Chamber, the Court of Requests, and Lobby
itself; the principal officers having placed themselves nearest to
the door of the Parliament House, every one seeming to'rejoice at
our restitution, and promising to live and die with us." Such
HO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
promises are easily made and easily broken in revolutionary peri
ods. The first step of the Parliament was to appoint a Committee
of Safety ; and, subsequently, a Council of State. The Council
was composed of soldiers and civilians, in nearly equal proportion.
They were sincere and zealous men, faithful to their great idea of a
Republic, of which all the authority should abide in a Parliament.
But the theory of parliamentary supremacy soon reduced itself to
the more practical question — which power should be supreme, the
civil or the military ? The Parliament asserted its claims with
resolute independence. Fleetwood was to be appointed Commander-
in-Chief; "but instead of authorising the Lieutenant-General to
grant commissions to such officers as should be appointed by the
Parliament, it was ordered that the said commissions should be
subscribed by the Speaker, and received from his hands ; by which
it was endeavoured to bring the military sword under the power of
the civil authority, as it ought to be in a free nation." Ludlow,
who relates this, adds : " But observing that these things were
greatly disiiked by the officers, and knowing how much it imported
the very being of our cause to maintain a good correspondence
between the Parliament and the Army, I earnestly pressed the
House not to insist upon the restrictions."* The Parliament
however, was firm, and the officers submitted, though with an i!l
•grace. The government was in the hands of men of decision and
energy. Its foreign policy was conciliatory. It professed its de
sire for peace; and though abandoning somewhat of the high tone
of Cromwell, it averted some immediate dangers by its moderation.
But the people of England had no confidence in the stability of
the dominion of this remnant of the Parliament, which was a ne
cessity during the Civil War, but was unsuited to the monarchic?.!
traditions of the country, revived, to a certain extent, in the "some
thing approaching to monarchy " of Oliver. The ultimate form of
government was a constant matter of debate within the House.
Beyond its walls every theory of the perfection of a Common
wealth was anxiously discussed. Harrington, who had twelve
years before been "disputing about government" with Charles I.,
was now disputing " daily at coffee-houses." In 1659, writes Au
brey, " at the beginning of Michaelmas time, he had every night a
meeting at the Turk's Head, in the New Palace Yard, where they
take water — the next house to the stairs, at one Miles's — where
was made purposely a large oval table, with a passage in the mid-
* " Memoirs," p, 660.
DIVISIONS IN THE PARLIAMENT. Ill
die for Miles to deliver his coffee. About it sate his disciples and
the virtuosi." The arguments in the Parliament House were, to
Aubrey, " flat " by comparison with this talk of the "virtuosi;"
who had a balloting-box, and balloted " how things should be car
ried," — how " the third part of the House should rote out by bal- '
lot every year, so that every ninth year the House would be wholly-
altered ; — no magistrate to continue above three years, and all to
be chosen by ballot." Pepys went to Harrington's Club in January,
1660, "and heard very good discourse." The Parliament contin
ued debating ; with real dangers all around. The greatest danger
was in its own divisions. " Parties are like so many floating islands,
sometimes joining and appearing like a continent ; when the next
flood or ebb separates them ; so that it can hardly be known where
they will be next. " *
As the natural result of this disunion, a royalisljrtsurrecljon
was organised. The old Cavalier party in England had been wholly
inactive since the death of Oliver. The probability is, that if the
hand of Richard had been sufficiently strong to have held the Army
in due subordination to the civil authority, and the Parliament
could thus have proceeded in its duties without molestation, the
country would have gradually settled down under a government
which afforded security for property, and continued stability for
the various interests that had acquired a firm footing during ten
years. But underthe disunited republicans who had obtained pos
session of power, the restoration of Charles the Second became a
fixed idea that gradually took possession of many minds besides
those of the more devoted Royalists. The impatience of the king's
adherents was the most likely source of injury to the king's cause.
This impatience was for some time kept down by the prudence of
Hyde. But a general plan of insurrection was at length com
pleted in July. The Parliament obtained a knowledge of the pro
ject, and took the most active measures of precaution. Charles and
his brother James met at Calais, with the intention of proceeding
to England. But the chief leaders of the proposed insurrection
were intimidated ; and the Royalists saw that the time for united
action was not yet come. Sir George Booth had, however, ap
peared in arms in Cheshire, on the 1st of August. In a few days
he was at the head of several thousand men, and had obtained pos
session of the citadel of Chester. Large additional forces were
immediately raised by the Parliament; and their command was en-
* Letter of 3rd June, quoted in Guizot's " Richard Cromwell," vol. 1. p. 183.
112 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
trusted to Lambert. He left London at the head of an adequate
force, and marched rapidly to Chester. The defeat of Sir George
Booth and his party was complete. The Royalist cause appeared
again to be hopeless. Lambert returned to London at a very slow
pace. The Parliament had voted him a thousand pounds to buy a
jewel ; but he came not to receive their thanks in person. He was
preparing, in concert with officers in London, to dispute their au
thority. A Petition had been presented to the House from the offi
cers under his command. It was to repeat certain demands for
appointment of General Officers, which had been proposed before
the Parliament had been restored. The House now voted against
the prayer of the Petition. Other meetings of officers were held,
and another Petition was resolved upon. These movements were
evidently preparations for a rupture between the two powers of the
State. The quarrel became serious. Lambert, Desborough, and
other officers were dismissed from their posts ; and Fleetwood was
removed from his command of the Army. On the 13th of October!
Westminster was surrounded by troops upon whose fidelity the
Parliament relied^ Lambert boldly marched thither at the head of
his regiment. A conflict appeared likely to take place ; but Lam
bert addressed the troops, and they quickly went over to him.
Lenthall, the Speaker, was stopped by the soldiers, who laughed
at him when he said he was their chief general. There was a con
ference between the civil and military members of the Council of
State which ended in a resolution that the Parliament should cease
to sit; and that the maintenance of public tranquillity should rest
with the Council of Officers.
The Committee of Safety appointed by the Army began to ex
ercise the functions of administration on the 23rd of October. On
the 30th the French ambassador writes to Mazarin, " There is as yet
no government established in England, notwithstanding the at
tempts which have been made for some days by the leaders of the
Army, and some ministers of the Council of State, to agree to one.
.... The "conjuncture seems favourable for all sorts of en
terprises."* There was one, far distant from the scene of con
fusion, who was watching what this conjuncture would bring forth.
George Monk, " the sly fellow" as Cromwell termed him, was courted
by the republican leaders, civil and military ; but he gave no signs
of adhesion to any faction. His army in Scotland was entirely de
voted to him. Like its commander, that army had no great sym-
* Guizot. Appendix 1, vol. ii.
MONK RESOLVES TO RESTORE THE PARLIAMENT. 113
pathy with the movements of the soldiers in London. The Royal
ists had long been making efforts to engage- Monk in their cause.
But Monk would, not stir at the invitation of any party-. Charles
himself wrote to Monk, and the letter was placed in the hands of
Monk's brother, a humble clergyman. He was afraid to be the
bearer of it ; but he committed it to memory, and proceeded to his
brother's head-quarters at Dalkeith. Booth's insurrection was
known ; and Monk was about to take some decided resolve. The
news of Booth's defeat by Lambert arrived, and Monk was saved
from a premature declaration against the Parliament. His soldiers
had thought that their general was the man to fill the void occa
sioned by the death of Cromwell ; but he was too cautious to risk
this perilous advancement. When he believed the opportunity had
passed for taking any steps to restore the Stuarts, he sent a letter
to the Speaker, Lenthall, asking to retire from public life. The*
letter was suppressed by Lenthall ; and soon afterwards, the Par
liament was ejected. Monk immediately took his resolution. He
addressed the troops at Edinburgh ; told them that the army in
England had broken up Parliament, to hinder the settlement of
the nation ; that they would next attempt to impose their insolent
extravagances upon the army in Scotland ; and that he was re
solved to keep the military power in obedience to the civil ; they
had received their pay and commission from the Parliament, and (
it was their duty to defend it. He wrote letters to declare his in
tentions to Lambert and Fleetwood, and to the Speaker, Lenthall.
He cashiered those officers who opposed his views, which were ex
pressly limited to a resistance to military tyranny in England. To
every approach of the Royalists he was inflexibly cold arid distant.
In London, the determination of Monk produced the greatest alarm
amongst the factions. Their views were vacillating and discordant.
At one time, they thought of recalling Richard Cromwell to the Pro-'
rectorship. They finally resolved to send a deputation to Monk to
effect a reconciliation ; and if that failed to proceed to a trial of
strength in battle. Lambert was appointed commander of the
troops in the north. More soldiers were raised in London ; and a
loan from the City was asked of the Common Council. It was re
fused. The commissioners sent to Monk executed their commis
sion, and represented to him the dangers which surrounded his
course. He called a Council of his officers ; and it was agreed
that three commissioners should proceed to London to negotiate
with the army there. Monk had given them instructions to en-
Vol. IV.— 8
114 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
deavour to gain time ; but contrary to his instructions they had, in
three days, concluded a treaty with the Committee of Safety, by
which the government was left in the administration of a Council
of Officers, no provision was made for the recall of the Parliament,
and Monk's own appointment of officers was to be revised. Great
indignation was excited in Monk's army, and it was resolved that
the treaty should not be ratified. Nine members of the old Coun
cil of State that had been thrust from office by the army now re
solved to make common cause with Monk. He had marched to
Berwick, with six thousand infantry, and four regiments of cavalry.
He now fixed his head-quarters at Coldstream, where he could
easily cross the Tweed. He had written to the Common Council
of London, to declare his intentions ; and he was proclaimed as a
deliverer by some members of the old Council of State. The peo
ple were universally discontented, refusing to pay taxes, and shout
ing for a free Parliament. The fleet, under the command of
admiral Lawson, declared that they would obey no authority but
that of a Parliament. The various leaders, civil and military, were
fiercely quarrelling. Some even of the republicans talked of the
restoration of the king. At last it was resolved to call a new Par
liament. On the 15th of December a proclamation was issued,
summoning a Parliament to meet on the 24th of January. The
country was under no law but that of the tyranny of detached bands
of soldiers, roving about at free quarters. Mrs. Hutchinson has
described a scene to which there were probably many parallels ; —
outrages that went on, " till the law was again in force : " —
" Six of Lambert's troopers came to gather money, laid upon
the country by an assessment of Parliament, whom the colonel
telling that in regard it was levied by that authority, he had paid
it, but otherwise would not ; two of them, who were in the room
with the colonel, the rest being on horseback in the court, gave
him such insolent terms with such insufferable reproaches of the
Parliament, that the colonel drew a sword which was in the room
to have chastised them. While a minister that was by held the
colonel's arm, his wife, not willing to have them killed in her pres
ence, opened the door and let them out, who presently ran and
fetched in their companions in the yard with cocked pistols. Upon
the bustle, while the colonel having disengaged himself from those
that held him, was run after them with the sword drawn, his brother
came out of another room, upon whom, the soldiers pressing
against a door that went into the great hall, the door flew open.
THE PARLIAMENT RESTORED. 115
and about fifty or sixty men appeared in the hall who were there
upon andther business. For Owthrope, Knolton, and Hitchin,
had a contest about a cripple that was sent from one to the other ;
but at last, out of some respect they had for the colonel, the chief
men of the several towns were come to him, to make some accom
modation, till the law should be again in force. When the colonel
heard the soldiers were come, he left them shut up in his great
hall ; who by accident thus appearing, put the soldiers into a dread
ful fright. When the colonel saw how pale they looked, he en
couraged them to take heart, and calmly admonished them of their,
insolence ; and they being changed and very humble through their
fear, he called for wine for them, and sent them away. To the
most insolent of them he said, ' These carriages would bring back
the Stuarts.' The man,_laying his hand upon his sword, said,
' Never while he wore that' Among other things, they said to the
colonel, when he demanded by what authority they came, they
showed their swords, and said, ' That was their authority.' "
The necessity for some immediate authority beyond that of the
Council of Officers at length became manifest to the Army in Lon
don. It was resolved to restore the expelled Parliament. The
Generals saw that their power was gone. Fleetwood sent the keys
of the House of Commons to Lenthall ; and on the 26th of De
cember, forty members, with the Speaker at their head, again en
tered this House, the scene of so many strange transactions,
whilst groups of soldiers shouted their approval, in the torch
light which glared upon anxious faces of men who had more
natural fears than reasonable hopes. A contest took place the
instant Lenthall had taken the chair. Twenty-three of the mem
ber's who had been excluded in 1648, demanded admittance, as
they had previously demanded on the 7th of May. The House
resolved to take the business of the absent members into con
sideration on the 5th of January. They withdrew to abide their
time. Lambert was at Newcastle, and Monk at Coldstream.. But
Fairfax, who had been in correspondence with Monk, assembled
his friends and dependents ; and some of Lambert's officers
joined him with their men. He entered York and was welcomed by
the Cavaliers of that city. Lambert marched to attack Fairfax,
and Monk crossed the Tweed to support him. At Wooler, Monk
received a cold letter from the Parliament that had re-commenced
its sittings ; and he learnt that Lambert's troops had been ordered
to return to their .several quarters. When he reached Newcastle
it& HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
he found Lambert's army disbanded. He went on to York, and
saw Fairfax. But he maintained a strict reserve as to. his future
plans ; and he struck an officer with his cane who said that Monk
would bring in Charles Stuart. The Royalists abroad were per
plexed. The Republicans in London were suspicious. Monk sent
forward his chaplain, Gumble, to express his opinions to the Par
liament on certain important points of administration. Gumble
wrote to Monk some truths as to the character of the parliamentary
leaders : " The prevailing and governing influence of the Parlia
ment is reduced into the hands of a few and inconsiderable per
sons, — either harebrained and hot-headed fools, or obscure and
disregarded knaves." They talked of sending the prudent and
trimming Whitelocke to the Tower, and voted that the enthusiastic
and honest Vane should cease to be a member of the House.
Their chief thought was to propitiate Monk. He had taken his
determination to march to London — with what ultimate purpose
beyond that of asserting the power of civil government was uncer
tain. He left many of his troops in York and others he sent to
Scotland. With four regiments of foot and three of horse, he
went on, amidst popular acclamations. But he would enter into
no promises or make any special demonstration. He was but a
servant, he said, of the Parliament, and all great questions must be
left to the Parliament. He was suspected by the two Commis
sioners that the House had sent to him ; but his wariness eluded
all their curiosity, even while he was receiving agents from the
. Royalists abroad. On the 28th of January he sent from St. Albans
a letter to the Speaker, pointing out the necessity that the troops
in and near London should be removed — it was not for their ser
vice that the soldiers who had been so lately in rebellion against
the Parliament should mingle with his faithful troops. His pro
posals were agreed to, "partly from some sparks of hope that
Monk could not be such a devil as to betray a trust so freely re
posed in him." *
The Royalists, meanwhile, were far from inactive. Some who
had lived quietly under the rule of Oliver, and had not stirred
whilst the government which had succeeded him was confined
within some limits of legal order, now moved, however cautiously,
to bring about the restoration of the ancient monarchy. Such was
Evelyn. On the 22nd of January he writes in his Diary, " I went
this afternoon to visit colonel Morley." Morley was one of the
* Ludlow, " Memoirs," p. S16.
DISAFFECTION IN THE CITY. H7
Commissioners appointed by the Long Parliament to the command
of the army ; and he was faithful to his trust, when Lambert, on
the 13th of October, was proceeding to Westminster to dissolve
the Parliament, for Morley met him, pistol in hand, and said he
would shoot him if he did not go back, upon which threat Lambert
went another way. Evelyn first approached Morley by sending
him a tract he had written, entitled " An Apology for the Royal
Party ; " and he afterwards addressed a letter to him, exhorting
him, by the remembrance of their ancient friendship, to aid " in
restoring us to our ancient known laws, native and most happy
liberties." * Morley, in January, 1660, was Lieutenant of the
Tower of London : " I went this afternoon to visit colonel Morley.
After dinner, I discoursed with him; but he was very jealous, and
would not believe that Monk came in to do the king any service.
I told him he might do it without him, and have all the honour.
He was still doubtful, and would resolve on nothing yet, so I took
leave." Evelyn, four months after, writes : " O, the sottish omis
sion of this gentleman ! What did I not undergo of danger in this
negotiation, to have brought him over to his majesty's interest,
.when it was entirely in his hands." On the 3rd of February Monk
entered London. For two days the capital had been in uproar.
The regiments that had been ordered to march, had refused to
obey. The apprentices were parading the city in formidable bands,
crying out for " a free Parliament." Pepys, the most amusing of dia
rists, presents us many glimpses of events through the " blanket of
the da*rk " which the graver historians pass over. On the 25th of
January, a gibbet is set up in Cheapside, and " the picture of Hew
son hung upon it in the middle of the street," — Hewson, the shoe
maker-Lord, that Warwick would not sit with. People in the midst
of their alarms, eat and drink as usual ; and Pepys' wife, on the
26th, " had got ready a very fine dinner." On the 30th he records :
" This morning, before I was up, I fell a singing of my song,
' Great, good and just,' and put myself thereby in mind that this
was the fatal day, now ten years since, his majesty died." Mon
trose's lines were probably in the minds of other Royalists on that
anniversary. On the 2nd of February he saw the Strand full of
soldiers ; and " saw the foot face the horse and beat them back,
and stood bawling and calling in the street for a free Parliament
and money." The next morning the soldiers were all quiet. Pepys
saw Monk march in : " In his passing through the town he had
* Appendix to Evelyn's "Diary," No. II.
ti8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
many calls to him for a free Parliament, but little other welcome.'
He was lodged in Whitehall. The troops who came to preserve
order were not very orderly. On the 7th, Pepys writes, " In the
palace I saw Monk's soldiers abuse Billing and all the Quakers, that
were at a meeting-place there, and indeed the soldiers did use them
very roughly, and were to blame." On the 9th, Monk is gone to
the City. There is arbitrary work there ; but the calm progress
of the law is uninterrupted, for Pepys hears " an action very finely
pleaded in Westminster Hall." Monk went to the City by com.
mand of the Parliament. It was believed in the House that the
powerful general was wholly with them. The more obscure Repub
licans were the leading spirits in the House. There was no com
manding genius to call up a new and vigorous Commonwealth out
of the expiring embers of " the good old cause." The destinies
of the nation were in the hands "of the cold, sullen, impenetrable
George Monk, who chewed his tobacco in ominous silence, open
ing his heart to no man. The Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Com
mon Council of London, had voted that they would pay no taxes,
but such as were imposed by a free Parliament. The Council oi
State sent for Monk, and proposed that the Common Council
should be forbidden to sit, the gates of the City broken down, the
portcullises wedged up, and the chains across the streets removed.
All the material means of resistance were to be destroyed. Monk
said that he would do these things if they would give the order.
" He added," says Ludlow, " that the disaffection of the City was
so great, that they would neveY be quiet, till some of them were
hanged." This ready consent of Monk to an unpopular act of
violence may be doubted. However, on the morning of the 9th,
before the citizens were awake, and the great shutters of the shops
had been dropped down, Monk and his men were marching to the
neighbourhood of Guildhall. He explained his orders to his officers.
Some remonstrated. " Will you not obey the orders of the Par
liament ? " was his answer. The posts and chains were then
attacked, amidst the indignation of the people. A deputation of
leading citizens came to him, to complain of the force thus used
by those whom they thought their friends. He told them that his
orders were to take down the gates as well as the chains ; but that
he would request the Parliament to suspend the further execution
of their commands. The Parliament was indignant ; sent an order
to Monk to execute his instructions to the letter; ordered that the
Common Council should be dissolved, and a new Council elected,
A FREE PARLIAMENT TO BE CALLED. 119
with such qualifications as Parliament should dictate. The next
morning Monk and his soldiers went to the completion of the work
prescribed to them. In the evening of the 10th he returned to
Whitehall. The slow man now came to a decisive resolution. He
had seen the temper of the people, and he was prepared to defy
those who claimed to be his masters. He called a Council of his
officers ; and they agreed upon a letter to Parliament, expressing
the public grievances, and requiring them to satisfy the nation's
just demands before a certain day. Early in the morning he and
hiSftrmy were on their way to the City; and the troops were halted
in Finsbury Fields. Monk waited on the Lord Mayor ; requested
him to summon a meeting of the Common Council at four o'clock:
and the civic dignitaries ,a,nd the general and his officers sate down
to dinner. Two members deputed by the House arrived to confer
with Monk. His letter, which was of the boldest character, had
thrown the Parliament into consternation. He was urged to return
to Whitehall. Monk's only reply was, " All will be well if you
attend to the letter, and issue out your writs on Friday for filling
up your House." Monk went to the Common Council and told
them what he had done. Guildhall resounded with cries of " God
bless your Excellency ! " The soldiers were feasted. The cry
went forth throughout London of " Down with the Rump." Pepys
has described, as none but an eye-witness could describe, the scene
of that night : " In Cheapside there was a great many bonfires, and
Bow bells and all the bells in all the churches as we went home
were a-ringing. Hence we went homewards, it being about ten at
night. But the common joy that was everywhere to be seen ! The
number of bonfires, there being fourteen between St. Dunstan's
and Temple Bar, and at Strand Bridge I could at one time tell
thirty-one fires. In King street seven or eight; and all along
burning and roasting, and drinking for rumps. There being rumps
tied upon sticks and carried up and down. The- butchers at the
May Pole in the strand rang a peal with their knives when they
were going to sacrifice their rump. On Ludgate Hill there was
one turning of the spit that had a rump tied upon it, and another
basting of it. Indeed it was past imagination, both the greatness
and the suddeness of it. At one end of the street you would think
there was a whole lane of fire, and so hot that we were fain to keep
on the further side."
Charles and his Court were at Brussels when the newsj-eacbed
' them of these events in London. " They thought all their sufferings
120 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
over," says Clarendon. And yet the best informed men in London,
whether republican or royalist, could not penetrate the thick veil
of Monk's real intentions. Aubrey, who lived a gossiping life in
places of public resort, and had access to persons of influence, says
of certain friends, "they were satisfied that he [Monk] no more
intended or designed the king's restoration, when he came into
England, or first came to London, than his horse did." Sir Henry
Vane, after the menacing letter had been written to the Parliament,
said to Ludlow, that " unless he were much mistaken, Monk had
yet several masks to put off." Ludlow went to see him in 'the
City, and after much discourse Monk exclaimed, "Yea, we must
live and die together for a Commonwealth." Whatever were his
real intentions, he maintained his ascendancy by the most earnest
professions of fidelity to the republican party and their opinions.
Yet his actions were more than doubtful. The House had twice
resolved that the secluded Members should not be admitted.
Monk had determined the contrary. The infusion of so many of
these who had been originally thrust out of Parliament for the
moderation of their opinions, was the surest way to neutralise the
power of the republican faction, who clung to authority with a
tenacity that indicated their real weakness. Monk, on the 2rst of
February, sent an escort of his soldiers to accompany a body of the
secluded Members to the House of Commons, he having previously
read them a speech, in which he formally declared for a Common
wealth. When they took their seats the greatest heats were
exhibited ; and some of the Republicans withdrew from the House.
Seventeen of them went in a body to Monk, to demand his reasons
for these proceedings. He protested his zeal to a Commonwealth
Government ; " and they then pressed him more home by demand
ing, if he would join with them against Charles Stuart and his
party ? " He took off his glove, and putting his hand within sir
Arthur Haslerig's hand, he said, " I do here protest to you, in the
presence of all these gentlemen, that I will oppose to the utmost
the setting-up of Charles Stuart, a Single Person or a House of
Peers." Ludlow, who records this, says that Monk then expostu
lated with them touching their suspicions, saying, " What is it that
I have done in bringing these Members into the House ? Are' they
not the same that brought the king to the block ? though others
cut off his head, and that justly." The Members thus restored by
Monk were chiefly of that great Presbyterian body who had been
ejected by the Independents ; and who now expected that they
THE COURT OF CHARLES. 121
should be strong enough, in the event of the restoration of the
monarchy, to make terms for the establishment of their form of
Church government. They immediately became a majority in
Parliament ; appointed Monk general-in-chief ; formed a new Coun
cil of State ; and superseded sheriffs, justices of the peace, and
militia officers, who were supporters of republican institutions. The
Covenant was again to be promulgated ; the Confession of Faith
of the Assembly of Divines to be adopted ; the penal laws against
Catholics, which Cromwell rarely put in force, were to be called
into full vigour. The tendencies of some of the members towards
monarchy were still very feebly indicated. Uncertainty everywhere
prevailed, whilst the man who had the power ofthe sword was well
known to have no fixed principles of politics or religion — was more
greedy of wealth than excited by any daring ambition — and would
only declare himself by some irrevocable action when he had made up
his mind as to the probable success and permanency of King or Com
monwealth. On the 2nd of March, Pepys writes : " Great is the talk
of a Single Person, and that it would now be Charles, George, or
Richard. For the last of which, my lord St. John is said to speak
high. Great also is the dispute now in the House, in whose name
the writs shall run for the next Parliament ; and it is said that
Mr. Prynne, in open House, said, ' In king Charles's !' " Admiral
Montague had been appointed " general at sea," the republican
admiral Lawson being put aside. He was the patron of Pepys,
and told him, on the 6th of March, that there were great endeav-
ouns to bring in the Protector again, but that he did not think it
would last long if he were brought in. Montague added, " No,
nor the king neither — though he seems to think he will come in —
unless he carry himself very soberly and well." How Charles
carried himself was perfectly well known to his most zealous friends
— even to those who themselves lived "soberly and well." When
,a proposal was made to Oliver Cromwell that Charles should
marry his daughter, the Protector objected his " debauched life "
as an insuperable difficulty. The Royalists, Presbyterian or
Episcopalian, saw no such objection in the marriage of Charles
with the State of Englarid. Very cirrious combinations of men
long separated were now forming. Old faithful friends of his
house were flocking to. the king at Breda. Amongst them now
and then appeared some country gentleman, whose clothes were
of a soberer hue and a more English cut, than those of Charles's
habitual courtiers. These had discarded the love-locks of the
122 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Cavaliers, their slashed doublets and flowing mantles, for the
hideous periwigs and embroidered surtouts of the Parisian fashion.
The staid royalist, who for some twenty years had seen no court
costume, wondered at the metamorphosis ; and might fancy that
there was more sympathy between himself and the Puritan in neat
and decorous habit -of plain black, — neat from the band Io the
shoe-tie, — than the men in the ugliest of laced liveries, who bent
double when they approached their exiled prince, and then turned
to Wilmot or Buckingham to laugh at the stalest jest or the new
est scandal. Very tarnished were the gold and silver embroid
eries of the courtiers at Brussels, or Breda, or the Hague, in the
early spring of 1660, when Englishmen from home gathered about
them. " Their clothes were not worth forty shillings, the best of
them," says Pepys. London soon sent money to the exiles, and
Paris was ready to provide fineries of which the Louvre might
have been proud. For there was a growing confidence that the
Commonwealth was fast coming to an end. Men, by a sort of in
stinctive feeling, were setting up the King's arms ; and drinking
the King's health, though Monk and his bands were still domina
ting in the City and at Whitehall. The Long Parliament was to
terminate its sittings on the 16th of March. On the 13th, that
once formidable republican assembly voted that the oath of a
Member of Parliament — to be "true and faithful to the Common
wealth of England, as the same is now established, without a
King or House of Lords," — should be abolished. On the 15th of
March the popular sentiment was manifested at the Royal Ex
change. A statute of Charles I. had been removed after the
tragedy of the 30th January ; and in the niche where it stood was
written, " Exit tyrannus, regum ultimus, anno libertatis Angliae
restitutas primo, annoque Domini 1648." For twelve years few
had ventured to affirm that " tyrant and the last of kings " were
words of offence ; or had asserted that the year 1648 was not the
first year of the restored liberty of England. On the evening of
the 15th of March, a ladder was placed against this niche ; soldiers
stood around ; a house painter mountedjhe ladder, painted out the
inscription, and waving his cap, shouted " God bless King Charles
the Second ! " Again bonfires blazed in the streets. On the 16th
of March, the Parliament met to vote their own dissolution, and
England hoped that a long term of rest and security had been
earned by the sufferings and changes of twenty years. Some few
uplifted their voices against the inevitable event ; and still clung
MONK AGREES TO ACT FOR CHARLES. 123
to their faith in a Commonwealth ; to their assured belief that
liberty and peace would be best maintained by the absolute au
thority of a " Grand or General Council of the Nation." This was
Vane's opinion, having no misgivings for his past actions and no
dread of his future lot, even though it were the hardest : " He
had all possible satisfaction of mind as to those actions God had
enabled him to do for the Commonwealth, and hoped the same
God would fortify him in his sufferings, how sharp soever, to bear
a faithful and constant testimony thereto."* This was also his
friend Milton's opinion : •' What I have spoken is the language of
that which is not called amiss, the good old cause : if it seem
strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than con
vincing to backsliders : thus much I should, perhaps, have said,
though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones,
and had none to cry to but with the prophet, ' O earth, earth,
earth ! ' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants
are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoke should happen
(which Thou suffer not who didst create mankind free ! nor Thou
next who didst redeem us from being servants of men !) to be the
last words of our expiring liberty." f
The clouded determinations of Monk were very soon becoming
more transparent. He had secretly received his cousin, sir John
Grenville, who had long'sought an interview in vain to deliver a
letter from the king. He would write no letter in answer; but he
entrusted Grenville to promise to Charles that he would be his
devoted servant. Monk made no conditions, but he tendered
some advice — that there should be a general amnesty, with only
four exceptions ; that the possessors of confiscated property
should not be disturbed ; that there should be liberty of con
science. Grenville repaired to the king at Brussels, where they
met in secret. A more formal body of envoys from England now
presented themselves to the king — a deputation of Presbyterians,
who came to offer the same terms which had been proposed to his
father in the Isle of Wight. The Parliament. was to have the con
trol of the army ; the Civil War was to be declared lawful ; new
patents of nobility were to be annulled. Charles laughed in his
sleeve. " Little do they think," he said, "that general Monk and
I are upon such good terms." The Presbyterians believed that
they alone had any chance of success. " Leave the game in our
hands," they said to the Cavaliers. They probably thought cor-
* Ludiow, p. S28. t " Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth."
124 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
rectly that Charles was indifferent as to the form of worship under
which England should be when he came to be king. But they
knew that Hyde was devoted to the restoration of the Anglican
Church, as a necfssary consequence of the restoration of the
monarchy. They wished that Hyde should be expelled from
power or influence, and used the strongest arguments to induce
the belief that the Restoration could not be accomplished whilst
he was a royal counsellor. In spite of their conviction of Monk's
adhesion to their cause, the few to whom Charles had entrusted
the secret of his correspondence with him, still sometimes doubted.
The French ambassador tried to obtain Monk's confidence. He
would give no opinion as to the future Government of England.
That must be settled by the next Parliament. Monk's real opin
ions were the less necessary to be disclosed ; for all England was
becoming impatient for the Restoration. Old servants of the
Commonwealth — Broghill, and Thurloe, and Lenthall — offered to
Charles their submission and their advice. The king, from mixed
motives of indolence and prudence, suffered matters to proceed
without committing himself to any party, or making any engage
ments for his future conduct. He yielded to Monk's advice in one
particular. He left the Spanish Netherlands, and established
himself at Breda.
In the midst of the apparent certainty of the Restoration being
at hand, a new cause of alarm suddenly arose. Lambert had been
committed to the Tower, when Monk's interest became predom
inant. He escaped on the 9th of April, and was speedily at ihe
head of some soldiers, who had revolted ; and, marching through
the midland counties, he called upon all to join him who would
preserve the Commonwealt'.i. Monk sent Ingoldsby to encounter
Lambert ; and declared to Grenville that, if Lambert met with any
success, he would no longer . have any reservation, but act in the
king's name and under his commission, to summon the Royalists
arms. On the 22nd of April, Lambert and his men were met at
Daventry by Ingoldsby's troops. A parley was proposed ; but
Ingoldsby refused any accommodation. The two armies had
advanced close to each other, and the conflict seemed imminent,
when Lambert's cavalry threw away their pistols ; and their leader
was quickly a prisoner. The last battle of the Commonwealth had
now to be fought at the hustings. The elections took place. A
few of the old republicans were returned. Some members were
elected who believed that the restoration of the monarchy could
LAMBERT'S INSURRECTION. 125
be effected, without losing any of the liberties which had been
won since the days of Laud and Strafford. The greater number
were men who were either led away by a fever of loyalty, or were
indifferent to any re-action which would end the struggles and
uncertainties of twenty years. It was impossible that a king thus
restored amidst a conflict of passions and prejudices — of old
hatreds and new ambitions — should be forward to make any pro
fessions of public duty, or cherish any deep affection for the
people he was to govern. It was fortunate that Charles was only
a heartless voluptuary, and was too selfish in his craving for ease
and pleasure, to add the personal energy of the tyrant to the
almost inevitable tyranny of those who believed that the king and
the people could return to the same condition in which they were
before Hampden refused to pay ship-money. The king's position
with regard to the Church was, in a similar degree, under the con
trol of the same spirit of indifference. Secretly a Papist, openly
a scoffer, Episcopalian,' Presbyterian, or Independent might harass
each other, so that Charles was quiet. He fancied himself most
safe with those who professed to believe that his authority was
divine ; and that " Render unto Caesar " meant, if rightly inter
preted, Let Caesar's will be the one law.
Five hundred and fifty-six members had been elected to the
House of Commons, the greater number of whom took their seats
on the 26th of April. Ten Peers only met in the House of Lords
on that day. Presbyterians and Cavaliers looked suspiciously at
each other ; but the Presbyterians, more accustomed to act in union,
manoeuvred that one of their party should be elected Speaker.
The first business of both Houses was to return thanks to Monk
for his services, and the Lords voted that a statue should be
erected in his honour. Colonel Ingoldsbyalso received the thanks
ofthe Commons forhis prompt action against Lambert. The House
was not yet in the humour to forget the sound advice of Monk to
the Lords when he returned them his thanks — " to look forward
and not backward in transacting affairs." The Cavaliers soon made
the House and the nation understand that the day of a triumphant
re-action was fast approaching. Their spirit spread amongst the
moderate and independent : "Everyone hoped in this change to
change their condition, and disowned all things they had before
advised. Every ballad singer sang up and down the streets ribald
rhymes, made in reproach of the late Commonwealth." * The day
* Mrs. Hutchinson's " Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 261.
126 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
after Parliament met, sir John Grenville went to the sitting of the
Council of State, and asked to speak with the Lord General. To
his hands he delivered a packet sealed with the royal arms. Monk
affected surprise and alarm, and it was decided that Grenville
should be called in. He said that the packet had been entrusted
to him by the king, his master, at Breda. The Council resolved
that the letters which Grenville brought should be delivered to the
Parliament. On the first of May, Grenville appeared at the door
of the Lower House, and being called to the bar presented a letter
addressed " To our trusty and well beloved the Speaker of the
House of Commons." He then west through the same formality at
the House of Lords. With each letter was enclosed a document ad- ,
dressed to the whole nation — the Declaration from Breda.* Gren
ville then proceeded to the City, and presented a letter from the
king addressed to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Coun
cil, which also contained the Declaration. In all these papers, the
composition of Hyde, there was little to alarm, and much to pro
pitiate, the prudent and peaceful. The Commons were assured
" upon our royal word, — that none of our predecessors have had a
greater esteem for Parliaments than we have ; " — Parliaments were
" so vital a part of the constitution of the kingdom, and so neces
sary for the government of it, that, we well know, neither prince
nor people can be, in any tolerable degree, happy without them."
The Declaration professed the king's desire " that all our subjects
may enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire administration
of justice throughout the land." It declared "a free and general
Pardon to all our subjects," — excepting onlv such persons " as shall
hereafter be excepted by Act of Parliament." All are invited to a
perfect union amongst themselves. Deploring the existence of
religious animosities, "we do declare a liberty to tender con
sciences ; and that no man shall be disquieted, or called in ques
tion, for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not
disturb the peace of the kingdom." All matters relating to the
possession of estates " shall be determined in Parliament." Both
Houses immediately applied themselves to prepare answers to the
royal letters ; declared that, "according to the ancient and funda
mental laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be,
by King, Lords, and Commons ; "—voted fifty thousand pounds to
the king as a gift ; f and presented Grenville with five hundred
* See Note at the end of this Chapter.
t " Of a tall stature, and of sable hue,
Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew ;
DEBATES ON THE BILL OF INDEMNITY. 1 27
pounds to buy a jewel. Commissioners from both Houses were
to convey their answers to the king. Grenville preceded them
with the best proof of loyalty and affection — four thousand five
hundred pounds in gold, and a bill of exchange for twenty-five
thousand pounds. Pepys tells us that Charles, when Grenville
brought him the money, was " so joyful, that he called the Princess
Royal and Duke of York, to look upon it, as it lay in the portman
teau before it was taken out."
On the 8th of May the two Houses of Parliament proclaimed
Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, at
Westminster, at Whitehall, and in the City. Although the king
had not arrived, the Restoration of the Monarchy was completed.
In a delirium of loyalty the Convention Parliament never thought
of making conditions for the liberties of the country. Hale, the
great judge, and Prynne, the learned lawyer, had ventured to pro
pose a Committee for considering what propositions should be
made to Charles, before the destinies of the country were irrevo
cably committed to his guidance. Monk opposed this : " I cannot
answer for the peace either of the nation or of the army, if any
delay is put to the sending for the king. What need is there of
sending propositions to him ? Might we not as well prepare them,
and offer them to him when he shall come over ? He will bring
neither army nor treasure with him, either to fright or corrupt us."
The House assented by acclamation. It rested the conservancy
of all that the nation had won since the opening of the Long Par
liament upon the flimsy foundation of the Declaration from Breda.
Bills were prepared, whicli were to be presented for the acceptance
of the king, "when he shall come over." Magna Charta and the
Petition of Right; Privilege of Parliament; Pardon, Indemnity,
and Oblivion, — were words glibly used as if they were things of
course. Bills were prepared for confirming purchases of property
during the times of trouble ; and for the abolition of Knight Ser
vice, the feudal tenure which was most obnoxious. But tbe real
temper of this Parliament was to be subjected to a severer test — ¦
the question of Amnesty had- yet to be settled. Monk had just
Twelve years complete he suffered in exile,
And kept his father's asses all the while.
At length, by wonderful impulse of fate,
The people call him home to help the State :
And, what is more, they send, him money too,
And clothe him all, from head to foot, anew."
Andrew Marvhll.
128 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
protested that if he were to suffer any one to -be excluded from
such Amnesty, he would be the arrantest rogue that ever lived.
Ashley Cooper had said to Hutchinson, " If the violence of the
people should bring the king upon us, let me be damned, body and
soul, if ever I see a hair of any man's head touched, or a penny of
any man's estate, upon this quarrel." Ingoldsby had received the
thanks of the Commons for recent services. He, and others who
had signed the warrant for the king's execution, were members of
the Commons. On the 9th of May, the debate on the Amnesty
Bill came on in both Houses. The earl of Northumberland said,
that though he had no part in the death of the king, he was against
questioning those concerned ; " that the example may be more
useful to posterity, and profitable to future kings, by deterring
them from the like exorbitances." Fairfax, in a noble spirit of
generosity, exclaimed, " If any man must be excepted, I know no
man that deserves it more than myself ; for I was General of the
army at that time, and had power sufficient to prevent the pro
ceedings against the king ; but I did not think fit to make use of
it to that end." Lenthall, the son of the famous Speaker, provoked
the House to tumult by boldly saying, "He that first drew his
sword against the king committed as high an offence as he that cut
off the king's head." The house at last voted as to the number of
regicides to be excluded from the Amnesty, and decided that seven
should be excepted. But it also resolved that every one should
be arrested who had sat upon the king's trial, and their property
seized. Other arrests took place. Some who had laboured best
with Cromwell to uphold the honour of England, such as Thurloe,
were impeached. The titles bestowed by the two Protectors were
annulled. Upon all great questions, political or religious, which
affected the future safety and liberties of these nations, postpone
ment was the ruling policy of the Cavaliers. The Presbyterians,
who were the first to aim at religious supremacy, began clearly to
see that the day was fast approaching, when they would regret the
tranquillity they had enjoyed under the toleration of that ruler whom
they had now agreed to declare a traitor.
The fortunes of Charles had so decidedly changed in the course
of a little month, that the foreign Courts who had looked adversely
or coldly upon him, now embarrassed him with their rival profes
sions of friendship. He was wisely advised not to be too forward to
receive such civilities from France or from Spain as might com
promise him in the future policy of England. The States of
THE KING EMBARKS FOR ENGLAND. 1 29
Holland invited him to take his departure from the Hague ; and
he arrived there from Breda on the 16th of May. Thither came
the commissioners of the Parliament ; the town-clerk of London,
with aldermen and lesser dignitaries; deputations of the Presby
terian clergy ; and a swarm of Englishmen of every variety of
opinion, who wanted to prostrate themselves at the feet of
power. Hollis, who had been one of the earliest leaders in the
battle of the Long Parliament, was the orator on the part of the
House of Commons. Their hearts, he said, were filled with ven
eration and confidence ; their longings for their king, their desires
to serve him, expressed the opinions of the whole nation — " lettings
out of the soul, expressions of transported minds " Other lords
had had dominion over them ; but their hearts and souls did abhor
, such rulers, and ever continued faithful to their king. Anthony
Ashley Cooper had civil words from Charles. Fairfax was received
with kindness. The king made smooth speeches to the Presby
terians ; but they obtained no satisfaction as to the future of Eng
land in the great question of religious union. No one, however,
pressed hardly upon him. There were no strong words spoken, as
the earlier race of Puritans would have spoken. Burnet, describing
the general character of Charles, says, " He was affable and easy,
and loved to be made so by all about him. The great art of keep
ing him long, was the being easy, and the making everything easy
to him." The modern phrase is "to make things pleasant;" and
both phrases mean that there should be a large ingredient of false
hood in human affairs. Admiral Montague, who was to have the
honour of receiving the king on board his ship, had long been in
communication with him. . The ship which carried the admiral's
flag had an ugly name, " The Naseby." On the 23rd, the king,
with the dukes of York and Gloucester, and a large train, came on
board. " After dinner," says Pepys, who was now Montague's
secretary, "the king and duke altered the name of some of the
ships, viz., the Naseby into Charles; the Richard, James; the
Speaker, Mary; the Dunbar (which was not in company with us),
the Henry." Lady Fanshawe, who was on board, is in ecstacies :
" Who can express the joy and gallantry of that voyage ; to see so
many great ships, the best in the world ; to hear the trumpets and
all other music; to see near a hundred brave ships sail before the
wind with vast cloths and streamers ; the neatness and cleanness of
the ships, the gallantry of the commanders, the vast plenty of all
sorts of provisions ; but, above all, the glorious majesties of the
Vol. IV.— o
130 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
king and his two brothers, were so beyond man's expectation and
expression." * The sky was cloudless, the sea was calm, the moon
was at the full. Charles walked up and down the quarter-deck,
telling all the wonders of his escape from Worcester — his green
coat and his country breeches — the miller stopping his night walk
— the inn-keeper bidding God bless him. " He was an everlasting
talker," writes Burnet ; and his gossip amongst his new friends in
this moonlight voyage gave some better promise than the cold
dignity of his father, which many must have remembered. It was
a merry trip, — and Pepys chuckles over " the brave discourse," and
especially the stories of " Thomas Killigrew, a merry droll, but a
gentleman of great esteem with the king." On the morning ofthe
25th they were close to land at Dover, and every one was preparing
to go ashore. " The king and the two dukes did eat their break
fast before they went, and there being set some ship's diet, they
ate of nothing else but pease and pork, and boiled beef " — a politic
appetite, which no doubt won the favour of Blake's old sailors.
When Charles landed at Dover, Monk was at hand to kneel
before him— "to receive his majesty as a malefactor would his
pardon," — says a biographer of the wary general. With a feeling
that belonged to another time the mayor of Dover presented the
king with a Bible. " It is the thing that I love above all things in
the world," said the ready actor, who knew his part without much
study. The royal train went on to Canterbury. There Monk ven
tured beyond his usual caution, by presenting the king a list of
seventy persons that he recommended for employments — men
whose names stank in the nostrils of all Cavaliers. Hyde, through
Monk's confidential adviser, Morrice, made the general understand
that such interference was unpleasant,"and Monk quickly apolo
gised after a very awkward attempt at explanation. Hyde was at
Charles's side, and prevented him being too easy. Monk received
a lesson ; but he was consoled by the Order of the Garter being
bestowed upon him.
On the 28th of May king Charles set out from Canterbury, and
slept that night at Rochester. At Blackheath the royal cavalcade
had to pass the Army of the Commonwealth. Thirty thousand
men were there marshalled. Many of these veterans had fought
against the family and the cause which was now triumphant. The
name of Charles Stuart had been with them a name of hatred and
contempt. They had assisted in building up and pulling down
* " Memoirs," p. 131.
THE KING ENTERS LONDON. 131
governments, which had no unity but in their determination to re
sist him who was now called to command them, with no sympathy
for their courage, no respect for their stern enthusiasm. The great
soldier and prince who had led them to so many victories had now
his memory profaned, by being proclaimed a traitor by a Parliament
that when he was living would have been humbled at his slightest
frown. The procession passed on in safety ; for the old discipline,
that no enemy was ever able to prevail against in the battle-field
was still supreme in this pageant, — this last harmless exhibition
of that might through which the liberties of England had been
won ; through whose misdirection they were now imperilled.
Charles went on in the sight of all London to Whitehall, — a
wearisome procession, which lasted till nine at night, amidst streets
strewed with flowers, past tapestried houses and wine-spouting
fountains ; with civic authorities wearing chains of gold, and nobles
covered with embroidered velvets ; trumpets braying, mobs huzza
ing. In this delirium of joy there was something beyond the idle
shouts of popular intoxication. It was the expression of the
nation's opinion that the government/of England Kad at length a
solid foundation upon which peace and security, liberty and re
ligion, might be established.
132
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
NOTE. HIS MAJESTY'S DECLARATION FROM BREDA,
TO ALL HIS LOVING SUBJECTS.
c. R. Charles, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland,
Defender of the Faith, &c. To all our loving subjects, of what degree or quality soever,
greeting : If the general distraction and confusion which is spread over the whole king
dom, doth not awaken all men to a desire and longing that those wounds, which have so
many years together been kept bleeding, may be bound up, all we can say will be to no
purpose ; however, after this long silence, we have thought it our duty to declare how
much we desire to contribute thereunto ; and that as we can never give over the hope, io
good time, to obtain the possession of that right whicli God and nature hath made our
due ; so we do make it our daily suit to the Divine Providence, that lie will, in compassion
to us and our subjecfs, after so long misery and sufferings, remit, and put us into a quiet
and peaceable possession df that our right, with as little blood and damage to our people as
is possible ; nor do we desire more to enjoy what is ours than that all our subjects may
enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire administration of justice throughout the
land, and by extending our mercy where it is wanted and deserved. And to the end that
the fear of punishment may not engage any, conscious to themselves of what is past, to a
perseverance in guilt for the future, by opposing the quiet and happiness of their country,
in tbe Restoration both of king, peers, and people, to their just, ancient, and fundamen
tal rights, we do, by these presents, declare, That we do grant a free and general Pardon,
which we are ready, upon demand, to pass under our Great Seal of England, to all our
subjects, of what degree or quality soever, who, within forty days after the publishing
hereof, shall lay hold upon this our grace and favour, and shall by any public act, declare
their doing so, and that they return to the loyalty and obedience of good subjects ; except
ing only such persons as shall hereafter -be excepted by parliament, those only to be ex
cepted. Let all our subjects, how faulty soever, rely upon the word of a king, solemnly
given by this present Declaration, That no crime whatsoever, committed against us or our
royal father before the publication of this, shall ever rise in jud. ment, or be brought in
question, against any of them, to the least endamagement of them, either in their lives,
liberties, or estates, or (as far forth as lies in our power) so much as to the prejudice of
their reputations, by any reproach or term of distinction from the rest of our best subjects ;
we desiring and ordaining, that henceforth all notes of discord, separation, and difference
of parties be utterly abolished among all our subjects, whom we invite and conjure to a
perfert union among themselves under our protection, for the Resettlement of our jnst
Rights and theirs, in a Free Parliament, by which, upon the word of a king, we will be
advised. And because the passion and un charitableness of the times have produced sev
eral opinions in Religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against
each other, (which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be
composed, or better understood) we do declare a Liberty to tender Consciences, and that
no man shall be disquieted, or called in question, for differences of opinion in matters of
Religion, which do not disturb the peace of the Kingdom ; and that we shall be ready to
HIS MAJESTY S DECLARATION. 133
consent to such an act of parliament as, upon mature deliberation, shall be offered to us,
for the full granting - that indulgence. — And because, in the continued distractions of so
many years, and so many and great revolutions, many grants and purchases of estates
have been made to, and by, many officers, soldiers, and others, who are now possessed of
the same, and who may be liable to actions at law upon several titles, we are likewise wil
ling that all such differences, and all things relating to such grants, sales, and purchases,
shall be determined in parliament ; which can best provide for the just satisfaction of all
men who are concerned. — And we do further declare, That we will be ready to consent to
any act or acts of parliament to the purposes aforesaid, and for the full satisfaction of all
arrears due to the officers and soldiers of the army under the command of general Monk,
and that they shall be received into our service upon as good pay and conditions as they
now enjoy. Given under Our Sign Manual and Privy-Signet, at our Court at Bredaj
this 14th day of April, 1660, in the 12th year of our reign.
134 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER VI.
Statutes again present materials for history. — Long Parliament declared to be dissolved.
— Tonnage and Poundage. — Excise. — Knight service and Purveyance abolished. —
The Army disbanded. — Church Livings. — Church Lands and Crown lands. — Act of
Indemnity. — Exceptions of the regicides, and of others. — Executions. — Insults to the
dead. — Episcopacy. — King's Declaration. — Convention Parliament dissolved. — Ana
baptist Insurrection. — Conferences at the Savoy. — New Parliament. — Marriage of
the Duke of York. — Prerogatives of the Crown. — Corporation Act. — Act of Uni
formity. We can once more open the ponderous " Statutes of the
Realm,"" and therein find the most important materials for the his
tory of the State and the history of the People. The last Statute
of Charles I. bears the date of 1640. The first Statute of Charles II.
bears the date of 1660. During these twenty years of Civil War,
and of the Commonwealth, there were Ordinances and Acts of Par
liament which had the force of Laws — many directed to temporary
objects, but many, also, of permanent utility. Some of the Statutes
of the Restored Monarchy were founded upon these, — often with
out the slightest reference to them. But occasionally, when a wise
law of the Long Parliament or of the Protectorate had become
an established principle, it was recognised in a new Statute, in
which it was called " a pretended Act." The royalist theory of the
Constitution was, that there was no vitality in any legislative body
not called into being by the Crown — that all laws were a dead letter
that had not received the assent of the Crown. The royalists
maintained that from the 30th of January, 1649, Charles the Sec
ond had been king de facto as well as king de jure ; that although
kept out of the exercise of his authority by traitors and rebels, he
had been for twelve years the sole governor of England ; that 1660
was the twelfth year of his reign, as the dates of Acts of Parlia
ment, and of other instruments set forth.* The Parliament of the
Restoration, which was begun to be holden on the 25th of April,
1660 — the Convention Parliament, as it is called — in their first
* "This had not been the usage of former times.— Edward IV., Richard III., Henry
VII., had dated their instruments either from their proclamation, or at least from some
act of possession." — Hallam.
KNIGHT-SERVICE AND PURVEYANCE ABOLISHED. 135
Statute declared the Long Parliament to be dissolved, and enacted
that the Lords and Commons then sitting at Westminster were the
two Houses of Parliament " notwithstanding any want of the
King's Majesty's W"it or Writs of Summons." * They had recalled
the legitimate heir of the Crown ; but this their first Act virtually
acknowledged that they had no constitutional power to do so. The
next Parliament, which was duly summoned by the King's writ,
always termed this Convention Parliament " the last Assembly ; "
for the second Parliament was far more servile in its royalist fer
vour than the first ; and many of its members regarded Charles
Stuart simply as the heir who had come to take possession of his
estate of England, together with five millions of people, his lawful
chattels. In a few years this so-called loyalty put on more offen
sive shapes ; and the people began to see that the old battle
against arbitrary power had to be renewed, with full benefit of a
bitter experience.
The Parliament of 1660, in the exuberance of its devotion, but
not altogether unwisely, resolved to make such an ample provision
for the executive power as should place it beyond the pretended
necessity of raising money by. unlawful means. They settled the
yearly revenue cf the Crown at an amount considerably beyond
the supplies voted to Charles I., and they voted the subsidy of
tonnage and poundage, for the term of the king's life.f One
stipulation, of great importance to the owners qf landed property,
was associated with this liberality of the Commons. When the king
and the Parliament came to the fatal issue of Civil War in 1641,
the feudal revenues of the Crown were necessarily set aside.
There was an end to the ancient claims of the Crown upon tenures
by Knight-Service, with all their oppressive conditions of fines for
alienation, of forfeitures, and of wardship. There was an end,
also, of the more generally obnoxious demands of purveyance.
* 12 Car. II. t. i.
t Ibid., *-. 4. The duties of Tonnage and poundage, or, as we now term them,
Customs, as settled by the Schedule of Rates of Merchandise in this Statute, continued
with little variation, through the reigns of Charles II., James II., William III., and
part of the reign of Anne. Reduced to one-half, they continued till George III. had
reigned twenty-seven years. This Statute of the Convention Parliament was thus the foun
dation of that system of taxing at a separate rate the smallest as well as the largest article of
Merchandise — a system which embarrassed all commercial operations almost up to the pres
ent day. In the table of Rates of 1660. there are about fourteen hundred articles of im
port upon which there is a varying duty. Looking at the value of money at that time, tbe
duties were enormous, and their effect in retarding all manufacturing and commercial pro
gress for half a century cannot be over-estimated.
136 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
These relics of prerogative would have revived with the re-estab
lishment of the monarchy. The Parliament made a bargain to re
lieve the landed proprietors ; but this bargain was completed at
the expense of the Commonalty. Charles surrendered the Court
of Wards, and Purveyance, and the Commons granted him and
his successors the Excise of beer and other liquors,* a tax first
introduced during the Civil War. It was originally a temporary
tax. The two great sources of modern revenue were thus placed
absolutely in the king's hands. Charles was rendered more inde
pendent of Parliament for the ordinary expenditure of the Crown
than his father, or grandfather, or Elizabeth, had been. No one
seems to have dreaded that the money destined in great part for
the proper dignity of the sovereign, and the due administration of
all executive authority, was likely to be wasted in the most unblush
ing profligacy. The character of the king, and the habits of his as
sociates, were not unknown ; but men deceived themselves into the
belief that long years of exile and poverty would have taught their
lessons of prudence and moderation ; that Adversity, " stern,
rugged nurse," would have inspired some thoughts of honour and
justice. But with Charles " self-pleasing Folly's idle brood " had
not been scared at Adversity's frown. The House had voted an
especial sum, to be raised by an especial mode of taxation, for dis
banding the army. In his speech at the close of the Session the
king said, " I do promise you, which is the best way I can take to
gratify you, I will not apply one penny of that money to my own
particular occasions, what shift soever I make, till it is evident to
me that the public will not stand in need of it." f He seems to
think that there is something magnanimous in this declaration ; —
that be might do what he liked with the sum which was considered
as entrusted to him for a specific purpose, but that he would abstain
from exercising his right of doing what he pleased with his own as
a gracious condescension to "the public." In six years more the
Parliament discovered the value of his majesty's self-denial; and
in the bill for a poll-tax introduced a clause that a commission
should be appointed to inspect all the accounts of the money sup
plied, and the expenses incurred, during the war. Pepys records
that in the lord treasurer's accounts there was a sum unaccounted
for of more than two millions ; and that it was thought that ,£400,-
000 of the money voted for the war had gone to the Privy Purse.
He then says that the notion of a commission to inspect the accounts
* 12 Car. II. c. 24. t "Pari. Hist." vol. iv. p. 122.
THE ARMY DISEANDED. I37
" makes the king and court mad; the king having given order to
my lord chamberlain to send to the playhouses and brothels, to
bid all the parliament-men that were there to go the parliament pres
ently." * To the playhouses and brothels to search for the parlia
ment-men ! ' The times were altered since they were to be sought
for in the churches and conventicles.
At the period of the Restoration, the Army, which had been
the instrument of effecting that great change, as it had effected so
many other great changes, consisted of fifteen regiments of horse,
and twenty-two regiments of foot, besides garrisons. That army
was supported by monthly assessments of seventy-thousand pounds.
An Act was passed " for the speedy provision of money for dis
banding and paying off the forces of this kingdom both by land
and sea."f A contribution was to be raised from all ranks and
degrees, under a commission in every county; and large sums were
voted for the complete disbanding, in subsequent Acts.f The
Act for the speedy disbanding of the Army and garrisons, and also
for paying off twenty-five ships, § was followed by " an Act for en
abling the soldiers of the Army now to be disbanded, to exercise
Trades." This salutary Statute provides that the disbanded men,
who would willingly employ themselves in the trades they had for
merly been accustomed to, or those who are apt and fit for trades,
might exercise their employments in corporate cities and towns,
without being restrained by any bye-laws ; and that those who had
been apprenticed to trades, but had not served the seven years
required by the Statute of the 5th of Elizabeth, should be qualified
to labour in their vocation as freely as if they had completed their
legal term. The industry of the country absorbed this formidable
Army. It was composed of a higher order of men than were usu
ally found in military service ; and they became the most industri
ous of citizens as they had been the best disciplined of soldiers.
The revenue assigned to the crown did not contemplate the con
tinuance of any standing army ; but Charles retained two regiments
of horse in his pay, who were called his guards. Upon this nar
row foundation was the present regular army of the United King
dom established. In 1662, the king had five thousand troops in
his service. A few years afterwards he began to talk of making
the Commons "a courageous speech," for that he was "master of
an army." ||
* "Diary," December 8, 1666. t 12 Car. II. c. 9.
X Ibid., c. 26, and c. 21. § Ibid., c. 15. It Pepys, October 4, 1666.
138 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The great question of the Church Establishment was not
brouo-ht forward in the Convention Parliament. The Presbyterian
members were too strong in that Assembly to render it safe to pro
pose such a sweeping change as would again make the Anglican
Church supreme in endowments and political power. Amidst all
the sectarian violence of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth,
the legal provision of the Clergy had never been disturbed, and
the private rights of presentation to benefices had been uninterrupt
edly exercised. The pulpits were, indeed, for the most part filled
with ministers of Puritan principles. Presbyterian or Independent ;
and the Liturgy, with the ceremonial observances connected with
it, had been abolished. These ministers, although they were not
encouraged to believe that the Presbyterian form, which had
never been universal, would be adopted, hoped for some com
promise that would ensure them the quiet possession of their liv
ings, and free them from any obligations repugnant to their con
sciences. " Because," said the king's Declaration from Breda,
"the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced
several opinions in Religion, by which men are engaged in parties
and animosities against each other (which, when they shall here
after unite in freedom of conversation will be composed, or better
understood), we do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and
that no man shall be disquieted, or called in question, for differen
ces of opinion in matters of Religion, which do not disturb the
peace of the kingdom." In the Convention Parliament no attempt
was made to contravene the spirit of this Declaration. The imposi
tion of the Covenant upon all the beneficed Clergy had ejected
large numbers of conscientious men from their livings.* Seven
teen years had intervened ; and another large body of conscientious
men, differing as to Church government, had succeeded to the
duties and emoluments of the Episcopal Clergy. The Parliament
of 1660 enacted that all the ejected ministers who survived should
be restored to their benefices, but without the right of claiming
any past emoluments. By the same Statute those who were in
actual possession of those livings for which there was no claimant
as previous possessor, were confirmed in their titles. This meas
ure, apparently so just, was in reality a delusion. Clarendon, the
ruling minister of the first years of the Restoration, although infin
itely superior in honesty and ability to the profligate courtiers and
unprincipled politicians with whom he was associated, seldom scru-
# See vol. iii. p. 4SS.
ACT OF INDEMNITY. 139
pled to " palter " with " the word of promise," when he had a long-
cherished hope to realize, or a deliberate revenge to gratify.
The settlement of the Church establishment was only one
amongst the complicated questions that arose, of necessity, out of
the Restoration. Many of the Crown lands and the Church lands
had been sold under the authority of the Long Parliament. The
title seemed so safe that in many cases they had been sold at
fifteen, and even eighteen years' purchase. A Bill was brought in
to determine this matter, which involved so many adverse inter
ests. It was strenuously debated by the Commons, in 1660; and
the only agreement that the House came to was, that the Crown
lands should be left out of the proposal for sales to be confirmed
or indemnity to be given. One member declared himself against
the purchasers of the Crown lands by quoting a proverb that " he
that eats the king's goose should be choked by its feathers." The
House was disinclined to such an unconditional restoration of
Church property. But the discussion was at length cut short by
the dissolution of the Parliament ; and the purchasers had no pro
tection against the due course of law, under which their titles were
defective. Unconditional restitution was the necessary result.
The Declaration of Breda had said, " because, in the continued
distractions of so many years, and so many and great revolutions,
many grants and purchases of estates have been made to, and by,
many officers, soldiers, and others, who are now possessed of the
same, and who may be liable to actions at law upon several titles,
we are likewise willing that all such differences, and all things re
lating to such grants, sales, and possessions, shall be determined
in Parliament." By the adroit management of Clarendon, Parlia
ment was relieved from the responsibility of the determination.
Loud complaints, no doubt, were made by many who had been
honest purchasers ; but their complaints were neutralised b)' the
louder murmurings of the Cavaliers, who, although some had re
turned to the possession of their estates, were deprived of any
compensation for their sequestrations, and compositions for delin
quency, during the authority of the Long Parliament. They were
shut out from any legal process for relief by the Act of Indemnity.
Bitter were their murmurings against the ingratitude of the king,
from whom they expected the magician's power of annihilating all
the natural and moral consequences of twenty years of vicissitude.
Such are the mortifications and miseries tabe endured by all par
ties when revolutions have run their course. During the conflicts
140 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of great principles men are elevated above their merely selfish in
terests ; but when the sword is sheathed there arise the bitterer
animosities of changed fortunes and disappointed hopes. Then
come the odious thoughts of revenge for the past,— schemes of
insulting triumph or dangerous machination. The calm after a
great revolution is more to be dreaded than its storms. Clarendon
saw this danger, though, when his own passions and prejudices
were concerned he yielded to the baser influences At the ad
journment of the Parliament, in September, after the Act of Obliv
ion and Indemnity had been passed, he thus spoke, as Chancel
lor : — " Shall we fold our arms towards one another, and contract
our hearts with envy and malice to each other, by any sharp mem
ory of what hath been unneighbourly or unkindly done hereto
fore ? What is this but to rebel against the person of the king,
against the excellent example and virtue of the king, against
the known law of the land, this blessed Act of Oblivion ? My
Lords and Gentlemen, the king is a suitor to you, makes it his
suit very heartily, that you will join with him in restoring the
whole nation to its primitive temper and integrity, to -its old
good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature ; —
Good nature, a virtue so peculiar to you, so appropriated by God
Almighty to this nation, that it can be translated into no other lan
guage, hardly practised by any other people : And that you will, by
your example, by the candour of your conversation, by your pre
cepts, and by your practice, and by all your interest, teach your
neighbours and your friends how to pay a full obedience to this
clause of the Statute, how to learn this excellent art of forgetful-
ness." "This excellent art of forgetfulness " was not easy to be
learnt. Certainly the government did not encourage its acquire
ment by the example of its own magnanimity ; but, eager as the
Court was for the exercise of some vengeance for the past, it was
but a faint expositor of the passions of many of the Lords and
Commons, who cried " havoc '' with their loudest voices.
Three weeks before the return of Charles II., the House of Com
mons had decided that seven persons should be excepted from a
proposed Amnesty ; and that all who had sate upon the king's
trial should be arrested, as well as some others who had been
ministers of the Protectorate.* After the Restoration it became
evident that the Court was by no means satisfied with so limited
an exception from a general pardon as that of seven who had been
* A nte, p. 128.
EXCEPTIONS OF REGICIDES AND OTHERS. 141
engaged in the transactions of twelve years of revolution. The de.
bates in both Houses on the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion are
very imperfectly recorded ; but there is enough to show how the
spirit of the country had been abased and demoralised — how com
pletely the feeling of national pride had departed from the public
men of England — how insensible the majority had become to those
principles of honour, by which the evils of the Civil War had been
mitigated on both sides. For three months this Bill of Indemnity was
debated in both Houses. The Commons went on adding name after
name to those of the seven who were originally excepted. The
Lords voted that all who had signed the death-warrant of Charles
I., as well as five others, should be excepted, either as regarded
life or estate. They carried the principle of private revenge so
far, that they declared that the surviving relations of four peers who
had been executed under the Long Parliament, should nominate
four to be put to death of the surviving members of the High Court
of Justice by which those peers had been condemned. There was
a difficulty, however, in the way of the sweeping proscription which
the Lords desired, which became a touchstone of honourable feel
ing in both Houses. The king, shortly after his landing, had
issued a proclamation, in which he commanded those who had sat as
judges of his father to render themselves up within fourteen days,
"on pain of being excepted from any pardon or indemnity as to
their lives or estates." The Parliament had suggested this proc
lamation. Was it a trap to induce these men to surrender, or was
it an indirect pledge that, so surrendering, they should partake of
the benefits of a general pardon ? The honour of the king was un
questionably committed to the most favourable construction of the
proclamation. Some, such as Ludlow, had the prudence not to
place confidence in ambiguous words ; and they fled abroad.
" Other poor gentlemen were trepanned that were brought m by
proclamation."* Clarendon, the chancellor, shuffled odiously
about a document whose ambiguity was doubtless well studied by
him. Southampton, the treasurer, with the high spirit of the old
Cavaliers, maintained " that since it was not thought fit to secure
the lives of those who had been ordered to surrender their persons
upon the faith ofthe proclamation, they ought at least to give them
the like number of days for saving themselves as were appointed
by that paper for their coming in." f The Commons debated this
point of the proclamation with a more moderate and honester feel-
* Hutchinson, vol. ii. p. 279. Ludlow, iii. p. 43.
142
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ing than the majority of the Lords. Although one rabid member
had the baseness to say " that these people's lives were but as a
bucket of water in the ocean, in regard of so many more as were
to receive benefit by the Act of Pardon ; " and another had the
effrontery to maintain that "their coming in upon the proclamation
was, that God had infatuated them to bring them to justice,—" yet
the general temper of the Commons was better represented by
Hale, who pleaded "for the honour of the king and the two
Houses;" and by Colonel Birch,, who said "if he should give
articles to a garrison, he should think himself very unworthy to
break them." This matter was at last compromised between the
Lords and Commons by a proviso in the Bill, that if the nineteen
persons therein named should be legally attainted, then neverthe
less the execution of the persons so attainted should be suspended
until execution should be ordered by Act of Parliament." * The
most remarkable exceptions to the Statute of Indemnity, in addi
tion to all the regicides with few omissions, were Sir Henry Vane
and General Lambert ; but the Houses concurred in an address to
the king that if these two leading men of the revolution were tried
and attainted, their lives should be spared. The king assented. I /
The trials of the regicides and others in custody, who were
excepted from pardon as to life and estate, took place in October.
Twenty-five of those who had sat in judgment upon Charles I. were
dead : nineteen had fled to foreign countries. Twenty-nine per
sons were brought to trial as traitors, before a Court of thirty-four
commissioners ; and they were all convicted. Of these, the nine
teen who had surrendered under the proclamation were imprisoned
for life. Ten were executed. These were Harrison, and five
others, who had subscribed the death-warrant of Charles ; Cook,
who acted as leading counsel upon the trial ; Axtell and Hacker,
two officers who commanded the guard over the royal prisoner ;
and the famous Hugh Peters. These men died in the belief that
they unjustly suffered for the discharge of a great public duty. In
their strong religious principles, which approached to the enthu
siasm of martyrs, in Harrison especially, they found support under
the cruelties of the old law of treason, which was executed to the
minutest point of its brutality. It is not creditable to Charles
that he was a spectator of these scenes. Evelyn writes, on the 17th
of October, " Scott, Scroop, Cook, and Jones, suffered for reward
of their iniquities at Charing Cross, in sight of the place where
# 12 Car. II. c. ix.
EXECUTIONS, AND INSULTS TO THE DEAD. 1 43
they put to death their natural prince, and in the presence of the
king his son, whom they also sought to kill. I saw not their exe
cution, but met their quarters, mangled, and cut, and reeking, as
they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle." A
more disgusting spectacle took place on the 30th of January, 1661,
which Evelyn also records : " This day (O the stupendous and in
scrutable judgments of God !) were the carcases of those arch-
rebels, Cromwell, Bradshaw (the judge who condemned his Maj
esty), and Ireton (son-in-law to the Usurper), dragged out of their
superb tombs in Westminster among the kings, to Tyburn, and
hanged on the gallows there from nine in the morning till six at
night, and then buried under that fatal and ignominious monume.nt
in a deep pit; thousands of people who had seen them in all their
pride being spectators." On the 4th of December, the Parliament,
upon the motion of colonel Titus — the colonel Titus who now claimed
the honour of having written "Killing no Murder " — had voted unan
imously that this revolting exhibition should take place. One Eng
lishman has recorded his sentiment upon this vote as regarded Crom
well — " which, methinks, do trouble me that a man of so great courage
as he was should have that dishonour." * On the 12th of Sep
tember, by a special order of the king to the dean of Westminster,
these bodies had been taken out of their vaults, and thrown into a
pit. On the same day, the body of Blake was removed from its hon
oured resting-place and re-interred in St. Margaret's churchyard.
To our minds there is nothing in the whole course of this evil
reign so prophetic of the coming national degradation, as the
indignities offered to the remains of the greatest soldier and the
greatest sailor that England had produced. Cromwell and Blake
by their genius and their patriotism made their country the most
honoured and dreaded of the nations. They bequeathed to the
heir of the ancient kings, a national dignity which was more solid
than the glories of the Edwards and Henries, and as dearly prized
by the people as the triumphs of Elizabeth. This miserable heir
of the grand English monarchy was utterly destitute of that na
tionality without which a sovereign is more degraded than the
meanest of his subjects. The future pensioner of France was in
capable of comprehending what England owed to the man whose
corpse he hung up on the gallows at Tyburn.
The restoration of surviving bishops to their sees, "with the con
secration of new bishops, was a policy which the Presbyterian
* Pepys' " Diary," December, 4, 1660.
144 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
party must have considered inevitable. That party had to a great
extent become powerless ; and was in no condition to renew the
struggles against Episcopacy which had so materially interfered
with any pacific arrangement with Charles I. For twenty years
there had been no display of copes and surplices in the service of
cathedrals. The young had never heard organs and choral voices
in parish churches. Now, the bishops assembled in Westminster
Abbey " all in their habits," as Pepys records; "But, Lord! at
their going out, how people did most of them look upon them as
strange creatures, and few with any kind of love or respect." *
The passion for the restoration of the monarchy did not extend to
this necessary consequence of that restoration. The serious citi
zens of London and other towns had been accustomed to the min
istration of the Puritan clergy, whether Presbyterian or Indepen
dent ; and they looked with apprehension and dislike to any change
that would interfere with their old habits. Their spiritual welfare
had not been neglected ; nor had they been committed to the guid
ance of ignorant or unlearned men, looking at the majority of the
Puritan ministers. The serious portion of the community were
sufficiently represented in the Convention Parliament to render
some caution necessary in the measures of the Court. On the 25th
of October the king published a Declaration, in which he avowed
his own attachment to Episcopacy, but expressed his opinion that
it might be so modified as to remove all reasonable objections ;
and he declared that the reading of the Liturgy, certain ceremonial
observances, subscription to all the articles, and the oath of canon
ical obedience, should not be pressed upon those who had consci
entious scruples. Calamy, Baxter, and other Presbyterian minis1-
ters, had been appointed Chaplains in ordinary to the king, in the
month after his restoration. The Puritans appear to have deceived
themselves into the belief that a happy concord would be estab
lished ; and the Court, whether from duplicity or weakness, ap
pears to have fostered the delusion. Some of the leading Puritan
ministers, amongst whom were Calamy, Baxter, Ash, and Rey
nolds, were introduced to the king ; and declared " their large hope
of a happy union among all dissenters by his means." Baxter re
cords that the king gave them a gracious answer ; professed his
gladness to hear their inclinations for agreement ; suggested that
both sides should abate somewhat of their pretensions ; nay, that
he was resolved to see this agreement brought to pass ; — with
• " Diary," October 4, 1660.
CONVENTION PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED. 145
much more to the same effect; "insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst
out into tears with joy, and could not forbear expressing what
gladness this promise of his majesty had put into his- heart." * In
less than a year the value of his majesty's promise was to be better
understood, when the Act of Uniformity was passed. In two years
non-conformity was made penal. We shall have briefly to notice
these healing measures. Their general effect is set forth with all
the bitterness of disappointed hope by the most eminent inter
preter of the feelings of the Puritan divines — those who, " in times
of usurpation had mercy and happy freedom," but who, " under
the lawful governors which they desired, and in the days when or
der is said to be restored, do some of us sit in obscurity and un
profitable silence, and some lie in prisons, and all of us are
accounted as the scum and sweepings and off-scourings of the
earth." f
The king's Declaration, and his promises to the Presbyterian
ministers, were looked upon with satisfaction by honest men of
both parties. There was a. possibility of such an agreement upon
points of discipline as would have made the Protestant Church of
England a real barrier against the revival of Popery, which was
not altogether a frivolous apprehension; and, through the concord
of earnest men who had long exercised an important spiritual influ
ence, would have opposed a sober religious spirit equally removed
from indifference or fanaticism, to the profligacy which was fast
becoming fashionable. To render the king's Declaration effectual
a Bill was brought into Parliament by Sir Matthew Hale. It- was
opposed by the united power' of the courtiers in Parliament, and
was rejected. This was the test by which the royal professions
were to be tried. " Such as were nearest the king's councils well
knew that nothing else was intended by the Declaration than to
scatter dust in men's eyes, and to prevent the interference of Par
liament." X Whilst the Convention Parliament lasted, all such
awkward questions were tided over. It was dissolved on the 29th
of December. Amongst the non-political Acts passed in this Parliament was
the Navigation Act, which was in substance a re-enactment of the
famous measure of the Long Parliament in 1651. § An Act for the
establishment of a General Post Office in London was also framed
upon the model of the Postal establishments of the Protectorate.
* Baxter, " Life," Part II. p. 231 ; folio. t Ibid., Part I. p. 84.
X Hallam, Chap. xii. § A nte, p. 20.
Vol. IV.— i o
146 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The complex arrangements which prevailed till our own time were
prescribed by this Act— one rate for a single sheet, another rate
for two sheets;— one rate for a distance not exceeding eighty
miles, another rate for a greater distance. The rates for foreign
letters were not exorbitant. No private persons were to carry let
ters ; and all ship letters brought from foreign ports were to be
delivered to the Postmaster General or his deputies.
The Parliament had not risen longer than a week when an ex
traordinary insurrection broke out in London. It was a renewal
of that fanatical outbreak which Cromwell put down with a troop
of horse on the 9th of April, 1657. The Fifth-Monarchy men
again rose on the 6th of January, 1661, under their old leader,
Thomas Venner, the wine-cooper. These men had a meeting
house in the city : and some fifty or sixty of them, after an encoun
ter with the feeble municipal police, marched to Caen-wood, near
Highgate, and having been there concealed for two days, returned
to encounter the trained bands, and even a regular body of guards,
in the confidence that their cause, the establishment of the reign
of Christ on earth, and the suppression of all other authority,
would be miraculously upheld. The capital was in fearful alarm;
the shops were shut ; the city gates barricaded. But these wild
men drove all before them ; till a rally was made, and they were
for the most part slaughtered, refusing quarter. Venner, and six
teen of his followers who were secured, were tried and executed.
This mad tumult was made the excuse for a proclamation for clos
ing the conventicles of Quakers, Anabaptists, and other sectaries.
The members of various sects throughout the country, who were
proscribed as dangerous, were very numerous ; but the severity
exercised towards them was really more favourable to their exten
sion than the toleration of Cromwell. The Quakers especially
held their ground against every severity — even against an Act of
Parliament of 1662, by which they were to be fined for assembling
for public worship, and for a third offence to be banished.
The Coronation of the king took place on the 23rd of April.
Every ceremony in Westminster Abbey, and Westminster Hall,
was of the most gorgeous nature. In the streets there were bon
fires out of number ; and " many great gallants, men and women "
drinking the king's health upon their knees.* The people of Lon
don had not recovered from their delirium. Throughout the land,
men were equally intoxicated by the return to the ancient order
* Pepys.
CONFERENCES AT THE SAVOY. 1 47
of things. The May-poles had been again set up ; the Christ
mas ale was again flowing in the squire's hall, the peasantry were
again wrestling and cudgel-playing on the village-green ; the stocks
were no longer a terror to the drunkard; the play-houses were
open in London, and itinerant actors again gathered their gaping
audiences in booth or barn. The old asceticism of the Puritans
was bitterly remembered. Their zeal for liberty, their pure lives,
their earnest religion, were regarded as disloyalty and hypocrisy.
The great share which the larger number of them had taken in the
restoration of the monarchy was also forgotten ; and amidst an ex
aggerated contempt for their formal manners, and a real dislike of
the restraint which they imposed upon audacious profligacy, the
Cavaliers carried the elections for a new Parliament by immense
majorities. The first Session lasted from the Sth of May to the
30th of July ; and in that short time reflecting persons began to
see "how basely things had been carried in that Parliament by the
young men, that did labour to oppose all things that were moved
by serious men." * But "to oppose all things that were moved by
serious men " was a very small part of the zeal of the Parliament
of 1661. Far more eagerly than Charles himself, or his minister
Clarendon, the royalist laboured as much as possible to prepare the
way for the return of the glorious days of the Star-Chamber and
the High Commission. The king and the chancellor carried on a
little farther the artifice of a desire for agreement in ecclesiastical
affairs. Before the meeting of Parliament, Conferences were held
at the Savoy between the bishops and twelve of the leading Puritan
divines, for the revision of the Liturgy. These discussions, which
were protracted for more than three months, could only conclude
in one way. The objections of those who called themselves " prim
itive Episcopalians " were put with a due acknowledgment that the
Book of Common Prayer is " an excellent and worthy work ;" but
they desire that " such further emendations may be now made
therein, as may be judged necessary for satisfying the scruples of a
multitude of sober persons who cannot at all, or very hardly, com
ply with the use of it as now it is." f The emendations which they
desired were very numerous, both in the prayers and in the rubric.
Whilst the churchmen were discussing these objections, sometimes
not in the most Christian spirit, the Parliament was settling the
question of conformity in a very summary manner ; and when the
Liturgy, a few months after, came to be reviewed in Convocation,
* Pepys, " Diary,'' August 4. t Baxter, " Life," Part II. p. 316.
148 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the points which gave offence to " tender consciences" were left
untouched. The Anglican Church felt its power ; and the notion
of conciliation, if ever seriously entertained, was soon supplanted
by the readier and simpler princi2Dle of coercion.
The altered character of the House of Commons was very soon
indicated by its proceedings. The Parliament met on the 8th of
May. On the 17th it was voted that every member should receive
the sacrament according to the forms of the Anglican Church. It
was also resolved that the Solemn League and Covenant should be
burned by the hands of the common hangman. There was no
hesitation now in proclaiming that the Presbyterians were a crush
ed and degraded party. In the common hatred of all Puritans,
the Independents were necessarily included. The one great prin
ciple of the policy of Clarendon was to re-establish the Church of
England in its ancient splendour ; and this desire 'would have been
as commendable as it was natural, could it have been accomplished
without a violation of those principles of religious freedom to which
the royal word was pledged. But Clarendon, who in exile had
been surrounded by suffering dignitaries of the Established Church,
had contracted a violent hatred of the entire body of the Puritan
Clergy ; and he constantly speaks of them in terms of contempt,
which only indicate his real ignorance of the condition of the peo
ple during the long period in which he was shut out from any in
tercourse with the great majority of his countrymen. With him
the whole body of the non-conforming ministers were "fellows."
He bitterly opposed the inclination of the king to mitigate some of
the evils which the temper of the Cavaliers was ready to inflict
upon them. This temper is thus accounted for by our constitu
tional historian : " The gentry, connected for the most part by birth
or education with the episcopal clergy, could not for an instant
hesitate between the ancient establishment and one composed of
men whose eloquence in preaching was chiefly directed towards
the common people." The gentry did " not for an instant hesitate "
to deprive "the common people " of the spiritual instructors to
whom they looked up with reverence; and to thrust upon them a
new set of ministers who had little sympathy with their religious
or political convictions. The inevitable consequence was that the
indifference of " the higher classes " to all earnest principles grad
ually spread through the whole community ; that the clergy were
more intent upon preaching the doctrine of passive obedience so
as to produce a nation of slaves and sycophants, than desirous of
CHARACTER OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT. 1 49
setting forth the great truths of Christian doctrine and Christian
morals, so as to separate " the common people " from the conta
gion of the horrible profligacy of the Court. Lauderdale related
to Burnet that the king told him to let presbytery go, " for it was
not a religion for gentlemen." The religion which the king and
his courtiers desired, was something that would be as kind to their
merits as blind to their faults ; and their wishes were gratified to
an extent which makes the most sincere friend of the Church of
England look back with loathing at the servility, the intolerance,
and the cowardice with which its hierarchy so long grovelled at
the feet of tyranny and sensuality. But if Clarendon went beyond
all the bounds of honest and wise statesmanship in his zeal to re
place the Church in the position which it had occupied before the
days of the Long Parliament, he manifested both wisdom and in
tegrity in firmly clinging to the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.
At the opening of this Second Parliament he put the king forward
to desire the confirmation of that Act, in stronger terms of entreaty
than were usually placed in the mouth of the sovereign. Claren
don himself says, " This Warmth of his majesty upon this subject
was not then more than needful ; for the armies being now dis
banded, there were great combinations entered into, not to confirm
the Act of Oblivion,»which they knew without confirmation would
signify nothing. Men were well enough contented that the king-
should grant indemnity to all men that had rebelled against him ;
that he should grant their lives and fortunes to them who' had for
feited them to him : but they thought it unreasonable and unjust
that the king should release those debts which were immediately
due to them, and forgive those trespasses which had been com
mitted to their particular damage." * One example of the extent
to which the passions of the Cavaliers carried them away from
the high feeling which was their general characteristic is very
striking. The pen of the novelist has made us familiar with the
real or fancied wrongs of the house of Stanley ; and there is an
other record not quite so enduring as the laments of Scott's Char
lotte de la Tremouillc : " At the earl of Derby's seat of Knowsley
in Lancashire, a tablet is placed to commemorate the ingratitude
of Charles II., in having refused the royal assent to a bill which
had passed both Houses for restoring the son of the earl of Derby,
who had lost his life in the royal cause, to his family estate. This
has been so often reprinted by tourists and novelists that it passes
* "Continuation of Life."
150 HISTORY OF ENGLAND,
current for a great reproach on the king's memory. It was how
ever, in fact, one of his most honourable actions. The truth is,
that the C avalier faction carried through Parliament a Bill to make
void the conveyances of some manors which lord Derby had vol
untarily sold before the Restoration, in the very face of the Act of
Indemnity, and against all law and justice. Clarendon, who, to
gether with some very respectable peers, had protested against
this measure in the Upper House, thought it his duty to recom
mend the king to refuse his assent." *
The firmness of the great minister of the Restoration in main
taining the Act of Indemnity made him as unpopular with the ex
treme Royalists, now all-powerful, as his somewhat extravagant
zeal for the Church of England rendered him odious to the Puri
tans, now all-humiliated. His position was one of extreme diffi
culty. He was an object of dislike and ridicule to Charles and his
courtiers because, from his age and his character, he looked dis
approvingly upon their excesses. He had become connected in a
remarkable way with the royal family, by the marriage of his daugh
ter with the duke of York. Unless he conducted himself with the
most extreme duplicity, the possible injurious consequences to
himself of this unequal union appear to have terrified him beyond
the bounds of sanity. The mother of two future reigning queens
of England, had indulged the passions of the king's brother
under an alleged betrothal. Six months after the king was placed
on the throne, a private marriage was avowed, and, soon after, the
lady gave birth to a son. Clarendon has himself recorded that he
proposed to send his daughter to the Tower ; and he maintained
that an Act of Parliament should be passed for cutting off her
head, which he was ready himself to propose. The passion, real
or feigned of the chancellor, received' on encouragement from the
king ; and the licentious courtiers, after an attempt had been made
to blacken the character of Miss Hyde, in the relation of circum
stances which only the basest natures could have detailed, accepted
the lawyer's daughter as a properly qualified duchess of York.
The story is told in the " Memoirs of Grammont " with a dramatic
force worthy of the imitation of "the dignity of history." Ham
ilton, the author of these Memoirs, which so completely exhibit
the character of the courtiers of Charles II., in their perfect un
consciousness of their degradation, tells how the earl of Arran,
Talbot, Jermyn, and Killigrew, at the desire of James himself,
Hallam, chap. xi.
PREROGATIVES OF THE CROWN. 15 1
each related " the particulars of what he knew, and more than
he knew, of poor Miss Hyde." The duke then went into his
brother's cabinet, and continued there a long while in secret con
versation. The scandal mongers remained without, in eager ex
pectation ; and when the duke came forth with marks' of agitation
on his countenance, they had no doubt of the result of the confer
ence. " Lord Falmouth began to be affected for her disgrace,
and to relent that he had been concerned in it, when the duke of
York told him and the earl of Ossory to meet him in about an
hour's time at the chancellor's. They were rather surprised that
he should have the cruelty himself to announce such a melancholy
piece of news : they found his royal highness at the appointed
hour in Miss Hyde's chamber: a few tears trickled down her
cheeks, which she endeavoured to restrain. The chancellor, lean
ing against the wall, appeared to them to be puffed up with some
thing, which thev did not doubt was rage and despair. The duke
of York said to them, with that serene and pleasant countenance
with which men generally announce good news : ' As you are the
two men of the court whom I most esteem, I am desirous you
s'lould first have the honour of paying your compliments to the
duchess of York : there she is.' " *
Clarendon, really strengthened in power and influence by the
high marriage of his daughter, met with little opposition in leading
a willing Parliament to trample upon all dissent from the Episco
pal Church ; to restore those prerogatives of the Crown which had
been set aside by the Long Parliament ; and to keep alive the spirit
of revenge against the republican party. The Act for the preser
vation of the king and government increased the strictness of the
law of treason ; and declared that no legislative power existed in
the Parliament, except in conjunction with the king.f The Act for
the command of the militia went rather beyond the constitutional
principle of recognising the sole power of the Crown to command
the forces by land or sea. It declared not only that neither House
of Parliament could pretend to such power, but could not lawfully
levy any war, offensive or defensive, against the king. { " These
last words," says Mr. Hallam, "appeared to go to a dangerous
length, and to sanction the suicidal doctrine of absolute non-re
sistance." Tumultuous petitioning was provided against by limit
ing the number to ten who should present a petition to the king or
the Parliament ; with some stringent regulations as to the mode of
* ' Memoirs of Grammont," Sir Walter Scott's Edition.
t 13 Car. II. c. 1. X Ibid., 2, c 6.
[S2
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
signing petitions.* The Corporation Act went much farther than
justly attempting to restore the executive power to its due au
thority in the state. Mingling the political and religious principles
of coercion, it required that all persons elected to corporate offices
should have' received the sacrament, according to the rites of the
English Church, within one year before their election; and it re
quired an oath from such officers that they believed it unlawful, on
any pretence whatever, to take arms against the king ; and required
them to abjure the traitorous position of taking arms by the king's
authority against himself or his officers, f In the municipal bor
oughs the supporters of the contest against Charles I. had been
principally found — men equally resolved in their love of civil lib
erty and their hatred of prelacy. The Corporation Act put as
strong a restraint upon them as an oath could effect. The restora
tion of the bishops to the House of Lords was accomplished with
out any opposition by this Parliament, in which the Presbyterians
had lost all influence. The crowning measure of ecclesiastical
polity was the Act. of Uniformity. X By this Statute it was re
quired that all the beneficed clergy, all fellows of colleges, and all
schoolmasters, should declare their unfeigned assent and consent
to all and everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer,
as amended in Convocation and approved by the king. By another
clause in this Act, episcopal ordination was required of all persons
holding ecclesiastical preferments. Those of (he clergy who, pre
vious to the Feast of St. Bartholomew, 1662, had not declared
their acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer, in the terms of
the Statute, were to be absolutely ejected from their livings. On
that day more than two thousand ministers of religion went forth
into the world without any provision for their future support. They
had received a striking example of conscientious integrity in the
refusal of the episcopal clergy to take the Covenant in 1643. § In
that revolutionary crisis the ejected incumbents had not been
wholly .unprovided for; one-fifth of the income of the new incum
bents having been allotted to them. Such a merciful consideration
for men of piety and learning — and most of the Puritan clergy
were zealous in their callings and pure in their lives — was not
granted by this revengeful Parliament. Measures of absolute per
secution against the ejected ministers were subsequently enacted —
measures which, in their application to all non-conformity, it re
quired a long and arduous struggle to obliterate from the Statute-
book. * 13 Car. II. u. 5. t Ibid., Session 2, c. 1. X 14 Car. II. c. 4. § See vol. iii. p. 488,
SCOTLAND. 153
CHAPTER VII.
Scotland. — The Scottish Parliament. — Execution of Argyle. — Episcopacy restored ill
Scotland. —Temper of the English Parliament. — Trial of Vane and Lambert. —
Execution of Vane. — Catherine of Braganza. — Marriage of the King. — Profligacy of
the King and his Court. — Insurrection in the North. — Conventicle Act. — Repeal of
the Triennial Act.— Dutch War.— The Plague.— The Five Mile Act.— The Settle
ment Act.
The real spirit of the Restoration is more clearly illustrated by
the proceedings of the government in Scotland than by its actions
at corresponding periods in England. Practically, since the vic
tory of Dunbar, Scotland had ceased to be an independent king
dom. For the true prosperity of both countries it was desirable
that this union should have been continued. To give the Stuart a
fair field for carrying matters with a high hand in his ancient king
dom, it was expedient again to isolate the smaller and poorer por
tion of the island from the larger and wealthier. Of course, when
the survivors of the Committee of Estates, that had been nomina
ted by Charles in 1651, were again called to resume the govern
ment of Scotland ; when a Lord Commissioner and other high
officers were appointed ; when a parliament was summoned to meet
at Edinburgh, — the national pride was abundantly gratified, and
Charles the Second was the best of kings. The people soon found
that they had to pay a heavv price for this nationality, which was.
to involve the loss of the civil and religious rights which were dear
est to the nation.
The Parliament which met at Edinburgh on the ist of January,
1661, has been honoured with the name of " the drunken parlia
ment." Burnet says, " It was a mad roaring time, full of extrava
gance ; and no wonder it was so, when the men of affairs were
almost perpetually drunk." In England, the passions of the Cava
liers were less fierce, and were held more in subjection by the
obvious danger of provoking another Civil War. In Scotland, the
dominant party had no thought beyond that of keeping its oppo
nents under its feet. Argyle, as the great leader of the Cove
nanters, was now to offer the satisfaction of his head for the fall of
154 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
his rival Montrose. Upon the restoration of Charles, Argyle had
hastened to London to offer his homage to the king. He was ar
rested ; and then sent to Scotland, to be brought to trial for his
alleged offences. When questioned before the Parliament he
pleaded the amnesty of 1651, and the English government deter
mined to admit the plea. He was then accused of having received
a grant from Cromwell ; of having aided the English invaders ; and
of having sat in Richard Cromwell's parliament, and voted for a
bill which abjured the rights of the Stuarts to the Crown. The
fate of Argyle was sealed when a packet arrived from England,
containing letters from him to Monk, inimical to the king and
favourable to Cromwell. To produce such private letters against
an old associate in the same cause, was as base in Monk as it was in
famous in the Parliament to be moved by such treachery to Argyle's
condemnation. He was sentenced to be beheaded within forty-eight
hours. He accepted his fate with courage and resignation. At the
same time Guthrie, a Presbyterian minister, violent and uncompro
mising in his opinions, was put to death as an example to the clergy.
He was personally obnoxious to Middleton, who in this, and in
every other instance, went headlong to the gratification of his re
venge. He procured the condemnation by the Scottish parliament
of the son of the Marquis of Argyle, for writing a letter reflecting
upon the acts of the government ; and he would have put this
nobleman to death, under the barbarous law of " leasing making " —
sowing dissensions by falsehood — had not Clarendon interfered to
stop the iniquity. Amidst these excesses against individuals, the
more extensive tyranny of forcing Episcopacy upon a people so
devoted to Presbytery was resolutely pushed forward. James
Sharpe, who had been sent to London on a mission from his Pres
byterian brethren, returned Bishop of St. Andrew's and Primate of
Scotland. Other prelates were appointed, of whom four were con
secrated in London. In the parliament of 1662, by the first Act of
the session, "the whole government and jurisdiction of the church
in the several dioceses was declared to be lodged in the bishops,
which they were to exercise with the advice and assistance of such
of their clergy as were of known loyalty and prudence : all men
that held any benefice in the church were required to own and sub
mit to the government of the church, as now by law established."*
The violence of the drunken Parliament was finally shown in the
wanton absurdity of what was called the " Act Rescissory," by
* Bumet, " Own Times," Book.
TEMPER OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. 155
which every law that had been passed in the Scottish parliament
during twenty-eight years was wholly annulled. The legal founda
tions of Presbytery were thus swept away. " The bill was put to the
vote, and carried by a great majority ; and the earl of Middleton
immediately passed it without staying for an instruction from the
king. The excuse he made for it was, that since the king had by his
letter to the Presbyterians confirmed their government as it was
established by law, there was no way leftto get out of that, but the
annulling all those laws." *
The Parliament of England, as if to furnish a little excitement
to the dull debates that had reference to non-conformity, in the
beginning of 1662 turned its attention to the duty of shedding a
little more blood, to expiate that of the royal martyr. The Parlia
ment was hounded on to this work from the high places of the
restored Church. The 15th of January was a general fast-day. " to
avert God's heavy judgments on this land," the season being un
usually rainy. Dr. Ryves, or Reeves, dean of Windsor, preached
before the House of Commons, " showing how the neglect of ex
erting justice on offenders (by which he insinuated such of the old
king's murderers as were yet reprieved and in the Tower) was a
main cause of God's punishing a land." f His text was from
Joshua, c. vij. v. 13, "There is an accursed thing in the midst of
thee, O Israel : thou canst not stand before thine enemies until
ye take away the accursed thing from among you." In the week
in which Evelyn coolly records this Christian exhortation to avert
the judgments of God, he has looked upon " an accursed thing,"
against which the pulpit of Westminster has no denunciations — the
passion of gaming " in a Court which ought to be an example of
virtue to the rest of the kingdom." Mr. Pepys says of this roaring
time, — " At Court things are in very ill condition, there being so
much emulation, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing, and
loose amours, that I know not what will be the end of it, but con
fusion." Rumours of conspiracies were rife at this period ; and
the virtuous Cavaliers of the Lower House thought with Dr. Ryves,
that it would be a salutary measure to execute all the regicides
whose fate, after conviction, had been suspended for the decision
of Parliament. The Commons passed a Bill for their immediate ex
ecution, in direct opposition to the feeling of the Convention Par
liament that their lives should be spared. The Lords read this
Bill a first time, and then let it drop. Charles, to his honour, said
•Burnet, "Own Times," Book ii. t Evelyn " Diary." *
Ij6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to Clarendon, " I am weary of hanging, except for new offences ;"
and he trusted that the Bill against the regicides would not come
to him; "for,'' said he, "you know that I cannot pardon them."
Some of the minor offenders who had been excepted from the
penalty of death, were now degraded from honours, and deprived
of their estates: Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay, and Robert
Wallop, who were sentenced by Act of Parliament, * to be drawn
upon sledges with ropes about their necks from the Tower to
Tyburn, and back again, suffered this indignity. The nineteen
condemned regicides were confined in various prisons, and wore
out their lives in such hopeless captivity as Henry Marten endured
at Chepstow. Three regicides, Okey, Corbet, and Barkstead, who
had not surrendered upon the king's proclamation, were captured
in Holland, in March, 1662, by the agency of Downing, who had
been Cromwell's ambassador at the Hague. " The Dutch were a
good while before they could be persuaded to let them go, they
being taken prisoners in their land. But Sir G. Downing would
not be answered so : though all the world takes notice of him for
a most ungrateful villain for his pains." f They were executed on
the 19th of April, and died defending the justice of their actions.
The compliance of the Dutch government in the surrender of
political offenders, contrasted unfavourably with the sturdy inde
pendence of the little states of Vevay and Berne. Ludlow, and .
others, received ample protection and liberal hospitality in Switzer
land ; and the royalists thus failing to secure them, had resort to
base attempts at assassination. One of these only was successful.
John Lisle was shot at Lausanne, in 1664, as he was going to a
church near the town-gate.
For some time after the promise of the king to the Convention
Parliament that Vane and Lambert, in their exception- from the Act
of Indemnity, should not suffer death if found guilty of treason,
they had remained prisoners in the Tower. On the 30th of Oc
tober, 1661, Pepys enters in his Diary, " Sir Henry Vane, Lam
bert, and others, are lately sent suddenly a\va;r from the Tower,
prisoners to Scilly : but I do not think there is any plot, as is said,
but only a pretence." Vane solaced his captivity by compositions
which show how earnestly he sought the one true and abiding
comfort in misfortune. His enthusiastic religion, his ardent as
pirations for civil liberty, his unselfish life, his eminent ability,
render him the most interesting of the republican party. Claren-
* 13 Car. II. c. 15. t Pepys, "Diary," March 17.
TRIAL OF VANE AND LAMBERT. 157
don sought his exemption from the Act of Indemnity because he
was " a man of mischievous activity." On the 7th of March,. 1662,
in a letter to his wife, Vane writes, " They that press so earnestly
to carry on my trial do little know what presence of God may be
afforded me in it, and issue out of it, to the magnifying of Christ,
in my body, by life or by death. Nor can they, I am sure, imagine
how much I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, which of
all things that can befall me I account best of all." * Thus for
tified against the worst, he was arraigned before the Court of the
King's Bench on the 2nd of June, 1662, as " a false traitor."' The
overt acts of treason alleged against Vane and Lambert were,
their exercise of civil and military functions under the Common
wealth. When we consider the number of men who had filled
high offices during the suspension of the monarchy, and yet had
been active instruments in its restoration, we marvel at the effron
tery which should wrest the law to the conviction of two men who
had been faithful servants of their country. The condemnation of
Vane and Lambert was wholly against the spirit, if not the letter,
of the statute of Henry VIIL, which declared indemnity for all
persons rendering obedience to a king for the time being, although
his title might be defective. By party reasoning, obedience to the
Parliament, which stood in the place of the king, could not be
deemed a crime against the king de jure. But the judges main
tained that Charles the Second was a king de facto, and had never
been out of possession. Vane, who defended himself throughout
with marvellous ability, replied that if the king was never out of
possession the indictment against him must fall to the ground ;
for it alleged that he endeavoured to keep out the king. The
courage, the proud consciousness of right, the lofty principles of
Vane, were the reasons which would have induced a high-minded
sovereign to adhere gladly to his promise that his life should be
spared in the event of his condemnation. Charles was not a high-
minded sovereign — he was selfish, corrupt,' faithless, shameless.
The letter which he wrote to" Clarendon the day after Vane's trial
is as characteristic of the man as any other of the acts of his un
worthy life :
"The relation that has been made to me of Sir Henry Vane's
carriage yesterday in the hall is the occasion of this letter, which,
if I am rightly informed, was so insolent as to justify all he had
done, acknowledging no supreme power in England but a Parlia-
* Quoted in Mr. Forster's " Life of Vant*," p. 210.
V\'
158 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ment, and many things to that purpose. You have had a true ac
count of all ; and if he has given new occasion to be hanged, cer
tainly he is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put
him out of the way. Tliink of this, and give me some account of
it to-morrow, till when I have no more to say to you. — C. R.
The deportment of a prisoner on his trial could not " give new
occasion to be hanged," even if it had been most violent. Vane
in his justification avoided every topic of offence to the king per
sonally, as none of Vane's public acts had been marked by any
personal hostility to him. The " if we can honestly put him out
of the way," was not a scruple which Chirles would long enter
tain. He was put out of the way on the 14th of June, dying with a
courage which, says Pepys, "is talked on everywhere as a miracle."
The life of Lambert was spared, according to that promise which
the king did not scruple to violate when his victim was " too dan
gerous a man to let live." Vane was the last of the sacrifices on
the scaffold to the revenges of the monarchy.
On the opening of the Parliament of 1 661, the king announced
that he was about to marry " a daughter of Portugal." This
marriage had been advised by Louis XIV., who, although he had
engaged to Spain to give no support to Portugal in its struggles to
maintain its independence, saw in this English alliance a mode of
strengthening Portugal against the power which entered into rivalry
with him. The Spanish ambassador in London opposed the match,
declaring that Spain would never cease to maintain her claims
against the House of Braganza. Vatteville, the ambassador from
Spain, and Bastide, the ambassador from France, each pressed
their opinions upon the Council of Charles. When the Portu
guese alliance was settled, they entered into a personal contest,
which is an amusing variety of the dull battles of protocols. They
resolved to fight out, in the streets of London, the claims of the
two Crowns for precedency. Charles issued a proclamation for
bidding his subjects to take part in the conflict which was to take
place on the expected entry of the Swedish ambassador. On the
Tower Wharf was drawn up, on one side of the stairs, the carriage
of the Spanish ambassador ; on the other side the carriage of the
French ambassador. They were each surrounded by many liveried
servants, on foot and horseback, fully armed. The Swede landed;
and, occupying a royal carriage, went on his way. Then began the
mighty strife of the representatives of the two greatest sovereigns
in Europe, as to which should next follow. Their attendants
MARRIAGE OF THE KING. *59
fought till fifty were killed or wounded ; but the Spaniard won the
race, by cutting the traces of the Frenchman's carriage. Why
should not the quarrels of courts always be fought out in this
fashion, which might give ambassadors some real business that
would allow them less leisure to embroil nations f
In spite of the triumphant Vatteville, Charles married Catherine
of Braganza. She was not remarkable for beauty, but she was
sensible and amiable ; and the king professed himself fortunate,
and avowed his resolution to seek his future happiness in conjugal
affection. His first act of devotion to his queen was to present
lady Castlemaine to her in the midst of the Court. It was known
to all, and to the queen herself, that " the lady " was his avowed
mistress. Catherine suppressed her indignation ; but the effort
caused the blood to gush from her nose, and she was carried in a
fit from the royal presence. The gracious king was indignant at
the squeamishness of the queen ; and insisted that Castlemaine
should be one of the ladies of her bed-chamber. Clarendon re
monstrated with his master, and ventured to compare royal harlots
with other lewd women ; but the remonstrances ended by the
Chancellor undertaking to persuade the queen " to a full compliance
with what the king desired." Catherine threatened to return to
Portugal. Charles did more than threaten — he sent away her old
servants, with the exception of a few, who were allowed to remain
when the queen's spirit was humbled to ask a favour. Clarendon,
in his ' Life,' tells the issue of this characteristic scoundrelism of
"our most religious and gracious king '' — the title which the dis
criminating bishops now gave Charles in the Liturgy : " The king
pursued his point : the lady came to the court, — was lodged there,
— was every day in the queen's presence, — and the king in con
tinual conference with her, whilst the queen sat untaken notice of ;
and if her majesty rose at the indignity and retired into her cham
ber, it may be one or two attended her; but all the company
remained in the. room she left, and too often said those things
aloud which nobody ought to have whispered .... All these mor
tifications were too heavy to be borne ; so that at last, when it was
least expected or suspected, the queen on a sudden let herself fall
first to conversation and then to familiarity, and, even in the same
instant, to a confidence with the lady; was merry -with her in
public, talked kindly of her, and in private used nobody more
friendly." The Infanta of Portugal brought to Charles three hundred and
160 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
fifty thousand pounds as her dowry. The English Crown also
acquired Tangier, a fort on the coast of Africa. The possession
of Tangier, which the nation regarded as worthless, was to com
pensate for the sale of Dunkirk, which the nation regarded as one
of the chief triumphs of the foreign policy of the great Protector.
Charles was more eager to put money into his purse, than to grat
ify the national pride ; and Louis the Fourteenth was as desirous
to obtain Dunkirk as Charles to convert the Gibraltar of that day
into jewels for new mistresses. Louis made a cunning bargain.
He gave four millions of livres in bills ; and then employed his
own ready money to discount his own bills, at a saving of half a
million. According to Louis's own account of the transaction, his
rival in the treaty was the city of London, the lord mayor having
been deputed to offer any sum, that Dunkirk might not be alienated.
Clarendon had advised the sale, although he" had a little before, in
a speech in Parliament, dwelt on the value of the place. The
people, naturally enough, however unjustly, held that the Chan
cellor had been bribed. The magnificent palace that he was build
ing near St. James's was popularly called "Dunkirk House;''
and the national dislike of the sale of Dunkirk was one of the first
symptoms that his power was on the wane. His participation in
that sale subsequently formed an article of his impeachment. The
popular opinion that the sale of Dunkirk was to supply new funds
for the profligacy of the Court, was confirmed by the public de
monstrations of that profligacy. Lord Buckhurst and Sir Charles
Sedley had outraged all decency by an exhibition which Pepys
recorded in cypher, but which his editor says is "too gross to
print." Baxter gives us some notion of " the horrid wickedness "
of these titled blackguards, " acting the part of preachers, in their
shirts, in a balcony " in Covent Garden.* With such companions
was Charles now generally surrounded. All thoughts of business
were abhorrent to him. To lady Castlemaine 's lodgings he was
followed by his " counsellors of pleasure," who laughed at the
"old dotards " who presumed to talk in a serious vein. Rivals to
" the lady " now sprung up, with the usual incidents of jealousies
and pourings, to be averted by lavish presents to the old favourite,
or heavier bribes to the new. The English Court became the
ridicule of foreigneis. The Dutch caricatured the king in various
of his characteristic positions. In one print he was shown with
" pockets turned the wrong side outward, hanging out empty ; " in
* " Life," Part iii. p. 13.
INSURRECTION IN THE NORTH. l6l
another, with two courtiers picking his pockets ; in a third, leading
two ladies, whilst other ladies were abusing him. * The heartless
swindler had appropriated great part of his queen's jointure to his
rapacious mistresses. The people, who groaned under the tax of
" chimney-money," and declared they would not pay it without
force, were yet pleased with the gossiping familiarity of the king,
as he sauntered among them, feeding his clucks in the new Canal
in St. James's Park, or joining his nobles in a game at"Pell-Mell."
The Chevalier de Grammont saw Cromwell, "feared at home, yet
more dreaded abroad, at his highest pitch of glory." He then saw
" an affectation of purity of manners instead of the luxury which
the pomp of Court displays." He came to the Court of Charles
IL, and "accustomed as he was to the grandeur of the Court of
France, he was surprised at the politeness and splendour of the
Court of England." What that " politeness and splendour " really
covered is disgusting to look back upon, when we know that we are
beholding the manners of our own countrymen. There were other
men than the republican John Milton, who felt that they had
"fallen on evil days." There were others than Puritans who list
ened not to " the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers."
But, taken as a whole, the nation was degraded. Its old spirit was
gone. There was a feeble attempt at insurrection in the north in
1663. This outbreak was partly of a religious character, and partly
of a political. The insurrection, which was put down by a few of
the king's guards, was an excuse for persecuting some of the sur
viving republicans, — amongst others, colonel Hutchinson, whose
quiet and decorous life was an offence which was to be expiated by
his death in the damp vaults of Sandown castle. The day. of
retribution was not yet come : but the handwriting was on the wall.
"We are much indebted," says Mr. Hallam, "to the memory of
Barbara, duchess of Cleveland, Louisa, duchess of Portsmouth, and
Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn. We owe a tribute of gratitude to the Mays,
the Killigrews, the Chiffinches, and the Grammonts. They played
a serviceable part in ridding the kingdom of its besotted loyalty.
They saved our forefathers from the Star-chamber and the High-
commission court ; they laboured in their vocation against standing
armies and corruption ; they pressed forward the great ultimate
* Pepys, November 28, 1663.
162 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
security of English freedom, the expulsion of the House of
Stuart." The abortive insurrection of the autumn of 1663 was made the
pretext for a new measure against non conformists in the session
of 1664; and for an important change in the constitution of Parlia
ment. The king, in his speech on the opening of this session, said,
" You may judge by the late treason in the north, for which so
many men have been executed, how active the spirits of many of our
old enemies still are. . . . It is evident they have correspondence
with desperate persons in most counties, and a standing council
in this town. . . Some would insist upon the authority of the
Long Parliament, of which, they say, they have members enough,
willing to meet ; others have fancied to themselves, by some com
putation of their own upon some clause in the Triennial BilL that
this, present parliament was at an end some months since." The
alleged connection of some Fifth Monarchy men with this trifling
insurrection of Farnley Wood, near Leeds, — of which Bennet,
one of Charles's ministers, said that the country was too ready to
prevent the disorders — was made the pretext for " An Act to pre
vent and suppress seditious Conventicles." * The preamble
states that the Act is "for providing further and more speedy
remedies against the growing and dangerous practices of seditious
sectaries, and other disloyal persons, who under pretence of ten
der consciencies do at their meetings contrive insurrections, as
late experience hath showed." But, insolently assuming that all
religious assemblies of non-conformists were seditious, it enacted
that if five or more persons besides the household were present at
"any assembly, conventicle, or meeting, under colour or pretence
of any exercise of religion in other manner than is allowed by the
Liturgy or practice of the Church of England," then every person
so present should, upon record before two justices of the peace, or
the chief magistrate of a corporate town, be liable to certain fines,
imprisonment, or transportation, for a first, second, or third of
fence. Under this abominable statute, puritan ministers who had
been ejected from their benefices, and their admiring followers,
were thrown into prison. Baxter has related in his plain and
forcible manner how this law interfered with the ordinary affairs
of life amongst serious people : " It was a great strait that people
were in, especially that dwell near any busy officer, or malicious
enemy (as who doth not ?). Many durst not pray in their families,
" 16 Car. II. c.4.
CONVENTICLE ACT. l6$
if above four persons came in to dine with them. In a gentle
man's house it is ordinary for more than four, of visitors, neigh
bours, messengers, or one sort or other, to be most or many days
at dinner with them : and then many durst not go to prayer, and
some durst scarce crave a blessing on their meat, or give God
thanks for it. Some thought they might venture if they withdrew
into another room, and left the strangers by themselves. But
others said, ' It is all one if they be but in the same house, though
out of hearing, when it cometh to the judgment of the justices.'
In London, where the houses are contiguous, some thought if they
were in several houses, and heard one another through the wall or
a window, it would avoid the law. But others said, ' It is all in
vain whilst the justice is judge whether it was a Meeting or no.'
Great lawyers said, ' If you come on a visitor business, though you
be present at prayer or sermon, it is no breach of the law, because
you meet not on pretence of a religious exercise.' But those that
tried them said, ' Such words are but wind when the justices come
to judge you.' And here the fanatics called Quakers did greatly
relieve the sober people for a time : for they were so resolute, and
gloried in their constancy and sufferings, that they assembled
openly (at the Bull and Mouth, near Aldersgate) and were dragged
away daily to the common jail ; and yet desisted not, but the rest
came the next day nevertheless ; so that the jail at Newgate was
filled with them. Abundance of them died in prison, and yet they
continued their assemblies still." * For years were the persecu
tions under this Statute continued with all the severity that the
government could call forth. Clarendon intimates that the Act
was not rigorously executed, otherwise it would have produced a
thorough reformation. Dr. Creighton, preaching before the king,
said that "the greatest part of the lay magistrates in England were
Puritans, and would not do justice ; and the bishops' powers were*
so taken away and lessened, that they could not exercise the
power they ought." f With accommodating magistrates, and a
persecuting hierarchy, the times of the Star Chamber would soon
have come back. But some magistrates were honest, and some
church-dignitaries merciful and tolerant. The Parliament was
still compliant enough. They were yet farfrom manifesting any
serious doubts of the value of passive obedience. But their very
intolerance towards Protestant dissenters was, in some degree, a
result of their suspicion of the king's desire to show favour to the
* " Life," p. 436. • t Pepys, " Diary," March 26, 1664.
164 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Papists. He claimed a dispensing power as to the relaxation of
penal laws in ecclesiastical matters. The Parliament gently denied
the king's right to this dispensing power, and a Bill to confirm
that power was dropped, to Charles's great displeasure. In the
constitutional point of the duration of Parliaments, the Crown was
more successful in carrying out its own desires. By the Triennial
Act of 1641, in default of the king summoning a new parliament
within three years after a dissolution, the peers might issue writs ;
or the sheriffs in default of the peers ; or in default of constituted
authorities the people might elect their representatives without
any summons whatever. These provisions against such violations
of the constitution as had been seen in the time of Charles I.,
could not affect a sovereign who desired to govern in connection
with Parliaments. Charles, in his opening speech in the session
of 1664, said, " I need not tell you how much I love Parliaments.
Never king was so much beholden to Parliaments as I have been ;
nor do I think the Crown can ever be happy without frequent Par
liaments. But, assure yourselves, if I should think otherwise, I
would never suffer a Parliament to come together by the means
prescribed by that Bill." * The first Charles, in the pride of his
triumphant despotism, could not have made a more insolent
avowal. The famous Triennial Act was repealed ; all its provis
ions for holding Parliaments in defiance of an arbitrary power of
the Crown were set aside ; and yet it was declared that Parlia
ments should not be suspended for more than three years. Charles
II. lived to violate this law.
The first war in which the government of the restored mon
archy was engaged originated in the commercial rivalry of the
English and the Dutch. The African Company of England and
the African Company of Holland quarrelled about the profits de
rived from slaves and gold-dust. They had fought for some mis
erable forts on the African coast ; and gradually the contests of
the traders assumed the character of national warfare. Tbe mer
chants petitioned Parliament to redress their injuries ; the House
of Commons listened with ready ear ; the king saw plentiful sup
plies about to be granted him, some of which might be diverted
from their destined use ; the duke of York was desirous of show
ing his prowess as Lord High Admiral. War was declared ; and
on the 3rd of June, 1665, the fleets of the two great commercial
nations were engaged off Lowestoffe. The victory was complete
* " Parliament Hist," vol. iv. col. 291.
THE PLAGUE. 1 65
on the side of England. The old sailors of the Commonwealth
had still some animating remembrances of Blake, with which they
inspired the emulation of their new comrades. The duke of York
was not deficient in animal courage ; and the courtiers who served
as volunteers had not lost the national daring in their self-indul
gence. But the victory raised no shouts of exultation in the marts
and thoroughfares of London. The great City was lying under
the dread of the most terrible infliction, which was' approaching to
sweep away a third of its crowded population. The destroying
angel was abroad : his avenging weapon was The Plague !
The June of 1665 comes in with extraordinary heat. The pre
vious winter and spring had been the driest that ever man knew.
The summer was coming with the same cloudless sky. There
was no grass in the meadows around London. " Strange comets,
which filled the thoughts and writings of astronomers, did in the
winter and spring a long time appear." The " great comet,'' says
Burnet, " raised the apprehensions of those who did not enter into
just speculations concerning those matters." The boom of guns
from the Norfolk coast is heard upon the Thames ; and the mer
chants upon Change are anxiously waiting for letters from the
fleet. In the coffee houses, two subjects of news keep the gos-
sipers in agitation — the Dutch fleet is off our coast, the Plague is
in the City. The 7th of June, writes Pepys, was " the hottest day
that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did
in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross
upon the doors, and ' Lord have mercy upon us : writ there ; which
was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my
remembrance I ever saw." The red cross upon the doors was too
familiar to the elder population of London. In 1636, of twenty-
three thousand deaths ten thousand were ascribed to the Plague.
The terrible visitor came to London, according to the ordinary
belief, once in every twenty years, and then swept away a fifth of
the inhabitants. From 1636 to 1647 there had been no cessation
of the malady, which commonly carried off two or three thousand
people annually. But after 1648 there had been no record of
deaths from the Plague amounting to more than twenty, in any one
year. In 1664 the Bills of Mortality only registered six deaths
from this cause. The disease seemed almost to belong to another
generation than' that which had witnessed the triumph and the fall
of Puritanism — which had passed from extreme formalism to
extreme licentiousness. How far the drunken revelries of the five
1 66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
years of the Restoration might have predisposed the population
to receive the disease, is as uncertain as any belief that the sobri
ety of the preceding time had warded it off. One condition of
London was, however, unaltered. It was a city of narrow streets
and of bad drainage. The greater number of houses were deficient
in many of the accommodations upon which health, in a great
degree, depends. The supply of water was far from sufficient for
the wants of the poorer population ; and with the richer classes
the cost of water, supplied either by hand labour or machinery,
prevented its liberal use. The conduits, old or new, could only
afford to fill a few water-cans dailv for household uses. There
was much finery in the wealthy citizens' houses, but little cleanli
ness. It is to be remarked, however, that the Plague of 1665 was
as fatal in the less crowded parts of Westminster and its suburbs,
as in the City within the walls. Building had been going forward
from the time of Elizabeth in St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, and in St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields ; and we might conclude that the streets
would be wider and the houses more commodious in these new
parts than in the close thoroughfares, over which the projecting
eaves had hung for many a year, shutting out air and light. But in
these suburban liberties the Plague of 1665 first raged, and then
gradually extended eastward. On the loth of June the disease
broke out in the City, in the house of Dr. Burnett, a physician, in
Fenchurch Street. " I saw poor Dr. Burnett's door shut ; but he
hath, I hear, gained great good will among his neighbours ; for he
discovered it himself first, and caused himself to be shut up of his
own accord — which was very handsome." This is a quaint com
ment upon the good doctor's voluntary subjection to misery worse
than death — to be shut up — with the red-cross on the door ; no
one coming with help or consolation ; all stricken with the selfish
ness of terror.*
* There is a remarkable picture of a solitary man abiding in a house whilst the plague
was around him, written by oue who has many of the qualities of the true poet. George
Wither, during the Plague of 1G25, resolved to remain in his lodging in London, and thus
he describes a night of " darkness and loneliness : " —
" My chamber entertain'd me all alone,
And in the rooms adjoining lodged none.
Yet, through the darksome silent night, did fly
Sometime an uncouth noise ; sometime a cry ;
And sometime mournful callings pierc'd my room,
Which came, I neither knew from whence, nor whom.
And oft, betwixt awaking and asleep,
Their voices, who did talk, or pray, or weep,
Unto my list ning ears a passage found,
And troubled me, by their uncertain- sound."
THE PLAGUE. 1Q7
Defoe's famous "Journal, of the Plague Year "has made this
terrible season familiar to most readers. The spirit of accuracy
is now more required than when the editor of a popular work
informed his readers that Defoe continued in London during the
whole time of the plague, and was one of the Examiners appointed
to shut up infected houses.* Defoe, in 1665, was four years old.
Yet the imaginary saddler of Whitechapel, who embodies the
'stories which this wonderful writer had treasured up from his
childhood, relates nothing that is not supported by what we call
authentic history. The " Citizen who continued all the while in
London," as the title of Defoe's Journal informs us, and whose
dwelling was " without Aldgate, about midway between Aldgate
church and Whitechapel bars," relates how, through May and
June, the nobility and rich people from the west part of the city
.filled .the broad street of Whitechapel with coaches and waggons
and carts, all hurrying away with goods, women, servants, and
children; how horsemen, with servants bearing their baggage, fol
lowed in this mournful cavalcade, from morning to night ; how the
lord mayor's doors were crowded with applicants for passes and
certificates of health, for without these none would be allowed to
enter the towns, or rest in any wayside-inn. The citizen of White
chapel thought "of the misery that was coming upon the city, and
the unhappy condition of those who would be left in it." On the
2istof June, Pepys writes, " I find all the town almost going out
of town ; the coaches and waggons being all full of people going
into the country." In the country the population dreaded to see
the Londoners. Baxter remarks, " How fearful people were thirty,
orforty, if not an hundred miles from London, of anything that
they bought from any mercer's or draper's shop ; or of any goo'ds
'that were brought to them ; or of any persons that came to their
houses. How they would shut their doors against their friends ;
and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid another,-
as we did in the time of wars ; and how every man was a terror to
another." The Broadstone of East Redford, on which an ex
change was made of money for goods, without personal communi
cation, is an illustration of these rural terrors. A panic very soon
took possession of the population of London. They talked of the
comet, ". of a faint, dull, languid colour, and its motion very lieavy.
solemn, and slow." They read ' Lilly's Almanac,' and ' Gadbury's
-Astrological Predictions,' and ' Poor Robin's Almanac,' and these
* *' Beauties of England and Wales."
l68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
books " frightened them terribly." A man walked the streets day
and night, at a swift pace, speaking to no one, but uttering only the
words " O the great and the dreadful God ! " These prognostica
tions and threatenings came before the pestilence had become very
serious ; and they smote down the hearts of the people, and thus
unfitted them for the duty of self-preservation, and the greater duty
of affording help to others. Other impostors thai the astrologers
abounded. The mountebank was in the streets with his " infallible
preventive pills," and "the only true plague-water." Pepys records
that " my lady Carteret did this day give me a bottle of plague-
water home with me." But gradually the astrologers and the
quacks were left without customers, for London was almost wholly
abandoned to the very poorest. Touchingly does Baxter say,
" the calamities and cries of the diseased and impoverished are not
to be conceived by those who are absent from them
The richer sort remaining out of the city, the greatest blow fell on
the poor." The Court fled on the first appearance of the disease.
Some few of the great remained, amongst others the stout old duke
of Albemarle, who fearlessly chewed his tobacco at his mansion of
the Cockpit. Marriages of the rich still went on. Pepys is diffuse
about a splendid marriage at Dagenham's, which narrative reads
like the contrasts of a chapter of romance. " Thus I ended this
month (July) with the greatest joy that ever I did any in my life,
because I have spent the greatest part of it with abundance of joy,
and honour, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments, and
without cost of money." A week after, he writes, " Home, to draw
over anew my will, which I had bound myself by oath to dispatch
to-morrow night, the town growing so unhealthy that a man cannot
depend upon living two days."
The narrative of Defoe, and other relations, have familiarised
most of us from our boyhood with the ordinary facts of this terrible
•calamity. We see the searchers, and nurses, and watchmen, and
buryers marching in ominous silence through the empty streets,
each bearing the red wand of office. We see them enter a sus
pected house, and upon coming out marking the door with the
fatal red cross, a foot in length. If the sick within can pay, a nurse
is left. We see the dead-cart going its rounds in the night, and
hear the bell tinkling, and the buryers crying " Bring out your
dead." Some of the infected were carried to the established pest-
houses, where the dead-cart duly received its ghastly load. The
saddler of Whitechapel describes what he beheld at " the great pit
THE PLAGUE. IO9
of the churchyard of our parish at Aldgate :" — " I saw two links
come over from the end of the Minories, and heard the bell
man, and then appeared a dead-cart, as they called it, coming
over the streets, so I could no longer resist my desire of seeing it,
and went in It had in it sixteen or seventeen bodies ; some
were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in rugs, some little other than
naked, or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in
the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked amongst the
rest ; but the matter was not much to them, nor the indecency to
any one else, seeing that they were all dead, and were to be hud
dled together into the common grave of mankind, as we may call
it, for here is no difference made, but poor and rich went together ;
there was no otner way of burials, neither was it possible there
should, for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers
that fell in such a calamity as this." Soon, as Pepys tells us on the
12th of August, " the people die so, that now it seems they are
fain to carry the dead to be buried by day light, the night not
sufficing to do it in." The terrors which the sleek Secretary of
the Navy feels when he thus encounters a dead body are almost
ludicrous. The Reverend Thomas Vincent, one of the non-con
forming clergy who remained in the city, has thus described the
scenes of August : " Now people fall as thick as the leaves in au
tumn when they are shaken by a mighty wind. Now there is a
dismal solitude in London streets ; every day looks with the face
of a Sabbath-day, observed with a greater solemnity than it used
to be in the city. Now shops are shut in, people rare and very
few that walk about, insomuch that the grass begins to spring up in
some places, and a deep silence in every place, especially within
the walls. No prancing horses, no rattling coaches, no calling in
customers nor offering wares, nor London cries sounding in the ears.
If any voice be heard it is the groans of dying persons breath
ing forth their last, and the funeral knells of them that are ready to
be carried to their graves. Now shutting up of visited houses
(there being so many) is at an end, and most of the well are min
gled among the sick, which otherwise would have got no help.
Now, in some places where the people did generally stay, not one
house in a hundred but what is affected ; and in many houses half
the family is swept away ; in some, from the eldest to the youngest ; '
few escaped but with the death of one or two. Never did so many
husbands and wives die together; never did so many parents carry
their children with them to the grave, and go together into the
170 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
same house under earth who had lived together in the same house
upon it. Now the nights are too short to bury the dead : the
whole day, though at so great a length, is hardly sufficient to light"
the dead that fall thereon into their graves." At the beginning of.
September the empty streets put on another aspect, equally fearful.
The bonfire, which was the exhibition of gladness, was now the
token of desolation. Every six houses on each side of the way were-
to be assessed towards the expense of maintaining one great fire
in the middle of the street for the purification of the air, — fires,
which were not to be extinguished by night or by day. A heavy
rain put out these death-fires, and perhaps did far more good than
this expedient. As winter approached, the disease began rapidly
to decrease. Confidence a little revived. A few shops were again
opened. The York wagon again ventured to go to London with
passengers. At the beginning of 1666 "the town fills again."
"Pray God," says Pepys, "continue the Plague's decrease; for
that keeps the Court away from the place of business, and so all
goes to rack as to public matters.'' He rides in Lord Brouncker's
coach to Covent Garden : " What staring to see a nobleman's
coach come to town. And porters everywhere bow to us : and
such begging of beggars." The sordid and self indulgent now
began to come back : " January 22nd. The first meeting of Gres-
ham College since the plague. Dr. Goddard did fill us with talk,
in defence of his and his fellow-physicians' going out of town in the
plague-time ; saying that their particular patients were most gone
out of town, and they left at liberty, and a great deal more." This
is Pepys' entry of the 4th of February : " Lord's day : and my wife
and I the first time together at church since the plague, and now
only because of Mr. Mills his coming home to preach his first ser
mon ; expecting a great excuse for his leaving the parish before
anybody went, and now staying till all are come home : but he made
but a very poor and short excuse, and a bad sermon." Mr. Mills.
and his doings, and the doings of such as Mr. Mills, were not with
out important consequences, which bring us back to the political
history of this time of suffering, in which the few manifested a
noble devotion to their duty, and the many exhibited the more
general characteristic of their generation— intense selfishness. De
foe tells, with the strictest accuracy, the mode in which the spiritual
condition of the plague-struck city was attended to : " Though it is
true that a great many of the clergy did shut up their churches, and
fled as other people did, for the safety of their lives, yet all
THE SETTLEMENT ACT. 171
did not do so ; some ventured to officiate, and to keep up the as
semblies of the people by constant prayers, and sometimes sermons,
or brief exhortations to repentance and reformation, and this as
long as they would hear them. And dissenters did the like also
and even in the very churches where the parish ministers were
either dead or fled ; nor was there any room for making any dif
ference at such a time as this was." Baxter also relates that, when
"most of the conformable ministers fled, and left their flocks in the
time of their extremity," the non-conforming ministers, who, since
1662, had done their work very privately, " resolved to stay with
the people ; and to go into the forsaken pulpits, though prohibited ;
and to preach to the poor people before they died ; and also to visit
the sick, and get what relief they could for the poor, especially those
that were shut up." The reward which the non-conforming min
isters received for their good work was "The Five Mile Act."
The Statute which popularly bore this name is entitled "An Act
for restraining Non-conformists from inhabiting in Corporations."*
In consequence of the plague raging in London, the Parliment met
at Oxford on the 9th of October. Their first Act was for a sup
ply of 1,250,000/. Their second was this " new and more inevita
ble blow aimed at the fallen Church of Calvin." f All persons in
holy orders who had not subscribed the Act of Uniformity were
required to take the following oath : " I, A. B.,- do swear, that it is
not lawful, under any pretence whatsoever, to take arms against the
king ; and that I do abhor the traitorous position of taking arms by
his authority against his person, or against those that are commis-
sionated by him, in pursuance of such commissions ; and that I will
not at any time endeavour any alteration of government either in
Church or State." In default of taking this oath they were forbid
den to dwell, or come, unless upon the road, wfthin five miles of
any corporate town, or any other place where they had been minis
ters, or had preached, under a.penalty of Forty Pounds and six
months' imprisonment. They were also declared incapable of
teaching in schools, or of receiving boarders. This Act had for
its oDJect wholly to deprive the conscientious Puritans of any means
of subsistence connected with their former vocation of Christian
ministers, or instructors of youth. Mr. Hallam truly says, "The
Church of England had doubtless her provocations ; but she made
the retaliation much more than commensurate to the injury. No
severity comparable to this cold-blooded persecution had been
inflicted by. the late powers, even in the ferment and fury of a Civil
• 17 Car. II. c. j. _ t Hallam. '
172 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
war." An attempt was made to impose the non-resisting oath upon
the whole nation ; but it was defeated by a small majority.
The extent of the miseries inflicted by the Plague in London
was probably diminished by " The Settlement Act " of 1662.*
This was entitled " An Act for the better relief of the Poor." The
preamble of the Statute declares the continual increase of the
Poor, not only within the cities of London and Westminster, but
also through the whole kingdom ; but there is little reason to doubt
that the main object of the Bill was to thrust out from the parishes
of the metropolis, all chargeable persons occupying tenements
under the yearly value of ten pounds. By tl.is Act the power of
removal was first established — a measure which, however modified,
has done as much evil to the labouring population in destroying
their habits of self-dependence, as a legal provision for their sup
port, prudently administered, has been a national blessing. The
Settlement Act was carried by the metropolitan members, with
little resistance from the country members. " The habitual con
gregating of the vagrant classes in London, and the dread of pesti
lence likely to be thereby engendered, appear to have overborne or
neutralised all other considerations at the time, and hastened the
passing of the Act." f The united efforts made by the Londoners
to carry this Bill, leave little room to doubt that they acted upon it
very promptly and vigilantly ; and thus some considerable portion
of the indigent population must have been driven forth from Lon
don and Westminster, to seek their parishes under the old laws
which determined their lawful place of abode. The ten pound
rental, either in London or the country, could protect none of the
really indigent. It gave a privilege only to the well-to-do artisan
or tradesman who had no legal settlement by birth, apprenticeship,
or other legal claim. In 1675, in a debate on a Bill for restraint of
building near London, one member said that "by the late Act the
poor are hunted like foxes out of parishes, and whither must they
go but where there are houses ? " Another declared that " the
Act for the settlement of the poor does, indeed, thrust all people
out of the country to London."{ The intent of the framers of the
Act had probably been defeated by the reprisals of the rural magis
trates and overseers. The system of hunting the poor went on
amidst the perpetual litigation of nearly two centuries ; and it is
not yet come to an end.
* 14 Car. II. c. 12.
t SirG. Nicholls : " History of the English Poor Law," vol. i. p. 297.
X" Pari. Hist." vol. iv. col. 679.
NAVAL AFFAIRS. 1 73
CHAPTER VIII.
Naval affairs. — Annus Mirabilis. — France joins the Dutch against England.— The sea-
fight of four days. — The London Gazette. — Restraints upon the Press. — Ravages of
the English fleet on the Dutch Coast. — The Great Fire of London. — Note, on Wreff s
Plan for rebuilding the City.
The naval victory of the 3rd of June, 1665, was a fruitless
triumph, won at a lavish expenditure of blood. The most loyal of
the subordinate administrators of public affairs considered that a
great success had been thrown away. Evelyn writes, (June 8th)
" Came news of his highness' victory, which indeed might have
been a complete one, and at once ended the war, had it been- pur
sued ; but the cowardice of some, or treachery, or both, frustrated
that." When the Dutch fled from off Lowestoffe to their own
shores, the English fleet commenced a pursuit ; but in the night
the King Charles, the duke of York's ship, slackened sail and
brought to. In a Council of War, as Burnet relates upon the au
thority of the earl of Montague, Admiral Penn affirmed that they
must prepare for hotter work in the next engagement ; for he well
knew the courage of the Dutch was never so high as when they
were desperate. The courtiers said that the duke had got honour.
enough, and why should he venture .t second time. His royal
highness went to sleep ; and in the night Brunkhard, one of his
servants, delivered an order to the master of the King Charles to
slacken sail, which order purported to be written by the duke. The
House of Commons instituted an inquiry; and it was alleged that
Brunkhard forged the order. Burnet says, " Lord Montague did
believe that the duke was struck, seeing the earl of Falmouth, the
king's favourite, and two other persons of quality, killed very near
him ; and that he had no mind to engage again." Some members
of the House of Commons thought it a very desirable thing for the
nation that the king's brother should incur no more such dangers.
The duke remained at home, to contribute his share to the scandals
which the Court habitually provoked, whether at Whitehall or at
Oxford. The Plague-year has passed; the "Year of Wonders" is come.
'74
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Dryden called his Annus Mirabilis " an historical poem." In his
preface he says, " I have taken upon me to describe the motives,
the beginning, progress, and successes, of a most just and neces
sary War ; in it, the care, management, and prudence of our king ;
the conduct and valour of a royal admiral- and of two incomparable
generals ; the invincible courage of our captains and seamen ; and
three glorious victories, the result of all. After this, I have, in the
Fire, the most deplorable, but withal the greatest, argument that
can be imagined : the destruction being so swift, so sudden, so
vast and miserable, as nothing can parallel in story." The year
1666 is, indeed, an eventful year ; and the relation of its miseries,
so closely followmg upon the calamity of the Plague, carries
with it the consolation that the spirit of the English people, founded
upon their industrious habits and their passion for liberty, has
always been able to surmount the greatest political evils, and to
acquire, even under the severest dispensations of Providence, the
courage and perseverance which convert chastisements into bless
ings. At the beginning of 1666, Louis XIV., for objects purely per
sonal, joined the Dutch against England, and declared war. This
policy of the French Court had a tendency to make the war with
the Hollanders more popular in England. Prince Rupert, who
was now a resident in London, and who had a command in the
engagement off Lowestoffe, was not regarded with any public con
fidence ; and the king felt it necessary to associate the duke of
Albemarle with him in the command of the fleet. On the Sth of
May the two Generals were at the Nore with their squadrons. " I
sailed to the buoy of the Nore to my Lord-General and Prince
Rupert, where was the rendezvous of the most glorious fleet in
the world, now preparing to meet the Hollander." * The people
of London, dispirited by the ravages of the plague, many outraged
by the persecutions against the non-conformists, unable or indis
posed to pay the taxes for the war, had little enthusiasm as to its
results. The 29th of May came, and Pepys is heavily afflicted at
beholding few bonfires on the east-side of -Temple-bar. Clarendon
says " Monies could neither be collected nor borrowed where the
Plague had prevailed, which was over all the City, and over a great
part of the country ; the collectors durst not go to require it or
receive it." f On the 31st a public Fast-day was appointed to pray
for the success of the fleet ; " but," says Pepys, " it is a pretty
• Evelyn, " Diary," May S. t " Life."
THE SEA-FIGHT OF FOUR DAYS. 1 75
thing to consider how little a matter they make of this keeping a
Fast, that it was not declared time enough to be read in the
churches, the last Sufiday ; but ordered by proclamation since : I
suppose upon some sudden news of the Dutch having come out."
The Dutch fleet had come out; and on the 1st of June it was in the
Downs, with Monk in sight of -their formidable line of fighting
vessels. On the 2nd there is a curious spectacle at Greenwich.
The king and the duke of York have come down the river in their
barge ; and they walk to the Park to hear the loud firing of the ships
in the Channel. The group of lordly attendants on Greenwich-
hill, whispering and pointing as the sullen boom of the guns comes
up the Thames ; — Charles and James standing apart in puzzled
conference, or laughing at some ill-timed jest ; — a bowing courtier
approaching the royal presence to bring news just arrived at
Whitehall, — this is a scene which painting might properly make its
own. That distant roar of cannon was not imaginary. Monk and
Rupert had separated. It had been believed that the Dutch fleet
was not ready for sea ; and Monk, with fifty-four sail, had floated
calmly from the Nore ; when behold, there are eighty Dutch men- '
at-war at anchor off the North Foreland. The surprise was un
accountable ; but it is a proof how rashly naval warfare was con
ducted when landsmen were the chief commanders. The English
courage was too much relied upon ; the science and experience
which can alone make courage truly efficient were thought subor
dinate requisites. Monk was a hardy soldier, but a very imperfect
naval tactician ; — moreover he was now elated and presumptuous.
He dashed at the Dutch; fought all day; and at night looked round
upon disabled ships. De Witt was in the fleet of Holland ; and
chain-shot, of. which he was held to be the inventor, cut the
English rigging to pieces.- They fired at our towering sails ; we at
their high-raised decks. The battle was resumed at the early dawn
of the 2nd of June. De Ruyter had received a re-inforcement of
sixteen ships during the night. Monk was looking in vain for
Rupert to come to his aid. . Another day of terrible fight, with
losses severe enough on the English side, to have driven to despair
a commander less resolute than Monk. Dryden has pictured him
at nightfall, standing upon deck, while "the moon shone clear on
the becalmed flood," musing on the probable issue of another day,
and mournfully preparing for an ocean grave. On the 3rd he burnt
some of his disabled ships, and retreated, fighting De Ruyter's
rear-guard. The noblest ship of the English navy ran on the
176 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Galloper sand, and was lost. Late on the 3rd, Rupert arrived from
St. Helen's ; and the battle *as renewed with more equality. The
poet describes how the anxious prince had heard the cannon long,
and drew dire omens of English overmatched.* The historian says,
" he had received orders to return from St. Helen's on the first day
of the battle ; nor was it ever explained why he did not join Albe
marle till the evening of the third. "f The Diarist divides the blame
between the government at home, and the proud prince, whose obsti
nate self-reliance had produced so many of the royalist disasters in the
Civil War ; " I to sir G. Carteret, who told me there hath been great
bad management in all this; that the king's orders that went on Fri
day for calling back the prince were sent but by the ordinary post on
Wednesday ; and come to the prince his hands but on Friday ; and
then, instead of sailing presently, he stays till four in the evening.
And that which is worst of all, the Hampshire, laden with merchants'
money, come from the Straits, set out with or but just before the fleet,
and was in the Downs by five of the clock yesterday morning ; and
the prince with his fleet come to Dover but at ten of the clock at
night. This is hard to answer, if it be true. This puts great as
tonishment into the king, and duke, and court, everybody being out
of countenance. Home by the 'Change, which is full of people
still, and all talk highly of the failure of the prince in not making
more haste after his instructions did come, and of our managements
here in not giving it sooner and with more care andoftener." The
first desire of the court, and the more natural one, was to set forth
that there had been a great victory. Newspapers, then, had no
peculiar sources of information, to check the tendency of all gov
ernments to deceive the people as to the results of their warlike en
terprises — a tendency which only makes disappointment more se
vere when truth comes out, and thus exhibits falsehood not only as
a crime but as a fault The court had now got its " Gazette,"
which was first published at Oxford on the 7th of November,
1665; and soon after became "The London Gazette." Roger
L'Estrange, Esquire, had commenced his "Intelligence pub
lished foi the satisfaction and information of the People," and
his " Newes," in 1663 ; the one issued on a Monday, the
other on a Thursday. What real satisfaction and information
the public could derive from these productions may be gathered
from the address of their conductor. He was "Surveyor of
the Imprimery and Printing Presses ; " and he tells his readers
* " Annus Mirabilis," stanza cvi. f Lingard.
THE PRESS. 177
that his sacred majesty has been pleased " to grant and commit
the privilege of publishing all intelligence, together with the survey
and inspection of the Press, to one and the same person. He can
didly informs his subscribers that, " supposing the press in order, the
people in their right wits, and news or no news to be the question,
a public Mercury should never have my vote." He is of opinion
that it makes the multitude " too familiar with the actions and
counsels of their superiors, too pragmatical and censorious ; and
gives them, not only an itch, but a colourable right and licence to be
meddling with the government." To keep the multitude in the
right course, he thinks " the prudent management of a Gazette may
contribute to a very high degree." * This worthy Licenser was
preceded in his high endeavours for the reformation of the prag
matical andcensorious multitude by the Licensing Act of 1662, by
which all books, according to their subjects, were to be licensed by
the chancellor, the secretary of state, the bishops, and other great
personages. All these authorities, practically, became merged in
Roger L'Estrange, Esquire. The number of master printers in
London was limited to twenty ; no books were allowed to be printed
out of London, except at the two Universities and at York ; and all
unlicensed books were to be seized, and the publisher punished by
heavy penalties. The Stationers' Company was made a principal
agency for carrying through these despotic regulations. We may
well judge, therefore, that the real issue of the four days' fight in
the Downs would be explained to the multitude after a fashion
which the "prudent management" of the virtuous licenser of the
Press, and candid monopolist of all intelligence, would prescribe.
When Mr. Pepys entered in cipher in his Diary, " Lord, to see how
melancholy the Court is under the thoughts of this last overthrow, for
so it is, instead of a victory, so much and so unreasonably expected,"
it was the duty of Roger L'Estrange to make the ignorant multitude
very joyful. Still there were material evidences of the truth. There
were no Dutch prizes in the Thames ; and when Mr. Evelyn, with
all his royalist devotion, went to Sheerness on the 15th of June, he
made this record : " Here I beheld the sad spectacle — more than
half that gallant bulwark of the kingdom miserably shattered ;
hardly a vessel entire, but appearing so many wrecks and hulls, so
cruelly had the Dutch mangled us." The "sad sight" makes him
acknowledge that none knew '¦ for what reason we first engaged in
this ungrateful war." There was a partial success when a portion
* See Nicholi's " Literary Anecdotes," 1S12, vol. iv, p. 36.
Vol. IV.— 12
178 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the two fleets met again on the 25th of July, each being refitted.
The Dutch were chased to their ports ; and Monk and Rupert kept
their coasts in alarm. A squadron of boats and fire-ships en
tered the channel at Schelling ; burnt two men-of-war and a hun
dred and fifty merchantmen; and, to the disgrace of civilised
warfare, reduced to ashes the thousand houses of the unfortified
town of Brandaris. For this success, a day of Thanksgiving was
appointed. It was kept ; "though many muttered that it was not
wisely done, to provoke the Dutch, by burning their houses, when
it was easy for them to do the like by us, on our sea-coasts." * De
Witt saw the havoc of Brandaris ; and he swore a solemn oath, that
till he had obtained revenge, he would never sheathe the sword.
He kept his oath. The ' Annus Mirabilis ' was at an end before
the great Dutch statesman inflicted a terrible retribution. At
the close of the year came Dryden, intent upon earning the lau
reate wreath, and proclaimed the glories of 1666, in magnificent
quatrains : — " Already we have conquered half the war,
And the less dangerous part is left behind:
Our trouble now is but to make them dare,
And not so great to vanquish as to find." t
The story of the Great Fire of London has been related with
minuteness by many trustworthy observers. We can place our
selves in the midst of this extrordinary scene, and make ourselves
as familiar with its details as if the age of newspapers had arrived,
and a host of reporters had been engaged in collecting every strik
ing incident. But it is not in the then published narratives that we
find those graphic touches which constitute the chief interest of
this event at the present time. Half a century ago the materials
for a faithful record of the Great Fire were to be sought in the re
port of a Committee of the House of Commons, in the State Trials,
and in various tracts issued at the period. There are also several
striking passages of Baxter's " Life," which relate to the fire. But
such notices are meagre compared with the personal records in the
two remarkable Diaries which have been rescued from obscurity
during our own day. We are with Mr. Pepys in his night-gown at
three o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the 2nd of September.
looking out of his window in Seething Lane, at the east end of the
City, and, thinking the fire far enough off, going to sleep again.
* Baxter, " Life," part iii. p. 16. f " Annus Mirabilis," cccii.
THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. 1 79
We accompany him later in the morning to a high place in the
Tower, and see the houses near London Bridge on fire. The
weather is hot and dry, and a furious east wind is blowing. The
active Mr. Pepys takes a boat from the Tower Stairs ; and slowly
sculling up stream, looks upon the burning houses in the streets
near the Thames ; distracted people getting their goods on board
lighters ; and the inhabitants of the houses at the water's edge not
leaving till the fire actually reached them. He has time to look at
the pigeons — of which the Londoners generally were then as fond
as the Spitalfields weavers of our time — hovering about the win
dows and balconies till they burned their wings and fell down.
There is nobody attempting to quench the fire in that high wind.
Everything is combustible after the long drought. Human strength
seems in vain, and the people give themselves up to despair. The
busy Secretary of the Navy reaches Whitehall, and tells his story
to the king, and he entreats his majesty to order houses to be
pulled down, for nothing less would stop the fire. The king desires
Pepys to go to the lord mayor and give him this command. In
Cannon-street he encounters the lord mayor, who cries, like a faint
ing woman, " Lord ! what can I do ? I am spent. People will
not obey me." He had been pulling down houses. He did not
want any soldiers. He had been up all night, and must go home
and refresh himself: There is no service in the churches, for the
people are crowding them with their goods. The worthy Pepys
had invited a dinner-party on this Sunday ; and so he goes home ;
. and, " we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry as at
that time we could be." But he and his guests sit nof long over
their feast. He walks through the streets ; and again he takes
boat at Paul's Wharf. He now meets the king and the duke of
York in their barge. They ordered that houses should be pulled
down apace ; but the fire came on so fast that little could be done.
We get glimpses in this confusion of the domestic habits of the
citizens. " The river full of lighters and boats taking in goods ;
and good goods swimming about in the water ; and I observed that
hardly one lighter or boat in three that had the goods of a house
in, but there was a pair of virginals in it." The severer Puritans
had not driven out the old Engliish love of music ; the citizens'
wives and daughters still had the imperfect spinet upon which Eliz
abeth and her maids of honour played. That hot September eve
ning is spent by our observer uppri the water. Showers of fire-
drops are driving in his face. He sees the fiery flakes shooting up
150 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
from one burning house, and then dropping upon another five or
six houses off, and setting that on flame. The roofs were in many
streets only thatched : the walls were mostly timber. Warehouses
in Thames-street were stored with pitch, and tar, and oil, and
brandy. The night came on; and then Pepys, from a little ale
house on the Bankside, saw the fire grow, and shoot out between
churches and houses, " in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame,
not like the fire flame of an ordinary fire." And then, as it grew
darker, he saw the fire up the hill in an arch of above a mile long.
Then rose the moon shedding a soft light over the doomed city ; .
and amidst the terrible glare and the gentle radiance the whole
world of London was awake, gazing upon the conflagration,, or
labouring to save something from its fury.
We turn to the Diary of Mr. Evelyn — a more elegant writer
than Pepys, but scarcely so curious an observer of those minute
points that give life to a picture. He has seen the fire from the
Bankside on Sunday afternoon ; and on Monday he returns to see
the whole south part ofthe city burning. It was now taking hold
of the great cathedral, which was surrounded by scaffolds for its
repair. " The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous
flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people,
the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm ;
and the air all about so hot and inflamed, that at the last one was
not able to approach it, so that they were forced to stand still, and
let the flames burn on, which they did, for near two miles in length
and one in breadth. The clouds, also, of smoke were dismal, and
reached, upon computation, near fifty miles in length. Thus I left
it this afternoon burning, a resemblance of Sodom, or the last
day.:' On Tuesday, the 4th, Evelyn saw that the fire had reached as
far as the Inner Temple. " All Fleet-street, the Old Bailey, Lud-
gate-hill, Warwick-lane, Newgate, Paul's-chain, Watling-street, now
flaming, and most of it reduced to ashes ; the stones of Paul's flew
like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a
stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as
no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them, and the demolition
had stopped all the passages, so that no help could be applied;
the eastern wind still more impetuously driving the flames for
ward." On that day the houses near the Tower were blown up ;
and the same judicious plan was pursued in other places. On the
5th the Court at Whitehall was in unwonted bustle. The king
THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. l8l
and his brother had set an excellent example of personal activity;
and gentlemen now took charge of particular streets, and directed
the means of extinguishing the flames. The people now began to
bestir themselves. The civic authorities no longer rejected the
advice, which some seamen had given at first, to blow up the houses
before the flames reached them, instead of attempting to pull them
down. The wind abated. Large gags were made in the streets.
The desolation did not reach beyond the Temple westward, nor
beyond Smithfield on the north. On Wednesday, the 5th, the
mighty devourer was arrested in his course. Three days and three
nights of agony had been passed ; but not more than eight lives
had been lost. Mr. Pepys at last lies down and sleeps soundly.
He has one natural remark: "It is a strange thing to see how
lonj> this time did look since Sunday, having been always full of
variety of actions, and little sleep, that it looked like a week or
more, and I forgot almost the day of the week."
The contemporary accounts of the Fire, such as we find in a
sensible pamphlet entitled ' Observations on the Burning of Lon
don,' * have little pretension to be picturesque in their details.
The more elaborate passages of Evelyn's ' Diary ' have been
quoted again and again ; and, grouped together, they form the best
connected narrative of an eye-witness. There is one passage in
Baxter's ' Life ' which is not so familiar; but which, in its rapid
eloquence, is as impressive as Evelyn, and more truly poetical than
Dryden's vague sublimities : " It was a sight that might have given
any man a lively sense of the vanity of this world, and all the
wealth and glory of it, and of the future conflagration of all the
world. To see the flames mount up towards heaven, and proceed
so furiously without restraint : To see the streets filled with people
astonished, that had scarce sense left them to lament their own
calamity : To see the fields filled with heaps of goods ; and sump
tuous buildings, curious rooms, costly furniture, and household
stuff, yea, warehouses and furnished shops and libraries, all on a
flame, and none durst come near to receive anything: To see the
king and nobles ride about the streets, beholding all these desola
tions, and none could afford the least relief : To see the air, as far
as could be beheld, so filled with the smoke, that the sun shone
through it with a colour like blood; yea, even when it was setting
in the west, it so appeared to them that dwelt on the west side of
the city. But the. dolefullest sight of all was afterwards, to see
* Reprinted in " Harleian Mi---ceUany.'? . - - -
t82 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
what a ruinous confused place the city was, by chimnies and
steeples only standing in the midst of cellars and heaps of rub
bish ; so that it was hard to know where the streets had been, and
dangerous, of a long time, to pass through the ruins, because of
vaults, and fire in them. No man that seeth not such a thing can
have a right apprehension of the dreadfulness of it."
Whilst indifferent spectators were gazing on the fire from Bank-
side, and the high grounds on the south of the Thames, the fields
on the north were filled with houseless men, women, and children.
" I went," says Evelyn, " towards Islington and Highgate, where
one might have seen two hundred thousand people, of all ranks
and degrees, dispersed and lying along by their heaps of what they
could save from the fire, deploring their loss ; and, though ready
to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one penny for
relief." There were liberal contributions from the king, and the
nobility, and the clergy. Collections were made and distributed in
alms to the most needy. But the real difficulty must have been to
ensure a supply of food, when all the usual channels of interchange
were choked up. Proclamations were made for the country people
to bring in provisions. Facilities were offered to the people io
leave the ruins, by a command that they should be received in all
cities and towns to pursue their occupations ; and that such recep
tion should ^entail no eventual burthen on parishes. No doubt it
was necessary to strive against the selfishness that vast calamities
too often produce in the sufferers and the lookers-on. The coun
try-people for miles around had gazed upon the flames. * There
was an immense destruction of books ; and their half-burnt leaves
were carried by the wind even as far as Windsor. The dense
cloud of smoke shut out the bright autumn sun from the harvest-
fields, and upon distant roads men travelled in the shade. The
extent of the calamity was apparent. Yet it may be doubted if
many of the great ones received the visitation in a right spirit.
Pepys says, " none of the nobility came out of the country at all,
* The author of this History, talking of the fire of London with a fiiend, in his 88th
year, whose intellect is as bright as his knowledge is extensive, was much impressed by
the fact that an event happening two centuries ago may have come to the ear of one now
living, with only a single person intervening between himself and an eye-witness. Such a
fr.ct ought to lead us not to reject traditional information as unworthy of historical record.
Our friend was born in 1769. His aunt, who died at 84 years of age, was accustomed to
talk with him about his great-grandfather, who died in 1739, at 03 years of age. That
great-grandfather used to describe his impressions of the fire of London, which he. saw
from a hill at Bishop's Stortford.
THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON. I&J
to help the king, or comfort him, or prevent commotions at this1
fire." Some of the insolent courtiers, exulted in the destruction :
" Now the rebellious city is ruined, the king is absolute, and was
never king indeed till now." * One profligate " young commander"
of the fleet " made mighty sport of it ;" and rejoiced that the cor
ruption of the citizens' wives might be effected at a very reduced
cost, -f
The Monument erected in commemoration of the Fire has an
elaborate Latin inscription, in which it is set forth that the destruc
tion comprised eighty-nine churches, the city-gates, Guildhall,
many public structures, hospitals, schools, libraries; a vastnumber
of stately edifices ; thirteen thousand two hundred dwelling-houses,
four hundred streets. An account, which estimates the houses
burnt at twelve thousand, values them at an average rent of 25/. a
year, and their value, at twelve years' purchase, at £3,600,000. The
public buildings destroyed are valued at ,£1,800,000; the private
goods at the same rate. With other items, the total amount of the
loss is estimated at £7,335,000. J
But the interruption to industry must have involved even a
more serious loss of the national capital. We have stated, on
the authority of Clarendon, how the Plague had rendered it diffi
cult to collect the revenue. He says of the necessities of the
Crown in 1666, " Now this deluge by fire had dissipated the per
sons, and destroyed the houses, which were liable to the re-imburse
ment of all arrears ; and the very stocks were consumed which
should carry on and revive the trade." §
The Monument, which was erected on the spot where the fire
first broke out, recorded that the burning of this protestant city
was begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of a popish
faction. The " tall bully " lifted his head and lied in choice Latin
for a century and three-quarters ; and when the majority of men
had grown more truly religious, and did not hold it the duty of one
Christian to hate another who differed from him in doctrines and
ceremonies, the Corporation of London wisely obliterated the
offensive record. In the examinations before the Committee of
the House of Commons, there was nothing beyond the most vague
babble of the frightened and credulous, except the self-accusation
of one Hubert, a French working-silversmith, who maintained that
he was the incendiary. He was hanged, "much to the disgrace of
the administration of justice. " Neither the judges," says Claren-
* Baxter. t Pepys. X " Harleian Miscellany," vol. vii. p. 331. § " Life.'*
184 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
don, "nor any present at the trial, did believe him guilty; but
that he was a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose
to part with it this way."
Dryden's stanzas on the Fire thus conclude, with reference to
the popular superstition, which had its influence even upon the
well-informed :
" The utmost malice of the stars is past,
And two dire comets, which have scourg'd the town,
In their own Plague and Fire have breathed their last,
Or dimly in their sinking sockets frown."
A medal was struck in commemoration of the Plague and Fire.
The eye of God is in the centre ; one comet is showering down
pestilence and another flame. The east wind is driving on the
flames. Death in the foreground is encountering an armed horse
man. The legend is "Sic Punit" — So He punishes.
NOTE ON WREN'S PLAN FOR BUILDING THE CITY. 185
NOTE ON WREN'S PLAN FOR REBUILDING THE
CITY.
Our noble Cathedral of St. Paul's, and many Churches which exhibit the genius of
sir Christopher Wren in many graceful and original forms of towers and spires, grew out
of the' Great Fire. But the occasion was lost for a nobler city to arise, of wide streets,
and handsome quays. The old wooden fabrics were replaced by those of brick ; but the
same narrow thoroughfares were preserved as of old. The owners of property could not
be brought to unite in any common plan ; and each built his house up again, upon his
own spot of ground. The constant labour of succeeding times, and of our own especially,
has been to clear away, at enormous cost, what the fire had cleared away in three days
and nights. This want of co-operative action was not the result of any ignorance of what
required to be done. Wren's labours and wishes are thus recorded : " In order to a
proper reformation, Wren, pursuant to the royal command, immediately after the fire,
took an exact survey of the whole area and confines of the burning, having traced over
with great trouble and hazard the great plain of ashes and ruins ; and designed a plan or
model of a new city, in which the deformity and inconveniences of the old town were rem
edied, by the enlarging the streets and lanes, and carrying them as near parallel to one
another as might be ; avoiding, if compatible with greater conveniences, all acute angles;
by seating all the parochial churches conspicuous and insular ; by forming the most public
places into large piazzas, the centre of six or eight ways; by uniting the halls of the
twelve chief companies into one regular square annexed to Guildhall ; by making a quay
on the whole bank of the river, from Blackfriars to the Tower The streets to
be of three magnitudes ; the three principal leading straight through the City, and one or
two cross streets, to be at least ninety feet wide ; others sixty feet ; and lanes about thirty
feet, excluding all narrow dark alleys without thoroughfares, and courts The
practicability of this scheme, without loss to any man or infringement of any property, was
at that time demonstrated, and all material objections fully weighed and answered. The
only, and as it happened insurmountable, difficulty remaining, was the obstinate aversenesa
of great part of the citizens to alter their old properties, and to recede from building their
houses again on the old ground and foundations ; as also the distrust in many and unwil
lingness to give up their properties, though for a time only, into the hands of public
trustees or commissioners, till they might be dispensed to them again, with more advan
tage to themselves than otherwise was possible to be effected The oppor ¦
tunity in. a great degree was lost of making the new City the most magnificent, as well as
commodious for health and trade, of any upon earth." *
* Wren's " Parentalia," p. 269.
l86 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER IX.
Meeting of Parliament. — Discontents. — Public Accounts. — Insurrection of Covenanters
in Scotland. — State of the Navy.— Dutch Fleet at the Nore. — Ships burnt in the
Medway, — Blockade of London. — Peace with the Dutch.— Clarendon deprived of
Office. — He is impeached. — He leaves England. — The Cabal Ministry. — Treaty of
Triple Alliance. — Secret Negotiations of the king with Louis the Fourteenth.
The flames of London were still smouldering when the Parlia
ment met at Westminster on the 21st of September. The king
said, " Little time hath passed, since we were almost in despair of
having this place left us to meet in ; you see the dismal ruins the
fire hath made." There had been a prorogation for ten months.
But money was wanting. " I desire," said Charles, " to put you to
as little trouble as I can ; and I can tell you truly, I desire to put
you to as little cost as is possible. I wish with all my heart that I
could have the whole charge of this war myself, and that my sub
jects should reap the benefit of it to themselves." No doubt it
was very disagreeable that the king's subjects, being to be called
upon to pay largely, should by any possibility take the liberty of
asking what they were to pay for. Clarendon tells us of the some
what dangerous temper which was spreading after the experience
of six years and a half of the happy Restoration. " Though they
made the same professions of affection and duty to the king they
had ever done, they did not conceal the very ill opinion they had
of the Court and the continual riotings there." * They were tend
ing to the accomplishment of Harrington's prophecy : "Well ! The
king will come in. Let him come in, and call a Parliament of the
greatest Cavaliers in England, so they be men Tit estates, and let
them sit but for seven years, and they will all turn Commonwealth's
men."f A bill was brought in for the appointment of Commis
sioners " to examine all accounts of those who had received or is
sued out any moneys for this war; and where they found any per
sons faulty, and who had broken their trust, they should be liable
to such punishment as the Parliament should think fit." Sir
George Carteret, and lord Ashley, who were chiefly aimed at,
* " Life." t Aubrey's " Lives," vol. ii. p. 373.
PUELIC ACCOUNTS. ¦ 187
" both applied themselves to the king for his protection m this
point. His majesty was no less troubled, knowing that both had
issued out many sums upon his warrant, which he would not suffer
to be produced." To such- a bill the king was resolved never to
give the royal assent. This is Clarendon's relation of the matter ;
and yet he is not ashamed to say that he urged the king " to pre
vent the excesses in Parliament, and not to suffer them to extend
their jurisdiction to cases they have nothing to do with." Mr.
Hallam says, " Such a slave was Clarendon to his narrow^prepos-
sessions, that he would rather see the dissolute excesses which he
abhorred suck nourishment from that revenue which had been al
lotted to maintain the national honour and interests, and which,
by its deficiencies thus aggravated, had caused even in this very
year the navy to be laid up, and the coasts to be left defenceless,
than suffer them to be restrained by the only power to which
thoughtless luxury would submit." * Every effort was made to
oppose the bill; f and the Parliament was prorogued in 1667 with
out its being passed. Next year, 1668, the Parliament carried its
salutary measure of control. A supply of _£i, 800,000 was granted ;
and at the prorogation the king said, " I assure you the money
shall be laid out for the ends it is given."
The calamities which London had endured of Pestilence and
Conflagration were not wholly unacceptable to the corrupt court.
Clarendon informs us that there were those about the king, who
assured him that the Fire " was the greatest blessing that God had
ever conferred on him, his restoration only excepted ; for the walls
and gates being now burned and thrown down of that rebellious
city, which was always an enemy to the Crown, his majesty would
never suffer them to repair and build them up again, to be a bit in
his mouth, and a bridle upon his neck; but would keep all open,
that his troops might enter upon them whenever he thought it
necessary for his service, there being no other way to govern that
rude multitude but by force." Charles was not pleased with these
suggestions, adds Clarendon. Desirable as it might be to have
the Londoners under his feet at this time of. their desolation, there
was still the old spirit abroad in England. " Mr. Williamson
stood, in a little place, to have come into the House of Commons,
and they would not choose him; they said 'No courtier.' And,
which is worse, Bab May went down in great state to Winchelsea
with the duke of York's letters, not doubting to be chosen; and
» " Constitutional HUtnrv.-- r. 1-. t Ante, p. 137.
188 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
there the people chose a private gentleman in spite of him, and
cried out they would have no court pimp to be their burgess ;
which are things that bode very ill."* The indiscretion of the
king, to apply the least offensive term to his conduct, was sufficient
to alienate the affection which had been so lavishly bestowed upon
him, even if the people, with their bitter experience, stopped short
of rebellion. There were large numbers of the humbler retainers
of the royal household who, when Lady Castlemaine ordered of
her tradesmen every jewel and service of plate that she fancied,
and told her servant to send a note of their cost to the Privy Purse,
were themselves absolutely starving. It sounds very like exagger
ation when we read that one of the king's musicians, "Evans, the
famous man upon the harp, having not his equal in the world, did
the other day die for mere want, and was fain to be buried by the
alms of the parish." But this is not idle gossip of Mr. Pepys.
There is an account in existence of " The state of the Treasurer
of' the Chamber, his office, at Midsummer, 1665," which shows the
yearly payments due to officers of the king's household, and of the
sums " behind unpaid." f There were forty-two musicians, to
whom their salaries had been due for three years and one quarter.
High and low, the Bishop Almoner and the rat-killer, the Justice
in Oyer beyond Trent and the bird-keeper, footmen, falconers,
huntsmen, bear-warders, wardrobe officers, watermen, messengers,
yeomen of the guard, and many others, useful or useless, had been
" behind unpaid," some for five years, some for four years, some
for three or two years, very few only for one year. To three
apothecaries, more than 5000/. was due. That these persons, fre
quenting the coffee-houses or alehouses of London, did not spread
abroad their griefs, cannot reasonably be imagined. A sullen dis
content, a silent indignation, settled deep into the hearts of the
whole community. If a sword had been drawn against the Eng
lish people, there would have been another Civil War, with one
certain result. Men were satisfied for twenty years longer to en
dure and murmur. " It is strange how everybody do now-a-days
reflect upon Oliver, and commend him, what brave things he did,
and made all the neighbour princes fear him ; while here a prince,
come in with all the love and prayers and good-liking of his peo
ple, who have given greater signs of loyalty and willingness to
serve him with their estates than ever was done by any people,
* Pepys, " Diary," October 12, 1666.
t Preface to " Secret Services of Charles II. and James II." Camden Society.
TEMPER OF THE PEOPLE. 189
hath lost all so soon, that it is a miracle what way a man could de
vise to lose so much in so little time." Not at all strange, Mr.
Pepys, that the people looked back upon Oliver, and what brave
things he did. But the vicissitudes of nearly twenty years — the
dread of property becoming insecure — the religious divisions — the
respect for the monarchical principle, however degraded in the im
mediate wearer of the Crown — the love for the ancient Church,
amidst all its pride and intolerance — these considerations kept
Englishmen quiet. The government, moreover, was corrupt, but
in England it was not cruel, beyond the cruelty of preventing men's
religious opinions by statute. On this side the Tweed the govern
ment provoked little more than the contempt of those whom it
fined and imprisoned for non-conformity. In Scotland, it drove
them to desperation ; and when they rebelled the thumbikin and
the boot were ready to be administered to the victims, under the
forms of justice by the apostate Lauderdale, or they were shot
down and hanged by the brute Dalziel. The archbishops of St.
Andrews and Glasgow hounded on the persecutors.
The restoration of the monarchy was, to Scotland the establish-
• ment of a policy of unmitigated despotism. The orders of. the
king and council in matters ecclesiastical were to have the force of
laws. A large army was raised to hold the people in subjection,
whilst episcopacy, which they abominated, was established, with
out any modification by general assemblies. The churches were
deserted ; and the non-conforming preachers had immense con
gregations in barns and fields ; on wild heaths and in the gorges
of the mountains. The assemblies were dispersed by the soldiers ;
but no violence could put them down. Those who were most zeal
ous had soldiers quartered in their houses, to grind out of them the
fines which they were unwilling or unable to pay. In the West of
Scotland, where the Non-conformists were most numerous and
most determined, sir James Turner, a fitting instrument of tyranny,
was sent to enforce obedience by mulcts and severer penalties, levied
at his bidding by his rapacious dragoons. To a resolute and hardy
population, maddened by injuries, and defiant of danger, resistance
in arms seemed not only a worldly policy but a sacred duty. A
body of Covenanters of the West marched to Dumfries, and seized
sir James Turner. They were for the most part peasants, with a
few Presbyterian ministers amongst them. But they were not ig
norant of military discipline, and soon became alarming in their
numbers and their subordination. About three thousand set off to
igo HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
march from Lanark to Edinburgh, but these bands gradually
dwindled to eight or nine hundred. When they had reached with
in four miles of the city, they learnt that it was fortified, and its
gates shut against them. They retreated to the Pentland Hills. On
the evening of the 28th of November, Dalziel came upon them
with a body of horse. Twice the insurgents drove back the cavalry,
but their ranks were at last broken and they were utterly dispersed,
The slaughter was inconsiderable ; but many were executed, and
some tortured. " One Maccail, that was only a probation preacher,
and who had been chaplain in sir James Stuart's house, had gone
from Edinburgh to them ; it was believed he was sent by the
party in town, and that he knew their correspondents ; so he was
put to the torture, which in Scotland they call the boots ; for they
put a pair of iron boots close on the leg, and drive wedges between
these and the leg. The common torture was only to drive these
in the calf of the leg ; but I have been told they were sometimes
driven upon the shin-bone. He bore the torture with great con
stancy; and either he could say nothing, or he had the firmness
not to discover those who trusted him. Every man of them
could have saved his own life, if he would accuse any other ; but
they were all true to their friends. Maccail, for all the pains of the
torture, died in a rapture of joy : his last words were, farewell sun,
moon, and stars — farewell kindred and friends — farewell world and
time — farewell weak and frail bod)- — welcome eternity — welcome
angels and saints — welcome Saviour of the world, and welcome
God the judge of all ; which he spoke with a voice and manner
that struck all that heard it." *
On the 31st of December, 1666, the official person who had the
most intimate knowledge of the affairs of the navy thus writes in his
Diary : " Thus ends this year of public wonder and mischief to
this nation. Public matters in a most sad condition ; seamen dis
couraged for want of pay, and are become not to be governed : nor,
as matters are now, can any fleet go out next year. ... A
sad, vicious, negligent court, and all sober men there fearful of the
ruin of the whole kingdom this next year ; from which, good God
deliver us." f Such ships as were in commission were command
ed by haughty young nobles, wholly ignorant of naval affairs. One
of these fair-weather captains, a son of lord Bristol, was heard to
say that he hoped not to see " a tarpawlin " in command of a ship
for a twelvemonth. The honest tarpawlins confessed that " the
* Burnet's " History of his own Time." t Pepys.
STATE OF THE NAVY. 191
true English valour we talk of is almost spent and worn out"*
Direful calamities at the hands of the All-seeing had not broken
the national spirit ; but the infamous corruption of the higher
classes was eating into the foundation of England's greatness.
Her people were losing that masculine simplicity; that healthy de
votion to public and private duties, that religious earnestness
— intolerant, no doubt, but rarely simulated by the followers of
Calvin or the followers of Arminius in the greatest heat of their
conflicts — the English were losing that nationality, whose excess
may be ludicrous, but whose utter want is despicable. Their high
intellect was being emasculated by a corrupt literature. Science was
groping in the dark under the auspices of the Royal Society ; and
Divinity was holdingforth from orthodox pulpits on the excesses of
the early Reformers, and the duty of non-resistance to kings deriv
ing their power direct from Heaven. These follies probably did
little harm ; and men gradually shook off their delusions, and went
forward to seek for experimental Science that had useful ends, and
for practical Theology that would make them wiser and happier.
But the corruptions of the Court soon worked upon the principles
of the people, through a debasing popular Literature. The Drama
had come back after an exile of twenty years. When the Drama
was banished, Tragedy was still a queen wearing her purple and
her pall ; and the " wood-notes wild " of Comedy were as fresh
and joyous as those of the lark in spring. The Drama came back
in the shameless garb, and with the brazen look, and the drunken
voice, of the lowest strumpet. The people were to be taught that
Shakspere was a barbarian, and not to be tolerated in his own sim
plicity. He was, if heard at all, to furnish the libretto of an opera,
to be got up with dresses and decorations by sir William D'Aven-
ant. " I saw," says Evelyn in 1662, " Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
played ; but now the old plays began to disgust this refined age,
since his majesty being so long abroad." This refined age, when
it brought women to personate female characters, heard from the
lips of Eleanor Gwynn and Mary Davis, the foulest verses, which
they were selected to speak to furnish additional relish to the
licentiousness of the poet. The theatre was at the very height of
fashion when it was most shameless. The actresses were removed
from " The King's House," to become the mistresses of the king,
by their gradual promotion from being the mistresses of the king's
servants. Nelly threw up her parts, and would act no more when
* Pepys, October 29, 1666.
192 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
lord Buckhurst gave her a hundred a year, in 1667. In 1671, when
Mr. Evelyn walked with the king through St. James's Park, Mrs.
Nelly looked out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall,
and there was " familiar discourse " between his majesty and the
" impudent comedian," at which scene Mr. Evelyn was " heartily
sorry." It was well for England that her salt had not wholly lost
its savour ; that the middle-class of London, though they rushed
to the savage Bull-baitings of the Bear-garden, which had been
shut up during the time of the Long Parliament, were too indig
nant at the costliness of the court to be enamoured of its gilded
profligacy. It was better still for England that some little of the
old Puritan spirit was left amongst the humblest classes — -that the
Bible was read by the poor, and Rochester and Shadwell were to
them unknown.*
Amidst the abandonment of the Court to its pleasures, — the
rapacity of the royal favourites, who received gratuities and pen
sions not to be counted by hundreds but by thousands of pounds —
the jealousy of the Parliament in granting money which they knew
would be wasted — the spring of 1667 arrived, without any prepara
tions for carrj'ing on the naval war. When the king's treasurer
had. got some of the money which the House of Commons tardily
voted, there were more pressing necessities to be supplied than
the pay of sailors, or the fitting out of ships. The satirical verse
of Andrew Marvell has represented this crisis with historic ac
curacy : " Each day they bring the tale, and that too true,
How strong the Dutch their equipage renew.
Meantime through all the yards their orders run
To lay the ships up, cease the keels begun.
The timber rots, the useless axe doth rust ;
Th' unpractised saw lies buried in its dust ;
The busy hammer sleeps, the ropes untwine,
The store and wages all are mine and thine ;
Along the coasts and harbours they take care
That money lacks, nor forts be in repair." t
* We recommend to the genre painters subjects tor a Picture of two compartments,
representing High Life and Low Life, after Sketches by Mr. Pepys, at Epsom, on
Sunday, the 14th of July, 1667 : —
" By eight o'clock to the Well, where much company. And to the town to the King' b Head ;
and hear that my Lord Buckhurst und Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir Charles Sedley
with them ; and keep a merry house. Poor girl I I pity her."
" I walked upon the Downs, where a flock of sheep was ; and the most pleasant and innocent
sight that ever I saw in my life. Wo found a shepherd, and his little boy reading, far from any
houses or sight of people, tho Bihle to him."
t " Instructions to a fainter about tl e Dutch Wars."— Works, vol. ii. p. IOi ; 1726.
DUTCH FLEET IN THE MEDWAY. 193
On the 23rd df January the sailors were in mutiny at Wapping, and
the Horse Guards; were going to quell them. They were in insur
rection for the want of pay, When the money was obtained from'
Parliament they still mutinied, for they were still unpaid. On the
5th of June the Portuguese ambassador had gone on board ' The
Happy Return,' in the Hope, ordered" to sail for Holland; but the
crew refused to go until they were paid. Other ships were in
mutiny the same day. On the 8th of June the Dutch fleet of eighty
sail was off Harwich.- It was time t0 stir. The king sent lord
Oxford to raise the militia of the eastern counties ; and " my lord
Barkeley is going down to Harwich also to look after the militia
there; and there is also the duke of Monmouth, and with him a
great many young Hectors, the lord Chesterfield, my lord Mande->
ville, and others; " but, adds Mr. Pepys, "to little purpose, I fear,-.
but to debauch the country women thereabouts." On the 10th o£-
June the Dutch were at the Nore. Then, indeed, the matter was:
past the skill of the "young Hectors." The enemy had advanced '"'
almost as high as the Hope. Monk has rushed down to Graves-
end — " in his shirt," writes Marvell. Money is now forthcoming to'
pay the revolted seamen ; but, sighs Pepys, " people that have been '
used to be deceived by us as to money won't believe us ; and we
know not, though we have it, how almost to promise it." The
Dutch fleet has dropped down to Sheerness. "The alarm was so.
great," writes Evelyn, " that it put both country and city into fear
— a panic and consternation, such as I hope I shall never see more ;
everybody; was flying, none knew why or whither." Monk was at
Gravesend, "with a great many idle lords and gentlemen." Op
posite them was Tilbury. Did any of these " idle lords and gen
tlemen, with their pistols and fooleries," think of the time when the,
great queen stood like a rock upon, that shore ; and her people
gathered round her with invincible confidence ; and the greatest
armament that ever threatened England was scattered by her true
gentlemen — the Raleighs and Carews, who loved their country with
a filial love, and hurled foul scorn at the invader ? Charles, if not
belied by the Dutch, was deliberating in Council on the propriety
of a flight to Windsor, by way of example to his terrified people.*
On the nth, news came to London that Sheerness was takenv
The drums were beating all night for the trained bands to be in
arms in the morning, with bullets and powder, and a fortnight's
victuals. The Londoners were momentarily relieved of their panic ;
* " Correspondence of Evelyn," vol. iS. p. 2 13 ; 10*52.
Vol. IV.— 13
194 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
for the Dutch fleet had sailed up the Medway. Chatham was safe,
the courtiers said. Monk had stopped the river with chains and
booms ; and Upnor Castle was fortified. Chains and booms, and
Upnor Castle, availed not long against the resolution of Ruyter and
De Witt, who were about to exact the penalty for the wanton des
olation of the coasts of the Texel. They went about their work
in a manly way — not burning Gravesend, which was really defence
less, but breaking through the defences of the Medway, behind
which our ships lay unrigged. They were quickly set on fire. In
Upnor Castle and the forts at Chatham, there was little ammuni
tion ; and the Dutch " made no more of Upnor Castle's shooting,
than of a fly." The proud ship which bore the king to England,
"the Royal Charles," was secured by the invaders as a trophy;
and when they had made their strength sufficiently manifest to the
panic-stricken sycophants of the depraved court, they quietly sailed
back to the Thames, and enforced a real blockade of London for
many weeks. The spirit of patriotism was trodden out of the
sailors by neglect and oppression. There were many of them on
board the Dutch ships, who called out to their countrymen on the
river, " We did heretofore fight for tickets ; now we fight for dol
lars." The sailors' wives went up and down the streets of Wapping,
crying, " This comes of your not paying our husbands." Mobs as
sembled at Westminster, shouting for " a Parliament, a Parlia
ment." They broke the Lord Chancellor's windows, and set up a
gibbet before his gate. Had the Dutch gone up the Thames be
yond Deptford, it is not impossible that the iniquities of the
Stuarts might have more quickly come to an end. Such a con
summation was not to be desired. The English people had to
endure two more decades of misrule, that they might gather
strength to fit themselves for constitutional government. Besides
the disgrace and humiliation, England suffered little from the
Dutch in the Thames and Medway. The Londoners were cut off
from their supply of sea-borne coal — no irremediable evil in sum
mer, but one that probably hastened a peace. On the 24th of
June, Mr. Evelyn writes, " The Dutch fleet still continuing to stop
up the river, so as nothing could stir or come out, I was before the
Council, and commanded by his majesty to go with some others
and search about the environs of the city, now exceedingly dis^
tressed for want of fuel, whether there could be any peat or turf
fit for use." The report was, that there was abundance. On the
28th the Dutch fleet was lying triumphantly at the Nore, — "a
CLARENDON DEPRIVED OF OFFICE. 195
dreadful spectacle," says Evelyn, " as ever Englishmen saw, and a
dishonour never to be wiped off." It was aspectacle of dishonour
' which ias never been seen since, and will never be seen again,
unless there should again be such a combination of anti-national
elements as in the days of Charles the Second — a profligate and
corrupt Court, avaricious and selfish ministers, a bribed Parlia
ment, an intolerant Church, a slavish Bench of Justice. If such
instruments of evil should again unite their forces, then the or
dinary supineness of office may become a heartless indifference to
every duty; then the pretentions of the high-born to engross all
the functions of administration may become the most shameless
avidity for the exorbitant pay of useless posts ; then the people
may be gradually brought to lick the dust like oriental slaves ; then
our soldiers and sailors may be marshalled in our enemy's ranks,
and pilot our enemy's ships, and exult that they fight for dollars.
The disgrace of 1667 will not have been in vain, if it teach the
great lesson that the corruption of the high is the corruption of the
national honour at its fountain head.
On the 29th of July a treaty of peace between England, Hol
land, and France, was concluded at Breda.
The fall of lord Clarendon from power, in 1667, is one of those
events whose causes can only be adequately developed, if they
can ever be fully and satisfactorily set forth, through an intimate
acquaintance with the public documents and private memorials of
the period. To attempt such an exposition here, even if the
materials for it were at our hand, would manifestly be beyond the
scope of a History so general as this. The intrigues of rival
statesmen, the vacillations of the sovereign, the passions of parlia
mentary factions, require to be fully examined, if we would
thoroughly comprehend the concurring influences which hurled the
most eminent statesman of the Restoration from his high position.
A faint outline of these combinations, in connection with an esti
mate of the character of the fallen man, is all that we can pretend
to offer. Sir Edward Hyde, of all the companions of the adversity of
Charles, was by far the fittest minister to guide him through the
extreme difficulties of his altered position. He was hated by the
queen-mother. His habits of thought and action were diametri
cally opposed to the levities and vices of the king and the younger
courtiers. He had many early associations with the struggle for
civil rights, which made him a stumbling-block in the way of any
196 , HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
broad attempts to emulate the despotisms of other European mon
archies. He was by principle and education devotedly attached to
the Protestantism of the Church of England. He was thus no
object of affection amongst many whose poverty he hadshared, but
from whose habits he was altogether alien. But his great abilities
were indispensable to Charles ; and thus sir Edward Hyde became
the earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor, and the real minister of
England, all other administrative functionaries being subordinate
to him. It was necessary to govern through Parliaments ; and
Clarendon, by his experience, his dignified carriage, his rhetorical
and literary powers, was eminently fitted for the duties of a parlia
mentary minister. He was for a while all-successful. The rooted
dislike of the queen-mother was neutralised, even to the point of
her graciously receiving the plebeian duchess of York. The king
and his associates were compelled to manifest respect to the dec
orous Chancellor, and to compensate their submission to his
wisdom by their ridicule of his manners. Clarendon's notions of
the prerogative, and of the rights of parliaments, were not in accord
ance with the vague schemes of being " every inch a king," that
silly nobles and slavish churchmen whispered to Charles ; but then
Clarendon had imbibed none of the broader doctrines cf civil
liberty which had entered into the popular mind since 1640, and
was heartily disposed to re-model the monarchy upon the precedents
of the days of Elizabeth and the first Stuart. Charles was indif- ¦
ferent to the Church of England, for which Clarendon was strenu
ous ; and Charles was for such a toleration of Protestant Dissenters
as would include the Catholic; but when Clarendon equally perse
cuted Puritans and Papists, Charles let him have his way, for, a
Papist at heart himself, if anything, he thought that a general per
secution would hasten on a general toleration. There was thus,
with the court, a perpetual compromise between the dislike of
Clarendon's personal character and the desire to snatch from his
policy such advantages as a less scrupulous minister could not have
obtained from Parliament. He was hated by the king and the
favourites because he had not, when the Parliament was lavish
and the nation mad, extracted from the temper of the hour a far
greater fixed revenue, such as would have made Parliaments less
necessary for the king. But when Parliament had the presump
tion to ask for an account of the disposal of the sums that had
been voted, then Clarendon's opposition to any interferences with
the old power of the Crown made his conscientious scruples about
CLARENDON DEPRIVED OF OFFICE. 197
the limits of prerogative less obnoxious. The principles of the
man were not fitted for the retrogressive objects of the Crown, ot
the progressive movement of the Nation. He was a Conservative,
to use the party name of our own day, clinging to the non-essen
tials of old institutions and laws, with the obstinate tenacity which
makes Conservatism a mere negation. The triumph of statesman
ship are not to be accomplished like the victory of the deliverers
of Gibeon, whilst the sun remains in the same place ofthe heavens.
As early as 1663, the earl of Bristol, a Catholic peer, in his seat
in Parliament, attributing to the Lord Chancellor all the evils under
which the country laboured, impeached him of high-treason. The
opinion of the judges was required ; and they answered, that by
the laws of the realm no articles of high-treason could be origin
ally exhibited in the House of Peers, by any one peer against
another ; and that the matters alleged in the charge against the
Lord Chancellor ' did not amount ' to treason. Personal hostility
appears to have provoked this ill-judged attack. Four years after
wards it was pretty well known that the king was alienated from
his grave adviser. Clarendon had made enemies all around him
by his faults as well as by his virtues. He was haughty and pas
sionate. He was grasping and ostentatious. He had returned
from exile in the deepest poverty. In seven years he had acquired a
sufficient fqrtune to build a mansion superior to ducal palaces, and
to furnish it with the most costly objects of taste and luxury. He
was envied by the nobility. He was hated by the people ; for in
the grandeur of what they called " Dunkirk House " they saw
what they believed to be the evidence of foreign bribery. The
duke of Buckingham had been banished from court through a
quarrel with lady Castlemaine ; and revenge threw him into the
ranks of those to whom the government was. obnoxious. Hebe-
came the advocate of the sectaries ; he became the avowed and
especial enemy of the Chancellor. For a short time he was sent to
the Tower, upon the supposed discovery of some treasonable in
trigues ; but he soon regained his liberty, and his royal master was
propitiated when the duke had made his peace with " the lady."
She interceded for Buckingham ; but at first was unsuccessful.
The court tattle said that the king had called Castlemaine a jade
that meddled with things she had nothing to do with ; and that Cas
tlemaine called the king a fool, who suffered his businessesto be
carried on by those who did not understand them.* But very
* Pepys, July 12.
I98 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
soon " the lady " carried her point ; Buckingham was restored to
favour ; Clarendon was sacrified. Charges of the most serious nature
were got up against him. The imputation of having sold Dunkirk
for his private advantage was confidently maintained. It became
known that whilst the Dutch were in the Thames, and the Treasury
was without a guinea, he had resisted the advice of the Council
that Parliament should be called together, upon the plea that it
had been prorogued to a more distant day; but had recommended
that money should be levied to pay the troops in the places where
they were quartered, and that the sums so raised from individuals
should be deducted out of their future taxes. That he had some
schemes for forced contributions as a temporary expedient was
admitted by himself. Other accusations, all of a very vague na
ture, were poured into the king's ear ; who, no doubt, was not in
disposed to get rid of one who was a severe monitor, and, though
pliant in some things, was not an unscrupulous tool. Charles,
through the duke of York, asked Clarendon to resign. He indig
nantly refused, saying, that his resignation would amount to a con
fession of guilt. After a conference of two hours the great minister
saw that his disgrace was resolved upon — disgrace which "had
been certainly designed in my lady Castlemaine's chamber." Her
aviary looked into Whitehall garden ; and when he went from the
king, she rushed from her bed at twelve o'clock at noon — " and
thither her women brought her her night-gown; and she stood
blessing herself at the old man's going away; and several of the
gallants of Whitehall, — of which there were many staying to see
the Chancellor's return — did talk to her in her bird-cage." * The
king sen1;for the seals. Evelyn went to see Clarendon, and says,
" I found him in his bed-chamber very sad. ... He had ene
mies at Court, especially the buffoons and ladies of pleasure, be
cause he thwarted some of them, and stood in their way." The
Parliament had assembled. On the 15th of October, the two
Houses voted an address of thanks to the throne for the removal
of the Chancellor, and the king in his reply pledged himself never
to employ lord Clarendon again in any capacity. This was not
enough. Seventeen charges were prepared against him by a
Committee of the Commons; and on the 12th of November, the
House impeached him of high-treason at the bar of the Peers.
There were animated debates in that House, in which Clarendon had
* Pepys, August 27.
THE CABAL MINISTRY. 199
many supporters. The two Houses got angry. The court became
alarmed. Clarendon was advised to leave the kingdom clandes
tinely, but he refused. Then the king sent him an express com
mand to retire to the Continent. He obeyed ; addressing a letter,
vindicating himself, to the House of Peers. An Act was passed
on the 29th of December, banishing him for life, unless he should
return by the following ist of February.
The close of the political career of Clarendon, under circum
stances of punishment and disgrace so disproportioned to his public
or private demerits, has left no stain .upon his memory. Whatever
were his faults as a statesman, he stands upon a far higher eleva
tion than the men who accomplished his ruin. As to the king, his
parasites and his mistresses, who were in raptures to be freed from
his observation and censure, their dislike was Clarendon's high
praise. In the encouragement which Charles indirectly gave to
attacks upon the minister who had saved him from many of the
worst consequences of the rashness of the royalists, and had
laboured in the service of his father and himself for twenty-seven
years, either in war, or in exile, or in triumph, with a zeal and
ability which no other possessed, we see only the heartless ingrat
itude of the king, and his utterly selfish notions of the duties of a
sovereign. Clarendon had become disagreeable to him, through
the very qualities which made the government endurable to high-
minded and sober men. Nor was it from any desire to carry out
more tolerant principles of ecclesiastical rule, nor from any convic
tion that his Chancellor's notions of civil policy were antiquated
and in many respects unsuited to the times, that the king sought
other advisers. The men who succeeded the great minister made
one attempt to remove some of the oppressions under which the
Non-conformists laboured. They failed ; and their failure was
followed by a more indiscriminate persecution. They made one
bold endeavour' at a course of foreign policy which might have
again placed England at the head of a union of Protestant free
states. For a very brier period the influence of France was shaken
off; and then England's king was the pensioner of Louis. Clar
endon went into exile. He was some time before he was per
mitted to find a resting place ; but he found it at last at Montpelier.
Pie was probably never sincerely reconciled to the loss of power
and grandeur ; but he believed' that he was reconciled ; and in
dedicating himself to a renewal of that literary employment which
has given him the best title to the respectful remembrance of
200 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
mankind, he found that consolation which industry never failed to
bestow upon a robust understanding, that was also open to religious
impressions. He says of himself : — " It pleased God, in a short
time, after some recollections, and upon his entire confidence in
Him, to restore him to that serenity of mind and resignation of
himself to the disposal and good pleasure of God, that they who
conversed most with him could not discover the least murmur or
impatience in him, or any unevenness in his conversations."
When the seals were taken away from Clarendon they were
given to sir Orlando Bridgman. The conduct of affairs fell into
new hands. Southampton, the most respectable of Charles's first
advisers was dead. Monk was worn out. Buckingham first came
into power with Arlington as secretary of state, and sir William
Coventry. But soon the ministry comprised the five persons
known as " The Cabal " — a name which signified what we now call
The Cabinet ; but which name was supposed incorrectly to have
been formed out of the initial letters of the names of the members,
— Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, Lauderdale. The
word Cabal had been used long before, to indicate a secret council.
Of the new advisers of Charles, Buckingham was the most influen
tial at Court, and he made great efforts to be at the same time the
most popujar. When Buckingham was taken to the Tower, Clar
endon was depressed by the acclamation of the people, who
shouted round the prisoner. As Clarendon had supported the
Church, Buckingham was the champion of the sectaries. Baxter
says, " As the Chancellor had made himself the head of the pre-
latical party, who were all for setting up themselves by force, and
suffering none that were against them, so Buckingham would now
be the head of all those parties that were for liberty of conscience."
The candid Non-conformist adds, " For the man was of no religion,
but notoriously and professedly lustful ; " but he qualifies his
censure with this somewhat high praise, — " and yet of greater wit
and parts, and sounder principles as to the interests of humanity
and the common good, than most lords in fhe court." * The duke
lived in York House, the temporary palace which his father had
built, of which nothing now remains but the Water Gate. Here he
dwelt during the four or five years of the Cabal administration,
affording, as he always continued to afford, abundant materials for.
the immortal character of Zimri : —
* " Life," Part iii. d. 21.
the Cabal ministry. zoi
" A man so various, that he scem'd to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,
Was every tiling by starts and nothing long ;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon :
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking." *
Ashley, afterwards earl of Shaftesbury— the Antony Ashley
Cooper of the Protectorate, who clung to the Rump Parliament till
he saw that Monk had sealed its fate, and then made his peace
' with Charles with surprising readiness — the ablest, and in some
respects the most incomprehensible of the statesmen of his time,
has had the double immortality of the satire of Butler as well as of
Dryden. In Thanet House, in Aldersgate-street, Ashley was at
hand to influence the politics of the city. When the mob were
roasting rumps in the streets, and were about to handle him roughly
as he passed in his carriage, he turned their anger into mirth by
his jokes. When the king frowned upon him, he went straight
from office to opposition, and made the court disfavour as service
able to his ambition as the court's honours and rewards ; —
" For by the witchcraft of rebellion
Transform'd to a feeble state-cameleon
By giving aim from side to side
He never fail'd to save his tide ;
But got the start of every state,
And at a change ne'er came too late." t
In a few years more Shaftesbury had earned the praise, or dis
praise, of Dryden, " A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleas'd with the danger when the waves run high."
The history of the Cabal ministry, which extends over a period
of six years, is not the history of a Cabinet united by a common
principle of agreement upon great questions of domestic and foreign
policy. Nor is it the history of a Sovereign asserting his own
opinions, and watching over the administration of affairs, under
the advice of a Council, and, through the agency of the great
officers of State. The monarchs of England, from the Norman
times, had been, for the most part, men of remarkable energy of
character ; and in default of their capacity for warlike action and
public business, some representative of adequate qualifications
wielded the executive power. The great kings of the Plantagenet
* Dryden, " Absalom and Achitophel.'' t " Hudibras," Part iii.
202 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
race were essentially their own ministers. Henry VIL, Henry
VIIL, Elizabeth, were remarkable for their laborious attention to
the duties of their great office. Charles I., whether aiming to be
despotic, or struggling for his crown and his life, was zealous,
active, and self-confident. Charles II. was absolutely indifferent
to any higher objects than personal gratification ; and to this cir
cumstance we must refer some of the extraordinary anomalies of
the government after the fall of Clarendon. Abraham Cowley
heard Tom Killigrew say to the king, •' There is a good, honest,
able man that I could name, that if your majesty would employ, and.
command to see all things well executed, all things would soon be
mended ; and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in
employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment ;
but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in
the world to perform it." * Killigrew's estimate of the character
of his royal master was altogether false. He was neither honest
nor able, with reference to any aptitude for the condition of life to
which he was called. He did not desire, he said, to sit like a
Turkish sultan, and sentence men to the bowstring ; but he could
not endure that a set of fellows should inquire into his conduct.
Always professing his love of Parliaments, he was always impatient
of their interference. There is something irresistibly -comic in the
way in which he tried to manage the House of Lords, in 1669, by
being present at their debates. He first sat decently upon the
throne, thinking to prevent unpleasant reflections by this restraint
upon the freedom of speech. But what he commenced out of
policy, under the advice of the crafty Lauderdale, he continued for
mere amusement. "The king," writes Burnet, " who was often
weary of time, and did not know how to get round the day, liked
the going to the House as a pleasant diversion : so he went con
stantly. And he quickly left the throne, and stood by the fire,
which drew a crowd about him, that broke all the decency of that
House ; for, before that time every lord sat regularly in his place ;
but the king's coming broke the order of their sitting as became
senators. The king's coming thither had a much worse effect ; for
he became a common solicitor, not only in public affairs, but even
in matters of justice. He would in a very little time have gone
the round of the House, and spoke to every one that he thought
worth speaking to. And he was apt to do that upon the solicita
tion of any of the tidies in favour, or of any that had credit with
* Pepys, December 2, 1666.
THE CABAL MINISTRY. 203
them." With such a sovereign, as utterly indifferent to the prop
erties of his public station as to the decencies of his private life,
we can scarcely expect that there should have been any consistent
principle of administration. The terrible experience of thirty
years imposed upon Charles some cautirfn in the manifestation of
his secret desire to be as absolute as his brother Louis of France.
The great Bourbon was encumbered with no Parliament ; he had
not to humble himself to beg for supplies of insolent Commons ;
he was not troubled with any set of fellows to inquire into his
conduct and ask for accounts of expenditure ; he had the gabelle
and other imposts which fell upon the prostrate poor, without
exciting the animosity of the dangerous rich ; he was indeed
a king, whose shoe-latchet nobles were proud to unloose, and
whose transcendant genius and virtue prelates , rejoiced to com
pare with the divine attributes. Such a blissful destiny as
that of the Bourbon could not befall the Stuart by ordinary
means. Charles would become as great as Louis, as far as his
notion of greatness went, by becoming the tributary of Louis. He
would sell his country's honour, — he would renounce the religion
he had sworn to uphold,— for an adequate price. But this bargain
should be a secret one. It should be secret, even from a majority
of his own ministers. Upon this point hinges the disgraceful his
tory of the Cabal.
But though Charles and two of his ministers, Arlington and
Clifford, were ready to go any length to make the policy of White
hall utterly subservient to the policy of the Louvre, and to bring
the creed of Lambeth into very near if not exact conformity with
the creed of the Vatican — though Buckingham and Shaftesbury
had some complicity in these iniquitous purposes — yet there was a
power in the State which had become too 'formidable for king and
ministers utterly to despise. The Parliament, servile and corrupt
in many compliances, was yet a power that might be roused into
sudden indignation by any outrageous exercise of prerogative, and,
above all, by any daring attack upon the Protestant tendencies of
the nation. The shiftings of politicians, of whom Shaftesbury was
the type, from courtiers one day to demagogues the next, were the
natural result of the want, during the first ten years of the Restora
tion, of any great principle of action which would raise politicians
on either side above the mere influences of personal ambition.
The Monarchy was an accomplished fact : to fight again for a
Commonwealth was no longer possible. The Church was re-estab-
204
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
lished, in triumphant intolerance : Presbyterians and Independents
had no standing place for a new struggle. The Crown and the
Parliament were both open to corruption ; and their venality taint
ed, though not in an equal degree, the advocates of non-resistance
and the enemies of that debasing principle. Placemen and patriots
each held out the '¦ itching palm " to France. There was no mani
fest struggle of opinion against power, till the design to bring back
England to the communion of Rome became evident. The resist
ance to this attempt roused the nation out of its apparent apathy.
The intolerant passion of the multitude— blind, cruel, frantic in its
fears — was quickly absorbed into the general determination that
England should be Protestant, which identified itself with civil
liberty. Religious liberty grew slowly out of the contest, when the
reign of the great enemies of all freedom was terminated by
their own folly and bigotry.
The story of the next twenty years, which brings us to the great
era of our modern history, would be incomprehensible, if we did
not constantly bear in mind, that public opinion had become a
real element in national progress. The Crown was constantly
dreaming of the revival of despotism, to be accomplished by force
and by corruption. Yet the Crown, almost without a struggle, was
bereft of the power of imprisoning without trial, by the passing of
the Habeas Corpus Act ; and it lost its control over the freedom
of the Press by the expiration of the Licensing system. The
Church thought it possible to destroy non-conformity by fines and
fetters. In its earlier Liturgy it prayed to be delivered from "false
doctrine and heresy ; " it now prayed for deliverance from " false
doctrine, heresy, and schism." Yet when it had ejected the Puri
tans from the Churches, and had shut up the Conventicles, it laid
the foundation of schisms which, in a few years, made dissent a
principle which churchmen could not hope to crush and statesmen
could not dare to despise. How can we account for the striking
anomaly, that with a profligate Court, a corrupt Administration, a
venal House of Commons, a tyrannous Church, the nation during
the reign of Charles II. was manifestly progressing in the essen
tials of freedom, unless we keep in view that from the beginning
of the century there had been an incessant struggle of the national
mind against every form of despotic power ? The desire for lib
erty, civil and spiritual, had become almost an instinct. The great
leaders in this battle had passed away. The men who by fits
aspired to be tribunes of the people were treacherous or inconstant;
ATTEMPTS AT TOLERATION. 205
But the spirit of the nation was not dead. It made itself heard in
Parliament, with a voice that grew louder and louder, till the tor
rent was once again dammed up. A few more years of tyranny
without disguise and then the end.
The first movements of the Cabal ministry were towards a high
and liberal policy — toleration for non-conformists, and an alliance
with free Protestant States. A greater liberty to dissenters from
the Church followed the fall of Clarendon. We see transient and
accidental motives for this passing toleration, rather than the as
sertion of a fixed principle. The bishops had supported Claren
don, and the king and his new ministers and favorites were there
fore out of humour with the bishops. The fire of London had
rendered it impossible to carry on the spiritual instruction of the
people by the established Clergy ; and therefore assemblies to
hear the sermons of Presbyterians and Independents were not
visited with the penalties of the Conventicle Act. It was, says
Baxter, " at the first a thing too gross to forbid an undone people
all public worshipping of God, with too great rigour ; and if they
had been so forbidden, poverty had left them so little to lose as
would have made them desperately go on."* Sir Orlando Bridg
man, now Lord Keeper, desired a conference with Baxter, " about
a comprehension and toleration," in January, 1668. The Lord
Chief Baron Hale, and Bishop Wilkins, were agreed with the
Lord Keeper iri promoting this salutary work. The king, says
Burnet, " seemed now to go into moderation and comprehension
with so much heartiness, that both Bridgman and Wilkins be
lieved he was in earnest in it ; though there was nothing that the
popish councils were more fixed in, than to oppose all motions of
that kind. But the king saw it was necessary to recover the affec
tions of his people." The opportunity of recovering the affec
tions of the great Puritan body, scattered, depressed, but still in
fluential, was thrown away. There were propositions on the part
of the non-conformists ; and amendments were suggested and ac
cepted. Baxter says that fourteen hundred non-conformable min
isters would have yielded to these "hard terms;" but that when
the Parliament met, the active prelates and prelatists prevailed to
prevent any bill of comprehension or indulgence to be brought in ;
" and the Lord Keeper that had called us, and set us on work,
himself turned that way, and talked after as if he understood us
not." In the king-'s speech, February 10, 1668, he recommended
* "'Life," Part iii- p. 22.
206 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
that they would seriously think of some course to beget a better
union and composure in the minds of his Protestant subjects in
matters of religion. On the 8th of April, a motion in the House
of Commons that his majesty should send for such persons as he
should think fit, to make proposals to him in order to the uniting
of his Protestant subjects, was negatived by 176 votes against 70.
At the opening of the Session of Parliament in j668, the king
announced that he had made a league defensive with the States-
General of the United Provinces, to which Sweden had become a
party. This was the Triple Alliance. The nation saw with rea
sonable apprehension the development of the vast schemes of am
bition of Louis XIV. He was at war with Spain ; but the great
empire upon which the sun never set was fast falling to pieces —
not perishing like a grand old house, overthrown by a hurricane's
fury, but smouldering away with the dry-rot in every timber.
France, on the contrary, was rising into the position of the great
est power in Eifrope. Her able but vain-glorious king already
looked upon the Spanish Netherlands as his certain prey. The
United Provinces were hateful to him as the seat of religious and
civil liberty. The crisis was come when England, by a return to
the policy of Cromwell, might have taken her place again at the
head of the free Protestant states of Europe. Was there any
real intention in the king or in his ministry to raise up England as
a barrier against the designs of France ? Or was the mission of
Temple to the Hague, by which a defensive alliance was con
cluded with De Witt in five days, a mere blind to conceal the dark
and dangerous schemes for a secret alliance with France ? When
Charles announced to Parliament this league with the United
Provinces and Sweden, it was thought to be " the only good pub
lic thing that hath been done since the king came into England."*
It was a marvel of diplomacy. De Witt and Temple met as two
honest men, without any finesse ; and they quickly concluded a
treaty which they believed to be for the honour and safety of both
their countries. "Their candour, their freedom, and the most
confidential disclosures, were the result of true policy." f This
treaty, says Burnet, "was certainly the masterpiece of king
Charles's life ; and if he had stuck to it, it would have been both
the strength and glory of his reign. This disposed the people to
forgive all that was past, and to renew their confidence in him,
which was shaken by the whole conduct of the Dutch war."
• P«py»- t Burkt, " Regicide^Peace."
THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE. 207
At the very time when the ambassador of England was nego
tiating the treaty which promised to be " the strength and glory of
his reign," the king was making proposals to Louis for a clandes
tine treaty, by which England was to be " leased out " to France,
" Like to a tenement or pelting farm."
208 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER X.
Visit to England of the Duchess of Orleans. — Secret Negotiations of the king Louis XIV.
— Renewed persecutions of Non -comformists. — Trial of William Penn. — The Coventry
Act. — Assault on the Duke of Ormond. — Blood attempts to steal the Regalia. — The
mystery of his pardon. — Shutting-up of the Exchequer. — Alliance with France. —
War with Holland. — Naval War — Invasion of the United Provinces.— Murder of
the De Witts. — The Prince of Orange. — Shaftesbury Lord Chancellor. — Declaration
of Indulgence. — The Test Act.
There is a brief record, in the Memoirs of Sir John Reresby,
of an event, seemingly unimportant, which led to very serious
consequences: "In the summer of 1670 the duchess of Orleans,
the king's sister, came over to Dover, where she was met by the
king, the duke of York, and the whole Court. Here it was that
she confirmed his highness the duke in the Popish superstition, of
which he had as yet been barely suspected. " * The duke of York
required no confirmation in his belief. He had long been in secret
a Roman Catholic, and attended the private rites of that religion ;
but at the same time he was in communion with the Church of
England. A Jesuit missionary remonstrated with him against this
double dealing. James communicated to the king his determina
tion publicly to embrace the Roman Catholic faith. Charles pro-
•fessed the same desire. He, also, though known to be indifferent
as to religious matters, had been suspected. Cosmo, the duke of
Tuscany, came to England in 1669; and the author of the duke's
travels says of Charles, that though he "observes with exact at
tention the religious rites of the Church of England, there is rea
son to believe that he does not exactly acquiesce, and that he may
perhaps cherish other inclinations." Of the Cabal ministry Clif
ford and Arlington were attached to the Church of Rome. Charles
and James took these ministers into their confidence at the begin
ning of 1669. The result was, a negotiation with France, which
went on for many months ; and of which the duchess of Orleans
came over, in 1670, to urge the points which the French king was
anxious to accomplish by irresistible temptations. The • secret
* " Travels and Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ' 1S31 ; p. 171.
SECRET NEGOTIATIONS WITH LOUIS XIV. 209
treaty -between Louis XIV. and Charles II. was concluded at
Dover,' on the 22nd of May, 1670* Its principal stipulations
were, that the king of England should publicly profess himself a
Catholic, when he should consider it expedient to make such dec
laration ; that he should join with the king of France in a war
against the United Provinces ; that to enable Charles to suppress
any insurrection of his own subjects, he should receive two mil
lions of livres, and be aided with an armed force of six thousand
men ; that of the conquests arising out of the joint war Charles
should be satisfied with a part of Zealand. The secret treaty hav
ing been accomplished, another treaty was prepared, in which the
article concerning the king's change of religion was omitted ; and
to this Shaftesbury, Buckingham, and Lauderdale were privy.
Charles and his ministers went back to London, to carry on a sys
tem of falsehood towards the nation, almost unmatehable amongst
the frauds of Courts and Cabinets. The beautiful duchess of
Orleans returned to France, to die a victim, as many believed, to
the jealousy of her husband. At the meeting of Parliament in
¦October, 1670, the Lord Keeper Bridgman -who we may conclude
-to have been ignorant of the atrocious confederacy of the king and
his more confidential servants — set forth the advantages of the
Triple Alliance, and the necessity of being prepared against the
ambition of France, by an augmentation of the fleet. The Com
mons voted that " his majesty should be supplied proportionably
to his present occasions ; " and when a grant of eight hundred
thousand pounds was obtained, the Parliament was prorogued.
The manifestation of a tolerant principle at home, at the be
ginning of 1668, was as short lived as the inclination to a high
and honourable foreign policy. The Act of 1664 against Con
venticles, whiqh was about to expire in 1670, was renewed in a
more stringent shape. The 12th Clause of this Statute threw
down the barriers against the most illegal exercise of its severities :
" That this Act, and all clauses therein contained, should be con
strued most largely and beneficially for the suppressing of Con
venticles, and for the justification and encouragement of all per
sons to be employed in the execution thereof ; and that no record,
warrant, or mittimus to be made by virtue of this Act, or any pro
ceedings thereupon, shall be reversed, avoided, or any way im-
* It was published for the first time by Dr. Lingard, from the original in the posses
sion of Lord Clifford. But the most important of the articles had long previously ap
peared in sir -Jdhn Dalrymple's History.
Vol. IV.— 14
2IO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
peached, by reason of any default in form." * Waller, who, at his
advanced age, was still the wit of the House of Commons; said of
the dissenters, " these people are like children's tops ; whip them,
and they stand up ; let them alone, and they fall." f Calamy at
tributes the saying to bishop Wilkins, who, with one other bishop,
opposed this Statute. Sheldon, the primate, urged the most vig
orous execution of the penal clauses, which were to drive the non
conforming preachers from the boarded hovels, which they called
tabernacles, fitted up by their congregations when the parish
churches of London were in ruins. This Act, according to Bur
net, " put things in such disorder, that many of the trading men of
the city began to talk of removing with their stocks over to Hol
land." The spirit of too many of the higher clergy was in decided
opposition to the temper of bishop Wilkins. Parker, chaplain to
Sheldon, and afterwards bishop of Oxford, laid himself open to
the lash of Andrew Marvell, when he proclaimed that " tender
consciences, instead of being complied with, must be restrained
with more peremptory and unyielding rigour than naked and un-
sanctified villainy." X Burnet says of this Statute against Con
venticles, " the king was much for having it pass, not that he in
tended to execute it, but h*. was glad to have that body of men at
mercy, and to force them to concur in the design for a general
toleration." This was a part of the scheme, upon which the
Secret Treaty with France was built. Severity at one time against
non-conformists, indulgence at another time, had one sole object
in view,— to prepare the nation for such an exercise of the pre
rogative as would dispense with the laws against Papists, and
make the people indifferent to a Roman Catholic king, and a Ro
man Catholic heir-apparent. It was not that Charles cared for
any form of religion ; but he had an earnest longing for the wages
of proselytism which Louis was to bestow.
The fines and imprisonments under the Conventicle Act fell,
for the most part, upon obscure persons. But there was one young
man, whose father was of historical celebrity, and of an elevated
station, who came under the penalties for non -conformity, and
fought the battle of dissent in a manner very embarrassing to
intolerant churchmen and arbitrary lawyers. William Penn, the
only son of the famous admiral, much to the annoyance of his
•Statutes of the Realm, 22 Car. II. c. i. vol. v. p. 656.
t " Parliamentary History," vol. iv. col. 445.
t See Marvell' s " Rehearsal Transprosed," vol. ii. p. 290, ed. 1673.
TRIAL OF WILLIAM PENN. 211
family, had embraced the principles of George Fox, the founder of
the sect of Quakers. He had manifested his spiritual tendencies
when a student at Oxford. He had been imprisoned in Ireland, in
1667, for attending the meetings of Friends ; he had begun to
preach and to publish in 1668. On the 14th of August, 1670,
William Penn, who, in common with others of his fraternity, whol
ly disregarded the Conventicle Act, going to the Meeting-house
in Gracechurch-street, found the door closed and guarded ; and
having addressed the people outside, was arrested. On the ist of
September, he, with William Mead, a linen-draper, was indicted at
the Old Bailey for preaching and speaking, to the great disturbance
of the king's peace. On the 3rd of September they were brought
to trial. It was altogether a remarkable scene ; in which the pris
oners conducted themselves with unusual boldness ; the lord-
mayor and recorder manifested more than the common insolence
of authority in bad times ; and the jury could not be compelled to
give a dishonest verdict. In the first instance the jury acquitted
Mead, and found Penn guilty of speaking to an assembly in Grace
church-street. They refused to find that it was an unlawful
assembly, as the recorder insisted. They were locked up without
fire or food through Saturday night. On Sunday, the'y again and
again refused to amend their verdict. The recorder, Howel, a
fitting predecessor of George Jefferies, who- afterwards carried
"judicial infamy to its extreme height, in a paroxysm of fury de
clared it would be never well with England, till something like
the inquisition was introduced. For another night the jury were
locked up, to endure hunger and thirst. When they were brought
into court on Monday morning, they still clung to their first verdict.
But the recorder maintaining it was no verdict, they jointly and
separately pronounced William- Penn not guilty. The jury were
each fined forty marks ; Penn was fined for contempt of Court.
All refused to pay the fines, and were imprisoned. The jury ap
pealed to the Court of Common Pleas, and were released by a
decision of the judges. Penn's fine was paid without his knowl
edge.* Doctor Parker, in his zeal for arbitrary power, had ventured to
say " 'Tis better to submit to the unreasonable impositions of Nero
and Caligula, than to hazard the dissolution of the State." Mar
vell, with a terrible bitterness, pointed the moral of the crimes and
* A full account of this trial is given in " William Penn, an Historical Biography,"
byW. H. Dixon.
2 12 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the fates of Nero and Caligula. * The profligacy of the Court had
begun to show itself in more daring outrages than the indecencies
and riots which rivalled the orgies of the lowest of mankind. " The
jolly blades, racing, dancing, feasting, and revelling, more resem
bling a luxurious and abandoned rout than a Christian Court," might
scandalise decent loyal gentlemen such as Evelyn. f The new
concubine, Mademoiselle Querouaille, that Louis had sent over to
confirm Charles in his proposed apostasy to his religion and his
treason to his country, might suggest some fears to honest states
men such as Temple. But the great majority of the Parliament,
and especially of the House of Commons, chosen in the royalist
excitement of the Restoration, had long looked upon such matters
with indifference. Another feeling was now growing up. Sus
picions attached to the foreign policy of the Court. The nation
felt disgraced in its extravagant profligacy. Murmurs were heard
even amongst the habitual supporters of the government. In a
Committee of Ways and Means it was proposed in the Commons
that a tax should be paid " by every one that resorts to any play
houses," of a shilling for a box-seat, sixpence for the pit, and three
pence for other places. It was urged that the Players were the
king's servants, " and a part of his pleasure." Sir John Coventry,
member for Weymouth, asked " If the king's pleasure lay amongst
the men or the women players ? "-{ The offence was visited with
a very summary punishment, perpetrated under the order of the
duke of Monmouth, the king's son, and, as was universally believed,
with the king's connivance. As sir John Coventry was passing
through the Haymarket, he was set upon by Sandys, lieutenant of
Monmouth's troop, and a number of his men, and by these ruffians
his nose was nearly cut off. The House had adjourned for the
Christmas holidays, and upon its re-assembly the first business was
to inquire into this breach of privilege. Some members wished the
matter to be left to the course of law ; but the great body were
resolved to have reparation for this outrage. Strong words were
spoken, such as indicated that the spirit of 1640 was not dead.
Are we to be under proscriptions, as in the times of Sylla and
Marius, asked sir John Hotham. Sir Robert Holt exclaimed that
Praetorian guards had been the betrayers of the empire. He alluded
to a recent assault upon the duke of Ormond, saying, " Lords' noses
be as ours are, unless they be of steel."* A Bill was passed " to
* " Rehearsal Transprosed," vol. ii. p. 155. | " Diary," October 21, 1671.
t '' Parliamentary History," vol. iv. c61. 461.
BLOOD ATTEMPTS TO STEAL THE REGALIA. 213
prevent malicious maiming and wounding," It recited the outrage
upon sir John Coventry on the 21st of December ; and setting forth
that sir John Sandys and three others, who had been indicted for
felony, had fled from justice, enacted that they should be banished
for ever unless they surrendered by a given day. Other clauses of
this Bill constitute what is known as the Coventry Act, by which
malicious maiming is made a capital felony.* The king, as if to
show his resentment of the humiliation to which he was subjected
in giving his assent to this Bill, had the indecency to grant a par
don to all the persons who, on the 28th of February, had assaulted
the watch, and deliberately killed the beadle of the ward. His son,
Monmouth, was the leader of that riot, as he was the contriver of
the assault on sir John Coventry.
The outrage upon the duke of Ormond, to which allusion was
made in the House of Commons, took place on the 6th of Decem
ber, 1670. He was returning in his carriage from a city dinner.
Two footmen at the side of the carriage were suddenly stopped ;
and the duke being dragged out, was placed on horseback behind
a man to whom he was fastened by a bejt. Onward they sped
towards Tyburn ; but the duke contrived to hoist his companion
out of the saddle, and both coming to the ground together, the
ruffian unloosed the belt, and fled upon the approach of some pas
sengers. At Tyburn preparations were made for hanging the duke
upon the common gallows. An inscrutable mystery surrounded
this crime. Large rewards were offered, with pardon to accom
plices. On Jhe 9th of May, 1671, five months after the assault
upon the duke, the famous attempt was made to steal the regalia in
the Tower. It was not till after the Restoration that the crown
jewels were exhibited to strangers. In April a man in a clergy
man's cassock, with his wife, came to see the regalia. The lady
being taken ill, was kindly accommodated in the house of Talbot
Edwards, the keeper of the jewel-office. An acquaintance com
menced. The pious clergyman said the grace at dinner with the
extremest unction ; proposed that his wealthy nephew should
marry the keeper's daughter ; altogether a most fascinating man.
The nephew was to come on a certain day. The clergyman was
duly there, with three friends. One remained in the house, whilst
the three others went with the keeper to behold the crown, and orb,
and sceptre, and other regal splendours. They gagged the old
man ; beat him till he was senseless ; began to file the sceptre into
* 22 & 23 Car. II. c. 1
214 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
two pieces, but being disturbed by the unexpected arrival of
Edwards' son, made off with the crown and orb. The alarm was
given : and they were finally seized on the Tower Wharf. The
matter being reported to the king, they were sent for to Whitehall ;
and Charles was himself present at their examination. The chief
in the robbery of the regalia was found to be a man known as
colonel Blood. He boldly avowed that he was the leader of the
assault upon the duke of Ormond, and that he meant to have hanged
him at Tyburn. He once, he said, had been prepared to shoot the
king himself, but awed by the presence of majesty, the pistol dropped
from his hand. He might be put to death ; but there were three
hundred ready to avenge his blood ; who, if he were spared, would
become the king's faithful followers. Charles pardoned him ; asked
the duke of Ormond to pardon him ; and gave him a pension. The
king told Ormond that he had certain reasons for asking him to
pardon Blood. There were mysteries about that Court of which
the good nature of "the merry monarch " — to use the dainty words
of glib historians — was the convenient veil. It is difficult to believe
in such a state of society as we find recorded by Evelyn : " Dined
at Mr. Treasurer's, in company with Monsieur de Grammont and
several French noblemen, and one Blood, that impudent bold fel
low who had not long before attempted to steal the imperial crown
itself out of the Tower." How he came to be pardoned, and re
ceived rewards, Evelyn says he could never come to understand.
"This man," he adds, "had not only a daring but a villainous
unmerciful look, a false countenance, but very well spoken, and
dangerously insinuating."
A supply having been obtained, the Parliament was prorogued
on the 22nd of April. The king candidly said it was not his inten
tion that they should meet again for almost a year. The proroga
tion was hastened by the desire to put an end to a controversy
between the two Houses, as to the right of the Lords to make
alterations in Money-bills sent up from the Commons. The Lords
had reduced the amount of an imposition on sugar. The Com
mons had established the right of originating money-bills, but the
Peers contended that the power of alteration, as well as of rejec
tion, remained with them* With the Parliament got rid of, at
least for a year, the government had now a clear field for carrying
* The arguments of the Conferences are given fully in the Parliamentary History, and
there is a very able summary of the historical question as to this right in Mr. Hallam's
" Constitutional History," Chap. xiii.
SHUTTING-UP OF THE EXCHEQUER. 215
out their foreign policy. France was now to receive the fullest
support in its designs upon the United Provinces. The Triple
Alliance was to be flung to the winds. Temple had come home
in the autumn of 1670 ; had been coldly received by the ministers
and the king ; and had been told by Clifford that he might declare
publicly how the ministers of the States "were a company of
rogues and rascals, and not fit for his majesty or any other prince
to have anything to do with." * Temple retired from public life
to his garden and his books. Clifford was prepared to find
resources for a war with Holland — a treacherous, wanton, and
anti-national war — in an act compared with which Blood's stealing
the crown was a small villainy. Bankers and other possessors of
capital had been accustomed to make advancements to the
Exchequer, upon receiving assignments of some portion of the
revenue, to be set aside for paying the principal and interest of the
money borrowed. One million three hundred thousand pounds,
were at this time pledged for immediate payment. A proclamation
was issued, suspending all payments for one year ; but promising
interest at the rate of six per cent. This interest was not paid for
many years. The bankers made the advances to the government
chiefly upon sums intrusted to them. Daniel Defoe, in 1671, was
a boy of ten years' old' ; but he became early associated with trade,
and he describes how the shutting the Exchequer came like a clap
of thunder upon the city. The panic was universal. There was
a run upon all the goldsmiths, whether their cash was in the
Exchequer or in their own strong boxes. The most reputable
traders were compelled to break. Private families were exposed
to extreme distress. Widows and orphans were ruined, says
Evelyn. The promise of payment in a year was, of course, not
kept. There was not only the war to provide for ; but a new
mistress, exceeding in prodigality all who had gone before her.
Mademoiselle de Querouaille, the agent and spy of the French
king,- became duchess of Portsmouth. The lady had been installed
as chief " Miss," with ceremonies, short of those of the altar,
" after the manner of a married bride." f " Rob me the Exchequer,
Hal," said the king to Clifford ; and then " all went merry as a
marriage-bell." Clifford hinted the scheme to Evelyn, "but," says
he, " it will soon be open again, and everybody satisfied. " A scheme
was concerted, as iniquitous as the shutting the Exchequer. At a
* Letters of Temple in " Courtenay's Life," vol. i. p. 344.
t Evelyn, 10th October, 1671.
2i6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
time when the confidence of the government of the States in the
faith of England was not wholly destroyed, it was decided to cap
ture a fleet of Dutch merchantmen from the Levant as it passed
up the Channel. The scheme, worthy of a band of pirates rather
than of a great nation, signally failed. The Hollanders, though
not prepared for any act of hostility, appointed a convoy to the
vessels which bore the rich Smyrna merchandise. Sir Robert
Holmes and lord Ossory had been appointed to the command of
the fleet that was to make prize of the Dutch merchantmen.
Holmes had no desire to share the prize with any other admiral,
and therefore in his cruise asked no assistance from sir Edward
Sprague's fleet from the Mediterranean, that he met at the back of
the Isle of Wight. The English admiral was unprepared for the
Dutch convoy of seven men of war. He was gallantly met ; and
was repulsed, having captured only four sail out of sixty. The
government of king Charles was not able to repay the subjects
whom it had robbed, by the robbery of its neighbours, as it had
proposed. The agents of this inglorious enterprise were ashamed
of it. Lord Ossory deplored to Evelyn that he had been ever
persuaded to engage in an expedition which revolted against his
sense of honour and justice.
The declaration of war from England against Holland appeared
on the 17th of March, 1672. That of France was issued at the
same time. Some show was made in the English declaration of
causes of offence — commercial injuries ; refusal to strike to the
English flag in the narrow seas ; insults to the king by defamatory
publications. Supporters of the government in England, as well
as its opponents, felt that it was a war of wrong and tyranny.
Evelyn writes that the pretended occasion was that, " some time
before, the Merlin yacht chancing to sail through the Dutch fleet,
their admiral did not strike to that trifling vessel Surely
this was a quarrel slenderly grounded, and not becoming Christian
neighbours." It was a corrupt attempt to aid the powerful in
oppressing the weak. At first successful, it ultimately failed. At
the beginning of May, the duke of York took the command of the
English fleet. Having united with a French squadron, they found
the Dutch fleet lying near Ostend. But the skill of De Ruyter
avoided an engagement, and the English fleet returned to the
coast to take in further supplies of men and provisions. De
Ruyter came out, and a stubborn battle took place on the 28th of
May, in Southwold bay. The French had little share in the
INVASION OF THE UNITED PROVINCES. 217
engagement. The fight lasted the whole day, with little advantage
on either side. The earl of Sandwich and most of his crew were
lost in the Royal James, which was blown up by a fire-ship.
Evelyn insinuates that the earl was left to perish, fighting like a
lion, though hating the war, " to gratify the pride and envy " of
some -that were not his friends.*
Whilst England was battling at sea with little real advantage,
the French armies were pouring into Holland. The fortresses on
the Rhine were quickly in their possession ; town after town of the
United Provinces yielded without a struggle ; the outposts of the
French were seen from Amsterdam. Then was the great com
mercial republic on the point of becoming an easy prey to the
ambition of that power that had already visions of universal domin
ion. The Government of the United Provinces was torn by fac
tions. Petty oligarchies presided over the separate States. The
dignity of Stadtholder had expired with Prince William II. in
1650. His widow, the daughter of Charles I., gave birth to a son,
a few days after her husband's death. That son was now twenty-
two years of age — the head of the illustrious house of Orange-
Nassau, but without power in his own country. The highest duties
of the first magistrate of the republic had been honourably dis
charged, by John de Witt, the Grand Pensionary of the Province
of Holland. When the French invasion filled the people of the
Seven Provinces with terror, their rage was not directed against
their enemies, but against their government. The popular feeling
in favour of the prince of Orange broke forth in the blind hatred of
an infuriated multitude against the statesmen who desired the per
manent suppression of the office of Stadtholder, a dignity almost
monarchical. The young prince William was called to the com
mand of the forces when the French troops entered the States.,
Cornelius de Witt was arrested, upon an accusation of having-
plotted against the life of, prince William. The accusation could
not be established ; and his brother John went to his prison at the
Hague to convey him away. Both the brothers were murdered by
an infuriated mob. Suspicious as was the commencement of his
great career, the young prince of Orange proved the deliverer of
his country. He roused the fainting courage of the, Deputies in
the States General. He rejected all the overtures of Charles and
Louis. No terms of advantage to himself would induce him to
compromise the honour of his nation. Relationship with the
* Evelyn, "Diary," May 31.
2 1 8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND
Crown of England was to him nothing in comparison -with saving
the Seven Provinces from the yoke of France. The dykes were
opened. The land was subjected to the dominion of the water, an
enemy less to be dreaded than a foreign foe. There was no sub
sistence for the invading army in that desert of sand and sea. The
French retreated. The guilty league of England and France was
powerless. Louis returned to Paris, leaving some troops in the
garrisons he had won. The Dutch admiral avoided another engage
ment with the English fleet. The war went on languidly for two
years, amidst the dissatisfaction of the English people. The
treasury of Charles was exhausted. The promised payment to the
public creditors was postponed by proclamation. The Parliament
had been prorogued from the 22nd of April, 1671. It was called
together on the 5th of February, 1673. For twenty-one months
the government had pursued an unmolested career. It had now
to meet an opposition, jealous and indignant, but more factious
than high principled.
In November, 1672, Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had been
created earl of Shaftesbury in the previous April, was raised to the
dignity of Lord Chancellor, upon the retirement, or dismissal, of
Sir Orlando Bridgman from the office of Lord Keeper. The dislike
which the lawyers of his time naturally felt at the elevation to the
highest judicial office of a man not of the legal profession, may be
found in the " Examen " of Roger North. His great offence was
that he declaimed "against the tribe of the Court of Chancery,
officers and counsel, and their methods of ordering the business of
the Court. . . . For the Chancery, he would teach the Bar that a
man of sense was above all their forms." * Shaftesbury possibly
saw that a servile adherence to forms was a real impediment to the
course of equity; and by a vigorous demonstration against forms
which ruined the suitors by delay, was enabled to earn the high
praise as a judge of the poet who was employed to blacken his
character as a statesman. " Discerning eyes ; " " clean hands ; "
" Swift of despatch ; " " easy of access ; "
" Unbrib'd, unbought, the wretched to redress ; "
are qualities which have some weight with us, although " the great.
poet probably never was in the Court of Chancery in Iris life, and,
though the first of English critics in polite literature, he could not
have formed a very correct opinion as to the propriety of an order
or decree in Equity." f Dryden, as is reported, displeased the
» " Examen," p. 46. t Lord Campbell ; " Lives of Chancellors," p. 310.
SHAFTESBURY LORD CHANCELLOR. 2 19
king by this tribute to the judicial virtues of Shaftesbury. Abhor
ring the statesman, he ought not to have praised the judge.
Another contemporary writer is to be disbelieved, according to
lord Campbell, because his estimate of Shaftesbury was unmixed
panegyric. The enemy, and the friend, are equally untrustworthy.
" Except being free from gross corruption.be was the worst judge
that ever sat in the Court." * How is this to be proved ? " There
are a few of his decisions to be found in the books, but none of
them are of the slightest importance." f We still hold ourselves
free to believe Dryden, and the other contemporary,, who says
that, under Shaftesbury, " justice ran in an equal channel, so that
the cause of the rich was not suffered to swallow up the right of
the poor ; " that " the mischievous consequences which commonly
arise from the delays, and other practices, of that Court were, by
his ingenious and judicious management, very much abated." +
Nor do we consider that as Chancellor he " played fantastic tricks
which could be expected only from a fool and a coxcomb,"§ because
he revived the ancient form of the Chancellor and the Judges riding
to Westminster Hall, on the first day of Hilary term, on which
occasion Judge Twisden " was laid along in the dirt ; " and because
he sat upon the bench " in an ash-coloured gown, silver laced."
These amusing characteristics of one who, not wholly different
from subsequent Chancellors, possessed some of the eccentricities
with the more sterling qualities of genius, are set forth with much
vivacity by Roger North, who hated Shaftesbury with an intensity
that the opposite opinions of factions alone can engender. When
ever we encounter this remarkable man in his future political
career, we must judge him not uncharitably if we would judge him
rightly. He was. long made the scapegoat for the political offences
whether of the Court party or the Country party. It is very diffi
cult to understand his principles or his policy ; but it is sufficient
to make us cautious in his condemnation, to know that he was
maligned by the supporters of arbitrary power, and looked up to
by the advocates of freedom and toleration. Mr. Fox probably
came to the safest conclusion upon his character when he said,
"As to making him a real patriot, or friend to our ideas of liberty,
it is impossible, at least in my opinion. On the other hand, he is
very far from being the devil he is described." ||
The Parliament met on the 4th of February, 1673. In March,
* Lord Campbell ; " Lives of Chancellors," p. 3 1 1. t Ibid. , p. 3 13-
X " Rawleigh Redivivus." § " Lives of Chancellors," p. 307-
II Introduction to " History of James II."
220 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
1672, two days before the war was declared against the United
Provinces, Charles had issued a Declaration of Indulgence in re
ligion, in which he declared his "will and pleasure to be, that the
execution of all and all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesias
tical, against whatsoever sort of non-conformists or recusants be
immediately suspended1; and they are hereby suspended." The
relief to Protestant dissenters may be estimated from the fact that
John Bunyan, who for twelve years had been confined in Bedford
gaol, during which long period he had written " The Pilgrim's Pro
gress," was almost immediately released. It would be difficult to
understand how such a measure of justice and humanity should not
have been universally acceptable to all but the most bigoted, unless
we take into account that through its general operation the laws
against Papists were relaxed, as well as those against Protestant
non-conformists. But the Declaration of Indulgence produced a
ferment in the nation which rendered it unpopular even amongst
the numerous class who had been harassed by the Act of LTni-
formity, the Five Mile Act, and the Conventicle Acts. They were
more favoured than the Roman Catholics, who were expressly re
fused public places for their worship, though its private exercise
was indirectly sanctioned. In a tract, written by John Locke^ the
intimate friend of Shaftesbury, the arguments in favour of the
Declaration of Indulgence are fully set forth. The writer of this
" Letter from a Person of Quality to his friend in the country,"
says that he asked Lord Shaftesbury what he meant by supporting
the Declaration, which seemed to assume a power to repeal and
suspend all our laws, to destroy the Church, to overthrow the Pro
testant religion, and to tolerate Popery. He represents the earl
to have contended that a government ought to be enabled to sus
pend any penal law, in the interval of the legislative power, but
that the two Houses of Parliament ought to determine such indul
gence, and restore the law to its full execution; that he had joined
in the Declaration for preserving the Protestant religion, by open
ing a way for the English Church to live peaceablv with the dis
senters ; that Papists ought to have no pressure laid upon them
except to be made incapable of office ; and he asked whether, in
this age of the world, articles and matters of religion should become
the only accessible ways to our civil rights ? * There was a pas
sage in the Declaration which was sufficient to fill the people with
* The letter is printed in Locke's Works ; also in " Parliamentary History," Vol. IV.,
Appendix V.
DECLARATION OF INDULGENCE. 221
alarm: " We think ourselves obliged to-make use of that supreme
power in ecclesiastical matters which is not only inherent in us,
but hath been declared and recognised to be so by several statutes
and acts of parliament." Upon their meeting, the Commons voted,
Upon a division of 168 to 116, "that penal statutes, in matters
ecclesiastical, cannot be suspended but by Act of Parliament."
Mr. Love, one of the members for the city of London, strenuously
supported the address to the king to withdraw the Declaration. A
member said to him, " Why, Mr. Love, you are a Dissenter your
self; it is very ungrateful that you who receive the benefit should
object against the manner." Defoe, who calls Mr. Alderman Love
" that truly English Roman," records his answer to the objection :
" I am a Dissenter, and thereby unhappily obnoxious to the law ;
and if you catch me in the corn you may put me in the pound.
The law against the Dissenters I should be glad to see repealed
by the same authority that made it ; but while it is a law, the king
cannot repeal it by proclamation : And I had much rather see the
Dissenters suffer by the rigour of the law, though I suffer with
them, than see all the laws of England trampled under the foot of
the prerogative, as in this example."* The Parliament and the
nation were not sufficiently advanced to repeal all penal laws that
affected the exercise of religion. To prevent the dangers which
were almost universally dreaded of the growth of Romanism, the
principle of intolerance was still upheld. The Court, not indeed
from any sense of justice, but for the advancement of its covert
objects, for some time resisted this vote of the Commons. But the
spirit of opposition was too strong to be rashly braved. The king
withdrew the Declaration of Indulgence, after Shaftesbury, in the
House of Lords, had turned to the popular side, and declared it
illegal. But the Country party, as opposed to the Court part)',
were resolved to manifest their hostility to Popery by a practical
measure which should reach the highest places. The duke of
York's opinions were no secret ; the king was suspected ; the arti
cles on religion in the treaty with France Could not be shrouded in
impenetrable mystery ; the first duchess of York had died in the
profession of Catholicism ; another alliance was about to be formed
with a young Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. The barrier to
be raised against the great dangers to repel which the nation was
rousing itself, was the Test Act. The House of Commons resolved
on the 28th of February, 1673, " that all persons who shall refuse
* See Wilson's " Life of Defoe," vol. i. p. 58.
22 2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and receive the
sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England, shall
be incapable of all public employments, military and civil." On
tl*e 1 2th of March, the Test Act, entitled a " Bill to prevent the
Growth of Popery," was read a third time. It required, in addition
(o the oaths, that a declaration renouncing the doctrine of transub-
stantiation should be made before admission to office. The pro
posed law affected the Puritans as much as the Papists, in the
point, of communion with the Church ; but they made little opposi
tion. They partook of the common dread that Romanism might
come back in some bold or insiduous form, and with it the arbi
trary power which had so generally been its companion. An at
tempt to give them a special measure of relief was defeated by the
prorogation of Parliament. The effect of the Test Act was deci
sive. The duke of York resigned his post of Lord High Admiral,
and prince Rupert was appointed to the command of the fleet.
Lord Clifford refused to take the test, and retired from his great
office of Lord High Treasurer. The Commons voted the supplies
with little reluctance, without going into the questions of the Dutch
war or the shutting the Exchequer. There were six months of
prorogation, during which the war was continued at sea with alter
nate success and defeat. At home the signs of an approaching
storm were becoming manifest.
THE DANBY MINISTRY. 223
CHAPTER XI.
The Danby Ministry. — State of Parties. — Separate Peace with Holland. — Charles pen
sioned by Louis XIV. — Popular Discontents. — Coffee-houses closed by Proclama
tion.— Re-opened. — Meeting of Parliament after fifteen months' prorogation. — Four
Peers committed to the Tower. — Marriage of the Prince of Orange to the Princess
Mary. — Violent contentions between the king and the Parliament. — Intrigues with
France of the Parliamentary Opposition. — The Popish Plot.
The Parliament had been prorogued to the 20th of October.
The instant the Commons met they voted an address to the king,
desiring that the intended marriage of the Duke of York with the
princess of Modena should not take place. The Parliament was
immediately prorogued for a week. On the 27th the king- opened
the Session in person ; and his Chancellor, Shaftesbury, addressed
the members in the us^ial terms of eulogy and hope. The address
against the marriage of the Duke of York was presented ; and
Charles returned for answer that the alliance " was completed, ac
cording to the forms used amongst princes, and by his royal con
sent and authority." A spirit of decided hostility against the gov
ernment was now evident in the Commons. They refused a supply
until "this kingdom be effectually secured from the dangers of
Popery, and Popish counsels and councillors." They voted that a
Standing Army was a grievance. They resolved upon a second
Address on the subject of the duke's marriage. It was to have
been presented on the 4th of November, but the king came sud- ¦
denly to the House of Lords, and ordered that the Commons
should be summoned. A singular scene took place. The Speaker
and the Usher of the Black Rod met at the door of the House of
Commons ; and the Speaker having entered, the door was shut, and
he was hurried to the chair. It was immediately moved that the
alliance with France was a grievance ; that' the evil counsellors
about the king were a grievance ; that the duke of Lauderdale was
a grievance. The Black Rod was knocking at the door with im
patient loudness ; the House resounded with cries of ' question ' ;
the Speaker leapt out of the chair, and in a wild tumult the mem
bers followed him to the House of Lords. The king then pro-
224 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
rogued the Parliament to the 7th of January. During the interval
Shaftesbury was dismissed from the custody of the Great Seal ;
Buckingham retired ; the Cabal ministry was broken up. Sir
Thomas Osborne, soon after created earl of Danby, became the
chief minister, and retained power till 1678; Shaftesbury became
the great leader of the party opposed to the Court. The history of
England for the next seven years is the history of a continual
struggle between the Crown and the Commons, during which time
we trace, amidst some honesty of purpose, an equal degradation of
the principles of loyalty and of independence. Monarchical govern
ment was never more profligate and anti-national, and representa
tive government was never more factious and corrupt, than in the
years from 1673 to 1681. The House of Commons elected after
the Restoration first met on the 8th of May, 1661. It continued
to sit till the 25th of January, 1679. Vacancies had been filled up
from time to time by new elections ; and in these what was called
the Country Party gradually preponderated. But the general com
position^ the House was a curious admixture of by-gone and cur
rent opinions. There is " A Letter from a Parliament Man to his
Friend," published in 1675, and attributed to Shaftesbury, which
describes with admirable humour, and probably with equal truth,.
the composition of the House of Commons: * — "Sir, I see you are
greatly scandalized at our slow and ,confused proceedings. I con
fess you have cause enough ;. but were you but within these walls
for one half day, and saw the strange make and complexion that
this house is of, you would wonder as much that ever you won
dered at it ; for we are such a pied Parliament, that none can say
of what colour we are ; for we consist of Old Cavaliers, Old Round
heads, Indigent Courtiers, and true Country-Gentlemen : the two
latter are most numerous, and would in probability bring things to
some issue were they not clogged with the humourous uncertain
ties of the former. For the Old Cavalier, grown aged, and almost
past his vice, is damnable godly, and makes his doting piety more
a plague to the world, than his youthful debauchery was : he forces
his Loyalty to strike sail to his Religion, and could be content to
pare the nails a little of the Civil Government, so you would but
let him sharpen the Ecclesiastical talons : which behaviour of his
so exasperates the Round-head, that he, on the other hand, cares
not what increase the interest of the Crown receives, so he can but
diminish that of the Mitre ; so that the Round-head had rather en-
* Printed in " Parliamentary History," vol. iv., Appendix IV.
STATE OF PARTIES. 225
slave the man than the conscience; the Cavalier, rather the con
science than the man ; there being a sufficient stock of animosity"
as proper matter to work upon. Upon these, therefore, the Cour
tier usually plays : for if any Anti-Court motion be made, be .'gains
the Round-heads either to oppose or assent, by telling them, If
they will join him now, he will join with them for Liberty of Con
science. And when any affair is started on behalf of the country,
he assures the Cavaliers, if they will then stand by him, he will
then join with them in promotingabill against the Fanatics. Thus
play they on both hands, that no motion of a public nature is made
but they win upon the one or other of them : and by this art gain a
majority against the country gentlemen, which otherwise they would
never have : wherefore it were happy that we had neither Round
head nor Cavalier in the House ; for they are each of them so
prejudicate against the other, that their sitting here signifies no
thing but their fostering their old venom, and lying at catch to snap
every advantage to bear down each other, though it be in the de
struction of their country." The same letter does not spare the
Corruption of that very considerable body of members that it terms
" Indigent;" a corruption which king Charles and king Louis each
found availing with patriots as well as with placemen : " You now
see all our shapes, save only the Indigents, concerning whom I
need say but little, for their votes are publicly saleable for aguinea
and a dinner every day in the week, unless the House be upon
Money or a Minister of State ; for that is their harvest; and then
they make their earnings suit the work they are about, which in
clines them most constantly as sure clients to the Court. For what
with gaining the one, and saving the other, they now and then ad
venture a vote on the Country side ; but the dread of Dissolution
makes them straight tack about. The only thing we are obliged to
them for is, that they do nothing gratis, but make every tax as well
chargeable to the Court as burdensome to the country, and save no
man's neck but they break his purse."
At the opening of the Session of Parliament In 1674, the king
uttered these words with his own lips : " I know you have heard
much of my alliance with France, and I believe it hath been very
strangely misrepresented to yon, as if there were certain secret ar
ticles of dangerous consequence ; but I will make no difficulty of
letting the treaties, and all the articles of them, without any the
least reserve, to be seen by a small committee of both Houses,
who may report to you the true scope of them." Charles I. did not
Vol, IV.— 15
226 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
hesitate to employ indirect falsehood ; but he never uttered such
an audacious lie as his son now used, to stem the discontents which
were gathering around him. Supplies were wanted to carry on the
Dutch war; but the nation hated the war, and the Commons
would not grant the supplies. To avert greater dangers a separate
peace was made with Holland. The war went on between France
and the United Provinces, who were now fully supported by Spain
and the German powers. The noble resistance of the Prince of
Orange to the ambition of Louis had saved his country ; but had
England taken a more honest course, future wars arising out of the
same lust of dominion might have been effectually prevented. The
Parliament was in some degree propitiated by the separate peace
with Holland ; but it was in a dangerous temper, and was quickly
prorogued. It met again on the 13th of April, 1675. English
troops under Monmouth had been left to assist the French, not
withstanding the English peace with Holland. The House of
Commons demanded their recall. The violent scenes between
furious partisans were suddenly mitigated, as if a god had de
scended to separate the combatants in a cloud. The god of money
had effected this peacefulness. The English troops remained as
auxiliaries of the French. After a protracted struggle to extend
the oath required to be taken by officers of corporations to privy
counsellors and members of parliament, which attempt was de
feated by Shaftesbury, the Parliament was prorogued. There was
another short Session. It was again prorogued for fifteen months
on the 22nd of November.
The alternations of indulgence towards non-conformists and their
persecution was one of the most striking symptoms of the utter
want of principle in the conduct of public affairs. The sufferings
of a large body of people were never taken into account when the
Court and the Parliament were each striving to rule by factions.
Defoe, who well knew the system which had been in operation from
his boyhood, said, " the persecution of Dissenters has been all along
the effect of state policy, more than error of zeal or a mistake of
religion." Persecution " has very seldom been carried on any
where from mere zeal, but with a complication of private ends, in
trigues, and all kinds of abstracted villainy." * Under Danby's
administration, in 1675, the king issued proclamations enforcing
the laws against non conformists. How these measures worked
may be seen in Baxter's simple relation : " I was so long wearied
* " Review,'' vol. ii. quoted in Wilson's " Life," vol. i. p. 60.
CHARLES PENSIONED BY LOUIS XIV 227
with keeping my doors shut against them that came to distrain on
my goods for preaching, that I was fain to go from my house, and
sell all my goods, and to hide my library first and afterwards to
sell it" He shifted his abode. " When I had ceased preaching
I was, being newly risen from extremity of pain, suddenly surprised
in my house by a poor violent informer, and many constables and
officers, who rushed in and apprehended me, and served on me one
warrant to seize on my person for coming within five miles of a
Corporation, and live more warrants to distrain for an hundred and
ninety pounds, for five sermons." * Though the king was strait
ened in his means of extravagance by the jealousy ot Parliament,
the prodigality of the Court was as manifest as ever. On the loth
of September, 1675, Evelyn writes in his Diary: "I was casu-
.ally showed the duchess of Portsmouth's splendid apartment at
Whitehall, luxuriously furnished, and with ten times the rich
ness and glory beyond the queen's ; such massy pieces of plate.
whole tables, and stands of incredible value." The lady looked
down with contempt upon her sister-strumpets. She affected a
decency that was not characteristic of some other ladies. When
the wit of Nell Gwynn was praised, "yes," exclaimed La Que-
rouaille, " but anyone may know she has been an orange-wench by
her swearing." The great duchess was the arbitress of the destiny
of statesmen. She quarrelled with Buckingham, and he was driven
into opposition. She corresponded with the French monarch, who
settled an estate upon her for her valuable aid in the degradation
of England. Time did not diminish her influence over the besot
ted king. Incredible as it may appear, there is a record of partic
ular payments to her out of the Secret Service Money in the one
year of l68t, of 136,668/. 10s. f The most hidden crimes cannot
wholly be concealed, especially when subordinate agents are con
nected with them. The long prorogation of the Parliament in No
vember, 1675, was a specific arrangement between Charles and
Louis, for which the unworthy king of England received five hun
dred thousand crowns. The two sovereigns, with the connivance
of Danby and Lauderdale, concluded a formal agreement not to
enter upon any treaties but with mutual consent ; and Charles ac
cepted a pension, upon his pledge to prorogue or dissolve any Par
liament that attempted to force such treaties upon him. The money
was regularly paid by the French minister to Chiffinch,"the notpri-
* " Life of Baxter," Part iii. pp. 172. 191.
t " Monies received and paid for Secret Services ; " Camden Society.
228 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ous pander to the vices of his master ; and the degraded king reg
ularly signed a receipt for the wages of his iniquity. Such things
could not go on without exciting some suspicion. How could the
extravagance of the Court be maintained ? Where did the money
come from ? The annual revenue was large, but all knew that it
was insufficient to meet the riots and follies of Whitehall. Seri
ous thinkers began to murmur. Gossiping loungers about the
coffee-booses began to sneer and whisper. Coffee-houses were in
those days what clubs are in our day — the great marts for the in
terchange of town talk, political, or literary, or fashionable, or scan
dalous, or simply stupid. A Coffee-house, says a tract of 1673,
" is an exchange where haberdashers of political small-wares
meet, and mutually abuse each other, and the public, with bottom
less stories." * Roger North takes a more serious view of Coffee
house gossip, in 1675: "There was such licentiousness of sedi
tious and really treasonable discourse, in coffee-houses, of which
there were accounts daily brought to the king, that it was considered
if coffee-houses ought not to be put down." f Clarendon, in 1666,
had proposed either to put down coffee-houses, or to employ spies
to frequent them and report the conversation. If in 1675 the
king had daily reports of " treasonable discourse," we may pre
sume that the spy-system had been tried, although it was not quite
efficient. On the 29th of December, a proclamation appeared, re
calling all the licences issued for the sale of coffee, and ordering
all coffee-houses to be shut up, " because in such houses, and by
the meeting of disaffected persons in them, divers false, malicious,
and scandalous reports were devised and spread abroad, to the
defamation of his majesty's government, and the disturbance of
the quiet and peace of the realm." The licences were withdrawn,
through a legal quibble upon the same Statute under which they
had been issued. By the Act granting the king certain excise du
ties in perpetuity, t a. ditty of fourpence was imposed " for every
gallon of coffee made and sold, to be paid by the maker." The
licence to sell was under a subsequent Act, by which the Justices
in Sessions, or the Chief Magistrate of a Corporation, were to
grant Licences for the selling of Coffee, Chocolate, Sherbet, or
Tea, no Licence being to be granted unless the retailer had first
given security for the payment of the clues to the king. § There
was ho complaint that the securities had not been given, or that the
* " Harleian Miscellany," vol. viii. p. 7. f "Lives ofthe Norths," vol. Up. 316.
t ii C II. c. 12. S 15 Car. II. c. 11.
COFFEE-HOUSES RE-OPENED. 229
dues were unpaid. The pretence under which the licences were
recalled was, that as the Statute made no mention of a time for
which the licences were granted, they might be recalled at any
time by a higher authority than that of the magistrates who issued
them. There never was a more flagrant violation of law under a
show of some submission to law. The Coffee-houses were closed.
"The great Coffee-house in Covent Garden" — -Will's Coffee
house—where Mr. Pepys saw in 1664, "Dryden the poet, and
all the wits of the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. floole of
our college," was suddenly shut up at the merry Christmas time.
Mr. Dryden had no longer there " his armed chair, which in the
winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire." * His
opera of " The State of Innocence and Fall of Man " was his
last previous dramatic production ; and he could no longer tell
to the groups around him, how when he went to the old blind
schoolmaster in Bunhill-fields, and asked "leave to put his Paradise
Lost into a drama, in rhyme, Mr. Milton received him very civilly,
and told him he would give him leave to tag his verses." f Milton
about a year before, had been carried to his last resting-place in Crip-
plesrate-church ; and amongst the " treasonable discourse " of the fre
quenters of the coffee-houses some might have uttered the thought
that Milton was not far wrong when, in his last political treatise, he
raised his warning voice against the way his countrymen were
marching, " to those calamities which attend always and unavoid
ably on luxury, all national judgments under foreign and domestic
slavery." X Probably no political measure was more indicative of
a disposition in the government to attack the liberties of the peo
ple in their social habits than this shutting-up of the coffee-houses.
The popular indignation soon compelled the government to retract
its proclamation. " The faction was much incensed," writes North.
"They said that Mr. Attorney [sir William Jones] should answer
it in Parliament." Mr. Attorney was frightened ; and possibly
some higher authorities were not at their ease. Permission was
given to re-open the houses for a certain time ; under a severe ad
monition to the keepers, that they should stop the reading of all scan
dalous Dooks and papers, and hinder every scandalous report against
the government. Despotism would be more dangerous though not
more odious than it is, amongst nations with pretensions to civ
* " Johnson's Lives of the Poets ; " Cunningham's edit. vol. i. p. 338.
Aubrey, " Lives," vol. iii. p. 444. X " Way to establish a free Commonwealth."
230 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ilisation, if it had something less of the weakness and folly which
always accompanies its measures for the repression of opinion.
At the opening ofthe Session of Parliament on the 15th of Feb
ruary, 1677, the Lord Chancellor, Finch, made an elaborate speech
which, says Mr. Southey, " contains passages which are as worthy
of attention now as they were when they were delivered."* Such
a passage as the following would be more worthy of attention, had
it not been repeated, with very slight variation, by every par
liamentary orator from that day to this, with whom the dead calm
of national apathy is the perfection of national happiness — the
highest glory of a sovereign to " be rowed in state over the ocean
of public tranquillity by the public slavery." f The words of Lord
Chancellor Nottingham are these : " It is a great and a dangerous
mistake in those who think that peace at home is well enough pre
served, so long as the sword is not drawn ; whereas, in truth, nothing
deserves the name of peace but unity ; such an unity as flows from
an unshaken trust and confidence between the king and his people .
from a due reverence and obedience to his law and his government •
from a religious and an awful care not to disturb the ancient land
marks." X These are the common-places which have been entered
in many a book besides Mr. Southey's. " Trust and confidence
between the king and his people " had been manifested by a pro
rogation of Parliament for fifteen months. A fierce debate took
place on this question. The duke of Buckingham maintained that
the prorogation for so long a time amounted to a dissolution, being
contrary to the statutes of Edward III., which required the annual
calling of Parliament. Lords Shaftesbury, Salisbury, and Wharton
supported this opinion ; and by way of silencing them were ordered
to be sent to the Tower, unless they begged pardon of the king and
the House. They refused, and were imprisoned. Such commit
tals by either House terminate with the Session; but the govern
ment contrived to keep these dangerous rivals out of the way for
more than a year, by adjournments instead of prorogations. In the
Commons, the Country party were in a minority upon this question.
The bribery of the Lord Treasurer had been more effectual than
the eloquence of the Lord Chancellor. The instalment of the
king's pension from France, paid in February, was applied to get
votes for a large grant. But the greater part of the supply was
* " Southey's Common-place Book," vol. i. p. 106.
t Marvell. " Rehearsal Transprosed," vol. ii, p. 293.
I: '' Pari. History," vol. iv. Co 80 ,.
MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCE OF ORANGE. 23 1
devoted to the support of the navy ; and with this sum the Com
mons would not trust the Treasurer, but appointed their own re
ceivers to superintend its disbursement. The French were now
carrying all resistance before them in the Spanish Netherlands.
The prince of Orange was defeated at Cassel. Valenciennes and
Cambray were surrendered. The Commons voted an address
praying the king to oppose the French monarch, and save the
Netherlands from his grasp. Charles required an immediate grant
as a preliminary to a declaration of war. The House refused it.
Then was resorted to that disgusting system of foreign bribery
by Spain to obtain the grant, by France to prevent it, which has
brought such great disgrace upon many of the public men of this
period, and which in some degree qualifies the same baseness in
the king. The grant being refused, Charles adjourned the Par
liament ; obtained an increase of his pension, from Louis ; and gave
his promise accordingly that he would keep off the meeting of the
troublesome representatives who urged him into war, and yet were
afraid to give him the means of carrying it on.
When sir William Temple, in 1668, having concluded the Triple
Alliance, returned to the Hague as Ambassador, he described the
prince of Orarige as " a young man of more parts than ordinary,
and of the better sort ; that is, not lying in that kind of wit which
is neither of use to one's self nor to any body else, but in good
plain sense." Temple adds, never any body raved so much after
England, as well the language, as all else that belonged to it." *
William was then in his nineteenth year. When Temple went
back to the Plague in 1674 the young man had applied his plain
sense and his higher qualities — if most high qualities be not in
cluded in plain sense — to take the position of the deliverer of his
country. He had measured his strength with the great Conde;
and in the battle of Seneffe, disastrous as it was, had earned from-
the French veteran the praise that he had acted in everything like
an old captain, except in venturing his person tod much like a
young soldier. Temple in his second embassy had hinted at the
possibility of an union with the daughter of the duke of York. The
proposal was renewed more formally, but the prince of Orange
did not then respond. He suspected the disposition of the Eng
lish government to favour the designs of Louis XIV. He was
himself resolved to struggle, "as he had seen a poor old man tug
ging alone in a little boat upon a canal, against the eddy of a sluice.
* Letter quoted in Courtenay's " Life of Temple," vol. i. p. 2S6.
232 I HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
This old man's business, and mine, are too like one another."*
But the desire for an English alliance overcame this repugnance to
the union. Probably he looked far into the future. William came to
England in 1677. On the 19th of October the marriage between
him and Mary, the eldest daughter of the duke of York, was agreed
upon. On the 4th of November it was solemnised—" to the great
joy of the nation," says Reresby ; ''for his highness being a prot
estant prince, this match in a great measure expelled the fears that
the majority had conceived concerning popery." f Dr. Edward Lake,
who was chaplain and tutor to the princesses Mary and Anne,
in his diary of the 16th of November, writes : "The wind being
easterly, their highnesses were still detained at St. James's. This
day the court began to whisper the prince's sullenness or clownish-
ness, that he took no notice of his princess at the play and ball, nor
came to see her at St. James's the day preceding this designed for
their departure." X With the usual earnestness of his character, Wil
liam was labouring to induce the king his uncle to take a bold and
honourable part in the negotiations for peace wilh France ; and it
is very likely that he neglected to pay to his bride those attentions
which policy, if not love, would have demanded. In after life
Mary showed the depth of her affection for her husband, so cold
in his demeanour, so high-minded in real deeds. The sweetness
of her nature was eminently fitted for his support and consolation
in the great trials, and the arduous duties, of his life. The chap
lain records that Mary wept incessantly all the morning of their
departure. " The queen observing her highness to weep as she
-took leave of her majesty, would have comforted her with the con
sideration of her own condition when she came into England, and
had never till then seen the king ; to whom her highness presently
replied, ' But, madam, you came into England ; but I am going
out of England.' " §
The marriage of the prince Orange with the princess Mary gave
offence to the king of France. He regarded it as a breach of faith
on the part of his pensioner, the king of England, and he stopped
the payment of the sum for which Charles had agreed to prevent
any meeting of Parliament till April, 1678. Before that time Louis
expected to have been in a condition to dictate terms to the Allies.
When the pensioner saw his pay stopped, he called the Parliament
together, on the 28th of January. To attempt to unravel the knot
* Conversation with Temple, " Life of Temple," vol. i. p. 4S8. t " Memoirs," p. 199.
X " Camden Miscellany," vol. i. 5 [Aid.
PARLIAMENTARY INTRIGUES. 233
of the complicated intrigues of this period would be as wearisome
to our readers as unsatisfactory to ourselves. The king announced
to the Parliament that he had made such alliances with Holland
as were for the preservation of Flanders, and had withdrawn the
auxiliary English troops from the French service. The king further
asked for money to carry on the war against France, so as to support
a fleet of ninety sail, and an army of forty thousand men. The fast-
and-loose game which was played throughout this Session has lefta
stain upon parliamentary government. It was impossible for the
Dutch and their allies, and equally impossible for the English people,
to understand the movements of the Court party and the Country
party as exhibited in the votes of Parliament. Well m ight the prince
of Orange say, " Was ever anything so hot and so cold as this Court
of yours ? Will the king never learn a word that I shall never for
get since my last passage to England, when, in a great storm, the
captain was all night crying out to the men at the helm, ' Steady !
Steady ! Steady ! ' ? " The independent members of the House of
Commons knew that a prompt assistance to tbe Allies was abso
lutely necessary to control the ambitious designs of France. They
urged the war, but they hesitated to vote the supplies, or clogged
the vote by vexatious conditions. " Great debates," says Reresby,
"had arisen upon this affair, and the reason of the violent opposi
tion it met with was the desire in some to oppose the Crown,
though in the very thing they themselves wished for, the nation
being ever desirous of a war with France ; and a jealousy in others
that the king indeed intended to raise an army, but never designed '
to go on with the war ; and, to say the truth, some of the king's
own party were not very sure of the contrary." * There was a
violent debate on the 14th of March, very imperfectly reported.
Reresby says of this debate, " Several speeches were made in the
House, full fraught of jealousies and fears, and particularly with
regard to the army at this time levying ; as if it rather intended to
erect absolute monarchy at home, than infest the enemy abroad."!
The Commons on the 29th of April received a message from the
king, desiring that the House would immediately enter into a con
sideration of a supply for him, for his majesty must either disband
the men, or pay them. The king and the representatives of the
people now came to violent issues. A supply was refused unless
a war was declared against France ; if not the army must be dis
banded. The army had been raised, and was encamped on Hounslow
* " Memoirs," p. 200 t Ibid,, p. 303.
234 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Heath. Evelyn there looked upon these forces on the 29th of
June : " We saw the new-raised army encamped, designed against
France, in pretence at least ; but which gave umbrage to the Par
liament. His majesty and a world of company were in the field,
and the whole army in battalia, a very glorious sight. Now were
brought into service a new sort of soldiers called grenadiers, who
were dexterous in flinging hand grenades, every one having a
pouch full." What Evelyn, a steady loyalist, thought a pretence, is
the only justification for the undoubted fact that some of the oppo
sition to the Court was the result of a secret connexion formed with
the Ambassadors of Louis by some of the parliamentary leaders.
Money was bestowed upon the more unscrupulous. We cannot
think, even if the designs of Charles upon the liberties of his coun
try had been manifest to Hollis, and Russell, and Sidney, instead
of being merely suspected, that they were justified in their in
trigues with any foreign prince, and especially with a monarch so
opposed to freedom and national independence as Louis XIV.
Undoubtedly their conduct was some apology for Charles in that
policy of evasion and delay which allowed France to conclude a
peace upon far more advantageous terms than Louis could have
obtained if William of Orange had been adequately supported.
The peace of Nimeguen, concluded on the 4th of August, left
Louis a large portion of his gains in this war of aggression. Eng
land had the disgrace of the most complicated faithlessness to all
honourable principle. She lost her national position in Europe,
and became a by-word for despotic states, and a scandal to the few
nations that were free. She stood alone in possessing a govern
ment in which the opinions of the people were supposed to have a
voice through their representatives. These manifestations of
weakness and dishonour were held to be inherent in a mixed con
stitution of king and parliament, and men were taught to think that
arbitrary power was -a safer and more glorious thing than regulated
freedom. Despotism is always ready to rejoice when the due bal
ance of representative government is disturbed by the violence or
the corruption of selfish factions.
On the 8th of July an Act was passed for granting a supply*to
the king of upwards of ^600,000, "for disbanding the army, and
for other uses." On the 15th the Parliament was prorogued.
Amidst the conflicts of party one Statute of this period marks the
great fact that religious intolerance had assumed a milder form.
" It is enacted " That the Writ commonly called Breve de Heret-
THE POPISH PLOT. 235
ico comburendo, with all process and proceedings thereupon, in
order to the executing such Writ, or following or depending there
upon, and all punishment by death in pursuance of any Ecclesias
tical Censures, be from henceforth utterly taken away and abol
ished." * But if the progress of opinion had wiped out of the
Statute Book the horrible law that heretics should be burnt, the
recollection of the days when that law was no dead letter was still
strong and vivid as ever in the popular mind. The dread of Po
pery was the one inextinguishable spark in the temper of the people
which the slightest breath might raise into a flame. The great
bulk of the nation knew little of the vices of the Court; and even
those who dwelt in and around Westminster looked with compla
cency upon the tall swarthy gentleman who walked up and down
the Mall in St. James' Park at his " wonted large pace ; '' and
who, when very humble strangers were presented to him in the
Long Gallery at Whitehall, would give them his hand to kiss, and
say " God bless you." f They were accustomed to hear of the
duke of York's irregular life, and little heeded his private indiscre
tions ; but when he became a declared Romanist and had married
a Catholic princess, there were no bounds to their dislike and their
suspicion. Dissenters from the Church, who practically knew all
the hardships of exclusion from civil offices, and from the privi
lege of worship according to their own consciences, would hear of
no scheme of toleration for Papists. Rousing themselves out of
the apathy which had succeeded to their delirium of loyalty, the
people had again begun to take a strong interest in public affairs.
They felt that the nation had lost character in its foreign transac
tions. They saw the old principles of servile obedience, which
had been struck down in 1640, again proclaimed as the duties of
subjects. They believed, with lord Shaftesbury, that " popery and
slavery, like two sisters, go hand in hand ; and sometimes one goes
first, and sometimes the other, but wheresoever the one enters the
other is following close behind." In the temper that prevailed
amongst the people in the summer of 1678, the excesses connected
with what is known as the Popish Plot were, like Shakspere's
characteristic of murder, " most foul ; " they were also " strange ; "
but they were not " unnatural." The nation was under a panic
which manifested itself in a temporary insanity. But we are not
therefore to conclude that the panic was wholly unreasonable ;
that the plot was a pure invention got up by witnesses altogethel
* 29 Car. II. c 9. t See " Diary of Henry Teonge," p. 232
236 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
false, at the instigation of Shaftesbury and other unprincipled poli
ticians ; that there was no design on the part of Romish intriguers
to restore their religion in England, to which the near prospect of
a Popish successor to the throne gave abundant encouragement.
It is unquestionable that the Jesuits did believe, as was expressed
in the letter of Coleman, the secretary of the duke of York, that
for " the subduing of a pestilent heresy " — the "mighty work " on
their hands — " there were never such hopes of success since the
death of queen Mary, as now in our days, when God has given us
a prince who is become zealous of being the author and instrument
of so glorious a work." The zeal of James was neutralised by the
indifference of Charles ; and therefore it was maintained that the
destruction of the king was the first object of the Plot. Charles
himself ridiculed the notion ; but that is no proof that he wholly
disbelieved the existence of some wild scheme for his removal.
The rumours of a Popish plot burst upon the nation at the be
ginning of October. Evelyn records, under date of the first of
this month, that he went to Dr. Tonge, the rector of St. Michael's
Wood Street, to see and converse with him at Whitehall, and
" with Mr. Oates, one that was lately an apostate to the Church of
Rome, and now returned again with this discovery '' of the Popish
plot. " Oates was encouraged," continues Evelyn, " and every
thing he affirmed taken for gospel. The truth is, the Roman
Catholics were exceedingly bold and busy everywhere." Reresby
says (hat the first news of the plot, " a design of the Papists to
kill the king," came to him in the country, on the loth of October.
"Nobody can conceive that was not a witness thereof, what a fer
ment this raised amongst all ranks and degrees." Burnet, who
says that he was so well instructed in all the steps cf the plot, that
he is more capable to give a full account of it than any man he
knows, records that three days before Michaejmas Dr. Tonge came
to him — "a very, mean divine, and seemed credulous and simple,
but I had always looked on him as a sincere man. At this time
he told me of strange designs against the king's person." Burnet
communicated the information to the Secretary's office ; but learnt
that Tonge had been already " making discoveries there, of which
they made no other account, but that he intended to get himself to
be made a dean." Burnet told Tonge's story "to Littieton and
Powell, and they looked on it as a design of lord Danby's, to be
laid before the next Session, thereby to dispose them to keep up a
greater force, since the papists were plotting against the king's
THE POPISH PLOT. 23.7
life." Roger North, on- the contrary, suggests that Shaftesbury
" was behind the curtain, and in the depths of the Contrivance." *
The generally received account is that one Kirby, on the 13th of
August, warned the king, who knew him, not to walk alone in the
Park ; ,that the same evening he brought Tonge to Charles, with a
narrative of the plot ; that the king referred it to the Lord Treas
urer ; that Charles was incredulous, and laughed at the simplicity
of Danby in his wish to lay the narrative before the Privy Coun
cil. But it may occur to some, bearing in mind the time that
..elapsed between the first information to tbe king and the official
notification to the Council, that there was some ground for the
conjecture of Littleton and Powel that the Court had its own ob
jects in raising the alleged Plot into importance, by encouraging
the witnesses in their extravagant relations. The objection of
lord Halifax to this theory was reasonable enough. He told Bur
net that "considering the suspicions all people had of the duke's
religion, he believed every discovery of that sort would raise a
flame which it would not be easy to manage." But the objection
assumed that the contrivers of such state-engines were duly sensi
ble cf the effects they might produce — that " the ingener might
contemplate the possibility of being " hoist with his own petar."
IX Danby stimulated the revelations of the plot to alarm the Com
mons into granting supplies, it did not follow that he would foresee
such a storm as would give a violent impulse to all the political
movements of the next ten years. Shaftesbury, says Roger North,
" was the dry-nurse, and took the charge of leading the monstrous
birth till it could crawl albne." It is quite within the range of
probability that the Court got up the Plot for its own purposes;
and that "the discontented party" took it out of the Court's hands
for its own purposes also.
Burnet, who relates conversations that he had with the king, rep
resents Charles as saying that after Tonge's audience he did not
know but some of the particulars related to him might be true, and
sent him to lord Danby, "The matter lay in a secret and remiss
management for six weeks," till, on Michaelmas eve, Oates- was
brought before the Council. He related many discourses he had
heard among the Jesuits at St. Omer's of their design to kill the
king ; he named persons, places, and times almost without num
ber ; he accused Coleman, the duke's secretary. Many Jesuits were
seized. Coleman removed, the bulk of his letters previous to his
* " Exanjertj" p. 35.
2Tfi HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
apprehension ; but two were accidentally left, addressed to the
confessor of Louis XIV., which in some degree confirmed the be
lief of a design to overthrow the government. Burnet went to
Whitehall, and there found Oates and Tonge under a guard. Pre
vious to Oates being examined a second time by the Privy Council,
he went before sir Edmondbury Godfrey, a zealous Protestant
justice of peace, and made oath to the narrative which he after
wards published. A fortnight after, Godfrey was missing, having
left his home on a Saturday morning. On the following Wednes
day his corpse was found in a ditch at some distance out of the
town, near Primrose-hill. His own sword was thrust through- his
body, but no blood was on his clothes ; on his neck were the marks
of strangulation. The Papists were, of course, suspected of his
murder ; although the motive was altogether a mystery. On the
other hand it was maintained that he had committed suicide. A
medal was struck ridiculing this notion, in showing the unfortunate
Justice walking with a halter about his neck after he is dead, and
St. Denis on the obverse, with his own head in his hand. There
was another medal with a portrait of Godfrey, and a representation
of the murderers carrying his body on a horse. Roger North, who
labours in every way to fasten the invention of the Plot upon the
party opposed to the Court, describes the fury of the people on the
discovery of this supposed murder; and says that their leaders
would have hounded them on to any massacre and destruction,
had the military not been in good order. The popular notion was
that the murder of Godfrey was to deter all men from any further
inquiry into the Plot. There was great excitement at the funeral
of the Protestant magistrate, which North has described with sdme
humour. "The crowd was prodigious, both at the procession,
and in and about the church ; and so heated that anything called
Popish, were it cat or dog, had probably gone to pieces in a mo
ment. The Catholics all kept close in their houses and lodgings,
thinking it a good composition to be safe there ; so far were they
from acting violently at that time. But there was all this while up
held among the common people an artificial fright, so as almost
every man fancied a Popish knife just at his throat. And, at the
sermon, besides the preacher, two other thumping divines stood
upright in the pulpit, one on each side of him, to guard him from
being killed, while he was preaching, by the Papists."* In this
feverish state of the popular mind, the Parliament met on the 21st
* " Examen," p. 204.
THE POPISH PLOT. 239
of October. Charles alluded to information received by him of a
design against his person by the Jesuits, but said he would leave
the matter to the law. The Parliament immediately determined to
take the subject into their own hands. They appointed a Commit
tee to inquire into Godfrey's murder and into the Plot ; they ad
dressed the king to appoint a solemn fast ; they further desired the
removal of all Popish recusants from the metropolis and ten miles
round ; before a week had elapsed, a bill was passed by the Com
mons to exclude Catholics from both Houses. Oates was exam
ined. Coleman's letters were read. On the 1st of November, the
Commons came to a resolution, " That, upon the evidence that has
already appeared to the House, this House is of opinion, that there
hath been, and still is, a damnable and hellish Plot, contrived and
carried on by Popish recusants, for the assassinating and murder
ing the king, and for subverting the government, and rooting out
and destroying the Protestant religion." The Lords unanimously
agreed in the Resolution of the Commons.
There are two descriptions by impartial witnesses which pre
sent striking pictures of the state of the popular mind at this sea
son. On the 17th of November, queen Elizabeth's birth-day, there
was a mock procession which Calamy, the son of the famous non
conformist, saw in his boyhood, and thus relates : " In the midst
of vast crowds of spectators, who made great acclamations and
showed abundance of satisfaction, there were carried in pageants
upon men's shoulders through the chief streets of the city, the
effigies of the Pope, with the representation of the devil behind
him, whispering in his ear, and wonderfully soothing and caressing
him (though he afterwards deserted him, and left him to shift for
himself, before he was committed to the flames), together with the
likeness of the dead body of sir Edmondbury Godfrey, carried be
fore him by one that rode on horseback, designed to remind the
people of his execrable murder. And a great number of dignita
ries in their copes, with crosses; monks, friars, and Jesuits ; Popish
bishops in their mitres, with all their trinkets and appurtenances.
Such things as these very discernibly heightened and inflamed the
general aversion of the nation from Popery ; but it is to be feared,
on the other hand, they put some people, by way of revulsion, upon
such desperate expedients as brought us even within an ace of
ruin." Daniel Defoe, then also a youth, was greatly excited by
the Popish plot, some of the credulities accompanying which he
described in his maturer years : " I did firmly believe the reality
24°
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the plot ; yet, when we ran up that plot to general massacres,
fleets of pilgrims, bits and bridles, knives, handcuffs, and a thou
sand such things, which people generally talk of, I confess, though
a boy, I could not then, nor can now, come up to them. And my
reasons were, as they still are, because I see no reason to believe
the Papists to be fools, whatever else we had occasion to think of
them. I cannot, indeed, spare room to examine the weakness of
the notion of a general massacre in England, where the Papists all
over the kingdom are not five to a hundred, in some counties not
one, and within the city hardly one to a thousand. But, 'tis plain,
these notions prevailed to a strange excess, made our city blunder
busses to be all new burnished, hat and feathers, shoulder-belt,
and all. our military gewgaws come in mode again, till the city
trained-bands began to be so rampant, that, like other standing
armies, they began to ride upon their masters, and trampled under
foot the liberty of that very city they were raised to defend. They
were made engines of oppression and disorder, disturbed meeting-
bouses, possessed the Guildhall, chose sheriffs, got drunk upon
guard, abused the citizens upon their rounds, and their prodigal
drunken sentinels murdered several people upon pretence they
would not stand at their command. In a populous city, it was im
possible but innocent people, either ignorant or perhaps in drink,
might run themselves into danger, not imagining they had to do
with brutes that would kill their fellow-citizens for such trifles,
with the same severity as if in an enemy's country, or on the fron
tiers." As there was nothing in the terrors of massacres and inva
sions ; of burnings of London and of the shipping in the Thames ;
of Jesuits about to rule the land under the seal of the Pope, — too
absurd for the multitude to credit ; so there was no eminent person,
however loyal and peaceable, who might not become a victim to
the accusations of those men who had brought a whole nation into
a condition of senseless panic. "All Oates' evidence," says Bur
net, " was now so well believed that it was not safe for any man to
doubt any part of it." He named peers to whom the Pope had
sent over his commissions. He accused Wakeman, the queen's
physician, of a project to poison his sovereign. Bedloe, a man of
notorious evil life, surrendered himself at Bristol, pretending that
he was cognisant of the murder of Godfrey, and could point out
the murderers and instigators ; and he then came forward in sup
port of the accusations of Oates against certain peers who had
THE POPISH PLOT. 241
been apprehended on Oates's charges. The consummation of the
impudence of Oates was his attempt to involve the harmless queen
in a charge of having concerted the murder of her husband. He
told a story that the queen had sent for some Jesuits to Somerset
House ; that he went with them, and standing behind a door, heard
one in a woman's voice, there being no other woman in the room
than the queen, assure them that she would assist in taking off the
king. North relates that Oates, at the bar of the House of Com
mons, said, " Aye, Taitus Oates, accause Catherine, Quean of
England, of Haigh T'raison." * Burnet has a curious relation of
his own conversation with the king on this delicate subject. The
good bishop's relations have been considered, though perhaps un
justly, a little open to doubt ; but we are not entitled to question
what he relates of his personal knowledge. " The king spoke
much to me concerning Oates's accusing the queen, and acquainted
me with the whole progress of it. He said she was a weak wo
man, and had some disagreeable humours ; but was not capable of
a wicked thing; and, considering bis faultiness towards her in
other things, he thought it a horrid thing to abandon her. He said
he looked on falsehood and cruelty as the greatest crimes in the
sight of God : he knew he had led a bad life, of which he spoke
with some sense ; but he was breaking himself of all his faults ; •
and he would never do a base and a wicked thing. I spoke on all
these subjects which I thought became me, which he took well ;
and I encouraged him much in his resolution of not exposing the
queen to perish by false swearing."
We have thus shown some ludicrous aspects of this famous
Plot. The horrible realities connected with it present a fearful
example of the atrocities that may be committed under the ex
citement of religious animosity. The trials of the accused per
sons commenced in November. Stayley, a Catholic banker, was
first sacrificed, upon a ridiculous accusation brought forward by
Carstairs, a Scotchman, who saw that the trade of false witness
was prosperous. He swore that he heard the banker say in French,
that the king was a rogue, and that he himself would kill him, if
nobody else would. Burnet gave offence by shewing that Car-
stairs was an infamous character; and Shaftesbury, as the bishop
relates, told him "that all those who undermined the credit of the
witnesses were public enemies." The poor banker was tried and
was hanged. Coleman was next brought to trial upon charges
* Scott, from this hint, has given Oates his peculiar dialect in ' ' Peveril of the Peak."
Vol. IV.— 16
242 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
made against him by Oates and Bedloe. The evidence was very
inconclusive ; but his letters were against him, although he main
tained that he had no idea of bringing in the Catholic religion, but
by a general toleration. He was convicted of high treason, and
executed. Three Jesuits, Ireland, Grove, and Pickering, were the
next victims. Green and Hill, two Papists, and Berry, a Protestant,
were then convicted of the murder of sir Edmondbury Godfrey,
upon the testimony of Bedloe, and the pretended confession of
Prance, a silversmith. The prisons were filled with hundreds of
suspected traitors. Five peers were confined in the Tower under
impeachment. Scroggs, the Chief Justice, conducted himself, in
all the trials, with the most ferocious determination to procure a
verdict against the prisoners. Oates in a few months was at the
height of his greatness. " He walked about," says North, "with
his guards assigned for fear of the Papists murdering him. He
had lodgings in Whitehall, and 1200/. per annum pension: And
no wonder, after he -had the impudence to say to the House of
Lords, in plain terms, that, if they would not help him to more
money, he must be forced to help himself. He put on an episco
pal garb, except the lawn sleeves; silk gown and cassock,- great
hat, satin hatband and rose, long scarf, and was called, or most
blasphemously called himself, the Saviour of the nation. Whoever
he pointed at was taken up and committed ; so that many people got
out of his way, as from a blast, and glad they could prove their two
last years' conversation. The very breath of him was 'pestilential,
and if it brought not imprisonment, or death, over such on whom
it fell, it surely poisoned reputation, and left good protestants ar
rant papists, and something worse than that, in danger of being
put in the plot as traitors."*
We have dwelt at some length upon this Popish Plot; and in
their order of time we shall have to give a few other details. It
may be thought that such an occurrence might be more briefly re
lated; but it is not only strikingly illustrative of the temper of the
people, but was really pregnant with important consequences. Dr.
Wellwood, who wrote his 'Memoirs' some" twenty years after these
events, has expressed, with tolerable impartiality, the view in which
they were regarded after the Revolution : — " A great part of the
Popish Plot, as it was then sworn to, will in all human probability
lie among the darkest scenes of our English history. However,
this is certain : the discovery of the Popish Plot had great and
* " Examen."
THE POPISH PLOT. 243
various effects upon the nation ; and it's from this remarkable
period of time we may justly reckon a new era in the English ac
count. In the first place, it awakened the nation out of a deep
hthargy they had been in for nineteen years together ; and alarmed
them with fears and jealousies that have been found to our sad
experience but too well grounded. In the next, it gave the rise to,
at least settled, that unhappy distinction of Whig and Tory among
the people of England, that has since occasioned so many mis
chiefs. And lastly, the discovery of the Popish Plot began that
open struggle between King Charles and his people, that occa
sioned him not only to dissolve his first favourite parliament, and
the three others that succeeded ; but likewise to call no more
during the rest of his reign. All which made for bringing in ques
tion the Charters of London, and other Corporations, with a great
many dismal effects that followed." *
* " Memoirs of the most material Transactions," &c. 1736, p. 111
244 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XII.
Discovery of the intrigues' of the king with France. — Impeachment of Danby.- Dissolu
tion of Parliament. — Elections. — The duke of York goes abroad.— Pretensibrs of
Monmouth to legitimacy. — The king's declaration as to his marriage. — The new
Council upon Temple's plan. The Exclusion Bill passed in the Commons. — The
Habeas Corpus Act. — Continued trials for the -Popish Plot. — Analysis of Payments
to the Witnesses. — Persecutions of Covenanters in Scotland — Murder of archbishop
Sharp. — Claverhouse defeated at Drumclog. — Monmouth sent to Scotland as General.
— Battle cf Bothwell Bridge. — Whig and Tory. — York and Monmouth rivals foi-the
Succession. — Proclamation against Petitions. — Abhorrers.
The political excitement of the Christmas time of 1678 had not
been equalled since the early days of the Long parliament. In
the very height of the fever of the Popish Plot a discovery was
made of the intrigues of the king with France, which very soon
led to the ruin of the Lord Treasurer, Danby. In the secret treaty
between Charles and Louis in May, 1678, it was agreed that the
English army should be disbanded. The French ambassador,
Barillon, pressed its reduction to 8000 men ; which Charles as con
stantly evaded; and he is said to have exclaimed, " God's fish ! are
all the king of France's promises to make me master of my sub
jects come to this ? or does he think that a matter to be done
with 8000 men ? " Louis was out of humour with Charles, who
appeared disposed to set up for a despot without his brother des
pot's aid ; and he urged Ralph Montague, the English minister at
Paris, to betray the secrets of their intrigues. Montague was also
out of humour with his own government. He came home, and
was elected a member of parliament. The Lord Treasurer dreaded
Montague's disclosures ; and ordered his papers to be seized, un
der pretence that he had held private conferences with the Pope's
nuncio. A royal message to this effect was sent to the Commons.
"But Montague," says Burnet, "understood the arts of a Court
too well to be easily catched." He had put a box, in which certain
letters were, "in sure hands, out of the way." The object in en
deavouring to obtain possession of these papers was to destroy
the evidence ofthe transactions of May, 1678. Montague, in his
place in the House said, " I believe that the seizing my cabinets
IMPEACHMENT OF DANBY. 245
and papers was to get into their hands some papers of great con
sequences, that I have to produce, of the designs of a great minister
of state." The box containing these was opened in the House ;
and Montague read two letters, one of which, signed Danby, em
powered him to stipulate for a payment to the king of six hundred
thousand livres annually for three years, as the price of his neu
trality. At the bottom of the letter were these words : " This
letter is writ by my order, C. R." Mr. Hallam has forcibly ob
served of the conduct of the king, as indicated by this letter, that
it " bears date five days after an Act had absolutely passed to raise
money for carrying on the war ; a circumstance worthy of particu
lar attention, as it both puts an end to every pretext or apology
which the least scrupulous could venture to urge in behalf of this
negotiation, and justifies the Whig party of England in an invinci
ble distrust, an inexpiable hatred, of so perfidious a cozener." *
There was a passage in this letter of instructions to Montague,
which gave dire offence to those in the House of Commons who
felt as Englishmen. Charles asked for the pension, " because it
will be two or. three years before he can hope to find his Parlia
ment in humour to give him supplies, after your having made any
peace with France." One member, Mr. Bennet, exclaimed, " I
wonder the House sits so silent when they see themselves sold for
six millions of livres to the French." Another, Mr. Harbord, said,
" I hope now gentlemen's eyes are open, by the design on foot to
destroy the government and our liberties." Sir Henry Capel,
calling upon the House to impeach Danby of treason, said, " This
minister has let the French king grow upon us, and let our king
take money from him, to lay aside his people." f From this time
the unity which the Lord Chancellor Finch so earnestly implored
was impossible. The arts of the Court were met by counter-arts
ofthe Opposition; the craft of the despot was resisted by the
turbulence of the demagogue ; the same foreign hand which had
bribed the king to degrade his country now bribed the Parliament
to contend against the king. It is a sickening spectacle. The
only consolation is that ultimate good came out of the instant evil.
Danby was impeached of high treason. He had reluctantly writ
ten this letter at the command of his unworthy master; but the
penalty constitutionally fell upon the minister. He defended him
self upon the plea that upon the matter of peace and war the king
was the sole judge, and that he ought to be obeyed by his minis-
* "Constitutional Histpry," chap. xiii. t '"Pari. Hist." vol. iv.
246 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ters of state, as by all his subjects. It is now well understood
that the commands of the sovereign furnish no justification for
evil measures of the Crown ; that the minister must have the re
sponsibility. Danby, though a mere accomplice in guilt, was the
one guilty minister ; for the letter said " To the Secretary [sir W.
Coventry] you must not mention one syllable of the money." The
continuance of proceedings against the Lord Treasurer was inter
rupted by the prorogation of Parliament on the 21st of December,
and by-its dissolution on the 24th of January, 1679. This was the
last Session of the Parliament that had continued since 1661. It
commenced in a frenzy of loyalty ; it ended in all the embitterment
of discontent at the present, and in dread of the future.
Roger North says that the vacation of Parliament " was indeed
a dismal one. . . . All populous places were made unquiet with
artificial fears and jealousies. . . . All incidents were made
wonders, and odd accidents right down prodigies." The London
ers were frightened, as if it- were a terrible omen, by a great dark
ness in London on a Sunday morning, " so that the people in church
could not read in their bibles." North asks a question which shows
that our metropolitan atmosphere has not much changed during
two hundred years. " To what end is this magnifying, so prodig
iously, a common accident in London, there being seldom a winter
without it ; for when a common mist mixes with the coal-smoke it
must be so ; and out of town, where is no smoke, it is not half so
much."* It was fortunate that the elections came to stir the peo
ple into real political action, instead of their yielding to vain delu
sions and idle fears. It seems, indeed, to have been a most stir
ring time. There is a striking picture of an election scene at Nor
wich, in sir Thomas Browne's letters. The return for the county
of Norfolk was contested ; and a new election took place : " I do
not remember such a great poll. I could not but observe the great
number of horses which were in the town ; and conceive there
might have been five or six thousand, which in time of need might
serve for dragoon horses ; besides a great number of coach-horses,
and very good saddle-horses of the better sort. Wine we had none
but sack and Rhenish, except some made provision thereof before
hand ; but there was a strange consumption of beer, and bread, and
cakes. Abundance of people slept in the market place, and lay like
flocks of sheep in and about the cross." f Evelyn laments that so
many from the country came in to vote for his brother as knight of
* " Examen," p. 534". t Sir T. Browne's Works, 1S36, vol. i. p. 241.
PRETENSIONS OF MONMOUTH TO LEGITIMACY. 247
the shire for Surrey, " that I believe they ate and drank him out
near to ,£2000, by a most abominable custom." Burnet says, " The
elections were carried with great heat, and went almost everywhere
against the Court."
The duke of York, two days before the Parliament met on the
6th of March, was presuaded to go abroad. His absence might
allay the heat which was manifested against him in the last Parlia
ment, when there was a violent debate upon the proviso of the
Lords, in the Bill for excluding Catholics from both Houses, that
the duke should be exempted. * But the duke of York, before he
left the country for a temporary exile, required that his interests in
the succession to the Crown should be protected against the pre
tended claims, of the duke of Monmouth. This supposed eldest of
the many illegitimate children of Charles 1 1, was born at Rotter
dam, in 1649. James II. in his "Advice to his Son" in the Stuart
Papers, says, " All the knowing world, as well as myself, had many
convincing reasons to think he was not the king's son, but Robert
Sidney's." His mother, Lucy Waters, who was known as Mrs.
Barlow, was a lady of somewhat disreputable life ; but Charles
seems to have clung to her with unusual fidelity. She lived on terms
of friendly intercourse with the sister of Charles, the princess of
Orange, who in writing to her brother says, " your'wife desires
me to present her humble duty to you." The term "wife" was
probably used in jest by Charles's sister. Mrs. Ba'rlow came to
England with the boy in 1656; and is said to have been received
by some Cavaliers with attentions paid to royalty. Cromwell had
her, in the first place, apprehended, and then sent an order to the
Lieutenant of the Tower to release '' the lady of pleasure and the
young heir." She went to Paris, and soon after died. The son
was received with favour by the queen dowager, Henrietta Maria,
and came with her to England in 1662. He was called Master
Crofts, from having resided with lord Crofts, and is described by
Evelyn as "a pretty spark." In 1663 he was created duke of Mon
mouth, and was ordered " to take place of all dukes." He was also
married at the same time to the young countess of Buccleugh, a
lady of immense fortune. Monmouth did not deserve " the finest
lady in the three kingdoms," for he became an abandoned profligate.
Charles appears to have been more constantly attached to him than
to any other human being ; and to this circumstance may be proba-
* Cathoiics had been excluded from the Lower House previous to the statute of 1678
excluding peers.
248 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
bly attributed the very general belief that the king had been mar
ried to his mother. The high offices bestowed upon Monmouth
were far above his deserts or abilities ; although he had exhibited
bravery and judgment in the war of 1673, in which the English as
sisted Louis XIV. in his campaign. In 1677 he served on the other
side, under the prince of Orange. The notion was either put into
his head by the enemies of the duke of York, or he indulged in the
delusion through some mysterious stories about documents in a black
box, that he was the legitimate heir to the throne. The opinion was
too general to be despised ; and it is not surprising, therefore, that
.before the duke of York went abroad he should have required his
brother to set the matter at rest by a solemn affirmation to the con
trary. Charles, on the 3rd of March, declared to his Council, " in
the presence of Almighty God, that he had never given or made any
contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever
but his wife, queen Catherine, then living." James, with the duch
ess of York, then departed for Brussels.
The resumption of the impeachment against lord Danby, upon
the meeting of Parliament involved two great constitutional ques
tions. One was, whether an impeachment by the Commons in
one Parliament could be continued in another Parliament. The
Lords resolved that "the dissolution of the last Parliament did not
alter the state of the impeachments brought up by the Commons
in that Parliament."* The other question was on the right of the
king to grant a pardon pending an impeachment. Danby, when he
saw the proceedings revived against him, obtained a pardon under
the great seal, which the king affixed without the knowledge of the
Chancellor. The Commons declared that a pardon to set aside an
impeachment could not be pleaded. After various contests, Danby
was committed to the Tower, and when a prorogation took place,
the impeachment fell to the ground.
After the fall of Danby, a great experiment in Administration
was resolved upon, on the suggestion of sir William Temple. His
notion was that any select body of ministers, such as was known
then as a Cabal, and is now called a Cabinet, should not be the
principal advisers of the king ; that the Privy Council should be
dissolved, and a Council smaller in number should be appointed,
with which the management of affairs should be entrusted, the
king pledging himself to submit all matters to their advice. This
* There were subsequent reversals of this decision; but in the impeachment of Warren
Hastings, the resolution of 1679 was affirmed in 1791.
THE NEW COUNCIL. 249
new Council was to consist of thirty members, fifteen being high
officers of state, and fifteen noblemen and gentlemen of wealth and
independence. The wealth was an essential condition in the notion
of the projector. The thirty members were to possess estates or
revenues amounting to ,£300,000, a sum equal to three-fourths of
the income, as then estimated, of the whole House of Commons.
The principle was evidently to interpose some great authority in
the State between the king and the representatives of the people
— something that would be a counterpoise to the vast development
of the power of the Lower House.* As an administrative body it •
is evident that Temple's Council would prove a failure. It could
not essentially differ from the old Privy Council ; for thirty mem
bers would be as unfit for the united action of an executive as fifty.
The Privy Council of Elizabeth and of James I., as in earlier times,
gave orders and signed dispatches. When sovereigns were their
own ministers, the inconvenience of a large executive body would
interfere little with the rapid and secret conduct of affairs. There
was a natural jealousy of Cabal or Cabinets ; but they had become
indispensable in the time of Charles II. The opinions of the Lord
Keeper Guilford upon the Cabinet Council, are illustrative of this
gradual change in the functions of Administration. Roger North
says that his relative intended to describe the transactions of the
Court, and the state of the empire, during his ministry as Lord
Keeper : " He begins with the state of the Cabinet Council, that
consisted of those great officers, and courtiers, whom the king
relied upon for the interior dispatch of his affairs. . . . This
council was derived from the Privy Council, which, originally, was
the same thing, and derived out of the magnum concilium. . . .
Assemblies at first reasonably constituted of a due number and
temper for dispatch of affairs committed to them, by improvident
increase came to Jse formal and troublesome, the certain conse
quence of multitude ; and thereby a new institution becomes neces
sary; whereupon it is found easier and safer to substitute than to
dissolve. Thus the Cabinet Council, which at first was but in the
nature of a private conversation, came to be a formal Council, and
had the direction of -most transactions of the government foreign
and domestic." f This opinion of Lord Guilford was formed
subsequent to the experiment of 1679, and had no reference to the
newly constituted advisers of the Crown. But it is clear that
* The design of Temple is most ably elucidated in Lord Macaulay's " Essays," vol. iii.
t " Lives," vol. ii. p 50.
250 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Temple's Council would have been as unmanageable as an execu
tive body as the Privy Council, which had become unfit for dispatch
of affairs " by improvident increase." Some of the popular leaders
were of this new Council, such as Russell. Shaftesbury was pro
posed by the king, and was nominated president. There was great
rejoicing at the formation of this Council. The people thought
they should be better governed. The Parliament looked coldly
upon the project. The ministers very soon formed into juntos.
There was a Cabinet of four members within the Council. None
of the hostility of the Commons to the duke of York was disarmed
by this nominal union of men of conflicting opinions. The thirty
had violent contentions ; and in a short time Shaftesbury appeared
in the anomalous character of President of the Council, and leader
of the parliamentary Opposition. The conduct of the king in this
Council is recorded by the great eulogist of the Court, with singu
lar admiration of the royal cleverness. The rolls of justices were
laid before the Council, in order to be reformed. " It was pleasant
to see with how much wit and good humour the king ordered
affairs, to disappoint these reformers. He would not suffer the
roll, that was begun with, to be out of his own hand, but pretended
to mark the alterations upon it himself. Then, as many of the
Council moved for alterations upon the account of good or bad
men (terms of art, which for brevity, they used to signify such as
the party liked, or would have put out, or not), if the king was
content a man should out, he made a mark at his name ; but, if he
would not part with him, he found some jocular reason to let him
stand; as that he was a good cocker, understood hunting, kept a
good house, had good chines of beef, kept good fox-hounds, or
some such indifferent matter, which it was ridiculous to contradict
or dispute upon. And, in this manner, he frustrated all their intent
as to removes." * With such a Council and such a sovereign, it is
manifest there could be no abatement of a violent temper in Par
liament. The confirmed hostility to the duke of York was mani
fested in a Bill for his exclusion from the succession to the throne.
To prevent this passing, the Parliament was prorogued on the 26th
of May to the 14th of August. The king took this step without
communicating with his Council. The Exclusion Bill had passed
a second reading of the Commons, and its clauses were being dis
cussed in Committee. But there was a measure of greater import
ance to the real and permanent interests of the country than this
* " Examen,'' p. 77,
• CONTINUED TRIALS FOR THE POPISH PLOT. 25 1
premature attempt to disturb the Succession. A great legal reform
had been carried through both Houses, and waited the Royal
Assent. On that 26th of May Charles, however reluctantly, sanc
tioned the utterance of the three old words which make legislation
law, when the Bill was presented to him, which now stands in our
Statute Bopks-as " An Act for the better securing the Liberty of
the Subject, and for Preventing of Imprisonments beyond Seas."*
This is the Habeas Corpus Act, the noble enactment which made
that clause of the Great Charter which secures the personal liberty
of every Englishman a living principle instead of a dead letter.
By the Common Law no subject could be illegally imprisoned, for
he might sue for the writ of Habeas Corpus, and be heard in open
court. But judges, sheriffs, gaolers, used every art to refuse and
to evade the writ. The Privy Council would cause men to be
confined beyond seas, in the king's foreign dominions, out of the
jurisdiction of the Courts of Justice. Political offences, real or
pretended, were thus punished more severely than the laws could
punish. Suspicion stood in the place of evidence. Unhappy men
lingered out years in distant prisons ; and their wrongs were never
known except to their oppressors. The strictness and promptitude
of the proceedings under the Habeas Corpus Act struck the old
weapon of tyranny out of the hands of the powerful. To Shaftes
bury, whatever may have been his demerits, we mainly owe the
triumph of this great measure. On the same morning that the
king gave his assent to the Habeas Corpus Act, he knocked off,
perhaps unconsciously, the shackles of the Press. The Licensing
Act of 1662 was to continue till the end of the next session of
Parliament. All books had been under the control of the Licenser
for seventeen years. By the prorogation of the 27th of May, that
system came to a temporary close. There was many a struggle
yet to be made before Englishmen could point to their own condi
tion, and exultingly say,
" This is true Liberty, when free-born men
Having to advise the public, may speak free." f
The Parliament was dissolved by proclamation before the 14th of
August, to which day it had been prorogued. The fourth Parliament
of Charles II. met on the 7th of October, 1679, but it was prorogued,
again and again, for more than a year. During the summer of 1 679 the
trials for the Popish Plot went forward, with no abatement of the
* 31 Car. II. c. 2.
t Milton's motto t) " Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," from Euripides.
252 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
popular outcry against the unhappy Roman Catholics. In June, two
Jesuits, Whitbread and Fenwick, who had previously stood at the
bar, and had been illegally remanded to prison in defect of evidence,
were again indicted, with three others. The cross-swearing on
these trials was astounding. The evidence of Oates went to prove
a conspiracy of which he became cognizant in London in April
1678. Sixteen of the inmates of St. Omer's came over to the trial,
and swore that Oates resided amongst them, uninterruptedly, from
January to June. On the other side, eight persons swore that they
had seen him in England at the beginning of May. The accused
were all found guilty. Langhorne, a Catholic lawyer, was also tried
and condemned. The six were executed on the 20th of June. The
grossest partiality was manifested from the judgment seat in these
trials. Scroggs, the Chief-Justice, kept no bounds of decency in
urging the jury to convict. The other judges sat by his side, and
interposed no opinion as to the credibility of the evidence. Roger
North offers this excuse for his relative, and the rest ofthe ermined
tools : " Nothing can qualify the silence, but the inconceivable
fury and rage of the community, gentle and simple, at that time,
and the consequences of an open opposition to the Chief, whose
part it was to act, as he did, demanding no assistance of any of
them ; which opposition might have been fatal in many respects :
for the creditof the witnesses must have been impeached, which
the time would not bear ; and it was not in their office to inter
meddle ; for, as to the fact, the jury is to answer. When it is so
done by the co-assessors, it is for discretion, and not duty ; the
most cogent reason was, that the prejudice was so universal,
and strong, that if an apostle had spoken against, no impression
had taken place, nor had it done the prisoners any service ; but on
the other side, not only the rabble, but even the parliament itself,
had flounced at it ; which consideration turned the scales of the
discretion, and made those judges rather let a vessel drive, which
they could not stop, and reserve themselves for fairer opportunities,
when such might happen, for them to do some good, without pre
tending to remove mountains." *
There was a stop at last to these disgraceful exhibitions. The
English " rabble " are violent, but they are not blood-thirsty ; and
the executions of men who maintained their innocence to the last
wrought pity and disgust even amongst the most prejudiced. The
trial of sir George Wakeman, the queen's physician, came on in
* " Life of Lord Keeper Guilford," vol. i. p. 327.
ANALYSIS OF PAYMENTS TO THE WITNESSES. 253
July. Oates and Bedloe were as positive in their testimony, as on
former trials where they easily obtained convictions. But now, to
their great astonishment, the bench allowed their assertions to be
questioned ; and thus, after Oates had gone through his course of
bold accusations against Wakeman, the Clerk of the Privy Council
came forward, and testified that when the confident witness was
asked by the Lord Chancellor if he knew anything personally of
the queen's physician, he lifted up his hands to heaven, and pro
tested he did not. Three Benedictine monks were indicted as
accomplices with Wakeman in the design to poison the king. After
a trial of nine hours the whole were acquitted. The believers in
the plot gradually diminished. " The witnesses," says Burnet,
"saw they were blasted ; and they were enraged on it, which they
vented with much spite against Scroggs.'- The trials of common
men were now laid aside. But Stafford and the four other lords
were still in the Tower, waiting to be tried by their peers. The
dissolution and repeated prorogations left their fate doubtful.
In the meanwhile Oates and Bedloe were in comfortable quarters,
and were receiving handsome gratuities, as well as Dugdale, an
other of their tribe. There are records of many payments to these
worthies, under the heads of " free gift and royal bounty ; " " for
diet ; " for " charges about several witnesses ; " for " expenses about
the plot ; " for " maintaining witnesses in town about the plot ; "
for "a further discovery of the plot ; "for " expenses in prosecu
ting ; " for " discovering a Jesuit ; " for " journeys ; " for " discover
ing Papists harboured in Court ; " for " lodgings in Whitehall ; " ex
tending over a period from March 30, 1679, to March 4, 1683. Of
the previous payments to the " witnesses "during half a year, we
have no record. We have made a careful analysis of about a
hundred and twenty entries of payment to Oates, Bedloe, Tonge,
and Dugdale as they appear in the accounts of moneys paid for
Secret Services ; and we find that up to the 7th of September,
1681, Oates received 1660/. 8s. lod. ;' Bedloe, to July 1680, received
804/. ; Tonge, who died in January, 1681, received 344/., and for
his funeral was also paid 50/. ; and Dugdale, who kept drawing
the wages of iniquity to the 4th of March, 1683, received 1138/.
15s* After April, 1681, Oates and Dugdale, instead of being
allowed to " sit at ten pounds a-week " like Falstaff, were reduced
to a very ignoble two pounds for allowance. Dugdale seems to have
held on, and received large sums, long after the supposed instiga-
* " Moneys for Secret Services," Camden Society, pp. 3 to 67.
254 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tors of a pretended Plot — Shaftesbury and his friends — had lost
power or parliamentary influence.
Whilst these fearful exhibitions of the dire effects of religious
animosity were passing in England, there were even more signal
displays of the same spirit, though in an entirely opposite direction,
manifested in Scotland. We turn with equal loathing from the
corrupt judgments of Scroggs, to the brutal slaughters of Claver-
house. And yet these events must be recorded for instruction and
for warning. Religious hatreds have not so entirely died out
amongst us, that we can be quite sure that disputes about candles
and flowers, about the Judaical observance of the Lord's day,
about Jews in Parliament, about Maynooth, might be wholly set
tled by furious orators and writers, without the sword and the
halter, unless the darkness which surrounds such controversies
were somewhat dispersed by the light of History. Men can only
effectually learn to be tolerant and loving, by seeing what monsters
bigotry has made of their forefathers.
After the suppression of the insurrection of Covenanters, in
1666,* Scotland continued in an unquiet state ; not openly resist
ing the government, but nourishing many elements of future dis
turbance. Archbishop Sharp was especially feared and hated by
the stricter Presbyterians. The most fanatical believed him to be
the enemy of God, and that his destruction would be an acceptable
service. In July, 1668, as the archbishop was getting into his
coach, he was shot at ; and his companion, the bishop of Orkney,
was wounded. No one attempted to seize the offender ; but the
archbishop had noted his features and general appearance. He
wandered about the country for a long time, and then returned to
Edinburgh. Six years afterwards, Sharp fancied that a shop
keeper who lived near him was the man who fired at him. His
name was Mitchell. He was brought before the Council, and after
a solemn promise that his life should be spared, he confessed his
guilt. The Council doomed him to perpetual imprisonment on
the Bass Rock, after having subjected him to the torture of the
boot. Mitchell had been confined here three or four years when
it was determined to bring him to trial, for his crime committed in
1668. Upon the duke of Lauderdale's becoming supreme in Scot
land, in connexion with the Cabal ministry, he attempted to carry
out the same policy of a compromise with non-conformists as was
being attempted in England. Many Presbyterian ministers con-
* Ante, p. 189.
PERSECUTIONS OF COVENANTERS IN SCOTLAND. 255
formed under the Declaration of Indulgence. Burnet says that it
was part of the plan to put " all the ousted ministers by couples in
parishes;" but that Lauderdale, who governed by fits, "passing
from hot to cold ones," neglected this precaution, and that many
of the deprived ministers went about, holding conventicles. Very
soon the principles of severity trampled down any disposition to
moderate courses. Indeed the more violent of the Covenanters
utterly despised any measure which would stop short of re-insta
ting their church in triumphant domination. The Black Indul
gence, as they termed the healing declaration, was denounced as a
bait for the worldly-minded and ungodly. There were large as-
senu lies in wild and solitary places, to which many came armed.
The government went about the repression of these meetings with
a frantic violence. To strike terror into the Covenanters they re
moved Mitchell from his wave-beaten rock in the Frith, and
brought him to Edinburgh for trial. His own confession was
urged against him. The promise upon which that confession was
extorted was suppressed. The archbishop, who had first employed
an agent to obtain this confession, denied any promise. The
lords Lauderdale, Rothes and Halton, swore that no such promise
had been made by the Council. The Council books were not al
lowed to be produced ; and the man was convicted. The distinct
record of the promise was found in the Council books immediately
after the conviction ; and yet the man was executed. " This ac
tion," says Burnet, " with all concerned in it, was looked at by all
people with horror ; and it was such a complication of treachery,
perjury, and cruelty, as the like had not perhaps been known."
The Covenanters were not deterred by this manifestation of vin-
dictiveness, but continued to assemble, particularly in the western
counties. Lauderdale determined to act as if the whole district
were in rebellion. He required all the land-owners to execute
bonds, not only for their own conformity in attending the church
service and avoiding conventicles, but for their servants, tenants,
and residents on their property. They refused, and Lauderdale
asked for authority to reduce them to submission by military force.
Charles consented. The Highlanders were brought from their
mountains to live at free quarters, and to plunder, in the devoted
district. The inhabitants were disarmed. Lauderdale's excesses
became at last too much even for the government of Charles to
bear. The king could not wholly justify the acts of his minister.
" But when May, the master of the privy purse, asked him in his
256 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
familiar way, what he thought now of his Lauderdale, he answered,
as May himself told me, that they had objected many damned
things that he had done against them, but there was nothing ob
jected that was against his service : such are the notions that
many kings drink in, by which they set up an interest for them
selves, in opposition to the interest of the people." * Hume terms
the opinion of the king "a sentiment unworthy of a sovereign."
It was a sentiment worthy of a captain of banditti.
There are no historical events with which the most cursory
reader is more familiar, than the murder of archbishop Sharp,
and the battles of Loudon Hill and Bothwell Bridge. The narra
tives of the atrocious tyranny which led to these events are suf
ficiently obscure, whether they issue from the persecuted or
the persecutors ; but they present a sufficiently distinct picture
which scarcely requires the colouring of romance to .command
our interest. That ancient hunter of Covenanters, Captain John
Creichton, — who was introduced by Swift to the notice of the
world in 1731, as "a very honest and worthy man, but of the
old stamp," and who himself laments over " the wonderful
change of opinions," — relates with the extremest glee his various
exploits in dispersing conventicles, in apprehending preachers,
and in delivering them to the proper authorities to be tortured
and hanged. He attempts no sort of excuse for using deceptions,
to find out his victims, quite unworthy of the fighting cavalier.
He hunts " the rogues " as if he thoroughly enjoyed the chase.
He cannot justify his "rashness " in such adventures, except that
it manifests his loyalty to his prince, his zeal for the church,
and his detestation of all rebellious principles. These narra
tives of Creichton precede his account of the insurrection of
1679. It was in the western counties that " the booted apostles
of prelacy " chiefly exercised their dragoonings. There the Cove
nanters were most numerous and most persevering. But in the
eastern districts there was the same spirit, though less openly
displayed. -In the county of Fife, a few religious enthusiasts,
encouraging each other in their secret prayer meetings, and accept
ing the stern denunciations of the Hebrew scriptures to smite the
wicked as holy impulses to murder the enemies of their own form
of worship, resolved upon the sacrifice of the archbishop of St.
Andrew's, and of Carmichael, the commissioner of the Council.
Ten of this band of fanatics went forth in search of thejr intended
* Bumet. Book iii.
CLAVERHOUSE DEFEATED. 257
victims. John Balfour, known by the name of Burly, and his brother-
in-law, Hackston of Rathillet, were the leaders in this design.
Carmichael escaped. But they accidentally encountered archbishop
Sharp ; and at once considered, in theirsavage enthusiasm, that God
had delivered their great enemy into their hands. Dragged from his
carriage as he was passing, in company with his daughter, over
Magus Muir, near St. Andrew's on the 3rd of May, 1679, he was
inhumanly butchered, his unhappy child struggling with the mur
derers to save her aged father. The leaders fled into the west.
Assembling some of the more violent of their own persuasion, their
contempt of the civil government was manifested by their extinguish
ing the bonfires which had been lighted on the 29th of May, in
honour of the king's restoration, in the burgh of Rutherglen. They
also burnt the Acts of Parliament for restoring prelacy and sup
pressing conventicles. On the ist of June, being Sunday, they
held a field conventicle at Loudon Hill. John Graham, 01 Claver-
house, marched out from Glasgow with about a hundred and fifty
cavalry, for the suppose of dispersing them. The number of the
Covenanters had increased to five or six hundred ; armed chiefly
with pikes and pitchforks. They had a few horse amongst them.
On a marshy ground near the village of Drumclog, Claverhouse
charged this irregular force. He was utterly discomfited, and was
compelled to retreat to Glasgow. The insurgents followed the
fugitives, their ranks receiving constant accessions, not only of the
Cameronians who would admit no compromise of the Solemn
League and Covenant, but of moderate Presbyterians, who were
indignant at the tyranny under which the country groaned. But
their camp was divided into rival sects, each despising the other as
much as they hated their common oppressor. At Glasgow they
were repulsed, in their first attack, by Claverhouse, who had raised
barricades within the city; but their numbers becoming more and
more formidable, he Withdrew his forces towards Edinburgh.
What was at first the desperate revolt of a few became a vast
tumultuous outbreak, approaching very nearly to a rebellion. The
Council in London were in alarm. It was determined to send the
Duke of Monmouth to Scotland to take the command of- the govern
ment troops. There was no want of energy in the movements of
Monmouth. He set out from London on the 18th of June. On
the 22nd he was at the head of the royal army on Bothwell-moor, a
few miles from Hamilton. The insurgents were encamped on the
opposite side of the Clyde. They were dispirited and irresolute —
Vol. IV.—I7
258 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
neither prepared to fight nor to yield. A deputation from the' more
moderate had an audience of the duke ; at which they limited their
demands to the free exercise of their religion, and would submit all
matters of difference to a free Parliament, and a General Assem-
bly of the Church. The duke called upon them to lay down theii
arms, but refused to treat except after their implicit submission.
Roger North has a curious relation of a secret arrangement for the
employment of the duke as general of the forces, which appears to
him a wonderful proof of the statesmanship of the duke of Lauder
dale and of his royal master. Monmouth was first appointed with
a latitude of power to fight, or treat, as he thought fit. The
majority at the Council board " approved of such a trust in the
General ; for why, said they, should so much blood, and of these
deluded miserables, be spilt, if they are willing to lay down their
arms on fit terms ? " None spoke to the contrary. " When the
king rose from Council, the duke of Lauderdale followed him into
the bedchamber, where, having him alone, he asked his Majesty if
he intended to follow his father ? Why, said the king ? Because,
sir, said the duke, ,you have given the General orders to treat ;
•.he consequence of which is — encouraging and enlarging the rebel
lion in Scotland, and raising another, by concert, in England, and
then you are lost. Therefore,^ you do not change your orders,
and send them positive to fight, and not to treat, the mischiefs that
befell your father, in like case, will overtake you." These two
worthies, according to North, then clandestinely altered the orders
which had been approved in Council, and gave directions that they
should not be opened but at a Council of War, and in sight of the
enemy. " The event," says the sympathising chronicler of this
duplicity, " sufficiently applauded this counsel." * That event was ¦
the slaughter at Bothwell Bridge. Tbe Covenanters had exhibited
one commendable point of strategy in guarding this passage of the
Clyde. But Hackston of Rathillet, who defended the bridge, was
not adequately supported. The mass of the insurgents were panic-
stricken when they saw the king's troops advancing upon them,
whilst the artillery from the opposite bank of the river was break
ing their ill-formed ranks. They fled on every side, Claverhouse
exhorting his men to avenge their defeat at Loudon Hill. All
accounts agree that Monmouth laboured to stop the butchery that
this worst of miscalled heroes commanded ; —
*" Examen," p. 8r.
WHIG AND TORY. 259
*' Taking more pains when he beheld them yield,
To save the fliers than to win the field." *
From the name of contempt which was bestowed upon the poor
Western Covenanters was derived the great party name of Whig.
The nicknames of opposite factions are necessarily obscure in their
origin, and the attempts at their explanation partake of the same
party character as the names themselves. The nicknames which
will live for ever in English history had each a very humble origin.
Tory, according to North, came in about a year before Whig. In
1679 the discussions on the Exclusion Bill were accompanied with
great heats in Parliament, and " without doors, the debates among
the populace were more fierce, and agitated with extremity of
opposite talk." The use of opprobrious words became common.
The anti-exclusionists were first called Yorkists. Then Tantivy
became a bye-word against them. The duke and the Irish were for
the most part in agreement ; so the duke's supporters were first
called Bogtrotters ; and then " the word Tory was entertained,
which signified the most despicable savages amongst the wild
Irish." North says, that " according to the common laws of
scolding," the loyalists now looked out for rival nicknames, " to
clear scores." Their adversaries were first called True Blues —
not satisfied with the plain Protestant blue of the Church ; then
Birmingham Protestants, " alluding to false groats counterfeited
at that place. That term was " not fluent enough for the hasty
repartee ; and, after divers changes, the lot fell upon Whig, which
was very significative, as well as ready ; being vernacular in
Scotland, from whence it? was borrowed, for corrupt and sour
whey." f Defoe accepts this derivation of Whig; and says, the
use of it began in Scotland "when the western men, called Came-
ronians, took arms frequently for their religion It
afterwards became a denomination to the poor harassed people of
that part of the country." X
The further we advance in the history of this miserable reign,
the more are we perplexed by intrigues and counter-intrigues, indi
cating the universal political corruption. After the dispersion of the
Covenanters, duke of Monmouth is suddenly sent for from Scotland;
Sir John Reresby goes to meet him at Doncaster on the 9th of
July. " It happened to be understood, that after his victory he
was about laying a foundation whereon to succeed in that kingdom,
* Waller. t " Examen," p. 32 a.
X " Review," quoted in Wilson's " Life of Defoe," vol. i.p. 73.
260 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and by the industry of his agents making himself popular. *
Charles was ill at Windsor. Monmouth was about his sick bed.
" He thought," says Reresby, " he had the king to himself." Sud
denly the duke of York, who had travelled from Brussels in dis
guise, presented himself : The Court was in commotion. The
king's brother, and the king's illegitimate son, had come to be con
sidered as rivals for the succession. To preserve some tranquillity
they were then both sent away — Monmouth to Flanders, James td
Scotland, as Lord High Commissioner. At Edinburgh, this Pa
pist prince manifested the sincerity of his desires for general
toleration, by superintending with the most anxious vigilance the
punishment of the Covenanters. Charles reproached Monmouth
for having given the government so much trouble with prisoners
after the fight of Bothwell Bridge, and Monmouth answered, that
he could not kill men in cold blood. James exhibited a worse trait
of Stuart nature by presiding over the examinations of prisoners
under torture. Under his at' ministration the Presbyterians were
subjected to the grossest violence of a licentious soldiery. The
military despots had full power to exercise the privileges of the
inquisition in the most summary manner. Do you renounce the
Covenant ? Do you admit that it was murder to kill the archbishop
of St. Andrew's ? Will you pray for the king ? To hesitate was
to incur not only imprisonment but instant death. This violation
of every form of law and every principle of justice went on for
several years. The story of John Brown, " the Christian carrier,"
has been honestly told by Scott, in spite of his lurking admiration
of Claverhouse.f The poor peasant, who had indeed been out
with the insurgents of 1679, was again in his home. He is seized
by dragoons as he is going to dig in some peat ground, and by
the command of Claverhouse he is shot in the presence of his
wife. To her the gallant butcher addressed himself: "What
thinkest thou of thy husband now, woman ? " She replied, '• I
thought ever much of him, and now as much as ever." He said,
" It were but justice to lay thee beside him." She said, " If ye
were permitted, I doubt not but your cruelty would go that length ;
but how will ye make 4 swer for this morning's work ? " He said,
"To man I can b ans - erable ; and for God I will take him in my
own hand." Sue ere the scenes that Scotland witnessed in
these days of her desolation. Unquestionably the duke of York
* " Memoirs," p. 229
t Compare " Tales of a Grandfather," chapter Iii., with " Old Mortality."
PETITIONERS AND ABHORRERS. 26 1
instigated the worst persecutions ; and the wretched instruments
of tyranny, such as Claverhouse, thought that their atrocities would
best exhibit their love and loyalty. Whilst James was doing his
congenial work in Scotland, the efforts of the faction opposed to
his succession to the crown were conducted with few conscientious
scruples. All the prejudices of the people were still stimulated
into an unchristian hatred of Roman Catholics. The processions
of the 17th of November, were repeated amidst the blaze of a
thousand torches, lighting up the hideous representations of nuns,
and priests, and cardinals ; and the effigy of the pope was burnt at
Temple Bar amidst the shouts of an enormous multitude, encour
aged by men of rank, who huzzaed from the balcony of the King's
Head Tavern. These were known as the King's Head Club;
and then as the Green Ribbon Club. The annual pope-burnings
were afterwards imitated at Edinburgh. The processions of Guy
•Fawkes on the 5th of November, and the processions of the pope
on queen Elizabeth's coronation-day, kept alive the intolerant
spirit towards Roman Catholics long after their original party-ob
jects had passed away. Shaftesbury is represented as the grand
contriver of these demonstrations of 1679 and 1680. But the
demagogue contrives in vain unless he has popular materials
to work with. No doubt he well handled the multitude, which at
that period first acquired the name of mob. They were the mobile
vulgus of these exhibitions. Shaftesbury had now been dismissed
from the Presidency of the Council ; and was the moving spirit of
the popular party. On the 28th of November, Monmouth suddenly
returned from Holland. The bells of the city welcomed his arrival.
The bonfires were again lighted. Charles was angry, or affected
to be so, at his son's disobedience. He deprived him of his offi
ces. He ordered him to quit the kingdom, or incur the penalty of
exclusion for ever from the royal presence. Monmouth obstinately
remained. It was the policy of the king to prevent the Parliament
assembling, for he had another scheme in hand to obtain a sum
from the king of France, which would enable him to dispense with
the advice of his troublesome subjects. The treaty failed ; but
Charles had boldly prorogued the Parliament on its meeting in
October. The Country party now set on foot all the powerful
machinery of petitioning. Grand Juries, Common Councils,
provincial Corporations, were suddenly moved, as by one impulse,
to petition the king that the Parliament, should meet at the end of
the first short prorogation. Charles became alarmed. He pub-
262 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
lished a proclamation, vague and absurd enough, against subscrib
ing petitions against the known laws of the land. What these
laws were, the proclamation did not set forth. But there was a re
action. The timid were alarmed; the servile were zealous. Men
who stood aloof from parties dreaded the signs of another Civil
War. They joined in declarations of abhorrence of petitions for
assembling of Parliament ; and those who supported the king in
what they considered his prerogative of calling a Parliament when
he pleased, of acting without parliamentary advice, and without
reference to public opinion, were denominated abhorrers. The
name abhorrer soon became merged in that of Tor-.'.
Tory — Whig — in a few years forgot that they each owed their
birth to "the common laws of scolding." The Irish savage grew
up into a fine gentleman ; the sour whey became the richest cream.
The names of opprobrium blossomed into names of honour. They
flourished in full glory for about a century and a half ; and then
passed into other distinctive titles, not so " fluent for the hasty
repartee." Whatever may be said for or against party distinctions
— and there is a great deal to be said in either view of the ques
tion — one thing is clear : the invention of Tory and Whig has
been a very pleasant boon for the writers upon politics and history.
These once rival nicknames save many circuitous expletives ; and,
if they do not exactly define political principles, they answer as
well as if one large section of public men and their followers had
been called red, the other blue — or one big-endians, the other little-
endians. The terms of Whig and Tory are vernacular ; and we
are thankful for their help in the labour that is before us.
CHARLES THE SECOND'S ALTERATIONS AT WINDSOR. 203
CHAPTER XIIL
Charles the Second's alterations at Windsor. — The Duke of York presented as a Rom
ish Recusant. — Progress of the Duke of Monmouth. — James leaves for Scotland. —
Parliament, — The Exclusion Bill. — Trial and execution of Lord Stafford. — The Par
liament dissolved. — The Oxford Parliament. — Its sudden dissolution. — The King's
Proclamation. — The Whig Vindication.— State Prosecutions. — Stephen College —
Shaftesbury indicted for high \reason. — The Ignoramus. — Court mancevres for the
choice of a sheriff of London. — Shaftesbury flies to Holland. — Persecutions of the
Scotch Covenanters.
Windsor Castle was now the summer residence of Charles II.
In August, 1678, Evelyn went with the duke of Norfolk to Wind
sor, " where was a magnificent Court, it being the first time of his
majesty removing thither since it was repaired." Charles had
changed the whole aspect of the Castle. By his command the
palatial fortress had been adapted for those state-displays which
were to rival the splendours of the Court of the great Bourbon.
A new building, forming the most imposing feature of the north
front, called the Star-building, had been erected from the plans of
Wren ; and by the connexion of the suit of rooms thus obtained
with the older portion, that splendid series of state apartments
was produced which terminated in St. George's Hall. But in these
alterations the ancient character of the proud dwelling of the Plan-
tagenets was utterly destroyed. If Wren had not had a vio
lent distaste of Gothic architecture ; if his royal employer had not
been wholly wanting in that patriotism which would have preserved
the main features of the Windsor of Edward III. and of Elizabeth,
as associated with the glorious days of the monarchy — his incon
gruous pile would not have remained for a century and a half a
significant monument of the corrupt taste of the latter days of the
Stuarts. To Frenchify Windsor Castle was worthy of the king
who needed French gold to pay for his buildings and his mispress
es ; to reward Signor Verrio for seating him enthroned amongst
the cardinal Virtues, or as the grand arbiter of the destinies of
Europe. Catherine of Braganza sits in serene majesty, surrounded
by the gods, on one of Verrio's ceilings. Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn
had the more solid honour of dwelling within view of the Castle,
e&4 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
at Burford House, so called after her son, lord Burford, afterwards
the duke of St. Albans.* Windsor is as characteristic of the age
as Whitehall. Reresby describes Charles in 1680 as living an
unusually quiet life whilst Wren was building and Verrio painting :
" The king shewed me a great deal of what he had done to the
house, which was indeed very fine, and acquainted me with what
he intended to do more ; for then it was he was upon finishing that
most majestic structure. He lived quite privately at this time ;
there was little or no resort to him; and his days he passed in fish
ing or walking in the park." t
Charles was thus " sauntering " at Windsor when the denouement
of the great drama of his house was rapidly approaching. Evelyn
has this record in his Diary, on the 24th of July, 1680: "Went
with my wife and daughter to Windsor, to see that stately court,
now nearly finished. There was erected in the court the king on
horseback, lately cast in copper, and set on a righ pedestal of white
marble, the work of Mr. Gibbons, at the expense of Toby Rustat,a
page of the back stairs, who, by his wonderful frugality, had ar
rived to a great estate in money, and did many works of charity, as
well as this of gratitude to his master, which cost him 1000/. He
is a very simple, ignorant, but honest and loyal creature." There
were many others of the simple, ignorant, honest, and loyal of
Charles's subjects who would be ready to aver, with Toby Rustat,
as the Latin inscription on the pedestal of this statue avers, that
Charles II. was not only the most merciful of masters but the best
of kings. The page of the back stairs who witnessed his never-
failing urbanity would receive that quality as the evidence of every
other merit. But from the more rational thinkers a severer judg
ment was to be expected. The duke of York " now reigned abso
lute in the king's affairs," writes Reresby. X Against the duke was
all the Whig hostility now concentrated. The tale of Monmouth's
legitimacy was revived. The king, oh the 3rd of June, renewed
his declaration that he was never married to any other than the.
queen. On the 26th of June, Shaftesbury, accompanied by several
lords and commoners, came before the Grand Jury at Westmin
ster, and presented the duke as a Popish recusant. The chief
justice defeated this bold measure by discharging the jury, whilst
* Windsor has at length found fit chroniclers of its various subjects of historical in
terest, as well as of the minuter topographical details which illustrate manners and cus
toms, in the elaborate work of Mr. Tighe and Mi Davis—" Annals of Windsor." 2 vols.
1858. t " Memoirs," p. 231. j /favt> p. 2J .
PROGRESS OF THE DUKE OF MONMOUTH. 265
Shaftesbury was in consultation with some of the judges. The Par
liament had been summoned to meet on the 21st of October. The
great question of the exclusion of the duke of York from the suc
cession to the throne was sure to be renewed. It was thought
that the king could.be gained over to consent to this departure
from the principle of hereditary right. The duchess of Ports
mouth had been induced by the Whig leaders, by threats and
promises, to undertake the recommendation of the exclusion to
the king, he having the right of naming his successor by will. He
was to receive an ample grant of money ; he might secure the
power of naming his favourite son, Monmouth, to wear the crown
after his decease. Burnet says that he was assured that the duch
ess of Portsmouth " once drew the king to consent to it." James
in his Memoirs implies this, when he found that " his being sent
away again began to be more discoursed of than ever." He sus
pected that " the king himself began to waver ; and accordingly he
soon found by discoveries on that subject that his majesty now
doubted whether he could stand by him or no. The duke repre
sented to him his constant and late engagement to the contrary,
but found him so changed that it gave him great reason now at
last to apprehend what he had been oft told, but never believed,
that his majesty would abandon him in the end." * The day be
fore the meeting of Parliament the duke of York sailed for Scot
land. The French ambassador, Barillon represents James as de
claring that he would make his enemies repent — " as much as to
say that he hopes to be able to excite troubles in Scotland and
Ireland." Even in England his cause would not have been with
out supporters. " The papists lifted up their crest in great arro
gance." f It was a moment of deep anxiety. Two of Charles's
ministers, Godolphin and Sunderland, advised him to consent to a
Bill of Exclusion. The duchess of Portsmouth had bribes and
blandishments to mould that royal will upon whose consistency
there could be no reliance. But the intrigue failed. The king
wanted the vote of money to precede the Exclusion Bill. The
Whig leaders wanted his assent to the Bill before the vote of
money. The Session was opened on the 21st of October — that
first meeting of the new Parliament which had been prorogued
seven times. Charles in his speech promised to support the Prot
estant religion "against all the conspiracies of our enemies." He
* Clarke's " Life of James II."— Extract from James's " Memf,i— " vol. i. p. 595.
t Reresby, p. 232.
266 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
would concur " in any new remedies which shall be proposed, that
may consist with preservingthe succession of the Crown in its due
and legal course of descent." On the 26th lord Russell moved
" that we may resolve to take into our consideration how to sup
press Popery, and to prevent a Popish successor." On the 2nd of
November, the Bill of Exclusion was brought in.
With the projected exclusion of the duke of York was inti
mately associated the design to set up the duke of Monmouth as
the future heir to the Crown. The king's declaration of his son's
illegitimacy was little heeded by the people. " This duke, whom
for distinction they called the Protestant duke, though the son of
an abandoned woman, the people made their idol." * Dryden has
painted Shaftesbury remonstrating with Monmouth on his doubts
and apprehensions, when a crown was within his view:
" Did you for this expose yourself to show,
And to the crowd bow popularly low ?
For this your glorious progress next ordain,
With chariots, horsemen, and a numerous train." t
The " glorious progress " of Monmouth was in the West of
England, in August, 1680. The country people -came from miles
round to see him in his way to Longleat. At Ilchester the streets
were strewed with flowers. At White Lackington House, near
Ilminster, he was met by two thousand horsemen. A woman
pressed upon him, and touched his hand, to be cured of the king's
evil, as if he already sat in the chair of Edward the Confessor. A
thousand young men, all clothed uniformly in white linen, went
three miles out of Exeter to meet him, and preceded him, hand
in hand, as he entered their city. X There were no riotous proceed
ings; but these demonstrations were very significant of the feel
ings of the middle classes towards the duke of York. The Pro
testant duke and the Papist duke were in direct antagonism. Mon
mouth understood how to keep alive this political cry. Ralph
Thoresby went to see him at Whitehall after his progress. Being
told " that we came from Leeds, the great clothing-place, he an
swered, with a smile, we were not for Popery there, no more than
they in the West, alluding to his extraordinary kind entertainment
there, as in the public news." § There was no political dishonesty
in thus appealing to popular opinion against the dreaded predomi-
* Evelyn, " Diary," November 28, 1679. f " Absalom and Achitophel."
X " Life of lames, Duke of Monmouth." By George Roberts, vol. i. chapter vii.
§ Thoresby's " Diary," vol. ' p. 66.
THE EXCLUSION BILL. 267
nance of Popery. But to set up the son of Lucy Waters as a pre
tender to the Crown was a great mistake of some of the Whig
statesmen — a mistake which inevitably tended to disgust the sober-
minded, and to lead to that re-action which enabled Charles to
walk once more in the old ways of despotism.
After many days' debate in the House of Commons, a Bill was
passed on the 15th of November, " for securing of the Protestant
religion, by disabling James, duke of York, to Inherit the imperial
Crown of England and Ireland, and the dominions and territories
thereunto belonging." It was carried to the Peers by lord Rus
sell. " A great number of members accompanied him and it ; and
as soon as it was delivered gave a mighty shout ; which tumultuous
and barbarous way of proceeding had too great a resemblance of
forty-one, not to convince all judicious persons that this would
prove a prelude of the same tragedy, if not timely prevented." *
The debate of the Lords was carried on with unusual heat. The
two great orators, Shaftesbury and Halifax, were pitted against,
each other in this contest, although their general principles were
the same. All accounts of this debate assign to Halifax the honour
of having thrown out the Exclusion Bill, by his almost unexampled
eloquence. It was rejected on the first reading by a majority of
33 — 63 dividing against 30. Halifax and others who opposed the
exclusion of the duke of York, desired to enact limitations of the
sovereign power, should he succeed to the Crown. The constitu
tional difference between these two propositions has been forcibly
put by Mr. Fox, in his History of James the second : " The ques
tion of what are to be the powers of the Crown is surely of supe
rior importance to that of who shall wear it ? Those, at least, who
consider the royal prerogative as vested in the king, not for his
sake but for that of his subjects, must consider the one of these
questions as much above the other in dignity, as the rights of the
public are more valuable than those of an individual. In this view,
the prerogatives of the Crown are in substance and effect the rights
of the people ; and these rights of the people were not to be sacri
ficed to the purpose of preserving the succession to the most
favoured prince, much less to one who, on account of his religious
persuasion, was justly feared and suspected."
When Charles opened the Parliament on the 21st of October,
he said, to give "the fullest satisfaction your hearts can wish for
the security of the Protestant religion, I do recommend to you to
* " Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 6i, .
268 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
pursue the further examination of the Plot, with a strict and an
impartial inquiry. I do not think myself safe, nor you neither, till
that matter be gone through with ; and therefore it will be neces
sary that the lords in the Tower be brought to their speedy trial,
that justice may be done." In his private conversation at this
period he expressed the utmost contempt of the witnesses for the
Plot. He "proved to a demonstration that many articles they had
given in evidence were not only improbable but quite impossible." *
To turn the wrath of the Parliament against his brother to some
humbler personages, there were victims in the Tower ready for the
sacrifice. The first and only victim selected from these prisoners
was lord Stafford. This nobleman, iiiustrious in the blood of the
Howards, venerable for his age and infirmities, was impeached by
the Commons, and brought to trial before his Peers on the 30th of
November. It was his sixty-ninth birthday. Westminster Hall
had been fitted up with a more than ordinary preparation. Places
were assigned to the king and queen, to the Peers, to the members of
the House of Commons, to the managers of the impeachment, to the
judges. " I think it was the deepest solemnity I ever saw," writes
Reresby. The same forms were gone through, with the same ar
rangements, as when Pym confronted Strafford, and the father of
the peer now accused presided as High Steward. The forms and
the arrangements of benches were the same ; but the spirit was
essentially different. It was not a trial which was to determine
whether England was to be a free monarchy or an absolute mon
archy. It was the struggle of a faction for a temporarv triumph,
to assert a power which was unable to reach the great delinquent.
The witnesses against Stafford were Oates, and Dugdale, and Tur-
berville. The accused peer defended himself with unexpected
ability. He pointed out how unworthy Oates was of belief — one
who pretended that he was never a Papist though he had gone over
to the Church of Rome ; who avowed himself a spy at St. Omers,
though he went through all the discipline of a proselyte. Evelyn,
who was present, was much struck by this, and thought " sucha man's
testimony should not be taken against the life of a dog." But
Dugdale and others positively swore to Stafford's participation in
a plot to assassinate the king. The majority of the peers, eighty-
six to fifty-five, pronounced him guilty, each giving his judgment,
with his hand upon his breast, " upon my honour." The unfortu
nate nobleman was condemned on the 7th of December, and he was
* Reresby, p. 234.
THE PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED. 269
executed on the 29th. Though on the day of his trial he was
assailed by popular invective, when he protested his innocence on
the Scaffold the spectators cried, " We believe you, my lord —
God bless you, my lord." The king, at the prayer of the House of
Lords, had remitted that part of the sentence of a traitor upon
which the most brutal could not look without disgust. The sheriffs
raised a question, which they addressed to the House of Commons,
whether the king could dispense with these barbarities. The
House resolved that it was content that execution should be done
upon lord Stafford by severing his head from his body. Lord
Russell has been accused, upon the assertion of the historian
Echard, of having sanctioned this interference with the dispensing
power— of having,"according to Hume, " seconded in the House
the barbarous scruple of the sheriffs." There is no proof that
Russell took any part in the debate upon the queries of the sheriffs.
We scarcely think that lord John Russell, whatever impartiality he
may thus show to the memory of his ancestor, is quite warranted
in thinking the testimony of Echard sufficient to give probability
to the assertion of a circumstance regarding Russell which is, " if
true, the most to be lamented in his whole life." * In the reign of
James the Second, a Bill was passed by the Peers, for reversing
the attainder of Stafford. It was interrupted in the Commons by
more urgent matters. It was riot till the reign of George the
Fourth, when religious animosity, if not wholly passed away, had
lost their ancient character of vindictiveness, that by a special
statute the attainder was annulled, and the descendants of lord
Stafford were restored to the honours of their house. Whilst
Stafford's blood was being shed upon evidence which the king
considered that of false witnesses, he felt none of the qualms which
his father felt when he consented to the death of the great eail
who said " Put not your trust in princes." No one put any trust
in the second Charles. Himself a Papist, he saw the Papist noble
hunted to death without even a tear for his fate. On the 24th
of December, says Reresby, " I was at the king's couchee, when
there were but four present. His majesty was in a very good
humour, and took up some time in displaying to us the fallacy and
emptiness of those who pretend to a fuller measure of sanctity
than their neighbours, and pronounced them \o be, for the most
part, abominable hypocrites and the most arrant knaves." Even
mitred heads came in for the royal sarcasms. " He was that night
* " Life of William Lord Russell," vol. i. p. 235.
270 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
(wo full hours in putting off his clothes, and it was half an hour
past one before be went to bed. He seemed to be quite free from
care and trouble ; though one would have thought, at this time, he
should have been overwhelmed therewith."* There was enough,
Indeed, to overwhelm a king who would take any matter seriously
to heart. The levity of Charles was his shield and buckler. The
Commons were- not only resolute in their persistent hostility to the
duke of York, but manifested an arbitrary violence in the arrest
of some who had signed the declaration of '• abhorrence." They
exercised a mere constitutional power in the impeachment of Chief
Justice Scroggs for dismissing the Grand Jury when the duke of
York was presented as a Romish recusant ; for stopping the publi
cation of a newspaper called " The Weekly Packet of Advice from
Rome ; " and for inflicting enormous fines upon publishers of
news, and requiring excessive bail, declaring " he would have re
gard to persons and their principles in imposing of fines." The
House at last resolved that until the duke of York was excluded
from the succession, they would not grant any supply. This im
practicable Parliament was dissolved on the 18th of January, 1681.
The distracted condition of public affairs at this juncture ex
cited so great alarm, that superstitions, arising out of unwonted
natural appearances, produced the same effect, even amongst the
educated, as in the days before scientific knowledge, although of
the humblest kind, had taught men to separate the aspects of the
physical world from their supposed connexion with moral causes.
On the 12th of December, 1680, Evelyn writes, " This evening,
looking out of my chamber-window towards the west, I saw a
meteor of an obscure bright colour, very much in shape like the
blade of a sword, the rest of the sky very serene and clear. What
this may portend God only knows. But such another phenomenon
I remember to have seen in 1640, about the trial of the great earl of
Strafford, preceding our bloody rebellion. I pray God avert his judg
ments." The danger of another Civil War was not altogether to be as
sociated with popular credulity. That great danger seemed approach
ing when the new Parliament met at Oxford on the 21st of March.
Some covert design on the part of the Crown was apprehended in
thus departing from the ancient custom of assembling the Parlia
ment at Westminster, except in times of the plague. The Oxford
Parliament of Charles the First was no precedent for this meeting-
pi ice of a new Parliament elected by the general voice of the natioa-
* " Memoirs," p. 238.
THE OXFORD PARLIAMENT. 27 1
The king went to Oxford surrounded by his guards. The Whig
members went to Oxford accompanied by armed bands of re
tainers, wearing in their hats ribbons inscribed "no Popery, no
slavery." Charles was indifferent as to the temper of the Parlia
ment on the question of supplies. On the day that he went to
Oxford he had concluded a treaty with Louis XIV. for a new sub
sidy of French gold. King James the Second records this trans
action with the utmost nonchalance : " The king's necessities had
been long so great, and the Parliament so refractory and insolent,
that he had no way left of relieving one, without consenting to the
unreasonable demands of ,the other, but by a private treaty with
France. The duke first put the king iri the way of it, which the
French at first answered only by compliments and in general
terms. But at last it was concluded they should give the king
fifty thousand pounds every quarter, the first payment to be at the
end of June, 1681, without any condition on the king's side but that
of friendship, but promises on the French part not to disturb
Flanders nor Holland." *
The Parliament of Oxford lasted seven days. The king and his
Court were at Christchurch. The Commons sat in the Schools.
Charles, in his' opening speech, spoke in a bolder tone than had
been his wont : " The unwarrantable proceedings of the last House
of Commons were the occasion of my parting with the last Parlia
ment ; for I, who will never use arbitrary government myself, am
resolved not to suffer it in others .... What I have formerly,
and so" often, declared touching the succession, I cannot depart from.
But to remove all reasonable fears that may arise from the possi
bility of a Popish successor's coming to the Crown, if means can
be found, that in such a case the administration of the government
may remain in Protestants' hand, I shall be ready to hearken to
any such expedient, by which the Religion might be preserved,
and the Monarchy not destroyed." f The " expedient " which was
proposed, with the sanction of the king, was to this effect — that the
duke of York should be banished during his life to the distance of
five hundred miles from the British dominions ;.that certain Roman
Catholics of considerable estates should also be banished ; that on
the decease of the reigning monarch the duke should assume the
tide of king, but exercise no sovereign power, the government
being administered by a regent — the princess of Orange being the
first regent, and the lady Anne regent after the princess. The
* " Life of James II.,"' p. 715. t " Parliamentary History,'' vol. iv. col. 1303:
272 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
expedient was rejected. The Commons again resolved, " That a
Bill be brought in to exclude James, duke of York, from inheriting
the imperial crowns of England and Ireland, and the dominions
and territories thereunto belonging " The refusal of the Commons
to agree to the proposed compromise is regarded by some as
factious, by others as imprudent. James himself thought the ex
pedient, which originated with Halifax, "fully as pernicious " as
the Bill of Exclusion.* The majority of the Parliament thought
the expedient futile. In a "Vindication" which we shall presently
notice, it was said, " The Parliament, observing the precedents of
former ages, did wisely choose rather to exclude him, than to leave
him the name, and place the power in' a regent. For they could
not but look upon it as folly to expect that one of his temper, bred
up in such principles of politics as made him in love with arbitrary
power, and bigoted in their religion which always propagates itself
by blood, would patiently bear these shackles, which would be very
disgustful unto a prince of the most meek disposition This
would certainly have bred a contest; and these limitations of
power proposed to keep up the government must unavoidably have
destroyed it." During the eventful week of the Session at Oxford,
the Commons were not only agitated by this great question of the
succession, but the apple of discord was thrown between the two
Houses, by the refusal of the Lords to entertain an impeachment
by the Commons fcr high treason of an impudent spy and libeller,
Fitzharris. The story of this man is merely the story of one of
those miserable games of plot and counter-plot whicli disgraced
these times. Being in the pay of the Court, he wrote a violent
libel against the king, which it is conjectured that he intended to
put into the pocket of some Whig leader, to implicate him in a
treasonable design. Lady Russell, in writing to her husband,
bids him look to his pockets. Fitzharris next pretended he had
important discoveries to make of Court secrets ; and the Whigs
turned to him as a valuable auxiliary. The Attorney-General then
having been ordered to prosecute him at law, the Whigs resolved
to save him by an impeachment from the certain destruction of a
trial at law. The Lords voted that Fitzharris should be left to the
ordinary course of justice. The Commons asserted their right to
impeach any peer or commoner for high-treason, and held that the
refusal oi the Lords to proceed upon this impeachment was a vio-
* " Life cf James II., vol. i. 11.670.
THE KINGS PROCLAMATION. 273
lation of the constitution of Parliament.* This dispute between
the two Houses was a sufficient pretence for a dissolution. Charles
accomplished this measure with a decision very unusual with him.
The Theatre had been ordered to be fitted up for the Commons,
who required more space than they found in the Schools. On
Saturday, the 26th of March, the king was exceedingly busy
amongst the workmen in the Theatre. On Sunday evening, he
was describing to the circle about him how admirably his faithful
Commons would be accommodated. On the Monday morning two
sedan-chairs were moving out of Christchurch. At the door ofthe
House of Lords the king got out of the first chair ; his robes were
taken out of the second chair. But " the Garter robes were put
up instead of the robes of State ; so the chair must go back, with
an officer to bring the right." f A peer who saw the manoeuvre was
forcibly detained till the robes of State arrived. Then the king
went into the chamber of the Peers ; the Black Rod summoned the
Commons ; and these unexpected words came from the royal mouth :
" My lords and gentlemen : That all the world may see to what a
point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end when
the divisions at the beginning are such, therefore, my Lord Chan
cellor, do as I have commanded you." My Lord Chancellor dis
solved the Parliament. " The king immediately departed with all
speed to London," says Reresby. " It was not to be expressed,"
writes North, "what clutter there was in town about getting off.
The price of coaches mounted cent, per cent, in a quarter of an
hour. It was the conceit of a foreign minister that the town looked
as if it had been besieged, and just surrendered upon articles forth-
¦ with to remove." On the 8th of April the king published a Declar
ation of the causes for the dissolution of the two last Parliaments.
Undutiful as was the behaviour of those Parliaments, his majesty
declared, " That nothing should ever alter his affection to the Pro
testant religion as established by law, nor his love to Parliament :
for he would still have frequent Parliaments."- During the four
remaining years of the life of Charles no other Parliament was
summoned. The royal Declaration was answered in a very elabor
ate " Vindication of the proceedings of the two last Parliaments "
— a calm and "logical paper, which assumed the existence of a real
* Mr. Hallam maintains that the " inadvertent position of Blackstone, that a common
er cannot be impeached for high treason, is contrary to the latest determination of the su
preme tribunal." " Constitutional History," chap. xii. Lord Campbell is opposed to this
opinion of Mr. Hallam j " Lives of the Chancellors," vol. ii. p. 357i etJit. ,s45-
t North, " Examen," p. 104.
Vol IV— 18
274 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
conspiracy for the establishment of Popery.* The king's Declaration
was read in the churches. The arguments of the Vindication, set
forth by Sydney, Somers, and Jones, produced little effect. The
terrors of the Popish plot had passed away. The danger of an
other Civil War excited, with few exceptions, an apprehension
that the Whig leaders were looking beyond a constitutional re
sistance to arbitrary government and to a Popish successor. Ad
dresses of attachment and confidence were now as unmeasured
in their servility as in the clays of the first James. Learned bodies
sent their deputations to Whitehall to tell the king that he derived
not his title from the people, but from God ; that to God only are
kings accountable ; "that it belongs not to subjects either to create
or cens' re, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to
be so by a fundamental hereditary right of- succession, which no
religion, no law, no fault, no forfeiture, can alter or diminish." f
Thuj encouraged, it can scarcely appear surprising that the king
should have followed up his triumph at Oxford — his coup de maistre,
as North terms the sudden dissolution, — by governing without
Patliaments ; and by calling in all the machinery of tyrannous
judges and corrupt juries to crush the leaders of the Opposition ;
that he should have deprived adverse Corporations of their Char
ters ; that he should have dispensed with the laws that interfered
with his Papist brother; and have himself died with the avowal on
his lips that contradicted the lie of his life, — the avowal that he
belonged to the Romish Church.
The lawyers had ample business on their hands immediately
after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament. Fitzharris was
put upon his trial in the Court of King's Bench. He pleaded his
impeachment in bar of the jurisdiction of that court. The judges
evaded the plea ; and he was convicted of a treasonable libel, and
was executed. Plunket, the titular archbishop of Armagh, was
at the same time convicted of an Irish Popish plot. There is no
infamy of the reign of Charles II. greater than this. The inno
cence of the Roman Catholic prelate was believed even by his per
secutors ; but he was sacrificed by the Court, that the popular
suspicion of the Popish tendencies of the king might be removed
by an ostentatious piece of bloodshedding. Thus far the law went
in the old direction of religious intolerance. But the re-action of
* It is printed in the " Parliamentary H.story," vol. iv. Appendix, No. xv.
t Address of the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, quoted from Wilkins' " Concilia," by
Dr. Lingard.
STEPHEN COLLEGE. 275
public opinion was not to be left unused. Some of the witnesses
for the Plot were still in hand ; and they were now as ready to
give evidence against Protestants as they had been to swear away
the lives of Papists. Stephen College, a London joiner, commonly
known as " the Protestant Joiner," had been swaggering at Oxford
with sword and pistol. He was accused of a treasonable attempt
to seize the person of the king. The evidence against him was
chiefly that of Dugdale. A London grand-jury ignored the indict
ment. College was then indicted in Oxfordshire, where a jury
was more compliant. He was tried on the 17th of August, and on
the trial Oates contradicted the evidence of Dugdale. We have
shown the amount and duration of the payments to these witnesses.*
It is to be observed that Oates ceased to be paid at this exact
period. " To punish Oates for his conduct at this trial, his pension
was taken from him, and he was turned out of his lodgings at White
hall, ; says Dr. Lingard. The documents we referred to show
that Dugdale received his wages for a year and a half longer. In
spite of the contradictory evidence Stephen College was hanged ;
the Lord Chief-Justice Guilford having manifested his fitness for
the dirty work of the government by intercepting the papers that
were handed to the prisoner as materials for his defence, and
Wi'tholding some that he asserted were libellous. " It had been a
prime jest," says Roger North, " if, under the pretence of a de
fence, the criminal should be allowed to vent seditious libels, full
of mutiny and reflection to amuse the people ; and so to come
forth and be published in print." f Burnet says of this trial,
" North's behaviour in that whole matter was such, that, probably,
if he had lived to see an impeaching Parliament, he might have
felt the ill effects of it."
A man of far higher mark than " the Protestant Joiner " was
now to be assailed through the great engine of the law. The Irish
witnesses who came over to give testimony against the Roman
Catholic primate had been believed by an English jury. Would
they be less worthy of credit when they swore that they had been
suborned by the earl of Shaftesbury to give false testimony against
the queen, the duke of York, and other personages ? Shaftesbury
was sent to the Tower in July. In November he was indicted of
high-treason before a London grand-jury, preparatory to a tria» by
his Peers in the Court of the High Steward. Had a true bill been
found Shaftesbury would unquestionably have finished his career
Ante, p 253. t " Life of Lord Keeper Guilford," vol. i. p. 301
276 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
on the scaffold, whether guilty or not. His judges would have
been selected by the king ; " his subsequent trial would have
b^en mere matter of form, as much as after sentence the warrant
to behead him." * During the five months of his imprisonment,
Shaftesbury, through his counsel, repeatedly applied for the pro
tection of his own Habeas Corpus Act. The judges evaded the
application. His character was to be blasted, so that the indict
ment should come before a jury sufficiently prejudiced against the
accused. Every weapon of abuse was employed against him. He
was denounced from the pulpits as " the Apostle of Schism ; " he
was characterised, in doggrel verse which preceded Dryden's im
mortal satire, as Machiavel, as the devil's foster-brother, as Achit-
ophel; the hint was taken, and a week before the indictment was
presented at the Old Bailey, came out " Absalom and Achitophel."
The king at this time " was more than usually serious, arid seem
ingly under a greater weight of thought than had been observed of
him on account of the most important business." Reresby, who
notices this unusual demeanour of the king, says that Halifax
maintained that it would be prudent to set Shaftesbury at liberty,
upon terms ; but that " the king was resolved to prosecute him to
the utmost" was the information of one of the secretaries. On
the 24th of November the indictment was presented to the Grand
Jury at the Old Bailey. North' and Pemberton sat on the Bench ;
and, contrary to all precedent, it was resolved that the examina
tion of the witnesses should be in open court. The foreman of
the jury contended that they were sworn to keep the king's coun
sel, their fellows' counsel, and their own, secret. North maintained
that the king could dispense with the secrecy. The object of
these tools of power was to help out the witnesses in their con
tradictions, and to awe the jury. The evidence of the charge "for
compassing and imagining the death of the king " was attempted
to be supported by a paper. " containing no less than matter of
high treason, which was sworn to have been found amongst the
papers in his closet." \ It was a plan of an association, not in his
handwriting, and without a signature. " The witnesses," savs
Burnet, " swore many incredible things against him, mixed with
other things that looked very like his extravagant way of talking."
The jury retired for a short time, and brought back the indictment,
with " Ignoramus " written on the back. A shout of joy went up
in the hall, and was re-echoed through the streets. Bonfires were
* " Livcj of Chancellors,'' vol. ii. p. 362. t Reresby, p. 25: .
COURT MANOEUVRES. 277
lighted. A medal was struck to celebrate the triumph. The king
discoursed to the foreign ambassadors " on the subject of the hard
measure dealt to him by Lord Shaftesbury's jury ; " and, in a
more sensible spirit, gave Dryden the hint for his poem of " The
Medal." The poem made the Medal more popular ; and men pro
claimed their opinions by wearing it hanging at the button-hole.
The refusal of the Grand Jury to find a true bill against Shaftes
bury was imputed to the selection of jurymen by the Whig
sheriffs. To obtain obedient sheriffs who would summon pliant
jurymen was now the great aim of the Court. This scheme was
carried into effect in a very remarkable manner. The Lord Mayor
of 1682, sir John Moor, was a more than average example of the
weakness and vanity that sometimes clings to civic dignitaries.
There was an old custom of the city which is thus described by
Roger North. "At the Bridgehouse feast which is sometime
before the 24th of June, the day of the election at Guildhall, the
Lord Mayor. takes his time, and, out of a large gilt cup, drinks to
some person he names by the title of Sheriff of London and Mid
dlesex, for the year ensuing. If the person be present, the cup is
immediately borne to him, and he pledges my Lord Mayor : if he
be not present then the cup is conveyed in the great coach, with
the sword-bearer and officers, openly, and in state, to the house of
the person drunk to, and the officer declaring the matter, presents
the cup to him ; and then he is called my Lord Mayor's Sheriff,
and not long after he is summoned to the court of the Lord Mayor
and Aldermen, and there, if he holds, he enters into bond to take
upon him the office at the time ; and if he fines off, then, in a like
method, the cup is sent to another, till the person is pitched upon
that will hold : and this way of drinking and fining off is of great
use to the city, for it brings money into the chamber; and it is
called going a birding for sheriffs. At Midsummer-day, when the
Common Hall meets for the election of sheriffs, and the Lord
Mayor and Court of Aldermen are come upon the Suggestum,
called the Hustings, the common sergeant, by the common crier,
puts to the hall the question for confirming the Lord Mayor's
sheriff, which used to pass affirmatively of course. After that, the
Lord Mayor and Aldermen rise and go up into the room they call
the court of aldermen, leaving the floor or body of the livery men
below to choose another sheriff by themselves, without their inter
posing or being concerned in the choice." This is, in part, a mis
representation. For forty years the cus'.om of nominating one of
278 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the sheriffs by the cup had been laid aside, and both sheriffs had
been elected, without such nomination, lay the Common Hall.
The Lord Mayor had been sent for by king Charles; and "the
king himself encouraged him, with expressions not only of protec
tion but command ; and at last, after much hesitation, he deter
mined roundly to conform, and all at once promised the king to
send his cup to any citizen his majesty should nominate to him.
He was slow, but sure " * Jeffreys, the recorder, suggested that
there was a rich Turkey merchant recently arrived from Constan
tinople, who was the very man. Dudley North, c'-<2 brother of the
Chief Justice, was a person of eminent ability, W-O had sounder
notions of commerce and finance than most men of his time ; and
it is painful to find one of such talent and knowledge- listening to
these arguments of his cunning and servile brother : " He was
made to understand what an advantage such an opportunity was to
oblige a king who had power to gratify by employment any fit
persons, such as he was." f And so the cup was sent, " in full
parade and form " to Mr. Dudley North. Midsummer Day, June
24, witnessed a tremendous uproar in Guildhall. The refusal of
the Lord Mayor's cup-sheriff was unmistakeable. The Lord
Mayor retired. He came again and again to put the question, but
with the same result. He then adjourned the Common Hall. It
was contended that the adjournment was illegal. Counsel were
brought on a subsequent day to argue the point, amidst the uproar
of contending factions ; " This was midsummer work indeed,
extreme hot and dusty ; and the partisans strongly disordered
every way, with crowding, bawling, sweating and dust ; all full of
anger, zeal, and filth in cw r -v They ran about up and down
stairs, so that any one, not Decter nformed, would have thought
the place rather an huge Bedlam thau a meeting for civil business.
And yet, under such an awkward face of affairs as this was, the
fate of the English government and monarchy depended but too
much on the event of so decent an assembly." X Roger North,
the encomiast of every measure that tended to convert the English
monarchy into a pure despotism, has no hesitation in acknowledg
ing that the fate of the existing government depended upon having
a sheriff who would return corrupt jurymen. He says of the
Court party, " If one good sheriff were gained, they did not fear
whai hurt the other alone could do ; for both sheriffs made but
one officer." The contest went on for several months. The city
• "Examen," p. 600. t Ibid., p. 001. X " Examen." p. 606.
SHAFTESBURY FLIES TO HOLLAND. 279
was in a continued fever. The Lord Mayor Opened a poll at
which North and another Court candidate were elected ; the
sheriffs opened a poll at which two popular candidates were
elected. The Chief Justice and his tool Jeffreys bullied and
intrigued : and in the end Dudley North and a fit coadjutor were
sworn into office. It was clear that if another indictment had been
presented against Shaftesbury, he would have had small chance of
saving his head. He fled to Holland, accompanied by his constant
friend, the famous John Locke. He died'in the following year.
The duke of York, as High Commissioner in Scotland, had
been manifesting the spirit in which he purposed to govern the two
countries when the power should fall into his hands." He had put
down an outburst of the puritan spirit in the followers of two min
isters, Cargill and Cameron., known as Cameronians. The excess
of fanaticism was met by the excess of tyranny ; and women, refus
ing to cry " God bless the king," went to their deaths as martyrs.
A Parliament was called. It voted that the succession to the
Crown was indefeasible ; it enacted a test, which, as altered by a
compromise of opposite parties, asserted the king's supremacy,
renounced the Covenant, inculcated the doctrine of passive obedi
ence, and disclaimed any attempt to change the civil or religious
establishments ; but at the same time it expressed the adherence to
the Protestant religion of the person taking the test. The court
iers proposed that all princes of the blood should be exempted
from the oath. The earl of Argyle opposed this, and he was con
sequently marked for destruction. In taking the test himself, as a
privy counsellor, he said that he did not mean to bind himself, in a
lawful way, from wishing and endeavouring any alteration which
he, might think to the advantage of Church or State, and not repug
nant to the Protestant religion and his own loyalty. A few days
after he was arrested ; was indicted for high treason ; and was found
guilty of treason and leasing-making. He contrived to escape to
Holland. His estate was confiscated. Scotland was wholly under
the feet of the tyrant. Judicial murders, were committed in every
district of the southern and western counties. Hundreds were
outlawed. A seditious declaration was published by the maddened
Presbyterians, renouncing allegiance to Charles Stuart. To com
pel suspected persons to abjure the declaration was now the busi
ness of a lawless soldiery and slavish magistrates. The Scottish
administration of the duke of York is thus complacently recorded :
" He stifled at its first birth a commotion of the fanatical party
280 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
which then happened to break out, whereof some were taken and
made examples of, but many more were won over by the great
esteem his presence had gained amongst them."* In his own
Memoirs of this period, he wonders how men could apprehend
danger from Popery, "while they overlooked the imminent danger
of being swallowed up by Presbytery and Fanaticism." f
Congenial as his pursuits in Scotland were to the duke of
York, he desired to return to England. He accomplished this ob
ject by enlisting the duchess of Portsmouth in his interest, by
some secret arrangement for settling a pension upon her out of
the income which he derived from the Post Office, upon which an
nuity she might raise a hundred thousand pounds. The affair
could not be managed; but Charles gave the duchess 10,000/.
quarterly out of his French pension, and she went abroad. The
duke came to England for a short time, and then returned to Scot
land, having narrowly escaped shipwreck in his passage. He
again came to give that impulse to the schemes for arbitrary power
which Charles had not resolution himself to carry out. Halifax
and Seymour, two of the king's ministers, opposed the duke's re
turn to London. Charles wanted his brother to fortify his resolves
to take "those vigorous councils and resolute methods the duke
had long pressed him to." { The prince of Orange had been in
England in 1681 ; and Charles then said to him that "he was con
fident, whenever the duke should come to reign, he would be so
restless and violent that he could not hold it four years to an
end." § Charles permitted the duke to try his hand in government
before he " should come to reign." The duke's biographer says,
" He shewed by his management in Scotland a good example of
the doctrine he preached, which, when his majesty followed, it set
him at rest for the remainder of his days." ||
• " Life of James IL," vol. i. p. 644. t Ibid., p. 656.
X Ibid., p. 799. § Burnet. 0 " Life of James II." p. 734.
THE ARMY ESTABLISHME* T. 281
CHAPTER XIV.
The army establishment. — Quo Warranto Information against the Corporation of Lon
don. — Surrenders of the Charters of other CorporaUons. — The Rye-House Plot. —
Arrests of Russell, Essex, and Sidney. — Trial ot Russell. — Russell's Execution. —
Trial of Sidney. — Scottish persecution.— The duke cf York's power in England. —
Decree of the University of Oxford.— Repeal of the Test Act.— Death of Charles
the Second in the faith of the Romish Church. — William Penn. — Settlement of
Pennsylvania. — Penn's Treaty with the Indians.
The " rest for the remainder of his days " which Charles se
cured, through following the doctrine which the duke of York
preached, was something very different from the ease which he
enjoyed in the early years of the Restoration. There were to
come, two years of a desperate struggle against the liberties of the
people, the termination of which struggle was to be left to the
greater energy of his successor. All the real power seemed now
to lie in the hands of the Crown. London bad lost its popular
sheriffs ; the choice of other sheriffs throughout the land was
chiefly directed by the Court ; the sheriffs could pack the jurymen
upon state-trials ; the jurymen would be duly exhorted from every
pulpit to believe, upon the authority of the Scriptures, that, as all
resistance to authority was a sin, the support of authority in all its
desires was a virtue. When a subject stood at the bar, indicted
for treason or misdemeanor at king's command, it was neces
sary for the country's peace that the Crown should have its wished-
for verdict. A trial was a ceremony at which good men should as
sist, by their unanimity of opinion with the king's judges and the
king's attorney, to place the throne upon the solid foundation of
the people's implicit obedience. There was now an army sufficient
to make men understand the danger of insurrection. It was some
thing more than two regiments of horse-guards, as in the recent
days when the Parliament was jealous of a royal force, and relied
for defence against external enemies upon a national militia. In
addition to two regiments of household cavalry, there were two
regiments of foot guards, a regiment of dragoons, and five other
regiments of foot. There was no war to give employment to thk
262 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
small army. There was no foreign garrison to absorb any portion
of that military strength which was available for the repression of
sedition at home. Tangier, which, when it came to the English
Crown as the dowry of queen Catherine, was held to be equivalent
to Dunkirk, was abandoned in 1683, and the garrison was brought
to England. Two millions had been expended upon the mole and
fortifications. The Parliament had objected that the garrison was
a nursery for a popish army. When the opinion of the Parliament
had ceased to be regarded, Charles brought this army home ; after
the works of Tangier had been utterly destroyed, and the harbour
blocked up with the rubbish. With an adequate military power
about the Court, the lesser wheels of the machinery of government
would be all in order. The rebellious city of London was now to
be taught its duty. In the corporate franchises of the metropolis,
and in those of other cities and towns, rested the chief force of the
middle classes. The old puritan spirit was not dead. Liberty and
Protestantism were names which stirred the most sluggish spirits
into patriotism ; and in the freedom of civic proceedings the tem
per of the people found a lawful right of assertion. Take away
the charter of the city of London, advised the slavish lawyers, and
break up that strong-hold of democracy. We are " the finest
flour," said the courtiers ; the common people are " the coarsest
bran." * There was no precedent for a forfeiture of corporate
privileges ; but such forfeiture was to be accomplished now by the
example of the surrender ofthe abbeys to Henry VIII. An In
formation, quo warranto technically called, was laid in the King's
Bench against the Corporation of London for two misdemeanors —
for having taken tolls under a by-law, and for having petitioned the
king to assemble the Parliament, in 1679, which petition was pub
lished. On the 1 8th of June the lord mayor, sheriffs, and alder
men knelt before the king, and humbly petitioned that his majesty
would not enter-up judgment against the City; and they were re
quired to make no future election of mayor, sheriff, aldermen, re
corder, or other officers, without the royal approbation ; that if the
king should disapprove of the mayor, they should proceed to re
election, when, upon a second disapproval, the mayor should be
nominated by the king himself; that in the case of the sheriffs, if
the king did not approve the first choice, he should at once nomi
nate his own sheriffs. The Corporation, thus bound hand and
foot, continued to be the slaves of the Court, till their shackles
* See Chamberlayne's " Present State of England," 1687, p. 37.
SURRENDERS OF THE CHARTERS. 283
were knocked off by the Revolution of 1688. Other corporations
were terrified into the surrender of their Charters. In 1684 the
Lord Chief Justice, Jeffreys, did " g<"eat matters towards bringing
in the Charters, as it was called," in his Northern circuit ; and the
king " was persuaded to present him with a ring, publicly taken
from his own finger, in token of his majesty's acceptance of his
most eminent services ; " and thus encouraged, Jeffreys " went
down into the country, as from the king Legatus a Latere, es
teemed a mighty . favourite ; which, together with his lofty airs,
made all the Charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down before
him ; and he returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns." *
There was little chance, -after this, that a Parliament should be
chosen in which the burgesses of England, who had fought the
battles of freedom for four centuries, should have any due share of
parliamentary representation. Prudent royalists were alarmed at
such proceedings. Evelyn saw nothing but evil in "these violent
transactions " — :a learned recorder set aside to make way for an
obscure lawyer — the Lord Mayor and two Sheriffs holding as cus-
todes, at the king's pleasure. " The pomp and grandeur of the
most august city in the world thus changed face in a moment :
which gave great occasion of discourse, and thoughts of hearts,
what all this would end in." \ The Court judged that resistance
to its behests was now utterly at an end. The king " at last sub
dued entirely that stubborn and rebellious city." { The duke of
York had a little private revenge to accomplish : " He thought it
necessary to terrify others by making an example of the late sher
iff, Pilkington ; who having said, upon the duke's return, ' he had
fired the city and was now come to cut their throats,' he caused
him to be indicted, May 8, and the words being proved by two
aldermen, the court assigned his royal highness a hundred thou
sand pounds for damages." § The royal influence could not only
effect the utter ruin of a citizen for hasty words, but it had a year
before shown that it could so manage the administration of justice
that a detestable murderer should escape unpunished. Lady Ogle,
a widow of fifteen, had, against her wish, become the wife of
Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, called, on account of his great
wealth, " Tom of Ten Thousand." The rich man and his bride
were parted for a time ; and she went abroad, where she had pre
viously met Charles John, count Konigsmark. The intimacy was
* " Examen," p. 625. t " Diary," October 4, 1683.
X " Life of James II," vol. i. p. 738. § Ibid
284 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
probably renewed. On Sunday evening, the 12th of February,
1682, Thynne was passing in his coach along Pall Mall, and near
a part then known as St. Alban's-street, where now stands the
Opera-arcade, he was murdered by a mounted ruffian, attended by
two others, who fired upon him with a blunderbuss loaded with
four bullets. Thynne expired on the following morning. The as
sassin, George Borosky, a Pole, and his confederates, two Swedes,
were apprehended. Count Kbnigsmark was captured a week after,
in endeavouring to escape from the country. The four were tried
at Hick's Hall, on the 28th, the count being indicted as an acces
sory before the fact. The Pole and the two Swedes were found
guilty and were hanged. The count was acquitted. Sir John
Reresby, who was very active in communicating with the king and
the council about this murder, says, " being at the king's couchee
on the 21 st, I perceived by his majesty's discourse that he was
willing the count should get off." He was the first that carried
the news of the count's acquittal to the king, " who seemed to be
not at all displeased at it ; but the duke of Monmouth's party, who
all appeared to add weight to the prosecution, were extremely dis
satisfied that the count had so escaped." * Of Konigsmark's guilt
there was not the slightest doubt.
" Nothing," says the Memoirs of James, " now was wanting to
make the king perfectly easy in his affairs but the duke's assist
ance in the management of them The discovery of a
cursed conspiracy, which in part they had already providentially
escaped, but still in great measure hung over their heads, hasted
the hike's re-admission into business for their mutual security."!
The providential escape was from the assassination of the king
and the duke, which it was alleged was intended to be accompUshed
. Rye-House, in Hertfordshire. Keeling, a vintner, communicated
to one of the Secretaries of State, that a plot had been devised for
engaging forty men to way-lay the king and his brother, as they
returned from Newmarket, at a farmhouse called the Rye, belong
ing to Rumbold, a maltster; that, the king returning sooner than
was expected, that scheme was given up, and a general insurrec
tion was projected by certain eminent persons, amongst whom were
the duke of Monmouth, lord Essex, lord Howard of Escrick, and
lord William Russell. Some of the inferior persons accused were
first apprehended. The Rye-House Plot was in every mouth. The
place was not so well known to Londoners as at the present day,
* " Memoirs," p. 26.-2. f •' Life of James II." vol. i. p. 738.
ARRESTS OF RUSSELL, ESSEX, AND SIDNEY. 285
when hundreds of summer holiday-folks go to make merry at the
Rye-House on the pleasant banks of the Lea. It was then de
scribed as " a place so convenient for such a villainy as scarce to be
found in England ; besides the closeness of the way over a river
by a bridge, gates to pass, a strong hedge on one side, brick walls
on the other." * The Rye-House Plot appears to have been a real
conspiracy amongst obscure men. That the Whig leaders partici
pated in the design of assassination was not considered probable
even amongst royalists of the time. Upon the committal to the
Tower of Russell, Essex, and Sidney, Evelyn writes, " The lords
Essex and Russell- were much deplored, few believing they had
any evil intention against the king or the church. Some thought
they were cunningly drawn in by their enemies, for not approving
some late counsels and management relating to France, to Popery,
to the persecution of the Dissenters, &c." The duke of Mon
mouth, lord Grey, sir Thomas Armstrong, and two others, for
whose arrest a proclamation was made, escaped. The trials of
three minor conspirators were hurried on, and they were convicted
on the evidence of their associates. On the 13th of July, lord
Russell was brought to trial. From the first he gave himself up
for lost. As he entered the Tower he told his servant Taunton
that he was sworn against, and his enemies would have his life.
Taunton hoped that his master's enemies had no such power.
'¦Yes," said Russell, "the devil is loose r" f
According to the political creeds of men of a past age, it has
been customary to speak of Russell and Sidney as martyrs in the
cause of liberty, or as scoundrels who had no just notions of gov
ernment. J To regard the conduct and character of either of these
eminent men with enthusiastic admiration is to us as impossible,
as to consider them as selfish and ambitious intriguers, ready to
plunge the nation into civil war for the advancement of a faction,
or the advocacy of a wild theory of a republic. Their notions of
political perfectibility were essentially different. Russell, the
calm and practical representative of a great party, sought to at
tain freedom under a monarchy sufficiently checked by a Parlia
ment, and to exercise religion under a Protestant establishment, toler
ant to all forms of dissent but that of Roman Catholicism. Popery
* " Autobiography of Sir John Bramston," p. 182.
t " Lifa of William Lord Russell, by Lord John Russell, vol. ii. p. 25.
t The Tory opinion is thus delivered by the Tory Johnson, with his usual vehemence.
See Boswell's ".Johnson."
286 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
was his one great terror, and not unreasonably so. He was violent
towards Papists, because he regarded Popery " as an idolatrous
and bloody religion." He was their relentless and persecuting
enemy when his party was all-powerful, for reasons which he thus
expressed : " As for the share I had in the prosecution of the
Popish plot, 1 take God to witness that I proceeded in it in the
sincerity of my heart, being then really convinced, as I am still,
that there was a conspiracy against the king, the nation, and the
Protestant religion." * The political principles of Algernon Sidney
were essentially different. He was the last of the old Common
wealth-men, of the school of Vane. He hated the legitimate tyran
ny of Charles as much as he hated the usurped power of Cromwell.
He disliked Popery rather with the dislike of the philosopher
than that of the Christian. Neither Russell nor Sidney con
templated the removal of political evils by the assassination of
the king. When Charles gave for his reason for denying mercy
to Russell, " If I do not take his life he will soon have mine," he
was thinking of his father's fate rather than of such danger as that
of the Rye-House. He told Russell upon his first examination
before the Council that nobody suspected him of any design against
his person, but there was good evidence of his being in designs
against his government. Russell was as conscious of his own
political importance as Charles was aware that in removing him he
removed the great obstacle to the designs which James now steadily
advocated with the zeal of a bigot and the blindness of a despot.
" Arbitrary government," said Russell to his chaplain, Mr. John
son, " cannot be set up in England without wading through my
blood." The trial of Russell derives its chief interest from a circum
stance which associates it with the tenderness, the devotion, the
fortitude of woman. The day before the trial, lady Russell, the
daughter of the earl of Southampton, wrote a note to her husband
in these words : "Your friends believing I can do you some ser
vice at your trial, I am extremely willing to try ; — my resolution will
hold out ; pray let yours. But it may be the Court will not let me ;
however, do you let me try." On the 13th of July the forms of in
dictment having been gone through, and the prisoner having in
vain requested a postponement of the trial for a day, that he might
produce witnesses not yet arrived, lie said, " May I have somebody
to write, to help my memory ? " " Yes, a servant," was the answer.
* Russell's paper delivered to the sheriff before his execution
TRIAL OF RUSSELL. 287
" My wife is here to do it." And so, by her lord's side, sat that
noble wife,-calmly doing her office amidst the most exciting scenes.
Lord Howard of Escrick appears. He was Russell's relative. To
save himself, he offered'to criminate his friends. He is put in the
witness-box. His voice falters. "We cannot hear you, my lord,"
says one of the jury. Howard explains, " There is an unlucky ac
cident happened which hath sunk my voice : I was but just now
acquainted with the fate of my lord of Essex." The news ran
through the court that Essex had committed suicide in the Tower.
" This fatal news coming to Hicks's Hall upon the article of my
lord Russell's trial, was said to have had no little influence on the
jury and all the bench to his prejudice."* The Attorney-General
said, " My lord Russell was one of the council for carrying on the
plot with the earl of Essex, who hath this morning prevented the
hand of justice upon himself." Men doubted whether Essex
perished by his own hand. His head was so severed from his
body " that an executioner could hardly have done more with an
axe. There were odd reflections upon it." f The evidence of
Howard and other witnesses went to show that Russell, before
Shaftesbury left the country, had attended a meeting in the City,
at which a rising was debated, and there was talk of the feebleness
pf the king's guard at Whitehall. Howard also asserted that
there was a cabal of six persons, Monmouth, Essex, Russell, Sid
ney, Hampden, and himself; and that one of their objects was to
draw the Scotch malcontents to join with them. Russell made a
very short defence, in which he solemnly denied the charges im
puted to him ; I have looked upon the assassination of any pri-
'vate person as an abominable, barbarous, and inhuman thing, tend
ing to the destruction of all society. How much more the assas
sination of a prince, which cannot enter into my thoughts without
horror and detestation ; especially considering him as my natural
prince, and one upon whose death such dismal consequences are
but'too likely to ensue. ... As for going about to make or
raise a rebellion, that, likewise, is a thing so wicked, and withal
impracticable, that it never entered into my thoughts. Had I been
disposed to it, I never found, by all my observation, that there was
the least disposition or tendency to it in the people. And it is
known, rebellion cannot be now made here, as in former times, by
a few great men." | And yet we cannot doubt that " a few great
* Evelyn " Diary," July 13. t Ibid.
X Lord John Russell's "Life," vol. ii.p. 60. From the MS. in Lord W. Jtussell's
handwriting. .;' '
288 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
men " contemplated some coercion of the government, perhaps
short of rebellion, despairing of " having things redressed in a legal
parliamentary way." It is difficult to draw the line between legal and
illegal resistance when men are hopeless of just government. Russell
was convicted of treason, though certainly he was illegally convict
ed. He had committed no overt act, imagining the king's death,
which had brought him within the Statute of Treasons of Edward
the Third. The Act of William and Mary, annulling his attainder
says that he was, "by partial and unjust constructions of law, wrong
fully convicted, attainted, and executed for high-treason." Russell
went to his death with Christian fortitude. Extraordinary efforts
were made to save his life, but Charles was not to be moved, even
by the offer of a hundred thousand pounds. Russell was beheaded
on the 21st of July, on a scaffold erected in. Lincoln's Inn Fields.
His parting with his noble wife had something more touching than
sobs and tears. " This flesh you now feel, in a few hours must be
cold," he said. They then kissed and separated, in eloquent
silence. The trial of Algernon Sidney was postponed till the 21st of
November. Pemberton was Chief Justice when Russell was tried.
He was removed to make room for Jeffreys. Lord Howard of
Escrick was again the chief witness against the friend who had con
fided in the betrayer's professions of republicanism. Two wit
nesses were required by the Statute of Treasons. There was no
second living witness against Sidney ; that defect was supplied by a
manuscript found among Sidney's papers, in which treasonable
principles, were held to be advocated. He approved of conspir
acies against Nero and Caligula, and therefore was ready to com
pass the king's death. Howard's depositions were different from
those which he gave on the trial of Russell. Sidney appealed to
the jury whether any credit was due to a man who deceived and
betrayed his friends — who had said he could not get his own par
don from the king till he had done " some other jobs." Of course
Sidney was convicted in the utter absence of all legal evidence of
treason. He was brought up for judgment on the 26th. When
he heard his sentence he prayed God that, "if at any dayjhe
shedding of blood that is innocent must be revenged, let the weight
of it fall only on those that maliciously persecute me for righteous
ness' sake." Jeffreys, although he had kept his brutal nature in
some subjection to decency, then exclaimed, " I pray God to work
in you a temper fit to go into the other world, for I see you are
SCOTTISH PERSECUTIONS. 289
not fit for this." Sidney stretched out his arm, and said, "My
lord, feel my pulse, and see if I am disordered." Evelyn records
that on the 5th of December, he was at a wedding where he met
Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys aad Mr. Justice Withings. " These
great men spent the rest of the afternoon, till eleven at night, in
drinking healths, taking tobacco, and talking much beneath the
gravity of judges ; who had a day or two before condemned Mr.
Algernon Sidney, who was executed the 7th on Tower Hill, on the
single witness of that monster of a man, lord Howard of Escrick,
and some sheets of paper taken in Mr. Sidney's study, pretended
to be written by him, but not fully proved." Sidney died with a
simple courage and unostentatious composure worthy of his
strength of mind. " When he came on the scaffold, instead of a
speech, he told them only that he had made his peace with God ;
that he came not thither to talk, but to die ; put a paper into the
sheriff's hand, and another into a friend's ; said one prayer as short
as a grace ; laid down his neck, and bid the executioner do his
office." *
Connected with the other chief participators in the alleged
conspiracy of 1683, we may mention that Monmouth was ultimately
pardoned ; and that sir Thomas Armstrong was given up by the
States of Holland, and executed without a trial upon his sentence
of outlawry. He had surrendered within the year, during which
the law allows the accused to claim a trial. Jeffreys rudely resisted
this legal demand of Armstrong.
The connexion of the English Whigs with the discontented in
Scotland gave birth to a terrible persecution In that enslaved king
dom. In England, even a Jeffreys could not go beyond a certain
point under the forms of law. In Scotland those forms were
utterly set at nought. Scotsmen, arrested in London, were sent to
Edinburgh for their mock trials. Some eminent haters of the
tyranny under which the land had fallen fled to Holland. Torture
was administered to other suspected and accused persons with a
ferocity exceeding even the times when the duke of York superin
tended the process of the boot. Sentences of forfeiture were
lavishly pronounced, by which such tools as Graham of Claver
house were enriched. The prisons were crowded with Covenant
ers. In England, James had openly succeeded to the chief admin
istration of public affairs. He had not withheld his consent from
the marriage of his daughter, Anne, to the Protestant prince
1 * Evelyn, " Diary."
Vol. IV.— iq
290 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
George of Denmark. The king rewarded the duke by his restora
tion to his offices of High Admiral and Privy Councillor.* Titus
Oates was indicted for Scandalum Magnatum, and damages of
100,000/. for a libel against the duke were awarded. Tbe Rev.
Samuel Johnson, chaplain to the late lord Russell, was summoned
before the Council, to answer whether he was .the author of a book
called "Julian's Acts and Methods to undermine and extirpate
Christianity." He acknowledged that he was. He was com
manded to produce one of the books. He said that he had sup
pressed all the copies, " so that they were now his own private
thoughts, for which he was not accountable to any power on earth."
No copy could be obtained ; and he was therefore prosecuted for
writing a book called "Julian the Apostate." He was condemned
in a fine of five hundred marks, which he was unable to pay ; and
was committed to prison. In prison he remained till the time
when James had the regal power, and exercised it with a frantic
violence, of which the barbarity perpetrated upon this exemplaiy
clergyman, whose only fault was a love of his country's liberties,
was one of the most hateful examples.! Arbitrary government
had now its full swing. The Oxford divines came boldly forward
to g've their aid to degrade the free monarchy of England into an
unmixed despotism. They published a decree against pernicious
books and damnable doctrines. They anathematised the seditious
and impious principle that civil authority is derived originally from
the people ; that there was any implied compact between a king
and his people : passive obedience was the only concern of the
subject with the government under which he lived. Sir George
Mackenzie, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, published his treatise
"Jus Regium," which he dedicated to the University of Oxford, in
which he maintained that " whatever proves monarchy to be the
best government, does, by the same reason, prove absolute mon
archy to be the best government." Sir Robert Filmer's pos
thumous work, which had the honour of calling forth the refutation
of its doctrines by Locke, went to the same extremes. Mr. Hallam
truly says, " We can frame no adequate conception of the jeopardy
in which our liberties stood under the Stuarts, especially in this
particular period, without attending to this spirit of servility which
had been so sedulously excited." The confidence of the ultra-
royalists was unbounded : " now the king had brought his affairs
* " Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 745.
t " Memorials of Mr. Samuel Johnson," prefixed to the folio volume of his works- 171a
REPEAL OF TEST ACT. 29 1
to a more happy situation than ever they had been since the Res
toration. He saw his enemies at his feet, and the duke his brother
at his side ; whose indefatigableness in business took a great share
of that burthen off his shoulders, which his indolent temper made
uneasy to him." * Charles had his brother officially at his side
through dispensing with the Test Act. Louis XIV. was carrying
on his ambitions designs without any apprehension of the inter
ference of England. By turns he bribed and he bullied the abject
Charles. There were some even amongst Charles's advisers who
felt the degradation. Halifax ventured to suggest the calling a
Parliiment.. James was diametrically opposed to such a measure.
Halifax advised that France should no longer dictate to England.
James knew that the French alliance ratified the slavery of England.
Charles was undecided — or pretended to be so. The great arbiter
stepped in to settle many doubts and difficulties.
On Sunday evening, the 1st of February, 1685, Evelyn was at
Whitehall. A week after he recorded his impressions of the scene
which he there witnessed : " I can never forget the inexpressible
luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and as it
were total forgetfulness of God, It being Sunday evening. The
king sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland,
and Mazarine, &c. : a French boy singing love songs in that
glorious gallery ; whilst above twenty of the great courtiers and
other dissolute persons were at Basset around a large table, a
bank of at least two thousand in gold before them." On Monday
morning, the 2nd of February, the king was struck with apoplexy.
On the Tuesday, he had somewhat recovered. On the Thursday
his case was considered hopeless. Two bishops came to him ; he
said he was sorry for what he had clone amiss; heard the form of
absolution ; but declined to receive the sacrament. T/.e duchess
of Portsmouth, who had manifested a real grief, told Barillon, the
French ambassador, that Charles was really a Roman Catholic ;
she urged Barillon to tell the duke that if any time were lost, his
brother would die out of the pale of his Church. James tells the
result himself. The duke "asked him if he desired he should
send for a priest to him ? to which the king immediately replied,
'for God's sake, brother, do, and please to lose no time.' But
then, reflecting on the consequences, added, ' But will you not
expose yourself too much by doing it ? ' The duke, who never
thought of danger when the king's service called, though but in a
" Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 746.
292 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
temporal concern, much less in an eternal one, answered, ' Sir,
though it cost me my life, I will bring one to you.'"* James
found Father Huddlestqn, a Benedictine monk. The king con
fessed, received extreme unction ; and then the Sacrament was
administered by Huddleston. His natural children were called
around the dying man's bed. Monmouth alone was absent, though
his father had been privately reconciled to him. The queen sent
to ask her husband's pardon for any offence she might have com
mitted. " It is I that ought to ask her pardon," said Charles, with
a passing remorse. " Do not let Nelly starve," he said to his
brother. He apologised to the watchers around him for the trouble
he was giving. The politeness of the gentleman remained with
him to the last. Charles died at noon on Friday, the 6th of Feb
ruary. The people of London, odious as was the government of
the king, lamented for the man. In that lament was probably
mingled the fear that a worse king was coming.
About three years before the death of Charles the Second, an
event took place which would then attract little of the regard of
English courtiers and politicians, but which was fraught with im
portant consequences never to be forgotten in the history of the
Anglo-Saxon race. On the 5th of March, 1682, William Penn,
who we last saw standing undaunted at the bar of the Old Bailey,
was before the king In council at Whitehall. His father, the admi
ral, had died in 1670, leaving his Quaker son a considerable prop
erty. The duke of York, a friend of admiral Penn, had undertaken
to be the young man's protector. Two years after his father's
death William Penn applied to James to use his influence to pro
cure some remission of the persecution of the Quakers. The duke
made some of those professions of toleration which he had learnt
to employ upon particular occasions. He was kind to Penn ; who
became a person of consequence at Whitehall. A considerable
sum, about 16,000/., was due from the Treasury to Penn as his
father's heir — the amount of money lent by the admiral, with ac
cumulated interest. He petitioned to have his claim settled, not
by a money-payment, but by the grant of a large tract in America
— a region of mountains and forests and prairies, accessible from
the sea by the river Delaware. During sixty years the colonisation
of the great North American continent by Englishmen had gone
steadily forward. The plantation of Virginia, the plantation of
New England in the reign of James I., laid the foundations of that
* " Life of James II.," vol. i. p. 747.
SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA.
293
mighty community whose present marvellous progress appears but
the faint realisation of its ultimate destinies.* In the reign of Charles
the Second, Carolina was also settled. Maryland had been a pre
vious acquisition; New Jersey had been conquered from the Dutch.
The commercial importance of the English North American set
tlements was stated by De Witt in 1669, when he wrote " The In
terest of Holland." He says, " The long persecution of Puritans
in England has occasioned the planting of many English colonies
in America, by which they drive a very considerable foreign trade
thither." Penn knew well that in the persecuted of his own sect
he would find the best of settlers— men always remarkable for their
industry and frugality. Not so solicitous for worldly profit, as for
a home for his followers beyond the reach of penal laws, Penn
assiduously pressed his suit ; and on the 5th of March, he stood
before the king and council, to have his charter signed. The
name suggested for this mountainous and wooded region was first
New Wales ; and secondly, Sylvania. The king prefixed Penn to
Sylvania. The Quaker legislator and his friend Algernon Sidney,
the republican, drew up a constitution for the new colony. It was
essentially democratic. Religious liberty was its great element,
and with that was necessarily connected civil freedom. There was
to be an executive Council, of which Penn, the proprietor, or his
deputy, • was to be president'; which Council was to consist of
seventy-two persons. There was to be an Assembly. Both were
to be chosen by universal suffrage. It has bean justly observed,
that "as the proprietor and legislator of a province which, being
almost uninhabited when it came into his possession, afforded a
clear field for moral experiments, he had the rare good fortune of
being able to carry his theories into practice without any compro
mises, and yet without any shock to existing institutions."!
The Welcome, a vessel of three hundred tons, in which Penn
was to embark, set sail from Deal on the ist of September, 1682.
There were a hundred passengers on board, of whom a third died
of the small pox during the voyage. On the 27th of October, the
survivors, with their governor, landed at Newcastle, on the Dela
ware. The next day Penn assembled the inhabitants, consisting
of families of various nations, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, English.
He produced his charters. He explained his svstem of government.
Penn's relation, Colonel Markham, had arrived before him, and
* See ante, vol. iii. p. 276.
t Macaulay, " History," vol i. 8vo, p. 507.
294 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
had prepared the way for him, by calling an Assembly for the pur
poses of legislation. In three days, Penn's constitution was adopt
ed ; and supplementary laws were enacted to carry out its spirit.
The industrial education of rich and poor was provided for ; justice
was to be cheaply administered ; prisons were to be regulated with
a view to the reformation of the criminal, death punishments, ex
cept for murder and tr.ason, were to be abolished. The governor
had much labour before him, but he went through it resolutely.
The lands of the province were surveyed, and divided into lots for
grant or purchase. Philadelphia was founded upon a plan which
contemplated the growth of a magnificent city. In a year many
houses had been built, and emigrants came in great numbers to be
come farmers or traders in a land where men could dwell without
fear of oppression. Schools were founded. A Printing-Press was
set up. A Post was established. The great outworks of civilisa
tion were won. The principles of justice, upon which the new col
ony was founded, were to guide the conduct of the colonists to
wards the native Indians. The treaty with the red men — the only
treaty that was never sworn to and never broken, says Voltaire —
was one of friendship, and brotherhood, and mutual defence. An
American has painted the scene, with the vagueness of his time as
to portraiture and costume ; but West's picture gives some notion
of a solemn ceremony, in which the Great Spirit, the common
Father of all, was appealed to in the pledge that the power of civ
ilisation should not be abused by the exercise of force or injustice
against the weakness of barbarism.*
* The interesting Biography of William Penn, by Mr. Hepworth Dixon, furnishes a
very complete view of the settlement of Pennsylvania, of which ours is necessarily the
briefest sketch.
ADDRESS OF JAMES THE SECOND. 295
CHAPTER XV.
Address of James the Second to his Council. — He is proclaimed. — He goes openly to
Mass. — Illegal levying of Customs. — The king's ministers. — Roman Catholic coun
sellors. — Roman Catholics and Quakers released from prison. — Renewed severities
against Covenanters. — Elections in England. — Money from France. — Constitution of
Parliament. — Its meeting. — Conviction and punishment of Titus- Oates. — Conviction
of Richard Baxter. — Argyle lands in Scotland. — Disastrous result of Ills expedition. —
His execution, — Monmouth lands at Lyme. — His Declaration. — He enters Taunton
in triumph. — He is proclaimed king. — March to Bristol. — Skirmish of Philip'r:-
Norton. — Monmouth returns to Bridgewater. — Battle of Sedgemoor — Flight of
Monmouth. — His apprehension. — His abject submission to the king.— His execution.
— Military executions in the Western Counties. — The legal massacres under Jeffreys.
— Transportations. — The Court traffic in convicts. — The legal traffic iu pardons.
The chamber of death is closed. James retires for fifteen min
utes to the privacy of his closet, and then comes forth as king to
meet the Council. It was necessary that he should address the
assembled counsellors. He declared that he would follow the ex
ample of his brother in his great clemency and tenderness to his
people ; he would preserve the government in Church and State as
by law established ; he knew that the principles of the Church of
England were for monarchy, and that the members of it were good
and loyal subjects, and therefore he should always have to defend
and support it ; he knew that the laws were sufficient to make the
king as great a monarch as he could wish, and therefore, whilst he
would never depart from the just rights and prerogatives of the
Crown, he would never invade any man's property. Some mem
bers of the Council asked for copies- of this " benign and gracious
declaration." The king said that he had spoken from his heart
without much premeditation, and had not his speech in writing.
Finch, the Solicitor-General, stated that he thought he could write
it down word for word. He did write a report; the king approved,
and ordered it to be published. The biographer of James says
that Finch worded the speech as strong as he could in favour of
the established religion, and that James passed it over without re
flection : " He was afterwards convinced it had been better ex
pressed by assuring them he never would endeavour to alter the
established religion, rather than he would endeavour to preserve
296 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
it ; and that he would rather support and defend the professors of
it than the religion itself." * James the Second was proclaimed
that same afternoon at Whitehall-gate, at Temple-bar, and at the
Exchange. The Council, and other officers of State, accompanied
the procession. On their return they all kissed the hands of the
king and queen. " The queen," writes Evelyn, " was in bed in her
apartment, but put forth her hand, seeming to be much afflicted, as
I believe she was, having deported herself so decently upon all
occasions since she came into England, which made her univer
sally beloved." t Charles the Second was buried on the 14th,
"without any manner of pomp." This absence of the usual cere
monies is accounted for by the fact that the late king had died a
Roman Catholic. That fact was not as yet public ; and the people
blamed the parsimony of James, or his want of the .affection of a
brother. The difficulty of conducting the funeral of Charles in
accordance with " the greater ceremonies which imsst have been
performed according to the rites of the church of England," J
pressed with increased force when the Coronation-day arrived,- on
the 23rd of April. Some alterations were made in the ritual ; and,
"to the sorrow of the people, no Sacrament, as ought to have
been." § The second Sunday after he came to the throne the
king went openly to mass ; and within a month of Charles' death
the Romanists " were swarming at Court with greater confidence
than had been ever seen in England since the Reformation, so that
everybody grew jealous as to what this would tend." ||
James had not been more than three days king, when his gov
ernment committed an illegal act. The grant of customs for the
life of the king expired on the death of Charles. A proclamation
was issued ordering that the duties on merchandise should be levied
as usual, till the royal revenue had been settled by Parliament.
This was against the advice of the Lord Keeper, Guilford, who rec
ommended that the duties should be collected and kept apart in
the Exchequer, till the Parliament should dispose of them. The
temper of the public was, then, so propitious to the Crown, that
almost anything would be borne with, which, in other times, would
have raised a flame." IT The counsellors chosen by the king for
his especial confidence were his brother-in-law, Rochester; Sunder
land, who had been Charles's Secretary of State ; and Godolphin,
* " Life cf James IL," vol. ii., pp. 3 & 4. t " Diary," February 6.
t " Life of James II.," vol. ii,, p. 6. § Evelyn, " Diary."
|| Ibid, March 5th. H North, " Life of Guilford," vol. ii., p. 113.
THE MINISTRY.
297
who had been first lord of the Treasury : Halifax, who had held
the Privy-seal, was appointed to the unimportant office of President
of the Council. It was nominally a higher office, and therefore a
witticism which he had used on the promotion of Rochester was
applied to himself — he was kicked up-stairs. The king's other
brother-in-law, Clarendon, was made Privy Seal. Sunderland had
voted for the Exclusion Bill, and therefore his continuance in
office was a matter of surprise. But, if we are to credit the king's
own assertion, this crafty minister saw the policy of connecting
himself, however secretly, with the Roman Catholic party. James,
in his own " Memoirs," says that in a consultation soon after his
accession to the throne between Lord Sunderland, Father Petre,
Mr. Jermyn, and lord Tyrconnel, "it was agreed that Father
Petre should be a Cardinal, lord Sunderland Lord Treasurer, lord
Tyrconnel Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (who engaged to procure my
lord Sunderland five thousand pounds per annum out of that king
dom, or fifty thousand pounds in money,) and that Mr. Henry
Jermyn should be made a lord, and captain of the Horse Guards." *
Tyrconnel and Jermyn were Roman Catholics. The king did not
stand alone in his inclination to tread a path, beset with dangers.
The apologists of James have endeavoured to induce a belief
that, soon after his accession, "he limited his views to the accom
plishment of two objects, which he called liberty of conscience and
freedom of worship, and which, had he been successful, would have
benefited, not the Catholics only, but every class of religionists."
Dr. Lingard expresses this opinion, after having stated that James
" gave it in charge to the judges to discourage prosecutions in
matters of religion, and ordered by proclamation the discharge of
all persons confined for the refusal of the oaths of allegiance and
supremacy." f It is implied that " the dissenters " were relieved by
this tolerant disposition. The relief extended only to Roman
Catholics and Quakers. The Puritan dissenters — Presbyterians,
or Independents, or Baptists, — had evinced no objection to the
oath which renounced the authority of the Pope. Those who con
tinued in prison were there for offences under the Conventicle
Acts and the Five Mile Act. The Roman Catholics would not
take the oath of supremacy ; the Quakers would not take any oath.
"I have not been able," says a high authority, "to find any proof
that any person, not a Roman Catholic or a Quaker, regained his
* " Life of James II. ," vol. ii., p. 77.
t " History," 8vo edition, vol. xiv. p. 13.
298 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
freedom under these orders." * The orders, signed by Sunder
land, were issued on the 19th of April. The relief to the Roman
Catholics was a natural manifestation of the disposition of the gov
ernment. The relief to Quakers was the result of a conviction
that they were a harmless sect, who carefully abstained from all
political action, and avoided even political conversation. The in
fluence of William Penn, who had returned home from Pennsyl
vania, was laudably exercised to obtain this relief for the Society
of which he was a member. The number of Quakers liberated
was estimated at above fourteen hundred. Roman Catholics were
liberated to the amount of some thousands, j T ,r. real disposition
of the government towards Protestant dissenters was . at that
period amply manifested by the proceedings in the Scottish Parlia
ment. The meeting of the Estates preceded that of the English
Parliament by nearly a month. In obedience to a special letter
from the king, calling for new penal laws against the Covenanters,
it was enacted on the 8th of May, that the punishment of death, and
confiscation of land and goods, should be awarded against those who
should preach in a conventicle under a roof, or should attend a
conventicle in the open air, either as preacher or auditor. The
persecution of the times of Charles II. was continued with in
creased fury. X The soldiery were let loose upon the districts
where the Covenanters were still unsubdued, to kill and plunder.
The tale of two unhappy women who were condemned to be
drowned, and were tied to stakes when the tide had receded, there
to await the lingering but certain death that would follow its return,
is not a fiction. Romance has not imagined any cruelty so horrible
as that perpetrated by the scoundrel Major Winram. Of the two
women whose drowning he superintended, one was a girl of eigh
teen, of the name of Margaret Wilson. She had seen her elder
friend perish. She was half dead herself when she was taken out
of the water. "Dear Margaret," said her neighbours, "only say
God save the king." Her answer was, " God save him, if he will,
for it is his salvation I desire." Beyond this she refused to go.
She would not abjure the cause of her religion, and consent to
attend the episcopal worship ; and she was again thrown into the
engulphing waves. The old laws against non-conformists were
severe enough, and were executed with sufficient ferocity, to jus-
* Macaulay. " History," vol. i. 8vo, p. 50}. Note. t Lingarr'.
t We anticipated the date of the murder of " The Christian Carrier," to indicate the
mode of proceeding with the Covenanters by the sanguinary Claverhouse. See p. 260.
ELECTIONS. 299
tify any resistance, even without the addition of the infamous law
which James caused to be passed against those who attended con
venticles. The biographer of James thus explains the motives of
the sovereign who desired, according to his panegyrists, " liberty
of conscience and freedom of worship : " — " The king's earnestness
to have the field conventicles suppressed was not from any spirit
of persecution — though those wretches deserved no quarter — but
from an apprehension of new troubles." * He made the Puritan
religion a pretence for manifesting his hatred of the Puritan love
of freedom. The Parliament had been summoned to meet on the 19th of
May. No one doubted that the House of Commons would exceed
all former Parliaments in subserviency, looking to the influences
which had been exercised in the returns of members. Burnet, the
Whig, complains of " the injustice and violence used in elections,
beyond what had been ever practised in former times." Evelyn,
the Tory, writes, " Elections for the coming Parliament in Eng
land were thought to be very indirectly carried on in most places." f
Again, he says, " There are many of the new members whose elec
tions and returns were universally censured, many of them being
persons of no condition, or interest in the nation or places for
which they served." The boroughs were almost wholly in the
hands of the Court; the old Charters having been superseded by
new Charters, which placed the returns in the power of a corrupt
few, nominated by the Crown. " It was reported that lord Bath
carried down with him [into Cornwall] no fewer than fifteen Char
ters, so that some called him the Prince Elector." X James had
some ambitious projects floating in his mind, and especially excit
ing him to secure^ an obedient Parliament. The interference of
the French king with the parliamentary system of England, during
the reign of Charles, was perfectly known to his successor. James
was not quitg so abject as his brother ; but nevertheless he was
ready to receive the French livres, and to submit his policy to the
wishes of his patron, till he could make himself sufficiently secure
of a large revenue for life. Then he would manifest a real inde
pendence. Meanwhile he talked to foreign ministers about main
taining the balance of power in Europe. He aspired to vie with
the Court of France in its ceremonial observances towards am-
bassadors. His pride made him bear his yoke somewhat impa-
* " Life of James II.," vol. i., p. T2.
t " Diary." May io., * Ibid. May 22.
300 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tiently. " He seemed resolved," says Burnet, " not to be gov
erned by French counsels." He gave out that he would cultivate
the friendship of the Prince of Orange and the United Provinces.
The courtiers said that a prince now ruled who would make
France as dependent on England as England had been dependent
on France. Louis slily said that " for all the high things given
out in his name, the king of England was willing to take his
money, as well as his brother had done." *
The Parliament assembled on the 19th of May. Under the
Stuarts there had been a vast increase of the Peerage. In the
reign of James the Second there were fifteen dukes and duchesses,
two marquises, sixty-seven earls and countesses, nine viscounts,
and sixty-six barons and baronesses, making a total of one hun
dred and fifty-nine. Eighty years before, there was no duke, only
one marquis, about nineteen earls, three or four viscounts, and
forty lords .f The learned Doctor of Laws, from whose Court
Calendar we derive this information, estimates that through luxury,
licentiousness, and want of fit education, " it was lately difficult to
find, as some "are bold to affirm, the courage, wisdom, justice, in
tegrity, honour, sobriety, and courtesy of the ancient nobility."
Of the riches of the Peerage he has no doubt. He computes the
yearly revenue of all England to be about fourteen millions, and
assigns one eleventh of the whole to the nobility. Including
twenty-five spiritual Peers (the see of York was vacant), there
were a hundred and eighty-one Lords of Parliament. The num
ber of Members of the House of Commons was five hundred and
thirteen.^ From the printed List of Members, it appeared that
there were not more than a hundred and thirty-five who had sat in
former parliaments. § The Whig majority was gone. The country
gentlemen, whether Whig or Tory, who were returned for the
Counties, were a weak minority compared with the representa
tives of the newly chartered Corporations. The composition of
the House of Commons was such that it would havelieen difficult
for the people to over-estimate the extent to which their so-called
representatives would go in placing the property and liberty of the
country at the feet of the king. The language of James, in his
Speech from the Throne, argues an undoubting confidence in the
machinery which he had procured for obtaining a large revenue,
* Burnet.
t Chamberlayne, " Present State of England," 1687, Part I. p. 285.
t Ibid., Part II- p. 91. § Evelyn, May 22.
SERVILE SPIRrT OF THE COMMONS. 30I
and for enforcing a due compliance with his projects for restoring
the influence of his own religion. He repeated not only the sub
stance, but the exact words, of the speech which he had addressed
to the Privy Council on the day of his accession ; " the better,"
said the king, "to evidence to you that I spoke then not by
chance." In demanding the settlement of the Revenue for his
life, for the many weighty necessities of government, he added
these words, " which I must not suffer to be precarious." Mr.
Fox has pointed out that " in arguing for his demand, as he styles
it, of revenue, he says, not that the Parliament ought not, but
that he must not suffer the well-being of the government, depend
ing upon such revenue, to be precarious ; whence it is evident,
that he intended to have it understood that, if the Parliament did
not grant, he purposed to levy a revenue without their consent." *
Think not, says the incipient despot, that you are to supply me
with a little money from time to time, out of your inclination to
frequent parliaments. " This would be a very improper method to
take with me. The best way to engage me to meet you often is
always to use me well." And the whole House of Commons, with
one exception, were awed by the " vultus instantis tyranni "—and
voted unanimously that the grant of revenue should be for life.
The one bold member was sir Edward Seymour, a Cavalier of the
staunchest breed. He did not oppose the grant, but he main
tained that the first thing to do was to ascertain who were legal
members of the House. This was more especially a duty, he said,
when the laws and religion of England were in evident peril. No
member dared to follow up this attack of a man whose high an
cestry gave a special impulse to Iiis proud courage. The members
of this Parliament "were neither men of parts nor estates; so
there was "no hope left of either working on their understandings,
or of making them. see their interest in not giving the king all at
once. . . . There was no prospect of any strength in opposing
anything that the king should ask of them." f An attempt was
made a few days later, to obtain some security in the matter of re
ligion ; by passing a resolution in Committee " to assist and stand
* Fox, " James II."
t Burnet. The writer, David Hume, who has had the chief direction of the English
historical mind for nearly a century, had the impudence to fabricate a d.bate in the House
of Commons for this occasion, in which he makes the opposers of the grant use argu
ments well worthy of a free and enlightened assembly. Mr. Fox pointed out that this
was a pure invention,, utterly unsupported by any contemporary writers, .. even by tra
dition.
J02 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
by his majesty, according to our duty and allegiance, for the sup
port and defence of the reformed religion of the Church of Eng
land, as now by law established." This was a great deal more
than his majesty desired. Nor was a concurrent resolution less
unpalatable, — that the House be moved to make an humble Ad
dress to his majesty, to publish his royal Proclamation " for put
ting the laws in execution against all Dissenters whatsoever from
the Church of England." Barillon, the French ambassador, writes
that these votes gave great offence to the king and queen, and
that orders were issued to the Court members to get rid of them.
When tbe House had to decide upon, the resolution of its Com
mittee, the previous question was moved; and it was resolved,
unanimously, "That this House doth acquiesce, entirely rely, and
rest wholly satisfied, in his majesty's gracious word, and repeated
declaration, to support and defend tbe religion of the Church of
England, as it is by law established, which is dearer to us than
our lives."
There were two remarkable trials at this period, which must have
had a considerable influence upon public opinion. The one was the
prosecution of Titus Oates for perjury ; the other the prosecution
of Richard Baxter for libel. Of the justice of tbe conviction of
Oates there can be little doubt. The atrocious severity of his
punishment was to gratify the revenge of the Roman Catholics,
who crowded Westminster Hall on his trial, on the 7th of May.
Tbe chief witness to the Popish Plot had long been lying in prison,
heavily ironed, in default of payment of the excessive fine imposed
upon him on his conviction for libelling the duke of York. He
had been accustomed to browbeat juries, and to be lauded to the
skies by judges. He had now to bear all the tyrannous invective
which judges thought it decent to use in state prosecutions ; and,
what to his unabashed impudence was far more terrible, he was to
be pilloried in Palace Yard, and at the Royal Exchange. He was
to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate on one day, and then
again to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. He was to be im
prisoned for life. He was to stand in the pillory five times every
year. His conviction, says Reresby, "was a grateful hearing to
the king." His majesty said " that Oates being thus convicted^
the Popish Plot was dead." Reresby is proud of his ready reply:
" I answering, that it had long since been dead, and that now it
would be buried, his majesty so well approved of the tutn, that
going with him afterwards to the princess of Denmark, I h_,a-o
CONVICTION OF RICHARD BAXTER. 303
him repeat it to her." * Whilst the small joke was circulating
about the Court, the wretched Oates was tortured in a way which
even the haters of his perjuries must have thought excessive. He
was flogged at the cart's tail on the first day, almost tc death. In
tercession was made to the king to remit the second flogging. The
answer was, " he shall go through with it, if he has breath in his
body." He did go through with it, and survived even seventeen
hundred lashes. It is clear that the judges meant him to be flogged
to death. He could not be executed for his offence ; but he could
be subjected to the torments of a lingering execution. Flogging,
under the government of James the Second, became a favourite
punishment. Another of the plot witnesses, Dangerfield, was
scourged for a libel, and he died. His death was laid upon a vio
lent man who struck him with a cane, injuring his eye, as he was
carried in a coach back to Newgate after his flogging; and that man,
Francis, was hanged for murder. The lacerated body of Danger-
field showed that the brutal assault of Francis was a secondary
cause of Dangerfield's death.
If Titus Oates was unmercifully scourged for the satisfaction of
the Papists, Richard Baxter was harassed, insulted, fined, and im
prisoned, for the terror of the Puritans. Baxter was tried for a
seditious libel, contained in his Paraphrase on the New Testament,
in which he somewhat bitterly complained of the wrongs of the
Dissenters. Baxter's counsel moved for a postponement of the
trial. " I would not give him a minute more to save his life," ex
claimed the brutal Chief Justice : " Yonder stands Oates in the
pillory, and if Baxter stood by his side the two greatest rogues
and rascals in England would be there." The trial, if trial it could
be called, went on. The barristers who defended the venerable
man, now in his seventieth year, were insulted by the ermined
slave of the Crown. Baxter himself attempted to speak, and he was
thus met by Jeffreys • " Richard, Richard ! dost thou think we will
hear thee poison the court ? Richard, thou art an old fellow, an
old knave ; thou hast written books enough to load a cart ; every
one is as full of sedition (I might say treason), as an egg is full of
meat ; hadst thou been whipt out of thy writing trade forty years
ago it had been happy. Thou pretendest to be a preacher of the
gospel of peace, and thou hast one foot in the grave ; it is time for
thee to begin to think what account thou intendest to give ; but
leave thee to thyself, and I see thou wilt go on as thou hast be-
* " Memoirs," p. 299.
304 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
gun ; but, by the grace of God, I'll look after thee. I know thou
hast a mighty party, and I see a great many of the brotherhood in
corners, waiting to see what will become of the mighty Don ; and
a doctor of the party [looking to Dr. Bates] at your elbow, but by
the grace of Almighty God I will crush you all." * The famous
non-conformist, — he who, in the earnestness of his piety and the
purity of his life, was unsurpassed by the greatest of the great di
vines of the English Church from which he differed so little, — was
of course found guilty. He was surrounded by friends and ad
mirers, who wept aloud. " Snivelling calves ! " exclaimed Jeffreys.
He was anxious, it is said, that the prisoner should be whipped at
the cart's tail, but that was overruled by three other judges. Bax
ter was unable to pay his fine of five hundred marks , and he re
mained in prison for eighteen months ; when his pardon was ob
tained. The king, in his speech to the two Houses on the 23d of May,
informed them that he had received news that morning from Scot
land, that Argyle had landed in the West Highlands, with men
from Holland. The Houses sympathised with the king in his
anger that Argyle had charged him with " usurpation and tyranny."
The earl had been three years and a half in Holland, an exile under
his unjust sentence. Many who had fled from the oppressions
exercised upon the Presbyterians had gathered around him. He
was the natural leader in any open resistance ; for five thousand
of his vassals would immediately flock to his banner, and with the
Covenanters in the western counties would form a considerable army.
The duke of Monmouth had seen Argyle, and had been pressed
by him to make a simultaneous attempt to raise an ii.urrection in
England. Argyle was fully prepared with money and with arms.
He had with him, to support the cause of his Church, men of rank
and influence. Monmouth had made no preparations, and had very
slight means of making any ; and his supporters were not men on
whom great reliance could be placed. But Monmouth's adherents
had this advantage over the followers of Argyle — they were not
jealous of entrusting authority to one hand ; they were not dis
tracted by minute differences, as the Covenanters had ever been
distracted. Reresby says that at the beginning of May the govern
ment had " advice that a store of arms had been bought up in Holland
and conveyed to Scotland ; " and that Argyle and lord Grey, and
even Monmouth, had gone with them. James had desired that the
•" State Trials."
EXPEDITION OF ARGYLE. 305
States of- Holland should interfere to prevent any expedition sail
ing from their ports. The prince of Orange, it is alleged, was
anxious to meet the wishes of his father-in-law, who had manifested
some disposition to throw off his dependence upon France. But
the authorities of the United Provinces were very slow in the ex
ercise of their divided responsibilities ; and three ships, in one of
which Argyle was on board, sailed out of the Zuy'der Zee on the
2nd of May. Monmouth and Grey were not with him. They re
mained to prepare for their own desperate adventure.
From the very first the expedition of Argyle was conducted with
an imprudence which was the result of indecision. At Kirkwall,
in the Orkneys, two men were allowed to go on shore. They were
arrested; and the news of the armament quickly reached Edin
burgh, whilst Argyle was lingering on the coast to obtain the
release of his men. When he reached Lorn, and his son went on
shore to summon the clans to gather round their chief, no person
of mark came to join in the war-cry of the Campbells. Many hum
ble vassals, however, assembled at Tarbet. Here the counsels of
the insurgents became more dangerously opposed to any plan of
concentrated action. Argyle wished to make a stand in his own
Highlands. Sir Patrick Hume and Sir John Cochrane were for
marching into the western Lowlands. The army divided. A
squadron, bound for Ayrshire, sailed up the Clyde ; and Cochrane,
having landed at Greenock, was convinced of the hopelessness of
an attempt to rouse the population into revolt. Argyle was now in
the isle of Bute and Cochrane returned to him. After various
encounters with the king's troops, Argyle was marching upon
Inverary, when the Lowlanders of his army refused to advance into
the Highlands. He then, with a greatly reduced number of fol
lowers, moved to Dumbartonshire, intending to march for Glasgow.
Meanwhile his ships had been taken, and the stores which he had
disembarked were also lost. Disaster followed upon disaster.
When the rebel army crossed the Leven they were surrounded by
the royal troops. It was determined not to risk an engagement,
but to advance upon Glasgow by a night march. They mistook
their course. The little army was reduced by desertion to a
few hundred men. Their leaders fled. Argyle, disguised as a peasant,
was at last captured in the manner quaintly described by lord
Fountainhall : " Argyle himself, fieirig alone on a little pony, was
overtaken by two men of sir John Shaw's, who would have had his
pony to carry their baggage ; whereupon he fired a pistol at them,
Vol. IV.— 20
306 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
for he had three on him, whereof I have two, which I got from his
son-in-law, the second marquis of Lothian ; and thereafter took the
water of Inchinan. But a webster, dwelling there, hearing the
noise, came with a broadsword." The weaver would not quit
Argyle, though the other two men would have let him go for gold ;
and finally " the webster gave him a great pelt over the head with
his sword, that he damped him so that he fell into the river, and in
the fall cried, ' Ah, the unfortunate Argyle ! ' " His fate was now
sealed. He was conducted to Glasgow, and thence to Edinburgh.
The same humiliations were inflicted upon him as were inflicted
upon Montrose. It was determined to execute him, without any
further trial, under the flagitious sentence that had condemned him
to death in 1681. All the innate nobleness of his character was
developed in these his last hours of misery. He was threatened
with torture ; but he refused to criminate any of his friends. He
made no supplications for mercy, but he prepared himself for the
scaffold, with the proud consciousness that he fell in a good cause,
and with the calm fortitude of an undoubting faith. The placid
sleep of the prisoner as the hour approached in which he was to
die — that sleep . which the apostate who gazed upon him could
scarcely hope again to enjoy — is a worthy subject for the historical
painter, and it has been worthily treated by a living artist.
On the 14th of June Evelyn makes the following entry in his
' Diary ' : — " There was now certain intelligence of the duke of
Monmouth landing at Lyme in Dorsetshire." The fact had been
communicated to Parliament the day before. At daybreak of the
11 th of June, three vessels were descried in the deepest part of the
bay ; and at a creek five miles east of Lyme, three persons landed,
and proceeded to White Lackington House, near Ilminster. This
Was the scene of Monmouth's first progress. The surveyor of the
port of Lyme, in the discharge of his official duty, put off in a boat
to visit the three vessels. He was conducted to the duke ; was
civilly treated ; but was not allowed to depart till late in the day.
The surveyor belonged to a club, who met weekly to play at bowls
and to dine. The members grew alarmed at their friend's absence.
The post came in at five o'clock, and brought a newspaper, giving
an account of three ships having sailed from a port in Holland.
The alarm increased. The mayor and burgesses went on the cliffs
to watch the suspicious vessels. »They talked of firing a great gun,
but they had no powder or shot. It was now near sunset; and the
terrified magistrates saw the king's revenue boat, with three other
MONMOUTH'S DECLARATION.
307
boats, filled with men, rowing in-shore. The men landed. The
few borough militia ran away. Some of the townsmen cried " A
Monmouth! A Monmouth! The Protestant religion ! " Before
night-fall the duke's standard was set up in the Market Place of
Lyme, and a declaration was read. Monmouth had landed with
only eighty-three followers.*
The alacrity of the two Houses of Parliament to support the
king " against James duke of Monmouth, his adherents and cor
respondents," was manifested in a spirit of ultra-loyalty. Without
the slightest evidence, beyond that of the mayor of Lyme, who had
posted to London with his news, they passed in one day a Bill of
Attainder against Monmouth; and they passed another Bill "for
"the preservation of his majesty's royal person and government,"
in which, to assert the legitimacy of Monmouth, or to propose in
Parliament any alteration of the succession to the crown, were
made high treason. The duke's Declaration was ordered to be
burnt by the common hangman. . A supply was voted to the king
to meet the charges attending this rebellion, and the Lords and
Commons were dismissed to their respective counties, by adjourn
ment. The Declaration issued by Monmouth asserted the great
principle that " Government was originally instituted by God, and
this or that form of it chosen and submitted to by men, for the
peace, happiness, and security of the governed, and not for the
private interest and personal greatness of these that rule." It
accused the existing government of attempting to turn " our limit
ed Monarchy into an open Tyranny," and to undermine " our
Religion by Popish Councils." It declared that "the whole course
and series of the life of the present Usurper hath been but one
continued conspiracy against the reformed Religion and rights of
the nation." It then accused the duke of York of having contrived
the burning of London ; of having fomented the Popish Plot ; of
having assassinated the earl of Essex ; of having poisoned his own
brother, the late king. It was not a wise Declaration. The vio
lence which stimulated the passions 'of the ignorant was offensive to
the reflecting and the moderate. There was no possibility of
accommodation, when it was declared that the sword should not be
sheathed till the reigning monarch was brought to condign punish
ment. In asserting his. own legitimacy, and his consequent right
to be king of England, the adventurer first said that he would leave
* From a MS. in the British Museum, written by Samuel Dassell, a Customhouse-
officer of Lyme, abstracted in Mr. Roberts' " Life of Monmonth," vol. i p. 220.
308 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
his claims to be decided by a free Parliament. In a subsequent
manifesto he took other ground. Rash and impolitic as were
many parts of Monmouth's Declaration — " full of much black and
dull malice," as Burnet describes it — there were others besides the
clowns and mechanics of the western shires who regarded " the
Protestant duke " as their deliverer. The Independents of Ax-
minster recorded in their " Church Book " their hopes " that the
day was come in the which the good old Cause of God and religion,
that had lain as dead and buried for a long time, would revive
again." * The fervid expectations excited by the landing of Mon
mouth were not entirely local in their character. Daniel Defoe,
then twenty-four years of age, joined the blue banner of the duke,
in the confidence that he came to do battle for civil and religious
liberty. Defoe subsequently recorded some of the incidents of
this short warfare — happily the last occasion in which Englishmen
had to meet Englishmen in a deadly encounter for great principles.
A royalist force had collected at Bridport, and Monmouth re
solved to attack them. He had landed from his ships four pieces
of cannon. He had fifteen hundred suits of defensive armour, a
small number of muskets, carbines, and pistols, and about a thou
sand swords and pikes. On the day after his landing, he had a
thousand foot under his command, and a hundred and fifty horse.
On that day dissension broke out amongst his followers. The
celebrated Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who was in command of
Monmouth's horse, had received an insult from Thomas Dare, one
of Monmouth's followers, who had been a goldsmith at Taunton ;
and the fiery Scot shot the Englishman, who instantly died. Such
summary vengeance was unsuited to the national character, and
Fletcher was obliged to fly to Monmouth's ship. This was an om
inous commencement. On the 14th lord Grey marched to Brid
port ; fought with the militia there ; and then retreated in disorder
to Lyme. In spite of quarrels and disasters numerous recruits
flocked to Monmouth's head-quarters at the George inn at Lyme
— an antique hostelry, which was burnt down about forty years
ago. The duke of Albemarle, Lord Lieutenant of Devonshire,
marched from Exeter, with four thousand of the trained bands.
On the 15th he was met at Axminster by a large body of the insur
gents. He thought it judicious to retreat. His men were not
staunch. They threw away their arms and clothes ; and the road
to Exeter was free to Monmouth. He was satisfied to march to
* Roberts, vol. i. p. :i2.
MONMOUTH'S ENTRY INTO TAUNTON. 309
Taunton, which he reached on the 18th of June. Situate in a val
ley of unrivalled fertility, and abundantly prosperous in its serge
manufacture, Taunton had long been conspicuous for its resolute
adherence to the old spirit of puritanism. Oppressed as was its
¦ dissenting population under the various Statutes against Non-con
formists, the principle of resistance was not extinguished amongst
them. Their pulpits were burnt ; they evaded the statutory pen
alties for non-attendance at church, by joining in the Liturgy be
neath the tower of St. Mary Magdalen. But this was only surface
obedience. Monmouth approached the town, and found that the
population had possessed themselves of the arms stored in the
belfrey of their church, ready for his service; Hundreds went out
to meet their idol. They thronged around him in their narrow
streets, every man with a green bough in his hat. The ways were
strewed with flowers ; the windows were hung with garlands ;
maidens of good families went in procession to offer him twenty-
seven standards which they had worked with their own hands.
One of them was " The Golden Flag," embroidered with J. R., and
a crown. This reception at Taunton probably decided Monmouth
to proclaim himself King. That resolve was not in accordance
with his first Declaration. It was offensive to many of his fol
lowers, who cherished the notion of a republic. Welwood says,
" Ambitious he was,, but not to the degree of aspiring to the Crown,
till after his landing in the West ; and even then he was rather
passive than active in assuming the title of King. It was impor
tunity alone that prevailed with him to make that step ; and he was
inflexible, till it was told him, that the only way to provide against
the ruin of those that should come in to his assistance, in case he
failed in the attempt, was to declare himself king; that they might
be sheltered by the Statute made in the reign of Henry VIL, in
favour of those that should obey a king de facto." * This forced
application of the statute of Henry VIL was altogether fallacious,
Monmouth was himself too ready to forget its real meaning.
Had Monmouth been king de jure, James was king de facto. And
yet Monmouth proclaimed the adherents of James as rebels and
traitors. The assumption of the regal title secured Monmouth no
real accession of strength. Not a nobleman joined him ; not even
any head of 11 n'ch and influential Whig family. His pretensions
were ridiculed oven by those of the higher classes who had no af
fection for the existing government. He issued Proclamation after
* " Memoirs," p. 148.
310 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Proclamation, " from our camp at Taunton, in the first year of our
reign." The Assembly sitting at Westminster, voting and acting
as a Parliament under the usurper, James duke of York, were de
sired to disperse, under the penalties of treason. All who collected
and levied taxes for James duke of York were declared to be rebels
and traitors. Christopher, duke of Albemarle, and his adherents,
"now in arms at Wellington," were to be pursued as rebels and
traitors. Monmouth marched out of Taunton on the 22nd of June.
Al lemarle marched into Taunton on the 23rd. He immediately
wrote a few brief words to Sunderland : " I came hither this night,
where I found these several Proclamations, which I send to your
lordship only for your diversion." *
Monmouth marched from Taunton to Bridgewater with six
thousand men. Many were armed with scythes, fixed on upright
handles. This rustic weapon was so important, that warrants were
issued to the tything-men " to search for, seize, and take all such
scythes as can be found in your tything, paying a reasonable price
for the same." f The large numbers that gathered round Mon
mouth's standard was rather an embarrassment than an aid. They
could not be provided with arms. They were a burthen upon the
country through which they marched. But the general disposition
of the humbler ranks of people to join Monmouth is evident from
this fact: the Lords Lieutenant were ordered to call out the Militia,
not so much to oppose the duke, " as to hinder the country from
flocking in to him ; for the king could have littie'ccnfidence in the
Militia of those parts, who were framed, to be sure, of the same
mould and temper of their neighbours, who so readily had joined
the invader." X On the 22nd of June the insurgents had marched
to Glastonbury. The monastic ruins, and the churches, gave shel
ter to the wearied men, who had travelled through a swampy dis
trict under a drenching rain. The next day they had reached Shep-
ton Mallet. The object of the march was to attack Bristol. On
the 25th they crossed the Avon at Keynsham. The night before, a
ship-had taken fire at the quay at Bristol. It was afterwards al
leged against the Bristowans that they had fired the ship as a signal
to the rebels. They were suspected by the authorities, for the
duke of Beaufort, having a considerable body of Gloucestershire
train bands with him at Redcliffe Mead, threatened to fire the city
if they afforded any aid to Monmouth. The king's forces now sur-
* EUis, "Original Letters, " First Series, vol. iii. p. 340.
* Roberts, voi. i. p. 328. t " Life of James II." vol. ii. p, 29.
SKIRMISH AT PHILIP's-NORTON. 31 1
rounded the insurgents. They became irresolute , and marched
away to Bath. Monmouth grew dejected. The large reward
of five thousand pounds had been proclaimed for " any who
should kill him.'** He was deeply mortified at the manifest un
willingness of the country gentlemen to engage in his support. He
expected some of the royal army to come over to him. He had him
self commanded a regiment, and was personally beloved. But those
who knew him b.est knew the weakness of his character. He was
brave in the field; but he had none of those high qualities which
fitted him to contend, even with the enthusiastic support of large
bodies of people, against the organised power of a government that
was capable of inspiring dread if it failed to secure affection. Mon
mouth made no attack upon Bath, which had a strong garrison. He
marched to Philip's-Norton, half way between Bath and Frome.
On the morning of the 27th the advanced guard of the king's army,
under the earl of Feversham, was close to the insurgents. That
guard was commanded by the duke of Grafton, the youngest of the
illegitimate sons of Charles the Second. Through a narrow lane
which led into Philip's-Norton, Grafton led his grenadiers against
his eldest half-brother. A barricade stopped their progress ; and
Monmouth attacked them in flank. Grafton cut his way through ;
and got back to theimain body of the royal army. There was fight
ing for several hours ; and the cause of the insurgents was strength
ened by the proof, that, raw and undisciplined as they were, they
could stand up against regular troops. The royal army retreated to
Bradford. Defoe says, that if Monmouth had pursued his advan
tage, he would have gained a complete victory. f The same night
the insurgent army marched, under incessant rain, to Frome. This
night-march, and the morning engagement, greatly reduced the
number of Monmouth's followers. Many had thought of the glories
of war — of a pleasant march- to London where their beloved duke
would establish the liberties of his country, and reward his trusty
friends. They had seen some of the dangers and miseries of real
warfare, and they hastened to escape from them.
At Frome Monmouth heard of the defeat and capture of Argyle.
At Frome there were no joyful congratulations as at Taunton ; for
the earl of Pembroke had a few days before put down a popular de
monstration of those termed in the London Gazette " the rabble."
* Evelyn.
"• Wilson, " Life of Defoe," vol. i. p. 108. Philip's-Norton is erroneously called
Chipping-Norton, in the passage quoted by Wilson.
312 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The prospects of Monmouth became more and more dark. He was
advised, according to some authorities, — he himself meditated, ac
cording to other accounts, — to leave his followers to their fate, and
escape to some foreign place of refuge. He had a devoted mistress
to fly to, lady Wentworth, whose passionate attachment might con
sole him for all the disappointments of his ambition. Lord Grey
opposed this dastardly hope of the unhappy man, and he remained
for a last struggle. At Wells his army had become unmanageable.
They lived at free quarters, and attempted to deface the cathedral.
On the 2nd of July they marched on towards Bridgewater. A de
putation from the people of Taunton came now to entreat Mon
mouth not to return to their town. There were symptoms enough
that Iris cause was now desperate. He had marched out of Bridge-
water with a confident army on the 22nd of June. He was again at
Bridgewater with a broken and dispirited force on the 4th of July.
In these eleven days he had accomplished nothing. On Sunday,
the 5th, the earl of Feversham, at the head of the roval army, en
tered the great moor, called King's Sedgmoor, which stretches in
a south-easterly direction from below Bridgewater to Somerton.
He encamped on this morass, on the west side of which flows the
river Parret, and whose deep and broad ditches, called Rhines, and
high causeways, showed how gradually the labour of man had con
verted this dismal swamp into a region comparatively fertile. In
this ancient region of waters Alfred had found refuge in its Isle of
Athelney. The names of the villages, compounded of " Zoy '' —
zee, sea — showed the maritime origin of the district. Feversham's
horse were quartered in the village of Weston Zoyland. His in
fantry were under canvas. On that Sunday the determination was
taken by the insurgent leaders to attack the king's army at night,
to anticipate the expected assault of Feversham. Monmouth, says
Defoe, " went up to the top of the steeple, with some of his officers ;
and viewing the situation of the king's army, by the help of per
spectives, he resolved to make an attempt upon them by way of pre
vention. He accordingly marched out of the town in the dead of
the night to the attack."* Monmouth from the elevation of Bridge-
water church could distinguish the regiment that he had once com
manded. If he had these men with him, he exclaimed, he could
not doubt of success. He had been told that the royal army was
not entrenched. He saw a plain beneath him intersected by great
ditches. He was promised to be led safely across them by guides.
* " Tour through Great Britain,'' quoted by Wilson.
BATTLE OF SEDGEMOOR. 313
He would not take the direct road from Bridgewater to Weston
Zoyland, but would advance along the Eastern Causeway, across
the North Moor and the Langmoor, and surprise his sleeping ene
mies in their camp. By this circuitous route of six miles, .Mon
mouth would avoid the royal artillery that commanded the direct
road. But he had undertaken a night march of extraordinary dif
ficulty. The biographer of Monmouth, whose local knowledge is
evidently complete, says, " A guide was needed in the lanes, but
was indispensable after the forces reached the open moor. Indeed,
any person desirous of traversing the moor by daylight at the pres
ent time, would be glad of direction to make a way to the cradle
bridges across the great drain or cut." * The front of the royal
army was covered by this great drain or cut, called the Old Bussex
Rhine. It was filled by the recent heavy rains. Defoe, who may
be regarded as an actor in these events, says of Monmouth, " Had
he not, either by the treachery or mistake of his guides, been
brought to an impassable ditch where he could not get over — in
the interval of which the king's troops took the alarm by the firing
of a pistol amongst the duke's men, whether also by accident or
treachery is not known — I say, had not these accidents and his
own fate conspired to his defeat, he had certainly cut the lord Fe
versham's army all to pieces."
The report of the pistol was heard in the royal camp. The
mist lay heavy upon the moor, but the moon was at the full ; and
in the uncertain light a body of men was seen approaching. The
alarm was sounded by the beat of drum. Grey had advanced with
the cavalry ; Monmouth was following at the head of the infantry.
Suddenly the great Bussex Rhine intercepted their progress.
Concealment was no longer possible. King Monmouth ! was
shouted, with the old rallying word of the Puritans, " God with
us ! " The king's troops fired across the ditch ; and the untrained
cavalry horses of the insurgents were scattered about the peat-
moor. Monmouth came up to the edge of the Rhine ; and shots
were exchanged across that impassable ditch for some time. The
whole royal army was now roused. Passing along the Weston
Zoyland road they could soon be in the open plain. The sun was
rising as the Life Guards scoured the moor, and the foot-guards
and other regiments advanced in compact ranks. Monmouth fled
from the field when he saw that his horsemen and his waggons
had gone. The king's artillery was brought up, the bishop of Win-
* Roberts, vol. ii. p. 63.
314 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Chester having applied his carriage-horses to drag the guns along
the Bridgewater road. Yet the peasants and cloth-workers made
a brave stand with their scythes and pikes. Their muskets were
useless, for in vain they shouted " For God's sake, Ammunition ! "
Another race of hardy men stood their ground to the last. " The
slain," says Evelyn, " were most of them Mendip miners, who did
great execution with their tools, and sold their lives very dearly."
It is impossible to regard the fate of Monmouth without a large
amount of commiseration. Bred up amidst all the follies and vices
of a luxurious Court; pampered with every indulgence by his im
prudent father; rendered independent at a very early age by mar
riage with a rich heiress ; raised to the highest honours and employ
ments ; made the tool of a party, unqualified as he was for any con
sistent political action ; bewildered with popular applause ; he finally
engaged in a desperate enterprise against a stern and relentless
enemy. When he fled from the field of Sedgemoor, he had about
him a pocketbook, in which there were certain entries which indi
cate that Charles the Second had a design to get rid of the control
of the duke of York, and restore Monmouth to his former position.
On the 1 6th of February is this expressive memorandum : " The
sad news of his death, by L. O cruel Fate ! " * After his defeat
' there was no hope for Monmouth. The price set upon his head
made escape from the kingdom almost impossible. Before four
o'clock of that July morning the fugitives from the fatal moor were
hiding in every ditch and every hovel from their pursuers. By
six o'clock Monmouth, with Grey, and two or three others, was
twenty miles from the field in which he had better have died fight
ing. They rode all day towards New Forest, till their horses were
exhausted. Disguised as countrymen they proceeded on foot.
Parties of militia were on the look-out on every side. Grey was
taken early on the morning of the 7th, near Ringwood. Two men
had been seen entering some enclosed grounds, intersected with'
hedges, some of the fields affording the shelter of standing crops,
and some overgrown with fern and brambles. The two men were
Monmouth and Busse, a German. The place was surrounded all
night with soldiers, after a fruitless search. Early on the morning
of the Sth Busse was discovered. The soldiers were stimulated
to greater exertion by the announcement that the reward offered
for Monmouth's apprehension would be divided amongst his cap
tors. The unhappy man, worn out with fatigue, starving, was
* Wellwcod's " Memoirs," Appendix, xv.
HIS SUBMISSION TO JAMES. 315
found in a ditch, in the garb of a shepherd. The same pockets
that held the raw pease which had been his only food, contained
the George with which Charles had invested his first-born son.
The prisoner was conveyed to Ringwood, about six miles distant
from the field now known as Monmouth's Close. The real char
acter of him who had led so many devoted followers to ruin was
now displayed. 'He did not rise out of -misfortune a nobler man,
as Argyle had risen. His first act was to write an abject letter to
king James, expressive of remorse for the wrongs he had done
him. He had assured the prince and princess of Orange that he
would never stir against his majesty, but horrid people had led him
away with false arguments. He could say many things to move
compassion, but he. only begged to have the happiness to speak
to the king, for he had that to say which he hoped would give his
majesty a long and happy reign. He had one word to say of too
much consequence for him to write. After remaining at Ringwood
two days, Monmouth and Grey were conducted to London under
a strong escort. They were three days on the road. Monmouth
was prostrated by his fears ; Grey was unmoved by his impending
danger. Arrived at Whitehall, a scene ensued which the French
ambassador, Barillon, considered opposed to the ordinary usage of
other nations. The sovereign saw the prisoner whose life he had
determined not to spare . Monmouth was brought pinioned into
his uncle's presence. " He fell upon his knees, crawling upon
them to embrace those of his majesty; and forgetting the charac
ter of a hero, whicli he had so long pretended to, behaved himself
with the greatest meanness and abjection imaginable, omitting no
humiliation or pretence of sorrow and repentance, to move the
king to compassion and mercy." This is the account given upon
the supposed authority of king James's papers. It is not contra
dicted by other narratives. The mean motive of the king in grant
ing an audience which in ordinary cases implied a pardon, is ex
hibited in this statement : " There appearing no great matters of
discovery, there was no advantage drawn to either side by this
unseasonable interview."* The "one word," if spoken, was of
no avail to save the prisoner's life.
Detailed narratives of executions for State offences occupy a
considerable portion of most English histories ; and, we presume,
they are attractive to the general reader. Whether those who died
by the axe under Plantagenet, Tudor, or Stuart, were innocent or
* "Life of James II.," vol. ii., p. 36.
316 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
guilty, were of pure or corrupt lives, the fortitude with which they
looked death in the face — without shrinking even from the dis
gusting preparations for the barbarities that accompanied death for
high treason — is an almost universal characteristic of their un
timely ends. The abjectness which Monmouth displayed when he
deluded himself with hopes of life, appeared to the French ambas
sador very different to the ordinary fortitude of Englishmen.
Monmouth, however, recovered his courage when the last great
trial was at hand. He had seen his wife in the presence of lord
Clarendon, on the Monday when he was committed to the Tower.
He saw her again on the Wednesday of his execution. The nature
of these interviews is perhaps correctly given by Evelyn, who says
that the duke received his duchess " coldly, having lived dis-
Ronestly with the Lady Henrietta Wentworth for two years."
The duchess was far more affected than her husband ; but he
showed a proper consideration for her future safety by maintaining
that she had been averse to his behaviour towards the late king,
and knew nothing of the circumstances of his recent attempt. In
his prison, and on the scaffold, Monmouth was attended by the
bishop of Ely and the bishop of Bath and Wells. The conduct
of these prelates, Turner and Ken, towards the unhappy man has
been compared to that of " fathers of the Inquisition." * On the
other hand it has been said, " they appear to have only discharged
what they considered a sacred duty."-)- They pressed him to
acknowledge the doctrine of Non-Resistance to be true, if he were
of the Church of England. He would do no more than acknowl
edge the doctrines of the Church of England, in general. Again
and again he was exhorted to a positive declaration upon this
point. Upon one subject his opinions were singularly illustrative
of his defective moral training. He maintained that his inter
course with lady Wentworth was not sinful ; for she had reclaimed
him from licentiousness, and their mutual attachment was pro
found and enduring. His disrespect for the conjugal tie was con
sidered by the prelates as a reason for not administering the Sacra
ment to one so imperfectly repentant. He was urged to speak to
the soldiers, and say that he stood there, a sad example of rebel
lion. He was urged to entreat the soldiers and the people to be
loyal and obedient to the king. His answer was emphatic : " I
have said I will make no speeches : I will make no speeches : I
come to die." His death was a horrible butchery, through the
* Roberts. -f Macaulay.
MILITARY EXECUTIONS IN THE WESTERN COUNTIES. 317
unskilfulness of the executioner. The multitude around, who,
for the most part, regarded the duke as martyred for the Protest
ant religion, yelled with fury when they saw their idolised favourite
thus mangled ; and as they dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood,
the thought must have crossed many minds that the day would
still come when new Monmouths should arise, to uphold the Cause
with happier results.
One of the dying man's answers to the questions with which he
was assailed was expressive of his consistent humanity : " Have
you not been guilty," he was asked, " of invasion, and of much
blood which has been shed ? " He replied, " I am sorry for invad
ing the kingdom and for the blood that has been shed." Again
pressed upon this matter, he said, " What I have done has been
very ill ; and I wish with all my heart it had never been. I never
was a man that delighted in tblood : I was very far from it."
Could the soft hearted Monmouth have looked forward to the
slaughters that were still to be perpetrated upon his poor followers,
he would have had still heavier reason for lamenting his brief
career of civil warfare. It is 1 orrible to know that a king sat upon
the English throne, in times not barbarous, who could command
and sanction the execution of nearly four hundred of his subjects
for their rash participation in a sudden revolt. It is still more
odious to know that, not two centuries ago, there was an English
judge so eager for bloodshed, and English juries so awe-stricken,
as to condemn three hundred and thirty-one persons to the death
of traitors, during one terrible Assize. In addition to those who
suffered the extreme penalty, eight hundred and forty-nine of the
insurgents were transported ; and thirty-three were fined or whip
ped The record of such circumstances is chiefly valuable to show
us the nature of the tyranny from which we have escaped. The
professional atrocities of a colonel Kirke, however exaggerated,
were natural results of the uncontrolled power of a brutal captain
of a brutal soldiery. The calculating barbarities of a Chief Justice
Jeffreys, under the forms of law, exhibit the excesses of an author
ity far more dangerous to freedom than the passing inflictions of
drum-head tyranny. When Kirke and his officers sit carousing at
the White Hart at Taunton : and at every toast of the drunken
crew a prisoner was hanged up for their merriment, and the drums
were ordered to beat to give the quivering limbs music for their
dancing, — we trace the degradation of the unchristian warriors,
who brought the habits of their warfare with barbarians to be the
318 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
scourges of their own countrymen. But when the Chief Justice of
England strains every faculty of his depraved intellect to procure
the condemnation of a lady, whose only crime was giving a meal
and a lodging to two fugitives, we may well believe that there is no
more direct evidence of the fatal course of arbitrary power than its
capacity to make the sword of Justice a far more terrible weapon
of oppression than pike or gun, and to degrade the head of a
learned and liberal profession to an office lower than that of the
hangman. The lady Alice Lisle, then seventy years of age, calmly
slept at the bar while Jeffreys charged the jury against her with
the vehemence of an advocate ; and she went to the scaffold with a
composure which her furious judge must have resented as the
proof of his impotence to kill the soul. Alice Lisle was his first
victim, and the only one at Winchester. Every exertion was made
to obtain her pardon, but king, James was inexorable. It was
nothing to the revengeful Stuart that the venerable lady had been
illegally convicted as an accessory in concealing a traitor, before
the trial and conviction of the said traitor himself. It was enough
that she was the widow of John Lisle, the member of the Long
Parliament and of the High Court of Justice. Jeffreys only
fleshed his fangs upon Alice Lisle. In Dorsetshire he executed
seventy-four persons. In Devonshire a mere thirteen were put to
death. In Somersetshire two hundred and thirty-three suffered
all the barbarous punishments of high-treason. The pitch caul
dron was constantly boiling in the Assize towns, to preserve the
heads and limbs from corruption that were to be distributed
through the beautiful western country. As the leaves were drop
ping in that autumn of 1685, the great oak of many a village green
was decorated with a mangled quarter. On every tower of the
Somersetshire churches a ghastly head looked down upon those
who gathered together for the worship of the God of love. The
directing post for the traveller was elevated into a gibbet. The
labourer returning home beneath the harvest moon hurried past
the body suspended in its creaking gimmaces (chains). The
eloquent historian of this reign of terror has attested from his own
childish recollections, that "within the last forty years peasants, in
some districts, well knew the accursed spots, and passed them
unwillingly after sunset." *
The barbarous executions of this evil time can only be matched
by the infamy of the great, in seeking to make a money advantage
* Macaulay, vol. i. 8vo, p. 645.
THE REWARDS OF JUDGE JEFFREYS. 319
in proportion to the number of prisoners to be transported. It
was calculated that a thousand of these unfortunates were to be
distributed amongst certain favoured persons ; and .Sunderland,
writing to Jeffreys by order of the king, says, "the queen has
asked for a hundred more of the rebels." They were to be sold
by these merchants in human flesh for field labour in Jamaica,
Barbadoes, and the Leeward Islands. Jeffreys did not approve of
this- courtly generosity, that would assign to others the proper
wages of the king and his instruments ; and he writes to James,
" I beseech your majesty that I may inform you that each prisoner
will be worth ten pounds, if not fifteen pounds a-piece ; and, Sir,
if your majesty orders them as you have designed, persons that
have not suffered in the service will run away with the booty." *
The most notorious of these transactions was that of the claim of
the Maids of Honour to make a profit out of the pardon of the
young girls of Taunton, who had presented the embroidered ban
ners to Monmouth on the day of his triumphal entry. More than
two thousand pounds were paid to these ladies of the queen of
England, to avert a prosecution of the innocent children who had
graced the procession of the handsome duke whom they were told
was their rightful king.
Jeffreys returned from his bloody Circuit to be rewarded with
the Great Seal. He boasted that he had hanged more for high
treason than all the judges of England since William the Conquer
or. In his proceedings he had a double gratification. He had a
pleasure in hanging, and a more solid delight in reprieving. He
sold his pardons for enormous sums ; and he was enabled by his
lawful earnings in this fattening time to purchase estates of the
value of thirty-four thousand pounds.
* Roberts, vol. ii. p. 241.
320
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XVI.
Tendencies to Absolutism. — Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. — Meeting of Parliament
— James announces his appointments of Romish Officers. — Address of the Commons.
Dissatisfaction of the Peers. — Parliament prorogued. — Trials for treason. — Repeated
prorogations, and final dissolution of the Parliament. — Preponderance of the Jesuit
party in the government. — Embassy to Rome. — Dispensing power of the king. —
Court of King's Bench affirms the royal power to dispense with the Test Laws. —
Roman Catholics appointed to benifices. — The Ecclesiastical Commission. — The
bishop of London suspended from spiritual functions. — Monastic bodies settle in
London. — Mass at Oxford. — Trial of the Rev. Samuel Johnson. — Massey, a Roman
ist, Dean of Christchurch. — Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge deprived. — Fellows of
Magdalen College, Oxford, ejected.
When the failure of Monmouth's expedition seemed almost
inevitable, Louis the Fourteenth wrote to his ambassador in Eng
land, " there is every appearance that he will soon meet with the
same fate as the earl of Argyle ; and that his attempt will have
served to render the king of England much more absolute in his
kingdom than any of his predecessors." Louis made this incon
trovertible deduction from the whole course of history. Tyranny
never learns moderation from the resistance which is made to it.
The resistance must be strong enough to crush the tyranny, or the
second state of the enslaved people will be far worse than the first.
The attempt of Monmouth was premature. The nation had vague
fears of the disposition of the government, but those fears were
not sufficient to justify insurrection. The system of James was
not at that time fully developed. The man who undertook to at
tack thatr system in its infant strength had not the confidence of
the best part of the nation. YSt his rallying cry of " The Protes
tant Religion " might have convinced any ruler less blind and obsti
nate than James, that the principle which was sufficient suddenly to
raise the industrious people of the western counties into an army of
cloth-workers and miners, — to make the train-bands throw away
their uniforms, and to leave it doubtful whether the militia would
fight,— would, if provoked beyond a certain point, convert the
whole nation into t' e opponents of the king. Fortunate was it for
the future destinies of England that James the Second, who would
have been the most dangerous of rulers a century earlier, was the
REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES. 321
weakest of despots, in his utter ignorance of the new elements of
society which had been called into real vitality during the struggles
of his father. He was not wanting in ability and in decision of
character; he was capable of serious application to business; he
was not utterly prostrated by idleness and luxury as his brother was.
But his personal merits were as the fuel to nourish the fire of his
intense egoism. Every action of his life had reference to his
personality. James, the king, was the one power in the State,
that was to counterbalance every other power. If James, the king,
could retain van Established Church, to proclaim his divine right
to dispense with laws, and to share its honours and riches with the
Romanists, till it should be wholly recovered to Rome, it were well.
If James, the king, could maintain a large standing army, by the
voluntary contributions of the people, it were well. But if Par
liament should refuse supplies ; If the Church should preach of
the supremacy of the law over the will of the sovereign ; if the
people should murmur under a hated military domination, — then,
Parliament should be dismissed; a High Commission should again
purge the Church of all disloyalty ; the soldiers should familiarise
burgess and yeoman with the benefits of free quarters. James
was not a man to accomplish such designs. He ran straightfor
ward, snapping as the mad-dog runs and snaps, and of course had
the same mad-dog ending, as a public enemy.
The Parliament was to meet on the 9th of November. Its
meeting had been preceded by the dismissal of Plalifax from his
office of President of the Council. The king could not induce the
ablest man of his time to fall into his own views as to the removal
of the Test Act. The schemes of James were maturing ; and he
desired to be surrounded by ministers who would have no scru
ples in seconding them. The removal of the barriers which op
posed the admission of Roman Catholics to office ; the repeal of
the Habeas Corpus Act; and the establishment of a large Standing
Army, were the objects to which the king devoted himself without
reserve. The Jesuits urged on the king, persuading him that " the
present juncture is the most favourable one that can be hoped for,"
to strengthen his authority. " But the opulent and settled Catholics
are alarmed for the future, and apprehend a change which may ruin
them." So wrote Barillon, the French ambassador. This juncture
was not altogether the most favourable. That persecution of the
Protestants in France which was carried into effect by the Revo
cation of the Edict of Nantes, took place in October. Under this
Vol. IV.— 21
322 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Edict the Protestants had lived undisturbed in the exercise of their
religion. The Edict had been originally declared to be a perpetual
and irrevocable law. The most peaceful and industrious communities
had flourished under this toleration ; and now the law was sudden
ly abrogated at the will of a despotic king, to whom the people
were no more than the beasts of the field. Louis had long carried
on a petty warfare against the Calvinists — interfering with educa
tion, seizing upon property, closing places of worship. But now,
the Protestant religion was to be extirpated in France at one blow.
The ministers ofthe reformed faith were suddenly banished orimpris-
oned; children were taken away from their parents; women were
driven into nunneries ; dragoons were let loose upon the people, to
pillage andto destroy. Burnet has described the horrible scenes of
what he terms "one ofthe most violent persecutions that is to be found
in history." He says, " I went over the greatest part of France while
it was in its hottest rage, from Marseilles to Montpelier. and from
thence to Lyons, and so to Geneva. I saw and knew so many
instances of their injustice and violence, that it exceeded even
what could have been well imagined ; for all men set their thoughts
at work, to invent new methods of cruelty. In all the towns
through which I passed, I heard the most dismal accounts of those
things possible ; but chiefly at Valence, where one Derapine
seemed to exceed even the furies of inquisitors. One in the streets
could have known the new converts, as they were passing by them,
by a cloudy dejection that appeared in their looks and deportment.
Such as endeavoured to make their escape, and were seized (for
guards and secret agents were spread along the whole roads and
frontier of France), Were, if men, condemned to the galleys ; and,
if women, to monasteries. . . . The fury that appeared on this oc
casion did spread itself with a sort of contagion : for the intendants,
and other officers, that had been mild and gentle in the former
parts of their life, seemed now to have laid aside the compassion
of Christians, the breeding of gentlemen, and the common impres
sions of humanity. The greatest part of the clergv, the regulars
especially, were so transported with the zeal that their king shewed
on this occasion, that their sermons were full of the most inflamed
eloquence that they could invent, magnifying their king in strains
too indecent and blasphemous to be mentioned by me." The
persecuted families carried their industry to other countries. To
England they brought their silk trade ; and they taught us to make
the hats which we had been accustomed to buy from France.
MEETING OF PARLIAMENT. 323
"The tyrant's revenue," says Evelyn, "was exceedingly diminish
ed ; manufactures ceased." At the moment at which the Pro
testant refugees were pouring into England, James was labouring
to attain the same power that Louis had so wantonly exercised.
There was no concealment about the matter. Evelyn writes, " I
was shewed the harangue which the bishop of Valentia, on Rhone,
made in the name of the Clergy, celebrating the French king, as if
he was a God, for persecuting the poor Protestants ; with this ex
pression in it : 'That as his victory over heresy was greater ihan
all the conquests of Alexander and Cassar, it was but what was
wished in England ; and that God seemed to raise the French
king to this power and magnanimous action, that he might be in
capacity to assist in doing the same here.' " *
The king opened the Parliament with a bold declaration. The
rebellion, he said, was suppressed, but the Militia was insufficient
for such services. " There is nothing but a good force of well-
disciplined troops in constant pay, that can defend us from such
as, either at home or abroad, are disposed to disturb us." He had
increased the number of that army. He asked for a supply answer
able to the expenses of that force. " Let no man take exception,
that there are some officers in the army not qualified, according to
the late Tests, for their employments. The gentlemen, I must tell
you, are most of them well known to me; and having former''/
served with me on several occasions, and always approved the
loyalty of their principles by their practice, 1 think them now fit to
be employed under me." He was afraid, he declared, that some
men might be so wicked as to hope and expect that a difference
through this might happen between the Parliament and himself ;
but he did not apprehend that any such misfortune could happen
as a division, or even a coldness; nor anything to shake their
steadiness and loyalty to him. Up to a certain point the House
of Commons would have borne anything. All the Municipal Cor
porations of England might be destroyed ; corrupt juries might be
terrified into false verdicts ; judicial massacres might be perpetrated
without rebuke ; an alderman of London, Cornish, might be hanged
at this very time upon the revived story of the Rye-House Plot ; a
poor widow, Elizabeth Gaunt, might be burnt at Tyburn for giving
shelter to a rebel who afterwards betrayed her ; there was no
amount of Civil Despotism which a Parliament would not have
sanctioned, and a Church declared righteous. — But to put the
* " Diary," November 3.
324 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
power of the sword into the hands of Popish officers, and to ask
the Protestant Commons to pay for this dangerous army, was
something more than could be borne. We have happily lived to
see these distinctions abolished ; but it may be a question if Eng
lish Protestantism could have ultimately_ shown its capacity for
doing a tardy justice to Roman Catholics, if its most violent pre
judices had not been roused at this season, and had not acquired
a real strength and dignity by finding that the Cause of religion
was also the Cause of liberty. The House of Commons, however
the majority was composed of the nominees of the Court, was still
penetrated with the old instincts of freedom. It hesitated about
voting supplies, before considering the king's address. It beat
the Court in a division of 183 against 182. It then, cautiously and
timidly, gave the king to understand that he had committed an
illegal act in appointing officers without their taking the test ; and
humbly hoped that " he would be graciously pleased to give such
directions that no apprehensions or jealousies may remain in the
hearts of his majesty's good and faithful subjects." He frowned
upon the Commons. He did not expect such an Address. He
had warned them against fears and jealousies. The reputation
which God had blessed him with in the world ought to have created
a greater confidence in him. The Commons were awe-struck by
the threatening brow of this poor inflated creature. A country
gentleman, Cook, of Derbyshire, said, he supposed they were all
Englishmen, and not to be frightened from their duty by a few
high words. The new-born independence of the House was laid
low ; and Cook was committed to the Tower for daring to say a
word of implied reproach. But the spirit of resistance began to
spread. The Peers manifested a deeper indignation against the
violation of the Test Acts avowed in the royal speech, than the
Commons had dared to exhibit. The sarcasm of Halifax was sup
ported by the zeal of Compton, the bishop of London, and by the
boldness of lord Mordaunt, afterwards the famous earl of Peter
borough. The king was present at a great debate. Jeffreys, the
Chancellor, attempted to carry the brutality of the Bench to his
new position on the Woolsack. The presence of his master was
not sufficient to protect him from the indignation of the -proudest
nobility of Europe. The government dared not divide upon the
motion to take the king's speech into consideration ; and the next
morning the Parliament was prorogued, without any supplies having
been voted.
PROROGATIONS, OF THE PARLIAMENT. 325
We have now come to the end of the first Act of the Drama of
the English Revolution. The king's manifestation of a temper to
govern despotically, and of a design to force an obnoxious creed
•upon the nation, had been gradually becoming more evident. The
suppression of Monmouth's rebellion had made him presumptuous.
He had a large hereditary revenue, and he had obtained the vote
for life of the most important imposts. He had established a
powerful Standing Army, and his provident expenditure, amount
ing almost to parsimony, would enable him to maintain it. The
judges were his creatures. The Church might be awed or cajoled
into any practical acceptation of its favourite doctrine of non-
resistance. From the time of this first dissension with the most
obsequious Parliament that had sat since the early years of the
Restoration, James manifested the most perfect reliance upon his
own self-sufficient power. Plis nature could brook no opposition.
He held to his purpose with a firmness that would have been ad
mirable, if it had been the result of any other principle than that
proud stupidity which could see no danger and accept no warning.
Having dismissed the Parliament, he had a little more judicial
business to accomplish. He pardoned Grey for his part in Mon
mouth's rebellion, because he could induce him to play the betrayer,
having bought his life at a heavy money payment and the heavier
price of his forfeited honour. Lord Gerard of Brandon, and John
Hampden, were tried for their participation in the Rye-House
Plot, upon Grey's confession. Their lives were spared. The earl
of Stamford had been indicted upon the same charge ; but the
prorogation of Parliament prevented his trial before his peers.
Lord Delamere was tried before the Court of the High Steward.
Jeffreys, who presided, had used every means to obtain a convic
tion, by the selection of the triers from men opposed in politics to
the prisoner, and he conducted himself on the trial with his usual
coarse partiality. But Delamere was acquitted. The most courtly
began to feel that enough vengeance had been taken for past
offences. Lady Rachel Russell expressed the general sentiment
when she wrote to her friend, " I do bless God that he has caused
some stop to be put to the shedding of blood in this poor land."
England was again to be governed without a Parliament. After
the prorogation of the 20th of November, 1685, .it was twice pro
rogued in 1686, and twice in 1687 ; and it was dissolved by proc
lamation on the 2nd of July in that year. The course of the
government towards abitrary power is a flood which has no con-
326 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
stitutional barrier to prevent it devastating the land. Will the
old sea-wall ever be built up again ? A strong people is equal
even to that work. A less vigorous race would have folded their
hands, and have left their fairest possessions to the destroyer.
At the beginning of 1686, king James was steering his state-
vessel, with a blind fatality, towards the inevitable Rapids. Pru
dent friends entreated him, while it was yet possible, to slacken
sail ; to tack ; to veer round, or to seem to veer. Such counsel
became offensive to him. His brothers-in-law, Clarendon and
Rochester, were looked coldly upon, for they were sfedfast in their
adherence to their Protestant convictions. Sunderland became
the prime adviser of the king, for he had consented to embrace
Catholicism. Having impaired his fortune by habitual gambling,
he shamelessly received a pension of twenty-five thousand crowns
from the king of France to espouse his interests, and prevent the
re-assembling of the Parliament. The minister and the king had
now a common bond of union, in the purpose of degrading their
country abroad and enslaving it at home. The Jesuits, with
Father Petre as their great director, were now paramount in the
government of England. The moderate Roman Catholics locked
with apprehension upon the rashness by which the habitual temper
of the nation might easily be lashed into fury. The ostensible
ministers of James were divided into two parties. The real power
was with the secret cabal of Sunderland and Petre. It was deter
mined to send an ostentatious embassy to the Pope, to replace
the modest agency with which the diplomatic business with the
Court of Rome had been previously conducted. Lord Castle
maine, the husband of the duchess of Cleveland, one of the late
king's mistresses, was appointed to this mission. The pontiff,
Innocent XL, was not favourable to the Jesuits, and was opposed
to the measures of the French king. Castlemaine was instructed
to listen to the counsels of the General of the Jesuits and of the am
bassador of France. The Pope sympathised with the feelings of
the moderate English Catholics, who were satisfied to be unmo
lested without hoping to be paramount. The Rector of the Jesuits'
College at Rome congratulated Castlemaine that the flourishing
Imperial Crown of England was at length added to the Papal
Diadem. * The Pope's agent in England, Count d'Adda, had been
instructed to solicit the intercession of James " with the French
monarch, in favour of the French Protestants." t Although the
• Wellwood, " Memoirs," Appendix xviii. f Lingard.
AN EMBASSY SENT TO ROME. 327
king of England had at first exhibited some pity for the persecuted
families who had sought shelter in his dominions, his real temper
and views were now unmistakeably displayed. On the 5th of May,
by the especial direction of the king in Council, and not without
remonstrance from some of his counsellors, there was burnt at the
Royal Exchange, by the common hangman, the translation of a
small volume recently published on the continent. Evelyn de
scribes this volume as " a translation of a book written by the
famous Monsieur Claude, relating only matters of fact concerning
the horrid massacres and barbarous proceedings of the French
king against his Protestant subjects." The book was burned
" without any refutation of any facts therein." Evelyn adds; " So
mighty a power and ascendant here had the French ambassador,
who was doubtless in great indignation at the pious and truly gen
erous charity of all the nation, for the relief of those miserable
sufferers who came over for shelter." The disposition of "the
nation " never presented the slightest obstacle to the egoism of
the Stuarts ; and they always had abettors, in such antiquated
idolaters of royalty as sir John Bramston, who, now in his seventy-
fifth year, being told that Claude's book had in it " expressions
scandalous to his majesty the king of France," says, " if so, it was
fitly burned, for all kings ought to be careful of the honour and
dignity of kings and princes." *
The time was close at hand when the old cry of the Cavalier,
" Church and King ! " would be uttered " with bated breath." The
king and the church were not unlikely to dissolve that partnership
which Strafford and Laud attempted to perpetuate ; and for the
maintenance of which the first Charles struggled at the risk of his
crown and his life. The bishops, who had never ceased to preach
the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance, and some
of whom had been suspected of inclinations towards Popery,
were now alarmed at the tendencies of the king. A brief had
been ordered in Counc.il for collecting contributions for the
French refugees. The collection was put off, under various pre
texts. Previous to the- publication of the brief, Ken, bishop of
Bath and Wells, exerted his eloquence in expressing " detestation
of the cruelties of the French, and exhorting to constancy in the
Protestant religion. This sermon was the more acceptable, as it
was unexpected from a bishop who had undergone the censure of
being inclined to Popery." f Other bishops manifested the same
* "Autobiography," p. 228. t Evelyn, " Diary," March 14.
328 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
spirit ; which example was followed by many of the Anglican
clergy. The king and his advisers would not be warned ; but in
timated to the archbishop of Canterbury that he must warn his
clergy not to preach on the miseries which the bigotry of Louis
had inflicted on his unhappy Protestant subjects. Such warning
was a significant fact. The clergy were not propitiated by the in
tolerant resolution of the king that, in the distribution of alms to
the refugees, the commissioners appointed to that duty should
only relieve those who would conform to the Church of England,
by receiving the sacrament according to its ritual. James was
now resolved to bring to issue the question of the king's dispen
sing power — that is, of the right of the sovereign to abrogate ex
press laws by the exercise of his prerogative. This prerogative
had been exercised in the earliest times of the Constitution ; but
had gradually become more and more limited, as the legislative
power had become more defined. It still continued to be exer
cised in matters of trifling import, and especially with regard to
laws which had fallen into disuse. To admit this dispensing power
as a general principle, applicable to all Statutes affecting the well-
being of the community, would be to render the monarchy of Eng
land absolute. The Test Act had been passed, in direct opposi
tion to the desire of Charles the Second, to prevent the admission
of Roman Catholics to civil and military offices. James the Sec
ond openly proclaimed his design to render the Test Act nuga
tory by his dispensing power of admitting to all offices, secular or
ecclesiastical. He had appointed sir Edward Hales, a Papist, to
be governor of Dover Castle, and .colonel of a regiment. He re
solved to make an effort to have his dispensing power sanctioned
by the Courts of Law. Four of the judges, although not opposed
to the politics of the Court, remonstrated with the king on the
illegality of his proposed measure ; and they were dismissed from
their offices. His Solicitor-General, Finch, held the same convic
tion ; and he was also dismissed. Four subservient judges, and a
crawling Solicitor, were appointed in their places. A collusive
action was brought in the Court of King's Bench for the penalty
incurred by sir Edward Hales, for not taking the Sacrament ac
cording to the Test Act. The information was laid by his own
servant. The object of the action was to obtain an authoritative
decision as to the legality of the plea of the defendant, that he
was enabled to hold his commission by letters patent authorising
him to do so notwithstanding the Test Act. The king's dispen-
ROMAN CATHOLICS APPOINTED TO BENEFICES. 329
sing power was now solemnly confirmed. " The new, very young,
Lord-Chief Justice Herbert, declared on the bench, that the gov
ernment of England was entirely in the King ; that the Crown was
absolute ; that penal laws were powers lodged in the Crown to en
able the King to force the execution of the law, but were not bars
to bind the king's power; that he could pardon all offences
against the law, and forgive the penalties ; and why could he not
dispense with them ? By which [judgment] the Test Act was
abolished. Every one was astonished." * The Attorney-General,
"Sawyer, had refused to draw warrants, which the king required
him to draw, by which members of the Church of Rome were au
thorised to hold benefices of the Church of England. The Soli
citor-General was more obsequious. The warrants were issued.
Under one, Edward Sclater, described by Evelyn as " an apostate
curate of Putney," was enabled to hold two livings ; and under an
other, Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, Oxford,
who, from the accession of James, had been a declared Roman
Catholic, and had been busily engaged in the work of conversion,
was enabled to hold his office and his benefices. The king's
design to sap the foundation's, if not to destroy the whole edifice,
of the Anglican Church, was now sufficiently manifest. One step
remained to be taken. The powers of Ecclesiastical Supremacy
which had been assumed at the Reformation for resisting the au
thority of Rome, were now to be adopted with renewed vigour for
re-establishing that authority. James determined to create a
Court of Ecclesiastical Commission — a Court modelled upon the
Court of High Commission, which had been solemnly abolished at
the Restoration.
The king, as the Head of the Church, had issued directions to
the Clergy not to introduce into their pulpits any discussion upon
doctrinal points which were matter of controversy. The whole
question of the differences between the Anglican and the Roman
Churches were to be excluded from the consideration of their con
gregations. A royal licence was granted to an apostate Protes
tant of the name of Hall, to be the King's Printer, for printing
missals, lives of saints, and Roman Catholic tracts, whose pub
lication was prohibited by various Acts of Parliament. The Pro
testant pulpit was to be silenced ; the Papist pulpit was to be free.
The Protestant press was to work under terror of venal judges and
terrified juries ; the Papist press was to be sanctioned by royal
* Evelyn, " Diary," June 27.
330 HISTORY OF ENGLAND
licence. A divine of high reputation, Sharp, Rector of St. Giles'-
in-the-Fields and Dean of Norwich, refused to submit to the de
cree that the clergy were not to preach upon controversial topics.
One of his parishioners earnestly begged to be informed of the
reasons upon which the Church of England rested its claims to be
a true national Church, in opposition to the universal pretensions
of the see of Rome. He expounded, as he was requested to do,
the essential differences of doctrine and practice between the two
Churches. Compton, the bishop of London, was required to sus
pend Dr. Sharp. He declined to do so ; but he requested the
offending Dean to suspend his preaching for a season. The Ec
clesiastical Commission was now in force. Jeffreys, the Chancel
lor, to whom all religious and moral principle was a matter of in
difference, was its president. Sancroft, the archbishop, would not
act. The bishops of Durham and Rochester were more com
pliant. Sunderland, the new convert to Rome, and Herbert, the
advocate of the dispensing power, were two other commissioners.
The Protestant convictions of Rochester, another of the commis
sioners, were not strong enough to lead him to risk his loss of
place. Compton was called before this partial and illegal tribunal,
Jeffreys bullied him ; but the bishop was firm. The one question
was, why he had disobeyed the king? Conscience, duty, were of
no avail in this Court. He was suspended from his spiritual
functions. The Crown did not dare to seize his revenues ; for the
Courts of Law mus.t have restored them.
The king has himself recorded some of the manifestations of
his open encouragement of Roman Catholicism, which gave deep
offence. His kingdom, he says, " grumbled at his taking the
chapel of St. James into his own hands, which then lay useless;
though to avoid all reasonable cause of complaint he took care to
leave the chapel of Whitehall to the Protestants, and build one
there from the ground for his own use. He settled fourteen Bene
dictine monks in that of St. James, and gave leave to the Jesuits to
build one in the Savoy, and settled a College there for the educa
tion of children, in which they had so good success that in a little
time there was at least two hundred Catholic scholars, and about
as many Protestants, who were no ways constrained in their reli
gion, or required to assist at mass or any of their public devo
tions." * The chapel of Whitehall was opened with all the pagean
try of the Romish ceremonial, at Christmas, 1686. A bishop was
* " Life," vol.ii. p, 79. " His Own Papers."
JESUITS SCHOOLS. 33 1
consecrated on the 29th of December* He sat in his rich copes
and wearing his mitre ; Jesuits and priests stood around, " censing
and adoring him ; " the silver crozier was put in his hand, " with a
world of mysterious ceremony." The worthy courtier, Evelyiij was
astonished : '' I could not have believed I should ever have seen
such things in the king of England's palace." The Benedictine
monks at St. James, the Jesuits' College in the Savoy, were only
parts of a general system. The Franciscans had their chapel in
Lincoln's Inn Fields ; the Carmelites settled in the city. The
street presented the wondrous spectacles to English eyes of cowled
and girdled friars mixing with the crowd ; and exultingly telling
the wonderers that " they hoped in a little time to walk in proces
sion through Cheapside." f Such things could not be, without
exciting the violent dislike of a populace that regarded Popery
with the traditional hatred of a hundred and fifty years. Riots took
place in London. The priests were insulted in their worship in
new chapels in the country. The school of the Jesuits in the
Savoy, and the schools which they had set up in various towns,
obtained little favour from their being opened to children of Prot
estant as well as of1 Catholic parents. The dread of proselytism
assumed a practical shape, in the rapid.- establishment of those
Charity-schools throughout the land, to which popular education
was almost wholly confined during the eighteenth century. The
Jesuits' school in the Savoy gave the first impulse to private endow
ments of those metropolitan schools for the poor, whose children
of both sexes now annually gather beneath the dome of St. Paul's,
to unite their five thousand voices in the simple hymns of a devo
tion well adapted to the national character. The side-aisles of the
great Protestant cathedral were appendages which James compelled
Wren to introduce into his plan, in the hope that they might
resound with the chants of Palestrina as the host was borne along
amongst kneeling worshippers. Fortunate for our country that our
forefathers preferred to join in Luther's Hymn ! The opposition
of the Protestant mind of the latter years of the seventeenth cen
tury to the secular teaching of the Jesuits was natural and inevita
ble. No consideration of their ability as teachers could disarm the
suspicion that they sought to make converts, under the guise of
affording instruction adapted to all churches and sects. The
same doubts of all religionists who profess to be merely secular
teachers still linger amongst us under other forms ; and they will
* Evelyn. " Diary." t Welwood. " Memoirs," p._>73.
332 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
continue to prevail between Protestant and Catholic, Churchman
and Dissenter, until Christian worship rests upon a broader foun
dation of Christian love.
The measures of the king became day by day more clearly
directed to the .gradual advancement, and ultimate supremacy, of
his own creed. The popular discontent was growing serious.
When the first Roman Catholic chapel was opened in the city, the
train-bands hesitated to disperse the mob that insulted the priests.
When Mass was first celebrated at University College, Oxford, in a
chapel opened by Obadiah Walker, the dangers of the Church were
proclaimed from pulpits in which it had been recently proclaimed
that there was no danger and no sin to be compared to that of
resistance to the divine authority of kings. The formation of a
great camp on Hounslow Heath was naturally considered to be for
the purpose of coercing a sinful generation, that obstinately refused
to accept the gracious invitation to come back to the creed of
Gardiner and Bonner. The ponderous folio of " Acts and Mon
uments " was again brought out, and mothers gathered their
children around their knees to hear the sad stories of Rowland
Taylor and Anne Askew. The camp at Hounslow was supposed
to be the evidence that, another time of fiery trial was at hand.,
" There were many jealousies and discourses of what was the
meaning of this encampment," writes Evelyn. The Reverend
Samuel Johnson chose to interpret its meaning, in his own incau
tious fashion. He had been in prison since his conviction in 1683
for writing "Julian the Apostate."* A restless and dangerous
man, Hugh Speke, was his fellow-prisoner ; and in the spirit of
mischief he excited Johnson to write an address to the troops
encamped at Hounslow, which Speke undertook to get circulated.
It was entitled " An humble and hearty address to all the Protes
tants in king James' army ; " and, says the biographer of Mr.
Johnson, "he exhorted the Protestant officers and soldiers not to
serve as instruments to enslave their country, and to ruin the reli
gion they professed"! Johnson was discovered as the author.
He had the generosity not to implicate Speke, and he alone suffered.
He was convicted, on the 16th of November, of a libellous publica
tion, and was sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and to
be publicly whipped. According to one account, when sentence
was pronounced he said, " You whip, upon my back, Acts of Parlia-
" Ante, p. 290. t " Memorials," p. xi.
CONVICTION OF REV. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 333
ment and the Church of England." * According to another account,
when told by the judge to be grateful to the Attorney-General that
he was not tried for high treason, he exclaimed, " Am I, when my
only crime is thai I have defended the Church and the laws, to be
grateful for being scourged like a dog, while Popish scribblers are
suffered daily to insult the Church, and violate the laws with
impunity?" He was scourged like a dog; but previous to his
punishment, he was stripped of his gown, by the bishops of Dur
ham, Rochester, and Peterborough, Commissioners appointed for
the diocese of London, during the suspension of Compton, the
bishop. Johnson's cruel sentence was inflicted on the .ist of
December, though strenuous endeavours were made to obtain* a
remission of the whipping. " The king was deaf to all entreaties :
the answer was, that since Mr. Johnson had the spirit of martyrdom,
'tis fit he should suffer." •"¦ His biographer says of the courageous
endurance of the suffering, " He observed afterwards to one of his
most intimate friends, that this t'.xt of Scripture, which came sud
denly into his mind, ' He endured the cross, and despised the
shame,' so much animated and supported him in his bitter journey,
that had he not thought it would have looked like vain-glory, he
could have sung a psalm while the executioner was doing his office,
with as much composure and cheerfulness as ever he had done in
the church ; though at the same time he had a quick sense of every
stripe which was given him, with a whip of nine cords knotted, to
the number of three hundred and seventeen."
In addressing- the army of king James in a style which was an
incentive to mutiny, Johnson went out of his province as a clergy
man ; and thus brought himself under the cognizance of a law
which could scarcely be considered as arbitrary. The censorship
o£ the press had been revived ; and this Address to the Soldiers
was one of the many publications that evaded all attempts at re
pression. One class of publications, however, the licensing sys
tem could not restrain — works of theological controversy.. There
were divines then in England who were fully equal to the task of
defending their Church against the advocates of Rome, whose
pamphlets, encouraged by the Court, and issued by its printer,
were boldly denounced by Johnson upon his trial. In this contro
versy writers whose names live in honoured remembrance, ardently
engaged — Sherlock and Tillotson, Stillingfleet and Prideaux. Such
who filled the pulpits of London — others who were the ornaments
* Bramston':; " Autobiography," p. 249. t " Memorials," p xii.
334 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of the Universities — had feeble opponents in the priests who ad
dressed the learned in bad English, and sought to convert the mul-
titude by legends of miracles, over which the shrewd artisan had
his heartless laugh. The government could not touch the con
troversial pamphlets, of which the Archbishop of Canterbury was
the Licenser. Disputants without a professional privilege could
be either punished or frightened away. At Amsterdam, the amus
ing John Dunton tells us, he had the good fortune to meet with
Doctor Partridge, " whose Almanacks had been so sharp upon
Popery that England was too hot to hold him." * But the contest
soon grew beyond the skirmishes of a paper-war. Before the
close of the year 1686, the king's determination to thrust Roman
Catholics into the higher offices of the Church and the Uni
versities, was manifested by the appointment of John Massey to
the deanery of Christchurch, Oxford. This Romanist convert was
installed without opposition, on the 29th of December. The suc
cess of this illegal act was encouraging. The fellowships of Ox
ford and Cambridge were as freeholders, held by Protestant tenure.
No one could be admitted to a degree without taking those oaths
which had been provided by Acts of Parliament to exclude Cath
olics from academical honours and offices. These Statutes king
James resolved to violate. On the 7th of February a royal letter
was sent to the authorities of the University of Cambridge, com
manding that Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, should be ad
mitted to the degree of Master of Arts. The authorities required
the Benedictine to take the oaths. He declined, and left Cambridge,
hinting at the consequences of a refusal to submit to the sovereign
will. There was an awkward precedent for granting degrees to
foreigners. The Secretary to the Ambassador of Morocco, a
Mahometan, had received the Master of Arts' degree. Burnet
points out that a proper distinction was made between strangers,
whose degree was merely honorary, and those who would have a
vote in convocation, as the king's priests would have, if admitted
upon the royal mandate. The University was twitted with the ob
vious remark that a Papist was treated worse than a Mahometan.
John Pechell, the Vice-Chancellor, had to endure an agonising con
flict between obedience to the Statutes and obedience to the king.
Learned dignitaries had been preaching and writing in support of
the king's absolute power, and they were now to have a practical
lesson of the real meaning of their doctrine. The terrified Vice-
* Dunton's " Life and Errors," p. 210, 1705.
VICE-CHANCELLOR OF CAMBRIDGE DEPRIVED. 33.5
Chancellor writes to our old friend Samuel Pepys, to relate his
misery under his dread sovereign's frown : " Worthy sir, 'tis ex
traordinary distress and affliction to me, after so much endeavour
and affection to his royal person, crown, and succession, I should
at last, by the providence of God, in this my station, be exposed to
his displeasure." * The " princely clemency " upon which the
Vice-Chancellor desired to cast himself, was sought in vain. The
Vice-Chancellor and the Senate were summoned before the Eccle
siastical Commission. Their judges were papists, or of papistical
tendencies. Jeffreys, the Chancellor, to whom all principles were
indifferent as long as he had the power to enforce arbitrary decrees
by his own insolent demeanour, was the mouth-piece of this body.
Pechell was frightened. The other delegates of the Senate in
vain pleaded that they had acted in obedience to the laws. The
Vice-Chancellor was deprived of his office, and suspended from the
enjoyment of his revenue as Master of Magdalene College. The
property-rights of the college, which were as sacred from any such
interferences as the estate which Jeffreys had bought out of the
price of his swindling pardons during his Bloody Campaign, were
thus as openly violated as the Statutes of the realm.
Cambridge was subject to no further molestation. At Oxford
it was concluded that the spirit of -resistance might be easily kept
down. Oxford had accepted a papist Dean of Christchurch. Ox
ford had suffered mass to be performed in two of its colleges. The
noble institutions of Oxford might gradually be made as available
for the advancement of Catholicism as the College of Douay, or the'
Jesuits' School in the Savoy. Had not Oxford, to use the words
of Burnet, "asserted the king's prerogative in the highest strains
of the most abject flattery possible, both in their addresses, and in
a Wild decree they had made but three years before this, in which
they had laid together a set of such high-flown maxims as must
establish an uncontrollable tyranny ? " f Surely resistance would
not come from Oxford, whatever might happen. There were pre
monitory symptoms that the spirit of English gentlemen would
at length be roused out of the sleep of slavery. Obadiah Walker
was insulted and ridiculed in his popish seminary. The under
graduates had long believed, as Colley Cibber represented his own
school-boy belief in 1684 : •¦ It was then a sort of school doctrine to
regard our monarch as a deity ; as in the former reign it was to in-
* Letter of February 23, — in the Pepys' Correspondence.
t " Own Times," Oxford edit. vol. iii. p. 146.
-^6 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sist he was accountable to this world, as well as to that above
him." * The undergraduates of 1686 were a little veering round to
this obsolete notion ; and in spite of the Oxford deification of James
II. it was necessary to quarter a troop of dragoons in that loyal
city, to allow " Ave Maria " to be sung in more than one chapel
without interruption from the scurrilous songs of the street. The
crisis was at hand. The presidency of Magdalen College was
vacant. It was rumoured that Anthony Farmer was to be recom
mended by a royal letter. This man was not qualified by the
Statutes of the College, the presidency being limited to fellows of
Magdalen or of New College ; he was of notoriously immoral life ;
he had become a pervert to Rome. The fellows of Magdalen re
monstrated in vain against the probability of this indecent choice.
The royal letter came. In the hope of some compromise the
election was postponed till it could be postponed no longer. John
Hough, a man worthy of the office, was elected. The fellows were
cited before the Ecclesiastical Commission. They produced such
proofs of Farmer's unfitness, that no attempt was made to enforce
his election ; but that of Hough was declared void. In -August a
royal recommendation of Parker, bishop of Oxford, arrived. The
fellows justly held that the right of election was in themselves ;
that Hough was duly elected ; that the presidency was not vacant-
The king had set out on a progress. On the 3rd of September he
reached Oxford. He lodged at the deanery of Christchurch, and
heard Mass in a chapel fitted up by the dean. The fellows of
Magdalen College were sent for. William Blathwayte, the Clerk
of the Council, writes to Mr. Pepys an account of what took place
at this audience : " His Majesty being informed that the fellows of
Magdalen College had refused to admit the bishop of Oxford to be
their president in the stead of Mr. Farmer, sent for them yesterday,
after dinner, to his anti-chamber in Christ-Church College, where his
majesty chid them very much for their disobedience, and with much
a greater appearance of anger than ever I perceived in his majesty ;
who bade them go away immediately and choose the bishop of
Oxford before this morning, or else they should certainly feel the
weight of their sovereign's displeasure. The terms were to this
effect ; and yet I hear this morning they have not obeyed his
majesty's commands, the consequences of which I cannot yet
learn." t The consequences were more full of peril to the threat-
* " Apology for the life of Colley Gibber," — edit- 1756, p. 23.
t Pepys' " Correspondence," September 5th, 1687.
THE FELLOWS OF MAGDALEN COLLECE EJECTED. 337
ening tyrant, than to the fellows of Magdalen College. Resolute
against the king's heaviest displeasure — unseduced by the arts of
a man whose political faults all would willingly forget, but whose
partial aberration from the path of duty can scarcely be disproved
— the fellows of Magdalen College persisted in their right of
election. Their legal president was ejected by a special commis
sion, whose decrees were enforced by troops of cavalry. Hough
refused to give up the keys of the college, and the doors were
broken open. The bishop of Oxford was installed by proxy, only
two fellows of the college giving their attendance. The other
fellows at length consented to a modified submission to the authority
which had been forced upon them. The king required a public
acknowledgment that they had acted undutifully ; and that the
appointment of the bishop of Oxford was legal : they must sue for
pardon. They one and all refused to submit to this humiliation.
They were one and all ejected from their college, and declared
incapable of holding any ecclesiastical appointment. The Ecclesi
astical Commission, by which this edict was issued, forgot that a
power might be raised again, as it had once been raised, before
which High Commissioners might be swept away, and even the
throne might totter to its base. The immediate object of the king
was accomplished. Magdalen College soon became a college of
Papists, with a Roman Catholic bishop at its head ; for Parker, the
bishop of Oxford, had enjoyed his dignity only during a few
months, in which his authority was so openly resisted that he
died, as men believed, of anxiety and mortification. A subscrip
tion was raised for the ejected fellows. All but the most bigoted
saw that the ties which bound the Church to the Throne were so
loosened, that upon one more violent strain the union might be
utterly broken.
Vol. IV.— 22
338 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XVII.
Fall of the Hydes. — Tyrconnel Lord Deputy in Ireland. — Declarations in Scotland and
England for Liberty of Conscience. — Abolition of Penal Tests.— Effects of the
Declaration of Indulgence. — The camp at Hounslow Heath. — The Papal Nuncio
publicly received by the King. — The King's policy towards Dissenters. — Dryden's
Poem of " the Hind and the Panther " — The Declaration commanded to be read in
Churches. — The Petition of the Seven Bishops. — They are committed to the Tower. —
The public sympathy. — The trial and acquittal of the Bishops. — Birth of the Prince of
Wales. The year 1687 opened with evil forebodings to those who were
well-wishers to the Monarchy and the Church. One whose loyalty
must have been sorely shaken by the dangerous experiments upon
the temper of the nation thus records his impressions : " Lord
Tyrconnel gone to succeed the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, to the
astonishment of all sober men, and to the evident ruin of the Prot
estants in that kingdom, as well as of its great improvement going
on. Much .discourse that all the White-Staff officers and others
should be dismissed for adhering to their religion."* The Lord
Lieutenant, to whom Tyrconnel is to succeed, is Clarendon. The
White-Staff officers are to follow the dismissed Lord-Treasurer,
Rochester. The fall of the two Hydes, the brothers-in-law of the"
king, was of evil omen. It was seen that the ties of relationship, of
ancient friendship, of fidelity under adverse circumstances, were of no
moment when the one dominant idea of the king was to coerce all
around him into his measures for forcing his creed upon a reluctant
nation. From the highest minister of the Crown to the humblest
country magistrate, all appointments were to be made with reference
to this royal monomania: " Popish justices of the peace established
in all counties, of the meanest of the people; judges ignorant of
the law, and perverting it. So furiously do the Jesuits drive,
and even compel princes to violent courses, and destruction of an
excellent government both in Church and State." f Tyrconnel,
whose violence and rashness were objected to even by moderate
Catholics, was instructed to depress the English interest, and pro-
* Evelyn, "Diary," January 17. t Evelyn, "Diary," January 17.
TYRCONNEL LORD DEPUTY IN IRELAND. 339
portionately to raise that of the Irish ; " to the end that Ireland
might offer a secure asylum to James and his friends, if by any
subsequent revolution he should be driven from the English
throne." * But Tyrconnel, says Dr. Lingard, " had a further and
mors national object in view." He entered, with the sanction of
the king, into secret negotiations with Louis XIV., " to render his
native country independent of England, if James should die with
out male issue, and the prince and princess of Orange should in
herit the crown." Ireland was then to become a dependency of
France — a truly " national object." Tyrconnel went about his
work in a wild way. He displaced the Protestant judges, and
filled their seats with Catholics. He terrified the cities and towns
into surrender of their charters, and gave them new charters which
made parliamentary representation a mockery. He had a scheme
for dispossessing the English settlers of the property which they
had acquired in the forfeitures of half a century previous. His
projects were opposed by grave Catholic peers, who said that the
Lord-Deputy was fool and madman enough to ruin ten kingdoms.
His character and that of his master, were ridiculed in the famous
ballad of Lilli-Burlero :
" Dare was an old prophecy found in a bog,
Lilli burlero, bullen a-la ;
Ireland shall be ruled by an ass and a dog,
Lilli burlero, bullen a-la."
James was the ass and Tyrconnel the dog. This ribaldry of Lord
Wharton was~adapted to a spirited air of Purcell, published ten
years before. "The whole army," says Burnet, "and at last the
people both in city and country, were singing it perpetually."
Wharton afterwards boasted that he had rhymed James out of his
dominions. He had produced a song, like many other songs of
wondrous popularity, with little intrinsic merit. But those whose
conviviality, even in our own days, had been stirred by its fascina
ting melody,t may well believe that it was whistled and sung in
every street in 1688 ; and that it had charms for Corporal Trim
and his tellow soldiers in Flanders, when its satire upon the " new
deputie '' who " will cut de Englishman's troat," was utterly for
gotten. There is no error more common, even amongst educated per-
* L'ngard.
t "A very good song, and very well sung,
J -lty companions, every one."
340 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sons, than to pronounce upon the opinions of a past age according
to the lights of their own age. In February, 1687, James issued
in Scotland a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. In April,
1687, he issued a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience in Eng
land. Why, it is asked, were these declarations regarded with
suspicion by Churchmen and by Dissenters ? Why could not all sin
cere Christians, of whatever persuasion, have accepted the king's
noble measures for the adoption of that tolerant principle which is
now found to be perfectly compatible with the security of an Es
tablished Church. It was precisely because the principle has been
slowly making its wav during the contests of a hundred and fifty
years, that it is now all but universally recognised as a safe and
wholesome principle. It is out of the convictions resulting from
our slow historical experience that all tests for admission to civil
offices are now abolished for ever. Roman Catholic, Presbyterian,
Quaker, Methodist, Independent, Unitarian, Jew, all stand upon
the same common ground as the Churchman, of suffering no re
ligious disqualification for the services of their country. But to'
imagine that such a result could have been effected by the inter
ested will of a Papist king, who had himself been the fiercest of
persecutors — who had adopted, to their fullest extent, the hatred
of his family to every species of non-conformity, — is to imagine
that the channels in which the great floods and little rills of reli
gious opinion had long been flowing, were to be suddenly diverted
into one mighty stream, for which time and wisdom had prepared
no bed. King James announced to his people of Scotland that,
" being resolved to unite the hearts and affections of his subjects,
to God in religion, to himself in loyalty, and to their neighbours in
Christian love and charity, he had therefore thought fit, by his
sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power, which
all his subjects were to obey without reserve, to give and grant his
royal toleration to the several professors of the Christian religion
after named." The moderate Presbyterians might meet in their
houses ; but field conventiclers were still to be resisted with the
utmost severity. Quakers might meet and exercise their worship
in any place. Above all, the various prohibitions and penalties
against Roman Catholics were to be void ; and all oaths and tests
by which any subjects are incapacitated from holding place or office
were remitted. The Council of Scotland made no hesitation about
•" sovereign authority " and "absolute power;" for they had told
James at his accession that " we abhor and detest all principles
ABOLITION OF PENAL TESTS. 34I
and positions which are contrary or derogatory to the king's sacred,
supreme, absolute power and authority;" In Scotland, the experi
ment appeared to be successful. The successors of John Knox
made no sign of resistance to a decree which gave honour to the
image-worshippers. James now summoned his English Council to
proclaim to them his new charter of religious liberty. Freedom of
conscience was conducive to peace and quiet, to commerce and
population; during four reigns conformity in religion had been
vainly attempted. All penal laws should be suspended by the royal
prerogative. "A Daniel come to judgment," cried some short
sighted Protestants of that day. "A wise and upright judge,"
cry some liberal philosophers of the nineteenth century.
Whilst James was introducing his scheme to his Council, he
was sounding every peer and influential commoner who approached
him, as to the probability of Parliament sanctioning the" abolition
of the Test Act. The Houses were shortly expected to meet. It
was desirable, to secure the adhesion of the members to this ob
ject, upon which the king had set his heart. He was met by cold
ness or open refusal, by many upon whose loyalty he thought he
could count ; and he believed that the loyalty which held kings
to be divine would shrink from no sacrifices of higher principles.
Upon those who held places he felt sure that he could successfully
operate. " It was against all municipal law,"' said the king, "for
free born subjects to be excluded the service of their prince, or for a
prince to be restrained from employing such subjects as he thought
fit for his service ; and that therefore he hoped they would be so
loyal as not to refuse him their voices for annulling such unreason
able laws." * Sir John Reresby was attacked by deputy : " The
king ordered the judges, in their several circuits, to feel the pulses
of the men ; in consequence of which I was, to my great surprise,
accosted at York by the judge, who told me he had orders to talk
with me on the subject." The prudent governor of York evaded
giving a direct expression of his intentions : " Had I answered
in the affirmative, I might have incurred the displeasure and cen
sure of the greatest part of the nation ; if in the negative I should
have utterly disobliged the king." Such negative would have for
feited his place : " Every man that persisted in a refusal to com
ply with this suggestion was sure to be outed." The labours of
the king to gain the support of members of parliament, "even' to
discoursing every one of them particularly in his closet, which
# Reresby — " Memoirs," p. 320.
342 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
made the English call that way of conference closeting" * set the
worldly courtiers upon devising the most polite forms of exprcs--
ing love and duty that committed them to nothing. When sir
Dudley North was pressed, "he remembered an old TurU&ii say
ing, viz., that a man is to say ' no ' only to the devil." f Penn went
over to Holland to sound the prince of Orange. William told him
" that no man was more for toleration in principle than he was ; he
thought tho conscience was only subject to God ; and as far as a
general toleration, even of papists, would content the king, he
would concur in it heartily. But he looked on the tests as such
a real security, and indeed the only one, when the king was of an
other religion, that he would join in no councils with those that
intended to repeal those laws that enacted them." J Penn under
took to promise that if the tests were abolished, the king would
secure toleration by a solemn and unalterable law. He was an
swered by a demonstration of the value of irrevocable laws to a
bigoted despot, — a blunt reference to the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. James left off his closetings and his negotiations.
His judges and lords-lieutenant were not required to persist in
their labours of threat or persuasion. He resolved to do without
the Parliament ; which he prorogued for six months, with a full
determination to be truly the absolute king. On the 4th of April
he issued his Declaration for entire liberty of conscience. He
would protect the Established Church in its legal rights, but all
penal laws against all non-conformists were suspended. All re
ligious tests as a qualification for office were abrogated. Every
form of worship, Roman Catholic or Protestant, might be publicly
followed. The effects of this Declaration were instantaneous.
Ralph Thoresby and his friends used to attend the preaching of
" Mr. Sharp, in private, as we could get opportunity, for which we
went several miles." The Declaration came, and " Mr. Sharp
preached the first sermon in public." The Declaration of king
James, he says, " gave us ease in this case ; and, though we dreaded
a snake in the grass, we accepted it with due thankfulness." §
Regarded simply as a matter of political expediency, without ref
erence to higher principles of action, the Declaration of Indulgence
of 1687 was a master-stroke worthy of the Jesuitical subtlety to
which it doubtless owed its origin. The king had committed him
self against the Church of England. The Church of England had
* Father D'Orleans— " History of the Stuarts."
t " Life of Sir Dudley North," p. iSi. X Burnet vol. iii- p. 133.
§ " Diary," vol. i. p. 186.
EFFECTS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDULGENCE. 343
resented his manifest design of thrusting Roman Caih Tics into its
preferments. "As he was apt," says Burnet, "to go warmly upon
every provocation, he gave himself such liberties in discourse upon
that subject, that it was plain, all the services they had done him,
both in opposing the exclusion, and upon his first accession to the
crown, were forgotten." * There were four bodies of dissenters,
whose united support would be an important counterpoise to the dis
satisfaction of the churchmen. These were, Presbyterians, Inde
pendents, Anabaptists, Quakers. They had all been the victims of
Conventicle Acts and of Two Mile Acts. Hundr:da of the Presby
terian clergy, long ejected from their pulpits, had be^n supported by
private charity. Some, up to the date of the Declaration, had
been lying in the gaols, amongst felons and common debtors, un
able to pay the fines which had been imposed upon them for
preaching. The Declaration opened a new world to them. They
were again free publicly to teach their followers. In new meet
ing-houses, and in their old barns, they might again declaim
against church discipline and set forms of prayer ; and warn their
hearers against that Popery which was again lifting its head. But
then Roman Catholics were equally freed from State-interference
with their worship. Mass might be publicly performed ; auricular
confession might be encouraged ; monastic institutions might once
more flourish. The penal laws against Papists were utterly sus
pended. Many dissenters were happy to embrace the relief which
was thus afforded them. They were soothed by the high sounding
professions of toleration which issued from the royal lips. They
were flattered by the agents of the Court into the belief that they
again could make head against the Church which had persecuted
them. But they were warned by the examples of their two greatest
ministers, Howe and Baxter, not to fall into the snare. Young Defoe
said to his non-conformist brethren, " I had rather the Church of
England should pull our clothes off by fines and forfeitures than
that the Papists should fall both upon the Church and the dissent
ers, and pull our skins off by fire and faggot." t The most elo
quent and sagacious statesman of the day, Halifax, addressed
them in his " Letter to a Dissenter " — a model of skilful popular
argument: "There must be something extraordinary, when the
Church of Rome setteth up bills, and offereth plaisters, for tender
consciences. By all that hath hitherto appeared, her skill in chirur-
*" Own Time," vol. iii. p. 151.
t Quotjd in Wilson's " Life of Defoe," vol. i. p. 128.
344 HISTORY OF ENGLANL.
gery lieth chiefly in a quick hand to cut off limbs ; but she is the
worst at healing of any that ever pretended to it." He warns the
dissenters against the temptation to enjoy a freedom from which
they had been so long restrained ; " If the case then should be,
that the price expected from you for this liberty is giving up your
right in the laws, sure you will think twice before you go any
further in such a losing bargain." * A large proportion of the
Non-conformists held aloof from the blandishments of the Court,
and ultimately made common cause with the Church. In his sub
sequent indignation against the relapse of churchmen into intoler
ance, Defoe exclaims, " Where had been the Church of England
at this time, humanly speaking, if the dissenters had one and all
joined in with the measures king James was taking to overthrow
it?" The Church knew this, and made loud professions of
brotherly regard to the separatists. The king and his papistical
advisers, on the other hand, employed every device to manifest
that the country was in favour of that dispensing power of a
gracious king, which could bestow, not only toleration, but unlim
ited blessings of national glory and prosperity, which were not to
be bestowed by the old statutes or new enactments. Paternal gov
ernment was the true remedy for all that was harsh and unequal
in statutory laws. The corrupt Corporations sent fulsome ad
dresses of thanks to the king. In these some Protestant Non
conformists were induced to join. But the great body remained
firm ; and a common danger brought them nearer to that union with
the Church, which the Stuarts, during four unhappy reigns, had
done their best to render impracticable.
In the summer of 1687, a great Camp was again formed on
Heunslow-heath. It was a military display of royal and aristocratic
luxury, " the commanders profusely vying in the expense and
magnificence of their tents." f The four troops of Horse Guards
were commanded by the earl of Feversham, the duke of Northum
berland, lord Churchill, lord Dover. The duke of Grafton com
manded the first regiment of Foot Guards ; the earl of Craven the
second regiment. There were nine regiments of Horse command
ed by the earls of Oxford, Peterborough, Plymouth, Arran, Shrews
bury, and Scarsdale ; by sir John Lanies, general Warden, and sir
John Talbot. There were three regiments of Dragoons, com-
* This letter is reprinted in the " Somers' Tracts," and in " Parhamentary History,"
vol. iv.
t Evelyn, " Diary," Juneti.
THE CAMP AT HOUNSLOW-HEATH. 345
manded by lord Cornbury, the duke of Somerset, and colonel
Berkeley. Lastly, there were fourteen regiments of Foot, com
manded by the marquis of Worcester; the earls of Dumbarton,
Bath, Litchfield and Huntington : lord Dartmouth ; and by colo
nels of the rank of commoners, amongst whom was the notorious
colonel Kirke. The standing army had been trebled, as com
pared with its number in 1683.* The courtly habits of its com
manders caused the people to regard this army as the instrument by
which the king could accomplish his designs against their liberties
and their religion. And yet in the, hour of need this formidable
army struck not a single blow ; and most of his courtly officers de
serted the king — a lesson which princes, who rely upon military
force, have often been taught, however slow they may be to learn.
The Londoners went out in holiday parties to look upon the mag
nificence of the camp at Hounslow. They mixed with the soldiers,
who, with the exception of the household troops, were of their own
rank as artisans and labourers. The temper of the nation was
roused out of its apathy, to express itself with the freedom which
Englishmen use when their political indignation is excited. A
shrewd observer, then a very young man, thus describes this
period : " It were almost incredible to tell you, at the latter end
of king James' time — though the rod of arbitrary power was
always shaking over us — with what freedom and contempt the
common people, in the open streets, talked of his wild measures to
make a whole Protestant nation Papists. And yet, in the height of
our secure and wanton defiance of him, we of the vulgar, had no fur
ther notion of any remedy for this evil, than a satisfied presumption
that our numbers were too great to be mastered by his mere will
and pleasure ; that, though he might be too hard for our laws, he
would never be able to get the better of our nature ; and that to
drive all England into popery and slavery, he would find, would
be teaching an old lion to dance." f
The camp at Hounslow was conveniently located between
Whitehall and Windsor. It was at hand to suppress disturbances
in the capital: it could be speedily summoned to protect the king
in the castle upon which his brother had lavished his adornments.
Windsor was now to be the scene of a gorgeous ceremony, such as
could scarcely have been exhibited without danger in the streets
• For full details of the military force of 1687, see Chamberlayne's " Present State of
England " for that year. Part i. p. 176 ; Part ii. p. 143.
t " Life of Colley Cibber," vol. 1. p. 48.
346 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of Westminster. James had knelt at the feet of the papal Nuncio,
who in the royal chapel of Whitehall had been consecrated bishop
of Amasia. He was now to receive this ambassador of the Pope,
with a pomp that belonged to past generations. It was resolved
that a duke should introduce the Nuncio to the king. James pro
posed the honour to the duke of Somerset — the commander of the
queen's regiment of dragoons, and a lord of the bed-chamber.
This young nobleman, who afterwards obtained the distinction of
being called " The proud duke of Somerset," behaved with a spirit
on this occasion that wholly forfeited the royal favour: " He hum
bly desired of the king to be excused; the king asked him his
reason ; the duke told him he conceived it to be against law, to
which the king said, he would pardon him. The duke replied, he
was no very good lawyer, but he thought he had heard it said, that
a pardon granted to a person offending, under the assurance of
obtaining it, was void. This offended the king extremely. He
said publicly, he wondered at his insolence ; and told the duke he
would make him fear him, as well as the laws." * On the 3rd of
July, Windsor was crowded with visitors. There was a procession
to the castle of thirty-six coaches, each drawn by six horses. The
Nuncio, robed in purple, was in the king's coach, with the duke of
Grafton, who had agreed to introduce him. His own coaches fol
lowed with ten priests. Then came the coaches of the ministers
of State, and great officers of the household ; and in that train of
equipages were the coaches of the bishop of Durham, and the
bishop of Chester. The king and queen sat upon a throne in St.
George's Hall." f The pensioner of France looked upon Verrio's
painted walls, where the triumphs of the Black Prince were repre
sented with no common skill. The devotee of Rome honoured its
ambassador with manifestations of homage that reminded those
who knew their country's history of the time when the ignoble
John became " a gentle convertite." Although this outrage upon
the popular feeling took place at Windsor, it was not done solely
in the view of court attendants : " The town of Windsor was so
full of all sorts of people, from all parts, that some of the inhab
itants were astonished ; and it was very difficult to get provisions
or room either for horse or man ; nay, many persons of quality, and
Others, were forced to sit in their coaches and calashes almost all
* Lord Lonsdale's Account. Note to Burnet, vol. iii. p. 178.
\ Bramston' s " Autobiography," p. 280.
THE KING'S POLICY TOWARDS DISSENTERS. 347
the day." * As if to mark that England was entering upon a new
era of government, on the 4th of July, a Proclamation dissolving
the Parliament appeared in the London Gazette.
In the autumn of 1687, the king made a progress through some
parts .of the West of England. One of his objects was to propi
tiate the Dissenters, who had taken so prominent a part in the in
surrection of Monmouth. Storms and birds of prey had not yet
cleared the gibbets of Somersetshire of the rags and bones of the
victims of 1685, when James went amongst the scenes of Jeffrey's
campaign, to promise not only spiritual liberty but civil honours to
the relatives and friends of those who had fought the battle which
they thought all good Protestants should fight. He gained little
by his blandishments. The answer which was given to him by
the rich non-conformist, William Kiffin, the grandfather of two
youths who were treated with marked severity at the especial in
stance of the king, was perhaps not unknown in the West. " I
have put you down, Mr. Kiffin, for an alderman of London," said
James. " I am unfit to serve your Majesty, or the city," replied
the old man : " I am worn out ; the death of my poor boys broke
my heart." Others might have thought of their own bereavements ;
and have felt a bitter contempt towards that king- who had talked
of his capricious favour as the " balsam for such sores." f The
government had forced new charters upon London, and upon many
of the municipal corporations throughout the country. Although the
•power of the Crown to nominate corporate functionaries, as well as
to eject them, was disputed, the process of ejection was very sum
marily exercised. The supporters of Church and King were thrust
out ; the Papists and the Independents were noininated. Non
conformists of different ranks of life were brought together in a
way that offended the pride of the upper classes amongst them.
Ralph Thoresby says, speaking of the Corporation of Leeds, "The
places of such as were to be ejected were filled up with the most
rigid Dissenters, who had put my name in the fag end of their
reformed list, there being but one, a smith by trade, after me." X
The process of regulation, as it was called, was not successful.
Many of the Charters were consequently attempted to be called
in ; but the resistance carried on in the Law Courts by Corpora
tions was almost general. All- these arbitrary measures of the
* Relation of the Nuncio's public entry. Printed in 1687. Reprinted in the Som-
els' Tracts.
t See Macaulaj. History, vol ii. p. 230, ist edition. t " Diary," rol. i. p. 186.-
348 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Crown had reference to the necessity which might arise of calling
a Parliament, and to the readiest means of procuring a servile Par
liament. Sir John Reresby tells us how, in his own case in 1688,
this process was managed. The king commanded him to stand
for York, in the event of an election. Reresby asked for his
promise of more than ordinary support — " Whether he would assist
me all he could to prevent my being baffled, and particularly by
such means as I should propose to him. His answer was Yes ;
and he gave immediate orders to the lords for purging the corpo
rations, to make whatever change or alteration I desired in the
city of York ; and to put in or out, which the king it seems had
reserved to himself by the last charter, just as I pleased."* In
London, James had put in an Anabaptist Lord Mayor — "a very
odd ignorant person," as Evelyn reports. When the sheriffs in
vited the king and queen according to custom, to feast at Guild
hall, the king commanded them to invite the Nuncio. Burnet says
the mayor and aldermen disowned the invitation, which must have
offended the king, who said, " he saw the dissenters were an ill-
natured sort of people, that could not be gained." This opinion
seems to have been that usually received at Court, if we may judge
from the Court Calendar of this year, in which the dissenters are
denounced as " the private, sullen, discontented, niggardly non
conformists." f At this time, Dryden published his famous poem
of " The Hind and the Panther " — at a time of which he says,
" The nation is in too high a ferment, for me to expect either fair
war, or even so much as fair quarter, from a reader of the opposite.
party. All men are engaged either on this side or that ; and
though conscience is the common word which is given by both, vet
if a writer fall among enemies, and cannot give the marks of their
conscience, he is knocked down before the reasons of his own are
heard." Dryden aims his satire at those he calls " the refractory
and disobedient " — not against those " who have withdrawn them
selves from the communion of the Panther, and embraced the
gracious Indulgence of his majesty in regard to toleration." J The
great poet, however, does not attempt to propitiate the Sectaries.
"The Panther" — the Church of England — is "sure the noblest,
next the Hind "—the Church of Rome. But the " Independent
beast" is typified by "the Bear:." the Anabaptist is "the bristled
Boar " who '¦ lurk'd in sects unseen ; " the Presbyterian is " the in-
* " Memoirs," p. 351. t Chamberlayne's " Present State," p. 41.
X Dryden's Preface to the Poem,
DRYDEN S POEM OF THE HIND AND PANTHER. 349
satiate Wolf " who " pricks up his predestinating ears;" "False
Reynard " is the Socinian. The Papist Laureate of James did
not bid for popularity, when he thus addressed the countries
whose names had been hateful in Fnglish ears from the days of
queen Mary : " O happy regions, Italy and Spain,
Which never did those monsters entertain! "
We can now admire the beauty of his versification, and the energy
of.his reasoning, in this poem of a period when Dryden thought his
cause was triumphant. It may be doubted whether it produced
many converts to Romanism, Or affected a' wider separation of the
Panther from the Bear, the Boar, and the Wolf. Many who would
scarcely heed his musical polemics would recollect his own heedless
sarcasm against the teaching of an infallible Church :
" The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes ou the man.'*
The year 1688 is come. Men were thinking of the correspond
ing year of the previous century — of the glorious 1588, when the
nation rallied round the great Elizabeth, and the invaders who came,
with the papal blessing, to destroy the heretical islanders, perished
in their pride. The contrast was humiliating. The king was now
labouring to drive back the mind of England into the night of the
fifteenth century. At this very time the great ally of this king was
hunting his Protestant subjects to the death by his " dragoon mis-
sioners." Could any other consummation be expected from an
illegal Declaration of Indulgence, which, abolishing the tests under
pretence of universal toleration, thrust Romanists into the highest
civil and military offices, seated Father Petre amongst the Privy
Counsellors of the kingdom, and turning out the members of cor
porations who clung to a Protestant establishment, gave the muni
cipal power to bigoted Papists or unscrupulous Dissenters. Thus
reasoned-the great body of Englishmen when this ominous year
arrived. It was opened with "a solemn and particular office of
thanksgiving for her majesty being with child." An heir to the
throne had long ceased to be expected as the issue of James and his
queen. The priests every where proclaimed that the king had put
up his prayers for such an event at the Well of Saint Winifred;
and that his supplications had been heard. The .divines of the
English Church were girding on their spiritual armour for a conflict
Whilst, at the beginning of April, mass was being performed at one
350 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
chapel at Whitehall, the other chapel was crowded by eager mul
titudes, to hear bishop Ken describe the calamity of the reformed
church of Judah under the Babylonian persecution. As God had
delivered Judah upon the repentance of her sins, so should the
new Reformed Church be delivered, wherever insulted and per
secuted.* The princess Anne, the daughter of James, was amongst
the hearers. The contest soon assumed a more formidable shape
than in the eloquence of the pulpit or the arguments of the press.
The king issued a second Declaration of Indulgence on the 27th
of April. It was a repetition of the Declaration of 1687, with an
avowal that his resolution was immutable, and that he would em
ploy no servants, civil or military, who refused to concur with him.
He would hold a Parliament in the following November ; and he
exhorted his people to choose representatives who would support
him in his resolves. This proceeding was little regarded; for" all
knew what the king meant, and knew also the pride and obstinacy
of his character. But his next step was something more exciting.
By an Order in Council of the 4th of May, he commanded the
Declaration to be read in all churches and chapels throughout the
kingdom, on two successive Sundays, by the ministers of all per
suasions. The Gazette of the 7th of May fixed the 20th of that
month for the first reading in London and the neigbourhood. In
the country, the first reading was to take place on the 3rd of June.
There was short time to collect the opinions of ten thousand minis
ters of the Anglican Church. There were then very imperfect
means of communication. The Gazette was wholly under the con
trol of the government. Letters could not be sent through the
post-office without the certainty that they would be opened, if sus
pected, and would be stopped, if their contents were displeasing.
Country clergymen would peruse the Order of Council in the
Gazette, and some might hear that it was considered by their
brethren in London as an insult to their order. But to disobey
was to incur the danger of deprivation by the Ecclesiastical Com
mission. The most eminent of the London clergy came to a res
olution not to read the Declaration ; and a large majority joined
in the same pledge. On the 18th a great meeting of prelates and
other divines took place at Lambeth, and a petition to the king was
drawn up by the archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of himself, of
divers of the suffragan bishops of his province, and of the inferior
clergy of their dioceses. They professed their averseness to dis-
* Evelyn, " Diary," April i.
PETITION OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS. 35 1
tribute and publish the king's Declaration for liberty of conscience,
not from any want of duty and obedience, — for the "loyalty of the
Church of England was unquestionable, — " nor yet," they said,
" from any want of tenderness to Dissenters, in relation to whom
we are willing to come to such a temper as shall be thought fit,
when the matter shall .be considered and settled in Parliament and
Convocation." Their averseness especially arose from the consid
eration that the Declaration was " founded upon such a dispensing
power as hath been often declared illegal in Parliament." It was
so declared, they said, in 1662, in 1672, and at the beginning of his
majesty's reign ; and therefore they could not in prudence, hon
our, or conscience make themselves jjarties to the Declaration, as
the distribution and solemn publication of it in God's house would
amount to. They therefore prayed the king not to insist upon
thSir distributing and reading this Declaration. The archbishop
and six suffragan bishops signed this petition. Sancroft was not
received at Court; and therefore, without . their head, bishops
Lloyd, Turner, Lake, Ken, White, and Trelawney, immediately
went to the king's palace, and were admitted to the royal closet.
The king was unprepared for resistance to his mandate. When
he read the petition he broke out into unseemly violence. " This
is a standard of rebellion," he cried. Three bishops passionately
disclaimed the imputation. " Did ever a good Churchman question
the dispensing power before ? " Ken answered, " We honour
you, but we fear God." The final threat of the king that they
should disobey him at their peril was met by " God's will be done "
from the lips of Ken. The petition of the prelates was circulated
through London on that Friday night. It was imputed to them
that they were instrumental to this publication; but they denied it.
There was but one copy, which the king kept. Burnet and Dal
rymple intimate that some one was concerned in the publication,
to whom the king had shown the original. A commentator on
Burnet, Bevil Higgons, says, "All agreed that' it must have been
in the press, if not before, by the time it was delivered to the king,
which was about five in the afternoon, and it came out that very
night at twelve, and was so bawled and roared through the streets
by hawkers, that people rose out of their beds to buy it." * Slow as
were the operations of the printing press at that time, there was
no necessity that the delivery of the petition, and printing, should
have occurred at the same hour of five, if not before, to allow of its
* Note to Burnet, Oxford edit. vol. iii. p. 220.
352 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
circulation at midnight. The printers of that age had learnt to do
their work with speed during the Civil War, when the broadside
stood in the place of the newspaper, and a ballad was as effective
as a leading article. On the Sunday following this memorable
Friday, the reading of the Declaration "was almost universally
forborne throughout London." * One exception to this disobedi
ence shows the direction of popular opinion. "I was then at
Westminster school," says lord Dartmouth, " and heard it read in
the Abbey. As soon as bishop Sprat, who was dean, gave order
for reading it, there was so great a murmur and noise in the church
that nobody could hear him ; but before he had finished, there was
none left but a few prebends in their stalls, the choristers, and
Westminster scholars. The bishop could hardly hold the proc
lamation in his hands for trembling, and every body looked under
a strange consternation." t In only four of the London churches
was obedience yielded to the mandate of the king. Over all Eng
land, not above two hundred of the Clergy read the Declaration.
" One, more pleasantly than gravely, told his people, that, though
he was obliged to read it, they were not obliged to hear it ; and he
stopped till they all went out, and then he read it to the walls." J
Sir John Reresby reports that he was told by lord Huntington,
one ofthe Privy-council, "that had the king known how far the
thing would have gone, he would never have laid the injunction he
did, to have the Declaration read in churches." § In its blind self-
reliance, tyranny rarely sees how far the thing will go. It puts the
match to the combustible matter, and is then astonished at the,
explosion. James had boasted that his past life ought to hiwe
convinced his people that he was net a man to recede from any
course which he had once taken. In this case he took more than
a week to look about him before he proceeded on his perilous way.
Some of his more prudent counsellors recommended that he should
issue a conciliatory proclamation, stating his deep mortification at
the proceedings of the Clergy, but admitting that, as their scruples
might have been conscientious, he was unwilling to treat them with
the severity due to their disobedience. This advice was rejected.
It was determined to prosecute the bishops for a seditious Libel.
They were summoned to appear on the Sth of June before the king
in council. During this interval, there had been no signs of sub
mission in the metropolis or in the country. The archbishop of
* Evelyn. t Note to Burnet, vol. iii. p. 218.
X Burnet, ibid. § " Memoirs," p. 345.
THE BISHOPS COMMITTED TO THE TOWER. 353
Canterbury, and his six suffragans, came into the royal presence
at Whitehall on the appointed afternoon. They were asked if they
rcknowledged the petition to be theirs. They had received sound
legal advice, and they refused to Criminate themselves. At length
the archbishop said that if the king positively commanded him to
answer he would do so, in the confidence that what he said in
obedience to that command should not be brought in evidence
against him. They were sent out, and upon their return the king
gave the positive command. Sancroft and his brethren then
acknowledged their hand-writing. They were immediately called
upon to enter into recognizances to appear in the Court of King's
Bench on a Criminal information for libel. They refused, main
taining that as peers they could not be so called upon. Their
firmness irritated and embarrassed the misguided king. He must
still proceed on his dangerous course. A warrant was made out
for their committal to the Tower. Then was presented a spectacle
which struck terror into the soul of the despot. The people of
London had, in many a year of trouble, seen the state-barge leave
Palace-yard stairs with some unhappy peer proceeding from West
minster Hall to his last prison. Often had they wept, as the axe
was borne before some popular favourite. But never had there
been such an outburst of feeling as on this evening of the 8th of
June. The seven prelates, surrounded by guards, passed through
lines of weeping men and women, who prayed aloud for their
safety, and knelt to ask their blessing. When they entered their
barge, the river was sparkling in the setting sun, as the oars of a
thousand wherries dashed up its silver waters. From Whitehall
to the Tower, as the twilight stole on, the voices of the people
were heard in one solemn cry of " God bless your lordships."
There was something in their popular sympathy far more elevating
and consoling than the favour of kings which the Church had so
laboured to earn. The Church was now in its right attitude — the
champion of the national faith and the national freedom. It
seemed as if the old contests for minute differences of doctrine
and discipline were at an end. To manifest respect towards them
would be to secure the resentment of the king; but the feeling
towards them received no abatement. Their very guards in the
Tower would drink no other health than that of the bishops. Day
by day, such numbers of persons flocked to them " for their bless
ing and to condole their hard usage," as Reresby relates, " that
great and very extraordinary remarks were made both of persons
Vol. IV.— 23
•54. HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and behaviour." The king saw with dismay, that his frown was
powerless, even over a nobility that had been too long accustomed
to fancy that the royal favour was their breath of life. Most
indignant was James when ten non-conformist ministers — leading
men amongst those whom he thought would be for ever at enmity
with episcopacy, — visited the prelates in the Tower. " He sent
for four of them to reprimand them; but their answer was, 'that
they could not but adhere to the prisoners, as men constant and
firm to the Protestant faith.'"*
The bishops remained a week in confinement. On the 15th of
June they were brought before the Court of King's Bench. There
was the same throng of spectators begging their blessing. They
were called upon to plead, after legal objections against their com
mitment had been over-ruled. Their trial was fixed for the 27th,
and they were then enlarged upon their own recognizances. The
people fancied they were wholly released, and lighted up bonfires.
The excitement went all through the land. The Dutch ambas
sador expected an insurrection in London. The miners of Corn
wall would come to the rescue of their countryman, Trelawney,
the bishop of Bristol, as the burden of the old ballad declares : —
"And shall Trelawney die ?
There's twenty thousand underground
Will know the reason why." t
The day of trial came. Evelyn says there were " near sixty earls
and lords on the bench." Westminster Hall and the whole neigh
bourhood were thronged with eager crowds. The trial lasted from
nine in the morning till six in the evening. Every point was ably
contested by the lawyers on each side — for a nation was looking
on. No one -could distinctly prove that the signatures to the
petition were the hand-writing of the accused. The clerk of the
Privy Council, B lath way te, was at last brought forward to swear
that he had heard them confess that the}- had signed it. Then
ensued a cross-examination which the counsel for the Crown tried
in vain to stop ; for it might implicate the king on an implied
promise that the confession should not be used against the peti
tioners. The writing was thus proved. No evidence, however,
could be obtained of the publication ; till Sunderland came to
swear that the bishops had told him of their intention to present a
petition to the king. The subject matter of the petition was at
* Reresby, p. 347.
t In the ruot.ition in Lord Mneau'ay's History, the words run, "thirty thousand
Cornish boys." See " Quarterly Review," vol. cii. p. 314.
TRIAL AND ACQUITTAL OF THE BISHOPS. 355.
last argued. It was maintained that the bishops were, perfectly,
right when they held that the dispensing power was illegal.
Amongst their counsel there was one, a young man, John Somers,
who that day took the high position which he ever after maintained,
as the great constitutional lawyer and statesman of his time. The
Chief-Justice, Wright, summed up that the petition was a libel.
Justice Alibone held the same opinion. But the other two judges,
Holloway and Powell, differed from them ; and Powell affirmed
that the dispensing power, as then administered, was an encroach
ment of the prerogative, and if not repressed, would put the whole
legislative authority in the king. The jury were locked up all
night. The king's brewer had fought stoutly for his royal custo
mer; but he at last yielded ; and at ten o'clock the verdict of " Not
Guilty" was delivered. The shouts went from the benches and
galleries of the Court to Westminster Hall ; from the Hall to the
streets and the river ; from London to every suburb. They were
echoed by the camp at Hounslow, when an express came there to
James to tell him of his great failure. He left directly for London.
" He was no sooner gone out of the camp than he was followed by
an universal shouting, as if it had been a victory obtained." * The
king asked the cause of the uproar. He was answered that it was
nothing; the soldiers only rejoiced that the bishops were acquitted.
" Do you call that nothing ? " said the baffled tyrant. He muttered
some threat of " so much the worse for them " — for whom the
threat was meant was not quite clear. He had one revenge. The
two judges, Holloway and Powell, as soon as the term was over,
were dismissed from their seats on a bench where independence
and honesty were qualities not to be endured. On the night of
the 30th of June, London was one blaze of bonfires and illumina
tions. The effigv of the pope again came forth to be burnt, as in
the days of Shaftesbury. Pope-burners and bonfire lighters were
indicted at the Middlesex Sessions ; "but," says Reresby, who was
present as a justice, " the grand jury would find no bill, though
they were sent out no less than three times ; so generally did the
love of the bishops and the Protestant cause prevail." The Dec
laration of Indulgence, and the Order in Council that the Clergy
should publish it, appeared the climax of the king's determination
to set his dispensing power above the law. The resistance of the,
Clergy brought the question to issue between the king and the
people. It was shrewdly observed that "a solemn declaration that
a king will not govern according to law seems a formal renouncing
* Burnet vol. iii. p. 226.
356 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of any right he has by it ; and when he has cut the bough he sat
upon, he has little reason to be surprised if he falls to the ground." *
Two days after the seven bishops were sent to the Tower, the
Council announced to the lords-lieutenant of counties that it had
"pleased Almighty God, about ten o'clock of this morning,, to bless
his majesty and his royal consort the queen with the birth of a
hopeful son, and his majesty's kingdoms and dominions with a
prince." f In the language of the Council it was "so inestimable
a blessing," that all the people would be called upon to unite in
thanksgiving. Another language was held even by the staunch
friends of the monarchy. Evelyn enters in his Diary of June loth,
" A young prince born, which will cause disputes." The legitimacy
of this young prince was long disputed. This birth was as little a
blessing to the house of Stuart as it promised to be to the weary
subjects of that house. A large majority of the nation was con
vinced that this heir of the crown was supposititious. It was
almost universally believed that imposture had been practised. The
princess Arine did not give credit to the queen's alleged pregnancy.
It was wholly disbelieved at the court of the prince of Orange.
The birth arrived a month before it was said to be expected. The
most ordinary precautions were not taken to put the fact beyond a
doubt ; for none but those in whom the people had little confidence
were in attendance on the occasion. That there was no imposture
is now matter of historical belief ; but so convinced were many.
political partisans that there was no real son of James IL, that,
seventy years afterwards, Johnson drew the character of a violent
Whig, who " has known those who saw the bed into which the
Pretender was conveyed in a warming-pan." J Burnet devotes five
or six pages of his folio volume to the various accounts of this pre
tended birth — stories which Swift properly ridicules. The belief in
this story is the only blot in the subsequent Declaration of William
of Orange to the English people ; and James took the manly, though
necessarily somewhat indelicate step, of instituting an inquiry and
publishing all the evidence to refute the calumny. The most im
portant influence of this birth upon the fortunes of England was,
that the prospect of an heir to the Crown, born of a Catholic
mother, and to be brought up in the bigoted school of a father who
had cast aside Protestantism to be governed by Jesuits and apos
tates, precipitated the Revolution.
* Lord Dartmouth's Note in Burnet, vol. iii p. 228
t Letter to the Earl of Rochester. Eilis. Series I. vol. iii. p. 339.
t " Idler," No. 10.
WILLIAM. PRINCE OF ORANGE. 357
CHAPTER XVIII.
William, Prince of Orange.— His character and position with regard to English affairs.—
The Princess Mary, and the Succession — Invitation to the Prince of Orange. — Prep
arations of William. — His Declaration. — Hopes of the English people. — Alarm of
the king. — William sails from Helvoetsluys. — The voyage. — Landing at Torbay. —
Public entry at Exeter. — The king goes to the army at Salisbury. — Desertions of his
officers. — The Prince of Denmark and the Princess Anne. — James calls a Meeting
of Peers.— -Commissioners to negotiate with the Prince of Orange.— The queen and
child sent to France. — The king fiies.— Provisional Government.— Riots.— The Irish
night— James brought back to London.— The Dutch guards at Whitehall.— The king
again leaves London. — The Prince of Orange enters.— The Interregnum .—The Con
vention. — William aud Mary King and Queen — The revolution the commencement
of a new era in English history.
At the village of Plurley, on the Berkshire side of the Thames
between Henley and Maidenhead, stood, in 1836, an Elizabethan
mansion called Lady Place, built on the site of a Benedictine mon
astery by sir Richard Lovelace, who was created a peer by Charles
I. This building was the seat of lord Lovelace in the reigns of
Charles II. and James 1 1., — a nobleman whose lavish hospitality
and expensive tastes were rapidly wasting " the king of Spain's
cloth of silver " * which his ancestor, one of Drake's privateering
followers had won. The spacious hall opening to the Thames, the
stately gallery whose panels were covered with Italian landscapes,
the terraced gardens— were ruined and neglected when we there
meditated, some thirty years ago, upon the lessons of " Mutabil
ity." All the remains of past grandeur are now swept away. But
beneath the Tudor building were the burial vaults of the house of
" Our Lady," which seemed built for all time, and which, we be
lieve, are still undisturbed. In these vaults was a modern in
scription which recorded that the Monastery of Lady Place was
founded at the time of the great Norman Revolution and that "in
this place, six hundred years afterwards, the Revolution of 1688
was begun." King William III., the tablet also recorded, visited
this vault, and looked upon the " Recess," in which "several con
sultations for calling in the prince of Orange were held." During
the four years in which James had been on the throne, the question
* " Worthies."
358 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of armed resistance had been constanty present to the minds of
many Whigs ; and to the prince of Orange they looked for aid in
some open attempt to change the policy of the government by
force, — or, if necessary, to subvert it. The wife of the prince of
Orange was the presumptive heir to the crown ; he was himself
the nephew of the English king. His political and religious prin
ciples, and those of the republic of which he was the first magis
trate, were diametrically opposed to those of his uncle. The chief
enemy of his nation was the chief ally of king James. The one
great purpose of the life of William of Orange was to resist the
overwhelming ambition of Louis XIV. . In 1688 he was thirty-
eight years of age. When he was only in his twenty-second year,
he had arrested the march of French conquest, and had saved his
country. His uncle Charles had deserted his alliance, and had
become the degraded pensioner of France. His uncle James
equally crouched at the feet of the enemy of national independence,
and of civil and religious liberty. William, under every difficulty,
had in 1686 succeeded in forming the League of Augsburg, to hold
in check this overwhelming ambition. His unrivalled sagacity and
prudence had united rulers of Catholic as well as Protestant
states, in a determination that the Balance of Power in Europe
should not be destroyed. James of England was content that his
country should remain in the degraded position in which it had
been left by his brother, provided that a continuance of that deg
radation would enable him to establish Jesuits and monks in the
high places of the Church, and rule without Parliaments, by a
power above the law. William of Orange must have long been con
vinced that this system could not endure. Holland was the refuge
of many an Englishman who had fled from persecution, when dis
senters were the objects of king James's hatred. They had no
confidence in his pretended toleration, because it was based
upon absolute^ authority. The public opinion of Englishmen
at home was uniting in the same conclusion. A crisis was at
hand, not only in England, but in the general policy of Europe.
William had stood aloof from any connexion with plots in the
later years of Charles, or of insurrections in the first year of
James. His object was that in England there should be union
between the Crown and the Parliament; for then England
would be strong, and capable of taking a part once more in such
a joint system of action as was contemplated in the Triple Alli
ance. That hope was now utterly gone. It was clear that James
THE PRINCESS MARY AND THE SUCCESSION. 359
imd his people would never be at accord. It was equally clear
that any bold and elevated foreign policy was hopeless. Unless
he had determined wholly to separate himself from English affairs
William of Orange would necessarily become associated with the
leading men of England, who saw that the government was driving
on to ruin. His original policy was to wait. The time might come
when the princess of Orange would be queen, and then William
would naturally be England's ruler. It was the desire of Mary
that her husband, in that event, should be the real sovereign.
Burnet relates this circumstance with some self-applause, but with
evident truth : " I took the liberty, in a private conversation with
the princess, to ask her what she intended the prince should be, if
she came to the crown. She, who was new to all matters of that
kind, did not understand my meaning, but fancied, that whatever
accrued to her would likewise accrue to him in the right of mar
riage. I told her it was not so. * * * I told her, a titular
kingship was no acceptable thing to a man, especially if it was to
depend on another's life : and such a nominal dignity might en
danger the real one that the prince had in Holland. She desired
me to propose a remedy. I told her, the remedy, if she could bring
her mind to it, was, to be contented to be his wife, and to engage
herself to him, that she would give him the real authority as soon
as it came into her hands, and endeavour effectually to get it to be
legally vested in him during life : this would lay the greatest obli
gation on him possible, and lay the foundation of a perfect union
between them, which had been of late a little embroiled. * * *
She presently answered me, she would take no time to consider of
any thing by which she could express her regard and affection to
the prince ; and ordered me to give him an account of all that I had
laid before her, and to bring him to her, and I should hear what she
would say upon it. * * * She promised him, he should always bear
rule; and she asked only, that he would obey the command of
' Husbands, love your wives,' as she should do that, ' Wives, be ^
obedient to your husbands in all things.' " * Dartmouth conjec
tures that the prince ordered Burnet — whom he calls " a little Scotch
priest" — to propose this to the princess, before he would engage
in the attempt upon England. When the insane proceedings of
James had rendered it more than probable that the event would
happen which his brother Charles said should never happen to
him — that he should be sent again upon his travels — the prince of
* "Own Time," vol. iii. p. 129.
360 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Orange, with an ambition that was founded upon higher motives
than mere personal advancement, might not unreasonably think that
there was a shorter road to .the English crown than by succession.
At the very climax of the folly of James, a son, or a pretended son,
was born. William and his wife believed that their just rights
were attempted to be set aside by an imposture. The leading men
of England believed the same. The quarrel between the kingand
the Church appeared to be irreconcileable ; and thus the most pow
erful influence over the people had ceased to be committed to the
doctrine of non-resistance to arbitrary power. The time for decis
ion was come in the summer of 1688. Edward Russell had been
over to the Hague in May, to urge the prince of Orange to a bold
interference with the affairs of England. " The prince spoke more
positively to him than he had ever done before. He said, he must
satisfy both his honour and conscience, before he could enter upon
so great a design, which, if it is miscarried, must bring ruin both on
England and Holland ; he protested, that no private ambition nor
resentment of his own could ever prevail so far with him, as to
make him break with so near a relation, or engage in a war, of
which the consequences must be of the last importance both to the
interests of Europe and of the protestant religion : therefore he
expected formal and direct invitation. Russell laid before him the
danger of trusting such a secret to great numbers. The prince
said, if a considerable number of men, that might be supposed to
understand the sense of the nation best, should do it, he would ac
quiesce in it." * Russell returned to England, and communicated
with Henry Sidney, the brother Algernon: with the earl of Shrews
bury; the earl of Danby; the earl of Devonshire ; and other peers.
Compton, the suspended bishop of London, was also confided in.
On the 30th of June, the great day of the acquittal of the seven
bishops, an invitation to William of Orange, to appear in England
at the head of a body of troops, was sent by a messenger of rank ;
admiral Herbert. It was signed in cipher, by Shrewsbury, Devon
shire, Danby, Lumley, Compton, Russell, and Sidney. William
took his determination. He resolved on a descent upon En<dand.
With a secrecy as remarkable as his energy, he set about the prep
aration of such a force as would ensure success, in conjunction
with the expected rising of nineteen-twentieths of the people, to
free themselves from an odious government.
In this eventful autumn there were dangers immediately sur-
* Burnet, vol. iii. p. 263.
INVITATION TO THE PRINCE OF ORANGE. 361
rounding the unhappy king of England, which were the almost in
evitable results of a long career of government which had weakened,
if not wholly extinguished, political honesty. The high pubMc
spirit, the true sense of honour, which had characterised the nobles
and gentry of England during the Civil War, was lost in the self
ishness, the meanness, the profligacy, of the twenty-eight years
that succeeded the Restoration. Traitors were hatched in the sun
shine of corruption. The basest expediency had been the govern
ing principle of statesmen and lawyers ; the most abject servility
had been the leading creed of divines. Loyalty always wore the
livery of the menial. Patriotism was ever flaunting the badges of
faction. The bulk of the people were unmoved by any proud re
sentments or eager hopes. They went on in their course of jndus-
dustrious occupation, without much caring whether they were under
an absolute or a constitutional government, as long as they could
eat, drink, and be merry. They had got rid of the puritan severity ;
and if decency was outraged in the Court and laughed at on the
stage, there was greater licence for popular indulgences. The one
thing to be avoided was- nonconformity, which was a very hard
service, even when lawful ; and a very desperate sacrifice when it
brought fine and imprisonment. Such was the temper of England
at the accession of James. It was a temper fitted for any amount
of national humiliation. Il was a temper apt for slavery. But
there was one latent spark of feeling which James blew into a
flame. The English hated Popery with a passionate hatred. It
was then seen by crafty politicians who had endured and even stim
ulated the bigotry of the king, that he had gone too far,, and that
he would not recede. Such a politician was Sunderland, who had
even made a public profession of Romanism to retain his places.
He became a Catholic to please the king in June. In August the
breach between the king and the Anglican Church had become so
irreparable that Sunderland was in correspondence with the prince
of Orange. The selfish instinct of such men was their storm-
barometer. Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, says of this crisis :
" It was evident to all the world, that as things were carried on by
king James, everybody must be ruined, who would not become a
Roman Catholic." * " Everybody " has a very limited signification.
in this lady's vocabulary. It included lord Churchill and a few
others. The narrative which we have to pursue to the end of this
chapter does not exhibit the nation in any very glorious light. Tha
* " Authentick Memoirs," p. 82.
362 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
story of the Revolution of 1688 is not a great epic, full of heroism
and magnanimity. There is only one real hero on the scene ; and
he is a cold, impassive -man, stirring up no passionate enthusiasm
—a hero, the very opposite of the fascinating Monmouth, who had
crowds at his chariot-wheels. William of Orange goes steadily
forward, flattering none, trusting few, suspecting most — a self-con
tained man, who will put his shoulder to the work to which he has
been called, and if he fails, he fails. Such a man was wanted to
re-construct the shattered edifice of English freedom upon solid
foundations. A popular king, with an undoubted title, might have
found a nation ready enough to be again manacled.
In the " Memoirs of king James " it is said, that he never gave
any real credit to the belief that the preparations of the prince of
Orange were designed against himself, till the middle of Septem
ber ; " for, besides the repeated assurances he had from the States,
by their ambassadors and others, and even the prince of Orange
himself, that these preparations were not designed^ against him,
the earl of Sunderland, and some others about him whom he
trusted most, used all imaginable arguments to persuade the king
it was impossible the prince of .Orange could go through with such
an undertaking ; and particularly my lord Sunderland turned any
one to ridicule that did but seem to believe it."* Louis XIV. saw
clearly the danger. He exhorted James ; he remonstrated ; he
offered naval assistance. The envoy of France told the States
that his king had taken the king of England under his protection,
and that war against James would be war against Louis. James,
in a spirit almost incomprehensible, despised the protection, and
rejected the proffered aid. The intentions of the prince of Orange
to come to England with an army were soon made manifest. A
proclamation was prepared by the Grand Pensionary, Fagel ;
" who,"' says Burnet, " made a long and lieavy draft, founded on
the grounds of the civil law, and of the law of nations." Burnet
translated it into English, and " got it to be much shortened,
though it was still too long." It is, indeed, a long document;
very little calculated for popular excitement. It set forth, in a
calm and dispassionate tone, the violations of their laws, liberties,
and customs, to which the people of England had been subjected.
It detailed the various acts by which a religion opposed to that
established by law had been attempted to be forced upon the
nation. It alluded to the general belief that a pretended heir to
+ " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 177.
HOPES OF THE PEOPLE. 363
the throne had "been set up, against the rights of the princess of
Orange. It declared that " since the English nation has ever testi
fied a most particular affection and esteem, both to our dearest
consort the princess, and to ourselves, we cannot excuse ourselves
from espousing their interest in a matter of such high conse
quence : and from contributing all that lies in us for the maintain
ing, both of the Protestant religion, and of the laws and liberties
of those kingdoms, and for the securing to them the continual en
joyment of all their just rights ; to the doing of which we are most
earnestly solicited by a great many lords, both spiritual and tem
poral, and by many gentlemen, and other subjects of all ranks."
For these reasons, the prince declares that he had thought fit to
go over to England, and to carry with him a sufficient force to de
fend him from the violence of the king's evil counsellors. This
expedition had no other design than to have a free Parliament
called ; of which the members should be lawfully chosen. " We,
for our part, will concur in everything that may procure the peace
and, happiness of the nation, which a free and lawful Parliament
shall determine, since we have nothing before our eyes, in this
our undertaking, but the preservation of the Protestant religion,
the covering of all men from persecution for their consciences,
and the securing to the whole nation the free enjoyment of their
laws, rights, and liberties, under a just and legal government."
The Declaration is dated from the Hague on the 10th of October.
The expectation of the speedy arrival of the prince of Orange
with his army was universal at the beginning of October. On the
7th Evelyn writes that the people " seemed passionately to long
for and desire the landing of that prince, whom they looked on to
be their deliverer from Popish tyranny ; praying incessantly for
an east wind, which was said to be the only hindrance of his ex
pedition with a numerous army ready to make a descent." The
king now endeavoured to put himself into a new attitude towards
his people. He gave audience to the archbishop of Canterbury
and some of the bishops. They represented to him the desirable
ness of revoking all the acts done under the dispensing power ; of
restoring the fellows of Magdalen College ; of giving back their
old franchises to the Corporations. The king did attend to some
of these suggestions. He dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commis
sion. He sent his Chancellor to deliver back to the Corporation
of London their ancient charter ; and he issued a proclamation re
storing all the municipal corporations to their ancient franchises.
364 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
He gave powers to the bishop of Winchester, which allowed him,
as visitor, to re-instate the ejected fellows of Magdalen College.
A sudden amendment of life under the influence of fear is not gen
erally considered as likely to be permanent. A king's sudden
redress of unjust acts, when one was at hand who could compel
justice, was not likely to propitiate subjects whose confidence had
been destroyed.
On the 16th of October, William, having taken a solemn leave
of the States of Holland, set forward from the Hague to sail from
Helvoetsluys. A fleet of fifty men of war, twenty-five frigates,
many fire-ships, and four hundred transports, was there assembled.
There were embarked four thousand horse and ten thousand foot
soldiers. The command of the army was entrusted to marshal
Schomberg. The van of the fleet was led by admiral Herbert.
The prince of Orange embarked on the 19th. His ship bore a
flag with the arms of England and N assau, surrounded with the
motto, " The Protestant Religion and Liberties of England."
Underneath was the motto of the house of Orange, " Je main-
tiendrai." The equivocal device of his ancestry, '¦ I will main
tain," was now associated with a definite purpose, of unprece
dented importance.
The east wind, which the people of London had been praying
for, bore the fleet of William prosperously towards the English
shores. But it suddenly changed; and a strong western gale,
which increased to a tempest, compelled the Dutchmen to seek
the refuge of their own havens. News reached the court of James
that the damage had been so serious, that the arrival of no hostile
armament need now be dreaded. The Gazette announced these
tidings. But the damage was quickly repaired. On the evening
of the 1st of November the fleet of William was again at sea. The
east wind was now full and strong. For some time an effort was
made to steer northward ; but that course was at last abandoned ;
and about noon of the 2nd the order was given to steer westward.
The same wind that bore the Dutch fleet towards our western
shores kept the English fleet in the Thames. On the 3rd, midway
between Dover and Calais, a Council of War was held. Rapin,
the historian, who accompanied the expedition, thus describes the
unwonted scene : " It is easy to imagine what a glorious show the
fleet made. Five or six hundred ships in so narrow a Channel, and
both the English and French shores covered with numberless spec
tators, are no common sight. For my part, who was then on board
William's voyage. 365
the fleet, it struck me extremely." The 4th of November was
William's birth-day. He dedicated that Sunday to private devo
tion, whilst the fleet .rode past Portland, with the intention of
anchoring in Torbay. The prince's ship was in the van. The night
was dark and rainy; the wind was violent; the pilot mistook his
course, and ran past Torbay towards Plymouth. There was dan
ger in attempting a landing at that port, which was strongly gar
risoned. But in the morning of the 5th the wind became calm ;
and a southern breeze carried them back into the magnificent
bay. Here Napoleon, gazing on its shores from the deck of the
Bellerophon, exclaimed " What a beautiful country ! " Here Wil
liam saw only hills shrouded in mist ; and the huts of a fishing
village. But Torbay was, according to Rapin, " the most convenient
place for landing horse, of any in England." Before night the
whole of the infantry was on shore. The horse were landed the
next morning. William and Schomberg were amongst the first to
land at Brixham. In the market-place' of this prosperous fishing
town of narrow and dirty streets, there is a block of stone, with
this inscription : " On this stone, and near this spot, William,
prince of Orange, first set foot on landing in England, 5th of Nov
ember, 1688." Burnet says, "As soon as I landed, I made what
haste I could to the place where the prince was ; who took me
heartily by the hand, and asked me if I would not now believe
predestination. I told him, I would never forget that providence
of God, which had appeared so signally in this occasion. He was"
cheerfuller than ordinary. Yet he returned soon to his usual
gravity." Rapin continues the narrative, with the graphic details
of an eye-witness: "The prince's army marched from Torbay,
about noon the next day, in very rainy weather, and bad roads.
The soldiers, before they landed, were ordered to bring three days'1
bread with them, and they carried their tents themselves. But the
officers, even the most considerable, were in a very uneasy situa
tion, at their first encampment, being wet to the skin, and having
neither clothes for change, nor bread, nor horses, nor servants, nor
other bed than the earth all drenched with rain, their baggage
being yet in the ships." Burnet says, " It was not a cold night."
After this first disagreeable halt on English ground, the army, by
noon the next day, was on its march towards Exeter. It was the
fourth day from the landing before William made his public entry
into the capital of the West. Two hundred captains of the host,
on Flanders steeds, clothed in complete armour, each horse led by
366 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
a negro ; two hundred Finlanders, with beavers' skins over their
black armour; led horses; state coaches; the standard of the
deliverer who was to maintain the liberties of England ; the prince
himself, with white ostrich feathers in his helmet ; guards and
pages, — volunteers ; and then a gallant army, bedabbled indeed
with mud, and wearing the orange uniform, strange enough in eyes
accustomed to tbe English scarlet; twenty pieces of cannon, then
of enormous size ; and, what was almost as potent, waggons
loaded with money — such was the spectacle upon which the people
of Exeter gazed, as the long procession moved through the steep
streets, and welcome was shouted from many a window of the old
gabled houses. But William had expected a reception more
decisive — a welcome which should give a greater assurance of suc
cess than a fleeting popular enthusiasm. No man of rank, with
troops of followers, was at Exeter to salute him. " The clergy
and magistrates of Exeter were very fearful and very backward.
The bishop and the dean ran away. " Lord Dartmouth has a note
upon this passage of Burnet. Shrewsbury, he says, informed him,
that the prince began to suspect he was betrayed, and had some
thoughts of returning ; but Shrewsbury told William that " he
believed the great difficulty amongst them was, who should run the
hazard of being the first ; but if the ice were once broken, they
would be as much afraid of being the last."* It was a week from
the landing before any gentleman of Devonshire joined the prince.
There was a king upon the throne whose vengeance would be even
more terrible than in 1685, if another attempt against him should
fail. But in that second week the feeling" of confidence became
more strong. Sir Edward Seymour arrived with "other gentlemen
of quality and estate," and he organised an Association. The
cloth workers and labourers, sufferers as they had been, had shown
less calculating apathy than the "gentlemen of quality." " Whilst
the prince stayed at Exeter," says Burnet, "the rabble of the
people came to him in great numbers." He has no word of grati
tude for their generous support. It was the fashion of that day,
and long continued to be the fashion, to speak of the common
people as " rabble " and " mob." William, in his cold way, looked
upon this rabble of Exeter only as a soldier looks. He did not
think it necessary to arm this undisciplined multitude, for he un
derstood, from the temper of the royal army, that, if his cause
* Burnet, vol. iii. p. 314.
THE KING GOES TO THE ARMY. 367
were likely to prosper, the hired defenders of the throne would
come over to him. He was not deceived.
From the time that the news arrived of the landing at Torbay,
the metropolis was naturally the scene of the greatest excitement.
A proclamation was issued, prohibiting all persons from reading
the Declaration of the prince of Orange. Of course the desire to
see that manifesto was increased. The king sends for the primate
and three bishops, and shows them that passage in which the
promised assistance of spiritual as well as temporal peers is set
forth. They express a doubt whether the manifesto is genuine.
The king upbraids them for their lukewarmness ; they recapitulate
their old injuries. He requires from them a declaration of abhor
rence of the proceeding of William. They refuse to stand alone
in such a declaration. The king in anger sent them away ; and
applied himself to touch for the evil, with a Jesuit and a Popish
priest officiating.* A large force had been assembled at Salisbury.
On the 15th, the king received the news that lord Cornbury, the
eldest son of the earl of Clarendon, had marched from the camp,
at the head of three regiments of cavalry. He did not carry
through his design of joining the army of William, for his officers
refused to proceed ; but he arrived at the Dutch camp himself, and
many of the men followed his example. The king was staggered
at the treachery of a young man who had been bred up in the
household of his own daughter Anne — of a favoured cfturtier, who
was the son of his brother-in-law. James called the officers of the
army to give him counsel. He exhorted them to preserve their
loyalty as subjects and their honour as gentlemen. " They all
seemed," says James in his Memoirs, "to be moved at this dis
course ; and vowed they would serve him to the last drop of their
blood. The duke of Grafton, and my lord Churchill, were the first
that made this attestation, and the first who, to their eternal infamy,
broke it afterwards." f We can sympathise with the indignation
of the unhappy king, without shutting our eyes to his errors and
Jiis crimes. Still more can we sympathise, when, ten days after
wards, he learnt that his son-in-law, George of Denmark, and his
own daughter, Anne, had deserted him. He had set out for Salis
bury, which he reached on the 19th. His agitation brought on a
violent bleeding at the nose, which lasted three days. Meanwhile
support was gathering round the prince of Orange from every
quarter. The northern counties were in arms. Nottingham was
* Evelyn's " Diary." t " Life," vol. ii. p. 219.
368 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the rallying point for the assembling of large bodies of men, headed
by Devonshire, and other great earls. On the 22nd, when the
army of the prince of Orange was at a short distance from Salis
bury, the earl of Feversham, the commander of the royal troops,
intimated that there was defection in the camp, and advised arrests.
James was still confident that no one could be a traitor to him.
His prodigious self-esteem and self-confidence blinded him to signs
of danger which were evident to all others. He began, however,
to think of retreating. He called a council of war on the evening
of the 24th. On the morning of the 25th Churchill and Grafton
were in William's camp. All was alarm ; and an immediate retreat
was commanded by the king. At Andover, the prince of Denmark
fled from him, with two noblemen. On the king's arrival in London
on the 26th he found that his daughter, Anne, was gone. " God
help me," exclaimed the wretched king, "my own children have
forsaken me." Anne escaped from Whitehall, with the assistance
of her friend, lady Churchill ; and was taken by the bishop of
London to Nottingham. " The king," writes the duchess of Marl
borough, "went down to Salisbury to his army, and the. prince of
Denmark with him ; but the news quickly came from thence that
the prince of Denmark had left the king, and was gone over to the
prince of Orange, and that the king was coming back to London.
This put the princess into a great fright. She sent for me ; told
me her distress ; and declared that rather than see her father she
would jump out at the window." The crafty duchess says, "it
was a thing sudden and unconcerted ; nor had I any share in it,
farther than obeying my mistress's orders, in the particulars I have
mentioned ; though indeed I had reason enough on my own
account to get out of the way, lord Churchill having likewise at that
time left the king, and gone over to the other party."*
James records his sense of his abandonment when he had come
back to London : " The contagion was spread so universally that
all parts of England furnished the same news of risings and de
fections ; the only strife was who should be foremost in abandonin°-
the king." f He had sent the infant prince of Wales to Ports^
mouth, to be conveyed to France, if there was no turn in affairs.
Father Petre, and other obnoxious advisers, had fled. There was
no manifestation of aid on the part of his Roman Catholic subjects
— of those who had lighted bonfires, and madly danced around
* " Authentick Memoirs," p. 80. \ " Life," p. 230-" Original Memoirs."
Queen of James II. concealed at Gravesend. -Vol. iv. 368.
NEGOTIATIONS. 369
them when the unfortunate child was born. * In his deep distress,
James called a meeting of all the peers who remained in London.
Nine spiritual lords, and between thirty and forty temporal lords,
attended him at Whitehall on the 27th. He had received a petition,
before he departed for Salisbury, entreating him to convoke a free
parliament. At the meeting those who had signed it explained
their views. But they further suggested that it would be desirable
to send commissioners to treat with the prince of Orange. They
also urged a general amnesty. Upon this point the king mani
fested some impotent anger; but he had provocations of treachery
enough to irritate a wiser man ; and he was goaded by words from
Clarendon, which Burnet even characterises as " insolent and in
decent." Three commissioners, Halifax, Nottingham, and Godol
phin, were appointed to treat with the prince. Godolphin told
Evelyn that " they had little power." A proclamation for a general
amnesty was issued ; writs were ordered to be sent out to call a
parliament for the 13th of January. But James, even in this mo
ment of despairing concession, was insincere. He told Barillon,
the French ambassador, that a parliament would impose conditions
on him that he could not bear. He must leave England. He
would take refuge in Ireland, or in Scotland, or he would seek aid
in person from the king of France, as soon as he had secured the
safety of the queen and his son. Dartmouth, the admiral of the
fleet, refused to be a party to carry the prince of Wales out of the
country. The child was therefore brought back to Whitehall.
The commissioners proceeded to the camp of the prince of Orange,
who was steadily advancing towards the capital. On the 6th of
December he had reached Hungerford. A skirmish took place at
Reading between two hundred and fifty of his advanced guard, and
six hundred Irish troops who had entered the town. The inhabit
ants joined with the Dutch troops in attacking the Irish, who were
regarded by them as enemies. It was the only serious affair of
arms during this bloodless contest for a crown. The memory of
this Sunday fight was long celebrated in Reading, by ringing the
bells on the anniversary of the defeat of the " Papishes," who
came to destroy the town "in time of prayer," as a ballad records.
At Hungerford, the king's commissioners arrived on the 8th.
William would not give them a private audience. They announced
to him, amidst a crowd of his supporters, that the proposition
which they had to make was, that all matters in dispute should be
* At Carlisle ; St.ory's Journal.
Vol. IV.— 24
370 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
referred to the parliament, for which writs were being issued; and
that in the interval the prince's army should not approach within
thirty miles of the capital. The prince retired, leaving the noble
men and gentlemen to consult together. The majority of his ad
herents considered that the proposition of the king should not be
accepted. William thought otherwise. But he required that if his
troops were not to approach London within the prescribed distance
on the west, the king's troops should be removed to an equal dis
tance on the east. Whilst the negotiation was proceeding at
Hungerford, the queen and the prince were privately conveyed
down the river, and the vessel in which they were aboard sailed
with a fair wind for France. This was on the ioth of December.
On that day James wrote to Lord Dartmouth, " Things having so
very bad an aspect, I could no longer defer securing the queen and
my son, which I hope I have done, and that to-morrow by noon
they will be out of the reach of my enemies. I am at ease now I
have sent them away. I have not heard this day, as I expected,
from my commissioners with the Prince of Orange, who I believe
will hardly be prevailed with to stop his march ; so that I am in no
good condition, nay, in as bad a one as is possible." * When the
king wrote this letter, he was meditating his own flight. The true
character of the man was disclosed in his last hours of sovereignty.
He sent for the great seal, and for the writs to summon a parlia
ment that had not gone out. He threw the writs into the fire.
He annulled those which had been issued. To no one of his min
isters did he reveal his intentions. He had announced to many
peers who had been invited by him to the palace, that he had sent
his queen and his son away, but that he should himself remain at
his post. At three o'clock on the morning of the nth he stole
out of Whitehall by a secret passage ; entered a hackney coach
provided by Sir Edward Hales, crossed the Thames in a wherry,
and threw the great seal into the river. Before London was awake
he was far on the road towards Sheerness.
England was without a government. Her kin?, who would not
rule according to law, left his people to the terrible chances of an
archy. In a great metropolis like London, there are marauders
always ready to take advantage of an\- public commotion. James
had commanded the earl of Feversham, by letter, to disband his
troops ; and they were let loose without any of the restraints of
discipline. In an emergency like this it was necessary that some
* " Pepys' Correspondence," vol. v. p. 147.
PROVISIONIAL GOVERNMENT. 37*
'decided resolution should be instantly taken, to prevent universal
confusion. Seven spiritual lords, with Sancroft as their head, and
twenty-two temporal peers, drew up a declaration that the flight of
the king having destroyed the hope of a parliamentary settlement
of affairs, they had determined to join the prince of Orange, and
until his arrival to preserve order by their own authority. Never
was some authority more necessary. The night came, and a
fierce multitude, amidst the cry of No Popery, burnt Roman Cath
olic chapels, and attacked the houses of ambassadors from Roman
Catholic states. But no lives were sacrificed. The next day
the train bands were under arms ; and tumults were kept down by
some troops of cavalry. On that day, the hated lord Chancellor,
Jeffreys, was discovered in the disguise of a sailor, in a public
house at Wapping. He was saved from a fierce mob by the train
bands, but not without severe injury, and was taken before the
Lord Mayor. It was mercy to the terrified judge, who had carried
terror into so many families, to send him to the Tower by an order
¦from the peers at Whitehall.
The night of the 12th was long memorable in London as " the
Irish night." The rioters had gone home. The city was peace
ful. But a rumour was spread that the Irish troops of Feversham's
disbanded army were marching on London. Every citizen came
forth with pike and musket to fight for life and property, whilst
every window was lighted up, and barricades were hastily con
structed in every leading thoroughfare. The alarm was altogether
false. But by some unknown agency the same consternation' was
excited throughout the country. Thoresby has left a vivid pic
ture of a night scene at Leeds. A fearful cry went through the
town of " Horse and arms, horse and arms ! the enemy are upon
us." The drums beat, the bells rang backward, the women shriek
ed. Thousands of lighted candles were there also placed in the
windows. Aged people who remembered the Civil Wars, said
they never knew anything like it.* When the panic was over
men felt ashamed of their fears. If the agents in spreading this
shameful delusion had expected to excite the people against the
Roman Catholics, they were greatly mistaken. The exaggerated
terror showed how little there was really to apprehend in a country
in which nine-tenths of the people were Protestants. The poor
Irish soldiers, wandering through the towns and villages, begged
for food, but they neither massacred nor plundered. They were
* Thoresby. " Diary," vol. i. p. 190.
372 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
soon required to deliver up their arms, and were provided with
sufficient necessaries.
On the third day from the flight of James, it became known in
London that he had not left the country. , He had gone on board
a hoy near Sheerness. But the vessel was detained by the state
of the tide ; and the news had come that the king had absconded.
The hoy was about to sail at .night, when she was boarded by fish
ermen, who had heard that some persons, dressed as gentlemen,
had taken their passage in her. They roughly treated the king,
who they fancied was Father Petre, and they carried him and sir
Edward Hales ashore to Sheerness. James was recognized by the
crowd around the inn to which he was taken; but although they
treated him with respect, they refused to let him go. The Council
in London were assembled, when a messenger arrived from the
king, bringing a paper calling upon all good Englishmen to rescue
him. A troop of Life Guards was immediately sent off; and when
Feversham, the;r commander, arrived, he found the king guarded
by militia, and surrounded by Whig gentlemen of Kent, who
thought it would be an acceptable service to detain him. He was
now moved to Rochester. William learnt at Windsor that the
flight of James was thus unluckily interrupted. On Sunday, the
I^th, the king had been pursuaded by his friends to return to
Whitehall. Pity, amongst many, had taken the place of hatred.
He was received by the people with shows of kindness that misled
him. He instantly put on the attitude that had so alienated his
subjects. He " goes to mass, dines in public, a Jesuit saying
grace." Evelyn adds, " I was present." He called the lords be
fore him who had saved the country from confusion, and haughtily
blamed their presumption in taking upon themselves the govern
ment. The next day, the 17th, a Council of Lords was held at
Windsor. It was determined that the king should not remain at
Whitehall. A message was sent to recommend him to move to
Ham House, near Richmond. Meanwhile the army of William
was advancing. On the night of that Monday, Whitehall was
guarded by Dutch troops. The lords from Windsor arrived. James
declined to go to Ham. He would prefer Rochester. A messen
ger was sent to William, who had reached Sion, and returned in
a few hours with his approval. One entry from Evelyn's diary
briefly tells the great event of the next morning: " I saw the king
take barge to Gravesend at twelve o'clock — a sad sight." That
night the prince of Orange slept in St. James' palace.
THE INTERREGNUM.
373
The reign of James II. is held to have terminated on the nth
of December, when he secretly departed from Whitehall, with the
intention of leaving the kingdom. The reign of William and Mary
is determined by Statute to have commenced on the 13th of Feb
ruary, 1689, " the day on which their majesties accepted the crown
and royal dignity of king and queen of England." The interval
of about two months is called by historians
The Interregnum.
On the 16th of December the prince of Orange held a court at
St. James's. Thither came the Corporation of London in state.
All the prelates were there, with the exception of the archbishop
of Canterbury. The London Clergy were not wanting in their
tribute of respect. Non-conformist divines also attended in a body.
" Old Sergeant Maynard came with the men of the law. He was
then near ninety, and yet he said the liveliest thing that was heard
of on that occasion. The prince took notice of his great age, and
said, that he had outlived all the men of the law of his time : he
answered, he had like to have outlived the law itself, if his high
ness had not come over."* Amidst this throng William stood
" stately, serious, and reserved." f His position was one of ex
ceeding difficulty. He was urged to take the crown, as Henry VII.
had taken it, by right of conquest. He rejected the advice. Such
a claim would have been a violation of his own promises. It would
have' justly irritated a proud and sensitive people, who already
looked with suspicion upon the orange uniform of his guards. He
resolved to assemble, provisionally, two bodies that should repre
sent the Lords and Commons of England. He invited the Peers
to attend him ; he invited also those who had sat in the House of
Commons during the reign of Charles II. and with them the alder
men of London, and a deputation from the Common Council. He
begged them to consider the state of the country, and communicate
* Burnet, vol. iii. p. 341. Swift has a characteristic note on this passage, " He was
an old rogue, for all that."
t Evelyn.
374 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to him the result of their deliberations. The two bodies met in
separate chambers ; and they each finally agreed to present to
William addresses, to request that he would issue letters to summon
a Convention of the Estates of the realm, and in the mean time
take upon himself the administration of government. These reso
lutions were agreed to with less hesitation when it was known that
James, after staying a week at Rochester, had gone over to France.
William applied himself with all the energy of his character to
extricate the nation out of its confusion. The exchequer was
almost empty. Such was the confidence in him that, upon his
word alone, two hundred thousand pounds were immediately placed
in his hands by the Common Council of London, as a loan sub
scribed by the merchants. The nation felt, generally, that it was
under a temporary ruler who would respect the law, and maintain
order and security. The letters for calling the Convention were
sent out ; the old charters had been restored ; and the elections
proceeded without any interference with the freedom of the electors,
by the influence of the servants of the government. The prince of
Orange had also been requested to proceed in the same manner in
regard to Scotland as in England — to take on himself the provisional
administration, and to call a Convention of the Estates.
On the 22nd of January the Convention met. The composition
of the House of Commons was such that there was not likely to be
any serious'difference of opinion upon the fundamental principles
of a settlement of the nation. But there were great difficulties to
be overcome. Evelyn has related the discussions at a dinner on
the 15th, at the palace of the archbishop of Canterbury, where he
met five bishops and several peers : " Sorry I was to find there was
as yet no accord in the judgments of the Lords and Commons who
were to convene. Some would have the princess made queen with
out any more dispute ; others were for a Regency ; there was a
Tory party, then so called, who were for inviting his majesty again
upon conditions ; and there were Republicans, who would make
the prince of Orange like a Stadtholder." The bishops, he adds,
" were all for a Regency, thereby to salve their oaths, and so ail
public matters to proceed in his majesty's name." The most im
portant of these differences was encountered and settled by the
Commons, in their great vote of the 28th of January: " Resolved,
That king James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the
Constitution of the Kingdom, by breaking the original Contract
between king and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits, and other
DEBATES. 375
wicked persons, having violated the fundamental Laws, and having
withdrawn himself out of the Kingdom, has abdicated the Govern
ment, and that the Throne is thereby become vacant." On the
29th they passed another resolution : " That it hath been found, by
experience, to be inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this
Protestant kingdom, to be governed by a Popish Prince." The
Lords, on receiving the Resolution of the Commons that the throne
was vacant, to which their concurrence was desired, entered upon
long and serious debates, having concurred in the Resolution that
the kingdom ought not to be governed by a Popish Prince. The
great question by them discussed was, whether a Regency, under
whicli the royal power should be administered in the name of king
James II. during his life, was not the best and safest way to pre
serve the laws and the Protestant religion. This motion was only
lost by a majority of two, fifty-one to forty-nine. They then pro
ceeded to the discussion of the abstract question, whether or no
there was an original contract between king and people. This
brought into conflict the assertors of divine right, and the assertors
that all power originally belonged to the community, the power of the
king being by mutual compact. This latter position, which rejected
the notions of absolute authority which had been so servilely main
tained since the Restoration, was carried by fifty-three votes against
forty-six. It was then resolved, that king James had broken the con
tract ; and then the substitution of the word "deserted" for
" abdicated " in the Resolution of the Commons was agreed to.
But the great point of discussion was, " Whether king James,
having broken that original contract between him and his people,
and deserted the government, the throne was vacant." The nega
tive was decided by a majority of fifty-five to forty-one. The Lords
and Commons were now at issue upon a great principle. The
majority maintained that in the monarchy of England the throne
could never be vacant ; that upon the demise of the crown the
right of the heir was complete ; any other principle would make the
monarchy elective. A conference between the two Houses was
carried on with remarkable ability; but the firmness of the Com
mons, intent as they were upon a practical result, led the Lords to
agree, the day after the Conference, to the Resolution of the
Commons, without alteration ; and further to resolve, that the
prince and princess of Orange should be declared king and queen
of England and all the dominions thereunto belonging. The Com
mons had resolved, on the 29th of January, that " before the Com-
376 HISTORY OF ENGLAND-
mittee proceed to fill the throne now vacant, they will proceed to
secure our religion, laws, and liberties." They accomplished this
in the memorable document known as " The Declaration of
Rights." On the 13th of February, the two Houses of the Con
vention went in a body to Whitehall. The princess of Orange,
who had arrived from Holland on the previous day, sat with her
husband, under a canopy in the Banqueting-House. Halifax, the
Speaker of the Lords, addressed their highnesses, and said that
both Houses had issued a Declaration, which was then read by the
Clerk of the House of Lords :
" Whereas the late king James, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges, and
ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion,
and the laws and liberties of this kingdom : By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing
with and suspending of laws, and the execution of laws, without consent of Parliament : By
committing and prosecuting divers worthy prelates, for humbly petitioning to be excused
from concurring to the said assumed power : By issuing and causing to be executed, a com
missioner under the great seal, for erecting a Court called ' The Court of Commissione for
Ecclesiastical Causes : ' By levying money for and to the use of the Crown, by pretence
of prerogative, for other time, and in other manner, than the same was granted by parlia
ment: By raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace,
without consent of parliament ; and quartering soldiers contrary to law : By causing
divers good subjects, being Protestants, to be disarmed, at the same time when Papists
were both armed and employed contrary to law: By violating the freedom of election of
members to serve in parliament: By prosecutions in the Court of King's Bench for mat
ters and causes recognizable only in parliament ; and by divers other arbitrary and illegal
courses. And whereas of late years, partial, corrupt, and unqualified persons, have been
returned and served on juries in trials, and particularly divers juries in trials for High
Treason, which were not freeholders : and excessive bail hath been required of persons
committed in criminal cases, to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the
subjects : and excessive fines have been imposed, and illegal and cruel punishments in
flicted : and several grants and promises made of fines and forfeitures, before any convic
tion or judgment against the persons upon whom the same were to be levied : All which
are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes, and freedom of this
realm. And whereas the said late king James II. having abdicated the government and
the throne being thereby vacant, his highness the prince of Orange (whom it hath pleased
Almighty God to make the glorious instrument of delivering this kingdom from Popery
and arbitrary power) did (by the advice of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and divers
principal persons of the Commons) cause letters to be written to the Lords spiritual and
temporal, being Protestants, and other letters to the several counties, cities, universities,
boroughs, and cinque-ports, for the choosing of such persons to represent them as were of
right to be sent to parliament, to meet and sit at Westminster upon the 2?nd day of
January In this year 168S, [1639] in order to such an establishment, as that their religion,
laws, and liberties, might not again be in danger of being subverted : Upon which letters,
elections having been accordingly made ; and thereupon the Lords spiritual and temporal,
and Commons, pursuant to their several letters and elections, being now assembled 111 a
full and free representative of this nation, taking into their most serious consideration the
best means for attaining the end aforesaid, do in the first place (as their ancestors in like
case have usually done) for vindicating and asserting their ancient rights and liberties,
declare : That the pretended power of suspending the laws, or the execution of laws, by
royal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal: That the pretended power oi
THE DECLARATION OF RIGHTS. 377
dispensing with laws, or the execution of laws, by royal authority, as it "hath been assumed
and exercised of late, is illegal : That the commission for erecting the late Court of Com
missioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commission and courts of the like nature
are illegal and pernfeious : That levying money for or to the use of the crown, by pretence
of prerogative, without grant of parliament, for longer time, or in any other manner than
the same is or shall be granted, is illegal : That it is the right of the subjects to petition the
lung, aud all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning, are illegal : That the
raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with
consent of parliament, is against law : That the subjects, which are Protestants, may have
arms for their defence suitable to their condition, and as allowed by law: That elections
of members of parliament ought to be free : That the freedom of speech, and debates, or
proceedings in parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place
out of parliament : That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines im
posed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted: That jurors ought to be duly em
panelled and returned ; and jurors, which pass upon men in trials of high-treason, ought
to be freeholders : That all grants, and promises of fines, and forfeitures of particular
persons, before conviction, are illegal and void : And that for redress of all grievances, and
for the amending, strengthening, and preserving of the laws, parliaments ought: to be held
frequently. And they do claim, demand, and insist, upon all and singular the premises, as
their undoubted rights and liberties ; and.no declarations, judgments doings or proceedings,
to the prejudice of the people in any of the said premises, ought in any wise to be drawn
hereafter into consequence or example. To which demand of their rights they are par
ticularly encouraged by the declaration of his highness the prince of Orange, as being the
only means for obtaining a full redress and remedy therein. Having therefore an entire
confidence that his said highness, the prince of Orange, will perfect the deliverance so far
advanced by him, and will still preserve them from the violation of their rights, which they
have here asserted, and from all other attempts upon their religion, lights, and liberties ;
the said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, assembled at Westminster, do re
solve, That Willian and Mary, prince and princess of Orange, be, and be declared king
and queen of England, France, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging, to
hold the crown and royal dignity of the said kingdoms and dominions, to them, the said
prince and princess during their lives, and the life of the survivor of them ; and that the
sole and full exercise of the royal power be only in, and executed by the said prince of
Orange, in the names ofthe said prince and princess during their joint lives ; and after
their deceases the said crown and royal dignity of the said kingdoms and dominions to be
to the heirs of the body of the said princess ; and for default of such issue, to the princess
Anne of Denmark, and the heirs of her body ; and for default of such issue, to the heirs of
the body of the said prince of Orange. And the said lords spiritual and temporal, and
commons do pray the said prince and princess of Orange, to, accept the same accordingly.
And that the oaths hereafter mentioned be taken by all persons of whom the oaths of
allegi nice and supremacy might be required by law, instead of them ; and that the said
oaths of allegiance and supremacy be abrogated : ' I, A. B., do sincerely promise and
swear, that I will be faithful, and bear true allegiance to their majesties, king William and
queen Mary. So help me God. I, A. B., do swear That I do from my heart abhor,
detest, and abjure, as impious and heretical, this damnable doctrine and position, That
princes excommunicated or deprived by the pope, or any authority of the see of Rome,
may be deposed or murdered by their subjects, or any other whatsnever- And I do de
clare, that no foreiTn prince, person, prelate, state or potentate, hath or ought to have,
any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence, or authority, ecclesiastical, or spiritual,
within this realm. So help me God-' "
When the reading of the Declaration was concluded, lord Hal
ifax, in the name of all the Estates of the realm, requested the
378 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
prince and princess to accept the Crown. " We thankfully accept,"
•said William, "what you have offered us." A few words of as
surance from those undemonstrative lips, that the laws should be the
rule of his life, that he would endeavour to promote the kingdom's
welfare, and that he would constantly seek the advice of the two
Houses of Parliament, concluded this memorable transfer of the
Crown. Amidst the shouts of the people, the Prince and Princess
of Orange were proclaimed King and Queen of England. The
Revolution was accomplished.
The Revolution of 1688 is the commencement of a new era in
English history. It was not a great popular victory over an abso
lute king or an intolerant priesthood. Such a victory had been
achieved by the Long Parliament ; but the change from a Monarchy
to a Commonwealth, from Episcopacy to Puritanism, was too ex
treme, and too sudden, to be permanent. The re-action brought
back the evil theories of Strafford and Laud ; but the time was past
when any successful attempt could be made to carry them out to
their extreme consequences. The time was also past when resist
ance to oppression and corruption would contemplate the overthrow
of the Crown and Mitre. The opposition to the measures of the
two successors of Charles the First was narrowed by limits which
did not circumscribe the contest with their father. When the in
sane passion of James the Second, to thrust an obnoxious religion
upon the nation, was to be carried through by his own illegal as
sumption of power, — when chartered privileges were violated —
when justice was corrupted at its fountain head — the desire to sub
stitute some other form of government in the place of the ancient
monarchy was gone. The republican enthusiasm of Vane and
Ludlow had given place to the safe Constitutionalism of Halifax
and Somers. When the Church of England was roused by its
own danger into a contest with the absolute king, whose right-
divine to unlimited obedience it had so strenuously maintain
ed, the Non-conformists did not reproach the Church for its incon
sistency, or make common cause with its enemies, in the hope of its
downfall. The zealotry of Peters, and the fanaticism of Venner, had
been succeeded by the moderation of Howe and the peace-makin"-
of Penn. Hence, in the Revolution of 168S, there was scarcely a
manifestation that the leaders of the movement contemplated any
violent change in the institutions of the countrv. It was bv no
means clear that the most influential among them contemplated
THE REVOLUTION A NEW ERA. 37£
ijie removal of their obnoxious sovereign. They sought to curb
nis illegal- proceedings, through the power of a foreign prince,
whose interest in the welfare of the kingdom gave a semblance 04
legality to his invasion, and whose sagacity and courage were the
pledges that his attempt would not miscarry for the want of the
necessary qualities to carry it through. From the same cause that
had rendered the resistance to the government a policy rather
than an impulse, the support which the government still retained
was a calculation rather than a feeling. That Loyalty was gone,
which regarded the king as the supreme arbiter of a nation's des
tiny, to be served without any limitation, and to be obeyed without
any doubt. With the Roundheads of the Civil War, resistance
to this irresponsible power was a principle. With the Cavaliers,
the defence of all royal power was a sentiment. Charles the Sec
ond destroyed the sentiment when it became incompatible with
respect for the possessor of the crown. James the Second com.
pleted its destruction, when he cast off those allies who had at.
tempted to found implicit obedience upon the divine command.
Frora the inevitable changes of national feeling in the past halt
century, whose lessons of experience had been so harsh and yet
so salutary, it resulted that the Revolution of 1688 was not a great
emotional change, in which the evil might be feared as much as
the good— a convulsion which should overthrow many right things
which ought to be preserved as well. as the bad things which ought
to be swept away. That, convulsion had taken place in the pre
vious generation. It was scarcely necessary now to do more than
preserve what had been won ; to restore what had then been de
stroyed ; and to render any future attempts impossible to bring
back the period of misrule- that preceded the great catastrophe of
the Monarchy. But to accomplish this amount of good effectually
and securely, it was the first condition of success that the Mon
archy should be preserved. The great difficulty of effecting this
preservation, and yet changing the occupier of the throne, is the
natural explanation of the inconsistency of the theory upon which
James was set aside. The practical necessity over-rode the ab
stract incongruity. There was to be sovereignty ; but the legiti
mate sovereign was cast out and the heir passed by. And yet the
elective principle was not absolutely maintained. But at the same
time the right divine, upon whichthe claim to absolute power had
been built, was rejected ; the compact between king and peopie
Iras recognised. There was still the Monarchy, with all its an.
380 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
cient dignity and possessions, but the title rested no longer upon
slavish theories. The title of William and Mary was irrevocably
associated with the Declaration of Rights. When, on the thirteenth
of February, William, prince of Orange, said to the Peers and Com
mons who tendered him the Crown in conjunction with his wife—
" We thankfully accept what you have offered us " — their recogni
tion of the gift also recognised the conditions of the gift, — that the
Rights and Liberties of the People, and the legal prerogatives of
the Sovereigns, were thenceforth to be inseparable.
The broad foundation upon which the Rights and Liberties of
the People were to be restored, kept up, extended if necessary, was
that of a free Parliament, — freely elected, free in its proceedings,
without whose consent no taxes could be levied, and no standing
army maintained — a Parliament frequently meeting, " for redress
of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening, and pre
serving of the Laws." Upon Parliamentary Representation was
the Revolution based. It is for this reason, especially, that the
Revolution may be considered the commencement of a new era.
The Parliament was thus to be a great integral part of the Consti
tution, without which no act of government could have a real vital
ity. During the whole unhappy time of the Stuarts, their great
struggle had been to govern without Parliaments. During the
Civil War and the earlier years of the Commonwealth, the attempt
of the legislative power to govern without the monarchical, was
found to be full of danger and insecurity. The sagacity of Crom
well saw that a Monarchy, or " something like a Monarchy," in
conjunction with a Parliament, was best adapted to the whole
structure of the English laws, and best suited to the character of
the English people. What Cromwell in vain aimed at was accom
plished without difficulty, bv a prince who much resembled him in
some of the great qualities that belong to a ruler of men. In 1689,
the Constitution was established through the principle of Resist
ance, not upon any new theories, but upon fundamental laws,
many of which were of an older date than that of the oldest oak
which stood upon English ground. For this reason, it has never
again been necessary to call in the principle of Resistance. A
time would come, when the government of England, being so es
sentially a Parliamentary government, the struggles of Parties
would have more regard to the possession of power than to the
interests of the nation. But it was the essential consequence of
these very strifes of Party, that, whatever the influence of oli-
THE REVOLUTION A NEW ERA. 38 1
garchs or demagogues, a controlling public opinion was constantly
growing and strengthening. The power that distinguished the cen
tury following the Revolution from all other centuries, was the
power of the Press, and especially the power of Journalism. Rude
and incomplete as were its first efforts against, and often for, cor
rupt and unpatriotic administrations, it gradually rendered public
opinion so active and concentrated, that statesmen could no longer
affect to despise its admonitions. The Press ceased to be con
trolled by a licenser. It ceased to be awed by the fear of state
prosecutions, when its security rested upon the verdict of twelve
men. The tampering with Juries was one of the most crying evils
of the period which preceded the Revolution. The doctrine which
had been so often violated was solemnly asserted in 1689, that
" Jurors ought to be duly empanelled and returned." Chiefly
through the influence of public ^pinion, kept in vigorous order by
the Press, — and let it always be borne in mind that the Press was
essentially controversial, and always will be so, — extreme opinions
became less and less. In the same degree the union of Classes
¦became closer. The representatives of the old great families ap
proached the commonalty, not as a " rabble," but as fellow-citizens.
The commonalty looked upon the aristocracy, not as a hateful caste
Of oppressors, but as their natural leaders. The Revolution of
1688 has been despised by some as an aristocratic Revolution.
Happy for us that it was not born of that " violent and unextin-
guishable hatred of inequality," that fierce desire " to raze to their
foundations all that remained of the institutions of the Middle
Ages ; " » which, chiefly, have made the Revolutions of another
great nation so unstable. * De Tocqueville.
382 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XIX.
View of the National Industry from the Revolution of 1688 to the Accession of the House
of Brunswick. — Population. — the South-Westera Counties. — The Woollen Manu
facture. — Clothing trade of the West. — Domestic Character of the Manufacture. —
Foreign Trade. — Bristol. — Watering-places of the Coast.— Travelling for pleasure. —
Inland Watering-places. — Bath. — Arsenal of Plymouth. — Iron Manufactures. — For
est of Dean. — South Wales. — Tin Mines of Cornwall. — Copper Mines. — Welsh Coal
Field.— Varieties of Employment in the West of England.
We are entering ujion that period of our national progress in
which England is very slowly developing itself into a manufactur
ing and commercial country. The great features of that progress,
and its accompanying changes in the character of the population,
must ever be borne in mind when we attempt to trace the political
history of the eighteenth century. This gradual development of
her resources is not a mere accident in England's career. It con
stitutes the most important feature of her advancing political con
dition. It requires to be thoroughly understood, if we would
rightly understand the circumstances which have given us our
present place amongst the nations. We propose to offer a pic
ture, derived indeed from scattered and imperfect materials, but
with some approximation to exactness, of the industry, and the
consequent condition and character of the people, during the
period from the Revolution of 1688 to the accession of the house
of Brunswick. Some of our authorities extend through the reign
of George I.* But there were few changes of invention or dis
covery to mark a new epoch of industry as immediately following
the close of the reign of Anne. It was the period before steam-
engines and navigable canals — the period before the cotton trade
— the period before scientific husbandry in its humblest form. It
was the period when the infant industry of England was thought
to be only secure under the system of Protection, earned to the
utmost amount of actual prohibition of foreign manufactures, or of
repression by high duties. It was a period of nearly stationary
population. It was a period of old staple production that was
thought all sufficing for national prosperity, and of timid experi-
* Such as Defoe's "Tour," which was commenced in 1722.
VIEW OF THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY. 383
ment in new fields of enterprise that were regarded as dangerous
and delusive. Such notions went before the coming era of mar
vellous extension of productive power ; and they long contended
against the political philosophy and the scientific knowledge that
determined that extension. Let us endeavour to trace what Eng
land was under its accustomed industrial habits, — patient, perse
vering, slow England— during the quarter of a century that suc
ceeded the Revolution. To our minds this is a period of extreme
interest. It is the period of transition from the plough to the
loom; from the spinning-wheel to the factory; from the age of
tools to the age of machinery. Employments are intermingled.
The shuttle is plied in the valleys where the fleece is sheared ; the
iron is smelted on the hills where the timber is felled for char
coal. Ships of small burden carry the products of one locality to
another, up the estuaries and tributary rivers ; and when naviga
tion is impeded by sands and rocks, packhorses bear the cargo
into the interior. The people of one district know very little of
another district. Each district has something to exchange with
its neighbour could they be brought into communication ; but im
practicable roads and unnavigable streams keep them separate.
Every county has its peculiar dialect, the traces of which philolo
gists eagerly hunt after. The sports of the West are not the same
as those of the South — the superstitions of the North have a dif
ferent character from those of the East. Yet, with all these ma
terial causes of isolation, England has one heart. She is made
compact by her Protestantism, by her general laws, by her system
of local government, by historical memory. Her people, in their
island home, intensely feel their nationality. But on this island
home, which has a greater sea-board than any other European
country, there is a constant incentive to an adventurous race to go
forth to the most distant shores — to trade, to colonise, to make all
the choice productions of the world their own by exchange — to be
the sea-kings, as were their Saxon forefathers. To comprehend
what England has done in a century and a half, we must carefully
look back upon the point from which she started in this wondrous
race. One of the earliest proceedings of the first Parliament of Wil
liam and Mary, was to grant an extraordinary Aid of £"68,820 per
month, for six months, payable in certain proportions by the sev
eral counties.* Shortly following this grant was an enactment
* 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 3.
384 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" for the taking away the revenue arising from Hearth-money."
This tax is described as " not only a great oppression to the poor
er sort, but a badge of slavery upon the whole people, exposing
every man's house to be entered into and searched at pleasure." *
But this tax of Hearth-money was in one respect a national advan
tage. It formed the basis of all reasonable calculations of the
amount of the population of England and Wales, towards the close
of the seventeenth century, and for many years afterwards. Greg
ory King took the number of houses returned by the hearth-money
collectors as determining his estimate that the population was
about five millions and a half ; a calculation very nearly borne out
by statistical researches in our own days. Other accounts take
the population of this period at a higher rate. From a table
printed in 1693 it appeared that there were 1,175,951 houses. f
Upon the authority of this table, allowing six persons to each
house, the population was subsequently- calculated at 7,055,7064
In the " Magna Britannia," which commenced to be published in
1720, the number of houses in each county is given; and, in many
cases, the equivalent number of the population is also given,
though upon a varying scale. § The result is not very materially
different from the estimates of Gregory King ; and if the houses,
in number about 1,200,000, were averaged to give five persons for
each house, they would show a population of six millions, at the
period to which our present inquiry extends. The use we pro
pose to make of these returns of houses, and of the assessment
for Aid, || is to endeavour to form some estimate of the compara
tive population, industry, and wealth of each of the great divisions
of the country; with occasional glances at the striking contrasts in
our own times presented by some large industrial districts.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the west of England
was the seat of the greatest commercial and manufacturing industry
of the kingdom. The five Soutli-Western Counties of Wilts, Dor
set, Devon, Cornwall. Somerset, then contained the largest number
of houses and consequently the largest population, as compared
with any other of our present eleven Registration Divisions. This
district was also assessed in 1689 at a higher rate than any other.
* 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 10. t " Parliamentary History," vol. v. Appendix No. 10.
X Chamberlayne's Present State, 1748.
§ The principle of assigning five persons to a house is sometimes observed ; some-
times, six persons ; and sometimes a medium between the two.
U The Assessment was doubled in 1603. but the proportions were the same.
Entrance of William III. into London. — Vol. iv. 373.
THE WOOLLEN MANUFACTURE. 385
It was to pay £"10,850 per month in aid, whilst the North-Western
District of Cheshire and Lancashire was only to pay £"1753. It
contained 175,403 houses whilst Cheshire and Lancashire only con
tained 64,256. The population of the South-Western Counties was
(at the rate of 5 persons for a house) 877,015, whilst the North-
Western District was 321,280. At the census of 1801, the South
western District contained a population only increased by about
one fourth during a hundred years ; whilst the North-Western was
three times as numerous as at the beginning of the century. The
contrast will be more striking if we look at the fact that, in 1851,
the population of Cheshire and Lancashire nearly doubled that of the
five South-Western Counties, which counties, a century and a half
earlier, contained three times as many inhabitants as the North-
Western. If we add Gloucestershire to the other five counties,
we shall find that these six chief counties of the West at the begin
ning of the eighteenth century contained 202,167 houses and there
fore above a million ten thousand inhabitants. At the same period,
Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland,
only contained 209,132 houses, and therefore these great North
ern counties only exceeded the West in population by about thirty-
five thousand souls. In 1851 these five Northern Counties con
tained five millions of inhabitants, being an excess above the six"
Western Counties of two million seven hundred thousand.
In the first year of the new dynasty an Act was passed " for the
better preventing the exportation of Wool, and encouraging the
Woollen Manufacture of this kingdom." * The great object of
commercial legislation for two centuries ^was to encourage the
Woollen Manufacture. The one mode of accomplishing this was
to prevent the exportation of Wool, and to prohibit the importation
of textile articles for every other country, not excepting Scotland
and Ireland. Wool was justly held to be "eminently the founda
tion of England's riches." f To let wool go away unwrought, or
even in the shape of yarn, was to lessen or destroy this source of
wealth. But the richer Dutch, especially, could give a better price
for the wool than the English clothiers ; and, said the first political
economist of that time, " they that can give the best price for a
commodity shall never fail to have it, by one means or other, not
withstanding the opposition of any taws by sea or land ; of such
force, subtilty, and violence is the general course of trade."}
Under the Statute of the first year of William and Mary, Commis-
* 1 Gul. and Mar. c. 32. t Sir Josiah Child. X Ibid.
Vol. IV.— 25
386 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
sioners nere appointed to prevent by forcible means the exporta
tion of Wool. They employed a sloop and boats for the search of
vessels. They had army of riding-officers and superiors in the
wool-growing counties and adjacent ports. The contests between
these riding-officers and the carriers of the wool were frequent and
sometimes deadly ; and the aggregate number of packs rescued
from the officers were greater than the number seized. The service
was most inefficient and dangerous in the North.* The landed in
terest and the manufacturing interest were for years at issue upon the
question of th% exportation of wool. The manufacturers desired a
monopoly. The landlords and cultivators advocated a perfectly-
open trade, and proclaimed the most liberal principles of commer
cial freedom. Such is the varying course of opinion which follows the
varying interests of industrial operations. The economical writers
of the end of the seventeenth century, who estimated the whole an
nual income of England at forty-three millions, and the rental at
ten millions, reckoned the annual value of the wool at two millions,
and the annual value of the woollen manufacture at eight millions.
That manufacture was chiefly in the Western Counties, as it had
been from the time of Edward VI. In that reign, though Coventry
and Worcester produced " White Cloths " and " Coloured Cloths ;"
though tbe " Coloured Long Cloths " of Suffolk, Norfolk, and
Essex were worthy of mention, as well as " Northern Cloths " and
" Welsh Friezes ; " Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Dev
onshire, were especially famous for their •' Whites " and "Reds,"
their " Azures " and " Blues." " Devonshire Kerseys," and
"Broadcloths called Tauntons and Bridgewaters," were the objects
of minute regulation. " " Manchester, Lancashire, and Cheshire
Cottons " — (a fabric so called in which cotton is held to have had
no place) — and " Manchester Rugs and Friezes " form a small
object of that legislative vigilance which was to insure " the true
making of cloth within this realm," and to prevent the '-many sub
til sleights and untruths " which were imputed to greedy cloth-
iers.f A hundred and fifty years later the West was still the great
Cloth-making district ; and to this cause may be chiefly attributed
its comparative superiority in wealth and population.
In the days before steam-power, and the application of chemical
science to manufactures, natural advantages wholly determined the
localisation of trades. The same principle must always prevail to
* Returns given in Smith's " Memoirs of Wool," vol. ii. p. 166.
t s & <> Edward VI. c. 5.
CLOTHING TRADE OF THE WEST. 387
a great extent in the most advanced stage of manufacturing indus
try. The clothing trade of the West was created by the adaptation
of the district to sheep pasturage. On the grassy downs and wide
plains of Wiltshire, innumerable flocks of sheep had yielded the
fleece before the time when Stonehenge and Abury were mysteri
ous ruins. The fleeces of the long-woolled sheep of the Cots
wold Hills were famous in the fifteenth century; and Camden
describes the substantial cotes with which this hill-district was
covered, to shelter the flocks from the winter storm or the keen
winds of the lambing season. The Mendip Hills supported a
short-woolled breed, whose wool was as fine as that of Spain, which
entered so largely into our woollen manufacture. The supply of
wool was thus at hand for the clothiers who dwelt in the valley of
the Lower Avon. The waters of that river, with its many branches,
were especially fitted for fulling and dressing and dyeing cloth.
The finest cloths were here fabricated. Frome, Bradford, Trow
bridge, Devizes, with many adjacent towns then of great impor
tance, were the seats of this " prodigy of a trade." * Frome had
added ten thousand to its population in -thirty years, and was con
sidered to have more inhabitants than Bath or Salisbury-! The
clothing towns were surrounded with their tributary villages and
hamlets, in which the work of spinning was performed by women
and children. To the cottages where the hum of the wheel was
ceaselessly heard, the clothiers of the towns sent their pack-horses
laden with wool, and brought back the spun yarn, ready for the
weaver's loom. The operative weaver was also in many cases a
domestic worker. In the fulling and dyeing processes was com
bined labour alone necessary. The forgotten poem of John Dyer,
" The Fleece " — which Johnson disdained on account of " the
meanness naturally adhering and the irreverence habitually annexed
to trade and manufactures " — gives us many accurate as well as
pleasing pictures of the weaving labours of the valleys of the
Avon, the Air, and the Stroud. The young man, entering upon
his career of industry, sets up his own loom ; he stores his soft
yarn ; he strains the warp along his garden walk, or by the high
way side ; he drives the thready shuttle from morn to eve ; he
takes the web to the fulling mill near some clear-sliding river,
where tumbling waters turn enormous wheels and hammers ; the
wet web is often steeped, and often dragged by sinewy arms to the
river's grassy bank ; it is hung on rugged tenters to brighten in
* Defoe's " Tour," vol. ii. p. 35, ed. 1738. t Ibid., p. 34.
388 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the fervid sun ; the clothier's shears and the burler's thistle skim
the surface ; and lastly, the snowy web is steeped in boiling vats,
where woad or fustic, logwood or cochineal, give their hues to the
purple of the prince, the scarlet of the warrior, and the black of
the priest.* There can be no greater contrast than that of the
Woollen trade of the West, a century and a half ago, with a Cloth
factory of the North in our own times ; where, with the gigantic
aid of steam, wool from every quarter of the habitable globe is
carded, spun, woven by the power-loom, fulled, sheared, and dyed,
in buildings one of which would turn out more cloth than a dozen
old clothing-towns, with their tributary villages. The contrast
between the semi-pastoral state of the great staple of England, and
its factory perfection, is equally remarkable as regards the moral
condition of the people. Tbe old loom is passing away : and so is
the weaver of Kidderminster, who had his book before him as he
threw the shuttle, and had " time enough to read or talk of holy
things." t
The Gloucestershire clothiers of Stroud and the neighbourhood
were especially famous for- their fine cloths of scarlet and other
gaudy hues, to which the purity of their streams was held as much
to contribute as tbe skill of the dyer. It was the fineness and
brilliancy of the English broad-cloths which gave them a value
beyond their own silks and brocades to the Persian and the Turk,
" even for their habits of ceremony." It was their intrinsic good
ness — to preserve which so many statutory regulations had been
prescribed for centuries — which recommended them to Spaniards
and Portuguese, to Venetians and Italians, to the Greeks of the
Levant and even to the Moors of Africa.} But this foreign trade
was greatly straitened by circumstances and opinions. At the
beginning of tbe eighteenth century the trade with France was
gone. In 1674 a jealousy of that trade was the paramount idea of
the commercial legislator; for England sent France only about
eighty thousand pounds' worth of woollen manufactures, and im
ported ten times that value of linen and silk manufactures, besides
wine, brandy, paper, and many toys and luxuries. The difference,
in the economical language of that day. was called the " Balance
gained by the French from us yearly." § When, after the acces
sion of William and Mary, the nation was at war with Louis XIV.,
» See Dyer's "Fleece," book iii. t See ante> v0,_ iy ^
J" Atlas Maritimus," 1727.
§ " Parliamentary History," vol. iv. Appendix, No. xi.
FOREIGN TRADE. 389
all trade and commerce with France was prohibited ; and it was
declared that it had been found by long experience that the im
portation of the commodities of France " hath much exhausted the
treasure of this nation, lessened the value of the native commodities
and manufactures thereof, and greatly impoverished the English
artificers and handicrafts." * The same proposition was repeated
in the same terms in 1 704. f To compensate for the loss of the
French trade, the North American colonies and the West Indies
had become important customers for our woollen manufactures.
The ports of Bristol and of North Devon thus continued to pros
per ; Liverpool was growing into importance ; but many of the
smaller ports of the channel were ruined. The towns of Wey
mouth and Lyme, that drove a flourishing trade with France before
• the Revolution of 1688, fell into decay. Lyme once sent large
cargoes of woollen goods to Brittany, X and its " Cobb " was busy
with little vessels laden with imports of French wines and linens.
In 1 709, the cobb-dues were under fourteen pounds, and the houses
were fast falling into decay. Ships were employed in foreign trade
of a larger tonnage than was fitted for small ports. Great towns
alone became the seats of external commerce. §
Such a port was Bristol at the commencement of the eigh
teenth century — the famous port of the West — the only port that
could pretend to enter into competition with London, and to trade
with an entire independence of the capital. || The Bristol shop
keepers were also merchants — " Wholesale men " — and they con
ducted an inland trade through all the Western counties by means of
carriers, and extended their traffic through the midland districts,
even to the Trent. Roger North had observed that at Bristol all
the dealers were engaged in adventures by sea ; — " a poor shop
keeper that sells candles will have a bale of stockings, or a piece
of stuff, for Nevis or Virginia." f There was too much truth in
his notice of one portion of the Bristol commerce — "rather than
fail, they trade in men." The planters with whom the Bristol
traders corresponded wanted labour, and in exchange for rum, and
sugar, and tobacco, men were sent — wretched outcasts who had
been kidnapped, or " small rogues " who were threatened by the
justices with the extreme penalties of the law, and were instructed
to pray for transportation " before any indictment was found
* 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 33. t 3 & 4 Anne, c 12.
X " British Merchant," 1713. § Roberts' " Southern Counties," p. 540.
II Defoe's " Tour," vol. ii. p. 249. f " Life of Lord Guilford," vol. i. p. 25.
3QO HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
against them. " * Bristol had this dishonour in the days of Charles
II., as it was the last to cling to the dishonour of the slave trade in
the days of George III. The Bristol traders, moreover, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, had to bear a reproach, which
even the noble charities of one of their great merchants, and
their old reputation for hospitality, which earned them the title of
" the courteous Bristolians," t could not outweigh. Defoe,, in
general no illiberal judge, complained of the inconveniences of
Bristol — its narrow streets, its narrow river, and "also another
narrow— that is, the minds of the generality of its people." He
recommends them to travel to London — "from the second great
trading town to the first ; and they will see examples worth their
imitating, as well for princely spirit as for upright and generous
dealings." X At that period Bristol was cursed with a very exclu
sive prosperity , and its uneducated freemen, amongst whom
strangers were jealously forbidden to settle, indulged, when their
adventures were prosperous, in that vulgar display which is the
general accompaniment of sudden riches. § It was also cursed
with an exclusive municipal government. From this great port
of the Severn, Sebastian Cabot, " a Bristol man born," went forth
in 1497 to set his foot upon Newfoundland. Two centuries later
Bristol was the great emporium for American produce, and Dam-
pier, with other bold buccaneers, sailed from Avon to come back
rich with Spanish prizes. A century and a half later', the " Great
Western " steamed down between the narrow rocks of St. Vincent,
on her first voyage to New York, caring little for tides and adverse
winds, for she had a self-contained power which took away the un
certainty of maritime communication, and made time and space "of
small amount in commercial calculations. The difference between
the Bristol of Cabot and the Bristol of Dampier, is not greater
than the difference between the Bristol of William III., whose
statue was worthily raised in Queen Square by her citizens, and
the Bristol of Queen Victoria. The Avon is now far too narrow for
the mighty vessels, crowded amongst the diminutive, that steam to
her quays from South Wales and Ireland, from Africa and America.
But the old commerce of wool and woollen manufactures, of which
* " Life of Lord Guilford," vol. i. p. 250, and vol. ii. p. 24.
t Fuller's "Worthies." X "Tour," vol. ii. p. 250-
§ Defoe perhaps wrote under the influence of some personal slight. He sought a ref
uge in Bristol when under pecuniary difficulties ; and was there pointed at as " the Sun
day gentleman."
WATERING-PLACES OF THE COAST. 391
Bristol was the seat, is gone. The North has carried away the
woollen manufacture from the West, to a very considerable extent.
South Wales has far more productive industry than the making of
flannels. The* hearth-money returns of Bristol show little above
five thousand houses, which would give a population not much ex
ceeding twenty-five thousand. Defoe says, " Bristol' is supposed
to have a hundred thousand inhabitants within the city, and within
three miles of its circumference." This is a material increase in
less than forty years. A later writer observes that " Bristol, the
second city in England, next to London has made the largest im
provements since the Revolution, of any place in the kingdom, un-
ess Manchester shall be thought an exception to this."*
The great woollen manufacture extended itself in the eigh
teenth century still further west. At Taunton Defoe found eleven
hundred looms at work for the weaving of common stuffs ; and he
was told that there was not a child in the town of above five years
old who could not earn its own bread. At Honiton he first saw
the serge manufacture of Devonshire, which occupied the whole
county. At Exeter, a city then full of trade and manufacture, he
looked with admiration upon the serge market, where the people as
sured him that serges to the value of a hundred thousand pounds
were sometimes sold in one week. The port of Topsham was then
one of the most considerable amongst the smaller ports of Eng
land ; and the woollen manufactures of Devonshire were thence
largely exported to Holland, to Portugal and Spain, to Italy.
The commerce of the Exe is now comparatively small. Devon
shire has still its scattered woollen manufactures, which give em
ploy to fifteen hundred males and two thousand five hundred
females ; and five hundred males, and eight thousand five hundred
females are now connected with the production of gloves and lace.
But new populations have been created by circumstances of which
the Devonians of a century and a half ago had no conception. It
was for modern times to behold all the bays of the south-western
coast where the myrtle is unharmed by the winter gales, transformed
into flourishing towns, where a few fishermen once earned a pre
carious livelihood. The rush to the coast for sea-bathing and sea-
air was a fashion unknown in the middle of the last century. Still
less was it the fashion to locate the invalid under the shelter of hills
and promontories, where the south-west breeze might give its soft
but invigorating freshness to those who were held to have been per-
* Smith's " Memoirs of Wool," 1747. Vol. i. p. 263.
392 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ishing in the crowded city. Torquay was then a name for a few huts.
Even more rare was the fashion of travelling for pleasure through
scenes which we now call beautiful, but which our forefathers held
to be horrible wastes. In the days of almost imp'assible roads,
and when wheel conveyances were not common, the hills of Dev
onshire and Derbyshire, the mountains of Wales and Westmore
land, were left to their primitive occupants, unsought by the tour
ist, and hated by the business traveller. No one sailed down the
Wye and the Dart for pleasure ; the Dove and the Wharf were
known in their inaccessible beauties only to the solitary angler.
When the companion of Charles Cotton rides with him near Ash-
bourn, the Essex man exclaims, " Bless me, what mountains are
here ! " and when told that the hills bred and fed good beef and
mutton, ejaculates, " They had need of all those commodities to
make amends for the ill landscape." * To the eyes of Defoe,
Westmoreland was a country eminent only for being the wildest,
most barren, and frightful of any that he had passed over in Eng
land, or even in Wales itself. He talks of the terrible aspect of
the hills, and laments that all the pleasant part of England was at
an end.f Gray was the first who looked at Windermere and Bor-
rowdale, at Skiddaw and Saddleback, with the eve of the poet.
Whateley was the first who described the Wye ; and Gray, who
followed him, is in raptures with its "succession of nameless won
ders." X Such a change in the taste of the present and the past
century may be accounted for without imputing to our predecessors
an indifference to the beauties of nature. Travelling was to them
weary work. The most populous districts, with the least execrable
roads, were to them the most attractive. The only inns were in
the great thoroughfares. The chance hospitality of a cottage on a
mountain side was not to their tastes. Long after the middle of
the eighteenth century good roads were the exception. Turnpikes
had done something to amend the evil. But up to 1770, when
Arthur Young wrote, the roads of the North, and especially of
Lancashire, were mostly execrable ; so that, speaking of the turn
pike road from Preston to Wigan, this shrewd observer says,
" Let me most seriously caution all travellers who may accidentally
purpose to travel this terrible country, to avoid it, as they would
the devil." § The love of the picturesque was not sufficient to bear
the ordinary tourist through such difficulties.
* " Complete Angler," Part ii. t " Tour," vol. iii. p, 18.
X " Works," vol. iv. 1836.
§ " Six months' Tour in the North of England," vol. iv. p. 5S0.
INLAND WATERING-PLACES. 393
In the West was the most celebrated watering-place of Eng
land. From the earliest times the hot springs of Bath had been
the resort of the invalid. The city at the beginning of the eigh
teenth century was a small cluster of narrow streets, where the
houses, although built of stone, were mean and ill-furnished. Yet
it had long been the resort of the rich health-seekers and the rich
pleasure-seekers. It was proverbial also for its beggars. Fuller,
noticing the proverb, says that many repair to Bath from all parts
of the land, " the poor for alms, the pained for ease." The beggars
came, like fowl to the barn-door, where there was " the general
confluence of gentry." Wood, the architect, changed Bath from a
crowded nest of dirty lodgings into a city of palaces. But after
these improvements were begun, Defoe compared "the close city
of Bath " to a foul prison ; and laments that physicians, by not
giving equal praise to the hot springs of Matlock and Buxton, had
not encoiiraged the building there of " noble and convenient bathing
places, and instead of a house or two, a city raised for the enter
tainment of company." * The passion for drinking mineral waters,
and for bathing in medicinal springs, sent the fashionable world, in
the beginning of the eighteenth century, to a similar round of idle
ness and dissipation, of card-playing and dancing, at the crowded
cottages of Tunbridge Wells, and the fishing hovels of Scarborough.
The virtues of the " Spa-waters " of the great sea-bathing place
of the North were known in the days of Elizabeth, Those who
walked from the town over the sands, to the mineral spring which
issued from the cliff, never thought of a swim in the sea. There
was then no gathering on the coast, east or west, north or south, to
inhale the breeze or to float in the brine. The sea was as much
dreaded by inland dwellers, as the mountains were hateful to the
inhabitants of the plains.
When the Prince of Orange landed at Brixham, the probability
was that the governor of Plymouth would have opposed the descent.
of a Dutch army upon the Western coast. The island of St. Nich
olas had been fortified in the time of Elizabeth. The citadel had
been built by Charles II. But at the end of the seventeenth cen
tury Plymouth was not a great naval station. No fleets of men-of-
war anchored in the Hamoaze ; no docks and victualling yards gave
employment to two thousand five hundred workmen. William III.
imparted the first impulse to 'the creation of the great arsenal
which was to rival Portsmouth, by building two docks, which were
* " Tour," vol. iii. p. 43.
394 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
begun in 1 69 1. But Plymouth, the noble estuary of the Tamar and
the Plym, had long been the most considerable port for merchan
dise of South Devon, as Bideford on the Torridge, and Barnstaple
on the Taw, had chiefly absorbed the commerce of North Devon.
The Plymouth of the end of the seventeenth century, and the Ply
mouth of the middle of the nineteenth century, are as essentially
different as the war ships of each period. The perils of the Eddy-
stone rock, "whereon many a good ship hath been split," * were
not averted by the warning light which has securely burnt there
since the days of Smeaton. A light-house was commenced to be
built on the Eddystone in 1696. In three years it was finished,
and the dangers of the approach to the Sound were greatly les
sened. The mighty storm of 1703, almost unequalled in its destruc
tive violence, swept the first lighthouse away. There had been
signals for help from the doomed fabric when the tempest began
on the 24th of November. On the morning of the 26th, the people
of Plymouth looked out upon the stormy sea with their perspective
glasses, and behold, the lighthouse was gone. Its engineer, Win-
stanley, perished with it. Another lighthouse, formed like the first,
of wood upon a stone foundation, was commenced in 1706. It was
destroyed by fire in 1755. The force of the South Western gales
always made the anchorage of Plymouth harbour somewhat unsafe,
till Telford's breakwater, one of the triumphs of modern engineer
ing, rendered the port as eminent for its safety as it is unequalled
for picturesque beauty.
The ship-building of Plymouth Dock, of Portsmouth, and of
the other naval stations, leads us to look at one of the most extraor
dinary contrasts between the end of the seventeenth century and
the middle of the nineteenth. What mighty efforts of invention
ahd energy between England depending upon foreign countries
for iron, and England supplying the whole world with iron : Eng
land without iron to hold together its " wooden walls," and Eng
land building iron ships ; using iron as the great material of the
grandest as well as of the humblest purposes of constructive art;
covering the whole island with iron roads for vehicles drawn by
iron engines ; connecting opposite hills by iron viaducts, and car
rying iron bridges over the narrowest river and the broadest
estuary — the England of every tool and every machine produced
from iron, and the England with scarcely iron enough to make its
ploughshares. In such considerations of the grandeur of Art
* Teonge's " Diary," p. 25.'
IRON TRADE. — FOREST OF DEAN. 395
1 there is the poetical element, as deep if not so vivid, as in the con
templation of the grandeur of Nature. To connect poetry with
manufacture, according to Dr. Johnson, "is to couple the serpent
with the fowl." Whateley, in a celebrated passage, described the
smoky cloud of an iron forge on the Wye as adding to the grand
eur of the scene at die New Weir. This was simply the pictur
esque of poetry. But what images of the past, the present, and
the future are connected with an incident of the iron manufacture
on the same river. The first mass was performed in " the Cister-
tian house of the blessed Mary of Tintern," in 1287. Now, five
hundred and seventy years afterwards, the majestic ruins of the
conventual church are the admiration of every visitor. To our
minds the impressiveness of this noble monument of the piety of
the days of Edward I. is enhanced by the solemn thought of the
vast social changes of six centuries — changes never more striking
ly manifested than in the fact that, within a few hundred yards of
the Abbey, the best wire was manufactured for the Atlantic Tele
graph. In the seventeenth century the forest of Dean was the prin
cipal seat of the iron manufacture. It had been an iron-making
district from the time of the Romans. The cinders from the old
Roman iurnaces still lie like pebbles on the sea-shore on the left
bank of the Wye, and deep cavities from which the iron-stone has
been dug attest the labours of the industrious race whose coins
are found in the same pits.* The work of smelting iron, which
the Romans only half performed with imperfect mechanical aids,
was carried through, though still imperfectly, by the miners of
fourteen hundred years later. The woods of the forest of Dean
were burnt for charcoal, in a country of pit-coal, and the best "sow-
iron " was made from the half-smelted Roman cinders. This sow-
iron was sent by the Severn into Worcestershire, Shropshire,
Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Cheshire, and there made into
bar-iron. The forges of Stourbridge, Dudley, Wolverhampton,
Walsall, and Birmingham were chiefly kept at work by the fine
iron from this Western country. " The forest of Dean," says
Yaranton, " is, as to the iron, to be compared to the sheep's back,
as to the woollen ; nothing being of more advantage to England
than these two are."t Nevertheless, there were a fewiron works
in Staffordshire and Warwickshire, in Worcestershire and Shrop
shire, where iron of inferior quality, a " a short soft iron, commonly
* Ante, vol. i.p. 48. 1 "England's Improvement," p. 58.
396 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
called cold-shore iron," was produced : it was chiefly used in the
nail manufacture .* An Act of 1668 recites, that the wood and
timber of the Crown in the forest of Dean had become totally de
stroyed.! Tbe manufacture of iron was unpopular. Many said,
" it were well if there were no iron works in England, and it was bet
ter when no iron was made in England : the iron works destroy all
the woods, and foreign iron from Spain will do better and last
longer. X Drayton makes the trees of the Weald of Sussex utter
their lament for "these iron times." Iron works had been nearly
driven from Kent and Surrey by statutes of Elizabeth and James
I. The iron railings round St. Paul's Churchyard were almost the
last produce of southern iron-works. Plant woods to burn for
charcoal, was the advice of those who believed that home-made
iron was a necessity. A man wiser than others in his generation,
Edward lord Dudley, obtained in 1619 a patent for smelting iron-
ore by pit coal. He would probablyhave bestowed immense riches
upon his country had not his iron-works been destroyed in an out
break of that popular ignorance which had too often interrupted the
course of scientific improvement. The notion of smelting the iron
ore by coal was not fairly tried till after 1740, at which time the
annual produce of iron in the whole country was only about seven
teen thousand tons. What a contrast is the conveyance of iron
from the mouth of the Wye in those days, and frora the mouth of
the Taff in our day. The furnaces of South Wales produce as
much pig-iron in one week, as all the furnaces of England produced
in the whole year of 1740. The seventeen thousand tons, smelted
by charcoal in that year, are only the hundred and fortieth part of
all the iron produced in the United Kingdom in 185 1, and only the
two-hundreth part of the produce of 1857. The iron of 1851, com
pared with the population, was estimated at a hundred and sixty-
eight pounds(i>£ cwt.). per head. The iron of 1740 gave less than
seven pounds per head. The iron workers of Merthyr-Tydvii are
greater now in number than the whole population of Glamorgan
shire at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The western extremity of England was the most ancient seat
of her mining riches. The Romans worked the tin-mines of Corn
wall, as they worked the lead-mines of Derbyshire. The sea-
coast is full of the traces of the earliest mining industry. At a
comparatively modern period, the reign of John, the Jews were the
chief workers of the tin-mines. In the middle of the eighteenth
* " England's Improvements," p. 5S.
t 19 & 20 Car. II. c. 8. t " England's Improvement," p. 56.
THE MINES OF CORNWALL. 397
century the produce of these mines was about sixteen hundred
tons ; and no great increase was observable for another half cen
tury. That quantity is about a seventh of the present annual pro
duce. The tin that was used to make the pewter dishes of the
rich in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is now chiefly
employed to produce the tinned iron plates that form the cooking
utensils of the mansion and the cottage, and the tea-pots of Britan
nia-metal and queen's-metal that are the luxuries of the mechanic's
household. The first tin-plate manufactory was established in
Monmouthshire in 1730. We now export tin-plates to the value,
annually, of a million and a half sterling. The mines of Cornwall
created the Stannary towns, of which Truro was the chief, for the
stamping of tin, and the assessment of its " coinage," as the rev
enue of the dukes of Cornwall. But the county, in the time of
William III., was full of decayed boroughs, which successive gov
ernments have reckoned amongst the best foundations of public
security. Of the five hundred and thirteen representatives of
England and Wales, Cornwall, with a population of a hundred and
twenty-six thousand, sent forty-four members to parliament. It
contained about a fiftieth part of the^ whole population, and it had a
voice in the legislature as potent as if it contained a twelfth of all
the inhabitants of the kingdom. This inequality did not contribute
to the prosperity of the district. It was poor, and it was venal.
The adventurers from Bristol who, at the beginning of the eigh
teenth century, thought that copper. ore might be found in Corn
wall; and Newcomen, the- engineer, who, in 1713, employed the
first steam-engine to drain a tin-mine near Helstone ; conferred
more substantial benefits upon Cornwall than all the privileges
that kings and ministers had ever bestowed upon the Duchy. The
Bristol traders set up mills in their cityfor the production of brass-
ware, and to this use was the first copper ore applied. Sixty years
afterwards, the copper produced from the ore of Cornwall was only
about three thousand tons. In another century it had quadrupled
in amount and value. The copper mines have brought about a
commercial marriage between Cornwall and South Wales. The
ore of the country which has no coal is conveyed across the Bristol
Channel to the. country which has coal in abundance. The works
for smelting copper upon the Neath and the Tawe are as remark
able as the iron-works of the Taff. They are the more remarkable
from the fact that the copper-ore of the Cornish mines now forms
only a portion of the quantity smelted. The ship that has borne
39S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the copper of Australia ten thousand miles, now enters the port of
Swansea in company with the small vessel that has only dared the
roll of the Atlantic, as she sailed beneath the bold cliffs from the
Land's End to Hartland Point.
One great element of the mineral wealth of South Wales,
whose existence is assumed in "this brief notice of her iron-works
and her copper-works, is to be found in her coal-fields. The other
coal districts of the West, those of Bristol and the Mendip hills,
are small in comparison with the vast range that extends from the
mouth of the Severn through the whole coast of Wales bordering
on the Bristol Channel. The South Welsh coal-field covers a
workable area of six hundred thousand acres. At the beginning
of the eighteenth century this vast mineral wealth was scarcely
worked. There was an export trade of coal from Swansea to
Somersetshire, Devonshire, Cornwall, and Ireland ; and there was
the same trade from Neath. * But no adequate machinery was
employed in the mines, and the works were carried on very little
below the surface, in pits which could be easily drained by hand-
labour. The demands of London for the " sea-coal fire " very
early made the Newcastle trade of importance. But Wales had
no share of this large supply ; and the peculiar value of its coal
was not felt till the age of steam-engines had arrived.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the industry of the
West of England probably exhibited a greater variety of employ
ments than any other district. The people were miners, fishers,
cultivators, orchardists, shepherds, weavers, sailors. The Cornish
tinners had been engaged in the same unvarying occupation, from
times that make other branches of the manufacturing industry of
England look as the mere growth of modern necessities. Their
peculiar language has died out ; but there is the remnant of an old
system of co-operative industry in the " tributer " system of their
mining labour, which assigns each man a reward different from
the ordinary system of wages.f Such arrangements especially
belong to an early age of society, before capital had organised
industry by its all-controlling power. The Cornish fisheries are
conducted upon the same principle, which has probably prevailed
from very remote times, when the shoals of pilchards came into
the Western bays, and have never ceased to come, although Fuller
* Defoe's "Tour," vol. ii. p. 283.
t See Babbage's " Economy of Machinery," &c. p. ,„.
VARIETIES OF EMPLOYMENT IN THE WEST. 395
thought they were "varying more westward, to Ireland."* The
same system of co-operation prevailed in one of the industries of
Somersetshire — the cheese-making of Cheddar — for which Fuller
has the characteristic name of "Join-dairies." In this village under
the ridge of the Mendip, the whole population were cow-keepers.
They all united in manuring the common upon which their cows
fed. Every cow-keeper brought his milk daily to a common-room,
where the quantity was measured and recorded: The making of a
great cheese went duly forward ; and when the milk of a poor man
who kept but one cow was sufficient for one cheese, he received
his cheese. The rich owner of many cows had his return earlier,
" but the poor man was sure of his just share, f In the rural econ
omy of the West there was nothing peculiar but the apple-growth.
It was especially the " Cider-land." { The Christmas festivities
were not complete, unless the old sacrifices to Pomona were kept
up in sprinkling cider upon the apple-trees. § The superstition is
gone ; but the ^.pple-orchards of the West have increased in fruit-
fulness as they have increased in number. The payment by the
farmer of a portion of his labourers' wages in cider is perhaps also
a relic of an ancient system, which appears in our day to have
become an evil. || Other distinguishing characteristics of this
district have passed away. " The Western English " — the dialect
of which the genuine characteristics are to be found in Robert of
Gloucester's Chronicle If — has left no very marked traces. The
Somersetshire school-boy would no longer translate, as Defoe
heard, the words of the Canticles, " I have put off my coat ; how
shall I put it on ? " into " Chow a doff 'd my coot ; how shall I
donn't? '** The old tourist found the " jouring " dialect prevail
when he had come " that length from London." Rapid and easy
communication have nearly swept away all such peculiarities, and
have made the Southern English absorb the Western, the Mercian,
the Anglian, and the Northumbrian.
* " Worthies," vol. i. p. 206. t Defoe's " Tour," vol. ii. p. 30.
X J. Philips's "Cider," bookii.
§ " For more or less fruits they will bring
As you do give them wassailing." — Herrick, " Hesperides."
II "Journal of the Bath and West of England Society," vol. vi. p. 136.
T " Quarterly Review," vol. Iv. p. 386. ** " Tour," vol. i. p. 319-
400 HISTORY OF KNGLAM).
CHAPTER XIX.
The West-Midland and North-Midland Coanties. — Birmingham. — Hardware.— The
Potteries. — Glass. — Nottingham. — Stockings. — Lace. — Derby. — Silk. — Lead Mines.
— Lincolnshire. — Salt. — Soda. — Soap. — Lancashire before the Cotton era. — Man
chester.— Liverpool.— Linen Trade.— Yorkshire.— The Clothing Villages.— Leeds.—
Sheffield.— Hull.— The Greenland Trade.— Newcastle. — Cumberland and Westmor
land. — Scotland. — Agricultural Counties. — Norwich. — South-Eastern Coasts. —
Cinque Ports — Brighton. — Dover. — Portsmouth. — Southampton.
The progress of Manufactures in districts favourable to their
pursuit is decidedly marked by the rapid increase of population.
The extension and improvement of Cultivation are not ordinarily
followed by any such proportionate increase of the numbers of the
people. Thus, of the West Midland Counties, Herefordshire,
Shropshire, Worcestershire, did not add more than one fourth to
their population throughout the eighteenth century. Warwickshire
and Staffordshire, which before the end of that period had become
great seats of the iron and hardware trade, and of the trade in
earthenware, had doubled their population. In the same manner,
though not in the same degree, of the North Midland Counties,
Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, which had grown up
into large hosiery districts, added half to their numbers during
that century. Of Lincolnshire, in the same period, the population
was nearly stationary.
Bishop Berkeley, in 1737, byway of example to the Irish of the
rapid turning of money, asks " Whether the small town of Birming
ham alone doth not, upon an average, circulate every week, one
way or other, to the value of fifty-thousand pounds ? " * The iron
ware of Birmingham was in repute long before the beginning of
the eighteenth century. In the time of Henry VIII. Leland wrote
that "a great part of the town is maintained by smiths, who have
their iron and sea-coal out of Staffordshire." The people of
Birmingham were then makers of knives, of bridle-bits, of nails
In the reign of Charles II. they still manufactured scarcely any
thing more than iron tools and husbandry implements. Their
forges were open to the public streets, by the side of the rough
* "The Querist" — Works, vol. ii. p. 273, ed. 1843.
BIRMINGHAM — HARDWARE. 40 1
shop where the spade and the bag of nails were exposed for sale.
Under the encouragement given by William III., Birmingham
began in his reign to make fire-arms. But how insufficient at that
period was the home production of iron articles we may judge
from the table of duties on imports,* in which we have iron pots,
backs for chimneys, frying-pans, anvils. The vast surface of the
great coal and iron field around Birmingham was then scarcely
penetrated. The blaze of the furnaces that now lights up the
country for miles, was then a very feeble illumination from the
few works where iron was smelted by wood. The anvils of Wol
verhampton, Dudley, Walsall, Bilston, Wednesbury, were then
employed in the humblest work of iron manufacture. Birmingham
before the middle of the eighteenth century, had attempted no man
ufactures in brass ; and the greater part of that wonderful variety
of industry which has given Berkeley's " small town " a population
of a quarter of a million of souls was quite unattempted. The
great prosperity of Birmingham belongs even to a much later
period than that in which Burke called it " the toy-shop of Europe."
It was always employed at work more important than tOy-making.
It supplied England and its Settlements with many articles of
convenience and utility, before it became famous through the world
for those manifold products of. ingenuity and taste which no nation
can rival. Every house that was newly built in England during
the eighteenth century gave a stimulus to the activity of Birming
ham to provide its locks and bolts. Every acre of ground that was
cleared for building in the American Plantations made a similar
demand upon the labour of the iron-working district. The Sheffield
axe hewed down the woods. The Birmingham spade trenched
the ground, and the thorns crackled under the Birmingham caul
dron. Slowly but certainly did the exports increase of those
articles which we imported at the beginning of this eighteenth
century, until; in 1856, the exports of hardware alone amounted to
three millions seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling.
In that district of North Staffordshire, now known as The
Potteries — a district of many towns, extending, with few intervals,
for eight miles — there was a manufacture of common cooking
ware at one of these towns, Burslem, at the beginning of the eigh
teenth century. It had been discovered that the Brown-ware could
be glazed with salt, instead of with pulverised lead-ore ;.and thus
Burslem, in 1700, had twenty-two glazing ovens. This district
* 2 Gul. & Mar. Sess. 2. c. 4.
Vol. IV.— 26
402 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
abounded in clays fit for earthenware ; but the art of producing the
finer sorts was wholly neglected. These clays were prepared and
dried in the sun ; and from these " sun-kiln potteries " was turned
out a coarse porous ware, which was called "butter-ware " — from
its property of keeping butter cool. Burslem was marked in maps
as the " Butter Pottery." About the time of the Revolution,
superior clays were introduced ; and an improved ware was manu
factured in small quantities. Nevertheless, the coarse white ware
of Holland, known as Delft, was a luxury for the rich. The wooden
trencher was the plate of the cottager and the small tradesman.
Any approach to a home manufacture of porcelain was far distant.
The East India Company imported ornamented ware known as
China, for which the introduction of Tea created a demand. The
middle of the eighteenth century was passed, before Josiah Wedge-
wood brought his science and taste to the manufacture of earthen
ware ; and finally produced specimens as admirable for their beauty
of design as for their general utility-. It is impossible to overrate
the blessing to the great body of the people of cheap and good
crockery. This is indeed a higher national advantage, even, than
the amount of industry, and of high artistical skill, called into
activity by our present manufacture of earthenware ; which employs
thirty-six thousand persons, and of which the exports amount to
nearly a million and a half sterling.
The manufacture of Glass was one of those industries to which
William III. was solicited to give encouragement. The govern
ment, in the unwise spirit that has not altogether died out with
reference to other manufactures, had thought fit to subject glass to
an excise. The duties were partially repealed, and they were
wholly removed before the end of the seventeenth century. By a
Statute of 1698, they are declared to be very vexatious and trouble
some, and of small advantage to the Crown ; would lessen the
duties on Coals much more than 'the duty on Glass would yield ;
and would endanger the loss of the manufacture to the kingdom." *
In 1746 duties on glass were re-imposed; and for another century
the profitable employment of capital and labour in this admirable
manufacture was repressed. A wise statesman abolished the
duties, and we look upon the result with wonder and admiration.
The manufacture, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and
during its first half, was principally confined to green glass and the
commonest window glass. Defoe says, " there were, when I was
* 10 Gul. III. ... 24.
NOTTINGHAM — STOCKINGS. 403
there, no less than fifteen glass houses in Bris*l, which is more
than are in the city of London." * The glass-houses of London
had nothing of the character of factories about them. They were
scattered in obscure districts amidst a wretched population.
Colonel Jack, the hero of one of those fictions of Defoe which
have all the truth of real life, says, " As for lodging, we lay in the
summer-time about the watchhouses, and on bulk-heads and shop-
doors, where we were known ; and in winter we got into the ash-
holes and nealing-arches, in the glass-house called Dallow's
Glass-house, in Rosemary Lane, or at another glass-house, in
Ratcliff-H ighway . ' '
Leicestershire had the reputation of producing the largest
sheep and horses in England. The graziers, in some places, were
so rich that they had become gentlemen. | But Leicestershire was
also a manufacturing county. The long wool of the Leicester
sheep gave rise to the worsted stocking-trade. In the town of
Leicester, and in other neighbouring towns, the weaving of stock
ings by frames had become the general employment. " One would
scarce think it possible," says the tourist of the early part of the
eighteenth century, "that so small an article of trade could employ
such multitudes of people as it does." X The wonder, no doubt, pro
ceeded from the fact that the great body of the people did not wear
stockings ; and hence stocking-weaving was " so small an article
of trade." At Nottingham and Derby Defoe saw the same indus
try affording general employment for labour in combination with
machinery. The stocking-loom of William Lea was invented in
1589. In 1670 there were only six hundred and sixty looms in the
kingdom, and these were chiefly employed upon silk stockings.
At the close of the reign of queen Anne there were nine thousand
looms. In the early part of the reign of queen Victoria, the stock
ing-looms of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire were
computed at forty-three thousand. In the northern counties,
stockings long continued to be made by hand. At Richmond
there was "a market for woollen and yarn stockings, which they
make very coarse and ordinary, and sell accordingly. Here you
see great and small a-knitting." § It was the same in Westmor
land. Machinery more effective than the stocking-frame is now
extensively employed in the production of hosiery.
Nottingham is at present the great seat of the Lace-trade — of
* "Tour," vol. ii. p. 251. t Defoe, " Tour," vol. ii p. 332. t Ibid.
§ Ibid., vol. iii. p. 115.
404 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the Lace produi»d by that wonder of mechanical ingenuity, the
Bobbin-net-frame, invented in 1809. But at the beginning of the
eighteenth century the Western and Southern counties were the
great seats of the bone-lace manufacture — of that lace which "the
free maids who weave their thread with bones " had been fabrica
ting in the days of Elizabeth and James I. In the reign of William
III. the importation of foreign bone-lace was prohibited. The
Flemings, who had been accustomed to send us their rich point-
lace, refused in consequence to take our woollen cloth ; and then the
prohibition was removed, " by being the occasion that our woollen
manufactures are prohibited to be imported into Flanders." Bone-
lace makingwasnotexclusivelyafeminine industry. There is a charm
ing passage in Berkeley's " Word to the Wise," in which he exhibits
the domestic industry of England, as a reproof to the Irish labourers
" who close the day with a game on greasy cards, or lying stretched
before the fire.'' " In England, when the labour of the field is
over, it is usual for men to betake themselves to some other labour
of a different kind. In the northern parts of thai industrious land,
the inhabitants meet, a. jolly crew, at one another's- houses, where
they merrily and frugally pass the long and dark winter evenings ;
several families, by the same light and the same fire, working at
their different manufactures of wool, flax, or hemp ; company
meanwhile mutually cheering and provoking to labour. In certain
other parts you may see, on a summer's evening, the common
labourers sitting along the streets of a town or viUage, each at his
own door, with a cushion before him, making bone-lace, and earn
ing more in an evening's pastime than an Irish family would in a
whole day." * Alas, for the bone-lace makers. Their industry
was almost extinguished by the inexorable machine of 1809. But
a change of fashion is bringing their labour again into repute. The
endowment in 1626 of a free-school at Great Marlow, to teach
twenty-four girls to knit, spin, and make bone-lace, had become a
provision for the continuance of obselete arts and unprofitable
labour. The revival of the prettiest "of these arts is one of the
many proofs that whilst machinery does its proper work for the
great bulk of comforts and luxuries, there are elegancies and nice
ties of hand-labour which machines cannot wholly supersede.
Lombe's famous silk-mill at Derby, completed in 17 17, was not
the first attempt to supersede the foreign thrown, or spun, silk, by
the conversion of the raw silk into what was called organzine. The
- Work*, vol. ii. p. 227.
DERBY. SILK. 405
silk-mill at Derby, " afterwards much improved by sir Thomas
Lombe, was firi-t erected by one Soracole, a man expert in making
mill-work, especially for raising water to supply towns for family
use."* The almost exclusive use of woollen cloth had been
trenched upon before the end of the reign of Charles II., by the
silks of France, f In 1699, it was bitterly complained of, that " the
unreasonable and indiscreet preference of India manufactures,
especially that of India silks and stuffs, hath almost wholly over
thrown, and unhinged, this profitable and necessary trade of silk
throwing and weaving." X The clamour was so great against In
dian silks and printed cottons, that after the 29th of September,
1 701, the wearing all wrought silks, of the manufacture of Persia,
China, or East India, and all calicoes, painted, dyed, or stained
therein, was absolutely prohibited. § If we may believe the advo
cates of prohibition, this Statute had the effect of repeopling Spital-
fields, " that looked before like a deserted place." || The weavers .
went blithely to work; and an ingenious experiment was tried to
furnish them with silk spun by machinery. Yet the weavers of
silk would not be satisfied with the home manufacture. The
mercer tried to palm off the wares of Spitalfields as French goods
illicitly imported. If Bishop Berkeley, with the large view of a
philosopher, saw the reason of this preference ; and, when the
clandestine importation went on, to a great extent, in spite of all
custom-house vigilance, asks "whether France and Flanders could
have drawn so much money from England, for figured silks, lace
and tapestry, if they had not had Academies for Design ? " We
should have remained till this day inferior in design, and in every
every other quality of the silk manufacture, had not a great states
man, who was denounced as " a hard-hearted political economist,"
made a partial beginning of that system of free trade which has
raised this particular manufacture, as it has raised so many others,
to an eminence which utterly disregards every danger of foreign
competition. The country which in 1825, was to be ruined by the
importation of foreign silks,. now exports silk of native manufac
ture, to an extent little short of two millions value in one year.
The Lead mines of the High Peak, in Derbyshire, were worked
in the period of which we write, without much mechanical aid.
The miner descended into the pit by a narrow square opening
* Defoe, " Tour," vol. iii. p. 33. t Smith on Wool, vol. i. p. 259.
X Smith on Wool, vol. ii. p. 44. § 11 & 12 Gul. III. c. 10.
II Smith, vol. ii. p. 191. t " English Tradesman," vol. ii. p. 199
406 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
called a groove, in the angles of which groove pieces of wood were
inserted. He ascended with his load of ore in the same rude
¦fashion. "We saw," says Defoe, "the poor wretch working and
heaving himself up gradually, as we thought with difficulty. * * *
He was clothed all in leather ; had a cap of the same without
brims ; and some tools in a little basket which he drew up with
him. * * * Besides his basket of tools, he brought up with him
about three-quarters of a hundred weight of ore." This poor man,
who could not express himself intelligibly, signified through an in
terpreter that he was at work sixty fathoms deep ; but that there
were five other men of his party, two of whom were eleven fathoms
deeper, and the other three fifteen fathoms deeper. These had an
easier labour, for they had a way out at the side of a hill. Such
was mining, in days before the steam engine. The lead mines
have always been worked with the expectation of obtaining silver,
for the extraction of which modern chemistry has afforded facili
ties. In 1699 one impediment to such experiments was removed.
By a Statute of Henry IV., the "multiplying" gold and silver was
made felony. This law, directed against the alchemist, made the
attempt to extract gold and silver, by refining metals, a high penal
offence ; and men of " study, industry, and learning," who in met
allurgy had " arrived to great skill and perfection, dare not exer
cise their said skill." The Act of Henry IV. was therefore re
pealed. * Such are the mistakes of legislation, when it fancies
that matters wholly belonging to its own time will have a perpetual
endurance. Our Statute book is full of such examples of blind
lawgiving; and the remedy seldom comes till the evil has become
insupportable. Lincolnshire is now universally acknowledged to be the most
fertile county in England. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century it numbered 40,590 houses, and a consequent population
of about two hundred and three thousand. In 1S01 it contained a
population only of about two hundred and eight thousand. In
1 85 1 its numbers reached four hundred and seven thousand. This
is the most remarkable example of the increase of a purely agri
cultural population, by the application, upon the largest scale, of
the resources of mechanical and chemical science. Defoe looked
upon the fen-country — the " often-drowned country," whose very
ditches were navigable, and whose inhabitants went from town to
town in boats. Here he heard the hoarse voice of the bittern.
* 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 30.
CHESHIRE.— SALT. 407
Here he saw the Decoys for wild-fowl, which were taken in incred
ible quantities for the London market, The bittern no longer
shakes " the sounding marsh ; " the Decoys are swept away to yield
a better supply of beef and mutton. The drainage of the Fens
was in progress when Defoe wrote ; and there were large outlays
of capital upon this great undertaking. But, " notwithstanding all
that hands could do, or art contrive, yet sometimes the waters do
still prevail, the banks break, and whole levels are overflowed to
gether." * The work which the Romans began ; which the skilful
monks of the middle age continued ; which spirited adventurers
undertook in the time of Charles I., but were interrupted by the
rapacity of his unwise government, and the subsequent troubled
times ; which was set on foot again in 1668 ; and which was an
especial subject of legislation in 1697, — has steadily gone forward.
The time may arrive when the Great level of the Fens may become
as wholly firm land, as the remains of ancient roads and trees be
low the surface show it once to have been. The contrast between
the great corn-bearing and grazing country of our own times, and
of the period of the Revolution, is sufficiently impressive, although
some land has yet to be reclaimed from the dominion of the wa
ters. The brine springs of Cheshire and of Worcestershire had been
producing Salt from time immemorial. On all parts of the coast
sea-water had been evaporated for salt, from days probably coeval
with the earliest labour of the fisherman. In 1670, the first bed of
rock salt was discovered at Nantwich, in Cheshire. Defoe men
tions that after this discovery of rock-salt, the salt of the brine
springs was not so much in request. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century England was known to possess an unlimited
supply of the material of salt ; yet the manufacture was so imper
fect, that the only salt fit for the tables of the opulent was im
ported. There was no gabelle, as in France, to prevent the free
consumption of salt ; but the nauseous taste, and the deleterious
effects, Of our common salt, necessarily limited its use. Then
came the long era of injudicious taxation. A duty was imposed
upon salt in the reign of William III., and in a century it was in
creased to twelve times the value of the article taxed. But this
was not enough for the grasp of self-defeating fiscal rapacity. The
duty was raised at last to fifteen shillings a bushel, or forty times
the value of the article taxed. In 1823 the salt duties were wholl)
* " Tour," vol. ii. pp. 341-344.
408 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
abolished. Then this necessary of life was to be used without
stint ; and salt was also to become one of the most important ma
terials of chemical manufacture. It is curious to trace the changes
in industry produced by the magic relief from taxation. The ab
olition of the duty on salt produced the manufacture of soda. The
cheapness of soda, and its certain and unlimited supply, wholly
altered the manufacture of soap. The alkali which was obtained
on every shore of England and Scotland, by burning the sea-weed
to produce kelp, now comes from the chemical works of New
castle and Glasgow, at a price which renders the labour of the
meanest peasant who earned the scantiest pittance by collecting
the weed, far too costly for the purposes of commerce. Every
farmer, in the middle of the last century, endeavoured to prevent
any clause being inserted in his lease to regulate his cutting of un
derwood. He wanted not the underwood for his own hearth. He
wanted to burn the wood to make ashes for the soap-boiler. In
Suffolk, the soap-boiler's men were always travelling the round of
the hamlets. They visited every house with light quartering carts,
to collect the wood ashes. There were scarcely any roads imprac
ticable to these vehicles. * The misery of a country with bad salt
and dear soap — both evils chiefly produced by misdirected taxa
tion — can scarcely be overestimated. The contrast of these mat
ters of the present and the past is astounding. The annual con
sumption of salt by every individual of the population of Great
Britain was estimated at twenty-two pounds in 1839. f Upon a
population of twenty-one millions, this would give a consumption
of four hundred and sixty-two million pounds, or eight million two
hundred and fifty thousand bushels. In addition, we now export
thirty million bushels of salt. Soap duties are now also abolished.
The first excise of a penny per pound was imposed in the reign of
Anne. The duties on soap went on increasing, till they were ut
terly repealed in the reign of Victoria. The consumption of soap
in 1851 was four times as great as that of 1801.
If the fire-nymphs and water-nymphs, and earth-nymphs of
Darwin had been endued with the spirit of prophecy — if his
"nymph Gossypia," X especially, had looked back upon the past,
and predicted of the future — the population of Lancashire, when
Darwin wrote in 1790, would have incredulously listened to facts
* Cullum's Hawsted, p. 250.
t M'Culloch. " Statistics of British Empire," vol. i. p. 592
J A name derived from Gossypium, the cotton plant.
LANCASHIRE BEFORE THE COTTON IERA. 409
such as these, whether told in sonorous verse or simple prose :
You numbered two hundred thousand souls at the beginning of the
eighteenth century ; you will number two million souls in the mid
dle of the nineteenth century. The vegetable fibre of which you
scarcely, knew the use when the first ship entered the first clock of
Liverpool, in the year 1700, and when Liverpool and Manchester
had no water communication, shall be brought from North America,
frora Brazil, from Egypt, and from India, in quantities that will
annually reach a thousand millions of pounds. This cotton-wool
shall be worked by machines which in their elaborate contrivances
shall make the " spinning jenny " of Arkwright appear a feeble
substitute for fingers. Enormous factories for converting the wool
into yarn, and for weaving the yarn into cloth by mechanical power,
shall rise up in barren districts, where the human foot now scarcely
treads ; and villages, each with a few hundred souls scattered
around its parish church, shall become enormous towns, with their
thousands of inhabitants. The products of this industry shall fur
nish twenty millions of our own nation with fabrics of wondrous
cheapness, and of beauty far surpassing the painted calicoes of the
'East, which were so jealously prohibited about a century ago.
Foreign nations shall purchase these cotton manufactures to the an
nual amount in money value of nearly forty million pounds. This
manufacture shall give direct employ to half-a-million of people in
the factories, and to a hundred thousand engineers and machinists
in connexion with these mills. All these wonderful results shall
be accomplished by almost incredible skill and perseverance, during
a period not longer than the ordinary term of human life. But the
most marvellous expansion of this industry, and of all other indus
tries, shall take place in the generation succeeding you ; and at the
termination of the first half of the nineteenth century, three per
sons shall subsist on this soil of Lancashire where one subsisted
at its commencement ; and ten shall subsist where one subsisted a
hundred years earlier.
To look at the condition of Lancashire before the cotton era is
to look at the Hercules in his cradle. But we must endeavour to
continue the sketch which we have attempted of other districts
about the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Manchester, in the early part of the reign of Charles II. , was
reckoned to contain six thousand people.* Fifty years later its
population was estimated at fifty thousand ; but this estimate
* Macaulay ; History, vol. i.
41 0 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
included "the suburb, or village, on the other side of the bridge."*
There were no very precise data for this estimate, beyond the
manifest increase of buildings and of trade ; • the increase of
inhabitants having demanded a new church, that of St./Anne. " If
this calculation be just, as I believe it really is," writes Defoe,
" you have here an open village, which is greater and more popu1-
lous than most cities in England : neither York, Lincoln, Chester,
Salisbury, Winchester, Worcester, Gloucester, no, nor Norwich
itself, can come up to it." f The social condition of Manchester,
at the end of the seventeenth century, was very primitive. Its
manufactures of fustian, girth web, ticking, tapes, were carried on
by small masters, who had apprentices residing in their houses.
These lads were employed in the servile offices of turning the
warping-mills, and carrying packages from place to place. The
master and his young men breakfasted together upon " water-pot-
-tage, boiled thick,'' and a bowl of milk stood upon the table, into
which all clipped their spoons," J In 1702 there was the porten
tous entry in a tradesman's household book, of a sum expended
for tea and sugar. In the reign of George I. it was held that " the
luxury of the age will be the ruin of the nation ; and one of the
proofs of this degeneracy was that "the wholesome breakfast of
water-gruel and milk-pottage is changed for coffee and tea." § The
present mill-owners of Manchester, each with his enormous trans
actions, represented by hundreds of thousands of pounds in a
year, furnish a remarkable contrast to " those travelling tradesmen
whom we call Manchester-men." To every town the fustians and
" small things called Manchester-ware " were borne by horse-packs ;
"the Manchester men being, saving their wealth, a kind of ped
lars who carry their goods themselves to the country-shopkeep
ers everywhere." || The perils of their land journeys were not
trifling : " The horse is driven avvay by some sudden flood, or
falls down in the water and spoils the goods." Ij" Manchester had
few rival neighbours in its trade of fustians and dimities, in which
a little hand-spun cotton was used. Towns such as Bolton, to
which " the cotton manufacture had reached," did not presume to
compete with Manchester's warping-mills. and Manchester's looms,
"which work twenty-four laces at a time," as is recorded with won
dering commendation. At Bury, the cotton manufacture was
* Defoe, " Tour," vol. iii. p. 174.
t "Tour," vol. iii. p. 174. \ Aikin. § "Augusta Triumphans."
II "Complete Tradesman," vol. i. ij /^^ voj# yu
LIVERPOOL. 41 1
ended, and the woollen manufacture of coarse sorts begun. At
Preston, the tourist "had come beyond the trading part of the
country." This gay town, known as Proud Preston, was full of
attorneys, proctors, and notaries. * Between the trading towns
there was very imperfect communication ; and until the Mersey,
the Irwell, and the Weaver were made navigable, land-carriage to
and from Liverpool was an important addition to the cost of ex
ported and imported goods.
The traveller entering Lancashire from the Western part of the
country would be ferried over the Mersey to Liverpool. Instead
of steamers and magnificent landing-places adjusting themselves
to the rise or fall of the tide, the traveller in the reign of Anne,
having reached the flat shore in the ferry, was carried " on the
shoulders of some Lancashire clown, who comes knee-deep to the
boat's side to truss you up." j- Liverpool, at the date of the Revo
lution, had no proper harbour and no quay. The trading-ships
lay in the offing, and their cargoes were borne to them or from
them in boats. In 1700 Liverpool had built a Dock — now known
as the Old Dock. " The like of this Dock was not to be seen in
any place of England, London excepted." J From the beginning
of the eighteenth century the rapid progress of Liverpool may be
dated. In 1709 it had eighty-four ships, and nine hundred sailors.
Its Customs soon became next in amount to those of Bristol, which
was only exceeded by London. Its warehouses were filled with
tobacco and sugar from the Plantations. Thus Liverpool went on
increasing for a century and a half, until in 1851 it numbered three
hundred and seventy-five thousand inhabitants ; and the British
and Foreign vessels entering the port exceeded four thousand in
one year. When the detestable Slave Trade was abolished, the
ruin of Liverpool was predicted. It had been engaged in that'
traffic from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it strove
to rival Bristol in the extent of the iniquity. Yet we must not for
get that in this matter the heart of trading England was long
hardened. The merchants of Lyme, in 1700, petitioned Parlia
ment against the apprehended monopoly of the African Company ;
and prayed " to be allowed to trade to the plantations, and kidnap
on the coast of Africa." §
Warrington, whilst Manchester was making its dimities, .was the
* " Tour," vol. iii. p. 1S0 — 83. t Defoe, " Tour," vol. iii. p. 164.
X Ibid., p. 168. § Roberts' " Southern Counties," p. 467.
412 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
seat of a considerable Linen trade. The table-linen, called Huck-
aback,-was extensively made in the neighbourhood of this place.
But every discouragement was given to the English linen manu
facture. It was maintained that Divine Providence had appointed,
the especial employment of manufacturing England, and that the
first acceptable sacrifice to His omnipotency was that of the flock.
Ireland might grow flax and make linen, as some compensation
for the injustice that had been committed towards her in absolutely
prohibiting the importation of her cattle.* But let England at
tempt no other manufacture than the woollen manufacture which
had been for ages the support of the nation. f The same dread of
permitting any wear for the living or the dead but that of woollen,
made the flock-masters and clothiers frantic, when printed cottons,
of English production, had become not only fashionable but com
mon in 1719. Drapers' wives, and even maid-servants and children,
it is alleged, wore calicoes or printed linen, attracted by their light
ness, cheapness, and gaiety of colour. The example of the gentry-
had corrupted the common people ; and so the manufacture tjf
light woollen stuffs would be ruined. J The result of this clamour
was an Act of 1721, to preserve and encourage the Woollen and
Silk Manufactures, by prohibiting the use and wear of all printed,
painted, stained, or dyed Calicoes, in apparel, household stuff, or
furniture. § Of course such legislation was nugatory ¦ but here is
the evidence, amongst many other proofs, of the supreme ignor
ance and folly of law-makers, who, from the earliest days of the
loom and the plough in England, have struggled to " regiment "
all industry — to encourage or.to prohibit — to determine what wages
labourers should be paid, and what should be the profit of cap
italists — to crush rising industries by taxation — to compel the peo
ple to eat dear food for the supposed benefit of the landowner —
and, finally, to find out that the nation was never so universally
prosperous as when its industry was wholly left to the care of
itself, under the guidance of God's natural laws.
Yorkshire had a population at the beginning of the eighteenth
century of five hundred and thirty thousand. The great woollen
manufacture, chiefly of the stuffs known as Yorkshire Kerseys, had
.raised five centres of this manufacture, which were known as
Clothing-towns — Bradford, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Halifax,
Leeds. The inhabitants of these five towns are now equal to a
* 18 Car. 1 1, c. 2. t Tract of i67j.— Smith on Wool, vol. i. p. 384.
t Ibid., vol. ii. p. 195. § 7 Geo. I. c. 7.
YORKSHIRE. — THE CLOTHING VILLAGES. 413
fifth of the whole population of Yorkshire. They were, a hundred.
and fifty years ago, small places, but full of busy and enterprising
dealers. It is noted as a remarkable proof of the importance of
the commerce of this district, that a cross-post had been establish
ed to connect the West of England with the North, which post
began at Plymouth and ended at Hull.* Defoe followed the
course of this post-road from Liverpool to Bury, and thence to
Halifax. There are few things in the books of the modern tourist
that can compare with his life-like picture of this country, then in
some parts almost inaccessible, but now covered with a web of
railways, more complicated than in any other portion of the island.
It was the end of August. The snow, even then lying on the hills,
appeared alarming. At Rochdale the travellers were offered a
guide ; but they apprehended no danger, and went on, satisfied with
a description of the land-marks. They ascended Blackstone Edge
amidst a snow-storm, but the way down was a very frightful one.
In the valley they had to cross a brook knee-deep. Again they
had to mount a hill, and again to cross a stream ; and in a journey
of eight miles they repeated this labour eight times, much to their
discontent. The tourist records not the picturesque beauties of
these Yorkshire valleys ; but he has given us a charming sketch
of their industry. As he approached nearer to Halifax the houses
were closer together, in every botton and on every hill-side. After
the third hill was passed, the country became one continued vil
lage, though every way mountainous ; and as the day cleared up, he
could see at every house a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece
of white cloth, sparkling in the sun. Every house on the hill-side
had its little rill, conveyed in gutters from the springs above ; and
on the heights there was coal, so that the great necessaries of the
manufacture were close at hand. In every house the women were
carding and spinning. The men were some at the loom, some at
the dyeing vat. Not an idle person was to be seen. The corn of-
this region, and of other part of the great clothing district, was
supplied from the East Riding, and from Lincolnshire and Not
tinghamshire. In the autumn the markets for black cattle were
prodigiously thronged, for the clothiers then bought as many oxen
as would serve their families for the whole year, salted, and hung
up in the smoke to dry. One product of Yorkshire was abundant
amongst them — " the store of good ale which flows plentifully in
the most mountainous part of this country." The domestic system
* Defoe, "Tour," vol. iii. p. 72.
414 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
¦ of the cloth-making villages of Yorkshire has not been wholly
driven out by the factory system ; but it is very different from the
time when the clothier kept "his one horse to fetch home his wool
and his provisions from the market, to carry his yarn to the spin
ners, his manufacture to the fulling-mill, and, when finished, to the
market to be sold."*
If the inhabitants of the clothing villages are now essentially
different in their mode of life, how much more striking is the dif
ference between the Leeds of queen Anne and the Leeds that
assembled a quarter of a million of people to greet queen Victoria
in 1858. The great cloth-market of Leeds was, in the seventeenth
century, kept upon the bridge over the Aire. As the market
increased it was removed to the High-street. From the Bridge to
the Market-house tressels were placed in the street, and a tempo
rary counter was formed. The clothiers came in from the country,
few bringing more than one piece of cloth ; and, after the refresh
ment of a pot of ale, a bowl of porridge, and a trencher of beef,
regularly provided for twopence by the public-house keepers, they
were at their tressels by six o'clock in summer and by seven in
winter. Each clothier placed his cloth lengthwise upon the coun
ter ; — " a mercantile regiment drawn up in line." The factors
come ; examine the cloth ; and conclude a bargain in a whisper.
In a short time the clothiers begin to move, each bearing his piece
of cloth to the buyer's house. In an hour the business is over, and
the market is left to the shoemakers, hardware-men, and other
retailers. Such was the Cloth-market also at Halifax and Brad
ford, before the days of the Cloth Hall of Leeds, which was built in
171 1. •)- The Linen manufacture of Yorkshire did not then exist.
There was no flax-factory to give employment to a thousand spin
ners under one roof, attending upon the movements of innumerable
steam-driven wheels and spindles. Yet in the small industry of the
West Riding in the eighteenth century, we see the germ of its gigan
tic operations in the nineteenth ; and we are by no means sure that
in the twentieth century the mighty industry of our own day may
not be looked upon as an imperfect development of the resources
of English wealth and energy.
Sheffield had been famous for its Cutlery from the time of
Edward III. At the end of the seventeenth century it had machin
ery which had lent no aid to the fabrication of the whittle which
Chaucer's Miller of Trumpington wore in his hose. Sheffield had
* Defoe, " Tour," pp. 73-84. t Thoresby's " Leeds " aud Defoe's " Tour.*'
GREENLAND TRADE. 415
one mill for turning grindstones. The "grinders " of Sheffield are
now of themselves a large population. It was boasted that around
Sheffield were six iron-furnaces; supplied by its neighbouring woods.
How many wood-furnaces would now be required for the produc
tion of its steel, and for the almost innumerable products of this
great metropolis of steel, giving employment to a population of a
hundred and fifty thousand ?
Hull was an exceedingly prosperous port at the beginning of
the eighteenth century ; although it had no dock till 1788. Its com
merce on the Northern shore of the Humber included shipments
to London, to Holland, and to the Baltic, of the woollens of the
West Riding, the hardwares of Sheffield, and the lead of Derby
shire. Its imports were of iron, copper, flax, and linen. But the
exports of corn from Hull exceeded those of any other port. One
trade, however, was lost to Hull at this period. An Act of 1692
recites that " the trade to Greenland and the Greenland seas, in
the fishing for Whales there, hath been heretofore a very beneficial
trade to this kingdom ; " and the preamble concludes by saying
that " the said trade is now quite decayed and lost." The Com
pany then established had little success ; and ' the Whale Fishery
was not resumed till 1750. England had little need of oil during
the first half of the eighteenth century ; for London and all other
towns were lighted chiefly by lanterns and link-boys. When light
could no longer be dispensed with, the parliament granted a heavy
bounty to all ships engaged in the Whale Fishery ; and many ships
were sent out " as much certainly in the view of catching the
bounty as of catching the whales." * The whales, however, shifted
their course ; and the Greenland fishery came nearly to an end, in
spite of the Act " for the regaining, encouraging, and settling the
Greenland trade." f
The tourist whom we have followed in his observant course,
says that from Durham to Newcastle the mountains of Coal, lyiny
at the mouth of numerous pits, gave a view of the unexhausted
store which supplies not only London but all the South part of
England. The people of London, he remarks, when they see the
prodigious fleets of ships which come constantly in with coal for
that increasing city, wonder whence they come, and " that they do
not bring the whole country away." The quantity of sea-borne
coal brought to London in 1856 was above three million tons, or
ten times the amount required about the end of the seventeenth
• M'Culloch, " Statistics," vol. i. p. 609 (ed. 1839). t 4 Gul. & Mar. c. 17.
416 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
century. But the foreign export of coal from the northern pits is
now enormous ; and large quantities are borne by railway and canal.
It has been calculated that if three million five hundred thousand
tons of coals were raised annually, it would require a period of
seventeen hundred years to exhaust the coal-pits of Durham and
Northumberland. The colliers of the Thames will not speedily
" bring the whole country away. " The wondrous coal-trade, and the
other industries of the towns of Newcastle, Tynemouth, Gateshead,
South Shields, and Sunderland, have raised up a population of
nearly two hundred and fifty thousand, being considerably in ex
cess of the entire population of Northumberland and Durham in
the early part of the eighteenth centurv. But we must not forget
that the vast expansion of mining and manufacturing industry
which we have recorded in this our general view, may be dated, in
great part, from a Private Bill of the tenth year of the reign of
William III., entitled " An Act for the encouragement of a new
Invention of Thomas Savery, for raising Water, and occasioning
Motion in all sorts of Mill- Work, by the impellant force of Fire."
Nor must we overlook the fact, that in the time of Charles IL,
Roger North describes the admiration of his brother at the inge
nuity of the coal-workers of Newcastle, whose "manner of carriage
was, by laying rails of timber, from the colliery down to the river,
exactly straight and parallel ; and bulky carts are made with four
rowlets fitting these rails ; whereby the carriage is so easy that one
horse will draw four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense
benefit to the coal-merchant." *
The population of Cumberland and of Westmorland was, at
the beginning of the eighteenth century, by far the smallest of any
English county. The two counties did not contain more than
twenty-one thousand houses, and a hundred and six thousand in
habitants. They had increased by one half in r8oi ; which num
ber was again increased by another half in 1851. They did not
contribute much more than Rutland to the Aid of 1689. The
Fells of Westmorland were held to be almost impassable. Kirkby-
Lonsdale and Kirkby-Stephen, Appleby and Kendal, were con
sidered pleasant manufacturing towns ; but all the rest of the dis
trict was proclaimed to be wild, barren, and horrible. Penrith was
said to be a handsome market-town, and of good trade. The peo
ple made woollen cloth, as they had made from the old times when
the outlaws of Sherwood were clothed in Kendal Green. Pack-
» " Life of Lord Guilford."
? SCOTLAND. 417
horses travelled about the villages with cloth ; and the pedlar con
tinued to be .the principal merchant, as he was up to the days of
" The Excursion." Whitehaven was a port of shipping coals,
chiefly to Ireland. The copper-mines of the Derwent Fells, which
had been wrought in search of gold, in the time of queen Eliza
beth, had been abandoned. The Black Lead mine of Borrowdale
had also been worked at that period : it continued to be worked in
the days when pencils were in small demand ; and it still yields its
rare and valuable produce, but in quantities unequal to the demand
of our own times. After the Union, the castles and great houses
of the Border went most of them to ruin. Carlisle had its Cathe
dral, its Castle, and its walls ; but it was a small city of old build
ings ; and its population of twenty-six thousand had to be created
after a century was past. There was one remarkable industry of
this remote district. The salmon taken in the Derwent were car
ried fresh to ' London, by horses which travelled day and night
without intermission. They travelled faster than the post, and the
extraordinary price of the luxury — from half-a-crown to four shil
lings a pound — repaid the cOst of carriage.* Railways serve London
with salmon at a cheaper rate.
The Industry of Scotland before the Union, in 1707, was so
limited in its character, that this is scarcely the period to attempt
any comparison between its' productive and commercial power pre
vious to that fortunate consummation, and its present condition of
agricultural and manufacturing excellence. The two countries,
when under separate legislatures, offered a wretched example of
mutual prohibitions, under, which the smaller country was by far
the greater sufferer. Scotland would not admit the English wool
en-cloth. England would not permit a Scotch trade with her'
Colonies. These miserable rivalries came to an end. A Glasgow
vessel of sixty tons first crossed the Atlantic in 1718; and from
that period Scotland steadily went forward in a noble career of
generous emulation with her sister kingdom. Her progress was
for many years slow. Capital was not rapidly accumulated after
generations of clan hostility. The hordes of beggars, that Fletcher
of Saltoun would have sold to slavery in 1698, could not be wholly
removed by the absorption of profitable labour in a few years.
The violent religious and political hostilities of six reigns could
not wholly subside when George I. came to the throne. But the
parochial school establishment of Scotland, which dates its efli-
* Defoe, "T:mr," vol. iii. p. 192.
Vol. IV— 27
418 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ciency from 1696, was to gradually produce the certain effects of
general education upon a keen and energetic race. The mode of
living amongst the peasantry of Scotland might be mean, as com
pared with the diet of the peasantry of England ; but the agency
was at work which would raise the condition of every labourer in
Scotland to a level with his compeers beyond the Border. A
humble lot in life was not incompatible with mental cultivation.
Allan Ramsay, in the reign of Anne, was a worker in the lead-
mines of the earl of Hopeton. Robert Burns, even in 1 781, sub
sisted upon oatmeal when a flax-dresser. But if Johnson, with his
usual prejudices, chose to describe oats as a grain eaten by horses
in England and by men in Scotland, the time was fast approaching
when the national food would cease to be associated with national
poverty ; when agriculture, improved beyond all example, should fill
the land with unprecedented fertility ; when, the mineral wealth of
Scotland should be worked with the same diligence as the cultivation
of the soil ; when the commerce of the Clyde should approach that of
the Thames and the Mersey, and its iron steam-ships should go
forth to every sea ; when cotton-factories, and print-works should
emulate the gigantic mills of Lancashire ; when, in a word, there
should be no distinctions of enterprise or wealth, and national jeal
ousies should only put on the form of harmless local opinions,
that belong to the past of romance, rather than to the past of his
tory. In the purely Agricultural Counties of England the changes,
even of a whole century, are not so remarkable as to demand from
us any attempt to point out such extraordinary contrasts as we have
heretofore dwelt upon. The great seats of tillage were the South
Eastern, the South Midland, and the Eastern districts. The slow
increase of population is the index of their progressive condition.
Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hants, and Berks, had an aggregate popula
tion at the beginning of the eighteenth century of about seven hun
dred thousand ; at the end of that century they were a little above
ten hundred and fifty thousand. Herts, Bucks, Oxon, Northamp
ton, Huntingdon, Bedford, and Cambridge, had, at the beginning
of the same period, about five hundred and eighty-two thousand in
habitants ; at its termination they had only about six hundred and
forty thousand. The Eastern Counties had, during the same hun
dred years, only increased from five hundred and eighty-two thou
sand people to seven hundred and fifteen thousand. But it must
AGRICULTURAL COUNTIES. 419
be remarked that the aggregate population of these fifteen counties
had increased from about two millions and a half, at the beginning
of the eighteenth century, to about four millions and a half at its
• end. "The whole of the eighteenth century had been a period of
very tardy improvement ip. cultivation. The first fifty years of the
nineteenth had been a period of extraordinary development of
agricultural resources.
In the reign of Anne the quantity of land under cultivation in
England and Wales was very little more than in the reign of
James I. One solitary inclosure Act was passed in the reign of
Charles II. There were two inclosure Acts passed in the reign of
Anne. Field-turnips were cultivated in King William's time ; but
their cultivation was not encouraged till the time of George II.
The cultivation of clover was advocated by Andrew Yaranton be
fore the Revolution ; but the peculiar value of green crops was
little understood. The alternate system of husbandry — the growth
of turnips or clover after a corn crop — -was recommended in the
middle of the seventeenth century. But the old system of fallows,
by which half of the cultivated land always lay idle, was steadily ad
hered to. The horse-hoeing husbandry of Jethro Tull was con
sidered only as a costly experiment which had ruined its originator.
The value of manure was little understood by the improvident
farmer ; and even the system of folding sheep upon ploughed lands
is mentioned as " a new method of husbandry." * Improvement
in the breeds of cattle was not attempted till the middle of the
eighteenth century. In 1710 Davenant estimated the average net
weight of the cattle sold at Smithfield at 370 lbs. The average
nett weight in 1800 was 800 lbs. The sheep of 17 10 weighed 28 lbs.
The sheep in 1800 weighed 80 lbs. Without the alternate hus
bandry neither the ox nor the sheep could be supported through
the winter, or adequately fattened at any time, except in low mead
ows and marshes.
The comparatively large population of London and Westmin
ster, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had a marked influ
ence upon the agricultural industry of the South Eastern, South
Midland, and Eastern Districts. A large quantity of corn was ne
cessary for the consumption of the populous city, and much corn
was grown within the districts most convenient for carriage. In
1696, it was estimated by Gregory King that the annual growth of
wheat, oats, barley, rye, and beans in the whole kingdom, amounted
* Defoe, " Tour,'- vol. i. p. 283.
420 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to ten million quarters, of which growth wheat was only one-
fifth. The greater portion of the wheat went to the large towns.
The rural population lived upon rye-bread, and barley-bread; and
oat-cake The Eastern counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk,
and the counties of Kent, Hampshire, and Sussex, had ready water-
communication with London by the Thames, below-bridge. Surrey,
Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, had the same facili
ties by the Thames above-bridge. We may trace the incessant in
dustry necessary to keep up the land and water communication with
the capital, displaying itself in districts somewhat remote from the
seaports and main-roads. With every natural advantage the com.
munication was laborious and costly : and its cost added very con
siderably to the price of grain and meat to the consumer. Some of
the corn-trade of the port of London gradually resolved itself into
the meal-trade. Farnham was the greatest commercial corn-mar
ket in England, particularly for wheat, until the farmers of Sussex
and Chichester ground their wheat, and sent the meal to London
by sea. * This trade was increased when the Wey was made nav
igable from Guildford, and thence to the Thames. By this navi
gation of the Wey, timber was brought by land carriage, for a dis
tance of thirty miles, from the woody districts of Sussex and Hamp
shire, f The demand for timber to meet the increase of London
was more profitable than its use in the iron-works of Sussex, which
were still smelting iron ore, and casting cauldrons and chimney-
backs, cannon and cannon-balls, in the reign of George II. } In
Essex, we see the influence of the wants of London. There was
little to be noticed at Chelmsford, but that it was a large thorough
fare town, full of inns, maintained by the multitude of carriers and
passengers on their way to London with droves of cattle, and with
provisions and manufactures. § Not the least remarkable of these
supplies for the capital by the eastern parts, were the droves of
turkeys, crowding the roads from Ipswich, and making their way
over the heaths and commons, in almost incredible quantities to the
great devourer. From the farthest parts of Norfolk, and from the
fen countries, droves of geese, sometimes a thousand or two thou
sand in a drove, were slowly moving on to their fate, from the be
ginning of August, feeding on the stubbles after harvest; and
" thus they hold on to the end of October, when the roads begin
* Defoe, "Tour," vol. i. p. 214. t /iia> p 21?
X Ibid., p. 230. 5 Ibid> p 2J
AGRICULTURAL COUNTIES. 421
to be too stiff and deep for their broad feet and short legs to march
» *
in. The- weaving industry of Norwich was more important at this
period than the industry of any other city or town of England. The
villages round Norwich were wholly employed in spinning yarn for
what was known as the stuff-weaving trade, which had been there
pursued for four centuries. Every inhabitant of Norwich was
working at his loom, his c^mbing-shop, or his twisting-mill. The
rich marshes watered by the Yare fed hundreds of black cattle
from the Scotch hills ; so that the thickly populated districts of the
eastern parts of Norfolk were plentifully supplied with animal food.
The fishery. of Yarmouth not only furnished an enormous export
of cured herrings, but gave all the towns and villages another cheap
article of food. The whole country was full of business activity
whether in manufactures or in sea-faring occupations ; a curious
evidence of that unremitting industry being, that pheasants were
unmolested in the stubbles, which showed, says Defoe, "that the
country had more tradesmen than gentlemen in it."
In the immediate neighbourhood of Cambridge there were pre
sented, in the autumn Of every year, two remarkable spectacles,
in striking contrast to each other. To Newmarket went William
III. in 1695, with his staid court, as Charles II. had gone thither
with his- troops of dissipated followers. But Newmarket was still
a scene of vice and folly, of frantic gaming and wild profaneness.
The highest of the land were at Newmarket, — "so eager, so busy,
upon their wagers and bets, that they seemed just like so many
horse-coursers in Smithfield ; descending from their high dignity
and quality to picking one another's pockets." So writes the stur
dy moralist, who speaks of vice in no courtly fashion, f The other
scene near Cambridge was Stourbridge Fair — the greatest fair in
England. Thither came to a row of booths called Cheapside,
every sort of retailer from London. Here were prodigious whole
sale transactions accomplished in wool and woollen goods, brought
from Lancashire and Yorkshire and the Western Counties. But
more extensive than any other traffic was that of hops. From
this fair the whole country beyond Trent was supplied with hops,
grown chiefly in Kent and Surrey, in addition to the supply of all
the Midland counties. It is no small proof of the energy which
overcame every natural difficulty of communication— bad roads
• — imperfect water-carriage — that a produce of considerable bulk
* Defoe. " Tour," vol. i. p. 62. t Ibid., p. 87.
42 2 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
should be brought from two distant counties to an inland common,
thence to be distributed over the whole kingdom.
The two great ports of the Eastern coast, Ipswich and Har
wich, were not in a flourishing condition after the Revolution. Ip
swich had lost its colliery trade, and its cloth trade. Much of its
ancient splendour had gone. More than a century was to pass be
fore it was to take the lead in carrying forward those great changes
of agricultural economy, which were to mark the age of thrashing-
machines, of sewing-machines and of the almost countless imple
ments of scientific husbandry. Harwich was the packet-station for
Holland. When the army of Marlborough was fighting, year after
year, on the great battle-field of Europe, Harwich was the busiest of
ports. Coaches went twice a week to carry London passengers from
and to this famous place of embarkation and of landing. But when
peace came, the Londoners set up passage-boats which went direct
from the Thames ; the coaches ran no more ; and Harwich decayed.
On the opposite South-eastern shore, Sheerness had been fortified ;
and the Medway bristled with lines of guns ; so that the danger
with which Chatham, the greatest naval arsenal, had been threat
ened in the time of Charles II., was held to be sufficiently guarded
against. Margate was a small port, the inhabitants making no
boast of its summer visits of shoals of shrimp-eating Londoners,
but of the frequent landings there of William III. Ramsgate
boasted only of the more antique honour which it claimed, that
Julius Caesar had there landed. The inhabitants of these little
places long continued to be, as they were described by Camden,
" amphibious creatures, and get their living both by sea and land.
* * * The self-same hand that holds the plough steers the ship."
The port of Sandwich had become choked with sand. Dover was
prosperous as the principal packet-station for France. Folkestone
was a mere village. The harbours of Rye and Winchelsea had
been ruined by the inexorable changes of the coast-line. The sea
had receded, and had left them desolate. Hastings was in little
better condition. Winchelsea had still a trade remaining to it, that
of electioneering venality ; and so had Shoreham, Bramber, and
Steyning. Brighthelmstone was "a poor fishing town, old built,
and on the very edge of the sea," which had at the beginning of
the century swept away many houses ; so that the inhabitants had
obtained a brief to beg money throughout England, to raise em
bankments. These were estimated to cost eight thousand pounds ;
" which," says the tourist of those times, "if one were to look on
SOUTH-EASTERN COAST-TOWNS. 423
the town would seem to be more than all the houses in it are worth.
Portsmouth was in a prosperous condition through the French war ;
and was strongly fortified. Southampton was a port whose com
merce had decayed ; but it had a noble High-street and a spacious
quay. As we advance to the Western Coast, we find Purbeck
prosperous in fitting out ships to carry paving-stone to London ;
and the quarries of* Portland profitably worked, in furnishing the
free-stone with which the new cathedral of St. Paul's, and other
public edifices of London, were being built.
424 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXI.
Gregory King's Scheme of the Income of the several families in England.— Degrees of
, Society. — Town and Country Populations. — London. — Its Population. — Commerce.
—Trading Companies.— Banking.— Unemployed Capital.— Projects for New Com
panies.— Lotteries.— Tradesmen.— Their character and habits. — Extent of London.
—Progress of Fashion Westward.— Street Economy, and Police.— Robberies and
Outrages. In 1688, "A Scheme of the income and Expense of the sev
eral Families in England " was calculated by Gregory King. He
gives the number of families in each degree, and the number of
persons. Of course there can be no absolute dependence upon
such a document ; although other political arithmeticians gave it
their approval. In 1851, the Census of that year included a minute
return of the infinitely varied Occupations of the People. The
Census of 1841 exhibits a general Classification, which is more
available for some points of comparison with the " Scheme " of
1688. The changes in the component parts of Society in about a
century and a half are very strikingly brought out by this com
parison. I. The " Scheme," in the first place, gives us, of persons of in
dependent means, 160 temporal lords, 800 baronets, 600 knights,
3000 esquires, 12,000 gentlemen. The income of an esquire is
taken at ,£450, and that of a gentleman at ,£280. There were,
moreover, 40,000 " Freeholders of the better sort," whose incomes
are taken at ^91 each There were also 120,000 Freeholders of
the lesser sort, each with an income of ,£55. These constituted
the class of yeomen, and many, no doubt, farmed their own land.
The Census of 1841 shows upwards of five hundred thousand per
sons returned as independent; but three fourths of these are
females. The more minute return of 1851 shows a large number
of annuitants, chiefly females. This class has been created by
those facilities of investment in the Government Funds and other
Stock, which scarcely existed in 1688.
II. We have next, in the "Scheme," 10,000 persons in the
Civil Service of the country ; — 5000 being in the greater offices and
DEGREES OF SOCIETY. 425
places, and 5000 in the lesser. The class of placemen was very
numerous at. a period when places were openly sold, and were re
garded as amongst the best of investments, for persons who de
sired the happy lot of sinecurists. The Civil offices of our time
are filled by about 16,000 persons of whom the greater number are
amongst the hardest workers of the community. The offices now
connected with local administration, and the servants of the dock
yard?, are not included in this comparison.
III. The mercantile class in 1688 was estimated at 2000 emi
nent merchants and traders by sea — each with the modest income
of ,£400 : and 8000 lesser merchants, each with an income of ,£200.
The shopkeepers and tradesmen were taken at 50,000, each with
an income of £4.5. The artisans and handicraftsmen at 60,000,
each earning ^38 by the year. The adult males engaged in Com
merce, Trade, and Manufacture, in 1841, exceeded two millions.
The miners and other labourers were more than half a milion.
IV. In 1688, there were, as we have mentioned, 160,000 Free
holders. There were also 150,000 Farmers, each with an income
of ^42 ioj. We may conclude that the greater number of the
small owners, as well as the renters of land, were engaged in
agricultural occupations. The Farmers and Graziers in 1841
were 309,000. Gregory King's estimate gives 364,000 labouring
people and out-servants, and 400,000 cottagers and paupers. At a
period when there was necessarily a great mixture of occupations,
it is impossible to say that these heads of families, amounting to
more than three-quarters of a million, were for the most part ag
riculturists. But we apprehend that a large portion were chiefly
engaged in occupations of a rural character. In 1841, the number
of agricultural labourers and gardeners, amounted to about twelve
hundred thousand.
V. The naval officers of 1688 were estimated at 5000 ; the com
mon seamen at- 50,000. The navy of the queen's and merchant
service in 1841 was returned as comprising 220,000 men and boys.
The officers of the army in 1688 were reckoned as 4000 ; the com
mon soldiers as 35,000. In 1841 the army comprised 131,000
officers and men. In 1851 the numbers were largely increased.
VI. The clergy were estimated in 1688 to consist of 2000
"eminent clergymen," each with an income of ,£72 ; and of 8000
"lesser clergymen," each with an income of ^50. In 1851 there
were 18,587 ministers of the established Church ; 8521 Protestant
dissenting ministers ; and 1093 Roman Catholic priests. The
426 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
"persons in liberal arts and sciences " in 1688 were reckoned as
15,000, each with an income of ^60. In 1841 the legal profession
comprised 17,454 persons; and the medical 22,187. Other edu
cated persons following miscellaneous pursuits were 143,836, of
whom 34,618 were females.
In looking at the amount of country and town population in
Gregory King's estimate, we may take the number of persons to be
as follows, in each of the preceding general divisions :—
Country Population in 1688.
Belonging to Families of Rank i53,52o
Clergy (estimated portion of the whole) . . . 40,000
Freeholders 940,000
Fanners ..''.. . .... 750,000
Labourers and out-servants (half of the whole) . . . 637,500
Cottagers, &c .... 1,300,000
Vagrants ... 30,000
3,851,020
Town Population in 1688.
Belonging to Families of Persons in Office - ... 70,000
Merchants ... .... 64,000
Clergy (remaining portion of the whole) . .... 12,000
Law . 70,000
Liberal Arts and Sciences 75*000
Shopkeepers and Tradesmen 255,000
Artisans 240,000
Army and Navy ... .... 256,000
Labourers and out-servants (half of the whole) . . . . 637,500
[,679,500
As nearly as we can judge from these imperfect data, the country
population in 1688 comprised five-sevenths of the entire number of
the people ; the town population comprised only two-sevenths. In
1 85 1, the town population slightly exceeded the population of the
country; that of the towns being 8,990, 809; that of villages and
detached dwellings in the country being 8,936,800.
Of the town populations, that of London probably comprised
one-third of the aggregate number. Three years before the Rev
olution, the inhabitants of the metropolis were estimated by King
at five hundred and thirty thousand. This was about one-tenth of
the whole population of the kingdom. Sir William Petty estimated
the inhabitants of London at a million of persons. This calcula
tion was founded upon very loose data ; and still looser were the
LONDON. — POPULATION. — COMMERCE. 42 7
assertions derived from the increase of houses, that in the reign of
George I. the City, with Southwark and Westminster, contained a
million and a half of people. Under the precise enumeration of
the census of 1801 London contained less than a million inhabi
tants. The entire population of England and Wales was then
under nine millions. Compared with other large towns at the end
of the seventeenth century, London was considered able to bear an
assessment in Aid that indicated her superiority in wealth as much
as in population. In 1693 she was called upon to pay a monthly
tax six times as great as the united assessments of Bristol, Norwich,
Exeter, Worcester, Chester, and Gloucester. In 1702, there be
longed to the port of London 560 vessels, averaging 151 tons each,
giving an aggregate of 84,560 tons. The number of merchant ves
sels of all the ports of England was 3281, with an average of nearly
80 tons, and an aggregate of 261,222 tons. London thus engrossed
about one third of the entire trade of the kingdom.
The commerce of the port of London, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, inconsiderable as it was when compared with
the gigantic operations of our own time, must have been sufficiently
imposing to the foreigner, and even to those who habitually looked
upon it. The magnificent docks of the Thames belong to the present
century ; one small dock belonged to the earlier period of which we
write. But the Pool was crowded in the reigns of William III. and
Anne with colliers and coal-barges, waiting to deliver their cargoes
at numerous private wharfs. Billingsgate, in 1699, was made a free
market for the sale of fish ; and the fishermen of little vessels that
now came with every tide laden with mackerel and soles, with lob
sters and oysters, were no longer compelled to sell exclusively to
the fishmongers, but were free to supply the street-hawkers. At
three o'clock in summer, and at five in winter, this famous market
was opened. The dispute of fishers and costermongers produced
that variety of our language which was once termed "Billings
gate;" but which is known by more general names since the great
fish market has become refined. But more speculative commercial
operations were going forward in the port of London than those
connected with the supply of grain, or coal, or fish. During the
quarter of a century from the accession of William and Mary to
the death of Anne, there had been only four years and a half of
peace. To the ordinary sea risks, at a time when marine insurance
was little resorted to, was added the risk of capture by a foreign
enemy, in distant seas, and not unfrequently in the Channel.
428 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Nevertheless,— although during the eight years and a half of war
in the reign of William, the tonnage of English shipping declined
by more than a half its previous amount, — immediately after the
peace of Ryswick, in 1697, the commerce of the country took a
sudden spring ; and although the war was renewed in 1 702, it went
on increasing during the reign of Anne. Two East India Compa
nies had been quarrelling for the twelve years succeeding the Rev
olution ; but at Isngth their differences were composed; they
established a common stock ; and the Old Company which was
formed at the beginning of the seventeenth century was incorpo
rated into the New Company at the beginning of the eighteenth.
The anxiety of the merchants of London to overthrow the monopoly
of the India Trade, which was in the hands of a few individuals of
enormous wealth, was at last successful. The silks and painted
calicoes of India were prohibited ; but the use of tea was spread
ing amongst the higher and middle ranks, and a new source of
profitable commerce was opened by the change of habits in the
people. Even whilst tea and coffee were taxed in their liquid
state, and families sent to the coffee-house for a quart of the pre
cious infusions, it was observed that excess in drinking, especially
about London, was somewhat lessened through their use.* Im
mediately after the Revolution, tea and coffee were made subject
to the Customs' duties. The shops of London then retailed the
new luxuries, but at a price which must have forbidden their gen
eral use. In 171 o, Bohea is advertised at twelve, sixteen, twenty
and twenty-four shillings per lb. ; the lowest green at twelve shil
lings, f Eighteen years afterwards, it is complained that " tea and
wine are all we seem-anxious for." J There was another change-in
the habits of the people produced by political causes operating
upon the accustomed course of trade. The war with France was
accompanied by a prohibition of French wines and brandy, of which
the previous returns showed an annual consumption of twenty-two
thousand tuns of wine, and eleven thousand tuns of brandy. The
Mefnuen treaty of 1703, under which the wines of Portugal were
put upon the most favoured footing, sent the wine consumers from
Claret to Port, of which twenty-thousand pipes were imported into
London in 1721. The loss of brandy was supplied by the con
sumption of home made spirits ; and in a very few years " the
* Chamberlayne's " Present State," 1637, p. 41.
1 Advertisement in "Tatler," No. 157, original edition.
J " Augusta Triumphans," by Defoe, p. 311.
TRADING COMPANIES. 429
distillers found out a way to hit the palate of the poor, by their
new-fashioned compound water, called Geneva." *
Several of the old trading Companies of London were at this
period carrying on their adventures with success. The Russia
Company, established in 1553, had certain privileges; but each
member of the Company traded on his own account. The Turkey
Company was formed in 1579; and two hundred years later was
denounced by Adam Smith as "a Strict and oppressive monopoly."
This was also what was called " a regulated Company," or a mo
nopoly for individual traders. The African Company, which began
its operations in 1530, was, on the contrary, a joint-stock Com
pany, its constitution being such as that which the East India
Company set forth as their own great claim to support, in which
" noblemen, gentlemen, shopkeepers, widows, orphans, and all
other subjects may be traders, and employ their capital in a
joint-stock." The Hudson's Bay Company was chartered in 1670,
for the purpose of opening a trade for furs and mineral's. For
nearly two centuries the trade in furs, conducted by this Company
and the North West Company, who were once rival but were at
last united, was held to be the sole use to which a region some
forty times larger than England could be applied. The minerals
which prince Rupert sent out a ship to search for, in the time of
Charles II., have been discovered in the time of queen Victoria.
The reign of the Hudson's Bay Company has suddenly passed away
upon the discovery of gold. A new Colony has been added to the
British Crown, in the same year which has also seen the transfer of
the sovereignty of India from a Joint-stock Company to the Im
perial government. It is impossible to look upon such mighty
changes without a conviction that events which may change the
destinies of millions of Asiatics, and fill another American region
of bbundless swamps and forests with the greatest civilising race of
the European family, are amongst the most wonderful of the Special
Providences of the Almighty.
The system of Banking, which had been slowly growing up in
London from the time of Charles 1 1., when the goldsmiths kept the
cash of the merchants, and large business transactions were ar
ranged by the payment of bills, 'or what we now call cheques, was
not followed at all, or at least very imperfectly, in the country dis
tricts. Remittances to London, even of the taxes collected for the
government, were made in specie. In 1692 the collectors of the
* " Complete Tradesman, ' vol. ii. p. 220.
430 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
tax-money of the North, carrying their precious burden on sixteen
horses, were attacked in Hertfordshire, and the treasure being
borne off, all the horses were killed by tbe robbers to prevent pur
suit.* In the instructions ofthe " Complete Tradesman," at a much
later period, we have this form of entry in the Account of Petty
Cash " ; — " To the Exeter carriers, for carriage of money, 15s 3d."
In 1694 the Bank of England was incorporated, and carried on
its first operations, with fifty-four cashiers and clerks, in the hall of
the Grocers' Company. This great Corporation commenced its
functions under the most auspicious circumstances. Its subscribers
anticipated the payment of a million two hundred thousand pounds
of taxes voted by Parliament, and the Company was allowed eight
per cent, upon the money advanced, besides an annual sum of
four thousand pounds for management. The system which was
recommended by the East India Company, under which the un
employed capital of noblemen, gentlemen, shopkeepers, widows,
and orphans, could be made profitable, was coming to be under
stood. But the facilities for the development of the system were
extremely few. Capital was raising its inarticulate voice for em
ployment ; and there were projectors at hand to hold out the most
tempting prospects of increase without labour and without risk.
to the persons of every degree, whose money was unprofitably
locked up in the strong-box. The age of Companies came
very soon, after the Revolution. No scheme of fraud, no de
lusion of folly, was transparent enough to make its victims stay
their headlong pursuit of imaginary wealth. The mania never
stopped. Several years after the ruin which was produced by the
infatuation of the South Sea scheme — of which we shall make
mention in due course — the management of Companies was thus
spoken of : " We are so fond of Companies, it is a wonder we have
not our shoes blacked by one, and a set of directors made rich at
the expense of our very blackguards." f The fluctuations, soon
after the Revolution, in the price of shares — not only of " new
projects and schemes, promising mountains of gold," but of the es
tablished trading Companies — were so excessive, that the business
of the Royal Exchange, in its stock-jobbing department, might be
compared to the operations of a great gambling-house. Indeed
the spirit of gaming had taken possession of the people in the
humblest as well as the highest transactions. In a Statute of 1698.
it is recited that many evil-disposed persons, for divers years last
• Evelyn, " Diary," 20th November. t - Augusta Triumphans."
PROJECTS FOR COMPANIES. 43 1
past, had set up mischievous and unlawful games called Lotteries,
in London and Westminster, and in other parts, and had fraudu
lently obtained great sums of money from unwary persons. The
Lotteries were therefore declared to be public nuisances. But
the newspapers of 1710 are full of the most curious advertisements
of Lotteries, called Sales. Some tickets were as high as two
guineas : many as low as sixpence.* Mrs. Lowe, the milliner,
next door to the Crown in Red Lion Street, has a sixpenny sale.
Six houses in Limehouse, and ,£2499 in new fashionable plate, are
to be disposed of by tickets, and the numbers are to be drawn by
two parish boys, out of two wheels, at the Three Tun Tavern in
Wood-street.f There is even a twopenny sale, at the Pasty-cook's,
at Porter's-block, near Smithfield.^ But there are signs of the cheats
coming to an end. The sale of goods for £7500, to be drawn on
Wednesday last, is postponed for weighty reasons ; but it will
certainly be drawn at Stationers' Hall, for eminent Counsel have
given under their hands that this sale of goods is not within the
Act for suppressing of Lotteries. 8 The Act was passed ; and the
"heavy plate" and "stitched petticoats " had to find an honester
market. Utterly opposed in principle to the spirit of Lotteries was
the principle of Insurance. There were two Insurance Offices
against Fire established before 1687— The Royal Exchange, and
the Friendly Society. The Amicable Society for insuring Lives
was chartered in 1706. But these most valuable institutions were
imitated in a gambling spirit. Insurances upon births and mar
riages were opened ; and became such covers for fraud that they
were suppressed by Statute in 1710.
The projectors of schemes for making all men suddenly rich, —
the managers of fraudulent insurances — the sellers o'f plate, jew
ellery, and mercery by lottery — all these, and many others, who
trafficked in human credulity, were exceptions to the general spirit
of the English tradesman. In an age of somewhat loose morality
amongst the higher classes, Burnet, writing in 1708, says, " As for
the men of trade and business, they are, generally speaKing, the
best body in the nation; generous, sober, and charitable." He
describes the inhabitants of cities as having " more knowledge,
more zeal, and more charity, with a great deal more of devotion "
than " the people in the country." Berkeley, who took a broader
view of human affairs than the historian of his own time, points to
* Advertisements in " Tatler," No. 239. + Ibid., No. 240.
X Ibid., No. 245- i M*., No 25*.
432 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" country gentlemen and farmers, and the better sort of trades.
men," as believers in the efficacy of virtue to make a nation happji,
rather than as confiding in the power of wealth. * Burnet rather
qualifies his praise of " the best body in the nation," by admitting
that in the capital city " there may be too much of vanity, with too
pompous an exterior." + Of this vanity and pompous exterior
there is various evidence. It was the natural result of a prosper
ous social condition, in which there were very few industrious
men who were not bettering their circumstances. It may seem
somewhat strange at a period not very far beyond a time when the
income of an eminent merchant was taken at four hundred pounds
a year, and that of a lesser merchant at not more than two hun
dred, that we find indications of a pompous exterior which would
necessarily be very costly. We can understand how sir Josiah
Child, who married his daughter to a duke's son, and gave ber a
portion of fifty thousand pounds, should have lived at a splendid
mansion at Wanstead, and covered acres with his plantations. We
do not wouder at the large expenditure of sir Robert Clayton, who
changed the barren hills of Marden, in Surrey, into a scene that
" represented some foreign country, which would produce sponta
neously pines, firs, cypress, yew, holly, and juniper." J But we
cannot avoid thinking that the average mercantile income was under
rated, when we know that the suburbs of London were full of
country houses, to which merchants and retailers always repaired
in the summer. Carshalton is described as crowded with fine
houses of the citizens, some of which were built at profuse ex
pense. § Other parts of Surrey presented the same show of wealth,
in such retreats of the traders, " who in their abundance make
these gay excursions, and live thus deliciously all die summer, re
tiring within themselves in the winter, the better to lay up for the
next summer's expense." || The frugality of the citizen's London
dwelling, over his shop or over his warehouse, must not be too
readily assumed. " It is with no small concern that I behold,"
says a correspondent of Mr. Bickerstaff, " in coffee-houses and
public places, my brethren, the tradesmen of this city put off the
smooth, even, and ancient decorum of thriving citizens, for a fan
tastical dress and figure improper for their persons and charac-
* " Alciphron," Works, vol. i. p. 337.
t " Our Times," Conclusion, vol. vi. p. 203, Oxford ed.
X Evelyn, " Diary," July 13, 1700. § Deioe, " Tour," i. 232.
II Defoe, " Tour," i. p. 239.
EXTENT OF LONDON. 433
ters." * The tradesmen and shopkeepers even aspired " to keep
footmen as well as the gentlemen ; witness the infinite number of
blue liveries, which are so common now that they are called the
tradesmen's liveries." Again : " Citizens and tradesmen's tables
are now the emblems, not of plenty, but of luxury." f Three or
four maid-servants were said to be kept in a house, where two
formerly were thought sufficient. Of course, there is the usual
exaggeration, in much of this complaint. One of the most certain
indications of an improving state of the middle classes is the more
luxurious nature of their diet ; the wear of better clothing ; the
employ of more domestic servants ; the furnishing their houses
with articles of improved taste. It does not necessarily follow
that convenience is more costly than discomfort, or refinement
than coarseness. The satirist is not always to be relied upon who
looks back to a past generation for his models of virtuous simpli
city. What was denounced as vanity and extravagance in Anne's
reign, might be held up as the most pattern frugality, to shame the
universal love of display in our time.
The rebuilding of the City after the great Fire, was a work of
marvellous energy, which offers an example, rarely paralleled, of
public spirit. It was scarcely to be expected that there -should
have been no sacrifices to mere expediency ; that a houseless pop
ulation should have set about the work of reconstruction by rais.
ing up a city of wide streets instead of narrow alleys ; and of reg
ular architecture instead of the diversified adaptations to individual
means and wants. Yet much was accomplished. Brick or. stone
houses replaced those of timber and plaster; and light and air
were not excluded by the topmost story of every house almost
touching its opposite neighbour. London was made more conveni
ent, but infinitely less picturesque. In one respect the new city
was not so airy as the old. Gardens behind many of the opulent
traders' houses, and large side-yards, were built over. The nobil
ity had migrated from the East to the West, and their old man
sions in Bishopsgate, and Houndsditch, and Barbican, with vast
courts and offices,' were covered with new squares. The fire of
London gave habitations to a more numerous population ; and it
was asserted that when the Citv had been rebuilt, four thousand
additional houses stood upon the area that was desolated by the
fire. If the new shops and warehouses and dwellings had no great
architectural pretensions, many public edifices had risen, which
* "Tatler," No. 270. t "Complete Tradesipan."
Vol. IV.— 28
434 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
gave London a feature characteristic of its age. The churches
which were destroyed had been mostly erected during the period
when the old religion was in the ascendant. They were adapted
to the ceremonials of Catholicism, and not for the accommodation
of congregations to whom the sermon was the all-important part of
public'worship. It was fortunate that a man of real genius existed
at the time of the Fire, who had a higher notion of the functions of
an Architect than to produce copies of buildings belonging to a
past age. It was fortunate that Sir Christopher Wren did not set
about re-producing a Gothic St. Paul's, but, after the labour of
thirty-five years, gave London the noblest Protestant Temple of
the world. It was fortunate that instead of repeating in his new
Parish Churches the gabled roofs and lancet windows of the four
teenth and fifteenth centuries, he left us, in his fifty-one Churches,
built under every - possible disadvantage, edifices of consummate
heauty and variety in one great feature of their external appear
ance. He had to build these churches upon small areas, manv
behind the main streets. He made his very difficulties the main
cause of his success. " Wren, with consummate judgment put his
strength into his steeples and campanili, which soar above the
sordid and dingy mass of habitations, and, clustering like satel
lites round the majestic dome of the Cathedral, impart to the gen
eral aspect of the city a picturesque grandeur scarcely rivalled by
Rome itself."* The accomplished artist from whom we quote
truly characterises Wren as an inventor.
After the fire of London, as the nobility and the opulent gentry
had gone Westward for their dwellings, the course of retail trade
took the same direction. In the latter years of Charles IL, the
mercers occupied Paternoster Row ; the street was built for them ;
it was thronged with coaches in two rows ; the neighbouring
streets were occupied by dependants upon the mercery trade, by
the lacemen and fringe-sellers. Gradually the court came no longer
to the city to buy its silks and velvets ; and the mercers followed
the court, and settled in Covent Garden.f Paternoster Row was
deserted by the dealers in brocades, to be ultimately supplanted
by the dealers in books, who, in like manner, deserted their old
quarters in Little Britain. The " persons of quality " had begun
to congregate a little north of Holborn. Great Ormond Street,
with one side open to the fields, was a seat of fashion ; and so was
* Mr. A. Poynter, in " Pictorial History of England," vol. iv. p. 742.
t "Complete Tradesman." vol. ii.
STREET ECONOMY, AND POLICE. 435
Bloomsbury Square. Spring Gardens, whose thickets were once
the resort of gallants in laced ruffles and periwigs, and of ladies in
masks, was now covered with gay houses. Covent Garden Square
was the very centre of high life. Drury Lane had not quite lost
the aristocratic perfume which belonged to Craven House and
Clare House. The fashionable tenants of the side boxes of Drury
Lane theatre, and of Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre, were not far
removed from these two famous resorts of " the Town," which was
now corrupted by Farquhar and Congreve, in lessons of human
conduct only made more dangerous by their wit. Soho Square
and St. James's Square were built before the Revolution. Golden
Square was in fashion a quarter of a century later. The land ot
gentility was gradually stretching away still westward, in the direc
tion of Piccadilly. But in 1708 Bolton Street was the most west
erly street of London, Albemarle Street, to erect which Claren
don's proud mansion had been cleared away, was in an unfinished
district of what are called " carcases," at the end of the eighteenth
century. Squares were growing up towards Tyburn Road, which
did not acquire its genteel name of Oxford Road, till it became the
seat of a new Bear Garden. The hangman's cart duly travelled to
the ancient gallows long after this road of deep sloughs had been
formed into a street. Changes marking the changes of society
were going on. May Fair, " held in Brookfield Market-place, at
the east corner of Hyde Park," dwindled away; and the Brook
which flowed from Tyburn was covered over by the houses of
Brook Street. The May-pole in the Strand, which James duke of
York employed his sailors to hoist up at the Restoration, to typify
the downfall of Puritanism, v/as removed to Wanstead, to support
"the largest telescope in the world." Puritanism lost its power
of domination, and gradually slided into Dissent. At the Revolu
tion there was a transient struggle, in which a little toleration was
the only victory of the principle which had overthrown the mon
archy. The New Church in the Strand took the place of the old
May-pole. Addison's Tory Fox-hunter seeing this church of St.
Mary le Strand half-built, thought that Dissent had triumphed, and
that an old temple of the establishment was in process of demoli
tion. He "was agreeably surprised to find that instead of pulling
it down they were building it up, and that fifty more were raising
in other parts of the town." *
The Street Economy, as it may be called, and the Police of the
*" Freeholder," No. 47, June 1, 1716.
436 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
London of the beginning of the eighteenth century, have so often
been described, that we can merely glance at these subjects, which
are the peculiar province of the essayist. It was a city, cleaner
probably, and with more public conveniences than any other cap
ital of Europe ; but in what we should now deem a condition most
unfavourable to health, comfort, and security. There were no
foot-pavements as distinguished from the carriage-road. There
were lines of posts in the chief streets, within which it was only
safe to walk. The carmen in the principal road were fighting with
the hackney coach drivers. The chairmen drove the foot-passen
gers off the railed-in way ; and the foot-passengers themselves
struggled for the honour of the wall. Every square and open place
was a deposit for rubbish and filth, gathering in heaps of abomina
tion, to be very tardily removed by the dustman. The streets were
resonant with the bawlings of higlers and wandering merchants of
every denomination. The pick-pockets and ring-droppers had no pre
ventive police to regulate the exercise of their profession. A crowd
of vagabond boys were often pursuing their sports in the most
crowded thoroughfares, of which sports foot-ball was the favourite.
The apprentice in the merchant's counting-house enters in his pettv
cash-book — " For mending the back-shop sashes broken by the
foot-ball, is. bd. " * The Thames was the most convenient high
way between the City and Westminster, with wherries employing
four or five thousand watermen. The hackney-coaches, to the
number of eight hundred, had not displaced them. But -*. more
rugged set than the Thames watermen — more terrific to a timid
squire from the country, or an ancient lady going down Blackfriars
to take the air— it is impossible to conceive. Their shouts of
" Next oars " and " Skullers," were appalling. No sooner was the
boat on its way, up or down the stream, but every passenger in an
other boat was assailed with a volley of " water compliments," com
pared with which the " slang" of our politer day is soft as the oaths
of Hotspur's wife.f It was at night that the real dangers of the
street began. The Watch was in the most lamentable state of
imbecility. The Court of Common Council, in 1716, decreed that
the streets should be lighted— but the few glass lamps only made
"darkness visible." Robberies were common in every great
thoroughfare. The very link-boy was a thief. The resorts of bul
lies and cut-throats, Whitefriars and the Savoy the Mint and the
* " Complete Tradesman," vol. ii.
t Vide (but you had better not) " Tom Brown's Works," vol. iii. p. 288, ed. r73o.
ROBBERIES AND OUTRAGES. 437
Clink, were put down by Act of Parliament in 1697, as places of
refuge for fraudulent debtors ; and the great haunts of villainy no
longer bade defiance to the officers of the law. But the drunken
outrages of the night-prowlers, " The Mohawks," who had " an out
rageous ambition of doing all possible hurt to their fellow-crea
tures," were denounced by the " Spectator," on the i2thof March,
1712; though on the 8th of April he says, some " are apt to think
that these Mohawks are a kind of bull-beggars, first invented by
prudent married men and masters of families, in order to deter their
wives and daughters from taking the air at unseasonable hours." *
Swift was terrified about them ; and a royal proclamation was issued
offering a reward of .£100 for the detection of any person wound
ing or maiming one of her majesty's subjects. There was probably
much exaggeration in these terrors. The historian of London de
duces their origin from "fictitious stories artfully contrived to in
timidate the people ; " and adds, " It does not appear that ever any
person was detected of any of the said crimes." He made all in
quiry in places where they were said to have been chiefly commit
ted, and could never learn of any one person having received the
least hurt.f Nevertheless, the deportment of some of the rich,
"'flown with insolence and" wine," was one of the reasonable terrors
of a street guarded by decrepit old men, and during an adminis
tration of justice which might beoften bribed by wealth and awed
by rank. * Nos. 324 and 347. * " Maitlahd's London," i. 511
Comparative Table ofthe Number of Houses and estimated Population at the Revolu
tion, and of the Populations of \ioi and 1851 ; with the Assessment for Aid in 1689
— arranged in Registration divisions.
Hearth-money. Iieturn'of Houses.
Population at
5 to a house.
Population, 1801.
Population, 1801.
Aid,1689.
South- Western Counties.
Wilts - - - - -
Dorset .....
Somerset- -
vim
21,940 66,31025,37444,680
135,465 109,700
281,550 126,870223,430
183,820114,452
340,308 192581273,577
254,221184.207567,098 355,558443,916
£1966 13^432291540
2771
175,403
877,015
1104,438
1805.000
10,850
West Midland Counties.
Gloucestershire -
Herefordshire -
Shropshire -
Worcestershire -
Warwickshire -
Staffordshire - - - -
26,76415,00023,28420,63421,97323,747
133,820 75,000
116,420103,170109,865
118,735
250,723 88,436
169,248146,441
206,798 242,693
458,605115 489
229,341 27G.926 475.013
608,716
1808113112031053
1192 852
131,402
657.010
1,104,339 | 2,164,290
7.239
London Division.
Middlesex and Westminster
69,139?30.9975
500,680
958,000
2,362,000
53040J 4291
South Eastern.
Kent
Sussex -
Hants ....
Berks ....
34,21839,24221,53726,851 16,906
171,090
196,210107,685 134.255 84,530
268,233308.667159,47121!),!'20 110,480
083,082615,766336,844 405.370170,065
1597
3326 182121891132
138,754
693,770
1,066,771
2,211,127
10,065
North Western.
Lancashire - -
24.05440,202
120.270
201,010
192,305673,486
455,725
2,031,236
747
1006
64,256
321,280
865,791
2,486,961
1753
York
106.151
530.755
851,000
1,790.995
3469
South Midland.
Bucks .....
Northampton - - - -
Huntingdon - - - -
Bedford
Cambridge -
16,56918,390 19,007
24,808 8,217
12,17017-347
82,84591,950 95,035
124,040 41,08560,85086,735
97,393
10S.132111,977131,525 37,568 63393
•89,346
167.298163,723 170,439
212,380 64.183
124,478185,405
134.513151135 1413 653
896
1020 349Ely
116,508
582.540 639.34
1,087,896
8,126
Eastern. Essex - - ....
34.819 34,42247,180
174,095172.110
235,900
227,682214,401273,479
369,318 337,215442.714
3098 3298
3378
116,421
582.105
715,562
1,149,247
9774
Forth Midland.
Leicester ....
Nottingham - - - -
Derbyshire ....
18,702 3,263
40,590 17,55421.155
93,51016,315
202,950 87,770
105 775
130.082 16,300
208,625 140,350
161.567
230,308 22,983
407.222270.427296,084
1084 240
2575 873 862
101.264
506.320
IVW.i-24
1.227,024
5634
Northern. Northumberland -
Cumberland ....
Westmorland - . -
15,984
22,741 14,825 6,501
79,920
113.705 74,125
32,505
149,384168,078 117.230 40,805
390,997 503.SG8195.492 58,217
823372 168 116
60.051
300,255
475,497
948,344
979
Wales and Monmouth
53,983
269,915
601,000
1,005.721
2939
438
FIXED POSITION OF THE VARIOUS CLASSES. 439
CHAPTER XXI.
Fixed position of the various Classes. — Difficulty of passing from one position to another.
— The Rural Population. — The Cottager. — The Agricultural Labourer. — Character
of the Agricultural Labourer. — The Farmers and Small Freeholders. — The Gentle
men and Esquires. — Character of the Country Gentleman. — His Animosities. — The
NobjHty. — The Nobility and Esquires in London. — The Clergy. — Great Social Evils.
— Neglect, — The Press. — Liberal Arts and Sciences.
In considering the proportions of the various degrees of society,
as presented by the approximating "Scheme" of 1688, and the
exact Census of 1851, we must bear in mind that, a century and a
half ago, the facilities possessed by the people of passing from one
occupation to another occupation were very limited ; and that the
power of what we term rising in the world was equally restricted.
In the locality in which a labourer was born he generally remained
to the end of his life. The laws of Settlement were attempted to be
relaxed in 1697 ; for it was felt and avowed that paupers were
created by the restraints which prevented them seeking employ
where there was work to be done, and compelled them to starve
upon the parochial pittance where there was no capital to support
labour.* But the clumsy machinery for remedying the evil would
not act ; and this semi-slavery continued unmitigated till our own
time. The barriers which prevented the artificer or the trader
from passing out of his first condition into one more eligible were
almost as onerous. The severe enforcement of the laws of Ap
prenticeship kept a man for ever in the particular pursuits for
which he had served seven years of dreary education ; and the
devices of Guilds and Companies and City-freedoms created a
practical monopoly, which it was very difficult to overthrow. Some
few men of great ability certainly overcame the impediments of
birth and education, and rose to opulence and honours ; but the
rise of the commonalty was always regarded with extreme jealousy
by the born great. The servile literature of the days before the
Revolution echoed this sentiment. It was sedulously inculcated,
in the fashionable belief, that all the wealth of the community was
*S & 9 Gul. iii., c. 3.
449 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
derived from the expenditure of the higher classes ; that the prod
igality of the gentry was the sole cause " that cooks, vintners,
innkeepers, and such mean fellows, enrich themselves ; and that
not only these, but tailors, dancing-masters, and such trifling
fellows, arrive to that riches and pride, as to ride in their coaches,
keep their summer houses, to be served in plate, &c, an insolence
insupportable in other well-governed nations."* Philosophers
arose to tell the prodigal great that they were in the right course,
for that private vices were public benefits ; and so, in very charity
to the providers of luxuries, the country squire became a rake upon
town, and his estates went to ruin, and all his poor dependents
felt the curse of his licentiousness. It was this extreme depen
dence of many of the peasantry upon the landowners, that held
them bound in more ignoble chains than those of the old feudality.
They might receive a capricious patronage, but they could not
demand a constant protection.
We may probably arrive at some view, however unsatisfactory,
of the component parts and condition of the Rural Population, by
a further analysis of Gregory King's scheme. We have assumed
that the incomes of families of rank, independent of the incomes
of those in " greater offices and places," are derived from their
landed estates. This aggregate income is somewhat under six
millions sterling. It is appropriated to sixteen thousand six
hundred families, who altogether number about a hundred and
fifty-four thousand persons, or between nine and ten in each family.
This is an excess of five in each family above the usual rate of
families, and it will show that eighty-three thousand servants and
retainers are maintained in these great households. But there are
also forty thousand "freeholders of the better sort," with an ag
gregate income of more than three millions and a half, who have
each two in family beyond the average. This gives another eighty
thousand dependents. The aggregate income of a hundred and
twenty thousand "freeholders of the lesser sort" is about six
millions and a half ; and these maintain sixty thousand in their
households beyond the usual proportion. There are thus two
hundred and twenty thousand persons directly maintained by the
expenditure of the independent classes— of the classes who are not
dependent upon their industry for their support, or only partially
so. These households, living upon a total revenue of sixteen
millions and a half, comprise about eleven hundred thousand
* Chamberlayne ; " Present State of England," 1687, P- 43.
THE COTTAGERS. 44'I
persons, or one-fifth of the whole population. The income from
the land is very nearly equal to the total income of the other ac
cumulating classes, — of the clergy, the lawyers, the physicians, the
naval and military officers, the civil officers, the merchants, the
men of science and arts, the traders, the artisans, and the farmers'.
These possess an aggregate revenue from their industry of eigh
teen millions, and maintain about sixteen hundred thousand per
sons. The independent classes, and their dependents, and the
other accumulating classes, comprise one-half of the population^
each person deriving twelve pounds- for his annual support. The
remaining population of very nearly three millions have an income
of nine million pounds, or three pounds for the annual support Of
each person.
The labouring people and out-servants have been supposed by
us to belong, half to the town population and half to the country
population. They are estimated to receive fifteen pounds for each
family.. But the income of each family of the cottagers and pau
pers is put as low as six pounds ten shillings, or one-sixth of the
income of the artisan. We would recommend this consideration
to those who are in the habit of asserting that in such happy times
as the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English cottager
was abundantly fed and clothed ; confortably housed ; was well
cared for by his betters — a contented man, who enjoyed a golden
age that will never return.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the enclosed land
of England was estimated at half the area of the kingdom. Since
that time there have been enclosed ten thousand square milesof
land, which, a hundred and fifty years ago, was heath, morass, and
forest. This vast tract of land, which was capable of yielding
something to spade, cultivation, was the region in which Gregory
King's " cottagers " gained their scanty livelihood. They were
the "squatters" upon the edges of commons; and the farmer
regarded, them with as much suspicion as he regarded the "va
grants." The squire would toss them a penny when they opened a
gate, or told him which way the fox was gone. The parson cared
very little for them, for they were too ragged to appear in church.
Undoubtedly the out-door agricultural labourer was in a better
condition than this wretched class who were so much below him.
His wages varied in different localities, from four shillings to six
shillings a week,, without food. The average was probably five
shillings. This rate agrees with King's calculation, that fifteen
442 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
pounds was the annual income for a labouring man's family. The
mode in which we are accustomed to regard the difference in the
value of money might lead us to the conclusion, that Ihe labourer
had a better lot with five shillings a week, than with ten shillings
in the present day. He indeed bought many things cheaper than
the labourer of our time, but there were many articles of necessity
or comfort much dearer than now, or wholly out of his reach.
In 1706 wheat was forty shillings a quarter. The difference is
not great between the price of 1858. But the labourer of the
eighteenth century never ate wheaten bread. Woollen clothing
of every sort was far dearer then. Linen was almost beyond
the reach of his wife and children. There were no cheap calicoes
for their shirts ; no smart prints equally cheap for their frocks.
Tea and sugar, the comforts of the modern cottage, were wholly
for the rich. Fresh meat was only eaten twice a week by half
the working people ; and never tasted at all by the other half. The
salt to cure the flesh of his hog was very dear, and frightfully un
wholesome. His hovel with " one chimney," was unglazed, and
its thatched roof and battered walls offered the most miserable
shelter. Furniture he had none, beyond a bench and a plank on
tressels, — an iron-pot, and a brown basin or two. All the minor com
forts of the poorest in our age were absolutely wanting. He was
no partaker of the common advantages that have accrued during a
century and a half, to the humblest as well as to the highest. No
commodity was made cheap to him by modern facilities of com
munication, which in that age would have been considered miracu
lous. He had the ague, and his children died of the small-pox,
without medical aid. The village practitioner, who might be called
in at the last extremity, was an empiric, to whom the knowledge
and sagacity of Sydenham were unknown, and who had no faith
in the theories of Harvey. Less fortunate than the peasant of the
nineteenth century, he had, in England, not the slightest chance
of going out of his condition through education ; or of making a
humble lot more endurable by some small share of the scantily
diffused stores of knowledge. His children were equally shut out
from any broader view of life than that of their native hamlet ; for
charity schools, few and mean as they were, founded for the educa
tion of the poor, were only established in some favoured towns.
Yet the peasant of the reigns of William and Anne was not an
unhappy or degraded being. He had not been humiliated by a
century of pauperism. He was emphatically a man— ignorant, in
THE FARMERS AND SMALL FREEHOLDERS. 443
our sense of ignorance ; believing in witches and omens ; fond of
rough sports, his wrestling and his cudgel-playing, and of some
cruel sports, his cock-fighting, and his bull-baiting. He was not
unfrequently a poacher, without any great sense of criminality.
But he had a salutary respect for the constable and the justice, and
was under a willing submission to the law, as were most other
Englishmen. On rare occasions he freely took his glass of strong
ale — at the fair or the wake, the sheep-shearing or the harvest
home ; had his honest merriment on the village-green, and some
times was asleep on the bench over which the arms of the parish
squire creaked in the wind. But he was not an habitual drunkard.
He had a clean smock frock for the day when he heard the bells
tolling for church ; and he felt, when listening to the same words,
and joining in the same ritual, as the lord of the manor heard or
joined in, that he had some position in the human family. He was
always a hard- worker; and he moreover knew that without industry
he should fall to a condition below that in which God had placed
him. " A neighbour of mine made it his remark," writes Berkeley,
"in a journey from London to Bristol, that all the labourers of
whom he inquired the road constantly answered without looking
up, or interrupting their work, except one, who stood staring and
leaning on his spade, and him he found to be an Irishman." *
The Farmers, and the smaller Freeholders, were, with the
exception of their greater command over the necessaries and com
forts of life, at no great elevation above the husbandman who
worked for wages. They were almost equally shut out from any
very extensive commerce with the general world. They attended
markets and fairs, but there the price of grain and of stock was the
principal object of their inquiries. The local rate was the sole
guide of their dealings. They_ had no price-currents to enable
them to sell, or to hold back, according to the averages of the
kingdom ; nor indeed had they the power, in their limited command
of labour, and in their utter want of machinery more effective than
labour, to take advantage of a sudden rise in the price of food.
Their bargains were hurried and improvident. The laws against
forestalling prevented speculation in corn, and interfered with the
natural foresight against coming seasons of scarcity. After the
harvest the grain was sold as speedily as possible, to provide cap
ital for the labour of another season. The people consumed with
out stint for a time ; and then came terrible scarcities, with
* " Works," vol. ii., p. 229.
444 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
miseries innumerable in their train. The cultivators, as we have
indicated, were slow to receive any improvement ; and in their
pursuit, as in many commercial pursuits, it was held that labour-
saving expedients were an injury to the poor. They worked with
the same rough tools as their grandfathers had used ; for the plough
and the harrow were incompetent to prepare the soil for seed with
out being followed up by much manual industry. There was a
rough hospitality in their households. The great kitchen served
for all domestic uses. Their home-servants took their meals at the
same board with themselves ; the children crowded about the floor ;
the dogs and the poultry gathered up the bones and the crumbs.
They were a sturdy race, full of the independence which they had
inherited from the times which made them free of the old lords of
the soil ; with many prejudices which had an intimate alliance with
virtues — a very difficult race for courtiers and preachers of divine
right to manage ; such a race as rallied round Hampden when he
stood up against ship-money; such a race as Cromwell chose for
his Ironsides ; men who preserved their traditions in their hatred
of Popery, and of everything which approached Popery and arbi
trary power.
The forty thousand "Freeholders of the better sort," whose
incomes are reckoned at ninety-one pounds a. year for each family,
though entitled to some of the privileges of men of worship, were
separated from the " Gentlemen " and the " Esquires " by barriers
more difficult to pass than those of mere wealth. We have a pre
cise description of the " yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year,
an honest man." He may sport over his own lands without being
informed against. " He is just within the Game Act, and qualified
to kill a hare or a pheasant." He often earns his dinner with his
gun. " In short, he is a very sensible man ; shoots flying, and has
been several times foreman of the petty jury." * But there was an
insurmountable obstacle to any approach to equality between even
the richest yeoman and the most impoverished esquire. The
genealogy of the esquire was at once his strength and his weak
ness. His family pride kept him from meannesses unworthy of a
gentleman ; but it did not always preserve him from excesses that
would appear more properly to belong to the humble origin of the
coarsest peasant. Too often he fancied that his rank exempted
him from the ordinary restraints of decent society. Yet in the
dissipation of the higher classes, which inevitably followed'a quar-
* " Spectator," No. 122.
CHARACTER Q.F THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. 445
ter of a century of profligacy that had almost destroyed the old
English character, there was, we are inclined to believe, some
struggle against the fashionable temptation, to which the great
wholly abandoned themselves in the court of Charles II. The
family ties were too often worn loosely ; but the belief in those
-happy times " ere one to one was cursedly confined," * was not a
general creed. The barbarous hospitality that induced " gentle
men to think it is one of the honours of their houses that none
must go out of them sober,"-!- was a little wearing away. One
who looked at mankind from the philosophical as well as the re
ligious point of view, attributes to idleness and ignorance the sen
sual excesses of " the uneducated fine gentleman. v The English
man is held to be " the most unsuccessful rake in the world. He
is;at variance with himself. He is neither brute enough to enjoy
his appetites, nor man enough to govern them." J Burnet boldly
says of the, gentry of his time, " They are for the most part the
worst instructed, and the least knowing, of any of their rank I ever
met with." They are ill-taught and ill-bred; haughty and inso
lent ; they have no love for their country, or of public liberty ;
they desire to return to tyranny, provided they might be the un-
der-tyrants. .In their marriages they look only for fortune. This
is an awful picture, though some of the shadows may be ,a little
too dark. Burnet was a Whig. The majority of the country gen
tlemen, having set up a constitutional sovereign, were again howl
ing for divine right, and manifesting their love for a Protestant
Church by sighing for the old days of confiscation and imprison
ment to sweep out non-conformity. The times are long past
when a lover of his country's liberty had a right to be angry at
this temper. We would rather look at it as a folly to be laughed
at, as Addison looked at it. His Tory Fox-hunter is the true rep
resentative of that class of " country gentlemen, who have always
lived out of the way of being better informed." The Fox-hunter
was of opinion that there had been no good weather since the
Revolution; and that the weather was always fine in Charles I I.'s
reign. He loved his spaniel, because he had once worried a Dis
senting teacher. He chose an inn for his quarters because the
landlord was the best Church of England man upon the road.
England, he maintained, would be the happiest country in the
world, if we could live within ourselves, for trade would be the
* Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel." t Burnet, " Own Time," vol. vi. p. 199.
X Perkeley, " Alciphron," Works, vol. i. p. 34
446 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ruin of the nation.* The Toryism of sir Roger de Coverley,
whom all love, was never offensive. He maintained the landed
interest as opposed to the moneyed. He would not bait at a
Whig inn. When he saw the headless statue of an English king
in Westminster Abbey, and was told that it had been stolen,
" Some Whig, I warrant you," says sir Roger. Burnet may de
nounce the gentry of his time as ignorant and irreligious. A far
greater historian may describe the squires who were in Charles
I I.'s commissions of peace and lieutenancy — and they could not
have changed much, in less than the term of one generation — as
differing little "from a rustic miller or ale-house keeper of our
time ; " and paint their wives and daughters " in tastes and ac
quirements below a housekeeper or a still-room maid of the present
day." f The country gentleman's " unrefined sensuality ; " his
" language and pronunciation such as we should now expect to
hear only from the most ignorant clowns ; " his " oaths, coarse
jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse ; " his habitual intoxication
"with strong beer;" his "bargains over a tankard with drovers
and hop-merchants " — are given as characteristics of the country
gentleman "of the time when the crown passed from Charles II.
to his brother." But some sketches of the country gentleman,
written in 171 1 — sketches which will endure as long as our lan
guage — may be set in merciful contrast to the highly coloured
composition of our eloquent contemporary, " derived from sources
too numerous to be recapitulated." With the sir Roger de Cov
erley of Addison and Steele we live for a month at his house in
the country, and see only sober and staid servants, and a chap
lain, who was chosen for plain sense rather than learning, and as
" a man that understood a little of backgammon." Will Wimble,
an idle younger brother to a baronet, describes a " large cock-
pheasant," and how he caught "the huge jack;" but we do
not see him and the host laid under the table. The knight's
knowledge is not extensive. He takes care to parade his acquaint
ance with Baker's Chronicle ; and tells that there is fine reading
in the casualties of Henry IV.'s reign. But he does not pretend
to be what he is not, and he has a reverence for the intellectual
qualities of his visitor from London. Nor is he ill-bred, haughty,
and insolent, as Burnet describes the class. With true politeness
he lets his guest rise or go to bed when he pleases ; dine in his
own chamber, or at the general table ; sit still and say nothing
• " Freeholder," No. 22. t Macaulay, vol. i. chap. iii. .
ANIMOSITIES OF THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. 44)
without being called upon to be merry. He indeed is somewhat
dictatorial and exclusive at church; and will suffer nobody to
sleep in it besides himself ; counts the congregation to see if any
of his tenants are missing ; and when John Mathews kicks h^s
heels, calls out to him to mind what he is about, and not disturb
the congregation. But he is compassionate even to the hare that
he rescues from his hounds ; and when he is doubting whether he
ought not, as a justice of the peace, to commit the gipsy as a va
grant, he ends by crossing her hand with a piece of money. This,
it may be said, is the fancy-picture of the most gentle of the great
English humourists. But all the life-like traits of past manners
must be derived from similar sources. Those who describe their
own age with the greatest bitterness of satire are not always the
most trustworthy. The exceptional- cases of gross vice and- de
grading ignorance in the gentry may be as often mistaken as char
acteristics of a class, as the ruffians and outcasts of a great city
may be mistaken for specimens of the hard-working and ill-paid
tenants of its hovels and garrets.
The most repulsive feature in the character of the English
Country Gentleman of the time of William and Anne is his politi
cal and religious bigotry. He does not only avoid the company of
his neighbour for their difference of opinion, but he positively hates
him. This is not a quiescent humour, whose chief evil is to de
stroy good fellowship. It takes the practical form of one contin
ued struggle for political supremacy. The dominion of King with
out Parliament he knows has passed away ; the most devoted Tory
has no serious hopes that it can be brought back again. If the
nation were to call over the son of James IL, he fancies that, al
though the young Stuart is a papist, there will be no interference
with the national religion ; and although the exiled family have
been taught from their cradles to venerate a heaven-appointed des
potism, that they will not be despots. Whig and Tory accept par
liamentary government as an accomplished fact, and they will each
see what they can make of it for their own advantage. Both par
ties had their strongholds in the boroughs that had representatives
without population. If they could manage the country districts
that were populous, they might wholly control the troublesome
cities and towns. The machinery of both sides was unlimited
,. bribery. The degradation of the briber was as great as that of
the bribed. " This corruption has become a national crime, hav
ing infected the lowest as well as the highest amongst us," writes
448 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Berkeley in 1721. The base politics of that age drew from thre
high-minded churchman the following noble denunciation : " God
grant the time be not near, when men shall say, ' this island was
once inhabited by a religious, brave, sincere people, of plain uncor-
rupt manners, respecting inbred worth rather than titles and ap
pearances, assertors of liberty, lovers of their country, jealous of
their own rights, and unwilling to infringe the rights of others ;
improvers of learning and useful arts, enemies to luxury, tender
of other men's lives and prodigal of their own ; inferior in nothing
to the old Greeks or Romans, and superior to each of those people
in the perfections of the other. Such were our ancestors during
their rise and greatness ; but they degenerated, grew servile flat
terers of men in power, adopted epicurean notions, became venal,
corrupt, injurious, which drew upon them the hatred of God and
man, and occasioned their final ruin.' " *
The Nobility — the " temporal lords " — were, as they always had
been, a most important portion of the rural aristocracy. Some
resided for considerable periods of the year in their mansions upon
their great estates. Their aggregate income was very nearly equal
to one half of the income of the whole body of the esquires. They
were the lords-lieutenant of counties, and, as such, had the control
of the militia force of the kingdom. They were not attended to
county meetings by hundreds of gentry wearing their liveries, as
in the feudal days ; they could not call out to the field their thou
sands of vassals. But they nevertheless mainly swayed the course
of political action, under the system which we call " constitutional."
As born legislators their direct power was far greater than in the
nineteenth century. In the eighteenth, they made far more overt
attempts to determine the composition of the Lower House. Yet,
perhaps, all things considered, they were then, as a body, the most
incapable of taking a large view of the destinies of their country,
and of nourishing a deep sympathy with the condition of the peo
ple. But nevertheless they could not segregate themselves from
the people. They could not repose in safety upon exclusive pre
tensions ; and thus they headed the Revolution, and imparted to
it the somewhat aristocratic character which it has taken more
than another century to repair. They made no attempt to propor
tion representation by the numbers of the represented, or by the
amount they paid in taxation. They had no very clear insight into
the changes which had been produced by the rise of the trading
* Berkeley, " Works," vol. ii. p. 197.
THE NOBILITY AND ESQUIRES IN LONDON. 449
classes. They made no exertions to better the condition of the
poorest. They did not train their children to discharge the high
functions to 'which they were born. They had them taught dan
cing, fencing, and riding. It looks like a satire when Burnet recom
mends that the sons of the nobility should be instructed in geogra
phy and history. Nevertheless, he admits that in his time, four or
five lords, by their knowledge, good judgment, and integrity, had
raised the house of peers to a pitch of reputation that seemed be
yond expectation. *
The desire of the nobility and other landowners to congregate
in London was not an unnatural one, and was in some degree ab
solutely necessary when the Parliamentary system of government
became the rule under which England was to live. The jealousy
of commerce, and of the use of foreign commodities, made the pa
triot of the end of the seventeenth century mildly reprove the grow
ing desire of the rich to gather round the seat of luxury and fash
ion ; as the despot of the beginning of the century had attempted
forcibly to restrain this desire. " Heretofore," writes the descend
ant of John Hampden, " the gentry and nobility of England lived
altogether in the country, where they continually spent the product
of the land. Now they all flock to London, where their way of
living is quite different from that used heretofore ; and they do not
expend in proportion the third part of things of our product, to
what they did when they lived among their neighbours." f We
know, at the present day, that the chief evils of absenteeship are
moral evils ; that the landlord who is a mere receiver of rents,
without taking thought for the general welfare of the humbler
classes upon his estates, does not do his duty in that state of life
to which he has been called. " The yeomen and gentlemen of
smaller estates," adds Mr. Hampden, " are now, generally speak
ing, the only constant residents in the country." But even the gentle
men of -smaller estates were frequently craving for -" a Journey to
London." The dramatists and essayists exhibit the figures which
the boorish squire, and his wife and daughters, presented in the
novel pleasures and temptations of the metropolis. The squire was
too often in the tavern, where he was told the wits and the quality
were ready to welcome the stranger. Here he drank punch, the
favourite beverage, and found it stronger than his strongest Octo
ber ; or he played at hazard with sharpers, and went home penni-
* " Own Time," vol. vi. p. 207.
t Tract of 1692, in " State Tracts published during the reign of William III.
Vol, IV— 29
45 O HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
less. His ladies resorted to the theatre, which was not a school
of morality. They walked in the New Spring Gardens * in their
" hoop petticoats ; " and thus " invested in whalebone " thought
themselves " sufficiently secured against the approaches of an ill-
bred fellow." f But the smart gentlemen who hovered about " this
new-fashioned rotunda " could still whisper such words of compli
ment as ladies dare not now read in Wycherley and Congreve.
"Tbe Folly," a floating Coffee House, where ladies of very different
degrees of respectability were entertained by the beaux of the reign
of Anne, was another place of genteel resort, which the lower popu
lar literature has described with sympathising coarseness. To the
country visitors of London the fashionable amusement of the mas
querade was the most dangerous of pleasures. It was in vain that the
preacher and the moralist denounced this as a contagion of the worst
kind. The duchess and the courtezan equally frequented such an
assemblage — the peer of the parliament and the mercer's apprentice
from Covent Garden. The mask made the licentious even more
free than in their ordinary talk ; and though an English lady could
bear many coarse jokes and sly allusions without blushing, from the
masquerade she would take back to her wondering friends such
specimens of " polite conversation " as would corrupt the most
secluded districts for half a century. These excursions of the gen
try to London, however rare, at any rate spread the worst follies of
the town. The neglect of the indigent at home — the neglect not of
mere almsgiving but of kindly intercourse — was certainly one ofthe,
evil consequences of the habitual residence, and even of the occa
sional sojourn, of the gentry in the metropolis.
The worldly estate of the great body of the Clergy may in some
degree account for the low estimate of their condition and charac
ter which had been taken at this period. Their political action we
shall have to describe, in their senseless dislike of the great man
who had saved the English Church from ruin, and their puerile
hankerings after the dynasty that they had united to eject. The
revenue of each of the twenty-six " spiritual lords " has been reck
oned at about three times as much as that of an esquire. The in
come of " eminent clergymen " is estimated for each at little more
than one-fourth of that of a gentleman. The lesser clergyman
ranks, in point of the annual means for the support of his family,
as below the small freeholder; a little above the farmer; and not
very much above the handicraftsman. These incomes being taken
* Vauxhall. t " Spectator," No. 127, ,7„.
THE CLERGY. 45 1
upon the average of ten thousand livings, would undoubtedly leave
some of the clergy with a pittance not higher than that of the com
mon seaman, and even of the out-door labourer. Can we wonder,
therefore, that servility and coarseness were considered the charac
teristics of the class ? They went from the Grammar-school to the
College upon an exhibition or a sizarship which had its own humil
iations. If fortunate, they began their career as Chaplains in noble
or other privileged households, where it was a blessed fate if they
were treated with a; much respect as was bestowed upon the butler.
When they obtained a benefice they had to perform the most me
nial labours to extract from it the means of subsistence. In this
last stage, can we wjnder that some might be found, instead of
taking rank as gentlemen, drinking ale and smoking with the vil
lage cowkeeper ? Perhaps it was not the worst society for them.
But in spite of these familiar pictures of the addiction of the coun
try parson to low company, and of his necessary connection with
mean labours, may we not conside'r that there were many who felt
an honest pride in ploughing their own field, and feeding their own
hogs ; whose wives were spinning the wool of their own sheep, and
whose daughters were scouring their bricked kitchen, without men
tal degradation ? Burnet, who was a severe censurer of his breth
ren, admits that the greatest part of them live without scandal ;
but in the very next sentence he says, " I have observed the clergy
in all places throughout which I have travelled — Rapists, Lutherans,
Calvinists, and Dissenters : but of them all our clergy are much
the most remiss in their labours in private, and the least severe in
their lives."* In another place he speaks of the zeal of the
Romish clergy, and of Dissenters ; " But I must own, that the
main body of our clergy has always appeared dead and lifeless to
me, and instead of animating one another, they seem rather to lay
one asleep." f The right reverend friend of William' 1 1 1, had sus
tained many mortifications from the restlessness of the great body of
the country clergy ; from their intolerance ; from their extravagant
notions of Church supremacy ; from their narrow views of political
affairs. The eminent divines of that day were great scholars and
great reasoners. The whole course of human thought was tending
to the actual rather than to the ideal. The philosophy of Locke
' may be traced in many a powerful religious argument which could
confound the sceptic, but could not rouse the indifferent. TJie
divinity of that generation, and indeed of the next, was for tho
* " Own Time," vol. vi. p. 183. t Ibid., p. 179.
452 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
most part formal and unimpassioned. Methodism arose ; and the
most ignorant of the human race found nourishment and hope in
words which came home to their bosoms and understandings.
Tillotson reasoning to the benchers of Lincoln's Inn, and White-
field moving the colliers of Bristol to tears, are contrasts of which
the lessons were not speedily learnt in the Church, but which when
learnt could not be easily forgotten.
The historian of his own time, to do him justice, saw what was
chiefly wanting to make the clergy efficient for good. He exhorted
them " to labour more," instead of cherishing extravagant notions
of the authority of the Church. If to an exemplary course of life
in their own persons, clergymen would add a little more labour, —
not only performing public offices, and preaching to the edification
of the people, but watching over them, instructing them, exhorting,
reproving, and comforting them, as occasion is given, from house
to house, making their calling the business of their whole life, —
they would soon find their own minds grow to be in a better tem
per, and their people would show more esteem and regard for
them." We who have now the happiness to feel that the Clergy
are the great civilisers, also know how slowly this sage advice was
taken by them as a class.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, and long after, we
see no struggle against great social evils, on the part of the clergy
or the laity. Every attempt at social reform was left to the Leg
islature, which was utterly indifferent to those manifestations of
wretchedness and crime that ought to have been dealt with by the
strong hand. Education, in any large sense, there was none.
Disease committed its ravages, unchecked by any attempt to miti
gate the evils of standing pools before the cottage door, and pesti
lent ditches in the towns. These were not peculiar evils of the
last century-; they continued long beyond that century, because
they were the results of social ignorance. But there were evils so
abhorrent to humanity, that their endurance without the slightest
endeavour to mitigate or remove them was an opprobrium of that
age. The horrible state of the prisons was well known. The
nosegay laid on the desk of the judge at every assize proclaimed
that starvation and filth were sweeping away far more than per
ished by the executioner, terrible as that number was. The judge's
chaplain ate the sheriff's dinner ; and all was well unless a few
jurymen took the jail-fever. The justices never entered the jails.
The vicar heeded not the Saviour's reproach, — " I was sick and ir
GREAT SOCIAL EVILS. 453
prison, and ye visited me not." London, and all other great towns,
were swarming with destitute children, who slept in ash holes and
at the street doors. They were left to starve, or to become thieves
and in due course be hanged. The Church, in 1701, established
" the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts."
The worse than heathen at home "were left to swell the festering
mass of sin and sorrow, until the whole fabric of society was in
peril from its outcasts, and no man's life orproperty was safe. The
only evidence that was listened to of something wrong in the en
tire social economy was this : one-fifth of the whole population were
paupers. Locke attributed the rapid increase of the poor-rates to
"the relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners.''
Those who by their rank or their office were especially called to
guide the ignorant, and to discourage the licentious, were certainly
to be charged with some neglect of their great duties, if such were
the causes of pauperism.
The evils of society, at the opening of the eighteenth century,
were not laid bare by publicity, the one first steplowards their
remedy. There was only one popular writer who approached
social questions with any practical knowledge joined to sound
benevolence. He . was Daniel Defoe. He looked for remedies,
not in drivelling schemes for setting the poor to work under paro
chial superintendence, but he told the capitalist and the labourer
how to raise their condition under the natural laws of demand and
supply. His " Review " was the first periodical work that sought
readers amongst the people. Addison and Steele saw that a
popular Literature was to be created ; and from that time the lay
preachers became effective. Newspapers multiplied. But even
Addison could not see that they were capable of becoming great
instruments of public good. It is remarkable that the man who
did as much as any one to prove the efficiency of the Press, should
have thus chosen to "hesitate dislike " against the humblest labour
ers in the same field. Perhaps he had a foresight of the power
that was to grow out of small beginnings. " Of all the ways and
means by which this political humour hath been propagated among
the People of Great Britain, I cannot single out any so prevalent
and universal, as the late constant application, of the Press to the
publishing of State matters. We hear of several that are newly
erected in the country, and set apart for this particular use. For,
it seems the people of Exeter, Salisbury, and other large towns,
are resolved to be as great politicians as the inhabitants of London
454 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and Westminster ; and deal out such news of their own printing,
as is best suited to the genius of the market-people, and the taste
of the county. One cannot but be sorry, for the sake of these
places, that such a pernicious machine is erected among them." *
We have left for the conclusion of this general view of the chief
aspects of England's social condition about the beginning of the
last century, a very brief allusion to those " liberal Arts and Scien
ces," which were slowly, but very surely, to change the half-devel
oped industry of the time of Anne to the marvellous proportions
of the commercial era of the first sovereign lady who came after that
queen. In the fifteen thousand engaged in these liberal pursuits
in 1688, we must include the medical profession. The study of
facts had succeeded to the theories and empirical remedies of the
school before Harvey and Sydenham. Botany had been systema-
tised by Ray ; and the medical student had the opportunity of be
coming familiar with plants in the " Physic Garden." The Royal
Society was incorporated by charter in 1662; and commenced the
publication of its Transactions in 1665. This was a great step
towards popularising science ; and if many of the papers which
were read at the Society's meetings appear now to be frivolous,
they kept alive a spirit of investigation which in time produced
results beyond the amusement of the small knot of virtuosi in the
capital, and in some of the chief towns. But, many years before
the end of the seventeenth century, that great genius had arisen
whose discoveries made the astonished philosopher of France figure
Newton as " entirely disengaged from matter," and the enthusias
tic poet of England exclaim, " God said let Newton be, and there
was light." f In noticing the wondrous powers of intellect which
called forth such tributes from contemporaries, and which succeed
ing generations have gratefully echoed, we desire chiefly to point
out that the discoverer of the law of universal Gravitation was
equally fitted for the solution of a problem that might appear
capable of being solved by minds of an inferior order. The great
reform of the Currency, one of the most difficult operations of the
ministers of William III., was carried through under the advice of
Newton, working at the same question of practical utility with
Locke. It is only just to the statesmen of the seventeenth century
* " Freeholder," No. 53, June 22, 1716.
t It is a worthy occupation of a life which, in its closing years, is more elevated by
science than excited by politics, for Lord Brougham to preside over the iuauguration of
a statute of Newton, at Grantham, on the 22nd September, 1858.
LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES. 455
to point out that, in several instances, they manifested their con
victions of the direct value of philosophical research and discovery.
From the foundation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, in
1676, may be dated the progress of scientific navigation. It would
be impossible to calculate the amount of obligation which English
Commerce alone owes to the labours of the great men who have
followed in the track of Galileo and Kepler, from the Newton and
Halley of the age which we have now imperfectly glanced at, to the
Hers.chel and Airy of o^^r own time.
Of the indirect power of Science to give its impulse to the
commonest labours of man — to call forth new exercises of industry,
to improve the processes already in existence, to furnish higher
aims to manufactures and commerce, to bring remote regions
within the range of maritime communication, to carry forward the
heaven-ordained design of spreading the blessings of civilisation
over the earth — no one who looks at what England was a century
and a half ago, and what England is now, can have the smallest
doubt. But it must not be forgotten that our country was a soil
adapted for the reception of this seed ; that abstract Science would
have remained in a great degree unproductive for practical ends,
except its powers had been developed amongst an energetic race
living under a system of public liberty. Amidst such a race the
spark of knowledge does not glimmer in mere speculative thought,
but becomes a fire, diffusing its warmth over an improving country.
Governments may be slow in seeing this indissoluble connection
between the discoveries of the philosopher and the province ofthe
statesmen. But if in a land of freedom they retard not the work
which they can never more than feebly aid, and even if they at
tempt to retard it, mind will assert its own empire, and produce
the results which constitute the essential differences between the
age before the steam-engine and the age of the electric telegraph.
456
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
A Scheme of the Income and Expense of the several FUmilies in
England, Calculated for the Year 1688.
Number of
Families.
Ranks, Degrees, Titles, and Quali
fications.
Ileads per
Family.
Number of
Persons.
Yearly In
come per
Family.
Yearly In
come in
General,
160 26
800600
3,000
12,000 5>«x> 5,000
2,000 8,000
10,000 z,ooo 8,000
40,000
120,000150,000 15,000
50,000
60,000 5,000
4,000
Temporal Lords
Spiritual Lords
Baronets
Knights
Esquires
Gentlemen
Persons in greater offices and
places *
Persons in lesser offices and
places
Eminent merchants and traders
by sea . ._
Lesser merchants and traders
by sea
Persons in the law
Eminent clergymen
Lesser clergymen
Freeholders of the better sort .
Freeholders of the lesser sort.
Farmers
Persons in liberal arts and sci
ences
Shopkeepers and tradesmen
Artisans and handicraftsmen.. ,
Naval officers ,
Military officers
500,586 50,000
364,000
400,000 35,000
Common seamen
Labouring people and out-ser
vants
Cottagers and paupers
Common soldiers
Vagrants, as gipsies, thieves,
beggars, &e
i»349. 5&:
Neat totals.
16 13
67655V2
5
4
5M3
3!i3>»
4l'3
6,400 520
12,800 7,800
30,00096,00040,00030,00c 16,000
48,000 70,00012,000
40,000
280,000
660,000 750,000 75,000
225,000240,000 20,000 16,000
2,675,520 150,000
1,275,000
1,300,000 70,000
5,500,520
£
3.2°° 1,300 880
650450
280
240 o
120 o
400 o
200 o
154 o
72 o
50 o
91 o
55 °
42 10
60 o
45 o
3380
60
15 6 10
512,000 33,800
704,000
390,000
1,200,000
2,88o,000 1,200,000 600,000
800,000
I,600,000
1,540,000 144,000
400,000
3,640,000 6,00,000
6,75,000 900,000
2,250,000 Z,2So,000 400,000240,000
34,488,800 1,000,000
5,460,0002,000,000 490,000 60,000
32 5 43,498,8oa
Note.— Mr. Gregory King, the author of this Scheme, considers that the 21 classes,
whose families amount to 500,586, are accumulators, spending less than their income ;
and that the other classes require some support beyond their earnings— that they decrease
the National Capital.
There are some few discrepancies between the items and the totals in the above Table
but they do not affect the conclusions to be derived from this " Scheme."
CHARACTER OF WILLIAM. 457
CHAPTER XXIII.
Resolution aud conduct of the Prince of Orange set forth in the Proclamation of William
and Mary— Character of William. — Aspirants for office.— The king's ministers.—
The judges.— Jealousy of William's Dutch friends.— The Convention declared to be
a Parliament. — Oath of Allegiance. — Refused by some spiritual and lay peers. — Non
jurors. — A Supply voted. — The principle of appropriation established. — Comprehen
sion Bill.— Reform of the Liturgy.— The Test Act.— The Toleration Act.— High and
Low Church.— Mutiny at Ipswich. — The first Mutiny Act. — Suspension of the Ha
beas Corpus Act.— Bill of Indemnity postponed.— The Coronation Oath.— The Cor
onation- —War with France.
" Whereas it hath pleased Almighty God, in his great mercy
to this kingdom, to vouchsafe us a merciful deliverance from Popery
and arbitrary power ; and that our preservation is due, next under
God, to the resolution and conduct of his highness the prince of
Orange." Such were the opening words of the proclamation,
which, on the 13th of February, 1689, announced to the people of
England that William and Mary were king and queen of these
realms. The same " resolution and conduct " which had delivered
England from the most imminent dangers, had to support the man
who was acknowledged as her deliverer, amidst perils and diffi
culties of which not the least were the treachery, the self-seeking,
the ingratitude of the greater number of those who had called him
to rule over them. For thirteen years this Dutch William almost
stood alone as the representative of what was heroic in England.
He is not a hero to look upon, according to the vulgar notion of
the hero. " He had a thin and weak body. . . . He was always
asthmatical, and the dregs of the small-pox falling on his lungs, he
had a constant deep cough." * This prince had no power of sub
duing men to his will by rhetorical arts. He was a master of
seven languages, speaking "Dutch, French, English, and German,
equally well," as Burnet records. But his possession of this ne
cessary accomplishment of a prince did not lead him to the ambition
of employing words to conceal his thoughts. " He spoke little and
very slowly, and most commonly with a disgusting dryness," |
* Burnet, " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 547- t Ibid.
458 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
says Burnet. " He speaks well, and to the point," says one of the
French negotiators of the peace of Ryswick He came amongst
courtiers who recollected the charm of the manners of Charles the
Second — -that fascinating gossip which always evaded " the point "
— and in a few weeks they talked of "the morose temper of the
prince of Orange." * Under this frjgid demeanour superficial ob
servers could comprehend nothing of the marvellous energy of
this man of action ; and they descanted upon " the slothful, sickly
temper of the new king." f Though " he had a memory that amazed
all about him," his great abilities were not generally recognised,
for he had few of the showy qualities which pass for genius. Men
of that time had not studied the science of Lavater and Spurz-
heim, yet they had a notion that "foreheads villainous low," were
symbols of imbecility : and when they looked upon the " large
front " of this cautious undemonstrative stranger, they might per
chance have thought that there was something in him, and that
there was meaning in the silent eloquence of his bright and
sparkling eyes." There was no vivacity in the man — "solemn
and serious, seldom cheerful, and but with a few," says Bur
net. Yet he managed to use his talents, such as they were, not
for display but for service. In war he carried the hearts of all
along with him by his fire and his daring. In negotiation he ac
complished the most difficult objects by his perseverance, and,
above all, by his truthfulness. Tallard, the ambassador from Louis
XIV., writes to his master: "He is honourable in all he does;
his conduct is sincere. ... If he once enters into a treaty with
your majesty, he will scrupulously adhere to it." X The same
impartial observer bears testimony to his sagacity : " He is very
quick-sighted, and has a correct judgment, and will soon per
ceive that we are trifling with him if we protract matters too
much." § " Few men had stronger passions," according to Bur
net ; but "few men had the art of concealing and governing pas
sion more than he had." He disarmed the hostility of factions by
his seeming imperturbability "The wishes of the king are
checked," writes Tallard, " and it is only by his extreme patience,
and by incessantly applying remedies to everything, that he suc
ceeds in a part of what he desires." |[ And yet from the depths
of this seemingly impassive nature breaks out the secret agony of
• Evelyn, " Diary," January 29. t Ibid^ March 2q_
t Grimblot— " Letters of William and Louis," vol. ii, pp. a% and 56.
J Ibid., p. 54. U /bid., vol. ii. p. 233.
THE KING'S MINISTERS. 459
his real sensitiveness, told only to his friend Heinsius : " Matters
in Parliament here are taking a turn which drives me mad." *
Such was the man who was called to rule over England, in times
when a statesman not to be treacherous, unpatriotic, corrupt, was
a rare distinction. " He is generally hated by all the great men,
and the whole of the nobility," says the French ambassador, after
William had been ten years on the throne, f But Tallard adds :
" It is not the same with the people, who are very favourably in
clined towards him, yet less so than at the beginning." What this
prince had done for England, from the beginning to the end, to
raise her in the scale of nations, to save her from foreign dom
ination, to keep her safe from domestic tyranny, to uphold that
liberty of conscience which is the basis of true Protestantism, to
make constitutional government a reality in spite of the low am
bition of ignorant factions, — this, the people of that generation
could not wholly appreciate, however they might feel that it was
good for them to be under a ruler who knew that he had a work to
do in the world, and who did it.
" Innumerable were the crowds who solicited for and expected
offices," says a bystander in 1689, who saw the progress of the
game.t " The pasture was not large enough for the flock," writes
an anonymous historian of the next generation. § In those days
statesmen were justly open to the reproach of seeking high place
out of the lust of gain, rather than for the gratification of an hon
ourable ambition. The official salaries were extravagantly large.
It was no part of the policy 'of the aristocratic movers in the settle
ment of 1689 to disturb the lavish bounties of the Stuarts to their
obsequious servants. But the people felt these burdens. In 1690,
Sir Charles. Sedley, in a debate on the Supply, said of William,
"He is a brave and generous prince, but he is a young king, en
compassed and hemmed in by a company of crafty old courtiers.
To say no more, some have places of 3000/., some of 6000/., and
others of 8600/. per annum." | In the lower offices of the house
hold and of the revenue, the pay was disproportionately large, and
the perquisites still larger. The coach and six horses of the Comp
troller of the Customs was a deep offence to the country gentlemen.Tf
We may readily imagine that in such a total change as that of
1689, there was a scramble for office, in which the real principles
* Grimblot— " Letters of William and Louis," vol. i. p. 355. t Ibid., vol. i. p. 466.
t Evelyn, "Diary," February 21. § Ralph, "History," vol. ii. p- 57—1746.
II "Parliamentary History," vol. v- col. 562, H Ibid., col. 670.
460 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
of public men were severely tested. The king — called to the suc
cour of England by the united voice of men of all parties, and
placed upon the throne with the partial approbation of many who
were opposed to the principles of his most ardent supporters, —
ventured upon an experiment in government, which to us would be
perfectly unintelligible if we were to judge of it by the practice of
modern times. He desired to govern by a balance of parties ; he
sought to carry that desire into effect by choosing his ministers
frora parties whose principles were diametrically ppposed, each to
the other. To comprehend why it was thought possible to twist
such a rope of sand into a state-cable, we must bear in mind that,
under the system which had passed away, of governing as much as
possible without parliaments, an administration was merely com
posed of men who were thought qualified to serve the king in their
respective offices without any common agreement upon particular
measures. An active king, such as Charles I. and James II., was
in many respects his own administrator. William III. was willing
to give the same personal superintendence to the conduct of that
great policy, whose advancement had chiefly moved him to contend
for the English throne. He would himself conduct the foreign re
lations of the country, for which duty, indeed, he was more fitted
than any man. But his confidential advisers in domestic politics
should be officers who had influence with the two great parties in
the State, and with the sub-divisions of the Whig and Tory fac
tions. There was Halifax, who was known as the Trimmer, — one
who was selected to tender the crown to William and Mary, but
who had, taken no part in the first steps which deprived James of
the crown. There was Danby, who had been impeached under
Charles II. for his arbitrary and corrupt practices, and who had
only given a modified support to the present change of government.
There was Nottingham, whose nomination to office was a propitia
tion to the High Church party. There was Shrewsbury, who had
borne a distinguished part in the battle which had resulted in the
great victory of the Whigs. But the Revolution was the triumph
of Whig principles ; and thus it was natural, in the hour of tri
umph, after some concessions to open adversaries or doubtful
friends, that the Whigs should have the larger share of the spoils.
The Great Seal was put in Commission. The great office of Lord
High Treasurer was not filled up, but Commissioners of the Treas
ury were appointed. In the same way the duties of Lord High
Admiral were entrusted to a Board. These arrangements for Com-
THE KING'S DUTCH FRIENDS. 46 1
missions were considered as politic devices "to gratify the more." *
One signal benefit of the great change was manifested to the na
tion — there would be no attempt to suppress public opinion by the
agency of corruption on the judgment seat : " Nothing gave a more
general satisfaction than the naming of the judges. The king or
dered every privy counsellor to bring a list of twelve; and out of
these, twelve very learned and worthy judges were chosen." f
Somers, to whose eloquence and sagacity the success of the Revo
lution was so much indebted, was named Solicitor-General.
In the spirit of that mean dislike of foreigners which character
ises the vulgar Englishman, a writer of our own day thus records
one of the complaints against the arrangements of 1689: "Three
of the king's Dutch followers, Bentinck, Auverquerque, and Zuy-
listein, were placed by him about his person, — with a disdain, not
of the prejudices, but of the feelings of the nation, which might
have recalled to mind his Norman predecessor." { There were
others about William's person, who were amongst the most true-
hearted of Englishmen. The Duke of Devonshire was Lord
Steward ; the earl of Dorset was Lord Chamberlain ; Sidney, the
brother of the republican, Algernon, was a gentleman of the bed
chamber. Yet William is held to have outraged the national feel
ing because he gave one place, not of political importance, but of
necessary companionship, to Bentinck, the friend of his youth —
the man who had nursed him in sickness, who had stood by him
in battle ; because he gave another to Auverquerque, who had
saved his life by personal intrepidity in the field of St. Dennis, in
1678 ; and another to Zuylistein, whose father had earned a debt
of gratitude from the saviour of Holland, by perishing in his cause,
when Luxemburg stormed his quarters in 1672. We doubt if the
people — not the mere place-hunters — were so unreasonable as to
expect that their deliverer, as they called him, should be isolated
amongst strangers ; should have wholly to make new friends ;
should cast aside all memories of old affections ; should forget all
the associations of that life of toil and danger which he had endured
from his twenty-second year to this his thirty-ninth. They could
not surely forget that William was Stadtholder of Holland, as well
as King of England ; that the interests of both countries were the
same ; that the first magistrate of each of the two free states of
Europe was embarked in a contest against the absolute monarch
* Evelyu, " Diary," March 8. t Burnet, vol. iv. p. 7.
t Continuation of Mackintosh's " History/' by William Wallace, vol. viii. p. 300.
462 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
who aimed at universal dominion ; that for the proper conduct of
this great enterprise, it were well that he should have some few
faithful friends, to whom he could pour out his heart without dread
of fickleness and faithlessness. Yet against such popular preju
dices It is hard to contend. William must have felt that the mere
circumstance of his being a foreigner was a serious impediment
to his power of doing his duty efficiently ; and thus amidst unde
served suspicions, and causeless jealousies, he pined for that hap
pier state from which he had been called ; he felt the want of that
admiration which surrounded him at tbe Hague ; he intensely
longed for the return of the tranquillity that he had thrown away
when he quitted his quiet home at Loo.
King William opened the Parliament on the 18th of February.
He addressed the two Houses in a very brief speech, composed of
the plainest words : " I have lately told you how sensible I am of
your kindness, and how much I value the confidence you have
reposed in me. And I am come hither to assure you, that I shall
never do anything that may justly lessen your good opinion of me."
The chief point of the speech was a recommendation " to consider
of the most effectual ways of preventing the inconveniences which .
may arise by delays ; and to judge what forms may be most proper,
to bring those things to pass for the good of the nation, which I am
confident are in all your minds, and which I, on my part, shall be
always ready to promote." The possible delays to which the king
alluded grew out of the agitation of the question, whether the Con
vention which had altered the Succession could continue to sit as a
Parliament. The Lords immediately passed a Bill "for removing
and preventing all questions and disputes touching the assembly
and sitting of this present Parliament," in which it was declared
that the Convention which assembled on the 22nd of January are
the two Houses of Parliament, " as if they had been summoned
according to the usual form." But in.the Commons the question
was debated with great violence, upon what were maintained as
constitutional principles. There had been two months of excite
ment since James had quitted the kingdom; and the inevitable
re-action of opinion made many eager to unsettle the Settlement.
Old Serjeant Maynard maintained that this was not a time to stand
upon forms. " There is a great danger in sending out writs at this
time, if you consider what a ferment the nation is in. I think the
clergy are out of their wits." The outrages that James had
attempted upon the national religion were by many forgotten. The
OATH OF ALLEGIANCE. 463
dread of Popery was extinguished in the dread of Dissent. This
was the first move of a powerful faction when they agitated the
question whether the Convention were a Parliament ; thus to post
pone the formal adhesion of the Church and the Laity to the new
sovereign, and to delay the grant of supplies, at a time of impend-
ding danger on every side. The state of the parlimentary con
stituencies — a state that remained unaltered for nearly a.century and
a half — presented a wide field for intrigue and corruption. The
real opinion of the people upon such a vital question as that of
uncompromising fealty to a new dynasty could not be fairly arrived
at, when Cornwall, with its twenty-five thousand householders,
returned one-third more members than Yorkshire with its hundred
thousand ; and when Sussex, another great seat of decayed boroughs
returned nearly four times as many members as Middlesex and
London. In this question of the legality of the Parliament, the
constituencies were not however called upon to decide. The Bill
was passed ; and it was accompanied with a clause that no person
should sit and vote in either House of Parliament without taking
the prescribed oath to be faithful and bear true allegiance to king
William and queen Mary, according to the form prescribed in the
Declaration of Rights.* The ist of March was the day after which
no seat could be taken in Parliament unless allegiance had thus
been previously sworn. The archbishop of Canterbury and seven
other spiritual peers absented themselves, as well as various lay
peers. In the Commons the absentees were not so proportionately
numerous. The Jacobite party sustained a defeat ; but the ex
ample of the prelates operated upon many of the inferior Clergy,
when the time arrived in which they also were to declare in the
most solemn manner their adherence to the new government. An
oath, in place of the old oath of allegiance and supremacy, was to
be taken by all lay persons holding offices, and by all in possession
of any benefice or other ecclesiastical preferment. Those church
men who did not take this oath on or before the 1st of August
were to be suspended ; and if at the end of six months they con
tinued to refuse, were to be deprived.f About four hundred refused
the oath, and, losing their benefices, were, during three reigns, a
constant source of irritation and alarm, under the name, familiarised
to us by our lighter as well as graver literature, of Nonjurors.
Whatever opinions may be entertained of the wisdom of this resist
ance, we must in this case, as in the previous cases of the Episcc-
• * i Gul. & Mar. c. «. t Ibid., c. 8.
464 HISTORY Ol'' ENGLAND.
palians ejected by the Long Parliament, and of the Puritans ejected
after the Restoration, respect the self-denial of those who suffered
for conscience sake. Their devotion to the principle of hereditary
right might be a weakness, but it was not a crime. The policy of
their deprivation was very questionable. Those who took the
oaths, and satisfied their principles by intriguing and preaching
against the government de facto, were really more dangerous than
the eminent divines, such as Ken, and Sherlock, and Leslie, who
openly refused to supjjort it by their declared allegiance. Violent
and factious men might bring contempt on the name of Nonjurors ;
but many of the less distinguished among them set about getting
their bread by the honest exercise of their talents and learning. If
some became fawning domestic chaplains to plotting Jacobite lords,
others kept themselves above want by literary labours, however
humble. John Blackbourn, the. ejected incumbent of two livings,
earned his bread as corrector of the press for William Bowyer.*
In this first Session of the first Parliament of the Revolution,
amidst signal manifestations of a narrow and a factious spirit, we
have abundant evidence of statesmanlike sagacity. The king
looked upon many unsettled questions with a wider range of view
than his own Council, or the Grand Council of the Nation. He
was confident in the justice and necessity of the objects for which
he desired to have his hands strengthened. The Parliament refused
its confidence. The king desired to carry out the fullest principles
of religious liberty that were consistent with the public 'safety.
The Parliament thought that there was a very strict limit even for
toleration. And yet, out of these differences, resulted much practi
cal good. The king wished to have ample means for maintaining
the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, for the pacification of Scot
land, for giving efficiency to the confederacy against the ambition of
the French. The Commons manifested a greater jealousy of entrust
ing the supplies to their deliverer than they had manifested towards
their oppressor. There were immediate evil consequences. The
Roman Catholic adherents of James devastated the Protestant set
tlements in Ireland ; the standard of resistance was successfully
reared in Scotland ; Louis threatened England with invasion, and
was marching a great army upon Holland. But the benefits of the
jealousy of the Commons are felt by us to this day. Those Whio-s
who carried their confidence in the intentions of William to an
extreme, were of opinion that the Revenue which had been settled
* Nichols' " Literary Anecdotes," vol. iii. p. 252.
APPROPRIATION ESTABLISHED. 465
upon king James for life should revert to the sovereign who had
taken his place. Some Tories, who were adverse to the govern
ment, but were eager to secure power by a simulated confidence in
the king, agreed in this view. The majority in Parliament success
fully resisted it. • William had proposed to his Council that the
Hearth-money, or Chimney-tax, should be abolished. Sir Robert
Howard told the house that the king said, "It was much in his
thoughts." Sir Robert added, " I could wish the house had heard
his discourse in all this business ; and in all his discourse from
Exeter hither, he expressed his inclination to do good to the
people." * To abolish the Hearth-money, an especial tax upon the
poor, was a duty to which William was called by the earnest solici
tations of the crowds who followed his march from Torbay to
London. But he frankly said to Parliament, " as in this his majesty
doth consider the ease of the subject, so he doth not doubt but
you will be careful of the support of the crown." The official
biographer of James II. sneers at William's self-denial; "He
wheedled them [the Commons] with a remission of chimney-money,
when he was well assured he should be no loser by his generosity,
and that it would be only like throwing water into a dry pump to
make it suck better below, and cast it out with more abundance
above," f This was not exactly the best mode of wheedling the
rich country gentlemen, by removing a tax from the cottage to put
it in some shape upon the mansion. Yet the Commons respected
the motive of the king, and substituted less oppressive taxes. But
they declined to grant the temporary revenue for the lives of the
king and queen. The hereditary revenue they did not touch.
Moreover they resolved that whatever sums they voted should be
appropriated to particular services, according to estimates. This
principle, partially adhered to in the time 01 Charles II., but wholly
disregarded by the parliament of his successor, has from the time
of the Revolution been the great security of the nation against the
wanton and corrupt expenditure of the Crown. Parliament may
make lavish votes ; but there must be a distinct vote in every case
for the service of a particular department. It is this which renders
the legislative power so really supreme in England ; it is this which
renders it impossible that an executive can subsist except in con
cord with the representatives of the people. We therefore owe a
debt of gratitude to the Parliament of the Revolution that they
* " Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 153.
t " Life of James II." vol. ii., p. 310
Vol. IV.— 30
466 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
clung to a principle and established a practice which have never
since been departed from. A temporary vote of credit is some
times asked under extraordinary circumstances ; but the consti
tutional right of appropriation, always secured in the express words
of the grant of supply, is the general rule which no minister would
dare to ask the representatives of the people to forego.
But if the Parliament of William and Mary is to be commended
for their jealousy of the king in the matter of Revenue, we may
doubt if they were equally wise in halting far short of- his known
wishes in the great questions of religious liberty, and religious
union. If the king's abstract sense of what was due to the con
sciences of men could have been carried out, we might have been
saved from a century and a quarter of bitter animosities ; and the
Church of England might have been more secure and more influen
tial, than during the long period when the Test Act remained in
force against Protestants, and Roman Catholics were not only
ineligible to civil officers, but had to undergo what we now justly
regard as persecution. But in this, as in all other cases, no reform
can be permanent which is premature. William desired such an
alteration in the ritual and discipline of the Church, as had been
vainly attempted from the time of James I., so as to satisfy the
scruples of non-conformists who were honestly averse to separation.
He advanced so far as to have what was called a Comprehension
Bill introduced into the House of Lords, by a zealous churchman,
the earl of Nottingham. It passed the Peers in a mutilated shape ;
was coldly received by the Commons ; and dropt through upon a
reference to Convocation. That ecclesiastical parliament had
transacted no real business since 1665, when they gave up the
right of taxing themselves. They had now been summoned, as
had been usual; but, contrary to use, important measures were
to be submitted to them at a time of violent divisions amongst the
Clergy. A considerable number of eminent divines were disposed
to such changes in the Services of the Church as would conciliate
the moderate Presbyterians and others who conscientiously ob
jected to certain portions of the ritual. A Commission was ap
pointed to consider what changes were desirable. A Report was
drawn up by the moderate Churchmen, such as Tillotson, and
submitted to the Convocation. The " rigid " or high-church party
had there prevailed ; and their prolocutor, Dr. Jane, when presented
to the bishop of London, proclaimed the resolve of the majority, in
the words of the barons of Henry III., — " Nolumus leges Anglia
THE LITURGY. — TEST ACT. 467
mutari." The Comprehension Bill, and the Reform of the Liturgy,
went to the ground together.
Another ruling desire of the king was that all Protestants
should be eligible to employments. On the occasion of giving his
assent to two Bills, on the 16th of March, he said, " I am, with all
the expedition I can, filling up the vacancies that are in offices and
places of trust by this Revolution. I know you are sensible
there is a necessity of some law to settle the oaths to be taken by
all persons to be admitted to such places. I recommend to your
care to make a speedy provision for it; and as I doubt not you will
sufficiently provide against Papists, so I hope you will leave room
for the admission of all Protestants that are willing and able to
serve." William proposed this at the time when the question was
under debate, whether the Clergy should be required to take the
oaths. He proposed it without consulting his Council, in the hope
that the two violent parties would agree to a compromise — that the
Whigs would not press the oath of allegiance upon the Clergy ; that
the Tories would not press the Sacramental Test upon the Dissen
ters. He was deceived in his expectations. The Test Act re*
mained in force against nonconformists. The Bill which deprived
the nonjuring Clergy of their benefices was carried.
The last and the least objectionable wish of the kingwas agreed
to, after long debate — that Dissenters should not be molested in
the celebration of their worship. The Toleration Act — " An Act
for exempting their majesties' Protestant subjects dissenting from
the Church of England from the penalties of certain laws " — was a
signal relief from a heavy burden, long borne by indignant sufferers.
Judged by the opinions of our own day the Toleration Act was a
very imperfect boon, requiring from dissenting ministers and
teachers subscription to certain articles of faith, as contained in
the Thirty-nine articles of the Church, with the exception of the
34th, 35th, and 36th Articles, and of those words of the 20th Ar
ticle which declared that the Church had power to decree rights or
ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith. The Protest
ants who "scruple the baptising, of infants," were further exempted
from subscribing part of the 27th Article. The. Quakers were ex
empted, upon a declaration of fidelity, and a simple profession of
their Christian belief. The Act of Toleration only relaxed the
severe enactments of the two former reigns, under this and other
conditions, without providing for their repeal. Yet eventually,
this famous Statute wasa measure of real'relief, f Or its cumbrous
468 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and impracticable conditions gradually fell into disuse. We may
judge of the satisfaction it gave to Dissenters, by the enthusiastic
plaudits of Defoe, in calling, upon his dissenting brethren, " an
nually to commemorate by a standing law among themselves, that
great day of their deliverance, when it pleased God to tread down
persecution, oppression, church-tyranny, and state-tyranny, under
the feet of the law, and to establish the liberty of their consciences,
which they had so long prayed for, in a public and legal tolera
tion " * The ministers of dissenting meeting-houses had thus no
longer reason to dread informations under the Act of Uniformity
and the Five Mile Acts. Their followers were discharged from
all apprehension of penalties for attending Conventicles, or for ne
glecting the worship of the Establishment, provided they took the
oath of allegiance, and subscribed the declaration against Popery
prescribed by the Statute of Charles II. The Protestant Dissen
ters were relieved by Act of Parliament from those restraints which
James II. attempted to remove by the dispensing power. The
Papists were specifically excluded from this relief ; and thus the
statutory indulgence was welcomed by Presbyterians, Independ
ents, Baptists, and Quakers, as much for what it denied to others
as for what it gave to themselves. But inasmuch as it narrowed
the area of state intolerance, it rendered a large proportion of the
Clergy more than ever intolerant towards those legally tolerated.
The kingwas brought up as a Calvinist ; and thus his tendencies
towards religious freedom were always suspected as having for
their end something adverse to the Anglican church. Swift, wri
ting in 171 1, in the spirit of triumphant Toryism, says, "the Rev
olution being wholly brdught about by Church of England hands,
they hoped one good consequence of it would be the reliev
ing us from the encroachments of Dissenters as well as those
of Papists." The hope was happily disappointed. The Dissenters
were no longer to be hunted by the constable, and imprisoned by
the justice of peace. "They," says Swift, "had just made a
shift to save a tide and join with the Prince of Orange, when they
found all was desperate with their protector king James ; and ob
serving a party then forming against the old principles in Church
and State, under the name of Whigs and Low-churchmen, they
listed themselves of it,' where they have ever since continued."!
In a subsequent paper, Swift affirms that the distinction of High
and Low Church, " which came in some time after the Revolution,"
* " Review," quoted in Wilson's "Defoe," vol. i., p. 181. t " Examiner," No. 37.
MUTINY AT IPSWICH. 469
was raised by the Dissenters," in order to break the church party
by dividing the members into high and low ; and the opinions
raised that the high joined with the Papists, inclined the low to
fall in with the Dissenters." * The unchristian hatreds of the
Revolution gave their colour to the politics of two reigns. Since
the accession of the house of Brunswick, these polemics have been
gradually diluted, so as to impart at last the faintest tinge to the
real course of public policy. Very slowly has the hold of intoler
ance of all kinds been relaxed. But as past years have diminished
the length and breadth of that debateable land, where deadly con
troversialists once fought a. loutrance, may we not hope that suc
ceeding years will completely reduce the old battle-field to the
dimensions of a pleasant tilting-ground, where blunt lances and
daggers of lath shall leave no scars after a gentle and joyous pas-
sage-at-arms. One of the most important securities for the liberties of Eng
land was accomplished at the Revolution. In the Declaration of
Rights it was maintained " That the raising or keeping a Standing
Army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be vvith con
sent of Parliament, is against law." An accidental occurrence
gave a legislative shape to this doctrine, which from 1689 has been
invariably adhered to. The English regiments which had served
under James II. were not in a complacent humour towards his
foreign successor. They looked with jealousy upon the Dutch
guards that had attended William to Whitehall ; and they took
various occasions of manifesting their dislike to the new govern
ment. They prevented the people lighting bonfires at Cirencester
when the king and queen were proclaimed. At Newbury and
Abingdon they would not allow the town crier to say, "God bless
king William and queen Mary." " The old army is rather grown
worse than mended," said a violent Whig. " I believe the black
coats and the "red coats to be the grievances of the nation." f
This discontent took an alarming form. Under the treaty of
Nimeguen, England promisedv succours to the States-General, in
the event of France being at war with them. France had declared
war. Troops in the service of England were ordered to enbark
for the continent. On the 1 5th of March, it was announced in the
House of Commons that lord Dumbarton's regiment— composed
chiefly of Scotchmen— had mustered at Ipswich ; had seized the
artillery ; and had made proclamation of king James. The Com-
* " Examiner," No. 44. t Howe. X " Parliamentary History," vol. vTtol. 137-
470 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
mons immediately voted an address to the king, " to desire him to
take effectual care to suppress the soldiers that are now in rebel
lion." The king quietly replied "that he had already appointed
three regiments of dragoons, with orders to stop them, and bring
ihem to their duty." One of the most distinguished of the Dutch
officers headed these troops. He came up with them near Slea-
ford, where, after a feeble show of resistance, they surrendered.
They were marched up to London. They had been guilty of high
treason, in levying war against the king ; and a few were brought
to trial at the county assizes for Suffolk. But no life was forfeited.
The government acted with a judicious mercy; and this regiment,
now the first of the line, served William faithfully in his hard
campaigns. This occurrence produced the first Mutiny Bill. The
preamble of the Act sufficiently explains its necessity, and the
caution with which the principle of a Standing Army, governed by
martial law, was adopted: "Whereas the raising or keeping a
Standing Army within this kingdom in time of peace, unless it be
with consent of Parliament, is against Law. And whereas it is
judged necessary by their Majesties and this present Parliament,
that during this time of danger several of the forces which are now
on foot should be continued and others raised for the safety of the
kingdom, for the common defence of the Protestant Religion, and
for the reducing of Ireland. And whereas no man may be fore
judged of life or limb or subjected to any kind of punishment by
martial law, or in any other manner than by the judgment of his
peers and according to the known and established laws of this
realm. Yet nevertheless it being requisite for retaining such
forces as are or shall be raised during this exigence of affairs in
their duty, an exact discipline be observed. And that soldiers who
shall mutiny or stir up sedition, or shall desert their majesties'
service be brought to a more exemplary and speedy punishment
than the usual forms of Law will allow."* The Mutiny Act was
limited to a duration of six months. It was necessarilv/enewed,
again and again, during the reign of William. A standing army
became an integral part of the government of this country, whether
during peace or during war. But Parliament always held its
effectual control over the executive, so as to prevent any abuse of
military power, by never passing a Mutiny Bill for a longer term
than a year. For one hundred and sixty-nine years the statute
book has continued to have its " Act for punishing Mutiny and
* i Gul. & Mar. c. 5.
THE FIRST MUTINY ACT. 47 1
Desertion ; " and in the Act of the 21st of Victoria, as in the Act
of the ist of William and Mary, it is still recited that the raising or .
keeping a Standing Army, unless it be with the consent of Parlia
ment, is against law ; that a body of forces is necessary for the
safety of the kingdom ; that no man can be punished except, by
the laws of the realm ; yet nevertheless, &c. &c. This Act, now
swollen to a hundred and seven Clauses, is to continue in force for
one year, at dates commencing and ending according to the distri
bution of the forces, whether in Great Britain or Ireland, or in the
numerous stations in every region of the globe where the British
flag now floats. Under the two constitutional principles, therefore,
of an appropriation of the supply, and the passing of an annual
Mutiny Bill, the power of the Crown cannot be maintained with
out the co-ordinate power of Parliament. The sovereign cannot
raise an army, or pay an army, without the consent of Parliament.
The annual assembly of Parliament is therefore absolutely essen
tial to the conduct of the government ; and if evil times should
ever by possibility arise in which the Crown and the Parliament
should be at issue, the maintenance of an army would be an act
of pure despotism on the part of the executive power, only to be
met by an equally unconstitutional assumption of executive power
on the part of the legislature.
The position .of the new government was necessarily a danger
ous one. Triumphant as had been the first days of the Revolution,
it was inevitable, especially whilst there was a civil war in Ireland,
and whilst Scotland was distracted by party-strife, that plots should
be formed in England for bringing back King James. William had
notified to Parliament that he had caused several persons to be
apprehended, on credible information that they were conspiring
against the government ; and he asked for advice under the diffi
culty of his unwillingness to act against law on the one hand, or to
suffer dangerous men to avail themselves of the privileges of the
Habeas Corpus Act on the other hand. The Lords, in an excess
of loyal devotion, recommended the king to take extraordinary
care of the public safety, by securing all disaffected persons. The
Commons, much more wisely, passed a Bill for the suspension of
the Habeas Corpus Act till the 1 7th of April. This Act was twice
renewed during the session. * If William thus thought it neces
sary to strengthen his hands against existing dangers, he desired,
as all high-minded possessors of power in troublous times should
* 1 Gul. and Mar. c. 2, c. 7, and c. 77.
472 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
desire, that in a great degree there should be oblivion for past
political offences. The cruel chancellor Jeffries ; the corrupt chief.
justice Wright ; other unjust judges and agents of despotism,
were in confinement. Many who had been manifest enemies of
public liberty dreaded that the day of retribution was at hand.
" The hottest of the Whigs," according to Burnet, would not for
ward this honest design of the king. " They thought it best to
keep many under the lash; they intended severe revenge for the
blood that had been shed, and for the many unjust things that had
been done in the end of king Charles's reign." They carried their
opposition to the king by indirect means, rather than by sweeping
exceptions to a general amnesty. " They proceeded so slowly in
that matter, that the Bill could not be brought to ripeness during
this Session." The people admired the mildness of the king's
temper. The factious politicians got up an imputation against him
that he desired "to make use of a set of prerogative men, as soon
as he legally could." *
The terms of the Coronation Oath, which for many years in the
memory of some living was a fatal stumbling-block in the great heal
ing measure of Roman Catholic relief, were debated in the first Par
liament of William and Mary, as if the difficulty was foreseen that
did arise under a very different condition of society. The ancient
oath was declared to be " framed in doubtful words and expres
sions with relation to ancient laws and constitutions at this time
unknown." f This part of the preamble of the Act had espe
cially reference to ecclesiastical laws. Those words of the new
oath which were the subject of debate run thus : The archbishop
or bishop is to ask the sovereign, " Will you to the utmost of
your power maintain the laws of God, the free profession of
the Gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion, established by
law ? " And the sovereign promises so to do. It was moved
" that the king, in the oath, swear to maintain the Protestant reli
gion, as it is, or shall be, established by law." Those who con
tended for the introduction of the words " shall be," amongst whom
was Somers, were in a minority. They desired that no such con
struction should be put upon the words " is established by law."
as should lead a conscientious ruler to imagine that he was to sanc
tion no legislative change that might affect the existing condition
of the Church. The historian of this period says : " Every person
who has read these debates must be fully convinced that the states-
* Burnet, "Our Time," vol. iv. p. 26. t 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 6.
THE CORONATION OATH AND CORONATION. WAR. 473
men who framed the Coronation Oath did not mean to bind the
king in his legislative capacity."* It is indeed true that the ap
prehension that the words " established by law " would make the
laws unalterable, was felt as an absurdity by the soundest heads in
that Parliament. " Not able to alter laws as occasion requires!"
indignantly exclaimed sir Robert Cotton. They looked only to
such alterations as might widen the limits of the Church by a liberal
comprehension of Protestant Dissenters. Sir George Treby seems,
if we rightly understand his words, to have looked further. " When
we are dead and gone, all these debates will be in the air, and a
greater scruple remain." f One greater scruple was that which
harassed the mind of George III. Happily the question is set at
rest by the common sense of our own times.
The Coronation of king William and queen Mary took place on
the nth of April, according to the ancient ceremonials. The arch
bishop of Canterbury was absent. The bishop of London supplied
his place. Burnet, now bishop of Salisbury, preached " with great
applause," says Evelyn. The Members of the Lower House had
especial places of honour ; tbey were feasted in the Exchequer-
chamber, and had each a gold coronation medal. The honest
citizens rang their bells and made their bonfires. The Jacobites
circulated their doggrel against "the dainty fine king; " and the
Dutch guards who kept the ground were abused as foreign mer
cenaries. The House of Commons, two days after the Coronation,
went up with a congratulatory address to the king and queen.
But, eleven days later, the House presented an address of far
greater import — declaring that they would support the crown in a
war against the French king. The seconder of the address main-
is o
tained " that it is of absolute necessity to declare war against the
most Christian Turk, who ravages all Christendom, and makes war
more barbarously than the Turks themselves." To Louis was at
tributed, in the address, " the present invasion of the kingdom of
Ireland, and supporting your majesty's rebellious subjects there."
William, in his answer, said, " I look upon the war to be so much
already declared by France against England, that it is not so prop
erly an act of choice, as an inevitable necessity, in our defence."
The spirit of the king leapt up at this hearty support of the Com
mons in the great contest for which he had been long preparing.
He is reported to have exclaimed to one of his intimates — " This
is the first day of my reign ! "
* Macaulay, vol. iii. p. 117. t " Parliamentary History, vol. v. col. 210
474
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXIV.
King James lands at Kinsale.— Schemes of Tyrconnel.— Condition of the Protestants in
Ireland. — James enters Dublin. — Siege of Londonderry. — The Siege raised. — The
Revolution in Scotland.— The Highlanders.— Dundee.— Battle of Killiecrankie.—
Death of Dundee.
"Wonderful uncertainty where king James was, whether in
France or Ireland," writes Evelyn on the 29th of March. James
had landed at the port of Kinsale on the 12th of March. There
was no uncertainty when, on the 22d, the House of Commons had
voted a Supply for six months "towards the reducing of Ireland,"
and a member of the government had said, " the French king has
carried king James into Ireland." What then passed in Parliament
was very imperfectly known to the public. The debates, in the
state in which they have come down to us, were merely the brief
notes of members for their private use. Even the Votes were
unpublished. There was a great debate on a motion for printing
the Votes, on the 9th of March. From this debate it appeared
that members were in the habit of communicating the results of
their proceedings to the constituencies. "It will only save the
gentlemen the trouble of writing to their corporations," said Sir
Thomas Lee. " You are told," says Sir Henry Capel, " of the
Roll of the 9th of Henry IV. — that nothing is to be taken notice of
in Parliament but what you communicate to the king. At that time
there were no coffee-houses and no printing. If you could keep
your votes out of coffee-houses, and suppress the licentiousness of
printing," you might oppose printing your votes, "otherwise you
make secrets here of what all the world knows." There were men
who had the sagacity to see that concealment only produced the
propagation of falsehood. " I would not have L'Estrange and
Nevil Payne," says Mr. Arnold, "write false news beyond sea. I
desire the truth to be known, and am for printing the votes.''*
The House decided against the printing. The majority thouo-ht
* L'Estrange was the Censor of the press Under Charles II. and editor of the " Public
Intelligencer." Nevil Payne was as agent of James in Scotland, who was in corresponcV
ence with the English Jacobites.
JAMES IN IRELAND. — TYRCONNEL. 475
that the Clerks of the House, who were suspected of sending the
Votes to coffee-houses, should be prevented from thus committing
"a great crime ; " and that it was for the honour of the House not
to print them. We can thus understand Mr. Evelyn's uncertainty
in a world of contradictory rumours. In the midst of the popular
ignorance of facts there was one consolation. They could freely
abuse their rulers. " The new king being much blamed for neglect
ing Ireland, now like to be ruined by the lord Tvrconnel and his
Popish party, too strong for the Protestants," writes Evelyn, in
the hour of' his uncertainty. The new king was betrayed, as he
was doomed to be on many future occasions. The prince of
Orange, under the advice of Irish noblemen and gentlemen, had
during the interregnum opened a negotiation with Tyrconnel.
Richard Hamilton, the brother of that wit of the court of Charles
II., who wrote the most profligate Memoirs in the purest French,
had come from Ireland to fight for king James against the prince
of Orange, but was chosen to return to Ireland to arrange with
Tyrconnel to preserve Ireland for king William. The son of sir
William Temple gave a pledge that Hamilton would be faithful.
Hamilton went to Tyrconnel and plotted with him how the Protes
tants could be'best crushed, and James seated in Ireland as its Papist
king. The too sensitive young Temple, when he found that his
friend had abused his confidence, drowned himself. " He was so
deeply oppressed with grief that he plunged himself out of a boat
into the Thames, laden with weights to sink him." * The schemes
of Tyrconnel succeeded. He persuaded lord Mountjoy to set
out on a mission to James at St. Germain's, to represent to
him " the moral impossibility of holding out against the power of
England." He sent with him another envoy, chief baron Rice,
" to give a quite different account to the king." Mountjoy was
put into the Bastille. Tyrconnel had a clear course for his oper
ations. " Accordingly this lord's back was no sooner turned but
he began by degrees to pull off the mask. He caused all the
Protestants in Dublin to surrender their arms ; he began to aug
ment the standing forces ; and with as much prudence as dexterity
soon put the kingdom in a tolerable state of defence." Such is
the explanation of the alleged neglect, not given by a partizan of
king William, but by the compiler of the Life of James II. from
his own Memoirs. f
* Alexander Cunningham — "History of Great Britain," vol. i. p. i»6.
t " Life of James II.
476 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
James had quitted France with this remarkable wish of the
great monarch at their parting — " the best thing I can desire for
you is never to see you back again." The munificent favours of
Louis — his generous as well as politic honours to a fallen brother —
the adulation of courtiers, who looked upon a king, however power
less, as a demi-god — these were to be exchanged for a doubtful
struggle for a divided kingdom. Yet if James could maintain a
position in Ireland, he might recover England. " If king James
would quit his priests,'' said Danby, " he might still retrieve his
affairs." * His prospects in Ireland were far from desperate ;
they were in many particulars encouraging. The Protestants who,
from the time of the plantation of Ulster in the time of James I.,
had been gradually changing a wild and profitless country into a
flourishing seat of trade and manufactures, had recovered the ef
fects of the massacre of 1641. Cromwell had replaced them in
security by the terror of his strong arm. They were again the dom
inant power; the native Irish were again a subjected race. James
II. out of no sense of equal justice to save the aboriginal people
from the tyranny of the smaller number, had determined to depress
the colonisers and subject them to the less regulated tyranny of
that hatred of their race and their religion which animated the
Celtic population. In two years Ireland, under the rule of Tyr
connel, was a kingdom in which the civil and military strength was
almost wholl) in the hands of Papists. The Protestant militia had
been disarmed early in the reign of James. Tyrconnel's soldiers
seized upon all arms in the possession of Protestant householders,
who were alone qualified by law to carry weapons. James entered
Ireland when all those likely to oppose him were thought to be
naked and defenceless.
Before the Revolution was completed in England, the inhabit
ants of Enniskillen and Londonderry had received such warnings
from the attitude of the Irish government, and the temper of the
native population around them, that they prepared to defend them
selves against the same sort of attack which Londonderry had suc
cessfully resisted in 1641. Enniskillen repelled the attempt to
quarter Popish soldiers in their little town. Londonderry secured
its gates against the entrance of a similar force. Mountjoy, who
was afterwards betrayed into the mission to James, was well re
ceived at Londonderry, and left a" Protestant garrison for their
protection, under one of his officers, lieutenant-colonel Lundy.
* Reresby's " Memoirs," p. 325.
JAMES ENTERS DUBLIN. 477
Before William and Mary had_ received the crown, the whole
Catholic population around the Protestants was preparing for
rapine and revenge. The sovereigns of the Revolution were, how
ever, proclaimed by the- staunch citizens of Londonderry and the
small colony of Enniskillen ; and they abided the issue without
shrinking. The men of Londonderry relied upon Lundy, as gov
ernor, who had sent his adhesion to England, and had received
from William and Mary a formal appointment to his command.
Upon Hamilton, Tyrconnel had bestowed the reward of his treach
ery, by placing him at the head of a body of troops to bring the
Protestants of Ulster to submission. These troops desolated the
country ; and the wretched inhabitants fled before them to Ennis
killen and to Londonderry. The city, which had been founded by
Englishmen upon the site of the old ruined city of Derry granted
by James I. to the Corporation of London, had become the chief
refuge for many thousands, in addition to its usual inhabitants.
Amongst those who had fled hither for succour, was the rector of a
neighbouring parish, George Walker, whose name will always live
in honoured remembrance.
The king of the Roman Catholics entered Dublin on the 24th
of March. Devoted soldiers lined the streets ; the houses were
hung with tapestry; his horse trod upon flowers and green leaves.
He was met at the castle gate by the procession of the host, and
he fell on his knees in adoration. Despatches received from Ham
ilton, now a lieutenant-general, showed that there was work to do,
beyond that of pageants and congratulations. The king himself at
length determined to go amongst the troops to encourage them,
taking with him the French officers that had accomjianied him to
Ireland.* His march into Ulster commenced on the 13th of April.
He travelled through a wasted country from which the inhabitants
had fled, taking with them their moveable goods. The position of
James and his followers was disagreeable enough. It was deter
mined to return to Dublin ; and so they went back to Charlemont.
But, says the Memoir, " the king received by an express a letter
from the duke of Berwick, in the name of all the General officers
as their opinion, that in case his majesty would return to the army,
and but show himself before Derry, it would infallibly surrender." f
James again changed his mind ; and setting out towards the ob
stinate city the next morning, overtook the French general Rosen
within two miles of the place where his mere presence was to
* " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 330 ; Own Memoirs. t Ibid., p. 332.
478 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
compel submission. The trumpeter sent by the king with a sum
mons, found the inhabitants "in very great disorder, having turned
out their Governor Lundy, upon suspicion."* The cause of this
unexpected reception was the presence of " one Walker, a Min
ister." He was opposed to Lundy, who thought the place unten
able, and counselled the townsmen to make conditions ;. " but -the
fierce Minister of the Gospel, being of the true Cromwellian or
Cameronian stamp, inspired them with bolder resolutions." f James
finally left Hamilton and the French generals to work their will
upon the besieged, and upon the people who had not the shelter of
the beleaguered city ; and he went back to Dublin to meet a Par
liament called for the 7th of May. We must finish this story of
heroic bravery and more heroic fortitude, although the events
which we shall thus attempt briefly to relate, will detain us from
other events of importance for more than three months of this busy
year of 1689.
Lough Foyle, the inlet of the sea which flows between the coun
ties of Derry and Donegal, extends from its narrow entrance at
Magilligan Point for about sixteen miles, when it meets the river
Foyle at Culmore. The river is navigable for ships of heavy
burthen to Londonderry, built by the colonists, on the left bank.
This city, in 1689, was contained within the walls ; and it rose by
a gentle ascent from the base to the summit of a hill, on the highest
point of which was its cathedral. The streets were regularly laid
out, in lines running to four gates, from a square in the centre, in
which the Town-house and the Guard-house were placed. The
gradual ascent of the city thus exposed it to the fire of an enemy.
The small Bastions were insufficient for the defence of the Cur
tain against a vigorous assault ; and there was no Moat nor Coun
terscarp. A ferry crossed the Foyle from the east gate ; and the
north gate opened upon a quay. On the east bank of the Foyle
were woods and groves, with sites of villages destroyed by the
marauding soldiery. On the west bank, close to the strand, was
alaige orchard, which became a place of ambush. At the entrance
of the Foyle was the strong fort of Culmore, with a smaller fort
on the opposite bank. About two miles below the city were two
forts, — Charles Fort on the west bank ; Grange Fort on the east.}:
Lundy, the treacherous or perhaps panic-stricken governor,
had persuaded Cunningham, the colonel who commanded two
* " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 333. X Ibid., p. 334.
X Plan in Harris's " Life of William III." p. 193.
SIEGE OF LONDONDERRY. 479
English regiments sent to assist in the defence of the place, to put
his troops on board ship- and sail away. The indignation of. the
English parliament was extreme when these troops returned home.
Liindy's intention to surrender being manifest, the citizens, under.
the advice of their reverend champion, and of a more regular sol
dier, superseded the governor, and he was glad to escape in dis
guise. The battle now commenced in earnest. The reverend
George Walker and Major Baker were appointed governors during
the siege. They mustered seven thousand and twenty soldiers,
dividing them into regiments under eight colonels. In the town
there were about thirty thousand souls ; but they were reduced to
a less burdensome number, by ten thousand accepting an offer of
the besieging commander- to restore them to their dwellings. There
were, according to Lundy's estimation, only provisions for ten days.
The number of cannon possessed by the besieged was only twenty.
With such resources a protracted defence of Londonderry might
well appear impossible. On the 20th of April the city was invested,
and the bombardment was begun. A strong force was planted at
Pennyburn Mill, to cut off the road from Culmore to the city, that
fort then being in the hands of the Protestants. It was afterwards
lost. On the 21st the garrison made a sortie, and routed this
force with considerable slaughter. Maumont, one of the French
generals, fell by a musket ball in this desperate sally. The
bombardment went on, with demi-culverins and mortars. No
impression was made during nine days upon the determination to
hold out ;_ and on the 29th king James retraced his steps to Dublin,
in considerable ill humour. He gave vent to that petulance which
had so often alienated his friends, by exclaiming, " If my army had
been English, they would have brought me the town, stone by
stone, by this time."
The siege went on, amidst bombardments and sorties, for six
weeks, with little change. Hamilton was the commander of James's
forces, in consequence of the death of Maumont; and another
French officer, Persignan, who might have assisted Hamilton's
inexperience,, was mortally wounded in a sortie of the sixth of
May. The garrison of Londonderry and the inhabitants were
gradually perishing from fatigue and insufficient food. But they
bravely repelled an assault, in which four hundred of the assailants
fell. Of the relief which had been promised from England there
were no tidings. This solitary city had to bear, as it would appear,
the whole brunt of the great contest for the fate of three king.
480 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
uoms. Large bodies of troops held the country on every side,
keeping in awe the trembling and starving population, that could
give no succour. No friendly ship could sail up the river without
receiving the fire from hostile forts at its mouth and on its banks.
No messenger could safely pass by land or by water to tell of the
need there was for relief. The banks of the Foyle were lined with
musqueteers. The roads on the East and on the West were
blocked by masses of troops. Across the narrow part of the river,
from Charles Fort to Grange Fort, the enemy stretched a great
boom of fir timber, joined by iron chains, and fastened on either
shore by cables of a foot thick. On the 15th of June, the anxious
lookers out from the high places of the city descried a fleet of
thirty sail in the Lough. The English flag floated in the great
aestuary, but the deliverers came no nigher for weeks. Signals
were given and answered ; but the ships lay at anchor, as if to-
drive hope to despair. Provisions were now dealt out in quanti
ties scarcely sufficient to sustain life ; and fever and dysentery
seized upon their hundreds of victims. Gunpowder was still left ;
but the cannon balls were shot away, and the resolute men cast
lead round brick bats, and fired the rough missiles upon the be
siegers. At the end of June, Baker, one of the heroic gov
ernors, died. Hamilton had been superseded in his command by
Rosen, when it was known in Dublin that an English fleet was
in Lough Foyle. The prolonged resistance of two months by a
city not fortified upon scientific principles, was too humiliating
for the Frenchman, who was reported to have dragooned the
Protestants of Languedoc ; and Rosen, who was invested with
powers as "Marshal General of all his majesty's forces," is
sued a savage proclamation, declaring that unless the place were
surrendered by the first of July, he would collect all the Protestants
from the neighbouring districts, and drive them under the walls of
the city to starve with those within the walls. This was not a
vain threat. For thirty miles round the remnant of the popula
tion — the old man incapable of bearing arms, and the youno- wife
with an infant at her breast— the children who lingered about their
desolate homes, and the cripple who could fly nowhere for shelter
— were driven in flocks towards the city where their friends were
well nigh perishing. Some dropped on the road; some were
mercifully knocked on the head. A famished troop came thus
beneath the walls of Londonderry, where they lay starvino- for
three days. The besieged immediately erected a gallows, within
SIEGE OF LONDONDERRY. 4S1
yjew of their enemies ; and sent a message to . their head-quarters
that priests might come in to prepare the prisoners within the city
for death, for they would hang every man if their friends were not
immediately dismissed. The threat had its effect, and the famished
crowd wended back their way to their solitary villages. It is but
justice to James to state, that he expressed his displeasure at this
proceeding, and wrote to Rosen. " It is positively our will, that you
do not put your project in execution as far as it regards the men,
women, and children, of whom you speak ; but on tne contrary,
that you send them back to their habitations without any injury to
their persons." .
Meanwhile the siege went, on. Batteries' were brought closer
and closer to the city ; and the .firing was continued by day and
night. At last a communication was effected with the fleet in the
Lough. Major-General Kirk, the evil instrument of cruelty in
-the expedition against Monmouth, was' now in the confidence of
the new government. He it was who had come to the assistance
of the besieged with men, arms, and provisions. He sent word
by a little boy, who carried a letter in his garter — or in his button
—that he found it impossible to get up the river ; that he expected
six thousand more men from England ; and that then he would
attack the besiegers by land. A doubtful hope. Famine was now
doing its terrible work. The well-known substitutes for ordinary
fpod, of horse-flesh, and dog's-flesh, of rats, of hides, were fast
failing On the evening of the 30th of July, Walker preached in
the Cathedral, exhorting his hearers still to persevere, for that
God would at last deliver them from their difficulties. An hour
after the sermon the lookers aut descried a movement in the Lough.
Three vessels are sailing to the mouth of the Foyle. There are two
merchantmen and a frigate. They are fired upon by the Culmore
Fort and the New Fort. They returned the fire. They are in the
river. They are within a mile of the boom. They heed not tbe
shots of the musqueteers, noi the guns of the Charles Fort and
Grange Fort. And now the foremost of the merchant vessels is
kit awn by her build. She is the Mountjoy of Derry. She dashes
at the boom. She breaks it, but she is driven ashore by the re
bound. They are boarding. No. The frigate comes up and fires
a broadside. The Mountjoy rights again. The three ships pass
the boom safely. They are coming to the quay. We are saved.
That night the four thousand three hundred of the garrison who,
out of seven thousand four hundred, were left alive, feasted upon
Vol. IV.— 31
482 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
something better than the nine lean horses and a pint of meal for
each man, that were left. Of the abundance that was landed at the
quay amidst the shouts of the brave defenders of Londonderry,
there was enough to make every heart glad of that heroic popula
tion, who thus fought and who suffered for a great principle. Bon
fires are lighted. Bells are rung. The fire of the besiegers is the
next day continued. But at nightfall a smoke arises from their
camp, as if from the huts which had given them shelter for three
months. Another night of watchfulness for the bosieged ; and as
the sun of the first of August glimmers over the waters of Lough
Foyle, it is seen that Rosen, with his half disciplined soldiers and
his Rapparees, had marched away on the road to Strabane. Eight
thousand of the besiegers had perished in this memorable strug
gle. *
At the period when Londonderry was saved, the men of En
niskillen took the field, and won. the decisive battle of Newton
Butler. On the 29th of July, the day before the great boom of the
Foyle was broken, two English colonels, Wolseley and Berry, who
had been sent by Kirk with a supply of arms and ammunition,
sailed up Lough Erne to the isle of Enniskillen with their welcome
cargo, and landed amidst the shouts of the people. Their arrival
was very timely. A large force was advancing against Enniskillen
under the command of Macarthy, Viscount Mountcashel. Wolse
ley and Berry went forth with three thousand men to meet the five
thousand who were thus coming with a confidence of success ;
for the duke of Berwick was to attack Enniskillen from another
quarter. The hostile forces were in presence of each other on
the 30th. The larger number began to retreat ; the smaller fol
lowed. Macarthy's dragoons at last turned to face the bold yeo
manry, who were advancing with the determination of men whose
dearest interests were at issue in this deadly strife. The Celtic
army was routed amidst terrible butchery. As the besiegers of
Londonderry halted on the ist of August at Strabane, they heard
the news of this defeat. They became wholly disorganised, aban
doning their stores and their sick and wounded. James was al
ready out of heart. The king's intelligence from England assured
» There are two original narratives of the siege of Londonderry, from which many
of !ts incidents must be derived. One is, " A true account of the siege," by the famous
George Walker, published in 1689- The other, published in .690, is "A Narrative of
the Siege," by John Mackenzie, a Dissentme Minister, who was chaplain to one of the
regiments in the city. These accounts are condensed and compared in the "life and
Reign of William III." by Walter Harris. mm ana
THE SIEGE RAISED 483
hhn of a speedy invasion from thence. The length of the siege
of Derry, the badness of the weather, the frequent sallies, the
unwholesomeness of the place of encampment "had in a manner
destroyed the army, so as that no service could be expected from
it for a considerable time." Add to this, " My;lord Mountcashel
entirely routed." Such were the griefs which, when Schomberg
landed with an army on the 13th of August, " struck such a con
sternation amongst the generality, as made them give up all for
lost."* We must revert to the close of the year 1688, to be able to pre
sent a rapid narrative of the course of the Revolution in Scotland.
The attempt of James to dispense with the Test Act was as
ill received in Scotland as in England. The Episcopalians sus
pected the motive ; the moderate Presbyterians did not welcome
his limited indulgence ; the Cameronians spurned it, with a bitter
hatred of their old oppressor, - and of all his evil instruments.
But there was. in Scotland that strong feeling of attachment
to their own race of kings which would not very enthusiasti
cally welcome their sudden and complete downfall. There was
sure to be a struggle, however it might terminate, for the superior
ity of the Church of the minority, established by law ; and for the
restoration of the Church of the majority, proscribed and persecuted.
Conflicting interests and passions were certain to be brought into
more immediate and direct hostility than in the English Revolution,
in which an outrage upon the Church with a view to the preponder
ance of Catholicism, united for a season the opjjosing principles of
Establishment and of Dissent. In Scotland the government was
wholly in the hands of those who had been the ministers of the
intolerant tyranny of the king, and were the bitter enemies of those
who clung to the Covenant. It was difficult to estimate what
course events would take when the prince of Orange landed in
England. The earl of Perth, the Chancellor, had declared him
self a Roman Catholic on the accession of James. When the
prince of Orange had landed, the Chancellor approached the Pres
byterian ministers in Edinburgh with the statements of what king
James had done for them, and how they ought to oppose the un
natural invasion of that good king's nephew. He was answered,
that the favours of the king had only for .their object to ruin the.
Protestant religion. James fled ; and then the terrified Chancel
lor attempted to fly also ; for,, says he, " Blair came from Edin-
• " Life of James IL," vol. ii. p. 372. Original Memoirs.
484 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
burgh, and told me that the king was gone into France, and that
if I did not immediately get away I was a gone man." * The earl
and his lady went on board a sloop, where tbe men used them
" with all the barbarity Turks could have done ; " and finally put
them on shore " at the pier at Kirkcaldy, exposed to the mockery
and hatred of the people." The mob of Edinburgh, on the 10th
of December, had broken into the chapel of Holyrood House,
which had been fitted up for the Roman Catholic service ; had de
stroyed its decorations ; and had committed the sacrilege of dis
turbing the graves of the old princes of Scotland. The rabble had
been fired upon by captain Wallace, who was in command of a
party of soldiers at the palace ; and the people of Kirkcaldy, says
the earl of Perth, " got into a tumnlt to have me immediately sent
to Edinburgh ; though the tide did not serve, and though they
knew that at Edinburgh I should have been torn to pieces, for
there they believed that Johnny Wallace was commanded by me to
fire upon the people." f He was rescued from the furious multi
tude of Kirkcaldy, " who began to call for cords ; " and was con
veyed to Stirling Castle, where he was detained as a prisoner for
four years. Such was the temper of the people towards dignita
ries at whose frown they had so lately trembled. The Episcopal
Clergy fared no better. The hatred of the Scottish Puritans
against the observance of Christmas went far bevond the quarrel
with mince-pie of the Commonwealth Puritans. On the Christ
mas day of 1688, as if by universal agreement in the Western coun
ties, the obnoxious ministers were, in the phrase of the day, " rab
bled." Armed bodies of Covenanters terrified each clergyman in
his manse; destroyed his furniture ; gave him notice to quit; or
turned him and his family out of their houses. They burnt his
Prayer Book, and they locked up his church. No lives were lost,
and no wounds were inflicted, in these execrable outrages.
In such a temper of a long oppressed people, William had
issued his letters, as in England, for the assembly of a Convention.
In England the strictest regard was paid to the existing state
of the representation. In Scotland, the Act of 1681, which com
pelled every elector to renounce the Covenant, was superseded by
William's authority ; and Lords were summoned who had been de
prived of their seats in the recent times of tyrannical rule. Mean
while, in the interval of two months before the Convention was to
assemble, furious passions were well nigh leading to a state ol
* " Letters from James, Ear] cf Perth," 1845, p. 1. t liuL, p. 5.
THE REVOLUTION IN SCOTLAND. 485
public confusion. Edinburgh Castle was held for king James by
the duke of Gordon. The Whigs of Edinburgh and of the West
were secretly arming. But each party was looking to the Conven
tion as the test of their political strength, and each prepared for a
contest which should decide the future fortunes of Scotland. No
bles of each party were in London. The consistent opposers of
the popish James flocked round the prince of Orange at Whitehall.
The most ardent supporters of the Stuart king were not driven
from the new court. The earl of Dundee, says Burnet, " had
employed me to carry messages from him to the king, to know
what security he might expect if he should go and live in Scotland
without owning the government. 1 he king said, if he would live
peaceably, and at home, he would protect him ; to this he answered,
that, unless he were forced to it, he would live quietly." William
was pressed to proscribe the Claverhouse who had borne so hateful
a part in the days of persecution ; but he refused to make any ex
ception to the general amnesty, by which he hoped to make Scot
land in some degree a land of peace.
Viscount Dundee arrived at Edinburgh at the end of February,
in company with the earl of Balcarres. These noblemen were the
confidential agents of James in Scotland; and from the day of their
arrival the enemies ofthe Revolution had a rallying-point. The epis
copal hierarchy were again full of hope that he they had called " the
darling of Heaven," might be preserved and delivered by the mercy
of God, by giving him the hearts of his subjects and the necks of
his enemies.* Balcarres is an authority for some curious incidents
of this crisis.f He and Dundee went to the duke of Gordon to
urge him to hold the castle of Edinburgh. They met "all the
duke's furniture coming out; " but they made him promise to keep
the fortress "until he saw what the Cpnventibn would do." On
the 14th of March the Convention met. The bishop of Edinburgh
prayed for the safety and restoration of king James, without op
position. The heir of the attainted Argyle took his seat, with only
one protest. The conquerors and the conquered stood face to face.
But the real strength was soon discovered. The duke of Hamilton
had a majority of forty as President. Each party had put up a man
that could not thoroughly be trusted. The marquis of Athol was
as loose a politician as his opponent. But they were the heads of
* Address to James, November 3, 1688.
t " Account of the Affairs of Scotland relating to the Revolution in 1688, as sent to the
late King James II., when in France," 1714.
486 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
powerful clans, and their rank and influence made them leaders of
politicians who had as little honesty as themselves.
It was alleged against the duke of Hamilton that he, and other
western lords and gentlemen, " had brought publicly into town
several companies of foot, and quartered them in the city ; besides
great numbers that they kept hid in cellars, and in houses below
the ground, which never ajupeared until some days after the Con
vention had begun."* Dundee complained to Hamilton that in
formation had come to his knowledge that he was to be assassinated.
The allegation came before the Convention on the 15th of March ;
and they took no concern in the matter. More important commu
nications were to be laid before them. There was a letter to be
read from king William in England ; and a messenger had arrived
with a letter from king James in France. The communication
from king William had the precedence, by a decision of the majority.
It was a mild and sensible document, exhorting to the laying aside of
animosities and factions, and suggesting a Union of the two nations,
" living in the same island, having the same language, and the same
common interest of religion and liberty." The letter of James was
counter-signed by the earf of Melfort, a man execrated by all par
ties. It breathed no spirit of peace. "He," the king, "would
pardon all such as should return to their duty before the last day of
that month inclusive, and he would punish with the rigour of his
laws all such as should stand out in rebellion against him or his
authority." When the seal of that letter was broken, the cause of
James was felt to be lost. It was determined by Balcarres, Dun
dee, and a few other Tories, to leave the Convention, and gather
together at Stirling. Sunday intervened They were to start on
the next day. Difficulties arose; and then Dundee, in his impa
tience, resolved to set out alone. "Then," says Balcarres, "he
went straight away with about fifty horse. As he was riding near
the castle of Edinburgh, the duke of Gordon made a sign to speak
with him at the West side of the Castle, where, though it be ex
tremely steep, yet he told the duke all that was resolved upon, and
begged that he would hold out the castle till the king's friends
might get him released, which he positively promised to do." Dal
rymple says, that when Dundee galloped through the city, "beino
asked by one of his friends who stopped him, ' where he was going,'
he waved his hat, and is reported to have answered, 'wherever the
spirit of Montrose shall direct me.' "
* " Account of the Affairs of Scotland relating to the Revolution in 1688, as sent to the
late King James II., when in France," 1714.
THE REVOLUTION IN SCOTLAND. 487
" The Gordon demands of him which way he goes —
Where e'er shall direct me the shade of Montrose —
Your Grace in short space shall hear tiJings of me,
Or that low lies the bonnet of bonny Dundee." *
The duke of Hamilton caused the doors of the Convention to be
locked. The drums were beat in the streets. The Western
Wliigs came forth from their hiding-places. "There was never so
miserablea parcel seen," say Balcarres. Nevertheless, the notion
of a rival Convention at Stirling was at an end ; and Dundee went
his own course, to redeem, by his death in the hour of victory,
some of the odium which, in spite of the romance of history, must
always attach to the realities of his cruel and fanatical life. For
he, a hater of fanatics, was amongst the worst who have borne that
name, — one of " those exploded fanatics of slavery, who formerly
maintained what no creature now maintains, that the Crown is held
by divine, hereditary, and indefeasible right ; " t — one who, in the
maintenance of this creed, divested himself of the ordinary attrib
utes of humanity, to be as callous as an inquisitor, and as remorse
less as a buccaneer. Disappointed in their scheme, the only thing,
says Balcarres to James, that could be thought of by all your
friends, " was to engage the duke of Gordon to fire upon the town,
which certainly would have broke up the Convention." The duke
was wiser. " He absolutely refused to do anything but defend him
self until he had your majesty's order."
The Convention now went fearlessly to work in the settlement
of the kingdom. After long debates the House came to a resolu
tion, which was embodied into an Act. " The Estates of the
kingdom of Scotland find and declare, that king James VII. being
a professed Papist, did assume the royal power, and acted as a
King, without ever taking the oath required by law, and had, by
the advice of evil and wicked counsellors, invaded the fundamental
constitution of this kingdom, and altered it from a legal and
limited monarchy to an arbitrary and despotic power ; and had
governed the same to the subversion of the Protestant religion,
and violation of the laws and liberties of the nation, inverting all
the ends of government ; whereby he had forefaulted the crown,
and the throne was become vacant." J An Act was also passed
for settling the crown of Scotland upon William and Mary. On
the day that the king and queen were cro.wned in England, they
* Scott. " the Doom of Devorgoi'." t Burke. " French Revolution."
X" Others were. for making use of an obsolete viori, forefaulting, used for a bird's
forsaking ha nest."— Balcarres.
488 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
were proclaimed king and queen in Scotland. Commissioners were .
appointed from the Convention to proceed to London, to invest
their majesties with the government. They— the earl of Argyle,
sir James Montgomery, and sir John Dalrymple — were introduced
at the Banqueting House on the 17th of May. Argyle tendered
the Coronation Oath, which concluded with this clause, " that they
would be careful to root out all heretics and enemies to the true
worship of God." Upon this William declared that " he did not
mean by these words, that he was under any obligation to be a
persecutor." The Commissioners replied, that " neither the mean
ing of the oath, nor the law of Scotland did import it." " I take
the oath in that sense," said William. In the Claim of Rights
which the Convention had prepared it was set forth, " that Prelacy,
and superiority of an office in the Church above Presbyters, is and
has been a great and insupportable burthen to this nation, and
contrary to the inclinations of the generality of the people ever
since the Reformation, they having reformed Popery by Presbytery,
and therefore ought to be abolished."
When Dundee, with his fifty horsemen, who had deserted from
the regiment in England which he once commanded, had left the
castle of Edinburgh far behind him, he scarcely then paused to
think whither the spirit of Montrose would direct him. He retired
to his country house in Forfar. He would probably have remained
there unmolested by the new government ; and he, as well as
Balcarres, might have thought it most politic to continue quiet for
a while. An agent of James arrived from Ireland, with letters
recommending that nothing should be done till further orders ; and
Melfort, by the same messenger, wrote to Balcarres and Dundee.
The letters fell into the hands of the dominant party in the Con
vention. Balcarres was arrested. Dundee had put the Tay be
tween himself and his unfriends, " and having a good party of his
own regiment constantly with him, they found it not so safe to ap
prehend him." Balcarres was brought before the Convention, and
the letters of Melfort to him were read. In one, savs Balcarres,
" he expressed himself much after this manner : That he wished
some had been cut off that he and I spoke about, and then things
had never come to the pass they were at ; but when we get the power
again, such should be hewers of wood, and drawers of water."
Balcarres adds, addressing the king, that although he had never
made any such proposition as that at which Melfort hinted, "noth
ing could have been more to the prejudice of your affairs, nor for
THE HIGHLANDERS. 489
my fuin, than this, which did show that nothing but cruelty would
be used, if ever your majesty returned." When the order was
given to arrest Dundee, he quitted his house with a few retainers ;
and was soon at the head of a body of Highlanders.
In the most picturesque history in our language there are no
passages more picturesque than those in which the eloquent writer
describes the Highlanders of this period.* He has produced his
likeness of the Gael " by the help of two portraits, of which one is
a coarse caricature, and the other a masterpiece of flattery." The
caricature was produced out of the prejudices which existed up to
the middle of the last century ; the flattery has been created by
poetry and romance in our own time. " While the old Gaelic in
stitutions were in full vigour, no account of them was given by any
observer, qualified to judge of them fairly." f We venture to think
that there is one account, not indeed very full or very striking,
which contains many traits which appear to be the result of ob
servation, and Which are not distorted by any violent prejudice.
Alexander Cunningham, who left a manviscript history of Great
Britain from the Revolution to the accession of George I., written
in Latin,J was a native of Scotland, who is supposed to have been
in Holland in 1688, and is held by his biographer to have been
chosen by Archibald, earl of Argyle, to be travelling tutor to his
son, lord Lome. His position would naturally give him an inter
est in the state of the Highlands, and would probably enable him
to describe the people from personal observation. " The Scotch
Highlanders," he Says, " a race of warriors who fight by instinct,
are a different people from the Lowlanders, of different mariners,
and a different language." This may appear a trite observation to
set out with ; but it was the case then, as it was much more re
cently with many, that "by most Englishmen, Scotchman and
Highlander were regarded as synonymous words." § Cunningham
goes on to say, " Though of a very ready wit, they are utterly un
acquainted with arts and discipline ; for which reason they are less
addicted to husbandry than to arms, in which they are exercised
by daily quarrels with one another." || The hostilities of clans was
the great moving principle in every Highland adoption of a public
quarrel, as we have seen in the career of Montrose and of Argyle.
It was the principle upon which Dundee relied when he hurried to
* Macaulay's History, vol. iii. c. xiii. t Ibid., p. 304.
X Translated by'Thomas Hollihbury, D.D., 1788. § Macaulay, vol. iii. p. 3«-
tl Cunningham, vol. 1. p. 120.
490 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the clans who were in arms for a private quarrel at Inverness.
But the cause of king James had a hold upon their affections, be
yond their desire to encounter the hostile chiefs who were the sup
porters of king William. They knew nothing of the political and
religious grounds of difference. The causes of the great Revolu
tion of England weie to them unknown and uncared for. It was
enough that " their minds, roused by the remembrance of former
times, were easily drawn over by the viscount of Dundee, who was
of the family of Montrose, to the interest of king James. They
firmly believe that the ancient' kings of Scotland were descended
from them, and wore the very same dress which they now wear ;
and therefore they were easily persuaded that king James was of
their own blood, and, by a kind of divine right, entitled to the
crown." * Their hardihood under exposure to cold and wet; their
habitual exercise ; their predatory excursions, are noticed by this
historian. " Being in general poorly provided for, they are apt to
covet other men's goods ; nor are they taught by any laws to dis
tinguish with great accuracy their own property from that of other
people. They are not ashamed of the gallows ; nay, they pay a re
ligious respect to a fortunate plunderer." f Scott says that a foray
was so far from being held disgraceful, that a young chief was ex
pected to show hfs talents for command, by heading a plundering
expedition. X To their chief " the common people adhere with the
utmost fidelity, by whose right hand they are wont to swear." §
Dundee knew the qualities of the race that he was going to lead
against the regular troops of the new government. Their peculiar
character and organisation were favourable for a dashing enter
prise. They were perhaps most to be feared in the hour of suc
cess. " In battle, the point to which they bend their utmost
efforts, and which they are most anxious to carry, is their enemy's
baggage. If that once falls into their hands, disregarding all dis
cipline and oaths, and leaving their colours, home they run." ||
The clan which Dundee joined at Inverness had for its chief,
MacDonald of Keppoch. This pugnacious warrior had recently
won a battle against Macintosh of Moy; and he was now about
to harry the Saxon shopkeepers of Inverness for having taken
part against his clan. In Inverness there was " sneezing," and
* Cunningham, p. 122. t Ibid., p. 121.
t Notes to " Lady ofthe Lake."
5 " No oath, but by his chieftain's hand." Lady of the Lake," canto iii.
II Cunningham, vol. i. p. 122.
BATTLE OF KILLIECRANKIE. 49I
sugar, and aqua-vita?. He had recently been,opposed to 1he sol
diers of king James, who, under the direction of the Privy Coun
cil, had gone forth with letters of fire and sword to waste and kill
in the country of MacDonald of Keppoch. When Dundee ar
rived, the chief thought less of the injuries which he had sustained
from the government of king James than of the glorious opportu
nity of plunder in a fight against the government of king William.
A goat was slain, a fire was kindled, the points of a small wooden
cross were seared in the flame, and then the sparks were extin
guished in the blood of the goat. " Their religion is partly taken
from the Druids, partly from Papists, and partly from Protes
tants," says Cunningham. In the ceremony of preparing the Fiery
Cross, we rnay readily trace the Pagan as well as the Popish ele
ment. MacDonald of Keppoch sent the Fiery Cross through his
district. It was the signal for arming and assembling at a given
place of rendezvous. It was handed on by one swift messenger
after another through the country of Keppoch's allies and friends.
The name of the Graham was sufficient to arm all those who hated
the Campbell. The deeds of Montrose were the favourite themes
of the bards ; and now another Graham was come to lead the clans
near Inverary, who had thrown off their submission to Argyle,
against another Argyle, who might again reduce them to their old
condition of dependence. Dundee first surprised the town of Perth,
seizing the public treasure ; dispersed two troops of horse ; and
then entered into the Highlands, to wait the arrival of aid from
Ireland. The clans gathered around him in Lochaber, all eager
to fight for the cause which had the Mac Callum More for its
enemy. During the month of June active operations in the Highlands
were suspended. But in the meantime Edinburgh Castle was sur
rendered by the duke of Gordon. General Mackay had taken the
command of the army in Scotland. " He was one of the best offi
cers of the age, when he had nothing to do but to obey and execute
orders ; for he was both diligent, obliging, and brave ; but he was
not so fitted for command. His piety made him too apt to mis
trust his own sense, and to be too tender, or rather fearful, in any
thing where there might be a needless effusion of blood." * To
shed blood needlessly is the greatest opprobrium of a commander.
To mistrust himself in the fear of unavoidable slaughter is to pro
duce a more fatal effusion of blood. It is not piety which produces
* Burnet; vol. iv. p. 47.
49? HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
such mistrust. Whether Mackay, the bravest of the brave, was
open to this covert reproach, does not appear in the narratives of
his conduct of the battle of Kibiecrankie. Dundee had learntthat
the marquis of Athol, who had decided to take part with the ruling
powers, had sent his son, lord Murray, into Athol to raise the
clans ; but that his own castle of Blair had been held against him ;
and that a large number of his clan had quitted the standard of the
marquis. He had also learnt that Mackay was advancing to reduce
Blair Castle, a post most important as the key of the Northern
Highlands. Dundee had received three hundred Irish troops from
Ulster, and he had collected again about three thousand High
landers, who had been allowed to leave Lochaber for their own
glens. Mackay was approaching Blair Castle, out of Perthshire.
Dundee arrived there on the 27th of July. Mackay was advancing
up the pass of Killiecrankie. On one hand of the narrow defile
was the river Garry, rushing below the difficult ascent. On the
other side were rocks and wooded mountains. One laden horse
and two or three men abreast would fill the road-way. In this
defile, the passage of Mackay might have been effectually resisted.
Dundee chose to wait for his enemy till he had reached the open
valley at the extremity of the pass. The troops were resting, when
the alarm was given that the Highlanders were at hand. From the
hills a cloud of bonnets and plaids swept into the plain, and the
regular soldier was face to face with the clansman ; — " Veterans
practised in war's game " on one side—" Shepherds and Herds
men " on the other.* There had been firing from each for several
hours. It was seven o'clock before Dundee gave the word for
action. Unplaided and unsocked the Highlanders rushed upon
the red soldier. They threw away their firelocks after a volley or
two ; raised their war-yell, amidst the shriek of the bagpipes ; and
darted upon Mackay's line. A few minutes of struggle, and then
a headlong flight down the pass. What the poet calls " the precept
and the pedantry of cold mechanic battle " could not stand up
against the rush of enemies, as strange as the mounted Spaniard
was to the Peruvian. The slaughter was terrible, as the Saxons
fled through the gorge, with the Celts hewing and slaying amidst a
feeble resistance. But there were no final results of the victory of
Killiecrankie. The Highlanders did not follow up their success,
for they were busy with the booty of the field; and Dundee had
fallen. He was leading a charge of his small band of cavalry;
* Wordsworth.
DEATH OF DUNDEE. 493
and was waving his arm for his men to come on, when a musket
ball struck him in the part thus exposed by the opening of his cui
rass. He fell from his horse, and, after a few sentences, " word
spake never more." * There was terror in Edinburgh when it was
known that Mackay had been defeated. There was hope when the
news came that Dundee had fallen. The Highlanders went back
to their mountains, laden with plunder. In London there was ne
cessarily alarm. " But when the account of Dundee's death was
.known, the whole city appeared full of joy ; and the king's enemies,'
who had secretly furnished themselves with arms, now laid aside
all thoughts of using them." f The over-sanguine hopes of the
enterprise of Dundee amongst the followers of king James, are thus
expressed in a lament for his death : " Had he lived, there was
little doubt but he had soon established the king's authority in
Scotland, prevented the prince of Orange going or sending an army
into Ireland, and put his majesty in a fair way of regaining England
itself." X Certainly not ; whilst the real intentions of James towards
Scptland and England continued to ooze out, as they were sure to
do. Balcarres, in his account to king James of the affairs pf Scot
land, has this anecdote of the characteristic Stuart policy: " Next
day after the fight, an officer riding by the place where my lord
Dundee fell, found lying there a bundle of papers and commissions,
which he had about him. Those who stripped him thought them
of but small concern, so they left them there lying. This, officer a
little after did show them to several of your friepds, among which
there was one paper did no small prejudice to your affairs, and
would have done much more, had it not been carefully suppressed.
It was a letter of the earl of Melfort's to my lord Dundee, when he
sent him over your Majesty's Declaration, in wliich was contained
not only an indemnity, but a toleration for all persuasions. This
the earl of Melfort believed' would be shocking to Dundee, con
sidering his hatred to fanatics ; for he writes, that notwithstanding
of what was promised in your declaration, indemnity and indulgence,
yet he had couched things so, that you would break them when
you pleased ; nor would you think yourself obliged to stand to
them." * The letter that it is pretended he wrote to King James is a transparent forgery.
t Cunniugham, p. 123. X " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 352.
494 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXV.
Close of the first Session of the English Parliament. — The Irish Parliament. — Second
Session of the English Parliament. — The Bill of Rights. — The Princess Anne. —
Whig and Tory Factions. — Parliament dissolved — State of the Army in Ireland. —
Abuses in Government Departments. — Opening of the New Parliament — Corrup
tion. — Jealousy in settling the Revenue. — Act of Recognition. — Act of Grace.. — Wil
liam goes to Ireland. — Landing and March of William. — The Boyne.— William
slightly wounded.— Battle ofthe Boyne.— Flight of James.— His Speech at Dublin.—
Naval defeat at Beachy Head. — Energetic Conduct of the Queen.
The proceedings of the English parliament, from the period
when the Commons went up to the king with an address, declaring
that they would support him In a war with France, to the adjourn
ment in August, are no doubt interesting when presented with char
acteristic details, but are scarcely important enough to be related
with minuteness in a general history. Less important Is it-to trace
the factious disputes in which so many angry passions and so many
petty jealousies were called forth, during the three or four latter
months of the Session. It is satisfactory to know that the attain
ders of William lord Russell, of Algernon Sidney, of Alice Lisle,
and of alderman Cornish, were reversed. It is not so satisfactory
to trace the revival of past animosities in the discussions upon the
sentence of Titus Oates, who brought that sentence before the
House of Lords by a writ of error. A majority of Peers affirmed
the judgment ; but in the Lower House a bill annulling the sentence
was brought in. The majority of the Lords looked at the infamous
character of Oates. In the Commons the supporters of the bill for
annulling the sentence looked to the illegality of the judgment.
The difference between the two Houses was compromised. Oates
was released from confinement, having received a pardon ; and the
Commons moved an address to the Crown that he should be allowed
a small pension for his support. In the case of Samuel Johnson,
the Commons voted that his degradation from ecclesiastical func
tions was illegal, and the king was asked to bestow some prefer
ment on him. William, more wisely, gave him a thousand pounds
and a pension.
During this Session an Act was passed by which any Protes-
THE IRISH PARLIAMENT. 495
tant clergyman of Ireland, who had been forced to leave that king
dom, "for fear of the Irish rebels," should not be deprived of an
Irish benefice by accepting ecclesiastical preferment in England.*
Before the landing of James at Kinsale many Protestants had fled
to England, in the dread of a repetition of the frightful atrocities
of 1641. Many of these refugees were aided by a public subscrip
tion ; and some of the clergy were appointed to lectureships and
small livings, f The miseries produced " by fear of the Irish
rebels " were small, compared with the tyrannous proceedings of
the Parliament which king James opened in Dublin on the 7th of
May. Of two hundred and fifty members of the Irish House of
Commons, only six were Protestants. James told the Parliament
in opening the Session, that he had always been for liberty of con
science, and against invading the property of any man. The next
day he issued a Proclamation in which he says that, since his ar
rival in his kingdom of Ireland, he had made it his chief concern
to satisfy his Protestant subjects " that the defence of their reli
gion, privileges,- and properties, is equally our care with the recov
ery of our rights." It has been alleged, as an excuse for James in
furnishing a very speedy .proof of the futility of such professions,
that he could not control the viole.nt spirit of his Parliament. They
passed an Act of Toleration on one day ; they passed an Act of
Confiscation on the next. The one Act consisted of unmeaning
professions ; the other transferred all the lands held by Protestants
under old Acts of Settlement to their ancient proprietors before,
the rebellion of 1 641. Another Act transferred the tithe, for the.
most part from the Protestant to the Catholic clergy, without com
pensation. But the iniquity of the Act which deprived the holders
of property for nearly forty years, whether acquired by grant, pur
chase, or mortgage, was small when compared with the Act of at
tainder by which two thousand six hundred persons were declared
traitors and adjudged to suffer the pains of death and forfeiture.
" The severity of this Act exceeded even that of the famous proscrip
tion at Rome during the last Triumvirate." X The Act of Attainder
affected the real estates of absentees thus declared to be traitors.
Another Act vested in the king all their goods and chattels, debts
and arrears of rent. The spirit of the Parliament was universally
carried out. The arms of all Protestants were seized, whatever
their political opinions. The Protestant clergy, mostly preachers of
* 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 29. t See Journal of the Very Rev. Rowland Davies, 1857.
X Harris's " Life of William III." p. 231.
496 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
divine right, were insulted and unprotected. The fellows and
scholars of the university of Dublin were thrust out of their halls
and chambers, and their property seized ; the sole condition of
their personal liberty being that no three of them should meet to-
together, "on pain of death." This was the ready phrase of ter
ror applicable under all circumstances. The king, with the exam
ple before him of iniquities long faded away, issued a coinage of
brass money which was to pass as sixpences, shillings, and half-
crowns. " Eight half-crowns of this money were not intrinsically
worth two-pence." * The tradesmen of Dublin, if they refused the
money, were threatened to be hanged by the Provost-Marshal.
The government of king James, that was looking forward to the day
when England and Scotland should come under the same merciful
rule, decreed, by proclamation in the name of the king, that no cov
etous person should give by exchange of the currency, intolerable
rates for gold and silver, to the great disparagement of the brass
and copper money, under pain of death.
Such, when king William met his Parliament on the 19th of
October, were the manifestations of what might be expected from
the blessed rule of king James, should he be restored in England.
It is recorded of William that, on the day before, he met the
Council, and produced a draft of his speech, written by himself in
French, when he thus expressed himself : " I know most of my
predecessors were used to commit the drawing of such speeches
to their ministers, who generally had their private aims and in
terests in view ; to prevent which, I have thought fit to write it
myself in French, because I am not so great a master of the
English tongue : therefore, I desire you to look it over, and change
what you may find amiss, that it may be translated into English."
This was not complimentary to the king's ministers, nor accordant
with our modern notions of ministerial responsibility. Yet it was
an honest endeavour of William's common sense not to be mis
understood. He said that it was a misfortune that, at the begin
ning of his reign, he should have to ask such large supplies°for
carrying on the wars upon which he had entered with their advice.
He had not engaged in these out of a vain ambition, but from the
necessity of opposing those who had so visibly discovered their
designs of destroying the liberties and religion of the nation. He-
asked that there should be no delay in determining what should be
the supply for the charges of the war, because there was to be a
* Harris's " Life of William III." p. 231.
James at the Battle of the Boyne.— Vol. iv. 511.
SECOND SESSION OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT. 497
meeting at the Hague, of all the princes and States who were
engaged against Francie, arid his own resolutions would be deter
mined by the means at his command. This was honest language ;
which the Commons seconded by a vote that they would stand by
the king in the reduction of Ireland and in a vigorous prosecution
of the war with France. Yet there is nothing more painful to one
who looks back upon the history of his country with an earnest
desire to think the best of her public men, than to trace, amidst
the bitter contests of factions, the slight predominance of the
patriotic spirit. The second Session of the Convention Parliament
is a melancholy exhibition of party intrigues for power, of rivalries
that were to be made enduring by mean revenges, of desjperate
attempts to revive the indiscriminate hatreds of the past in a
frequent disregard of the necesisities of the present — hateful
contests, that made William seriously purpose to throw up the
government, and remove himself from a scene where he was unable
to make men understand that there was a duty to their country,
which ought to outweigh all selfish desires.
The work for which this Session of Parliament is to be chiefly
remembered in after time, was the passing of the Bill of Rights.
This celebrated measure was the reduction to a Statute of the
Declaration of Rights.* Some important jjrovisions were intro
duced. It was enacted, to prevent the kingdom being governed
by a Papist, that the sovereign should in Parliament, and at the
Coronation, adopt by repetition and subscription, the declaration
against Transubstantiation. It was also enacted that if the sov
ereign should marry a Papist, the subject should be absolved from
allegiance. The dispensing power of the Crown — the cause of so
many fierce conflicts — was absolutely taken away.-f The Parlia
ment in this Session left few other records of considerate legisla
tion. They went wildly to work with impeachments. They
impeached the earl of Peterborough and the earl of Salisbury, for
departing from their allegiance, and being reconciled to the
Church of Rome. They impeached the earl of Castlemaine, under
a charge of trying to reconcile the kingdom to the Church of Rome.
They raked up the accusations against those who had been acces
sary to the convictions of Russell and Sidney, chiefly, in the hope
to fasten some charge upon Halifax, who had retired from office.
They carried their political hatreds ,eo far back into the region of
history, as to accept a statement that " Major-General Ludlow is
* Ante, vol. iv. p. 376. t r Gul. & Mar. Sess. 2, t. 2
Vol. IV.--32
498 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
come into England, and is in town ; and that his old accomplices
do comfort, aid, and abet him ; " and thereupon they carried an
address that the king would issue a proclamation for apprehending
General Ludlow, who stood attainted of highjreason for the murder
of Charles I. Old Colonel Birch, who asked for evidence of
Ludlow being in London, made a sly allusion to the contrast
between the present and the past: "I am in a new periwig, and
pray let the House look upon me." * The men of the new periwigs
seemed anxious that the passions of the old love-locks should never
be forgotten. Ludlow returned to his asylum at Vevay ; to wonder,
perhaps, what sort of Revolution was that of 1688, which had thus
repudiated what it owed to the Puritans who had made the Bill of
Rights a practicable thing.
Amongst the annoyances to which William and Mary were
subjected by party intrigues, there were none, probably, more
personally distasteful than the misunderstandings which arose out
of the position of the princess Anne. Upon her marriage with
prince George of Denmark she had a settlement of ,£20,000 a year.
From the circumstance of Anne being the presumptive heir of the
Crown, it was not unnatural that she should desire a larger revenue.
From the peculiarities of her character she was necessarily a fit
subject for intriguing politicians to work upon. Sarah Churchill,
afterwards duchess of Marlborough, had over her the most un
bounded influence. The attachment of Mrs. Morley (Anne) to
her dear Mrs. Freeman (Sarah) — or rather the dependence of a
weak nature upon an imperious one — had an influence of long.
duration upon the politics of England. The correspondence of the
princess and the lady of the bed-chamber, under their fictitious
names, would lead to the belief that real friendship was not in
compatible with a court atmosphere, if we did not see beneath this
seeming affection the schemes of one of the most cunning and
domineering of her sex. The Tories, who looked to Anne, in 1689,
as. one to be propitiated, had been moved to apply to Parliament
for a large increase of her income. Sarah tells the story herself:
" Her majesty, when some steps were made in Parliament towards
settling a revenue on the prince and princess, taking her sister one
night to task for it, she asked her, What was the meaning of these
proceedings ? To which the princess answered, She heard her
friends had a mind to make, her some settlement. The queen
hastily replied, with a very imperious air, * Pray, what friends have
* "Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 414.
WHIG AND TORY FACTIONS. 499
you but the king and me?'" The lady goes on to state how she
urged the princess to persist' in applying to Parliament instead of
depending upon the king ; how Shrewsbury (she erroneously calls
him " duke ") came to her from the king, " who promised to give
the princess ,£50,000 if she would desist from soliciting the settle
ment by Parliament ; " and how she, the dictatress of the princess, -
insinuated a doubt whether the king would keep his word ; upon
which the princess herself told Shrewsbury,' "that she could not
think herself in the wrong to desire a security for what was to
support her."* The friends who had a mind to make the princess
some settlement went too far. They asked for ,£70,000 a year,
which the House would not grant; and, finally, Anne received the
,£50,000 which Shrewsbury was authorised to offer.
The politics of the palace were passing annoyances from the
troublesome movements of a faction, rather than jpermanent causes
of uneasiness to the king. The Whigs, to whom he in a great de
gree owed his crown, had manifested a violence towards their
political opponents that rendered it impossible that he could wear
that crown in tranquillity. They sought to obtain a considerable
increase of power, by a bold manoeuvre which would materially
strengthen them in a new Parliament. Without any attempt to
'legislate in the spirit of party, a Bill had been read twice for re-
storingthe Corporations which had surrendered their Charters at the
mandates of Charles II. and James II. There was a thin attend
ance in the Houce. for it was the holiday tin'e of Christmas. But
the Whigs by concert mustered in force, and engrafted upon the
Bill two clauses disqualifying for municipal office every person who
had been instrumental in surrendering the charter of a borough.
The term proposed for the duration of this" disqualification was
seven years. A large proportion of the parliamentary franchise was
in the hands of corporations. The clause would have the effect
of removing Tory electors, and substituting Whig electors. This
attempt at a surprise was finally defeated. Thegross injustice of
the clauses — their spirit of vindictiveness — produced a disgust in
which the king participated as much as any man. Absent mem'
bers rushed to London from every district — and the clauses were
r* length rejected. The Tories, now triumphant, tried to carry the
Bill of Indemnity for political offences, which had been laid aside
in the last Session. So many exceptions to the measure of am
nesty were introduced by the opposite faction, that it became a
" Authentic!! Memoirs of the Lie of the Duchess of Marlborough," p. 89.
500 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
measure of proscription. William was worn out by these contests'.
According to Balcarres, he told the duke of Hamilton, " that he
wished he were a thousand miles from England, and that he' had
never been king of it." * Burnet gives a circumstantial relation of
the effect of these manifestations upon a mind so usually calm and
imperturbable. " He was once very near a desperate resolution ;
he" thought he could not trust the Tories, and he resolved he would
not trust the Whig.". : so he fancied the Tories would be true to the
queen, and confide in her, though they would not In him. He
therefore resolved to go over to Holland, and leave the govern
ment in the queen's hands : so he called the marquis of Carmar
then, with the earl of Shrewsbury, and some few more, and told
them, he had a convoy ready, and was resolved to leave all in the
que3n's hands ; since he did not see how he could extr'cate him
self out of the difficulties into which the animosities of parties had
brought him : they pressed him vehemently to lay aside all such
desperate resolutions, and to comply with the present necessity.
Much passion appeared among them : the debate was so warm,
that many tears were shed : in conclusion, the king resolved to
change his first design; into another better resolution, of going over
in person, to put an end to the war in Ireland." j This last res
olution came to be known ; and it was determined by the Whigs
to oppose it, as a step inconsistent with the health and safety of
the king. William took a decisive course. He went to Parlia
ment on tbe 27th -of January, determined to prevent any address
that should interfere with his "purpose, in his speech from the
throne he said, " It is a very sensible affliction to me, to see my
good people burthened with heavy taxes ; but, since the speedy
recovery of Ireland is, in my opinion, the only means to ease them
and to preserve the peace and honour of the nation, I am resolved
to go thither in person, and, with the blessing of God Almighty,
endeavour to reduce that kingdom, that it may no longer be a
charge to this." The Parliament was then prorogued : and, two
day; after, dissolved.
" There was fierce and great carousing about being elected in
the new Parliament." Thus writes Evelyn on the 16th of Feb
ruary. '• There was a great struggle all England over in elections,"
says Burnet; "but the Corporation Bill did so highly provoke all
those whom it was to have disgraced, that the Tories were by far
the greater number in the new Parliament." A year had passed
* Ralph, vol. ii. note at p. ,86. ^ "Own Time," vol, jv.,p. 69.
STATE OF THE ARMY IN IRELAND. 501
in which the foundations of civil and religious liberty had been
widened and strengthened ; but the constitutional legislation of
the Convention Parliament was not likely to excite much popular
enthusiasm. The people were heavily taxed to carry on the war
On the continent no effectual resistance had been offered to the
ambition of France ; and in Ireland James was dictator, at the
head of a large military force. A prince with the highest reputa
tion for courage and sagacity had come to be king over England ;
and yet her navy had been defeated in an encounter with the
French ; and the army which had gone to Ireland under Marshal
Schomberg had done nothing, and was perishing in its inaction.
At the dinner table of the most influential minister, Carmarthen,
"a very considerate and sober commander, going for Ireland, re
lated to us the exceeding neglect of the English soldiers, suffering
severely for want of clothes and necessaries this winter, exceed
ingly magnifying their courage and bravery during all their hard
ships." * Meagre as are the reports of debates in Parliament, we
miy trace, in 1689, complaints of departmental neglect very similar
to those which were so loudly outspoken in 1855. Mr, Waller
gave an account at the bar of the House of Commons of the state
of the army in Ireland. The baggage-horses were left behind at>
Chester ; for profit was made by putting them to grass. The sick
ness by which Schomberg's forces were terribly reduced, he imputed
to tbe great defect of clothing; "all that were well clothed were in
health!" He contrasted the care bestowed upon a Dutch regiment
in camp with the neglect of the English : " Their officers looked
upon their soldiers as their children, and would see them make
their huts, pave them, and lay fresh straw ; in the whole Dutch
camp scarce two died." Surgeons' medicines were very ill pro
vided : " It was reported they had 1700/. worth of medicines, but
I know not where they were." In that rainy season " the foreign
ers were warmer clothed than our own men, in great coats over
their close coats ; of which the English had none." Lastly, the
troops " were not well furnished with shoes : some came late ;—
they were not consigned to anybody." t The Commons naturally
became furious at these recitals of neglect and peculation. Shales,
the Commissary of the Stores, was the chief mark for their indigna
tion. " If ever you have the war carried on with honour and suc
cess," said Colonel Birch, " you must hang this man." The House
wanted to criminate higher men than the Commissary of the Stores,
* Evelyn, " pjary," February 19. t "fariiam^utary History," voj. .v. col.^.
J02 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
whose experience in what was useful as well as what was dishonest
had been acquired in the army of James. The Commons resolved
upon an indecent address to the king, to ask him to inform them
who had recommended Shales. William consulted his higher
sense of honour by refusing to be an informer. A wiser course was
adopted than hanging Shales. A Commission was sent to Ireland,
to remedy these abuses. The state of the navy was not more satis
factory than that of the army. The indefatigable Secretary of the
navy, Pejpys, though now out of office, had his keen eye upon the
abuses of that- department of which he had the most intimate knowl
edge of any man. At a dinner at which Evelyn was present,
Pepys " deplored the sad condition of our navy, as governed by
inexperienced men since the Revolution." He was for building
frigates. He desired " they would leave off building such high
decks, which were for nothing but to gratify gentlemen-command
ers, who must have all their effeminate accommodations, and for
pomp. It would be the ruin of our fleets, if such persons were con
tinued in command, they neither having experience, nor being cap
able of learning, because they would not submit to the fatigue and
inconvenience which those who were bred seamen would under
go." * The Victualling of the Fleet was as notoriously infamous
as the Commissariat of the Army. The Victuallers were ordered
by the House into custody; but the affair seems to have evapor
ated in talk. " I believe the fleet is as ill victualled as if our en
emies had done it," was the sense of the House, thus expressed by
Mr. Hampden. " You may talk of raising money, but not of raising
seamen," said another member. The seamen would not serve to
be starved and poisoned. With a Council in which there was far
more hatred than concord ; with a Parliament in which the evils
of Party greatly outweighed its advantages ; with a Church equally
divided in opinion — "of whom the moderate and sober part were
for a speedy reformation of divers things, which it was thought
might be made in our Liturgy, for the inviting Dissenters, others
more stiff and rigid, for no condescension at all ; " f with the dry
rot of corruption in all the administrative departments of govern
ment, we can scarcely be surprised that William panted for an
other field of action, in which his own energies could be fairly put
forth. "The going to a campaign," he said, "was naturally no un
pleasant thing to him ; he was sure he understood that be'tter than
how to govern England." X And so the sickly man advised with
* "Diary," March 7. t Ibid., February 16. X Bumet, vol. iv. p. 8a.
OPENING OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT. 503
sir Christopher Wren about building for him a house of wood, that
should be carried with the army like a showman's booth ; and
though hie constant cough had driven him from Whitehall to Ken
sington for purer air, he resolved to take no heed of those who
manifested a real or pretended concern for his health. He would
see with- his own eyes if affairs in Ireland were irretrievable. Upon
the king himself almost wholly devolved the duty of making a fit
preparation for his campaign, by searching into the abuses of the
military dejpartments, and of remedying evils of such disastrous
magnitude He wrote to his friend Portland, after the ^prorogation
of Parliament, "All will depend upon success in Irelan:!. I must
apply myself entirely to regulate everything in the best way I can.
There is no small work on my my hands, being so badly assisted
as I am."*
At the opening of Parliament on the 20th of March, 1690, some
changes- had been made in the ministry, and in the le? ser offices,
" so that," says Burnet, " Whig and Tory were now jpretty equally
mixed ; and both studied to court the king by making advances
upon the money-bills." f The king had a tolerably equal contempt
for both factions ; and his sense of the baseness of some jpublic
men is recorded by the historian of his own time. Sir John Trevor,
who had been Master of the Rolls under James, "being a Tory in
principle, undertook to manage that party, provided he was furnished
with such sums of money as might purchase some votes ; and ty
him began the jpractice of buying off men, in which hitherto the
king had kept to stricter rules. I took the liberty once to complain
to the king of this method. He said he hated it as much as any
man could do ; but he saw it was not possible, considering the
corruption of the age, to avoid it, unless he would endanger the
whole." X The corruption of the age lasted through three genera
tions. It had " lighter wings to fly " when paper-credit came. It
grew more rampant under the second George than under the first.
It flourished through half the reign of the third George. It would
have lasted to our time if the people had not become fully acquaint
ed with the proceedings of their representatives. It could not live
in the light of public opinion, shed upon the nation by the free
publication of the debates. We can scarcely blame king William
for using the ready means of self-defence, whilst his enemies freely
employed the subtlest arts for his overthrow. It was difficult for
him to truit any one. His favourite minister was the Whig
» Note in Macaulay, vol. iii. p. 537- * Burnet, vol. iv. p. 71. X Ibid., p. 74.
504 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Shrewsbury. Read his correspondence, and he appears the fairest
of advisers. He writes to the king, " I wish you could have
established your party upon the moderate and honest principled
men of both factions ; but as there be a necessity of declaring, I
shall make no difficulty to own my sense, that your majesty and the
government are much more safe depending upon the Whigs, whose
designs, if any against, are improbable and remoter than with the
Tories, who, many of them, questionless, would bring in king James ;
and the best of them, I doubt, have a regency still in their heads ;
for though I agree them to be the properest instruments to carry
the prerogative high, yet I fear they have so unreasonable a venera
tion for monarchy, as not altogether to approve the foundation yours
is built upon." * William manifested some favour to the Tories,
and Shrewsbury resigned the seals as Secretary of State. Burnet
says, "he saw the Whigs, by using the king ill, were driving him
into the Tories ; and he thought these would serve the king with
more zeal if he left his post." William, continues Burnet, "loved
the earl of Shrewsbury." The man represented as so bullen and
so cold, pressed his favourite Secretary, again arc! again, to hold
the seals. Shrewsbury steadily refused, and 1. is '-aj'itation cf
mind threw him into a fever that nearly coi.t I ir.i 1 is life." It has
been proved, beyond doubt, that this friend of Willi m resigned the
seals by the command of king James to whoi.i h.j lui.i tendered his
services. James, in a paper submitted to the i rencli !_;ovcrnment
in 1692, said, " There is the earl of Shrewsbury, who. being Secre
tary of State to the prince of Oraii'.e. surrendered hi i charge by
my order." \ Shrewsbury, from wc.iknci.s of character, was f.iitli-
less to the master whom he admired ; and his alienation \v_s very
temporary. Others were treacherous through the baseness 01 their
natures ; and, in betraying the prince whom they had contributed
to raise, did not hesiute to betray their country.
Whatever may have been the amount of individual baseness,
and of party violence, amongst the legislators of this period — how
ever unpleasant their jealousy of arbitrary power might have been
to a king who truly desired to rule over a free people — the spirit of
the Long Parliament had not departed from the second Parliament
of the Revolution. However desirous Whig or Tory might be to
gain favour with the sovereign, they agreed in refusing to grant the
duties of Customs to the crown for life, as they had been granted
to William's two predecessors. "Why should they entertain a
* Coxe, " Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 15. t Macaulay, vcl. iii. p.- 596, note.
JEALOUSY IN SETTLING THE REVENUE. 505
jealousy of me," the king said to Burnet, "who came to save their
religion and liberties, when they trusted king James' so much, who
intended to destroy them ? " Wisely and boldly did the bishop
answer him: "King James would never have run into those coun
sels that ruined him, if he had obtained the revenue only for a short
term."* On a previous occasion, when this question of the settle
ment of the revenue was raised, William said to Burnet, " he
understood the good of a commonwealth as well as of a kingly
government ; and it was not easy to determine which was best ;
but he was sure the worst of all governments was that of a king
without treasure and without power." f We may well believe that
William had no desire to use treasure or power for despostic pur
poses ; and yet we .may rejoice that the Commons of England
stoutly resolved to prevent the possibility of the Crown becoming
dangerous by being too independent. For out of the practical
working of the Constitution, through many a struggle, it has come
to be understood that the sovereign can" have no interest separate
from the public advantage ; and that the representatives of the
people would grossly err in any attemjjt to lower the personal
dignity of the sovereign. The real relations of the executive and
the legislative power have practically changed, without any change
in the constitutional theory of their rights. Under the well under
stood principle that the advisers of the Crown cannot exist with a
minority in the House of Commons, the dignity of the Crown is in
no degree lessened by any opposition which may enforce a change
, of the servants of the Crown. It was otherwise when the sovereign
was in a considerable degree his own minister ; and when his ser
vants did not act under a joint responsibility. William drew a
distinction between the good of a commonwealth and the good of
a kinglv government. Practically, the distinction has almost ceased
to exist in our times. But we venture to think that our constitu
tional historian scarcely makes allowance for the remaining influence
of the traditions of the monarchy when he says of William, " he
could expect to reign on no other terms than as the chief of a com
monwealth." X
The Statute-book contains an Act of a dozen lines, which passed
with little effectual opposition, although well calculated to produce
a trial of strength between the two great parties. It is the Act
whereby the Lords and Commons recognise and acknowledge that
* " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 75. t Ibid., p. 60.
X Hallam, " Constitutional History," chnp. xv.
506 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
William and Mary " were, are, and of right ought to be, by the laws
of this realm, our sovereign liege lord and lady, king and queen. "*
This Act also declares that all the Acts made in the Parliament
assembled on the 13th of February, 1688 [1689], are laws and
statutes of this kingdom. Upon-this point the Lords debated long
and warmly. In the Commons, the question was settled in two
days ; for Somers put the House in a dilemma. This parliament,
he said, depends entirely on the foundation of the last. - If that
were not a legal parliament, they who were then met, and had taken -
the oaths enacted by that Parliament, were guilty of high treason :
the laws repealed by it were still in force, so they must presently
return to king James." t The Whigs had their triumph in so easily
carrying this Bill. It was a triumph of comm6n sense. They were
justly defeated upon an attempt to impose a new test upon the
people. A Bill was introduced in the House of Commons, requiring
every person holding office to abjure king James. To make the
proposed measure still more odious, any justice of the peace was
empowered to tender the oath of abjuration at his pleasure, and to
commit to prison whoever refused to take it. The Bill was rejected
by a small majority. The measure, with some modifications, was
then tried anew in the House of Peers. " I have taken so many
oathg in my time," said lord Wharton, who looked back to the days
of the Long Parliament, " that I hope God will forgive me if I have
not kept them all. I should be very unwilling to charge myself
with more at the end of my days." The old Puritan interpreted
the real feelings of every honest, man about the multiplication of
political oaths. It was well known that William had no desire for
such a measure as this oath ; and thus, after many angry words
and insinuations, the abjuration of king James was abandoned.
King William strengthened his throne far more effectually than by
a test arbitrarily administered, by authorising Carmarthen to present
to the Peers an Act of Grace for political offences. Bitter mem
ories of the past had prevented the passing of Indemnity Bills.
William resolved that the cause of the Revolution should not be
disgraced with forfeitures and bloodshed, as was that of the Res
toration. The exceptions to the Act of Grace were the surviving
regicides — who had been excepted under the Act of Charles II.
These were far out of the reach of such a visitation for the crime
of forty years standing. Thirty of the evil instruments of James
were excepted by name ; and, last of all, " George, lord Jeffreys,
* 2 Gul. & Mar. c. 1. ? Burnet, vol. iv. p. 73.
WILLIAM GOES TO IRELAND. 507
deceased." This " Act for the King and Queen's most gracious
general and free pardon," was passed by both Houses without
debate. It was one of the most effectual means to prevent a recur
rence of "the long and great troubles and discords that have been
within this kingdom." Yet the clemency of William was sneerecT
at by those who received its benefits, and condemned by those who
were baulked of th Jr revenges. The king closed the Session on
the 20th of May ; and an Act having been passed to give the queen
power to administer the government in his absence, he prepared to
take the conduct of the war in Ireland.
William left London on the 4th of June. He had selected nine
privy-councillors to advise the queen in the conduct of affairs. It
was difficult wholly to rely upon the honesty of this Council, in
which there was a mixture of the leading men of the opposite
factions. It was a time of great anxiety. Plots were in course of
detection ; invasion might be expected. The king determined to
go where the necessity was most pressing. " He seemed to have
a great weight upon his spirits, from the state of his affairs, which
was then very cloudy. He said, for his own part, he trusted in
God, and would either go through with his business, or perish in
it. He only pitied the poor queen, repeating that twice with great
tenderness ; and wished that those who loved him would wait
much on her, and assist her."* William had done everything in
his power to ensure success in his great enterprise. Schomberg
had been largely reinforced. His army had grievously suffered
from sickness and neglect. The pestilence which had thinned its
ranks was deemed by the court of king James, " a visible mark of
--God's judgment upon that wicked and rebellious generation."!
William, " a fatalist in religion " according to Smollett, had a
rational confidence that God might manifest His judgments through
the industry and zeal of His creatures ; and he had set about to
repair all that had been amiss in the previous organisation of the
Irish army. He had now in Ireland thirty-six thousand troops, well
fed, properly clothed, not wanting in the munitions of war, pre
pared by his own vigilant superintendence to take the field with
those advantages without which the skill of a general, and the
bravery of his men, may be thrown away. The English knew how
carefully it had been endeavoured to repair the evils of the last
autumn and winter. Still the people were anxious and doubtful.
There is a curious instance of the uncertainty attached by publifi
* Burnet, vol. iv. p. 82. t " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 385.
508 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
opinion to the determination of the king to attempt the reduction of
Ireland, — an instance also of the gambling spirit of that age. R0w<-
land Davies, Dean of Ross, who had been ejected from his ben
efices, is going with the army of Wiiliam as a Chaplain. He arid
four of his friends desire to raise money ; and they borrow four
hundred pounds under a bond, signed and sealed at Jonathan's
Coffee-house, the great resort of stock-jobbers, " for the payrherit
of six hundred pounds within a month after king William and queen
Mary are in actual possession of Dublin and Cork." * Of the
condition and prospects of king James, a lamentable account is
given by his official biographer. The duke of Berwick had been
beaten at Belturbet ; Charlemont had surrendered ; but these mis
fortunes " were nothing in comparison of the disappointments the
king met with from the court of France." Louis would not con
sent to make England the seat of war instead of Ireland. He
would not believe that the friends of James in England, at the head
of an Irish and French army, would soon "make the English weary
of resisting God and their duty." f Louis would only consent to send
six thousand men into Ireland. The English were masters of
Ulster. The Catholics who quitted it upon Schomberg's landing
brought such prodigious flocks of cattle with them, as ate up the
greatest part of the grass and corn of other counties, according to
the lugubrious memoir writer. The Rapparees destroyed on all
sides ; there was no corn nor meal to feed the army ; no cloth, no
leather ; " and the brass money put an absolute stop to importa
tion." — We cannot have a more striking picture of the effects of
an improvident and iniquitous administration of public affairs.
Ulster, at the beginning of June, was big with expectation of
the arrival of king William. Absurd reports preceded him. An
officer came from London to Belfast, and reported that the parlia
ment was adjourned ; that the king was speedily to set out, "and
will bring with him four hundred thousand men." j On the 7th,
the busy chaplain, preaching one day, dining jovially in the English
quarters on another, saw many troops landing at Carrickfergus,
and the train of artillery in the harbour. On the loth, in the
evening, on a false report that the king was landed, "all the
country flamed with bonfires." § On the 14th, over a bowl of
punch, " we received the news of the king' ; 1 mding, and being at
Belfast, and spent the night jollily." On th . 15th, the officers of
* "Journal" of Rowland Davies, p. 101. t "Life of James II." vol. i. p. 336.
X Rowland Davies, p. 117. j j^id., p. 119.
THE BOYNE.
SC9
the various regiments crowded round William, and were presented
to him. Troops continued to arrive, "insomuch that there was
not less than five hundred sail of ships together in the Lough."
William reviewed the troops on the 17th and on the 19th, and then
gave orders that they should march after him. The army was-
cotnposed not only of English and Englishers. There were
Brandenburgers, Dutch, Danes, and French Huguenots. The
spirit of the king triumphed over his feeble body. He was all
animation. His eye sparkled with the exultation of hope. " I will
not let the grass grow under my feet," he exclaimed. James ap
peared equally alert at the call of danger. He left Dublin on the
16th of June. William's army was at Loughbrickland on the 26th
of June, consisting of thirty-six thousand men. The troops had
manifested a very different conduct from those of James, who had
ravaged the country in the preceding year ; for William had issued
an order that they " do so carry themselves both in garrison,
quarters, and wheresoever they shall march, as persons ought to
do who are under military discipline ; " that they, should not pre
sume to rob or spoil, to do violence or extort, " but that they duly
pay such reasonable rates for their provisions," as shall be ordered
and appointed.* The captains of king William's forces paid in a
better coin than the brass money of king James. It was expected
that the Irish army would have disputed the passage of William at
the pass near Moyra Castle, now known as Ravensdale ; but they
left it open ; and on the 27th the English army was at Dundalk
forming " a camp at least three miles in length, in two lines." f
King James still retired as William advanced ; but at length, on the
30th, as the English army approached Drogheda, the enemy was
seen encamped on the opposite south bank of the Boyne.
The army of James was in a strong defensive position. The
stream which divided the counties of Louth and Meath was be
tween him and his rival. " The river was deep, and rose very high
every tide ; and after these difficulties were surmounted, there was
a morass to be passed, and behind it a miry ground." X The camp
of James on the Meath side was defended by intrenchments and
batteries. The fortress of Drogheda, on the Louth side, was held
by the Irish, and displayed the ensigns of James and of Louis.
The numbers of his enemy were variously reported to William.
He had received tolerably accurate information from a man who
» Harris, " Life of William," Appendix xl. t Rowland Davies, p. mi.
} Harris, p. 266.
510 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
knew how to deal with exaggerations. An officer who had de
serted from James's army greatly magnified their real amount. Mr.
Cox, a civilian with sir Robert Southwell, bade the officer look
upon the English camp and say what their numbers were. " He
confidently affirmed them to be more than double their real num
ber; whence his majesty perceived he was a conceited ill-'
guesser." * William, surrounded by his generals, rode along the
bank of the river on the morning of the 30th to inspect the posi
tion of the enemy. "We shall soon be better acquainted with
their numbers," he observed.f He alighted from his horse near
the village of Old Bridge. It was a rising ground, within musket-
shot of the river. His breakfast was spread on the grass, and he
rested for an hour. On the opposite bank there were watchful
eyes directed towards the group which surrounded William ; and
it was soon perceived that no common enemy was within the reach
of cannon. Two field pieces were quickly brought down from the
hill, and planted in a ploughed field screened t>y a hedge. The
king had remounted. One piece is fired, and the horse of prince
George of Hesse is hit. Another shot, and William himself is
struck. The ball has rent his buff-coat, and grazed his right
shoulder. His officers crowd around, for the king stooped upon
his horse's neck. He alights, and the slight wound is dressed.
A shout went through the camp of James ; and the tale passed
from mouth to mouth that the prince of Orange was killed. The
rumour soon crossed the sea. On the 2nd of July feux-de-joie
were fired in Paris, to proclaim the great triumph. The next day
had its own tale, of which James himself was the bearer. William
was soon riding through every part of his army ; and when the sun
of that last of June was set, he was still in the saddle, making ar
rangements by torchlight for the coming struggle. He had re
solved to pass the river the next morning. The enterprise was
thought by Schomberg too dangerous. William felt that there was
greater danger in deiaying a decisive action. The event proved
that the daring of the comparatively inexjpericuced prince was a
better policy than the caution of the old hero of many a well
foughten field.
The right wing of William's army was the earliest in its move
ments after day-break on that first of July. It was led by the son
of marshal Schomberg, accompanied by the earl of Portland.
There were twenty-four squadrons of horse and dragoons, and six
* Harris, p. 267. t Ibid.
BATTLE OF THE BOYNE. 5 II
regiments of foot under the command of Meinhart Schomberg, the
marshal's brave son. Every man had a green bough in his hat,
according to an order issued by the king on the previous night.
This right wing marched towards the bridge of Slane, about five
miles from the main camp. Rowland Davies, who was with this
division, says, " at two fords we passed the river, where there were
six squadrons of the enemy to guard the pass." _ Other accounts
represent the right wing as passing over the bridge of Slane.
Whether by. the fords or by the bridge, the passage was resisted
by some squadrons of horse, but they soon gave way. The French
general Lauzun saw that the movement of the English right wing
must be met, and he rajjidly moved his best troops to prevent the
rear of James's army being attacked. " As soon as we passed the
river," says Davies, "we saw the enemy marching towards us, and
that they drew up on the side of a hill in two lines. " Portland
recommended the horse and foot to be drawn up also in two lines,
intermixing horse and foot, squadron with battalion — "grounded
upon the example of Caesar, at the battle of Pharsalia."* Rowland
Davies parades no such learned authority, in relating the same
fact ; and he says, " thus the armies stood for a considerable time,
an impassable bog being between thern." Reinforcements of foot
having arrived, "we altered our line of battle, drawing all our
horse into the right wing ; and so, outflanking the enemy, we
marched round the bog and engaged them, rather pursuing than
fighting them, as far as Duleek." t
It was arranged that king William should lead the left wing,
and pass the Boyne about a mile above Drogheda. This division
consisted wholly of cavalry. Marshal Schomberg, commanding
the centre, composed almost entirely of infantry, was to cross the
river about half a mile higher up at the ford of Old Bridge. Count
Solmes led his Dutch regiment of guards through the rapid water,
though up to their middle. The English foot crossed up to their
armpits. The Danes and French refugees also waded through
the stream at other points. The south bank was bristling with
Irish horse and foot. Some attempt at resistance was made by
the Irish infantry while the greater part of the troops were still in
the water; but at last the columns had crossed. Then the Irish
foot would not face these resolute soldiers of many nations. An
ancient fear of the Danes perhaps contributed to their jpanic. But
the Irish cavalry, led by Hamilton, fought with desperate courage
* Harris, p. 268. * Journal of Davies, p. 123.
512 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
against the infantry that had gained the shore, or were still in the
bed of the river. The issue was very doubtful. Caillemot, the
commander of the Huguenots, was killed. The veteran Schom
berg saw the danger; and rushing to the river without waiting to
put on his cuirass, crossed, and led the retreating Protestants, ex
claiming, " Allons, messieurs ! Voila vos persecuteurs." Schom
berg fell in the confusion ; his skull was cloven. On the same
ground fell the heroic defender of Londonderry, George Walker.
At this critical juncture William arrived on the field. He had
brought his left wing across the stream, with some difficulty.
There was a rapid tide. The bed of the stream was in some
places a deep mud. His own horse floundered in the miry bot
tom, or was carried along by the rushing tide. \ But the king and
his cavalry were at last on firm ground. William drew his sword,
and was soon in the heat of the fight. The Irish horse retreated tow
ards Donore, about a mile from the pass. Here, from his tent on
the hill near the church, now a ruin, king James had watched the pro
gress of the battle. Here his retreating horse made a stand. They
turned upon their pursuers, and William's cavalry began to give
way. He rode up to the Enniskilleners, and exclaimed, " What
will you do for me ?" " It is the king," said their officer. "You
shall be my guards to day," cried William, and led on the yeomen
who were conquerors on the field of Newton Butler. The battle
of the Boyne was not yet won. Again and again " Little Will " *
rallied his troops whenever they gave way, and brought them up
to the charge. The fate of the day did not long remain in sus
pense. Hamilton, the traitorous messenger to Tyrconnel, was
taken prisoner. "Will the Irish fight any more ? " said William.
" Yes, sir, upon my honour, I believe they will." " Your honour ! "
exclaimed the injured prince ; and then directed that his prisoner's
wounds should be looked to. There was little more fighting.
James saw the day was going against him ; and he mounted his
horse and fled, the French covering his retreat. At nine o'clock
that night he arrived in Dublin.
It is remarkable that a battle so momentous in its consequences,
should have been attended with so small a sacrifice of life. The
loss in James' army did not exceed fifteen hundred men, chiefly
cavalry. On William's side the loss of men was not more than five
hundred. If we may judge from a passage in Rowland Davies,
• " Little Will, the scourge of France,
No Godhead, but the first of men." — Prior.
William III. at the Battle of the Boyne. —Vol. iv. 512.
FLIGHT OF JAMES. — HIS SPEECH AT DUBLIN. 513
the steadiness of the Dutch guards repelled the attacks of the Irish
horse, by a mode of fighting which is mentioned as if it were novel :
" Count Solmes marched over the river with the blue Dutch regi
ment of guards. No sooner were they up the hill, but the enemy's
horse fell on them, ours with the king being about half a mile lower,
passing at another ford. At the first push, tbe first rank only fired,
and then fell on their faces, loading their muskets again as they
lay on the ground. At the next charge, they fired a volley of three
ranks. Then, at the next, the first rank got up and fired again,-
which being received by a choice squadron of the enemy, consist
ing mostly of officers, they immediately fell in upon the Dutch as
having spent all their front fire. But the two rear ranks drew up
in two platoons and flanked the enemy across ; and the rest, screw
ing their swords into their muskets, received the charge with all
imaginable bravery, and in a minute dismounted them all. The
Derry regiment also sustained them bravely, and as they drew off
maintained the same ground with great slaughter."
Such was the battle of the Boyne, in which Protestant Europe
was fighting against Roman Catholic ascendancy, in the island
which had been distracted for a century and a half with the bitter
est wars of religion. The Londoner, the Scot, and the English
settler of Ulster, the Dutch Calvinist and the French Huguenot,
stood the brunt of that first of July, with equal resolution and equal
confidence in their leader.
A great principle was manifested in this battle — a principle not
always understood by statesmen or warriors — that the results of a
victory are not to be estimated by the numbers of killed and
wounded on the side of the vanquished — nor by the possession of
the field of battle — not even by the submission of the district in
which the conquering army has gathered its laurels. Looking at
the mere material results of the ist of July, there was no sufficient
cause for the dispersion of the Irish army, many of whom James
had seen fighting bravely in his cause as he looked upon the valley
of the Boyne from the hill of Donore. The real victory was in its
moral consequences — in the instant and complete exposure of the
character of th : man for whom the better part of the Irish Catho
lics had been fighting, out of an honest conviction that they were in
arms for the cause of their country and their religion. James first
deserted them in his intense selfishness : he afterwards insulted
them in his cowardly ingratitude. On the morning of the 2nd of
July, he assembled the magistrates of Dublin. He said that he had
514 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
been often told, that when it came to the touch, the Irish would
not bear the brunt of a battle. He had provided a good army, and
had made all preparations to engage a foreign invader, and he
had found the fatal truth of which he had been forewarned.
Though the army did not desert him as they did in England, yet
when the trial came they basely fled the field, and left it a spoil to
his enemies. Thenceforward he determined never to head an Irish
army, and now resolved to shift for himself, as they themselves
.must do. He exhorted them to j>revent the plunder or destruction
of the city ; and to submit to the prince of Orange, who was a merci
ful man. After this, the most devoted slave of the house of Stuart
would perfectly understand that this ungenerous and cruel attack of
James upon his army was a mere selfish expedient to cover the
ignominy of his own desertion of the cause for which his adherents
had fought — some with admirable resolution ; others as well as the
miserable discipline in which they had been trained would lead a
reasonable man to expect. They had been trained to plunder, to
ravage, to make war with the instinct of savages ; and when they
had to meet the shock of civilized warfare, they fled as a lawless
multitude always will flee, regardless of everything but their own
safety. The battle of the Boyne manifested tbe utter disorganisa
tion of the principle force by which Ulster had been wasted and
harassed during a year of evil government.
There was another battle being fought on the south-eastern coast
of England, at the very hour when the shot that was fired across
the Boyne had very nearly settled the question whether the Revo
lution of 1688 should be a striking-jpoint in a race of honour and
prosperity, or a broken trophy of one brief and useless effort for
liberty and the rights of conscience. The departure of William
for Ireland was the signal for an attack upon the English coasts,
which was to be accompanied with an insurrection of the Jacobites.
A fleet sailed from Brest under the Count de Tourville. The
English fleet was in the Downs, under the command of the earl of
Torrington. He sailed to the back of the Isle of Wight, and was
there joined by a squadron of Dutch vessels under a skilful com
mander, Evertsen. Queen Mary and her Council were aware that
the French fleet had left Brest. It soon became known that the
English admiral had quitted his position off St. Helen's, and had
sailed for the Straits of Dover upon the approach of the French.
The Council determined to send Torrington positive orders to
fight. The French fleet was superior in vessels and guns to the
ENERCETIC CONDUCT OF THE QUEEN. 515
combined English and Dutch fleet ; but the inequality was not so
great that a man of the old stamp of Blake would have feared to
risk a battle. Torrington did something even worse than hesitate
to fight. He let the brunt of the conflict fall upon the Dutch.
He put Evertsen in the van, and brought very few of his own
squadron into action. The Dutch fought with indomitable cour
age and obstinacy, but were at length compelled to draw off. The
gazers from the high downs of Beachy Head witnessed the shame
ful flight of a British admiral to seek the safety of the Thames.
When the news came to London that Torrington had left the
Channel to a triumphant enemy — when an invasion was imminent,
for England was without regular troops — when jjlotters were all
around, and arrests of men of rank, even of Clarendon, the queen's
kinsman, were taking jjlace — then, indeed, there was an hour
almost of despair such as was felt when Dc Ruyter sailed up the
Medway. But the very humiliation roused the spirit of the people.
The queen was universally beloved ; and, although studiously
avoiding, when the king was at hand, any interference in public
affairs, she took at once a kingly part in this great crisis. " The
queen balanced all things with an extraordinary temper," writes
Burnet. She sent for the Lord Mayor of London; and inquired
what the citizens would do, should the enemy effect a landing ?
The Lord Mayor returned to the queen with an offer of a hundred
thousand pounds ; of nine thousand men of the city trainbands,
ready instantly to march wherever ordered; and a proposal for
the Lieutenancy to provide and maintain six additional regiments
of foot; and of the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council to
raise a regiment of horse, and a thousand dragoons, by voluntary
contributions.* The same spirit was manifested throughout the
land. The people might grumble against the Dutch ; they might
feel some commiseration for an exiled prince ; they might be
divided about questions of Church government; they might com
plain that the Revolution had brought them increased taxation.
But they would have no Papist government thrust upon them by
the French king. They would not undo the work of theii own
hands. The gloom for the disaster of Beachy Head was quickly
forgotten. On the 4th cf July a messenger had brought letters to
the queen which told that a great victory had been won in Ireland,
and that the king was safe ; and, says Evelyn in his quiet way,
" there was much public rejoicing."
* Maitland's " London," vol. i. 495.
516 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXVI.
James embarks for France.— William enters Dublin.— The French devastate Teign.
mouth.— William's march to Limerick.— Siege of Limerick.— The siege raised.—
William goes to England.— Parliament — War supply.— England and Continental
Politics.— William leaves for Holland.— Congress at the Hague.— Mons capitulates
to the French.— Vacant sees in England filled up.— Plot of Preston and Ashton.—
Treason laws. — Marlborough in F landers. — Limerick surrenders to Ginkell.—
Treaty of Limerick.
King James, "in compliance with the advice of all his friends,
resolved to go for France, and try to do something more effectual
on that side, than he could hope from so shattered and disheart
ened a body of men as now remained in Ireland." * " Request of
friends " is the apology for the foolish actions of the weak king as
well as of the vain scribbler. On the 3rd of July, James quitted
Dublin with all speed, about five in the morning; left two troops
of horse at Bray, to defend the bridge there against any pursuers ;
rode over , the Wicklow mountains, and baited near Arklow;
"mended his pace" when four French officers maintained that the
enemy was not far behind ; and never stopped till he got to Dun-
cannon about sunrise. His attendants found a merchant ship at
Passage. The captain was persuaded to take James on board in
the evening. They sailed for Kinsale ; and the next day the royal
fugitive was secure in a French frigate, and was landed safely at
Brest. f James repaired to St. Germains, where "his Most Chris
tian Majesty came to see him ; and in general terms promised all
imaginable kindness and support." The sanguine exile having
abandoned Ireland, had his ready scheme for invading England,
" now naked and ungarnished of troops." Louis received the pro
ject coldly ; and, finally, would have nothing to do with the affair ;
although James magnanimously offered to go with a fleet, either
with or without an army, for he was sure " his own sailors would
never fight against one under whom they so often had conquered." X
His Most Christian Majesty pretended illness when his brother of
* " Life of James II." Own Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 401. t IbuU
X Dalrymple.
WILLIAM ENTERS DUBLIN. 517
England came to pester him with his new demands for ships and
troops. " The court of France could not forbear speaking great
disrespect, even in his own hearing; which the queen seemed
much more sensible of than he did. " * The courtiers of Versailles
could guess at the truth ; although " the few English courtiers who
stayed with the queen in France, to justify the flight of their king,
did not spare calumniating the Irish." They averred " that the
Irish abandoned their prince, and left him exposed to the enemy; "
and this version of the cause of James's return was so believed by
the uninformed, that the Irish who had been refugees in France
since the days of Cromwell, "durst not walk abroad or appear in
the streets, the people were so exasperated against them." f
On the day that James fled from Dublin, the citizens had to
apprehend two sorts of danger. The forces of James, scattered
about the vicinity, pressed by hunger, might return and rifle the
town. The lowest of the Dublin populace, in a pretended zeal for
religion, threatened to burn and plunder the houses of the Papists.
The city was saved from these calamities chiefly by the firmness
of captain Robert Fitzgerald. X On the 3rd, the camp of William
on the Boyne was broken up. On the 4th, the Dutch guards took
possession of Dublin Castle. On the 5th, the head-quarters of the
king were at Ferns ; and on the 6th, being Sunday, he rode to
Dublin, and in the cathedral of St. Patrick returned thanks to God
for the success of his arms. William, however, continued to sleep
in his camp. On the 8th, "his Majesty in person viewed and took
a general muster of all the army, and was fourteen hours on horse
back ; only for one quarter did he alight to eat and drink." § The
news of the disgrace of Beachy Head had reached Ireland on the
loth, when the king, contemplating a return to England, resolved
to secure Waterford, as the most important harbour of the Eastern
coast. On the nth of July the army was on its march. Rowland
Davies records how. in defiance of the royal proclamation, the
troops " robbed and pillaged all the road along." Execution fol
lowed execution. On the 14th, on the march to Carlow, " as we
passed, two of the Enniskillen dragoons hung by the wayside, with
papers on their breasts exposing their crime ; and thereby our
march was very regular without any such excursions or pillaging
* Dartmouth's note in Burnet, vol. iv. p. 100.
t "Macarhe Excidium," Camden Society edit. p. 41.
X Harris, p. 273. § Rowland Davies, p. ia6.
518 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
as before." * On the 21st, Waterford was in possession of
William's troops, the garrison having capitulated. Ihe king then
determined to return to Dublin, with the view of embarking for
England. With a French fleet in the Channel, there was now
greater danger to be met on the English shores, than in the resist
ance which continued to be made in Ireland. The forces which
had been scattered on the ist of Jul)' had gathered around Limer
ick, and were prepared to defend that city. Officers and soldiers,
without orders from their superiors, without a leader, all flocked
to Limerick, " as if they had been all guided thither by some secret
instinct of nature." f But, irregularly fortified, and its defence
left to the Irish, it was considered as likely soon to fall. On his
road to Dublin, on the 27th, more accurate intelligence from Eng
land had reached the king, and he determined to invest Limerick
in person. The shameful discomfiture of the allied fleet at Beachy Head
had not been followed up by the French so as to produce any re
sults that should give serious alarm to William. On the 22nd of
July, the French admiral, Tourville, was anchored in Torbay, with
the fleet which had chased Torrington to the mouth of the
Thames ; and he had been reinforced with a number of galleys,
rowed by slaves. The whole fleet was employed to transport
troops. The approach of danger had roused up the spirit of the
July of 1588. The beacons are again blazing on the Devonshire
hills. From every road in the interior the veomen of the West
are gathering on the coast, not shrinking from trying their strength
against the veterans of France. Tourville loses faith in the assur
ances of the Stuart courtiers, that all England would be up to aid
in his enterprise. All England is shouting ¦' God bless king Wil
liam and queen Mary." But Tourville will do something. He
lands some troops at Teignmouth, which Burnet calls a "misera
ble village," but which the inhabitants represented as consisting
of two towns, having three hundred houses. The people of Teign
mouth obtained a brief for their losses : and in this document they
say that " the French fleet, riding in Torbay, where all the forces
of our county of Devon were drawn up to oppose their landing,
several of their galleys drew off from their fleet, and made towards
a weak unfortified place called Teignmouth, about seven miles to
the eastward of Torbay." The narrative then continues to de
scribe the ravages of these heroes :— " Coming very near, and hav-
* Rowland Davies, p. 128. t " Macaria: Excidium.
WILLIAMS MARCH TO LIMERICK. 519
ing played the cannon of their galleys upon the town, and shot
near two hundred great shot therein, to drive away the poor in
habitants, they landed about seven hundred of their men, and be
gan to fire and plunder the towns of East and West Teignmouth-
which consist of about three hundred houses ; and in the space of
three hours ransacked and plundered the said towns, and a village
called Shaldon, lying on the other side of the river, and burnt and
destroyed one hundred and sixteen houses, together with eleven
' ships and barks that were in the harbour. And to add sacrilege
to their robbery and violence, they in a barbarous manner entered
the two churches of the said towns, and in the most unchristian
manner tore the Bibles and Common Prayer-books in pieces, scat
tering the leaves thereof about the streets, broke down the puhpits,
overthrew the Communion-tables, together with many other marks
of a barbarous and enraged cruelty. And such goods and mer
chandises as they could not, or durst not, stay to carry away, for
fear of our forces, which were marching to oppose them, they spoilt
and destroyed, killing very many cattle and hogs, which they left
dead in the streets." After these feats, Tourville sailed away to
France ; and left behind him an amount of indignation that was
worth more for defence than even the troops of horse raised by
the citizens of London. The brief of the " poor inhabitants " of
the towns of East and West Teignmouth and Shaldon, — who " be
ing in great part maintained by fishing, and their boats, nets, and
other fishing-craft being plundered and consumed in the com
mon flames," had lost, as they alleged, eleven thousand pounds —
went through every parish from the Land's-end to the East, South,
and North ; and every penny that was dropped in the plate at the
church door was accompanied with the pious hope that England
might have strength from above to resist the Papists who burnt
fishing-huts, and tore the Bible in pieces, and who would ravage
this island as they had ravaged the Palatinate.
On the 8th of August king William's main army was encamped
at Cahirconlish, about six miles from Limerick. "As we came
up," says Davies, " we saw houses in the country round on fire,
which put the king into some concern." The earl of Portland had
advanced with a large body of horse and foot within cannon-shot
of the city ; and in the evening of the 8th William himself viewed
the position in which the strength of the Irish Catholics was now
concentrated. The French General, Lauzun, had declared that
the place could not resist the attack of the advancing army. With
520 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the pedantry that sometimes clings to military science as well as to
other sciences, he trusted more to walls and moats, such as Vau-
ban constructed on the French frontier, than to resolute hearts, by
which Limerick only could be defended. He left the Irish to thei'r
fate. The Irish resolved to redeem the dishonour of the Boyne.
They had an intrepid counsellor in Sarsfield, their general, who
put his own resolute spirit into the twenty thousand defenders of
the city. Lauzun and Tyrconnel had marched away to Galway, as
the English advanced guard approached. As the setting sun
flashed on the broad expanse of the Shannon, William would see
an old town entirely surrounded by the main stream and a branch
of the great river, and connected with another town by a single
bridge. The town on the island, with its ancient castle built by
king John on the bank of the stream, was known as the English
town. The other was known as the Irish town. The eye of the
tactician would quickly see the capacity for defence of this posi
tion, even though its walls were not of the most scientific con
struction. The English town was accessible only through the
lower Irish town. The Shannon, in a season of wet, overflowed its
flat margin. " The city of Limerick," says one at whom some may
laugh as an authority, "lies, an' please your honour, in the middle of
a devilish wet swampy country. * * * 'Tis all cut through with drains
and bogs."* Thus naturally defended, a besieging army had many
difficulties to encounter, and there could be no want of supjjlies to the
besiegers from the open country of Clare and Galway. The
river approach from the sea was commanded at this time by a
French squadron. William looked upon Limerick, and determined
to commence the siege. On the 9th the main body of his army
advanced. "When we came near the town, and found all the
bridges within a mile of the city lined by the enemy, the king or
dered a detachment of grenadiers to go down and clear them, which
theyimmediatelydid, with all the bravery imaginable."! ThepecuUar
missiles of the grenadiers thus employed, are called " new invented
engines ; " X and the Irishman of this period is represented as ready
to give his one cow, if he could be safe " without these French and
Dutch grenados." § Before the night of the 9th, the Irish town,
according to Davies, was invested " from river to river." The ex-
* Corporal Trim, in "Tristram Shandy." Sterne, says Lord Macaulay, "was
brought up at the knees of old soldiers of William."
t Davies. t " Macaria: Excidium."
§ Notes to the same, by Mr. Crofton Croker.
SIEGE OF LIMERICK. 52 1
pression has reference to the remarkable curve of the Shannon in
its course to the sea, before it reaches the island on which tfcs
English town was built. The river thus encloses, in the form of a
horseshoe, a long and narrow tongue of land, but not insulated from
the country on the southern bank. William's position was taken
up partly on this space between the windings of the stream, and
partly on the south bank, near the Irish town. For several days
the siege was not actively prosecuted, for the battering train had
not arrived.. On the night of the 10th, Sarsfield, with about five
hundred horse, passed out of Limerick, crossing the Shannon at
Killaloe, with the object of intercepting the train of artillery and a
supply of military stores and provisions, coming to the besiegers
from Dublin. The convoy had arrived within eight miles of the
English position. The ruined castle of Ballyneedy was at hand to
offer a place of safety for the waggons and guns; but the escort
was scattered about in the open plain, securely sleeping whilst a
few sentinels watched. Sarsfield suddenly came down from the
mountains ; killed most of the too confident escort, the rest flying
for their lives ; loaded the guns to the muzzles, and half buried
them ; heaped up the barrels of powder around the guns, with a
pile of waggons and stores ; fired a train ; and was safe in Limerick
before the dawn. Part of the army was at Drumkeen, waiting for
the heavy cannon, which were expected to be within three miles of
them on the night of the nth. "About three in the morning we
were all awakened by the firing of two great cannon near us, which
made our house shake, and all within it startle ; and about an hour
after were alarmed by a man that fled to us almost naked, who as
sured us that the enemy had fallen upon us, taken all our cannon,
ammunition, and money, and cut off the guard." * Sarsfield attrib
uted great importance to the success of this daring enterprise ;
for he told a lieutenant who was taken prisoner, that if he had failed
he should have given up all as lost, and have made his way to
France. The loss of the cannon and stores was partially repaired
by the arrival of two guns from Waterford. But that surprise
was in some degree more fatal to the besiegers than in the actual
havoc and loss. The success of the exploit gave new com age to
those who resolved to defend their city against an army not greatly
superior in numbers to themselves. The besiegers were propor
tionately depressed, for they knew that the materials for a bombard
ment were insufficient. On the night of the 17th the forces of
* Davies's Journal, p. 136,
522 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
William entered the trenches of the besieged ; and the same des
perate work went forward till the 27th, when a general assault was
determined upon. The attack was unsuccessful. As the troops of
William mounted a breach with the most determined bravery, the
Irish repulsed them with equal resolution. A fort, called the
Black Fort, was stormed and carried ; when a magazine was ex
ploded, by which the greater part of a Brandenburg regiment was
destroyed. After four hours of desperate fighting, the besiegers
retired, with fearful loss on both sides. At a council of war on
the 29th it was determined to raise the siege. On the 30th king
William was on his way to Waterford ; and the next day the be
siegers had quitted their trenches, and the camp was broken up.
There was a reason for this determination of the council of war,
even more powerful than the gallant resistance of the Irish. An
other assault might be more successful ; for in this failure of the
27th some of the besiegers had penetrated to the very streets of
the English town. But the elements were opposed to the farther
progress of the siege. Evelyn writes in his Diary, " The unsea
sonable and most tempestuous weather happening, the naval expe
dition is hindered, and the extremity of wet causes the siege of
Limerick to be raised." Tlje duke of Berwick asserted that when
the siege was raised not a drop of rain had fallen. Rowland
Davies, on the 25th of August, says, that day " proved so extremely
wet that no one could stir ; " but he does not mention bad weather
again till the 9th, when in the camp near Thurles the evening
" proved extremely wet and stormy." In this uncertain condition
of the evidence to disprove the insinuation of Berwick, that the
wet weather was a pretence of king William to cover the shame of
defeat, the testimony of the humourist who preserved " the tradi
tions of the English mess tables," is worth something. "There
was such a quantity of rain fell during the siege, the whole country
was like a puddle ; 'twas that, and nothing else, which brought on
the flux, and which had like to have killed both his honour and my
self. Now there was no such thing, after the first ten days, con
tinued the corporal, for a soldier to be dry in his tent, without
cutting a ditch all around it, to draw off the water." *
King William landed at Bristol on the 6th of September; and
slowly travelled to London. The renown of his victory at the
Boyne was slightly diminished by his repulse at Limerick; but the
English of all ranks felt proud of their sovereign, and had confidence
* " Tristram Shandy," vol. iii. c. xl.
PARLIAMENT. — WAR SUPPLY. 523
in his energy and sagacity. His reception by the people was as en
thusiastic as could be indicated by huzzas and bonfires, — by peals of
bells and loyal addresses. The parliament was to meet on the 2nd
of October. In the interval an .expedition had set sail for Ireland,
tinder the command of Marlborough. On the 22nd of Sejptember
the fleet was disembarking troops near Cork. The forces of Marl
borough were soon joined by a portion of the army from Limerick,
under the duke of Wtirtemberg. The German prince and the
English earl settled a dispute about precedence, by agreeing that
they should command on alternate days. Marlborough here dis
played that genius which was to culminate in victories far greater
than had ever been achieved by English generalshijp. Cork capitu
lated, after a struggle of forty-eight hours, on the 29th. On the
30th the Protestant magistrates of Cork proclaimed the king and
queen. Marlborough did not wait to receive the freedom of the
city, in the silver box which the Corporation voted him. He was
on his march to Kinsale ; and his cavalry arrived there in time to
save the town from, destruction, it having been fired by the Irish.
The garrison, after a short resistance, also capitulated. Marlbor
ough accomplished these successes with no great loss of men in
action ; but many perished from the diseases incident to the season
and the climate. The duke of Grafton, who had accompanied the
expeditions as a volunteer, was wounded in the attack upon Cork,
and died on the 9th of October. The spot where he fell is now
called Grafton's alley.*
The second Session of the second Parliament of William and
Mary was opened by the king on the 2nd of October. His partial
success in Ireland was modestly alluded to, with one slight refer
ence to his own exertions : " I neither spared my person nor my
pains, to do you all the good I could." He told the Houses that
the whole support of the Confederacy abroad would absolutely de
pend upon the speed and vigour of their proceedings in that Session.
The Parliament testified its belief that the support of the Confed
eracy was a national object, by voting, in less than a fortnight,
more than two millions and a half for maintaining an army ofnearly
seventy thousand men ; and a further sum of eighteen hundred
thousand pounds for the navy and ordnance. So large a supply had
never before been voted by Parliament for warlike operations—" the
vastest sum that ever a king of England had asked of his people." f
This supply was to be raised by a monthly assessment on land, by
* Note of the Editor of Davies's Journal. t Burnet, vol. iv. p. 113.
524 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
doubling the excise duties, and by increasing the customs' duties
on certain articles imported. The community in every rank of life
would thus feel the cost of this war. Yet the House of Commons
was almost unanimous in voting tbe supply. Burnet wrote to Mr.
Johnston, the English minister at Berlin, that the members " dare
not go back into their countries, if they do not give their mouey
liberally. * * * We seem not to be the same people that we
were a year ago ; and the nation seems resolved to support the
king in the war, to the utmost to which it can possibly stretch it
self." * Burnet attributes this change to the outrages of the
French at Teignmou'.h, and to the gallant behaviour of William in
Ireland as contrasted with the meanness of James. This national
conviction of the necessity of earning on the war with extraordi
nary vigour may be ascribed to more general causes. Imperfect
as were the sources of political information, the English people
well knew that an European war against the preponderance of
France was inevitable. The hostile attitude of the French kino-
towards England was essentially connected with the long-formed
determination of the prince of Orange, to organize a general resist
ance to the designs of Louis against the independence of nations.
William had freed England from a bigoted despotism, and at the
same time had put himself at the head of the European coalition.
Louis, in his determined endeavour to restore the deposed king —
untaught as James was by misfortune, and as obstinate as ever to
maintain the prerogatives which he claimed by Divine right — was
attacking his continental enemies in the most vital part. William,
as King of England, wielded an authority far greater than William
as Stadtholder of Holland. When the English people took William
as their king, they accepted the involvements 'of his continental
politics as the unavoidable price of their liberty. Had they con
tinued under the rule of James, they might have been spared the
vast burdens of a continental war by remaining in a state of semi-
vassalage to France. The condition of peace was slavery. They
had made their election for freedom at what ever cost, and they
were willing to abide by it. The Englishman of 1690 saw, what
only dreamers have ever failed to see, that a state of isolation from
continental quarrels was simply an impossibility, if his country
were to hold her rank among the nations. He knew how she had
sunk in all the attributes of honest greatness under the base gov
ernment of the Restoration. He knew that she had again a leader,
* Quoted in Ralph's History, vol. ii. p. 247.
ENGLAND AND CONTINENTAL POLITICS. 525
who would strive to bring her back to the position in which Crom
well had placed her as the head of the Protestant States. But
he also knew that, the idea of the isolation of England from con
tinental politics being a delusion, it was better for her to fight her
battles on the banks of the Meuse or the Scheldt than on the
banks of the Thames or the Humber. In the operations of the
Confederacy to which England was committed by the sovereign
of the Revolution, there might be the mistakes inseparable from
conflicting interests. Perfect co-operation in such alliances was
scarcely to be expected. The same summer that saw" the disgrace
of Beachy Head and the havoc of Teignmouth, also saw the defeat
of the allies at Fleurus by the greatest of French generals, Luxem
burg. The thought might enter many minds that the power of the
great French king was too mighty ; had such support in the most
skilful of diplomatists ; was too entirely under the direction of one
head, to be adequately resisted by any combination of jealous
courts, held together onlv by the energy of a prince of infirm health,
and blunt manners, who was indeed their natural and acknowedged
leader, but as such leader of great kings and petty dukes — the
pettiest the most proud and punctilious — exposed to intrigues that
would mar every well-concerted project, and rivalries that would
arrest every bold enterprise. The victory of the French over the
Dutch at Fleurus was attributed to the want of concert of the elec
tor of Brandenburg. Such want of organization might occur again,
and the results of the alliance might only go to lead on the ambi
tion of France to new encroachments. So might reason the refin
ing politician of that period. But then would come the instinctive
feeling of English common sense, that even a battle lost might not
be wholly unprofitable. When William was fighting at the Boyne,
England was under the apprehension of an invasion. The news
of Fleurus arrived to make men anxious. But to the movements
of the allies, connected with the doubtful and bloody day of Fleu
rus, is attributed the fact that England was saved from the hostile
descent of a great army. The French, says Burnet, " had suffered
so much in the battle of Fleurus, and the Dutch used such dili
gence in putting their army in a condition to take the field again,
and the elector of Brandenburg bringing his troops to act in con
junction with them, gave the French so much work, that they were
forced, for all their victory, to lie upon the defensive, and were not
able to spare so many men as were necessary for an invasion." *
* " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 94.
526 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Many thoughtful minds in England would thus see that William
was not sjpeaking with an un-English spirit when he said to his
Parliament, " if the present war be not prosecuted with vigour, no
nation in the world is exposed to greater danger." It was better
for the jjurjiose of a continental war that the nation should be heavily
taxed — that loans should be raised which should be felt in after
time, rather as a precedent than for their actual amount ; that the
commerce of the country should decay ; that even her population
should dwindle ; than that the country should have peace and
dishonour under the tutelage of Louis of France. It was not the
French nation that was at war with England, to place a satrap of
king Louis on the throne at Whitehall. The man who said he was
" himself the State," was the enemy to be opposed. The only man
to oppose him was he who shrank from no labour and no privation
to earn the position which even Louis himself, a few years later,
was obliged to concede to his merits. " I could not see him,"
writes the French king to Marshal Boufflers, "at the head of so
powerful a league as that which lias been formed against me, with
out having that esteem for him which the deference that the prin
cipal powers of Europe have for his opinions seems to demand." *
The mental qualities of William — what St. Simon describes as the
capacity, the address, the superiority of genius, which acquired for
him " the confidence, and, to say the truth, the complete dictator
ship of all Europe, excepting France " — these qualities were not
only the best security of England against the renewal of her degra
dation under the Stuarts, but reflected some of their lustre upon
the country which had chosen their possessor for its ruler. And
thus, with treasons against him hatching at home ; with non-juring
churchmen hating him for his toleration, and praying for a heaver.-
ordained king though he were a papist ; with a popular feeling, not
sufficiently propitiated by William himself, that he was more a
Dutchman than an Englishman, he set out for the Congress at the
Hague, and the nation at any rate felt that its honour was in safe
hands. On the 5th of January, 1691, the king closed the Session of
Parliament, with his thanks for the great dispatch they had used
" in furnishing the supplies designed for carrying on the war." He
was now at liberty, he said, to go into Holland. The wind was
adverse for some days; but on the iSth he embarked at Grave
send, with many distinguished persons of his court. The passage
* Letter dated July 12, 1697, in Grimblot, " Letters," &c. vol. i. p. 24.
CONGRESS AT THE HAGUE. 527
that is now made in twenty hours occupied five days. The man-
of-war in which the king sailed was becalmed off the English coast ;
and when the shores of Holland were neared, it was thought dan
gerous to approach in the thick fog that shrouded the land from
view. William was resolved to make the coast in an open boat;
but a night of cold and darkness was passed, before a landing was
effected on the island of Goree. . Covered with ice, the king and
his nobles were too happy to enjoy the shelter and warmth of a
peasant's hovel. The enthusiasm of his reception when he
reached the Hague was an ample compensation for the disagree
able incidents of his voyage, and for the perils at which "he him
self was the only person nothing at all dismayed." * William had
that hatred of parade which belongs to the truly great ; and he at
first resisted the entreaties of his countrymen that he should make
a public entrance at the Hague. He yielded at length to their
wishes ; and on the 26th of January he passed through long files
of his admiring compatriots, under triumphal arches, on which the
chief actions of his life were painted. The pomp was soon over,
and the real business began. The Tory historian, who has no af
fection for the jjerson of William, writes, " Of the princes and min
isters who attended his Majesty at the Congress, almost all au
thors affect to give a long and jpompous list, in imitation perhaps
of the tricks of the stage ; where it is used to form a court, or a
train, of scenemen or other rabble, to raise a higher idea in the
audience of the hero presented before them." f In place of such
a list, let us endeavour to give some notion of the interests that
were represented at this extraordinary assembly of potentates and
ministers. The emperor of Germany had his representative at the Con
gress. His real interests were essentially concerned in resisting
the oppressions of France ; but his ruling desire was to succeed
in his war against the Turks, chiefly with a view to the enlarge
ment of his own dominions. He was a Roman Catholic, and had
no sympathies for the Protestant coalition of England and Hol
land. Charles II. of Spain was there represented by the marquis
'of Gastanaga, the governor of the Netherlands, the imbecile ser
vant of a weak king and a decaying monarchy. The armies of
France would soon have overrun the Spanish Netherlands, if they
had not been defended "by some bolder arm than that of Spain.
* " A Late Voyape to Holland, written by an English Gentleman attending the
Court."— ifiqi. Reprinted in Harleian Miscellany.
t Ralph, vol. ii. p. 264.
528 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
' These great Catholic sovereigns had not been hostile to the prince
who had ejected the Pajpist king of England ; for at the time when
the Revolution of 1688 was maturing, pope Innocent the Eleventh
was not indisposed to encourage any opjjosition to his oppressor, the
French king. His ministers, it is affirmed by the historian of the
Popes, had personal knowledge of the designs of the prince of
Orange upon England ; and if he knew not of the entire scheme,
" it is yet undeniable that he attached himself to a party which was
chiefly sustained by Protestant energies, and founded on Protes
tant sentiments." * But at the period of the Congress at the
Hague, Innocent the Eleventh was dead. His successor, Alex
ander the Eighth, had indeed the same disposition to make com
mon cause with those who opposed Louis. In July, 1691, that
pope also died. His successor, Innocent the Twelfth, was of a
more pacific disposition ; and the French king saw the necessity
of making concessions to the papal see, and thus removing one
cause of the strange union of Catholic and Protestant. Changes
such as these rendered the task of William to hold the Coalition
together a work of constant and increasing difficulty. At the Con
gress, however, there were princes who joined the alliance with a
zeal for the cause which William represented as the sovereign of
Protestant England, and the first " magistrate of Protestant Hol
land. The chief of these was Frederick the Third, elector of
Brandenburg — subsequently Frederick, first king of Prussia. His
mother was aunt to William ; and he succeeded to the electoral
dignity seven months before his cousin landed in Torbay. William
had sent him the Garter in 1690; and it is said that the youno-
elector was indulging his taste for pageants in a solemn investiture
of the insignia of the "most honourable and noble order," at the
hands of the English envoy at Berlin, when he ought to have been
marching to the Sambre to aid the prince of W'aldeck. We have
been made somewhat more familiar with the person and character
of our William's cousin, in his relation of grandfather to Frederick
the Great, t Crooked, through an accident in his infancy; of weak
nerves ; of a turn for ostentation ; an expensive prince ; but never
theless a spirited man and str'.ctly honourable ; — this is he who, on
the 3rd of February, 1691, is entertained by his cousin, the king
and stadtholder, " at his house in the wood ; " and sits on Wil
liam's right hand; whilst the duke of Norfolk is on his left, and
* Ranke's " History of the Popes," translated by Mrs. Austin, vol. iii. d. 181.
t Carlyle. " History of Friedrich II of Prussia."
CONGRESS AT THE HAGUE. 529
great nobles, English and foreign, fill up the table. The gentle
man who attended on one of these noble English lords tells us
how "the first health was begun by the king, who whispered it
softly to the elector, and the elector to the rest ; " and he also tells
us how, ten days after, the king dined with the elector, "who went
out m- the very street to receive him " when he came; and when
he returned, " accompanied him to the very boot of his coach." *
The Hohenzollern, " with his back half-broken," knew how to
show respect to his heroic little cousin, with the constant asthma.
Of other German jprinces at the Congress there were the elector of
Bavaria, and the landgraves of Hesse Cassel and Hesse Darm
stadt ; there were princes of Luxemburg, of Holstein, of Wiirtem-
berg, of Anspach. Few came out of disinterested love for the
cause of national independence. Of one of these potentates there
is this curious notice by a contemporary : " The elector of Saxony,
a bold man, and a hard drinker, as well as a zealous assertor of
the Protestant religion, was brought into the confederacy by the
promise .of money : ' For,' said he, 'our friendships, though ever
so good, must be confirmed by presents.' " f
Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy, had already joined his fortunes
to those of the Confederacy. At the period of the Congress he
was defending his own dominions against the armies of France.
The young prince had become weary of the domination exercised
over him by the French court ; had for some time been secretly nego
tiating with Austria ; and was watching the progress of the Revolu
tion in England, with a view to make a decisive effort for indepen
dence. The vigilance of the diplomatists of Louis frustrated his
designs ; and, with the ultimate argument of an army marching
upon ' Piedmont, Catinat, the French general, demanded for his
master, that French troops should garrison Turin and Vercelli.
Victor put on a bold front ; refused compliance ; and war was the
inevitable consequence. An ambassador from Savoy came to
London before William set out for the Hague, and in a formal ad-
diess to the king said, "You have inspired my master with the
hope of freedom after so many years of bondage." The first.
military operations of the duke of Savoy were unfortunate ; and at
the period of the Congress many an anxious thought of William
must have been turned to Piedmont. The talent and bravery of
-Victor were undoubted — a Capacity too much mingled with Italian
. craft, but a courage that did not shrink from an encounter with
• " A late Voyage to Holland." t Cunningham. " History," p. 133.
Vol. IV.— ^4.
530 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
fearful odds. The dangerous position of the duke of Savoy enabled
William to stipulate successfully that the Waldenses, who had
been subjected to long and grievous persecution, should be allowed
to exercise their religion in peace. A treaty containing a secret
article for their toleration was signed on the 8th of February. 1691.
The arrangements of the Congress had sufficiently ripened in a
month to allow William to announce in the London Gazette, that
the various powers had agreed to furnish certain contingents,
which would enable an army of two hundred and twenty thousand
men to take the field. But whilst the king of England was infus
ing his spirit into his allies, some eager and confident, others tardy
and lukewarm, most with some especial private interest to accom-
j)lish — whilst, as the caricaturist of that day paid a homage to his
powers, William was teaching his bears to dance* — Louis suddenly
appeared in person at the head of a great army to besiege Mons,
the strongly fortified capital of Hainault, and one of the chief bar
riers of the Netherlands against France. The French troops,
gradually converging to the frontier from every quarter of the
territory of Louis, were opening trenches before this strong for
tress, whilst the allied powers were deliberating and dining at the
Hague. William, with his accustomed energy, at once broke up
the Congress ; got together an army of fifty thousand men ; but
arrived only in time to learn that the burning city had capitulated
amidst the terrors of its population, after a bombardment which
had destroyed one half of its dwelling places. Louis went back to
Versailles to hear the well-rehearsed flattery, that wherever the
great king appeared the genius of Victory was there ready with the
laurel crown. William ran over to England, with his secrets of
thefuturekeptclo.se in his own bosom. He arrived on the 13th
of April. On the 1st of May, he was again on his way to Holland.
In these seventeen days the king had important affairs to settle,
which required the exercise of a clear intellect.
The period had arrived when it was necessary to fill up the
sees, vacant by the refusal to take the oaths, of the archbishop of
Canterbury and the bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester,
Norwich, and Peterborough. Two other non-juring bishops,
Worcester and Chichester, had died in the interval since the
Revolution. A discovery had been made of a correspondence of
Turner, the bishop of Ely, with the court of St. Germains. Burnet
says, - the discovery of the bishop of Ely's correspondence and
* "Macaulay," vol. iv. p.~S^ <£
VACANT SEES FILLED UP. 53 1
engagements in the name of the rest, gave the king a great advan
tage in filling the vacant sees." Whether Turner was justified in
stating to James that he was acting in concert with his brethren,
when he advised that a French army should come into England, may
reasonably be doubted. Sancroft and a few bishops denied the
charge in a printed pajper, in answer to an anonymous pamphlet.
Endeavours had been made to conciliate the non-juring prelate?.
All that they would engage to do was to live quietly. Their de
privation was no longer opposed, even by the king's Tory advisers.
So Tillotson became archbishop of Canterbury, and Sharp arch
bishop of York. Patrick, Stillingfleet, Moore, Cumberland, Fow
ler, and Kidder, filled the other vacancies. " In two years' time
the king had named fifteen bishops ; and they were generally
looked upon as the learnedest, the wisest, and best men that were
in the church." This was Burnet's opinion ; but from this opinion
there were many dissentients. Tillotson was especially marked
out for the hatred of the Jacobites. The violent high-churchmen
saw cause of offence in all these preferments, for the successors
of the non-juring bishops " were men both of moderate principles
and calm tempers."*
When the king closed the Session of Parliament on the 5th of
January, he noticed " the restlessness of our enemies, both at home
and abroad, in designing against the prosperity of this nation and
the government established." It was impossible that such " rest
lessness," and such dislike of "the government established,"
should not exist in some quarters. William alluded to the appre
hension of lord Preston, with two other agents of the Jacobites, on
the night of the 31st of December. They were seized on board a
smack in the river, with papers addressed to James, containing
propositions for his coming over with a small force during the
absence of William, when the nation would be undefended, and
the people would be complaining of the burthen of taxation. Pres
ton and his humbler associate, Ashton, were tried for high treason
in January, and were convicted upon very clear evidence. The
altered character of the mode in which prisoners charged with
political offences were treated by the judges and by the counsel
for the crown, was strikingly exhibited in this trial. In the " Life
of James " there is a curious observation of the compiler, which
shows in what light the laws of the realm were considered by the
champions of arbitrary power. The law which makes a corre-
* Burnet, vol. iv. p. 132.
532
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
spondence with a foreign enemy treasonable is for the safety of the
commonwealth, as every other portion of the law of treason con
templates that safety. The biographer of James writes thus:
" My lord Preston and Mr. Ashton (there not appearing evidence
enough against Mr. Elliott) were brought to their trials, con
demned, and the latter executed, being the first that suffered by a
court of justice for the royal cause ; which was a new subject of
grief to the king, for he knew not what would be the consequence
when he found the laws, as well as the sword, turned against
him."* The notion could never be driven out of the heads of
those who had seen a king ejected for his contempt of the
laws' ; that he alone was the source of all law ; and that with
out him, the one legitimate head of the law, it was powerless to
protect or to punish. The new head of the law, expressly chosen
that the ancient laws, which gave the people security and freedom,
should not perish, but should be strengthened by an infusion of
principles having still higher regard for the general good, — this
sovereign of the Revolution was always considered by James and
his minions as an interloper having no legal rights. The solemn
compact which had been entered into by the nation with William
and Mary was to give them no real authority. William was
but a Prince of Orange, who had traitorously and wickedly thrust
out God's anointed ; and the assassin's knife was therefore too
good a fate for him. Happy was it for England that this prince
was a man of justice and clemency. We shall have to mention
plot after plot against his life and his government. But we shall
have to record no sweeping proscriptions, no demands for new.
powers, no exercise of his own uncontrolled will. During the long
continuance of plots and conspiracies, the laws of high treason
were so modified as to assure the prisoner a much fairer trial than
under the ancient system, bv affording him every facility for his
defence. We may have incidentally to notice the publication of
the most virulent libels against the person and principles of Wil
liam. But we shall also have to record that, at the very time
when these attacks were most frequent and most inflammatory, the
laws against printing and publishing were relaxed instead of being
made more stringent — the censorship of the press was abandoned.
We may probably attribute to this moderation of the king, the
circumstance that, although his reign was one of continual danger
to his person ; that although he was surrounded by treacherous
* " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 443.
PLOT OF PRESTON AND ASHTON. 533
servants and cold friends ; that although a systematic attack upon
the principles that raised him to power -was constantly going for
ward, — his power strengthened as it grew, out of the very absence
of any attempt to prop it by unconstitutional devices. There
might have been something in the character of the English people
which led them to respect the equanimity which had no morbid
dread of the conspirator or the libeller ; which was never diverted
from its own course of duty by fear or by revenge. But certainly
there must have been something very remarkable in the character
of William — very different from the ordinary character of those
who are termed usurpers — to direct him toward the noble policy
of making himself secure by equal justice instead of irregular des
potism, and of living down calumny instead of weakly attempting
to forbid its utterance. We have been led to these remarks by
the fact, that when William returned from the Continent in April,
he had to occupy some portion of his short visit to England by
learning the extent of the conspiracy of which Preston was the
chief agent, and of determining as to the fate of some of those
accused as conspirators. We cannot enter minutely into the
details of the discoveries which had been made by his ministers in
the king's absence. Preston had confessed, when his own fate
appeared to depend upon his confession, that he was guilty himself,
and that Clarendon, Turner the bishop of Ely, and William Penn,
were implicated with him. When William returned to England,
Preston was brought before him at the Council ; and he then said,
" that Mr. Penn had told him the duke of Ormond, the earls of
Devonshire, Dorset, Macclesfield, lord Brandon," * and others,
were well affected to the plot. He also implicated lord Dart
mouth. The accusation against these eminent persons was prob
ably without foundation. Whether or not, William stopped the
hearsay testimony of Preston. The biographer of James shows
the value of this wise discretion : " It is probable the prince of
Orange thought it not prudent to attack so great a body of the
nobility at once ; that what he knew was sufficient either to be
aware of them, or by forgiveness and a seeming clemency gain
them to his " interest. Which method succeeded so well, that
whatever sentiments those lords Which Mr. Penn had named
might have had at that time, they proved in effect most bitter
enemies to his Majesty's [king James's] cause ever afterwards." f
And this is deliberately written by the habitual maligner of king
William. t Ibid.
534 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Since the successes of Marlborough in the autumn of 1690,
there had been no marked change in the positions of the two con
tending parties in Ireland. To follow up his successes was not
a trust assigned to the victor at Cork and Kinsale. Marlborough
was chosen by William to accompany him in his Continental cam
paign. He was entrusted to collect all the English troops, and to
wait near Brussels till the king should arrive to take the command.
William had much diplomatic work on his hands — to encourage
the wavering, to assist the weak, and to bribe the hungry. Victor:
Amadeus was in despair at the devastation of his country by the
French armies : Schomberg was sent by William to raise the duke
out of his despondency. The petty princes of the Germanic
empire, striving, for the most part, for some personal dignity or
profit, had each to be propitiated and kept in good humour. In
the interval between the king's arrival at the Hague and his taking
the command of the army, Marlborough was sorely tempted to
make good some of the professions which he had secretly conveyed
to the sovereign whom he had betrayed in 1688. It is recorded
that Marlborough had, in London, told colonel Sackville, an agent
of the court of St. Germains, " that he was ready to redeem his
apostacy with the hazard of his utter ruin ; " and " proffered to
bring over the English troops that were in Flanders if the king
[James] required it." It is further stated that he wrote to the
same effect to James himself, in January and May, 1691. " Never
theless,'' says the compiler of James's life, "the king found no
effects of these mighty promises ; for his majesty insisting upon
his offer of bringing over the English troops in Flanders, as the
greatest service he could do him, he excused himself under pre
tence that there was some mistake in the message." Marlborough
asked, however, for two lines under the hand of James, "to testify
that he would extend his pardon to him." * James, it is stated,
complied with this request. Whether the crafty Churchill really
believed, as he assured James, that " in case the French were suc
cessful in Flanders, or any ill accident should happen to the prince
of Orange, his restoration would be very easy," it is pretty clear
that he, like many others, saw nothing higher in politics than their
own safety and their own profit. William had no suspicion of the
man employed by him in a most important command. The oppor
tunity was probably wanting for a decisive act of treachery in this
* " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 448.
LIMERICK SURRENDERS TO GINKELL. 535
campaign, in which nothing great on either side was accomplished
or even attempted
But, if 1691 were a year of inaction in Flanders, it was a year
of great events in Ireland. In the spring, Tyrconnel had arrived
from France to assume his position as the viceroy of James ; and
he was followed by a French general, Saint Ruth, as commander-
in-chief of the Irish army. He took the command at Limerick, and
made great exertions to bring the disorganized troojps into a state
of efficiency. On the English side, an experienced Dutch officer,
Ginkell, was appointed to the command-in-chief. His first opera-
tion was to lay siege to Athlone. On the thirtieth of June, a day
memorable with the English army, the grenadiers again put green
boughs in their hats, and were led to the assault under the command
of Mackay. The town was taken by a bold attack ; and Saint
Ruth, who was encamped near, marched away on the road to Gal
way. He took up a strong position at Aghrim, resolved to risk a
general engagement. On the 12th of July, at five in the evening,
the two armies joined battle. The Irish fought with the most
desperate resolution. The English and Dutch attacked and fell
back, again and again. The" issue was at one time very doubt
ful. But at the very crisis of the engagement, the French general
was killed by a cannon-ball, and his death was concealed. The
other general, Sarsfield, was inactive with the reserve, waiting for
orders. The Irish were overpowered, and were soon disorganized.
The victory of the English was complete, and they did not use it
with moderation. There were few prisoners ; and four thousand
Irish lay dead on the actual battle-field. It is supposed that seven
thousand altogether fell in the horrible carnage which accompanied
the total rout of Aghrim. Ginkell followed up his victory by
obtaining the capitulation of Galway ; its garrison, with the French
general, D'Usson, being permitted to retire to Limerick. Here
was the last stand made against the triumphant army of king Wil
Uam. That army was now well supplied with artillery and the
munitions of war. The same ground was occupied as in the pre-
. rtous year ; but it was not in the same wet condition. Ginkell, by
a bold manoeuvre, crossed the Shannon on a bridge of boats, and
scattered the Irish horse that were encamped near the city. He
then succeeded in carrying a detached fort, which commanded the
bridge called Thomond's ; and a fearful slaughter of the garrison
r.ccomjzianied this success. The bombardment was terribly effect
ive. The garrison might hold out till the whole town was in ashes ;
536 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
but even then, unless the besiegers were compelled to retire on
the approach of the wet season, hunger would effect what cannon-
balls and bombs had left incomplete. The fall of the city became
inevitable. In 1690 a French fleet commanded the approaches
from the sea. Now, an English fleet rode in the Shannon. Hos
tilities were suspended for some days during the progress of nego
tiations. On the 1st of October, two treaties were signed — one
military, the other civil. The civil treaty was signed by the Lords
Justices, who had repaired to the camp. The first article of this
civil treaty was in the following words : " It is agreed that the
Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in
the exercise of their religion, as are consistent with the laws of
Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of king Charles the
Second. And their majesties, as soon as their affairs will permit
them to summon a Parliament in this kingdom, will endeavour to
procure the said Roman Catholics such further security in this
particular, as may preserve them from any disturbance on account
of their said religion." An entire amnesty was promised to all who
should take the oath of allegiance. Limerick bears the name of
" the City of the Violated Treaty." -Years of unjust and vindictive
penal laws, which are now happily swept away, have manifested
that this reproach is not unfounded. The Parliament of Ireland
became wholly Protestant, and laws were passed wliich not only
denied the Roman Catholics "privilege, in the exercise of their
religion," but deprived them of the most sacred civil rights —
the rights of family. The war in Ireland was at an end — but not
its woes. It was offered to the thousands of Irish troops at Lim
erick, to make their election for entering the army of king Wil
liam, or to become the soldiers of king Louis in France. The
greater number decided for France. It had been promised by the
Irish general that those who embarked for another country should
be allowed to take their wives and families with them. The prom
ise could only be partly realised. " When the ablest men," says
the writer of " Macariae Excidium," " were once got on shipboard,
the women and babes were left on the shore, exposed to hunger
and cold, without any manner of provision, and without anv shelter
in that rigorous season but the canopy of heaven ; and in such a
miserable condition that it moved pity in some of their enemies."
Ireland thus passed under the rule of the English colonizers.
Happy would it have been, if years had not been suffered to elapse
before it was felt that penal laws were the worst of all modes for
TREATY OF LIMERICK. 537
securing religious conformity ; happy, if another series of years
had not been wasted in attempts to maintain the Union of two
nations without an equal participation of civil rights. The pres
ent generation has honestly laboured to repair the injustice of the
past; and the time may thus arrrive when even the name of the
third William shall be pronounced without party hatreds.
538 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Scotland. — Affairs of Religion. — Plots. — The Highland Clans dispersed, — State of the
Highlands in r69i. — Breadalbanc. — Proclamation of die Government. — The Master
of Stair. — Tardy submission of Miclan. — Order as to rebels not submitted. — Ordcrfor
Maclan of Glencoe, and his tribe. — Letters of the Master of Stair. — Highland troops
arrive in Glencoe. — The Massacre of the MacDonalds. — Inquiry into the Massacre
in 1695. — Resolutions of the Scottish Parliament. — Master of Stair dismissed. —
The other persons implicated. — Breadalbane. — Misconceptions connected with the
Massacre. — Character of William unjustly assailed.
The politics of Scotland in the first two years after the Revolu
tion were more comjDlicated than those of England. The ascend,
ancy of the Presbyterians had been established ; but the Episco
palians were still a formidable body. In 1689, although ejpiscopacy
had been abolished, the church-government had not been defined.
There was no supreme directing power in affairs of religion. In
1690, the Parliament of Scotland established the synodical author
ity ; made the signature to the Confession of Faith the test of or
thodoxy ; and Patronage was abolished, under certain small com
pensations to the patrons. The dissensions connected with these
arrangements gave courage to those who looked to discord as the
means for restoring the Stuart king. A knot of turbulent and dis
contented men, known as The Club, entered into schemes for re
versing all that had been accomplished by the Revolution. Their
leaders were frightened, and informed against each other. Lord
Annandale implicated the unhappy Jacobite scribbler, Nevil Payne.
He thought himself safer in Scotland than in London — a fatal mis
take. We extract a passage in a letter from the earl of Crauford
to the earl of Melville, the king's high-commissioner, to show how
the ancient ferocity still lingered amongst the politicians of Scot-
lind. The letter is dated December nth, 1690 : "Yesterday in
the. afternoon, Nevil Penn (after near an hour's discourse with
him, in name of the council, and in their presenc-, though at sev
eral times, By turning him out and then calling him in again) was
questioned upon some things that were not of the deepest concern,
and had but gentle torture given him, being resolved to repeat it
PLOTS.— HIGHLAND CLANS DISPERSED. 539
this day. Which accordingly about six this evening we inflicted
On bdth thumbs and one of his legs, with all the severity that was
consistent with humanity, even unto that pitch that we could not
preserve life and have gone further ; but without the least success."*
This was the last occasion on which Scottish statesmen were dis
graced by endeavouring to extort evidence against political mal
contents, by "all the severity that was consistent with humanity."!
The noble actors in this plot offered up the obscure Nevil Payne
as a sacrifice ; secured their own safety ; and suffered the Low
lands to settle down into peace.
After the victory of Killiecrankie, there was a hew gathering of
Highland clans. The command was taken by general Cannon,
who had come over from Ireland with the three hundred troops sent
by James to the aid of Dundee. The chieftains soon began to
fnanifest their repugnance to be under the control of a stranger,
although he had served in the Netherlands, and brought his mili
tary exjperience to aid their national mode of warfare. The com
parative value of regular troofjs and mountaineers, who if they failed
in the first rush were quickly disorganised, was again to be tried.
The Cameronian regiment at Dunkeld was attacked by four or five
thousand Highlanders. The place was obstinately defended by
the successors of the old Puritans, and after four hours' fighting,
the clans drew off ; the chiefs signed a pledge to support king
James ; and their followers dispersed. The victorious army of
Dundee melted away like a snow-drift. During 1690 there were
various outbreaks of detached clans. But Mackay collected an
overpowering force at Inverlochy; and there hastily built Fort
William, and fixed a garrison there under the command of colonel
Hill. King William, as early as March 1690, manifested a wise dis
position to tranquillize the Highlands by gentle measures. His
Warrant to George ' viscount Tarbet to treat with the Highland
Chiefs, authorizes him to offer the leaders of the clans indemnity,
with money and honours, upon their "return to their duty."
Early in 1691, a message had been sent to James "by the loyal
Highlanders who had continued in arms for him in Scotland, that
unless those of the South joined them, or that his majesty sent
speedy succours, it would be impossible to hold out any longer."
* " Leven and Melville Papers," p. 582.
t " The law of England was the only code in Europe which dispensed with judicial
torture."— Burton, " History of Scotland," vol. i. p. 85.
540 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
His majesty returned for answer that his abilities to assist were
exhausted by the pressing necessities ot Ireland; but that "ha
had made a shift to send them some present relief of flour, salt,
brandy, tobacco, medicinal drugs, flints, &c," and that if they
could stand out no longer, he recommended " an outward com
pliance." * In 1690 a negotiation had been opened with lord
Breadalbane, to win him over to the government, and to employ
his influence to conciliate the rebel chiefs. This negotiation
failed. But in the autumn of 1691, Breadalbane, having made his
submission to the government, was again authorized to treat with
the heads of clans, and to expend twelve or fifteen thousand pounds
in this work of pacification. It may well be doubted whether this
Highland earl went about his trust in perfect good faith. He is
described by his contemporary, John Macky, "cunning as a fox;
wise as a serpent ; but as shppery as an eel." t At any rate, those
who had the most intimate knowledge of the rivalries and petty
interests of the chiefs doubted the practicability of the jplan, as they
doubted the honesty of the man employed to work it. Colonel
Hill, in May, 1691, had received an order from the Council, as he
writes to the earl of Melville, "to fall upon those Highlanders
within my reach that do not presently come in and take the oath of
allegiance, and deliver up their arms." In a previous letter he
says, " I could wish, if they rise again, that all the West country,
and all the clans whom they have injured, may be let loose upon
them till they be utterly rooted out. " X Utterly to root out a rebel
lious clan was the ready method that presented itself to the military
mind. At this time Hill says, " I expect several of them in, and
the MTntoshes men in the Brae, and Glencoe men , if they fail, I'll
put my orders in execution against them." On the 15th of May,
he writes to Melville, " I have last night received an order to delay
the severity prepared by the former order, till I hear further." § He
took wiser measures than the plan of rooting out. He sent the
clans the form of an oath, to which many chiefs subscribed. " The
Appin and Glencoe men have desired they may go in to my lord of
Argyle, because he is their superior, and I have set them a short
day to do it in." || By a letter of sir Thomas Livingstone, who was
chief in command of the king's forces, it appears that he " had
* " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 468.
t Quoted in Burton's " Scotland," vol. i. p. 156,
t " Leven and Melville Papers," pp. 610, 611. § Hid., p. 613.
II Ibid., p. 618.
PROCLAMATION OF THE GOVERNMENT. 541
been commanded by the Master of Stair, to order Hill not to act
as yet any way vigorously on his side."* The Master of Stair,
sir John Dalrymple, was secretary of state for Scotland, and was
then in attendance upon king William in Holland and the Nether
lands. The scheme of lord Breadalbane for bribing the chiefs to
submission and loyalty was the cause of the direction to Hill not to
act vigorously. Colonel Hill by no means approved of Breadal
bane or his plan. He would, he writes, have had " much more of
the people under oath had not my lord Breadalbane's design hind
ered ; which I wish may do good, but suspect more hurt than good
from it : for my part, hereafter if I live to have geese, I'll set the
fox to keep them." f Breadalbane came into the Highlands, and
made his overtures to certain chiefs. " He tells them the money
he has for them is locked up in a chest at London ; but they be
lieve, if he say true in this, he will find a way to keep a good part
of it to himself." X On the 23rd of July, Dalrymple wrote to
Livingstone from the camp at Gerpines, in the name of the king, to
direct him to keep his troops on the Highland borders, but not to
commit any acts of hostility against the Highlanders. § On the
29th of July, the Privy Council of Scotland expressed their opinion
to the queen, that if the army had marched against those who held
out when Hill was tendering the oath, "they would have submitted
themselves, or been easily forced to it." |
The plans of Breadalbane did not produce the effect that was
contemplated. Hill writes on the 23rd of August, that the country
was peaceable ; but that there were impediments to a general sub
mission, through the oath of confederation amongst clans, " by
which they are obliged to do nothing without the consent of each
other." U" There was a strong suspicion that Breadalbane did get
the lion's share of the money which he pretended to be in the chest
at London, but which was really in his own coffers. According to
a tradition preserved by Dalrymple, he refused to give any account
of how it was applied, saying, " the money is spent— the Highlands
are quiet — and this is the only way of accompting among friends."
In the distribution of his gratuities he brought his own interests
and passions into play. He was a great Highland lord, with large
domains and hundreds of vassals , but his territories were often
exposed to the depredations of the clans with whom he was at
* " Leven and Melville Papers," p. 622. t Ibid., p. 623.
XIbid.,p. 625. § Ibid., p. 631. II Ibid. p. 634.
H Ibid., p. 641.
542 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
feud. The small clan, MacDonald of Glencoe, were bad neigh
bours to Breadalbane ; and he took this occasion to require that
the gratuity which he had to offer for their allegiance should be a
set-off for certain claims of the Campbells for injuries committed
by the MacDonalds. Maclan, their chief, as proud if not so great
as Breadalbane, was wholly impracticable upon such terms. Others
followed his example; and many clans remained in a state of inert
rebellion. In August, the government determined to bring the
submission of the Highland chiefs to a decisive issue, by a Proc
lamation offering indemnity to all who should take the oaths, on
or before the last day of December, 1691, and threatening the ex
tremities of military execution, — in the old form of threatening the
vengeance of fire and sword, — against all and each who should not
submit to the government, and swear to live in peace. " Letters
of fire and sword had been so ceaselessly issued against the High
landers, that in the time of the Stuarts it was a usual and little
noticeable form."*
It would appear by a letter of the duke of Hamilton, dated as
late as the 26th of December, that he regretted that sir Thomas
Livingstone, who had that night returned from London, had not
seen the king, which " would have contributed more to his service
than commanding him back ; for he could have advised better
measures than is taken, to have reduced the Highlanders, of which
there is not one word signified to the Council." f Some of the
chiefs had he-Id out to the very last. But on the 31st of December,
all the clans had given their submission, with one exception — the
MacDonalds of Glencoe. The submission of all the other chiefs
who had been in arms against the government was an event which
was not contemplated with satisfaction by the Master of Stair.
Burnet says, " a black design was laid, not only to cut off the men
of Glencoe, but a great many more clans, reckoned to be in all
above six thousand persons." J This maybe a very loose asser
tion ; but letters of Dalrymple, written to lieutenant-colonel Ham
ilton early in December, prove that he had an especial grudge
against the MacDonalds, " for marring the bargain which the earl
of Breadalbane was doing with the Highlanders ; " and that he
entertained a hope that the MacDonalds would "fall into the net"
— that is, not comply with the Proclamation. He further intimates
that the government is obliged to ruin some of the clans, " in order
to weaken and frighten the rest." That Dalrymple contemplated
* Burton's " History of Scotland," vol. i.p. 156.
t " Leven and Melville Papers," p. 652. X " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 274.
TARDY SUBMISSION OF MACIAN. 543
something like "the black design" mentioned by Burnet, is evident
from his letter of instructions to the commander of the troops for his
guidance, if the obnoxious clans should not have submitted by the
prescribed day. He is directed to destroy entirely the country of
Lochaber, Lochiel's lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's.
" Your power shall be large enough. I hope the soldiers will not
trouble the government with prisoners." Mr. Burton considers
that Dalrymple, from whose letters of this nature we now turn with
such loathing, "only pursued the old policy of Scottish govern
ments towards the Highlanders The rule had always
been to show no more consideration to Highlanders than to wild
beasts."* •The clan of the MacDonalds dwelt in the valley of Glencoe,
under their' venerable chief Maclan. Their huts were scattered
in several hamlets around his house — a small jjopulaticn of not
two hundred adult males. f He had fought with his few hardy
followers in the ranks of Dundee at Killiecrankie; he had the
reputation of being one of the most daring of the Highland ma
rauders ; he had driven off cattle in the territories of Argyle and
Breadalbane. He was therefore an object of especial hatred to those
proud nobles, who regarded him as a paltry robber to be crushed
when the opportunity came. Maclan had his own pride, and de
ferred his obedience to the Proclamation till the last moment. On
the 31st of December he presented himself, with some of his clan,
at Fort William, and offered to take the oaths before colonel Hill.
The commander of the garrison had no legal power to receive
them ; he was not a magistrate. Hill gave him a letter to the
sheriff of Argyleshire, stating the application that had been made
to him, and expressing a hope that the submission of the " lost
sheep recovered " would be received. It was six days before he
reached Inverary, over mountain paths covered with snow. The
sheriff yielded to the old man's prayers and tears ; administered
the oath, and sent to the Sheriff-Clerk of Argyle, then at Edinburgh,
a certificate to be laid before the Council of the circumstances
which had led him to do what was a departure from the letter of the
Proclamation, but which was within its spirit. The Sheriff-Clerk first
tendered the certificate, with a copy of Hill's letter, to the Clerks
of the Council, who refused to receive it. He then applied to
individual Privy Counsellors, who would not interfere in the
* " History of Scotland," vol. i. p. 170.
t Macaulay says " two hundred persons ; " certainly an error.
544 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
matter. The certificate was finally suppressed, and the general
body of the Council were kept in ignorance of it. Amongst those
who advised that the certificate should not be sent in, was the Lord
President, father of sir John Dalrymple. Dalrymple, the Secretary,
was the medium for the transaction of Scottish affairs with the
king. It would appear that the general submission of the. clans
was not quite certain; for the king had signed, on the nth of
January, instructions to sir Thomas Livingstone, to pursue with
fire and sword those Highland rebels who had not taken the bene
fit of the indemnity ; but to allow them to surrender on mercy.
Objections were taken to the use of the old term "fire and sword "
in these instructions. On the 16th of January the instructions of -
the nth were repeated, with verbal alterations, and with this addi
tion : " As for Maclan of Glencoe and that tribe, if they can be
well distinguished from the rest of the Highlanders, it will be
jproper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that sect of
thieves." Burnet alleges that " the king signed this, without any
inquiry about it ; for he was too ajpt to sign papers in a hurry."
Those who doubt this, allege that it was not only signed but super
scribed by the king. The Hon. William Leslie Melville says " that
the king's having both superscribed and subscribed 'one unfortu
nate sentence,' should not be received by all our historians and
poets as a conclusive jproof of his being cognisant of their contents.
I find numerous warrants and orders from him, some sup rscribed
and subscribed, some only superscribed, some only subscribed, as
a man in haste would dispatch business of form."* It is of some
importance to bear in mind that what William superscribed and
subscribed was a long letter of instructions containing several
clauses. It was a duplicate, with alterations, of what he had sign
ed five clays before. In this duplicate the "one unfortunate sen
tence " was added. In a little book, very useful as a summary of
events, the compiler prints the words beginning, " As for Maclan,"
and ending, " sect of thieves," with " William R." as the super
scription of these four lines only, subscribed " W. R." He then
rejects the notion that William signed without reading the docu
ment, because it consisted " of so few words." f We attach no
importance to Burnet's defence. In our view the character of
William is best defended by assuming that he did read the order ;
that he signed without knowing that Maclan had irregularly taken
* Preface to " Leven and Melville Papers," p. xxxv.
t Annals of England," vol. iii. p. 371.
ORDER FOR MAC-IAN OF GLENCOE AND HIS TRIBE. 545
fhe oaths ; and that the words, " to extirpate that sect of thieves,"
who were represented in a state of rebellious warfare, was not to
direct their butchery with circumstances of treachery and cruelty.
We are inclined to believe that William not only signed the order
with a complete knowledge ; but that the attempt to prevent any
indiscriminate slaughter, by the words " if they can well be distin
guished from the rest of the Highlanders," looks like an emanation
from his mind. The Master of Stair would have little cared how
ftiany were slaughtered in a loose construction of the exceptional
case of the MacDonalds. Whether the argument that the word
extirpate " would naturally bear a sense perfectly innocent, and
would, but for the horrible event which followed, have been univer
sally understood in that sense," * may admit of a difference of
opinion. The word meant, no doubt, a complete suppression of a
community not conforming to the laws of civilised society ; but, as
ijt appears to us, it did not mean their indiscriminate slaughter.
Hill, who appears to have been no cruel ojjpressor, desires that the
rebellious clans " may be utterly rooted out." To extirpate, and
to root out, are synonymous terms. We believe that William knew
what the word implied. He had probably never read " The Tem
pest ;" but used the word as" Shakspere used it when he makes
the king of Naples hearken to the suit of Prospero's brother, that
he " Should presently extirpate me and mine
Out of the dukedom.'
If the long letter of instructions, concluding with the short sentence
relating to the MacDonalds, had run in the ancient form for the
destruction of Highlanders, he might have hesitated : " To invade
them to their utter destruction, by slaughter, burning, drowning,
and other ways, and leave no creature living of that clan, except
priests, women, and bairns." \ At any rate we may affirm, that
it is a falsehood in the compiler of the Life of James II. to say,
" By an order, which Nero himself would have had a horror of,
the prince of Orange commanded one colonel Hill and lieutenant
colonel Hamilton, to put Glencoe to death, and all the males of his
line, [in age] not exceeding seventy." J It is observed by Walter
Wilson, in his Life of Defoe, that "the inveteracy that marked the
language of the Jacobites when speaking of king William, and with
* Macaulay, vol. iv. p. 205.
t " Spalding Club Miscellany." Quoted by Mr. Burton.
X " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 470.
trrt, Ttr -,,.
546 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
which their works are so highly seasoned, has descended in full
force to our own day." We have an example of this temper in the
yaluable but somewhat jirejudiced " Annals " issued from Oxford,
in which it is inferred " that Stair did not really go beyond Wil
liam's instructions in planning the massacre of Glencoe, although
the Parliament of Scotland had the complaisance to lay the greater
blame on the minister." The Parliament of Scotland expressly
said, as the first result of their investigation in 1695, " We found,
in the first place, that the Master of Stair's letters had exceeded
your majesty's instructions." William was, indeed, justly indig
nant at this resolution; "frequently repeating that he thanked the
Parliament of Scotland ; they had used him better than England
had done his grandfather, for they had tried him for his life, and
brought him in not guilty." * His pride was wounded that any
investigation at all should have taken place as to his concurrence
in the act of his minister. The Parliament had voted the Glencoe
slaughter to be a murder ; and he thought it no compliment to be
formally acquitted as an accessory before the fact.
In transmitting from London the instructions signed bv the
king on the nth of January, the Secretary of State for Scotland
wrote to sir Thomas Livingstone, " I have no great kindness to
Keppoch nor Glencoe ; and it is well that people are in merey.
Just now, my lord Argyle tells me, that Glencoe hath not taken
the oath, at which I rejoice. It is a great work of charity to be
exact in rooting out that damnable sept, the worst of the High
landers. ' When Dalrymple sent the instructions of the 16th; he
wrote to Livingstone,"For a just example of vengeance, I entreat
the thieving tribe of Glencoe may be rooted out to purpose." To
colonel Hill he wrote on the same date, " That such as render on
mercy might be saved ; " but entreats that " for a just vengeance
and public example the tribe of Glencoe may be rooted out to pur
pose. The earls of Argyle and Breadalbane have promised that
they shall have no retreat in their bounds." During another fort
night nothing was done towards accomplishing Dalrymple's entrea
ties. On the 30th he wrote again to Livingstone : '¦ I am glad that
Glencoe did not come within the time prefixed. I hope what is
done there may be in earnest, since the rest are not in a condition
to draw together to help. I think to harry their cattle, and burn
their houses, is but to render them desperate, lawless men ; but I
believe you will be satisfied it were a great advantage to the na-
* Defoe, " History of the Union," p. 72.
LETTERS OF THE MASTER OF STAIR. 547
tion, that thieving tribe were rooted out and cut off." To Hill he
writes, on the same day, " Pray, when the thing concerning Glen
coe is resolved, let it be secret and sudden." Colonel Hill sent his
orders to lieutenant-colonel Hamilton, to march with eight hundred
men straight to Glencoe ; " and there put in execution the orders
you have received from the commander-in-chief." Hamilton ad
dressed his orders to major Duncanson, his second in command ;
concluding his letter by directing that the avenues be so secured,
" that the old fox, nor none of his cubs get away : The orders are
that none be spared, nor the government troubled with prisoners."
Major Duncanson then despatched captain Robert Campbell of
Glenlyon, to proceed to Glencoe, in advance of the other troops,
with a detachment of a hundred and twenty men of Argyle's regi
ment. He arrived there on the ist of February.
The Valley of Glencoe has been variously described, according
to the associations of those who have visited it. In the eyes of the
picturesque historian of this period,— who regards it as a rugged
desert, "valued on account of the shelter which it afforded to the
plunderer and his plunder," — it is " the most dreary and melan
choly of all the Scottish passes, the very Valley of the Shadow of
Death."* To the equal minded tourist, "the scenery of this val
ley is far the most picturesque of any in the Highlands." f To
the enthusiastic believer in Ossian, it is the valley of Fingal, —
having a name, indeed, signifying in the Celtic tongue, the Valley
of Tears — " the most peaceful and secluded of narrow vales."
" Here the matchless melody of the sweet voice of Cona first
awaked the joy of grief." The blue stream of Ossian's Cona
here bends its course to Lochleven. The glen, " so warm, so fer
tile, so overhung by mountains which seem to meet above you," is
described as " a place of great plenty and security." J The ad
mirable historian of Scotland from the Revolution, tells us of the
narrow slip of grazing ground between the Alpine walls of Glen
coe ; and a few, still narrower, on the upper levels. If the Mac
Donalds had not lived, he says, by plunder, their arid glen could
not have supported the population. § Whether barren or fertile,
whether filled by robbers, or by " born poets," who treasured up'
"the songs of Selma,"— here dwelt the Maclans in patriarchal'
* Macaulay, vol. iv. p. 191. t Pennant.
t See Mrs, Grant's " Letters from the Mountains," Letter xi. 1773.
§ Burton, vol. i. p. 102.
548 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
simplicity. Campbell of Glenlyon, who came with his hundred
and twenty Highlanders of the Argyle regiment on the Ist of Feb
ruary, 1692, spent twelve days with his men amidst the somewhat
unpoetical hospitalities of the clan. The Maclans had no affec
tion for the Campbells ; but Glenlyon's niece was married to the
second son of their chief ; and when he and his lieutenant, Lind
say, said they came as friends, and asked for quarters, being sent
to relieve the garrison of Fort William, who were overcrowded,
they were received with cordiality. Undoubtedly the chief and
his clansmen trusted to the indemnity of the governmeut which
they thought had been secured by the oath which Maclan had
taken before the Sheriff of Argyle. Here they lived for twelve
days as Highlander with Highlander. They had beef and spirits
without payment. They were sheltered from the snow storms in
the huts of the poor people. Glenlyon became affectionate over
his usquebaugh with the husband of his niece ; played at cards
with the old chief; and entertained two of Maclan's sons at sup
per on the night of the 1 2th. At that time he had the following
letter in his pocket, from major Duncanson, dated on the 12th
from Balacholis, in the immediate neighbourhood : " You are
hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the MacDonalds of Glencoe,
and put all to the sword under seventy. You are to have especial
care that the old fox and his sons do on no account escape your
hands. You are to secure all the avenues, that no man escape.
This you are to put in execution at five o'clock in the morning
precisely, and by that time, or very shortly after it, I'll strive to be
at you with a stronger party ; it I do not come to you at five, you
are not to tarry for me, but to fall on. This is by the king's spe
cial command, for the good and safety of the country, that these
miscreants may be cut off, root and branch. See that this be put
in execution without fear or favour, else you may expect to be
treated as not true to the king and government, nor a man fit to
carry commission in the king's service. Expecting you will not
fail in the fulfilling hereof, as you love yourself, I subscribe these
with my hand." Captain Campbell did not tarry for his superior
officer. He was strong enough to do his murderous bidding with
out his aid. Sir Walter Scott thinks that the purposed crime was
more foul, through its perpetration being " committed to soldiers,
who were not only the countrymen of the proscribed, but the near
neighbours, and some of them the close connexions of the Mac
Donalds of Glencoe." He adds that, " the massacre has been un-
HIGHLAND TROOPS ARRIVE IN GLENCOE. 549
Justly attributed to English troops." * We venture to believe that
English troops had not the qualities which would have recom
mended their employ. It is impossible not to see that the revenges
of the Campbells had as much to do with this act, as " the king's
special command." Argyle and Breadalbane were not promising
that the clan MacDonald should have " no retreat in their bounds,"
without making known their desire to their people that "the old
fox and his cubs " should be wholly " cut off." The cunning of the
affair was characteristic of the mountain tribes : '¦ Highland his
tory is crowded with incidents, which, in modern phraseology,
would be stamped as treachery, but in the social system of the ac
tors passed as dexterity." f Some agitation amongst the Argyle
soldiers — whisperings and murmurs — had roused the fears of John
Maclan. He went at midnight to the house of Inverriggen, in the
hamlet where Glenlyon was quartered. The captain was up and
his men about him. He was ordered, he said, to march against
Glengarry's people. Could he be likely to harm his friends, and
especially those amongst whom his niece had married ! Would he
not have given a hint to Alaster ? The man was satisfied. The
night was stormy. The valley lay quiet in mists and thick dai'k-
ness. At five in the morning Glenlyon and his men slaughtered
Inverriggen and nine other men. A child of twelve was stabbed
by an officer bearing the name of Drummond. Lindsay and his
party went to the house of the old chief, and killed him as he was
dressing himself, roused by his faithful servants. His two sons
escaped amongst the rocks. His wife was stripped of her trinkets
by the savages, and died the following day from her ill-usage. In
another hamlet, Auchnaion a serjeant of the name of Barbour,
with his detachment, snot Auchentriater, and seven others, as they
sat round the fire In the dark morning. It is reckoned that the
number of the slaughtered was thirty-eight. Happily, the order
that the avenues should be secured was not effectually carried out.
Duncanson did not arrive in time. The reports of the murderous
guns had alarmed the sleeping families, and three-fourths of the
adults, with their wives and children, escaped by the passes before
the troops of Hamilton had barred their way. No deed of blood
remained for those who came to Glencoe, when the sun was high
in the heavens, but to slay an old man of eighty. Their work was
to burn the huts of the tribe, and drive off their cattle. But the
unhappy fugitives who had escaped the slaughter had to endure all
* " Tales of a Grandfather," chapter lviii. t Burton, vol. i. p. 165.
550 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
the extremities of hunger and cold in that inclement season. The
number who perished in the snow ; sank exhausted in the bogs ;
crept into caverns, and died for lack of food, was never ascer
tained. In a short time, some few stole back to their half-ruined
cabins, and in after years the valley had again a population.
Amongst those who returned to the scene of desolation was the
bard of the tribe. " The bard sat alone upon a rock, and looking
down, composed a long, dismal song." *
In an age of publicity the extraordinary occurrences of the val
ley of Glencoe would have been known in a week in every corner
of these realms. In an age when newspapers were uncommon,
and gatherers of news by no means vigilant to minister to public.
curiosity, no Londoner knew of this tragedy, or, if he heard some
rumour, heeded it not. After some weeks had elapsed, there was
a report that a robber tribe had been engaged with Scotch troops,
and that the chief and some of his clan had been killed. At Edin
burgh, jDeople in the coffee-houses began to talk. Glenlyon was
conscious of the remarks upon him, and said that " he would dojt
ao'ain, if it were again to be done. He would stab any man in
Scotland or England without asking why, if he were commanded so
to do." Argyle's Highland regiment was quartered at Brentford,
in June, 1692 ; and it was afterwards published that the soldiers
talked about the massacre, and that one said, " Glencoe seems to
hang about Glenlyon night and day ; and you may see it in his
face." Whilst public murmurings were faintly heard in Scotland
— not " while public indignation was at the highest," as Scott says
— Dalrymple wrote to Hamilton from the Hague, on the 30th of
April, 1692, " For the people of Glencoe, when you do your duty
in a thing so necessary to rid the country of thieving, you need
not trouble yourself to take the pains to vindicate yourself, by
showing all your orders, which are now put in the ' Paris Gazette.'
When you do right you need fear nobody. All that can be said
is, that, in the execution, it was neither so full nor so fair as might
have been." Charles Leslie, the non-juring clergyman, obtained
some particulars of the deliberate treachery and cold-blooded fe
rocity which made the Glencoe massacre so peculiarly atrocious ;
and he published the circumstances about the end of 1692. A
pamphlet called " Gallienus Redivivus " followed up this attack.
Burnet says that the transaction at Glencoe " raised a mighty
outcry, and was published by the French in their Gazettes, and by
* Mrs, Grant,
INQUIRY INTO THE MASSACRE. 55 1
the Jacobites in their libels, to cast a reproach on the king's gov
ernment as cruel and barbarous ; though in all other instances it
had appeared that his own inclinations were gentle and mild,
rather to an excess."* The affair would probably have rested
with the French Gazettes and Jacobite libels, had not the Parlia
ment of Scotland, after a recess of two years, met in 1695, when
Glencoe was a subject which had roused the nation to demand in
quiry; for the non-jurors and friends of king James had worked
diligently in stirring up the popular feeling. Political hostility to
the Master of Stair had something to do with the tardy indigna
tion of the Scottish Estates. William had in 1693 authorized an
investigation of tbe matter by the duke of Hamilton and others.
The duke died, and the inquiry was left to die with him. The
king war: now advised to take a more decided course, anticipating
the measures of the Scotch Parliament. He issued a Commission
of Precognition to the marquis of Tweeddale, and other privy coun
sellors in Scotland. The inquiries were necessarily minute and
complicated ; but the document was at last produced. From that
document, and the letters and oral evidence accompanying it, is an
authentic narrative of the massacre to be collected.
The report of the Commission, with the depositions and let
ters, were read in the Scottish Parliament on tjie 24th of June, 1695,
and the results is thus recorded :
" After hearing of the said Report, it was voted, nemine con-
tradicente, that his Majesty's instructions of the nth and 16th
days of January, 1692, touching the Highland rebels who did not
accept in due time of the benefit of his indemnity, did contain a
warrant for mercy, to all, without exception, who should offer to
take the oath of allegiance, and come in upon mercy, though the
first day of January, 1692, prefixt by the Proclamation of Indem
nity, was past, and that therefore, these instructions contained no
warrant for the execution of the Glencoe men, made in February
thereafter. "Then the question stated and voted, if the execution and
slaughter ofthe Glencoe men in February, 1692, as is represented,
to the Parliament, be a murder or not, and carried in the affirma
tive." It was then moved "that since the Parliament has found it a
murder, that it may be inquired into, who were the occasion of it,
"* " Own Times," vol. iv. p. 155.
552 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and the persons guilty and committers of it, and what way and
manner they should be prosecute." *
On the ioth of July, the Parliament agreed to an Address to
the king, which contains the following material passages :
"We humbly beg that, considering that the Master of Stair's
excess in his letters against the Glencoe men has been the original
cause of thjs unhappy business, and hath given occasion in a great
measure to so extraordinary an Execution by the warm directions
he gives about doing it by way of surprise ; And considering the
high station and trust he is in, and that he is absent, We do there
fore beg that your Majesty will give such orders about him for
vindication of your Government as you in your royal wisdom shall
think fit.
" And likeways considering that the Actors have barbarously
killed men under trust, We humbly desire your Majesty would be
pleased to send the Actors home, and to give orders to your Ad
vocate to prosecute them according to Law, there remaining noth
ing else to be done for the full vindication of your Government of
so foul and scandalous an aspersion as it has lain under upon this
occasion." f
The Master of Stair was only dismissed from office by the
king. The Parliament of Scotland did not accuse " the original
cause of this unhappy business " as being participant in what they
voted to be a murder. Whether the king ought to have placed
the chief culprit on his trial for a great crime can scarcely be
maintained without acknowledging that William had some excuse
for his comparative lenity in the very mild recommendation of the
Parliament "to give such orders about him, for vindication of
your government, as you in your royal wisdom shall think fit."
Most persons will nevertheless agree with the historian that "in
return for many victims immolated by treachery, only one victim
was demanded by justice ; and it must ever be considered as a
blemish on the fame of William that the demand was refused." J
The Scottish Parliament imputed no guilt to Livingstone or Hill ;
they somewhat doubted about Hamilton and Duncanson ; but they
were clear that captain Campbell and captain Drummond, lieuten
ant Lindsay, ensign Lundy, and serjeant Barbour were the actors
in the slaughter, and ought to be prosecuted. The king did not
cause these to be prosecuted. He knew perfectly well that they
* " Acts of Parliament of Scotland," vol. ix. p. 377. f ibid. p. .„.
X Macaulay, " History," vol. iv. p. 580.
MASTER OF STAIR DISMISSED. 553
had as sound a legal defence before a civil tribunal, as any of the
privates who discharged their muskets under the orders of ser
jeant Barbour. Defoe affirms that "his Majesty often saidf it was
a moot-point in war, whether they had broken orders or no; and
though I have the honour to know that his Majesty exceedingly
resented the manner, yet it did not appear at all that they had laid
themselves open to military justice in it." *
There was one person connected with the Glencoe massacre,
of whom we lose sight in the decisions of the Scottish Parliament
as to "who were the occasion of it." That person is the earl of
Breadalbane. But there is a further record in the Minutes of that
Parliament which shows that the other great culprit besides Dal
rymple had not been wholly overlooked: "July 1. A warrant
granted to bring the earl of Breadalbane down to the Parliament
House." f From the Parliament House he was committed to the
castle of Edinburgh, on a charge of high treason. In the course
of the Glencoe inquiries the Highland chief Glengarry, and others,
deposed that in offering them money he alleged that he continued
in the interest of king James, and pressed them to make a show of
pacification, that they might be ready to serve him at some future
time — the " outward compliance " which James had himself recom
mended. Breadalbane contrived that the inquiry should stand
over from time to time, till the Session of Parliament came
to an end. He had pleaded his pardon from the Crown ; but the
offences charged were subsequent to that pardon. Burnet says,
" he pretended he had secret orders from the king, to say anything
that would give him credit with them ; which the king owned so
far, that he ordered a new pardon to be passed for him."4 It is
impossible to fathom the depths of the intrigues of the Scottish
statesmen and great lords at this jperiod. Burnet in his narrative
of the Glencoe massacre, says of Breadalbane : that he might grat
ify his own revenge, and render the king odious to all the High
landers, he proposed that orders should be sent for a military exe
cution on those of Glencoe." § We believe in no such refinement
of Breadalbane's cunning. He and Argyle were glad to sweep out
the MacDonalds, who annoyed them. Dalrymple would have ex
terminated the whole Celtic population of Jacobites, Papists, and
thieves — for the greater part were such in his mind — as his prede-
* " History of the Union," p. 72.
t " Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland," vol. ix. p. 389.
X " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 274. § Hid-, P- 153-
554 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
cessors in power had,often hunted them down as wild beasts. Not
three months before Dalrymple put the Order of January 1 6th be
fore William to sign, he wrote to Breadalbane that no prince but
William would have not been tempted to hearken to the earnest
desires of all those he trusts in his government. '• to have made
the Highlanders examples of his justice, by extirpating them." *
William acceded to the one exception to his general clemency.
urged upon him by Dalrymple, Argyle. and Breadalbane ; for it
was a measure justified to his mind by the "laws of war." It is
one of the most lamentable evils of these laws, that in some cases
a violation of the rights of humanity ceases to be regarded as a
crime ; and that in all cases implicit obedience to orders is the par
amount duty of a soldier, however revolting to his moral sense.
Sir Walter Scott, recalling his early recollections, says, that
" on the 5th of November, 1 7SS. when a full century had elapsed
after the Revolution, some friends to constitutional liberty pro
posed that the return of the day should be solemnized by an agree
ment to erect a monument to the memory of king William, and the
services which he had rendered to the British Kingdoms." How
was the proposal defeated ? By an anonymous letter in one of the
Edinburgh newspapers, " ironically applauding the undertaking,
and proposing as two subjects of the entablature for the projected
column, the massacre of Glencoe, and the distresses of the Scot
tish colonists at Darien." We have related the one story, with a
scrupulous regard to facts. We shall have to tell the ether dis
tressing narrative, with the same scrupulosity. Sir Walter Scott im
presses upon his grandson this lesson : •' You may observe from this
how cautious a monarch should be of committing wrong or injustice,
however strongly recommended by what may seem political neces
sity." t The great novelist left his juvenile readers, and his confid
ing adult readers, to the full belief that king William was the princi
pal person to be accused as the author of both calamities. There
jsrobably is not a more striking instance of the blindness of a morbid
nationality, than in this mode of attributing "wrong or injustice "
to a sovereign who, in the one case, was wholly under the guidance
of his Scotch ministers, acting in the spirit of all Scotch Statesmen
towards the Highland clans ; and in the other case was whollv
under the control of the English parliament, uttering the voice of
the English nation in the commercial jealousies of the age. We
have reached a period when all the false nationalities and party
* Burton, Appendix, vol. i. + " Tales of a Grandfather," chap, lix.
MISCONCEPTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE MASSACRE. .'555
sympathies embodied in romance, and in histories more fictitious
than fiction, have very nearly done their work ; when we may look
at kings and statesmen tl, rough that achromatic glass which shows
them under no false colouring in their public characters. We may
therefore doubt, with a Scottish historian who belongs to this more
advanced age, whether, in a period when the Highland chief was
acting after his kind in the indulgence of a fierce revenge — when
the Scottish statesman was acting as Scottish statesmen had done
for ages before him^it was likely that a "far-seeing and deeply
judging prince " should desert his nature and habits so much as
" to countenance, suggest, and urge on, the slaughter of those poor
Highlanders." * The anonymous libeller who would have in
scribed "Glencoe" on the entablature of a column to William, if he
had read the evidence, would have known perfectly well that this
slaughter was devised by Scottish statesmen ofthe Lowlands, and
carried through by Scottish captains of the Highlands. He would
have known that the treachery of this military execution was the
device, in the old crafty and ferocious spirit of clan hostility, of the
native soldiers to whom the slaughter was entrusted. He probably
knew that Glencoe was not the last of the Highland massacres,
sanctioned by no intervention of king William, but by the old
" letters of fire and sword "granted by the Privy Council of Scotland.
These. letters were not granted for any political object; but in the
ancient spirit of revenge by which a favoured clan was authorized
to destroy another less favoured. Six years after the Glencoe
massacre, the laird of Mcintosh obtained letters of fire and sword
against MacDonald of Keppoch. Mcintosh and his followers.
with the assistance of the governor of Fort William, are authorized
to hunt and take ; if necessary to put to death ; and if they retire
to strongholds to " raise fire and use all force and warlike engines."
This process, then a legal one, was not sent out against the king's
rebels— for the pacification ofthe Jacobite clans had been accom
plished—but to obtain restitution of lands alleged to be unjustly
held by a clan that did not care for being " put to the horn." t It
were well if those who repeat glibly "how -cautious a monarch
should be," &c, would lead their readers to some real knowledge
ofthe condition and manners ofthe Highlanders of those days, and
of the mode in which the authorities of Scotland had for genera
tions been accustomed to treat them. They would perhaps then
be inclined to assign to its proper cause— a hatred of the political
* Burton, vol. i. p. 173. t Hid., vol. i. p. 177. note.
556 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and religious princijiles of the king of the Revolution — the imputa
tion that to his " hard-heartedness " is to be ascribed " the massacre
of Glencoe ; an enormity which has left a stain on William's
memory that neither time, nor the services that he was providen
tially the instrument of rendering to these kingdoms, can ever
efface."* In narrating the circumstances which retarded the Union of the
kingdoms of England and Scotland — a measure of which William
observed, " I have done all I can in that affair, but I do not see a
temper in either nation that looks like it" — Defoe says, " The affair
of Glencoe was another step to national breaches." To us, looking
calmly upon this affair at the interval of a hundred and sixty-six
years, it would appear the most extravagant of national delusions
to set up this as "a ground of national animosity." From the
beginning to the end it was a Scottish affair. Not an English
statesman was concerned in advising the proceeding. The char
acter of the monarch who signed the order, as king of Scotland,
is far more truly exemplified in one sentence of the Proclamation
of Indemnity, which ought to have been the rule of conduct for
those who urged on the massacre — " to interpret this indemnity in
the most favourable and ample manner."
* " Annals of England," vol. iii. p. 120.
PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES. 557
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Marlborough dismissed from office. — Parliamentary debates. — Independence of the
Judges. — The king leaves for Holland. — Threatened invasion. — Declaration of James.
— Battle of La Hogue.— Siege of Namur. — Grandval's plot to assassinate William. —
Battle of Steinkirk. — Parliament. — Crime and public distress. — Commencement of the
National Debt.— The Licensing Act expires — Place Bill.— Bill for Triennial Par
liaments. — The King's Veto. — Murder of Mountfort. — Trial of Lord Mohun.
" The king was pleased, without assigning any reason, to re
move my lord Marlborough from his employments." Such is the
brief notice of an important event by the wife of the great peer.
Much fuller is her account of the circumstances which caused a
serious disagreement between queen Mary and her sister, the prin
cess Anne. The queen, three weeks after the dismissal of the earl,
wrote to her sister that " it is very unfit lady Marlborough should
stay with you, since that gives her husband so just a pretence of
being where he ought not." Mary said, I need not repeat the cause
he has given the king to do what he has done, nor his unwillingness
at all times to come to such extremities, though people do deserve
it." Anne refused to be separated from her beloved Mrs. Free
man ; and Mrs. Freeman being commanded to leave the palace,
Mrs. Morley left with her. Anne chose her abode at Sion House ;
and the nation was scandalised at a quarrel between the occupier
of the throne and the sister who might one day be called to oc
cupy it. It is easy to imagine that no circumstance in the lives of
of William and Mary produced more misery than this rujiture. The
dismissal of Marlborough occurred on the 10th of January, at the
very time when, in the view of some Candid persons, William was
occupied in planning the slaughter of an obscure Highland clan. It
was a period to the king of great political anxiety. Lady Marlbor
ough says she could never learn " what cause the king had for his
displeasure." The popular feeling regarded the earl's dismissal as
a just punishment " for his excessive taking of bribes, covetous-
ness, and extortion on all occasions from his inferior officers."* In
another passage, Evelyn attributes Marlborough's disgrace to his
* Evelyn, "Diary," January 24.
558. HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
" having used words against the king" What Marlborough had
really done has been revealed in a letter of James. The Lieuten-
ant-General of William, who also held the domestic office of his
Gentleman of the Bedchamber, had concerted witii the Jacobites
to effect the recall of James by the subtlest of plots. He was or
ganising a party to propose and carry in Parliament a motion that
all the foreigners in the emjploy of the Crown, civil or military,
should be sent out of the kingdom. The object was to produce
a rupture between the king and the parliament. Then, says the
letter of James, " my lord Churchill would declare with the army
for the parliament; and, the fleet doing the same, they would have
recalled me." James adds that some of his own imprudent friends,
dreading that the scheme of Churchill had for its ultimate object
to make the princess Anne queen, discovered it to Bentinck, and
thus " turned aside the blow." *
The Parliament was adjourned on the 20th of February, having
met on the 2nd of the previous October. It was a Session of great
debate ; but more remarkable for the discussion of important
measures, than for their final enactment. The rival claims of the
Old East India Company and of the New, were the subject of earn
est argument, not unmingled with party feelings. But nothing was
finally decided ; and a bill for the regulation ofthe India trade was
suffered to drop, f A most important measure for regulating trials
in cases of high treason was passed by the Commons ; but becom
ing the subject of a great controversy between the two houses, as
to the right of peers to be tried by the whole body of the Upper
House as well during a recess as during a sitting of Parliament,
that valuable bill also fell through. A few years later the jealousy
of the Commons was removed. Another measure of great public
advantage was defeated by the king's Veto. It was the first time
in which William had exercised this power. The Judges had been
made independent of the Crown as to their term of office. They
were appointed by William and Mary " Ouamdiu se bene gesse-
rint:" they could not be arbitrarily removed. But their salaries
had not been fixed, as they ought to have been. The Houses
passed a Bill for legally establishing this judicial independence ;
also providing that each judge should be paid a thousand a year.
But they charged the salaries upon the hereditary revenues of the
* This letter, in French, is given by Macaulay, who mentions that a translation was
published by Macpherson " eighty years ago." " History," vol. iv. p. 166.
t See ante, p. 428.
INDEPENDENCE OF THE JUDGES. 559
Crown, without the previous consent of the king having been ac-
cotded. The king, says Hallam, "gave an unfortunate instance of
his very injudicious tenacity of bad prerogatives in refusing his as
sent." A later historian says that the circumstances under which
the king used his veto have never been correctly stated. " William
could defend the proprietary rights of the Crown only by putting
his negative on the bill It was not till the provisions
of the bill had been forgotten, and till nothing but its title was re
membered, that William was accused of having been influenced by
a wish to keep the judges in a state of dependence."* This great
constitutional principle was determined by the Act of Settlement
of 1701.(13 Gul. 3, c. 2), which provides that after the limitation of
the Crown under that statute shall take effect, " Judges' Commis
sions be made Quamdiu se bene gesserint, and their salaries as
certained and established ; but upon the Address of both Houses
of Parliament it may be lawful to remove them." f
The king set out for Plolland on the 5th of March. At the be
ginning of the Session he had told the Parliament that an Army of
sixty-five thousand men would be required, and the Houses voted
that number. The distribution of the land force gave about eleven
thousand men for England, thirteen thousand for Ireland, two
thousand for Scotland, and thirty-eight thousand to serve beyond
the sea. The jprojDortion of regular troops for the defence of Eng
land was thus comparatively small ; but then the militia of the
kingdom could be immediately called out, and the regiments of
London and Westminster were always in readiness for service.
The Navy had been brought into a greater state of efficiency than
at any previous jjeriod since the Revolution. If loyal songs are
to be believed in, the war was j^ojpular;
" Our army makes Lewis to tremble and quake
He fearing that Moiis we again will retake." X
Weavers, shoemakers, butchers, dyers, hatters — the men of Lon-
* Macaulay, " History," vol. iv. p. 183. There is an exception to Lord Macaulay's
wonted accuracy in his remarks on this subject. He says, " that great law (the Bill of
Rights) had deprived the Crown of the power of arbitrarily removing the judges." The
Bill of Rights contains not a word on the subject ; neither does the Declaration of Rights.
t Mr. Hallam has pointed out that we owe the independence of the Judges to this
statute, and not to George III., as we have long been taught to believe. Blackstone con
tributed to this popular delusion, by ascribing vast importance to the statute 1 Geo. III.,
c. 23, which continued the commissions of the judges notwithstanding the demise of the
Crown — a point befote doubtful. The recent editor of Blackstone, Dr. Kerr, has pointed
out that " the learned commentator much exaggerates the value " ofthe statute of George
III. X " Songs of the London Apprentices and Trades." Edited by Charles Mackay, p. 122.
560 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
don and the men of the West— were all ready to march under
" renowned king William," says the popular doggrel. But some
thing more effective than a broadside ballad was issued to stir up
the country to defend its government. It was a Declaration by
James himself, which was not suppressed by the queen and her
Council, but reprinted, and widely circulated with appropriate com
ment. There was in this document not a word of regret for the
past ; not a word that could hold out a prospect of amendment for
the future. It breathed vengeance against nobles and prelates
who were proscribed by name ; it threatened whole classes with
punishment as guilty rebels ; the judges and juries who had con
victed Ashton and Cross, two of the plotting Jacobites ; and the
" fishermen and all others who offered personal indignities to us
at Feversham." Such was a Declaration issued to jirepare the
people for receiving their ejected king with contrite tears, when he
came back at the head of a French invading army. James had at
last induced the king of France to hazard the chance of a landing
in England. The minister who had constantly opposed that dan
gerous project was dead. That minister was Louvois. He had
been the chief military administrator of Louis for nearly a quarter
of a century, but at last became obnoxious to his master. Louvois,
says Burnet, "grew uneasy at the authority Madame de Maintenon
took in things which she could not understand ; and was in con
clusion so unacceptable to the king that once, when he flung his
bundle of pajpers down upon the floor before him, the king lifted
up his cane, but the lady held him from doing more." * Saint
Simon tells something like the same story, with the variation of
the king catching up the fire-tongs instead of lifting his cane.
Louvois died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison. Saint
Simon represents Louis as feeling free when he had got rid of his
old servant; and then relates that, when an officer came from
James at Saint Germains, with a compliment of condolence, Louis,
" with an air and a tone more than perfectly easy " (plus que
de'gage's) replied — " give my compliments and thanks to the king
and queen of England, and say to them from me, that my affairs
and their affairs will go on none the worse for what has happened."
When the great war minister of France was saved by the hand of
death from being sent to the Bastile, Louis was free to assist his
confident brother at St. Germains with ten thousand French
troops, and with the Irish regiments wliich had entered the service
* "Own Time," vol. iv. p. 165.
THREATENED INVASION. 56 1
of France. A camp was formed at La Hogue ; and James, in the
Declaration which we have noticed, announced that the Most
Christian King had now " lent us so many troops as may be abun
dantly sufficient to untie the hands of our subjects, and make it
safe for them to return to their duty and repair to our standard." *
On the 24th of April, James joined his camp in Normandy. He
relied upon his French and Irish army, but he relied as much upon
the defection of the English fleet. Not only Admiral Russell, but
other officers had been tampered with. Russell, however, had
been disgusted into something like a sense of honour and duty by
the insane declaration issued by James. He sent word to the
rebel-threatener that he ought "to grant a general pardon, and
that then he would contribute what he could to his restoration
without insisting upon any terms for himself." f This crafty rene
gade had still something of the Englishman about hiih ; for whilst
he proposed to get out of the way with the fleet he commanded,
so as to give the invaders an opportunity of landing, he declared
that if he met the French fleet he would fight it, even though the
king himself were on board."
On the 1 5th of May, the English fleet was at St. Helen's. It
had been joined by the Dutch fleet, the whole force amounting to
ninety sail of the line. Russell was in command on board the
Britannia. A scene took jplace in that flag-ship which is happily
without a subsequent parallel in English history. A despatch
had arrived from Nottingham, the Secretary of State, which
Russell was commanded to read to the Commanders of the Fleet.
In his cabin there were men whose names are inscribed amongst the
great naval heroes of our land — sir George Rooke, — sir Cloudes
ley Shovel. Such true hearts could have little suspected that
he who read to them the magnanimous resolve of the queen was
most obnoxious to its covert reproach. Nottingham said, in her
majesty's name, that a report was spread abroad that some of the
officers of her fleet were not hearty in their service, and that she
had ordered many of them to be discharged. She further said that
she believed the report was raised by the enemies of the govern
ment, — that she retained an entire confidence in their fidelity and
zeal for the service of the crown and the defence of the country,
and was resolved not to displace any one. Then, with one accord,
an address to the queen was signed — Russell probably not signing
as being too exalted for suspicion to attach to him. It was an
* " Life of James II," vol. ii. p. 479. t Ibid., p. 489.
562 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
address, not cold and formal, but full of the devotion of the heart,
concluding in these earnest words, — " And that God Almighty may
preserve your majesty's most sacred person, direct your counsels,
and prosper your arms by sea and land against your majesty's
enemies, let all the people say Amen, with your majesty's most
dutiful and loyal subjects." * There was no time for the enthusiasm
of that hour to cool. On the afternoon of that day the French
fleet, under Tourville, was seen from the coast of Dorsetshire. On
the 17th, the English and Dutch fleets were at sea. Tourville had
with him only his own squadron, having sailed from Brest, and in
his passage to Cape la Hogue had come within view of Portland.
Off La Hogue the French transports were receiving troops. Tour
ville was to convoy this fleet of the invaders. On the morning of
the 19th, the two fleets came in sight of each other. Tourville
immediately bore down upon an armament more than double his
number The wind was favourable to him, and only half of the
ships of the allies could come into action. The defection upon
which he relied was nowhere to be seen. To vindicate their honour,
the commanders of the English fleet urged their men with a zeal
that made them invincible, and Russell even told the sailors of the
ships that he visited, to throw over any commander that played
false, himself not excepted. Carter, Rear-Admiral of the Blue —
who is said to have disclosed that overtures had been made to him
from the Jacobites — broke the French line at the onset, was mor
tally wounded, and dying exclaimed, " Fight the ship as long as
she can swim." The battle lasted five hours, when the wind
changed, and the whole force of the allies was brought together.
The victory was complete, the French flying in every direction to
their own shores. Tourville's ship, the Royal Sun, the finest ves
sel of that day, got to Cherbourg, with two other three-deckers.
There were no docks at that time to afford security. The great
men-of-war were hauled into the shoals, Admiral Delaval attacked
them with his fire-ships and his boats' crews, and the pride of the
French navy and the two other vessels were burned to the water's
edge. Tourville, during the chase, had shifted his flag to the
Ambitious, and with twelve other large ships had got into the bay
of La Hogue. Here he lay, under forts and batteries, with the
army of James close at hand, and the flags of England and France
flying on one of the forts, for James himself was within. On the
* The address is in Uie London Ga2ette of the 19th of May, and is quoted iu Ralph,
vol. ii. p. 352.
SIEGE OF NAMUR. JJ63
23rd of May, Admiral Rooke led a flotilla of two hundred boats and '
numerous fire-ships into the bay. The huge vessels fired with
little effect. There was a cannonade from the batteries and volleys
of musketry from the shore ; but on came the rowers, with the old
battle-shout. The boats' crews of Tourville fled in confusion. The
crews of the French ships abandoning them, the English sailors
boarded, and set them on fire. At eight the next morning again
came Rooke into the bay with his terrible flotilla. The remaining
vessels were in like manner burned, after their guns had been
turned against the French batteries. " The' defeat," says the
biographer of James, " was too considerable to be redressed, and
too afflicting to be looked upon, nor was it even safe to do it long." *
Saint-Simon, mentioning that " the king of England ".looked on at
this battle from the shore, says, " he was accused of letting some
words escape him of partiality in favour of his nation, although
none had made good the promises upon which he had counted
when he had urged a naval battle." Tourville, says the same
authority, had sent two couriers to Louis to represent the extreme
danger of relying upon the assurances of James as to the probable
good will of the English commanders, and his confidence in the
defection of more than half the fleet during an action. Evelyn
writes in his Diary of the 5th of June, " Reports of an invasion
were very hot, and alarmed the City, Court, and People." On the
15th he writes, " After all our apprehensions of being invaded,
and doubts of our success by sea, it pleased God to give us a great
naval victory, to the utter ruin of the French fleet." The success
was recognised by a temporary act of national gratitude, in a dis
tribution of" thirty- seven thousand pounds amongst the sailors, and
in the bestowal of gold medals upon the officers. A more per
manent demonstration of the feelings called forth by the victory of
La Hogue was a declaration by the queen, that the royal palace of
Greenwich should become what we now look upon with patriotic
pride — the noble asylum for the disabled "mariners of England."
When the news of La Hogue reached the great supporter of
James, the French army was besieging Namur. The army of the
allies, under the command of William, was encamped in the neigh
bourhood. The French general, Luxemburg, with an overwhelm-
ino- force, prevented any near advance for the relief of the be
sieged. Louis himself conducted the siege. " The fortified and
threatening hill" looks over a "watery glade" of exquisite
* "Life of James II," vol. ii. p. 496.
5-64 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
beauty;* but in the early summer of 1692 the Sambre had over-
flowed its banks ; and the besiegers had to contend with other dif
ficulties than those created by the science of Cohorn, the engineer
of the States-General, who was in the citadel. Vauban, the great en
gineer of France, was in. the lines with Louis. The magnificent mon
arch so far relaxed the rigour of his wonted etiquette as to permit
Vauban to dine with him ; at which distinction, says Saint-Simon,
Vauban was overwhelmed. It was a time when the presence of the
monarch was of some importance. Boileau describes the king, with
the basest adulation of a venal muse, as directing the siege :
"C'est Jupiter en personne."
Saint-Simon shows him doing some service in a sensible human
fashion, when it rained in torrents, and the trenches were full of
mud and water. The soldiers were cursing Saint MeMard ; for
that saint, like his brother of our calendar, was held to be in a
rainy humour for forty days if he willed it to rain on his festival
day, the 8th of June. Louis, who always travelled with a vast
troup of idle lackeys and fine gentlemen of his household, com
manded them to work in carrying corn to the army of Luxemburg.
The roads were impassable for waggons, and the household troops
and fine gentlemen were commanded to bear sacks of grain to the
starving soldiers on the cruppers of their horses. Bitterly they
complained ; but the king would be obeyed. Without his presence,
says Saint-Simon, the siege would never have been successful.
The besiegers were in extremity for want of provisions. Unfor
tunately Cohorn was wounded. The governor of Namur and the
garrison lost heart, and the town was first surrendered and after
wards the citadel.
During the siege of Namur the army of William had often a
distinct view of the operations of the French array. On the ist of
June the English were encamped at Ville, on the Mehaigne. The
low grounds on each side of the river were so flooded by incessant
rains, that it was impracticable to cross, so as to attack the enemy
on the opposite side. On the sth the rains had destroyed most of
the bridges over the Mehaigne. " I scarce see what we have to
do here," writes one in the camp. On the 8th the allied army and
the army of Luxemburg were each moving on opposite banks of
the river. On the 13th the French army had drawn nearer to Na
mur, and William continued to follow their movements, f Namur
* See Wordsworth's Sonnet.
t Letters of Vernon to Colt, printed in Tindal's " Continuation of Rapin," vol. iii.
p. 206.
BATTLE OF STEINKtRK. 565
surrendered on the 30th. " The king's conduct," says Burnet,
" was on this occasion much censured ; it was said he ought to
have put much to hazard, rather than suffer such a place to have
been taken in his sight." Boileau concludes his ode with a taunt,
to the enemies of France — " Go to Liege and Brussels, to carry
the humble news of Namur taken under your eyes." Louis re
turned to Paris with his long train of carriages filled with ladies of
the court — his poets, his comedians, and the musicians — " accor
ding to the old Persian luxury." William remained to watch Lux
emburg, and to fight if opportunity offered. In the middle of July
the allied camp was at Genappe. Three prisoners had been
brought thither from Bois-le-duc, accused of a design to assassin
ate William. Their movements had been watched for some time.
Burnet had made it known that M. Morel, of Berne, who had been
incarcerated in the Bastile for seven years on refusing to renounce
his Protestantism, and had been released in April, had written to
him that he had been out of curiosity to St. Germains to see king
James ; and that returning in a public conveyance he met with a
man named Grandval, whom he had observed in secret conversa
tion with the exiled king. Grandval was very communicative, and
said there was a design in hand that would confound all Europe — ¦
the prince of Orange would not live a month. Various other cir
cumstances had led to the arrest of Grandval and two men that he
had associated in his enterprise, Dumont, a Walloon, and the '
Baron de Leefdale, a Dutchman. These two accomplices of Grand
val had no desire to carry through the project to which they had
agreed. They gave warnings that there was a plot to remove Wil
liam by assassination. Leefdale came with Grandval from Paris
to the Netherlands. Dumont, having previously told something of
what he knew to the duke of Zell, at Hanover, set out to meet
Grandval. When apprehended, and brought to the camp at Gen
appe, a court-martial of general officers commenced sitting on the
23rd of July, for the trial of Bartholomew de Liniere, Sieur de
Grandvah The examination of the prisoner had been taken, and
the witnesses were about to be confronted with him, when " greater
matters intervening put a stop to the process of Grandval.*
The " greater matters " were the sudden determination of
William to attack Luxemburgj and the disastrous issue of the en
terprise. The French army was encamped between Enghien and
Steinkirk, a few miles to the north-west of Hal. The head-quar»
* Letter of Vernon to Colt.
566 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ters of William's army were at Lambecque. Luxemburg had an
ao-ent in the allied camp who gave him information of the move
ments of the forces opposed to him— a secretary of the elector of
Bavaria, named Millevoix. A letter from this man was accidentally
picked up, and carried to the elector. His correspondence was
discovered ; and William, with remarkable presence of mind, took
advantage of the discovery, not by hanging the traitor, but by
making his treachery serviceable. He dictated a letter of false in
telligence to the terrified Millevoix, in which Luxemburg was in
formed that the English would come the next day towards the
French army to forage, and that a portion of the army would be
at hand to protect the foragers. At dawn on the morning of the
3rd of August, the whole force of the allies was marching towards
Steinkirk. Luxemburg was incredulous of the news which his
scouts brought him, for he relied upon the informant in whom he
thoroughly trusted. He at last roused himself. The nature of
the ground was in his favour. The march had been tedious, for there
were defiles to pass, and the country was enclosed The duke
of Wiirtemberg led the vanguard, and drove the advanced bri
gade of the French from hedge to hedge. But Luxemburg, with
the rapidity of genius, had soon the main body of his army in or
der of battle. The affair was no longer a surprise. We have
before us an unpublished letter written by marshal Conway in
1774, on the occasion of a visit to this battle field: "From Ouden-
arde and Enghien by Grammont the road lies through a beautiful
country. Near the former we took horses to go and see the
ground of the famous battle of Steinkirk, where king William took
such good measures to surprise marshal Luxemburg ; but by the
activity and quickness of that able antagonist, failed in his project,
and was repulsed after a long and bloody engagement. The ground
here remains, by all accounts, just as it was at that time, now eighty-
two years ago." * As the ground was, eighty-two years after the
battle, we may readily conclude that another term of eighty-two
years has made no very material change. Commerce has not here
created new towns, though a railway may cut through the hedges,
and span the hollow ways, where the allied cavalry could not
act, and the vanguard began to engage, while the main body
of infantry was at some distance. Count Solmes, who was chief
in command of the English, sent his horse to their relief ; but, says
* From a MS. volume of Conway's Letters to his brother, the Marquis of Hertford,
the property of the author of this history.
DEBATE ON THE BATTLE OF STEINKIRK. 567
a great military critic, "What signified his marching the horse,
where the ground was so strait, and the French had such a nation
of hedges, and copses, and ditches, and felled trees laid, this way
and that, to cover them." * The eloquent Corporal truly describes
how five English regiments were cut to pieces; "and so had the
English life-guards too, had it not been for some regiments upon
the right, who marched up boldly to their relief, and received the
enemy's fire in their faces, before any one of their own platoons
discharged a musket." These brave fellows were led by Auver
querque. They saved the English life-guards ; but they could not
save the infantry who had been left without support. Mackay,
their brave. leader, fell in the desperate conflict. The blame of
this great reverse was imputed to count Solmes, who had probably
to bear the mistakes of others as well as his own. It is clear that
the nature of the ground was not perfectly understood ; and that the
panic to be produced by a sudden attack was too confidently relied
upon. William made every effort to bring up his men to relieve
the vanguard ; but Luxemburg was now reinforced by Boufflers,
who heard the firing, and marched from his neighbouring quarters.
The king, it is said, looked upon the slaughter, and exclaimed,
" Oh, my poor English, how are they abandoned." On each side
there were about seven thousand killed and wounded. The allies
marched from the field of battle in good order, to the camp from
which they had unfortunately gone forth, as they believed to victory.
The nation was dispirited. The army was indignant that Solmes,
a foreigner, should have been placed in the command of English
troops, and then look on while they were slaughtered. In the
House of Commons, three months after, the public voice found an
indignant vent. That House now fully exercised the right from
which it has never since parted, of seeking occasion freely to
comment upon warlike operations; — sometimes unjustly, often ig-
norantly, but never without advantage to the discovery of truth.
On the 22nd of November, these words were heard in the House :
" None are ignorant of the melancholy story of Steinkirk ; every
one knows that tragedy. The common soldiers had no opinion of
their officers. I move," added sir Peter Colleton, " That none but
natives should command Englishmen." Sir Edward Seymour
asked, " What number have you fit for General Officers ? They
are few ; and will you think to discharge and send away foreign
ers till you have generals of your own ? " There can be no
* " Tristiam Shandy."
Jj68 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
doubt that during the lOng vassalage of the Stuarts to France,
England had lost all the qualities of a military nation, except the
best quality, the spirit of her people — the blood and bone of those
who fought in her ranks. She wanted scientific as well as brave
leaders, bred in her own bosom. Seymour truly said, "Men are
not born generals." There were in the House of Commons at
that time, as there have been ever since, officers of rank, who came
from active service in the field to the senate, and said honestly
what they knew. Lord Colchester, who commanded the third
troop of horseguards, was one of these. He told his story simply
and clearly ; and his relation confirms the ordinary historical ac
counts in all essentials : " I find the business of Steinkirk stick with
some gentlemen. The chief occasion of the ill-success there was
the wrong information given to the king of the ground we were
to pass, which was so full of hedges and woods, that we could not
draw up one body to sustain another; horse and foot were mingled.
I saw the attack made by Fagel ; Dutch, English, and all nations :
they beat the French from hedge to hedge, but their very weight
of men bore us down. The. French came upon us, and Auver
querque came up, and behaved himself as well as any man in the
world. He sent us two Danish regiments, and we retreated to
the main" body, and from thence to the main camp." * The anger
of the House centred upon Solmes. "When this attack was
formed," said colonel Cornwell, " Solmes was there, with ten
battalions to sustain them. Solmes said, ' That to send more was
to slaughter more.' " The king withdrew his countenance from
the obnoxious general, who had offended by his haughtiness as
well as by his conduct in the battle of Steinkirk. He fell in a
second unfortunate battle in the coming year.
The Court-Martial on Grandval was re-opened in a week after
the battle. Two of the Generals of whom it was originally com
posed had fallen in the field — Mackay and Lanier. The duty of
the court was not very embarrassing ; for the prisoner had made
a circumstantial confession, " without any constraint or pain, or
being in irons." So says the official relation of the Court-Martial.
He declared that the late French minister, Louvois, had in 1691
entered into an agreement with Anthony Dumont, about the mur
der of king William ; that upon the death of Louvois the design
dropped, but that Barbesieux, the son of Louvois, who succeeded
him as Secretary of State to the French king, revived the project,
* " Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 713.
ILLNESS OF THE QUEEN. 569
and had several conferences with him, Grandval ; that he was en
gaged in the affair with colonel Parker, in the service of king
James ; and that with him, Barbesieux, and Dumont, the plan was
arranged, which was that he should shoot William, when he ex
posed himself during the campaign. Leefdale was then brought
into the scheme. The most material averment of the prisoner
was, that he had seen James at St. Germains, his queen being
present, and that James said, " Parker has given me an account of
the business ; if you and the other officers do me this service, you
shall never want." Grandval was executed in the camp at Hal,
according to his sentence. He declared in a letter to a friend that
it cost him his life for having obeyed the orders of Barbesieux.
The confession of Grandval was printed and circulated in several
languages. No answer was made to its circumstantial statements,
vouched for by ten distinguished officers of various' nations, who
comjjosed the Court-Martial.
The king returned to England on the 1 8th of October. The
outward signs of a cordial welcome awaited him. There were
illuminations as he passed through London to Kensington.
There was a loyal address from the Corporation of London ; and
the king dined at Guildhall on the Lord Mayor's day. There
was a solemn thanksgiving for his safe return, and for the great
victory at sea. But there were many symptoms of political and
social distenrpers, which made sober men uneasy. In September
the queen had issued two proclamations — one for the discovery of
seditious libellers, the other for the apprehension of highwaymen.
The one proclamation was far more effective than the other. The
libellers worked their secret jiresses, and the furious zealots cir
culated their productions without any material injury to the govern
ment. The people grumbled a little more under the pressure of
taxation, and under other evils of their daily life, when they read
inflammatory pamphlets from Jacobites and Non-jurors ; but a
return to the times before the Revolution was the farthest from
their wishes. There was a good deal of alarm in that autumn of
1692, from the daring crimes that sometimes seem epidemic in a
nation. Hence the proclamation against highwaymen. We have
mentioned a robbery of the tax-collectors in Hertfordshire* Sim
ilar gangs of banditti robbed mails and stage-coaches even in the
day-time. William on his return took strong measures to put down
these enormities. Many highwaymen were discovered and execu-
* Ante, p. 430.
57O HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ted ; and a regiment of dragoons was used as a preventive police,
and patroled all the great roads leading to the capital. Burglars
were almost as bold and as numerous as footpads and highway
men. We doubt whether there was any especial distress con
nected with this particular juncture ; though it is said that there
was a failure of the harvest — that the heavy rains had been fatal to
the crops — that no fruit ripened — that the price of the quarter of
wheat doubled.* Evelyn indeed writes in his Diary of the ist of
October, " This season was so exceedingly cold, by reason of a
long and tempestuous northeast wind, that this usually pleasant
month was very uncomfortable. No fruit ripened kindly." But
he says nothing of a bad harvest in England. He says, " France
is in the utmost misery and poverty for the want of corn and sub
sistence." The harvest of 1692 is represented as plentiful, so that
England was- exporting corn.f Nevertheless there can be no
doubt that amongst a jieople who had not previously borne such
heavy burdens of taxation as four years of war had imposed upon
them — and whose industry was not sufficiently developed to enable
them to bear their burdens without being weighed down — there
must have been much suffering and more discontent.
The king opened the Parliament on the 4th of November.- He
thanked them for their large supplies ; he would be compelled to
ask for a further supjply to maintain a force by sea and land. He
was sensible how heavy this charge was upon his people. It
afflicted him to learn that it was not possible to be avoided, without
exposing the kingdom to inevitable ruin and destruction. He
hoped for their advice and assistance, which had never failed him.
The House of Commons set about giving its advice ; but it did
little more than display a good deal of ill-humour as to the conduct
of the war. There were several important matters bearing upon
the future condition of the country, arising out of the proceedings
of this Session, which we shall briefly notice.
Turning over the Index of the ponderous Statute-book, to look
for Acts that have had a permanent influence on the condition of
the country, we might perhaps pass over one Act that bears this
lengthy title : " An Act for granting to their majesties certain rates
and duties of excise upon beer, ale, and other liquors for securing
certain recompenses and advantages in the said Act mentioned, to
such persons as shall voluntarily advance the sum of ten hundred
» Macauley, vol. iv. p. 204. t Tindal, vol. iii. p. 217.
COMMENCEMENT OF THE NATIONAL DEBT. 57 1
thousand pounds towards carrying, on the war against France." *
Under this statute commenced the National Debt of England.
The million of money which was to supply a portion of the expenses
of the war " in a manner that would be least grievous," as the
preamble says, was expected to be voluntarily advanced on the
credit of the special provision of the new duties of excise, which
were to be set apart as they were paid into the Exchequer. The
ten hundred thousand pounds were speedily subscribed ; for the
industry of the people had created cajMtal which was seeking
employment, although they had been far more heavily taxed during '
four years than at any previous period. Louis, although he was
familiar with the system of loans, was somewhat amazed at the
comparative ease with which taxes were raised and a million of '
money borrowed in England upon the credit of the taxes. He is
said to have exclaimed, " My little cousin the prince of Orange is
fixed in the saddle ; no matter ; the last louis d'or must carry it." f
This was really a just view of the premises of success, though the
great king's conclusions were fallacious. The people of England
were in a far better condition than the people of France, to fight
on without expending all to the last louis d'or. The working and
accumulating Middle Class was far more powerful in the one nation
than in the other. There can be no doubt that the means first created
by the Act of 1693 for the investment of superfluous capital, have
largely contributed to the progressive development of the national
resources. There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that the
facilities of borrowing by the creation of Stock, have often led to
extravagant expenditure in wars- that have averted no real danger
nor secured any public advantage.
There can be nothing more true than the assertion of Mr.
Ricardo that " there cannot be a greater security for the contin
uance of peace, than the imposing on ministers the necessity of
applying to the people for the taxes to support a war." He has
further observed, speaking the language of common sense which is
the language of all true political economy, that " the burdens of a
war are undoubtedly great during its continuance, but at its ter
mination they cease altogether. When the pressure of war is felt
at once, without mitigation, we shall be less disposed wantonly to
engage in an expensive contest, and if engaged in it, we shall be
sooner disposed to get out of it, unless it be a contest for some
* 4 Gul. & Mar. c. 3. t Ralph, vol. ii. p. 398.
572 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
great national interest."* Although the statesmen and the people
of the reign of William III. felt that the war against the prepon
derance of France, and the consequent subjection of England, was
for a great national interest, they also felt that the burden could
not be borne in the existing state of the country without resort to
the system of loans. In the case before us they did not contem
plate a permanent loan. In the next year, when the Bank of Eng
land was established upon the condition of lending a sum of money
to the government, of which the principal could not be demanded
by the lenders, though the borrowers had the privilege of paying it
off. a permanent debt was begun to be contracted. The system
of borrowing went on for three years, till at the peace of Ryswick
the debt amounted to twenty-one millions and a half. Nevertheless,
so strong was the objection to the continuance of that system, that
although engaged in a most expensive war for five years after the
accession of Anne, the debt was reduced to sixteen millions. In
half a century more it had increased to seventy-five millions. It
was then the received opinion of financiers that if it ever reached
a hundred millions the nation must become bankrupt.
When we look at the one million borrowed on Life annuities
in 1693, arid the eight hundred and three millions constituting the
public debt of the United Kingdom in 1858, we may be amazed at
the vast amount of the burthen which has been gradually accumu
lating, but we also can now distinctly perceive how that burthen
has been borne. It has not weighed down the country, because
all the material resources of the country have been increasing with
it. The increasing wealth — of which this vast debt owing by the
nation to the nation is a symbol,— produced by the incessant appli
cations of capital and labour, of science and invention, has increased
the ability of the great body of the people to participate in the
advantages to be derived from a ready and secure investment of
their savings, with the condition that the sum so invested might be
easily transferable. To this cause may be attributed the ease with
which the government of that day could obtain loans by the crea
tion of Public Funds at a fixed rate of interest, chiefly upon
annuities. That facility shows the growing importance of the
trading class, who most readily lent their surplus capital. Money,
also, was no longer hoarded by those who had no means of employ
ing, it commercially; although for a' considerable period, there
were vast numbers who had not sufficient confidence in the govern-
* " Works of David Ricardo," pp. 539 and 546.
THE LICENSING ACT EXPIRES. 573
ment to lend. The time was far distant when there would be three
hundred thousand persons receiving dividends upon stock, and
when one million three hundred and forty thousand persons would
also lend their small accumulations through the agency of Savings'
Banks. The country was steadily growing more prosperous, as
the National Debt went on increasing to six times the amount at
the period when inevitable bankruptcy was predicted. It was six
hundred millions at the jieace of Amiens. The eighteenth cen
tury, deficient as it was in many social improvements which we
now command, was a period of rapid progress in agriculture and
manufactures ; and with this progress came a greater command of
food and clothing, better dwellings, less frequent and less fatal
epidemics for the great bulk of the people. The loan of 1693 has
furnished data for a remarkable inquiry into the prolongation of
life in the eighteenth century, consequent upon the bettered condi
tion, and therefore improved health, of the population. That loan
was a tontine. Every contributor of 100/. might name a life, to
receive a fixed dividend during the duration of that life. As the
annuitants dropped, their shares of the dividends were also to be
divided amongst the survivors, till the whole number of annuitants
was reduced to seven. In 1790, during, the ministry of Mr. Pitt.
another tontine was negociated. The comparative results, as
exhibiting the probable duration of life at the two periods, have
been worked out by Mr. Finlaison, upon the assumption that the
438 females and 594 males named in 1693, and the 3974 females
and 4197 males named in 1790, were the youngest and the health
iest lives that the shareholders could select. Taking the dates at
which the annuities of 1693 fell in, and estimating those of 1790
that had fallen or were still remaining in 1851, the calculation
showed that in 1790 the expectation of life had increased one
fourth.* In 1692, " An act for continuing certain laws that are expired
and near expiring" was passed, in which the Act of Charles IL,
continued by that of James II. , "for preventing abuses in printing
seditious, treasonable, and unlicensed books and pamphlets, and
for regulating printing and printing-presses," then about to expire,
was continued to the 13th of February, 1692, and to the end of the
next session of Parliament. If that renewed Act should expire,
the Press, exempted from the superintendence of a licenser, would
* We gather these facts from a paper by Dr. Southwood Smith, read at Birmingham
in 185.7.
574 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
to a great extent be freed ; its real freedom would depend upon
the law of libel, and its honest ajjplication. The licenser of the
Stuarts, sir Roger Lestrange,-was ejected from his office at the
Revolution. " His sting is gone," says John Dunton. That
worthy chronicler of publishers and authors sketches the characters
of the successors of the Tory licenser, saying, very libellously, "he
would wink at unlicensed books if the printer's wife " kept up to
the example of too many wives of that age. He describes Mr.
Fraser " commonly called Catalogue Fraser, from his skill in
books;" Dr. Midgley, "no bigot;" Mr. Heron, with "an air of
pleasantness in his countenance ; " and " our last licenser, before
the Act of Printing expired, Edmund Bohun, Esqre.," "a furious
man against dissenters," and " a pretty author himself." * Edmund
Bohun brought his own house down over his head. He carried
his party feeling into his official occupation ; but had very strange
notions which his party would not avow. He was bitterly attacked
by a writer of very questionable notoriety, Charles Blount; and
was more effectually damaged by a scheme of the same person " to
ensnare and ruin him."f Blount wrote a pamphlet, which Bohun
readily licensed— for it rested the rights of the sovereigns of the
Revolution upon a principle which would confer upon them abso
lute power. On the 22nd of January, complaint was made to the
Commons, that a pamphlet, entitled " King William and queen
Mary Conquerors, contained matter of dangerous consequence to
their majesties, to the liberties of the subject, and to the peace of
the kingdom." The House examined the matter; ordered the
pamphlet to be burned by the common hangman ; and prayed the
Crown to remove from his office Mr. Edmund Bohun, the licenser,
who had suffered the pamphlet to be printed. With the removal
of this licenser the system of licensing came to an end. The Act
for regulating Printing expired. The House was in a libel-burning
mood, with regard to the same description of offence : " Dr. Burnet,
Bishop of Salisbury's book burnt by the hangman, for an expres-'
sion of the king's title by conquest, on a complaint of Joseph
Howe, a member of parliament— little better than a madman." X
Some were for impeaching the bishop. The Pastoral Letter in
which the doctrine was held was .written in 1689. There could be
no impeachment ; for there had been an Act of Grace in 1690.
The House of Commons has never failed to rejoice in any exhibi-
* Dunton's " Life aud Errors," p. 351,- edit. 1705.
t Macaulay. } Evelyn. "Diary," Feb. 4.
PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 575
tion of the power of some member to make a bad joke. At the
cry of " Burn it, burn it," the book was sent to the flames at Char
ing Cross.
There were two attempts made in this Session to produce what
may be called a Reform in Parliament. The Commons jaassed a
Bill excluding all placemen from sitting in the House who should
be elected after February, 1693. Men holding office of every kind,
civil and military, were in Parliament. It was unwisely proposed
to exclude all persons who should in future hold office under the
Crown. It was prudently determined by the sitting members not
to exclude themselves. They passed no " Self-denying Ordi
nance." The Lords rejected this measure by a very small major
ity. A Bill providing that the existing Parliament should end on
the first of January, 1694, and that no Parliament should in future
sit more than three years, was introduced to the House of Lords,
by Shrewsbury, who represented the Whigs. It passed both
Houses. On the last day of the Session, the king rejected the
measure, in the words of Norman French which would now be the
most fatal words ever spoken by a sovereign. The Constitution
has worked itself clear of such contending powers. The use of
the Veto was not then thought " an exercise of prerogative which
no ordinary circumstances can reconcile either with prudence or a
constitutional administration of government."* The Bill for
triennial parliaments was passed in the next year, without opposi
tion from the Crown. The most memorable circumstance con
nected with the Bill which William rejected was, that having asked
the advice of sir William Temple, that advice, to pass the Bill, was
communicated to the king by the humble friend of the retired
statesman, his secretary, Jonathan Swift.
Slightly connected with the political transactions of the begin
ning of 1693 was a tragical event that occasioned great public
scandal. "After five days' trial and extraordinary contest, the
lord Mohun was acquitted by the lords of the murderiof Mount
fort, the player, notwithstanding the judges, from the pregnant
witnesses of the fact, had declared him guilty. But whether in
consideration of his youth, being not eighteen years old, though
exceeding dissolute, or upon whatever other reason, — the king
himself present some part, and satisfied, as they report, that he
was culpable — sixty-nine acquitted him, only fourteen condemned
him." t The people cried out that when blood was shed by the
•Hallam. " Constitutional History," chap, xv- t Evelyn. " Diary," Feb. 4.
576 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
great there was no justice for the poor. Members of the House
of Commons rejoiced that, in the last Session, they had so strenu
ously opposed an extension of the privileges of the peers, who
thus sheltered one of their own guilty members. William Mount
fort, the player, according to Colley Cibber, was in tragedy the
'most affecting lover — in comedy, he gave the truest life to the fine
gentleman. In 1694 he was in his thirty-third year — "tall, well-
made, fair, and of an agreeable aspect." Nine years before, he
was patronised by Jeffries, when at the height of his power; and
at a lord mayor's feast the jovial chancellor made Mountfort
" plead before him in a feigned cause, in which he aped all the
great lawyers of the age in their tone of voice, and in their action
and gesture of body " — very much to the scandal of sir John
Reresby, who records the fact. This accomplished actor was the
favourite of the town. But Mrs. Anne Bracegirdle was " the dar
ling of the theatre." She was " the universal passion," but she
admitted no favourite. Amongst the rakes and fops who fre
quented the one theatre that now enjoyed the monopoly of the
drama, it was a fashion " to have a taste of tendre for Mrs. Brace-
girdle." * Amongst those who toasted this lively brunette over
their bumpers of claret, were a captain Hill, and his friend and
admirer, the debauched young peer. The captain had addressed
the actress in terms which she rejected with contempt. He be
came jealous, and his jealousy fixed upon Mountfort ; for Hill had
writhed at seeing the handsome actor in love scenes, when the
lady smiled upon her admirer with all the semblance of real pas
sion. Hill, with the assistance of his noble friend, determined to
carry off Mrs. Bracegirdle. They also determined to have no
more trouble with the presumptuous player. They forced the
actress into a coach as she was coming out of a house with her
mother ; but she was rescued, and the courtly pair departed, vow
ing vengeance on Mountfort. They loitered about the player's
house till midnight. As he approached his home lord Mohun met
him in Norfolk-street, entering into friendly conversation. Hill
came behind, struck Mountfort on the head, and then ran him
through the body. The Grand Jury found a true bill against
Mohun and Hill for the murder. Hill escaped. The judges, at
the request of Carmarthen, who presided at the trial, had given
the opinion upon the case to which Evelyn alludes.
• Cibber's "Apology."
MINISTERIAL CHANGES. 577
CHAPTER XXIX.
Ministerial Changes.— Preparations for the Campaign.— Louis and William with their
, ('Armies— Louis returns to Versailles. — Battle of Landen. — Naval Miscarriages.— A
Ministry formed.— Government by Party.— Preponderance of the Wlligs Financial
difficulties. — Establishment of the Bank of England. — Expedition against Brest. —
Illness of the Queen. — Her Death.
King William had closed the Session of the English Parlia
ment on the 14th of March. He. had made some important changes
in official appointments. Sir John Somers had been promoted to
the dignity of Keeper, the great seal having been so long in com
mission, that " all people were now grown weary " of the dilatory
and expensive proceedings in Chancery.* Russell was removed
from the command of the fleet ; for, in consequence of fierce differ
ences between him and Nottingham, the Secretary of State, they
could not have held office together. At this juncture Burnet no
tices the formation of a party " that studied to cross and defeat
every thing." One of the principal leaders of this party was sir
Christopher Musgrave, who " upon many critical occasions gave
up some imjDortant points, for which the king found it necessary
to pay him very liberally." f The memory of this senator has been
preserved from the utter oblivion to which such patriotism is best
consigned, by four lines of the great satirist of the next reign : —
" Once, we confess, beneath the patriot's cloak,
From the crack'd bag the dropping guinea spoke,
And jingling down the back-stairs told the crew
Old Cato is as great a rogue as you." X
The amount of business done in this way was very considerable.
The bribe at Kensington was too often found necessary to neu
tralise the bribe from Versailles. William grew more and more
cynical and sullen under these degrading affairs of state-craft, and
gladly rushed away to hunt in Holland or to fight in Belgium.
His Most Christian Majesty — "Jupiter en person ne "—is again
* Burnet, vol. iv. p. r87.
t Ibid-, p. 190. X Pope, " Epistle on the Use of Riches."
trn, Ttr ni
578 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
about to take the field. What privations he is now to undergo for
the glory of France ! He is fifty-seven years of age. He had been
fifty-two years king ; but his real sovereign power did not com
mence till the great minister, Mazarin, had closed his long career
of intrigue. Then the magnificent sovereign burst forth in all the
grandeur that can result from the implicit belief of one man that
he is born to uncontrolled command, and that all that remains fen-
millions of subject beings is to obey. The first maxim of government
that Louis laid down was that kings are absolute lords ; that all
property was theirs ; that the lives of their subjects were theirs
also. He had the old feudal nobility of France at his feet. Their
political power had burnt out in the wars of La Fronde. All that
was left to them were their exclusive privileges, and their capacity of
grinding tbe occupiers of land by every variety of exaction. They
had nothing in common with the great body of the people ; they
had no common rights to maintain ; they were no longer the pro
tectors of the vassals from a greater tyranny than their own. AH
the miseries of feudalism remained, with none of its security. The
great lords of the soil had all become the slaves of the court. They
were yet, to a certain extent, brave and warlike. They fought in
their embroidery at Steinkirk, as their fathers had fought in their
armour at Agincourt. But their reckless gallantry had no higher
principle for its support than that of the liveried menial whose
bravery is founded upon the arrogance and ostentation of his mas
ter. Their adulation of their grand monarque was in some re
spects a trade. He was the fountain of all honour and all prefer
ment ; the grosser their flatteries the more certain their rewards.
He was the sun that imparted life to all within its sphere. Where
that sun did not shine, there was one universal thick darkness. But
where did it not shine ? It was the great central power that
vivified all France. The sun rose upon France when the chief
valet went forth from the royal bedchamber and said, " the king is
awake." Then the princes of the blood, and the dukes and counts
who were waiting in the antechamber, enter in solemn state, with
the pages of the wardrobe, who bear the surtouts and the wigs,
with other inferior habiliments that majesty may condescend to
wear. As the sublime operations of shaving and hand-washing
go forward, those who have the privilege of "la premiere entre'e "
gather round to behold how the Phoebus of France is gradually
unfolding its beams. As that sun becomes more and more bril
liant, " les grandes entries " take place, and marshals and bishops
LOUIS AND WILLIAM WITH THEIR ARMIES. 579
look on with humble adoration while a duke hands Louis his shirt,
and a marquis assists him to pull on his stockings. The waist
coat, the coat, the blue ribbon, and the sword, complete the courtly
investiture of this more than mortal, who stands in the relation of
. Providence to France.* Such was the morning opening of the
terrible routine day of Versailles — of its dreary etiquettes— its
heartless splendours— its odious profligacies — the absolute king
himself the merest slave of the artificial life which he enforced as
the basis of his power. From such a monotony the king of France
is about to seek relief in once more looking upon the pomp and cir
cumstance of war. He departs from Versailles with his vast cav
alcade of ladies, of cooks and valets, of actors and musicians. He
puts himself at the head of the army of Boufflers, whilst Luxem
burg with another army is near at hand.
On the 24th of March William left London to embark at Harwich
The wind was contrary, and he returned for a few days to Kensing
ton. The court life of that suburban residence is as striking a
contrast to the court life of Versailles, as the little villa is insignif
icant itself when compared with the proud palace of the French
king. The Kensington which William bought of lord Nottingham
was then surrounded with only twenty-six acres of plantations and
gardens — " a patched building," says Evelyn. Another observer
of the time says, " the walks and grass are very fine." Queen
Mary directed the laying out of the gardens, and William rejoiced
to watch the growth of the evergreens in which he delighted. It
was a seat well suited for a king of simple tastes. Versailles was
well suited for an ostentatious king, who counted it amongst his
great works to have expended ten millions in subjugating nature
by art — building a vast palace, and creating magnificent gardens,
in a desert of sand and swamjp. f A few days' quiet, and
William is again hurrying with small retinue to the Hague. He
has, as usual, to unite the discordant members ofthe confederacy;
to soothe the rivalries of princes who each wanted some supreme
command ; to tempt some with money, some with promised hon
ours. At the beginning of June Lotfis was with the army of- Bouf
flers, who had taken up a position at Gembloux. The ladies of
the court were left in safety within the walls of Namur. The other
army commanded by Luxemburg was only half a league distant
* De Tocqueville says of the centralising system, " The French Government having
thus assumed the place of Providence."
t St. Simon.
580 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
from that of Boufflers. William had entrenched himself near
Louvain. He had thus posted himself to prevent an advance of
the French upon Liege or upon Brussels. However inferior in
numbers, he was resolved to hazard a battle if the enemy should
advance. He took no sanguine view of his situation when such a
mighty force was so near, having a perfect command of supplies.
St. Simon, who was serving in this campaign as a captain of
cavalry, says of William, "we have since known that he wrote
several times to his intimate friend, the prince de Vaudemont, that
he was lost — that he could only escape by a miracle." Luxemburg
urged Louis to advance. To the astonishment of the French
armies the king announced his determination, on the Sth of June,
to return to Versailles, and to send part of the great force into
Germany. St. Simon attributes this resolution to the remembrance
of the tears which Madame de Maintenon had shed at their part
ing, and to the letters in which she urged the return of her royal
lover or husband. The same shrewd witness of what was clearly
regarded as pusillanimity in the great king, describes the bursts
of laughter amongst friends, the sneers, the whispered indignation,
which even the most extravagant loyalty could not suppress.
Louis retraced his steps to Namur, and on the 25th of June he
arrived with his ladies at Versailles.
Boufflers had left the army of the Netherlands with the de
tached force sent to the Rhine. Luxemburg was now in the sole
command of the French army, which was still superior to that of
William. But this ablest of the generals of Louis by his skilful
manoeuvres contrived to weaken William's force. William had
learnt that Luxemburg was advancing to lay siege to Liege, and
he determined to detach a large body to assist in its defence,
leaving his own entrenched camp near Louvain, and marching
with his remaining fifty thousand men to a favourable position on
the river Gette. The feint of Luxemburg was successful. He
suddenly turned from the road to Liege ; and on the 28th of July,
William was aware that he had been deceived, and that the enemy
was coming fast upon him with a greatly superior army. He
would not retreat. All that could be done was to strengthen his
position. In one night of incessant labour entrenchments had
been thrown up; redoubts had been constructed; the hedo-es and
mud walls of the two villages which the allies occupied had been
converted into barricades. <• It is incredible." says St. Simon,
"that in so few hours, such an extent of regular defences could
BATTLE OF LANDEN. 581
have been created." On the morning of the 29th of July, their
value was to be tested.
When Luxemburg suddenly changed his apparent determina
tion to move upon Liege, he ordered the fascines to be burnt, with
which each battalion had been provided for the siege. By a rapid
march of eight leagues he had reached a plain within hearing of
the multitudinous sound's of William's camp. All the night these
noises were heard, and " we began to fear," says St. Simon, " that
the enemy was about to retreat." The sun had scarcely risen
when the batteries of the allied army gave effectual proof that no
flight was meditated. The French artillery could not be brought
up till an hour afterwards. " We then began to see," says St.
Simon, " that the affair would be difficult." The allies occupied
the heights, and the two villages of Neerwinden and of Bas-Landen,
one on the right and the other on the left. A long entrenchment,
on the high ground, connected one village with the other. As
the French cavalry advanced, the batteries from their commanding
entrenchment did great execution. The great struggle was for
the possession of these villages, especially of Neerwinden. The
French infantry attacked with the impetuosity of their nation, and
they were repulsed by the English characteristic obstinacy. At
Neerwinden their general Montchevreul was killed, and the young
duke of Berwick was taken prisoner. The French cavalry endea
voured to force the entrenchments, and were suffered to ajpproach
within pistol-shot of the allied infantry, when, says St. Simon,
"the enemy gave such a well-directed volley, that the horse
wheeled round, and retired faster than they came." During four
hours had this struggle been carried on. Twice had the French
infantry been repulsed, and thrice the French cavalry. St. Simon
relates how Luxemburg called the princes of the blood, and his
fellow marshals, to a conference at a spot out of reach of the can
non of the allies, and there for half an hour earnestly debated what
course should be adopted, under the circumstances of such obsti
nate resistance. A third time it was resolved to attack Neerwin
den, but with such an overwhelming force as should carry the vic
tory, if victory were to be won. The household troops of Louis,
headed by the prince of Conti, attacked with irresistible fury.
When they had carried the walled gardens and cleared the en
trenched street, the carbineers and the cavalry poured in. The
allies began to retreat as the French gained possession of Neer
winden, from the top of whose clock-tower the curs' of the village
582 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
looked down upon the terrible struggle. Suddenly William ap
peared at the head of his English guards ; and the famous house
hold troops of France, " until now invincible," says St. Simon,
gave way before him. But all was in vain. The entrenchments
of the main line could not be adequately defended, whilst the
brunt of the conflict had to be borne in the two villages on the ex
treme right and left. The line was broken ; a retreat was neces
sary ; but it was not a disorderly retreat. William, according to
the sober narrative of St. Simon, fought to the last, and he^vith
the elector of Bavaria passed over the bridge which the allies had
constructed over the Gette, when he saw that there was no reason
able hope in a further contest. A more enthusiastic relation thug
paints the king : " Gallant mortal ! This moment, now that all is
lost, I see him galloping across me, corporal, to the left, to bring
up the remains of the English horse along with him to support the
right, and tear the laurel from Luxemburg's brows, if yet 'tis possible
— I see him with the knot of his scarf just shot off, infusing fresh
spirit into poor Galway's regiment — riding along the line — then
wheeling about, and charging Conti at the head of it — Brave !
brave by heaven! cried my uncle Toby, — he deserves a crown."
It is the fire of genius which thus lights up the traditions of
Sterne's boyhood. The daring of William, " when all was lost,"
was not " to tear the laurel from Luxemburg's brow," but to cover
the retreat of his scattered forces, as they had to cross the tempo
rary bridges, or plunge into the fords and climb the steep banks of
the Gette. The exhausted victors remained upon the ground they
had won. There had been twelve hours of fighting. Twenty
thousand of both armies fell in that terrible battle-field, which the
French call Neerwinden and the English call Landen. The vic
tory of Luxemburg had no direct results. The retreat of William
involved no greater disaster. He was not a fortunate general, but
no one could deny his courage and his indomitable energy. He
was one of those who possess the rare faculty of considering no
misfortune, however severe, to be irretrievable. On the night of
the battle he wrote a note to his friend Portland, in which he says,
"These are great trials, which God has been pleased to send me
in quick succession. I must try to submit to His pleasure without
murmuring, and to deserve His anger less." In three weeks he
had gathered all his forces around him at Brussels. The detach- '
ment that had been unfortunately sent to Liege had joined the
head-quarters in safety. The crisis, William said, had been terri-
NAVAL MISCARRIAGES. 583
ble ; but he thanked God it had ended no worse. The only suc
cessful result of the campaign in which Louis took the field with a
hundred and forty thousand men, to sweep the allies from the
Netherlands was the taking of Charleroy, to which siege William
offered no opposition. The biographer of James pours out his
complaints that the court of France had not availed itself of the
advantages gained over the Allies, especially " at the famous battle
of Landen," to be zealous in the matter of his restoration to the
crown of England ; "for there never was greater hopes of terrify
ing the English into their duty than at this time." His Most
Christian Majesty did not avail himself of the favourable occasion.
James had published a Declaration in April, which promised all
sorts of good things to his rebellious subjects, in which promises
no- one 'confided. The dream so long indulged of " terrifying the
English into their duty " was the last hope ; and that was doomed
to disapfjointment. The French, says the biographer of James,
" began to be so weary of the war, and were indeed so terrified
themselves by the great scarcity which happened that year, that
his Most Christian Majesty thought fit to make offers of peace, by
mediation of the crown of Denmark." He adds, "It is not im
probable but when the English saw the French so disheartened after
such mighty advantages, that it allayed their apprehensions of the
king's being forced upon them, and consequently their endeavours
of restoring him themselves." *
During the absence of the king, England had undergone other
disasters besides that of Landen. She saw the operation of the
Allies unsuccessful in every quarter. The French army which
had been detached from. Gembloux crossed the Rhine, and en
abled another French force to take Heidelberg, and repeat the
ravages which had previously disgraced their arms in the Pal
atinate. Catalonia was invaded, and the fortress of Rosas was
taken by the French. The duke of Savoy sustained a memorable
defeat at Marsiglia. Worst of all, through the mismanagement of
naval affairs, the rich Smyrna fleet of English and Dutch mer
chantmen, which was to be convoyed by English and Dutch men-
of-war, was intercepted by Tourville, and captured, destroyed, or
scattered. In the utter want of correct intelligence, the English
admirals Killigrew and Delaval, had thought the squadron safe
when they had sailed to a certain point beyond Ushant ; for they
believed that Tourville was in Brest harbour. He had come out,
* " Life of James II." vol. ii. p. 516.
584 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
and had joined the Toulon fleet. Rooke, against his remonstrances,
was left with a very inadequate force, and the other admirals sailed
homeward, ready to avert any attempt upon the English coasts.
Off Cape St. Vincent, Rooke learnt that a French fleet was in the
bay of Lagos. He soon found himself in presence of an enemy of
four times his strength. The Dutch fought bravely, while Rooke
made all speed with part of his unfortunate convoy to Madeira.
The loss to the mercantile interest of England and Holland was
enormous. The suffering merchants of London sent a deputation
to the queen, to JJray for inquiry into the cause of this misfortune ;
and Mary's conciliatory reply disarmed some portion of the anger
of the jpeople. It was a time of great excitement. Violent pam-
phlets against the government were scattered abroad from secret
presses. A printer named William Anderson was indicted for
high treason, was convicted, and was executed. It requires a
rather violent stretch of historical partisanship to affirm that such a
conviction was legal, although the tracts inculcated a general in
surrection, and the nation was exhorted to free itself from its ty
rant. There was no proof of the printing of these tracts at the
press of Anderson beyond what resulted from a comparison of the
types used with the types seized on his jiremises. Even if the
proof of printing had been complete, we may conclude that there
is " much danger in the construction which draws sprinted libels,
unconnected with any conspiracy, within the pale of treason, and
especially the treason of comfjassing the king's death, unless where
they directly tended to his assassination."* The punishment of
Anderson only increased the virulence of the Jacobite jsam-
phleteers, as must ever be the case when extreme punishments
are resorted to as the readiest means of prevention for political
offences. The hanging of Anderson in London, and the torturing
of Nevil Payne in Edinburgh, •)• did more injury to the cause of
William than the defeats of Steinkirk or Landen. He came to
put down the injustice and cruelty of arbitrary power; and yet,
said his enemies with some truth, tyranny still walks abroad under
the mask of freedom.
At the beginning of November, William was again at Kensing
ton. The Parliament was to meet on the 7th. A great change in
* Hallam, "Constitutional Histnry,'' chap. xv.
t We omitted to mention {.intf, p. 53.S), that the warrant for the torture of Nevil
Payne bears William's signature ; a mere formal act, perhaps, but one which attaches ob
loquy to his memory.
A MINISTRY FORMED. 585
the administrative system of England was about to take place.
The king for five years had endeavoured to govern by choosing
his ministers from each of the two great parties of the State ; some
times givihg the preponderance to the Whigs, at other times to the
Tories. These ministers carried on the public affairs of their sev
eral departments without very well defined principles of action,
amidst personal hatred and jealousies which were too often highly
injurious to the national interests. An experiment was now to be
made to substitute for this individual direction of public affairs the
administration of a party. The heads of departments were to be
united by some common consent upon political principles. " Party
divisions," says Burke, "whether on the whole operating for good
o.- evil, are things inseparable from free government." He held it
to be a duty for public men "to act in party," with all the modera
tion consistent with vigour and fervency of spirit,* — a duty not
very easy at any time, and almost impossible in the earlier stages
of representative government, when all were going through a sort
of education in constitutional principles. William was about to
change some of his ministers ; at the same time to select new ad
visers from those who would "act in party; " who would submit
their own wills to a general agreement ; who would constitute what
we now understand as a Ministry, whose possession of power
under the authority of the sovereign, and with the command of a
parliamentary majority, implied the superior influence of the gen
eral principles which constituted their bond of political union.
William had become convinced that he could best carry on his
government through the party which had mainly accomplished the
Revolution. He would not compose his administration exclusively
of Whigs, but there should be such a preponderance of those who
held Whig principles, that the Tory party, so closely bordering
upon the Jacobite party, should be neutralised in what we may now
call a Cabinet. The functions of the Privy Council had become
merged in the Cabinet Council. In a debate in 1692, on Advice given
to the king, one member exclaimed, " Cabinet Council is not a word
to be found in our law-books. We knew it not before. We took
it for a nickname." f Another member described what the Cabi
net was : " The method is this ; things are concerted in the Cabinet,
and brought and put upon them for their assent, without showing
any of the reasons. That has not been the method of England.
* " Observations on a late State of the Nation."
t Waller, " Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 731.
586 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
If this method be, you will never know who gives advice." * The
objectors to a Cabinet desired that every counsellor should, in the
acts of Council, set his hand to assent or dissent. This was to
secure individual responsibility for evil measures — a responsibility
which has vanished in the united responsibility of a Ministry.
However strong was the Parliamentary jealousy of a Cabinet, the
exclusion of the Privy Council from the real business of the State
became more and more established in the reign of William. But
the jealousy remained. In a clause of the Statute of the 12 & 13
Will. III., "for the further limitation ofthe Crown," it was enacted
that " all matters and things relating to the well-government of the
kingdom, which are properly cognizable in the Privy Council, by
the laws and customs of this realm, shall be transacted there."
This was a prosjiective clause, to take effect after the succession
contemplated by the Act. It was repealed by the 4 & 5 of Anne,
c. 20, where the clause is recited.f To make the supreme admin
istration of affairs — the questions of armaments that required pro-
found secresy, and of diplomacy whose success dejsended upon
ministerial reserve — " properly cognizable in the privy Council,"
has been impossible even if it had been salutary, since the power
and influence of England gradually assumed the extension and
proportions which began to characterise her policy subsequent to
the Revolution. As representative government gradually com
pelled the sovereign to choose an administration founded upon the
preponderance of a party, so this administration by party gradually
broke up that unseemly division of the servants of the Crown into
factions, which was occasionally manifested until the middle of the •
eighteenth century.
The earl of Sunderland had become a confidential adviser of
king William. " By his long experience," says Burnet, "and his
knowledge of men and things, he had gained an ascendancy over him,
and had more credit with him than any Englishman ever had." J
Sunderland's " knowledge of men and things," had been acquired
in a long course of shaping his opinions by his conviction of what
he thought the most expedient and profitable system for his own
advancement and security. He had publicly supported the most
tyrannous actions of James, however he might have secretly op
posed some of them. To please his master, he had declared himself
* Wharton, "Parliamentary History," vol. v. col. 731.
t Curiously enough, the clause does not appear in the Act of William, as given in the
" Statutes of the Realm."
X " Own Time," vol. iv. p. 215.
PREPONDERANCE OF THE WHIGS. 587
a Papist. To,make himself safe in the Revolution which he saw
at hand, he had betrayed that master. He vanished from the
scene of active politics when William became king, retired to
Holland, and again declared himself a Protestant. He was ex
cluded -from William's Act of Grace as one of the chief instru
ments of the late tyranny. But he came back to England, and
"made himself a necessity for the new government. He had cut
off all hope of being reconciled to the Jacobite party ; he could
be very useful to the party of the Revolution. " His long ex
perience " made him master of all the complications of political
action. He was the representative in 1693 of that class of un
principled politicians of which Talleyrand was the representa
tive when the Bourbons were restored to France. His advice
was not to be despised, however the man might be odious.
Speaker Onslow, in his Notes upon Burnet, Says, " I remember
to have heard from a great personage, that when the earl of
Sunderland came afterwards to be in king William's confidence,
and pressed him very much to trust and rely more upon the Whigs
fhan he had done, the king said, he believed the Whigs loved him
best, but they did not love monarchy ; and though the Tories did
not like him so well as the others, yet, as they were zealous for
¦monarchy, he thought they would serve his government best. To
which the earl replied, that it was very true that the Tories were
better friends to monarchy than the Whigs were, but then his
majesty was to consider that he was not their monarch." * Sun
derland, out of his knowledge of men and things, knew that the
republican party had ceased to exist ; and William saw that Sun*
derland's distinction between the affection for monarchy, and the
love of the monarch de facto, was a sound one. William did trust
and rely more upon the Whigs than he had done. Somers had
been made his Keeper of the Great Seal ; the choice was wise.
The attorney's son had rendered the highest service in that great
crisis which was to establish the government of England upon the
basis of law. He was the leader of his party, as much by his
moderation as by his eloquence and learning. Russell, who had
more than once been tempted to betray the government he served,
but when the hour of trial came did his duty to his country, was
restored to the command of the fleet. Thomas Wharton, the son
of a .puritan peer, had led a life of dissipation in the time of Charles
the Second, and continued his course of profligacy under the sober
* Burnet, Oxford edition, vol. iv. p. 5.
588 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
regime of William. The man was hated, and yet he was popular.
The hate with which he was regarded by the Tories was perhaps
the result of his political consistency. When he died, a Tory wrote
his elegy: — " Farewell, old bully of these impious times,
True pattern of the Whigs, and of their crimes." *
With Somers, Russell, and Wharton was joined, in William's new min
istry, Charles Montague. He had cast off the honours of asecond-rate
poet to become a first-class politician. His jjarliamentary eloquence
was almost unrivalled. His financial abilities were more necessary
to a government conducting a most expensive war, even than his
eloquence. One more Whig was to be won, and he was Shrews
bury. He re'signed the office of Secretary of State in 1690, when
William favoured the Tories. He had been tampered with from
St. Germains, and was faithless to his trust. But he had seen his
error, and was now to be called back by William to a hearty allegi
ance. The seals were again offered to Shrewsbury. The king
had a personal regard for him ; but he refused to accept the office
which Nottingham had relinquished. Before the meeting of Par
liament a lady wrote to him, by the king's command : " He assured
me," says her letter, " that when 1 e valued any body as he did you,
he could easily forget some mistakes." f Again Shrewsbury re
fused office. A female friend of this lady wrote to the coy earl,
hinting that a dukedom would be the reward of his compliance.
The ladies persevered for several months, and at last Shrewsbury
yielded, and had his dukedom and the Garter. The chief female
negotiator on the jjart of the king was Mrs. Villiers, — one whom
the scandal of the time regards as his mistress — one of whom Bur
net makes no direct mention, but to whom he is supposed to have
alluded when he says of the prince of Orange and Mary, in 16S6,
that "the perfect union between them had of late been a little em
broiled." Elizabeth Villiers, maid of honour to the princess of
Orange — afterwards married to the earl of Orkney — was a woman
of remarkable ability, with whom Swift delighted to talk for hours ;
who, in 1713, gave the great writer her picture; but who was not
formed for the usual female conquests, however great her mental
powers. " I think," writes Swift to Stella. " the devil was. in it the
other day when I talked to her of an uglv squinting cousin of hers,
and the poor lady herself, you knows, squints like a dragon." f
* " The Lord Whiglove's Elegy," 1715.
t Coxe, " Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 20. t " Journal to Stella," letter liv.
FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES. 589
The king and his new ministers did not shrink from demanding
from the Parliament a larger supply than ever for carrying on the
war. Eighty-three thousand troops were voted for the service of
1694; and the naval estimates were also largely increased. The
Whig majority in the House of Commons was strong enough to
bear down all unreasonable ojpposition. There were violent debates
on the naval miscarriages, but no blame was thrown on the
conduct of the late disastrous campaign. How to raise the large
sums necessary to maintain the land and sea forces was a matter
of anxious discussion. A land-tax, a jDoll-tax, stamj>duties, a tax on
hackney coaches, and a lottery, were the expedients. High and
low were the adventurers in this new sj^stem of state gambling,
-as Evelyn records : " In the lottery set up after the Venetian
manner by Mr. Neale, sir R. Haddock, one of the Commissioners
of the Navy, had the greatest lot, 3000/. ; my coachman, 40/."
But money was still wanting. The necessity gave birth to one
of the greatest public establishments of this or any other country,
the Bank of England.
The Statute under which this national institution was formed
bears a very ambiguous title : " An Act for granting to their
majesties several rates and duties inpon tonnage of ships and ves
sels, and upon beer, ale, and other liquors, for securing certain re
compenses and advantages in the said Act mentioned, to such
persons as shall voluntarily advance the sum of fifteen hundred
thousand pounds towards the carrying on the war against France." *
The subscribers for the advance of a loan, ujxra the conditions set
forth, were to be constituted a corporate body " by the name of the
Governor and Company of the Bank of England." The money
really required to be advanced was twelve hundred thousand
pounds. f The subscription list was filled in ten days. The trad
ing community had been sufficiently prepared for a right apprecia
tion of the project which was carried in the House of Commons by
the energy of Montague. The scheme of a Bank had been the
subject of discussion for three years. William Paterson — a man
whose name is associated with this most successful scheme of a
great national bank for England, and with another most unfortunate
project of a great national system of colonisation for Scotland —
had in 1691 submitted proposals to the government somewhat sim
ilar to the plan which was carried out in 1694. His scheme was
ably supported amongst commercial men by Michael Godfrey, an
* 5 & 6 Gul. & Mar. c. 20. t A nie, p. 430.
59° HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
eminent London merchant ; and when the government at last
adopted it, Godfrey's influence in the city was as useful as Mon
tague's eloquence in Parliament. The original plan of a national
bank was met by every sort of objection. Some said it was a new
thing, and they did not understand it. Others said the project
came from Holland, and there were too many Dutch things already.*
In 1694, "the men who were sujiposed to have most money op
posed and appeared against it [the bank] with all their might, pre
tending it could not do without them, and they were resolved never
to be concerned." f Tories said that a bank and a monarchy
could not exist together. Whig's said that a bank and liberty were
incompatible, for that the Crown would command the wealth of the
bank. A clause was introduced in the Act, which jjrevented the
Bank of England making loans to the government without authority
of Parliament, which neutralised the Whig objection. With this.
restriction the Bank of England has yet, in all times, been a pow
erful ally of the government. The system of small loans came to
an end, as thus described in a paper called " The Wednesday
Club," written by Paterson himself, as his biographer affirms :
" The state officers and privy counsellors of that time were brought
to stoop so low as to become frequent solicitors to the Common
Council of London, to borrow only ,£100,000 or ^200,000 at a time,
on the part payment of the land-tax, all payable within two years,
and then to stipulate and receive guineas at 22s. per piece, besides
still further securing allowances on such occasions, which one may
suppose to have been considerable. As the state-officers deigned
to become suitors to the Common Council, so were the particular
Common Councilmen to the inhabitants of their respective wards,
going from house to house, as our parish officers do in case of
briefs for fire, for building and repairing churches, or the like." J
The king prorogued the Parliament on the 25th of April, and
again set out for the Continent at the beginning of May. The
campaign was in no degree remarkable for its gains or its losses.
But the French had been arrested in their march to European
dominion. They were held at bay. The naval plan of warfare
was vigorously conceived in the cabinet of William, but it was de
feated by what was once thought accident, but which is now
proved to have been treachery. A great French fleet under Tour
ville had sailed from Brest to the Mediterranean. A portion of
the allied fleet of English and Dutch under Russell was to look
* Bannister's " Life of William Paterson," p. 100. t Ibid., p. 96. X Ibid., p. 97.
EXPEDITION AGAINST BREST. 591
after Tourville, and another portion under Berkeley was to form a
secret expedition. Troops commanded by Talmash were taken
on board Berkeley's squadron. The two admirals parted com
pany west of Cape Finisterre. Russell sailed to the Mediterra
nean ; Berkeley to Brest, which it was supposed was left without
adequate defence. Berkeley and Talmash would not credit the re
port of their own officer, that the French were prejpared for their
reception. Eight English vessels entered Camaretbay; and were
received with the fire of many batteries. Talmash attempted to
land his soldiers from boats ; when strong bodies of cavalry and
infantry appeared on the beach, and drove them back in confusion.
The cannon of the fortifications that had been constructed in afew
weeks, swejpt away more than a thousand brave English. Talmash
himself was mortally wounded, but lived to reach Portsmouth,
whither the armament had returned in all haste. The discomfiture
was caused by the jpurpose of the expedition having become known
to the French government. Vauban had been sent to Brest, and
his science and promptitude had soon defended the entrance from
the bay to the harbour with bombs and cannon, placed in the most
commanding positions. William at the end of June wrote to
Shrewsbury from the camp of Roseback, " You may easily con
ceive my vexation when I learnt the repulse our troops had ex
perienced in the descent near Brest ; and although the loss is very
inconsiderable, yet in war it is always mortifying to undertake any-
tiling that does not succeed." * A few days later the king wrote :
" I am indeed extremely affected with the loss of poor Talmash ;
for although I do not approve of his conduct, yet I am of opinion
that his too ardent zeal to distinguish himself induced him to at
tempt what was impracticable." f It is asserted that the resolu
tion to attack Brest was betrayed to James by Godolphin, and also
by a letter from Marlborough. :£ Of Marlborough's treachery to
his country there is the unquestionable evidence of a letter written
by him to James on the 4th of May, in which he says, that it has
that day come to his knowledge that the expedition preparing at
Portsmouth, is to be commanded by Talmash, and designed to
burn the harbour of Brest, and to destroy the men of war that are
there. He then says, " This would be a great advantage to Eng
land ; but no consideration ever can, or shall, hinder me from let.
" Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 45. 1 Ibid., p. 46.
X Dalrymple.
592 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
ting you know what I think may be for your service." * That
Marlborough had in view the destruction of a rival general, Tal
mash, is to load his memory with a charge of guilt even more
atrocious than his systematic jjerfidy in affairs of state. Yet he
did not lose a moment in soliciting a return to high employment
when Talmash was no more. In a letter of Shrewsbury to the
king, he says : " It is impossible to forget what is here become a
very general discourse, the probability and conveniency of your
majesty receiving my lord Marlborough into your favour. He has
been with me since this news, to offer his service, with all the ex
pressions of duty and fidelity imaginable." f William gave a very
short answer to the recommendation of his Secretary of State :
" As to what you wrote in your last letter concerning lord Marl
borough, I can say no more than that I do not think it for the
good of my service to entrust him with the command of my
troops." X The failure at Brest was attempted to be retrieved by
miserable expeditions against defenceless towns on the French
coast. Dieppe, Havre, and Calais were bombarded. This
wretched mode of attack upon an enemy's harmless people, though
begun by the French, was felt to be useless and exasperating: — " a
cruel and brutish way of making war, — an action totally adverse to
humanity or Christianity." §
William returned from the Continent on the 9th of Novem
ber. He had to learn, what is as damaging to a government as
¦an unsuccessful attempt in war, that a State trial under a- special
commission at Manchester, of some Lancashire gentlemen accused
of high treason, had resulted in an acquittal. The government was
set on to this prosecution by one of those dangerous sjpies that
always start up in unquiet times, and too often foment the con
spiracies they-are employed to discover. Before the trial, after
swords and armour had been found in old houses, and arrests had
been made, this Lancashire plot was turned into ridicule. At the
trial the chief informer, when his brother spy had given evidence
against the prisoners, swore that the alleged plot was an invention
of their own. The Counsel for the Crown threw up his brief; the
prisoners were acquitted ; and the presiding judges were hooted as
tltey left Manchester.
The Parliament was opened by the king on the 12th of Novem-
* " Life of James," vol. ii. p. 522. Macpherson also prints the letter in his " Orig
inal Papers."
t " Shrewsbury Correspondence," p. 47. X ibid, p. 53. § Evelyn.
ILLNESS OF THE QUEEN. 593
ber. The Commons adjourned for a week. When they met for
business, they applied themselves in earnest to vote the Supplies
and to discuss a bill "for the more frequent meeting and callino- of
Parliament." This is the famous Triennial Bill which the king
had rejected by his Veto in one Session of Parliament, and which
the Commons had refused to pass in another Session. The Bill
was now passed by both Houses without much opposition. On
the 22nd of December, William came to Westminster. Great was
the anxiety to know what words would now be uttered by the officer
who spoke that voice of the Crown which confirmed or disallowed
a measure of the two Houses. The words uttered were the old
form of Assent, " Le roy et la royne le veulent." The king looked
unhappy, but it was not a disquietude of state which moved him.
Queen Mary was dangerously ill at Kensington.
" The small-pox raged this winter about London," writes Bur
net. To comprehend at this time the significance of the word
"raged," we must carry our minds back, far beyond the period
when Jenner discovered vaccination — beyond even the period when
Lady Mary Wortley Montague made inoculation fashionable.
When Burnet adds, that " thousands " were dying of this fatal
disease, we must understand him literally. When the small-pox
entered a house, it was considered as terrible a visitation as the
plague. William went sorrowfully from the Parliament House
to Kensington. Mary had been ill two days. She had never had
the small-jjox ; but her regular physicians disputed about the symp
toms. Ratcliffe, the most skilful " in all early and quick discovery
of a distemper," — but, "proud of his fame in his profession, which
fed his natural haughtiness, and made him think himself above, and
refuse the attending of the highest personages when he had taken
any prejudice against them," — declined at first to attend the queen
when he was sent for.* He came at last and pronounced the fatal
word " small-pox." William was in despair. " He called me," says
Burnet, " into his closet, and gave free vent to a most tender pas
sion. He burst out into tears, and cried out that there was no hope
for the queen, and that from being the happiest, he was now going
to be the miserablest creature on earth. He said, during the whole
course of their marriage he had never known one single fault in her;
there was a worth in her that nobody knew besides himself." Mary's
fortitude and resignation were above all praise. The religious con
solations which her faithful friend and counsellor, archbishop Til-
* We find this character of Ratcliffe, and his refusal, in Onslow's Notes on Burnet.
594 HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
lotson, would have administered to the dying queen were to be
bestowed by his successor, Tenison. Tillotson had died five weeks
before. When Tenison made Mary aware of her danger, but
with " some address not to surprise her too much," she was per
fectly calm. " She thanked God she had always carried this in
her mind, that nothing was to be left to the last hour." Queen Mary
died on the 28th of December, in the thirty-third year of her age.
All parties agreed in acknowledging the beauties of her character.
Burnet, the Whig, says, -" She was the most universally lamented
princess, and deserved the best to be so, of any in our age, or in
our history." Evelyn, the Tory, writes : "She was such an ad
mirable woman, abating for taking the cr own without a more due
apology, as does, if possible, outdo the renowned queen Elizabeth."
She had many arduous duties to perform in the repeated absences
of the king ; and not the least important was the distribution of
ecclesiastical preferments. With a deep sense of religion she
marked her preference for those divines who were moderate in
their opinions, and earnest in the proper discharge of their high
functions. When there were state affairs to attend to, she never
shrunk from the proper duties of the sovereign. Her tastes were
simple and unostentatious ; her morals of unblemished purity ; her
charity was universal. Her deep attachment to her husband was
founded upon her admiration of his high qualities. William's
grief for her loss " was greater," says Burnet, " than those who
knew him best thought his temper was capable of ; he went beyond
all bounds in it. When she died, his spirits sunk so low, that
there was great reason to apprehend that he was following her."
Queen Mary was sumptuously interred in Westminster Abbey,
although, " on opening a cabinet, a paper was found, wherein she had
desired that her body might not be opened, nor any extraordinary
expense at her funeral, whenever she should die : this paper was
not found in time to be observed." * The funeral cost fifty thou
sand pounds. A more worthy expenditure of public money in her
honour took place when William determined to erect Greenwich
Hospital, in compliance with that desire which she had expressed
after the battle of La Hogue, to provide an asylum for disabled
seamen. Mary, in following the fortunes of her husband and ac-
capting with him the sovereign power of these kingdoms to the ex
clusion of her father, discharged a higher duty even than that of filial
affection. But she was always solicitous for that father's personal
* Evelyn- " Diary," March I.
DEATH OF THE QUEEN. 595
safety The paltriness of James's character was manifested upon
his daughter's decease, in a manner which St. Simon thus records :
" The king of England [James] prayed the king [Louis] that the
Court should not wear mourning. All those who were related to
the prince of Orange, including M. de Bouillon and M. de Duras,
were forbidden to wear it. They obeyed and was silent ; but
this sort of revenge was considered very petty."
England.
France,
Germany.
Papal States.
Spain.
Russia.
I&55
\
( Charles II. , King dejure.
1 Commonwealth.
Louis XIV.
Ferdinand III.
Alexander VII.
Philip III.
Alexei Michaelowitch.
1658
—
—
Leopold I.
—
—
—
i66o
Charles II. , King de facto.
-
-
-
-
—
1665
-
-
-
—
Charles II.
—
1667
-
-
-
Clement IX.
-
-
1670
-
-
-
Clement X.
-
-
1676
-
-
-
Innocent XI.
—
Feodorell.
1682
-
-
-
-
-
Ivan Alexandrowitch.
1685
James II.
—
-
-
-
Peter the Great.
168c
William and Mary.
—
—
Alexander VIII.
-
-
Great Britain.
France.
^Germany.
Prussia.
Sweden.
Russia.
Spain.
1690 William and Mary
Louis XIV.
Leopold I.
Frederic William
Charles XII.
Peter I.
Charles II.
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