The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 4

Another Whig of far higher character was called at the same time to a far higher place in the administration. The Great Seal had now been four years in commission. Since Maynard's retirement, the constitution of the Court of Chancery had commanded little respect. Trevor, who was the First Commissioner, wanted neither parts nor learning; but his integrity was with good reason suspected; and the duties which, as Speaker of the House of Commons, he had to perform during four or five months in the busiest part of every year, made it impossible for him to be an efficient judge in equity. Every suitor complained that he had to wait a most unreasonable time for a judgment, and that, when at length a judgment had been pronounced, it was very likely to be reversed on appeal. Meanwhile there was no efficient minister of justice, no great functionary to whom it especially belonged to advise the King touching the appointment of judges, of Counsel for the Crown, of Justices of the Peace. 412 It was known that William was sensible of the inconvenience of this state of things; and, during several months, there had been flying rumours that a Lord Keeper or a Lord Chancellor would soon be appointed. 413 The name most frequently mentioned was that of Nottingham. But the same reasons which had prevented him from accepting the Great Seal in 1689 had, since that year, rather gained than lost strength. William at length fixed his choice on Somers.

Somers was only in his forty-second year; and five years had not elapsed since, on the great day of the trial of the Bishops, his powers had first been made known to the world. From that time his fame had been steadily and rapidly rising. Neither in forensic nor in parliamentary eloquence had he any superior. The consistency of his public conduct had gained for him the entire confidence of the Whigs; and the urbanity of his manners had conciliated the Tories. It was not without great reluctance that he consented to quit an assembly over which he exercised an immense influence for an assembly where it would be necessary for him to sit in silence. He had been but a short time in great practice. His savings were small. Not having the means of supporting a hereditary title, he must, if he accepted the high dignity which was offered to him, preside during some years in the Upper House without taking part in the debates. The opinion of others, however, was that he would be more useful as head of the law than as head of the Whig party in the Commons. He was sent for to Kensington, and called into the Council Chamber. Caermarthen spoke in the name of the King. "Sir John," he said, "it is necessary for the public service that you should take this charge upon you; and I have it in command from His Majesty to say that he can admit of no excuse." Somers submitted. The seal was delivered to him, with a patent which entitled him to a pension of two thousand a year from the day on which he should quit his office; and he was immediately sworn in a Privy Councillor and Lord Keeper. 414

The Gazette which announced these changes in the administration, announced also the King's departure. He set out for Holland on the twenty-fourth of March.

He left orders that the Estates of Scotland should, after a recess of more than two years and a half, be again called together. Hamilton, who had lived many months in retirement, had, since the fall of Melville, been reconciled to the Court, and now consented to quit his retreat, and to occupy Holyrood House as Lord High Commissioner. It was necessary that one of the Secretaries of State for Scotland should be in attendance on the King. The Master of Stair had therefore gone to the Continent. His colleague, Johnstone, was chief manager for the Crown at Edinburgh, and was charged to correspond regularly with Carstairs, who never quitted William. 415

It might naturally have been expected that the session would be turbulent. The Parliament was that very Parliament which had in 1689 passed, by overwhelming majorities, all the most violent resolutions which Montgomery and his club could frame, which had refused supplies, which had proscribed the ministers of the Crown, which had closed the Courts of justice, which had seemed bent on turning Scotland into an oligarchical republic. In 1690 the Estates had been in a better temper. Yet, even in 1690, they had, when the ecclesiastical polity of the realm was under consideration, paid little deference to what was well known to be the royal wish. They had abolished patronage; they had sanctioned the rabbling of the episcopal clergy; they had refused to pass a Toleration Act. It seemed likely that they would still be found unmanageable when questions touching religion came before them; and such questions it was unfortunately necessary to bring forward. William had, during the recess, attempted to persuade the General Assembly of the Church to receive into communion such of the old curates as should subscribe the Confession of Faith and should submit to the government of Synods. But the attempt had failed; and the Assembly had consequently been dissolved by the Lord Commissioner. Unhappily, the Act which established the Presbyterian polity had not defined the extent of the power which was to be exercised by the Sovereign over the Spiritual Courts. No sooner therefore had the dissolution been announced than the Moderator requested permission to speak. He was told that he was now merely a private person. As a private person he requested a hearing, and protested, in the name of his brethren, against the royal mandate. The right, he said, of the office bearers of the Church to meet and deliberate touching her interests was derived from her Divine Head, and was not dependent on the pleasure of the temporal magistrate. His brethren stood up, and by an approving murmur signified their concurrence in what their President had said. Before they retired they fixed a day for their next meeting. 416 It was indeed a very distant day; and when it came neither minister nor elder attended; for even the boldest members shrank from a complete rupture with the civil power. But, though there was not open war between the Church and the Government, they were estranged from each other, jealous of each other, and afraid of each other. No progress had been made towards a reconciliation when the Estates met; and which side the Estates would take might well be doubted.

But the proceedings of this strange Parliament, in almost every one of its sessions, falsified all the predictions of politicians. It had once been the most unmanageable of senates. It was now the most obsequious. Yet the old men had again met in the old hall. There were all the most noisy agitators of the club, with the exception of Montgomery, who was dying of want and of a broken heart in a garret far from his native land. There was the canting Ross and the perfidious Annandale. There was Sir Patrick Hume, lately created a peer, and henceforth to be called Lord Polwarth, but still as eloquent as when his interminable declamations and dissertations ruined the expedition of Argyle. But the whole spirit of the assembly had undergone a change. The members listened with profound respect to the royal letter, and returned an answer in reverential and affectionate language. An extraordinary aid of a hundred and fourteen thousand pounds sterling was granted to the Crown. Severe laws were enacted against the Jacobites. The legislation on ecclesiastical matters was as Erastian as William himself could have desired. An Act was passed requiring all ministers of the Established Church to swear fealty to their Majesties, and directing the General Assembly to receive into communion those Episcopalian ministers, not yet deprived, who should declare that they conformed to the Presbyterian doctrine and discipline. 417 Nay, the Estates carried adulation so far as to make it their humble request to the King that he would be pleased to confer a Scotch peerage on his favourite Portland. This was indeed their chief petition. They did not ask for redress of a single grievance. They contented themselves with hinting in general terms that there were abuses which required correction, and with referring the King for fuller information to his own Ministers, the Lord High Commissioner and the Secretary of State. 418

There was one subject on which it may seem strange that even the most servile of Scottish Parliaments should have kept silence. More than a year had elapsed since the massacre of Glencoe; and it might have been expected that the whole assembly, peers, commissioners of shires, commissioners of burghs, would with one voice have demanded a strict investigation into that great crime. It is certain, however, that no motion for investigation was made. The state of the Gaelic clans was indeed taken into consideration. A law was passed for the more effectual suppressing of depredations and outrages beyond the Highland line; and in that law was inserted a special proviso reserving to Mac Callum More his hereditary jurisdiction. But it does not appear, either from the public records of the proceedings of the Estates, or from those private letters in which Johnstone regularly gave Carstairs an account of what had passed, that any speaker made any allusion to the fate of Mac Ian and his kinsmen. 419 The only explanation of this extraordinary silence seems to be that the public men who were assembled in the capital of Scotland knew little and cared little about the fate of a thieving tribe of Celts. The injured clan, bowed down by fear of the allpowerful Campbells, and little accustomed to resort to the constituted authorities of the kingdom for protection or redress, presented no petition to the Estates. The story of the butchery had been told at coffeehouses, but had been told in different ways. Very recently, one or two books, in which the facts were but too truly related, had come forth from the secret presses of London. But those books were not publicly exposed to sale. They bore the name of no responsible author. The Jacobite writers were, as a class, savagely malignant and utterly regardless of truth. Since the Macdonalds did not complain, a prudent man might naturally be unwilling to incur the displeasure of the King, of the ministers, and of the most powerful family in Scotland, by bringing forward an accusation grounded on nothing but reports wandering from mouth to mouth, or pamphlets which no licenser had approved, to which no author had put his name, and which no bookseller ventured to place in his shop-window. But whether this be or be not the true solution, it is certain that the Estates separated quietly after a session of two months, during which, as far as can now be discovered, the name of Glencoe was not once uttered in the Parliament House.

CHAPTER XX

State of the Court of Saint Germains—Feeling of the Jacobites; Compounders and Noncompounders—Change of Ministry at Saint Germains; Middleton—New Declaration put forth by James—Effect of the new Declaration—French Preparations for the Campaign; Institution of the Order of Saint Lewis—Middleton's Account of Versailles—William's Preparations for the Campaign—Lewis takes the Field—Lewis returns to Versailles—Manoeuvres of Luxemburg—Battle of Landen—Miscarriage of the Smyrna Fleet—Excitement in London—Jacobite Libels; William Anderton—Writings and Artifices of the Jacobites—Conduct of Caermarthen—Now Charter granted to the East India Company—Return of William to England; Military Successes of France—Distress of France—A Ministry necessary to Parliamentary Government—The First Ministry gradually formed—Sunderland—Sunderland advises the King to give the Preference to the Whigs—Reasons for preferring the Whigs—Chiefs of the Whig Party; Russell—Somers—Montague—Wharton—Chiefs of the Tory Party; Harley—Foley—Howe—Meeting of Parliament—Debates about the Naval Miscarriages—Russell First Lord of the Admiralty; Retirement of Nottingham—Shrewsbury refuses Office—Debates about the Trade with India—Bill for the Regulation of Trials in Cases of Treason—Triennial Bill—Place Bill—Bill for the Naturalisation of Foreign Protestants—Supply—Ways and Means; Lottery Loan—The Bank of England—Prorogation of Parliament; Ministerial Arrangements; Shrewsbury Secretary of State—New Titles bestowed—French Plan of War; English Plan of War—Expedition against Brest—Naval Operations in the Mediterranean—War by Land—Complaints of Trenchard's Administration—The Lancashire Prosecutions—Meeting of the Parliament; Death of Tillotson—Tenison Archbishop of Canterbury; Debates on the Lancashire Prosecutions—Place Bill—Bill for the Regulation of Trials in Cases of Treason; the Triennial Bill passed—Death of Mary—Funeral of Mary—Greenwich Hospital founded

IT is now time to relate the events which, since the battle of La Hogue, had taken place at Saint Germains.

James, after seeing the fleet which was to have convoyed him back to his kingdom burned down to the water edge, had returned in no good humour to his abode near Paris. Misfortune generally made him devout after his own fashion; and he now starved himself and flogged himself till his spiritual guides were forced to interfere. 420

It is difficult to conceive a duller place than Saint Germains was when he held his Court there; and yet there was scarcely in all Europe a residence more enviably situated than that which the generous Lewis had assigned to his suppliants. The woods were magnificent, the air clear and salubrious, the prospects extensive and cheerful. No charm of rural life was wanting; and the towers of the most superb city of the Continent were visible in the distance. The royal apartments were richly adorned with tapestry and marquetry, vases of silver and mirrors in gilded frames. A pension of more than forty thousand pounds sterling was annually paid to James from the French Treasury. He had a guard of honour composed of some of the finest soldiers in Europe. If he wished to amuse himself with field sports, he had at his command an establishment far more sumptuous than that which had belonged to him when he was at the head of a great kingdom, an army of huntsmen and fowlers, a vast arsenal of guns, spears, buglehorns and tents, miles of network, staghounds, foxhounds, harriers, packs for the boar and packs for the wolf, gerfalcons for the heron and haggards for the wild duck. His presence chamber and his antechamber were in outward show as splendid as when he was at Whitehall. He was still surrounded by blue ribands and white staves. But over the mansion and the domain brooded a constant gloom, the effect, partly of bitter regrets and of deferred hopes, but chiefly of the abject superstition which had taken complete possession of his own mind, and which was affected by almost all those who aspired to his favour. His palace wore the aspect of a monastery. There were three places of worship within the spacious pile. Thirty or forty ecclesiastics were lodged in the building; and their apartments were eyed with envy by noblemen and gentlemen who had followed the fortunes of their Sovereign, and who thought it hard that, when there was so much room under his roof, they should be forced to sleep in the garrets of the neighbouring town. Among the murmurers was the brilliant Anthony Hamilton. He has left us a sketch of the life of Saint Germains, a slight sketch indeed, but not unworthy of the artist to whom we owe the most highly finished and vividly coloured picture of the English Court in the days when the English Court was gayest. He complains that existence was one round of religious exercises; that, in order to live in peace, it was necessary to pass half the day in devotion or in the outward show of devotion; that, if he tried to dissipate his melancholy by breathing the fresh air of that noble terrace which looks down on the valley of the Seine, he was driven away by the clamour of a Jesuit who had got hold of some unfortunate Protestant royalists from England, and was proving to them that no heretic could go to heaven. In general, Hamilton said, men suffering under a common calamity have a strong fellow feeling and are disposed to render good offices to each other. But it was not so at Saint Germains. There all was discord, jealousy, bitterness of spirit. Malignity was concealed under the show of friendship and of piety. All the saints of the royal household were praying for each other and backbiting each other from morning, to night. Here and there in the throng of hypocrites might be remarked a man too highspirited to dissemble. But such a man, however advantageously he might have made himself known elsewhere, was certain to be treated with disdain by the inmates of that sullen abode. 421

Such was the Court of James, as described by a Roman Catholic. Yet, however disagreeable that Court may have been to a Roman Catholic, it was infinitely more disagreeable to a Protestant. For the Protestant had to endure, in addition to all the dulness of which the Roman Catholic complained, a crowd of vexations from which the Roman Catholic was free. In every competition between a Protestant and a Roman Catholic the Roman Catholic was preferred. In every quarrel between a Protestant and a Roman Catholic the Roman Catholic was supposed to be in the right. While the ambitious Protestant looked in vain for promotion, while the dissipated Protestant looked in vain for amusement, the serious Protestant looked in vain for spiritual instruction and consolation. James might, no doubt, easily have obtained permission for those members of the Church of England who had sacrificed every thing in his cause to meet privately in some modest oratory, and to receive the eucharistic bread and wine from the hands of one of their own clergy; but he did not wish his residence to be defiled by such impious rites. Doctor Dennis Granville, who had quitted the richest deanery, the richest archdeaconry and one of the richest livings in England, rather than take the oaths, gave mortal offence by asking leave to read prayers to the exiles of his own communion. His request was refused; and he was so grossly insulted by his master's chaplains and their retainers that he was forced to quit Saint Germains. Lest some other Anglican doctor should be equally importunate, James wrote to inform his agents in England that he wished no Protestant divine to come out to him. 422 Indeed the nonjuring clergy were at least as much sneered at and as much railed at in his palace as in his nephew's. If any man had a claim to be mentioned with respect at Saint Germains, it was surely Sancroft. Yet it was reported that the bigots who were assembled there never spoke of him but with aversion and disgust. The sacrifice of the first place in the Church, of the first place in the peerage, of the mansion at Lambeth and the mansion at Croydon, of immense patronage and of a revenue of more than five thousand a year was thought but a poor atonement for the great crime of having modestly remonstrated against the unconstitutional Declaration of Indulgence. Sancroft was pronounced to be just such a traitor and just such a penitent as Judas Iscariot. The old hypocrite had, it was said, while affecting reverence and love for his master, given the fatal signal to his master's enemies. When the mischief had been done and could not be repaired, the conscience of the sinner had begun to torture him. He had, like his prototype, blamed himself and bemoaned himself. He had, like his prototype, flung down his wealth at the feet of those whose instrument he had been. The best thing that he could now do was to make the parallel complete by hanging himself. 423

James seems to have thought that the strongest proof of kindness which he could give to heretics who had resigned wealth, country, family, for his sake, was to suffer them to be beset, on their dying beds, by his priests. If some sick man, helpless in body and in mind, and deafened by the din of bad logic and bad rhetoric, suffered a wafer to be thrust into his mouth, a great work of grace was triumphantly announced to the Court; and the neophyte was buried with all the pomp of religion. But if a royalist, of the highest rank and most stainless character, died professing firm attachment to the Church of England, a hole was dug in the fields; and, at dead of night, he was flung into it and covered up like a mass of carrion. Such were the obsequies of the Earl of Dunfermline, who had served the House of Stuart with the hazard of his life and to the utter ruin of his fortunes, who had fought at Killiecrankie, and who had, after the victory, lifted from the earth the still breathing remains of Dundee. While living he had been treated with contumely. The Scottish officers who had long served under him had in vain entreated that, when they were formed into a company, he might still be their commander. His religion had been thought a fatal disqualification. A worthless adventurer, whose only recommendation was that he was a Papist, was preferred. Dunfermline continued, during a short time, to make his appearance in the circle which surrounded the Prince whom he had served too well; but it was to no purpose. The bigots who ruled the Court refused to the ruined and expatriated Protestant Lord the means of subsistence; he died of a broken heart; and they refused him even a grave. 424

The insults daily offered at Saint Germains to the Protestant religion produced a great effect in England. The Whigs triumphantly asked whether it were not clear that the old tyrant was utterly incorrigible; and many even of the nonjurors observed his proceedings with shame, disgust and alarm. 425 The Jacobite party had, from the first, been divided into two sections, which, three or four years after the Revolution, began to be known as the Compounders and the Noncompounders. The Compounders were those who wished for a restoration, but for a restoration accompanied by a general amnesty, and by guarantees for the security of the civil and ecclesiastical constitution of the realm. The Noncompounders thought it downright Whiggery, downright rebellion; to take advantage of His Majesty's unfortunate situation for the purpose of imposing on him any condition. The plain duty of his subjects was to bring him back. What traitors he would punish and what traitors he would spare, what laws he would observe and with what laws he would dispense, were questions to be decided by himself alone. If he decided them wrongly, he must answer for his fault to heaven and not to his people.

The great body of the English Jacobites were more or less Compounders. The pure Noncompounders were chiefly to be found among the Roman Catholics, who, very naturally, were not solicitous to obtain any security for a religion which they thought heretical, or for a polity from the benefits of which they were excluded. There were also some Protestant nonjurors, such as Kettlewell and Hickes, who resolutely followed the theory of Filmer to all the extreme consequences to which it led. But, though Kettlewell tried to convince his countrymen that monarchical government had been ordained by God, not as a means of making them happy here, but as a cross which it was their duty to take up and bear in the hope of being recompensed for their sufferings hereafter, and though Hickes assured them that there was not a single Compounder in the whole Theban legion, very few churchmen were inclined to run the risk of the gallows merely for the purpose of reestablishing the High Commission and the Dispensing Power.

The Compounders formed the main strength of the Jacobite party in England; but the Noncompounders had hitherto had undivided sway at Saint Germains. No Protestant, no moderate Roman Catholic, no man who dared to hint that any law could bind the royal prerogative, could hope for the smallest mark of favour from the banished King. The priests and the apostate Melfort, the avowed enemy of the Protestant religion and of civil liberty, of Parliaments, of trial by jury and of the Habeas Corpus Act, were in exclusive possession of the royal ear. Herbert was called Chancellor, walked before the other officers of state, wore a black robe embroidered with gold, and carried a seal; but he was a member of the Church of England; and therefore he was not suffered to sit at the Council Board. 426

The truth is that the faults of James's head and heart were incurable. In his view there could be between him and his subjects no reciprocity of obligation. Their duty was to risk property, liberty, life, in order to replace him on the throne, and then to bear patiently whatever he chose to inflict upon them. They could no more pretend to merit before him than before God. When they had done all, they were still unprofitable servants. The highest praise due to the royalist who shed his blood on the field of battle or on the scaffold for hereditary monarchy was simply that he was not a traitor. After all the severe discipline which the deposed King had undergone, he was still as much bent on plundering and abasing the Church of England as on the day when he told the kneeling fellows of Magdalene to get out of his sight, or on the day when he sent the Bishops to the Tower. He was in the habit of declaring that he would rather die without seeing England again than stoop to capitulate with those whom he ought to command. 427 In the Declaration of April 1692 the whole man appears without disguise, full of his own imaginary rights, unable to understand how any body but himself can have any rights, dull, obstinate and cruel. Another paper which he drew up about the same time shows, if possible, still more clearly, how little he had profited by a sharp experience. In that paper he set forth the plan according to which he intended to govern when he should be restored. He laid it down as a rule that one Commissioner of the Treasury, one of the two Secretaries of State, the Secretary at War, the majority of the Great Officers of the Household, the majority of the Lords of the Bedchamber, the majority of the officers of the army, should always be Roman Catholics. 428

It was to no purpose that the most eminent Compounders sent from London letter after letter filled with judicious counsel and earnest supplication. It was to no purpose that they demonstrated in the plainest manner the impossibility of establishing Popish ascendancy in a country where at least forty-nine fiftieths of the population and much more than forty-nine fiftieths of the wealth and the intelligence were Protestant. It was to no purpose that they informed their master that the Declaration of April 1692 had been read with exultation by his enemies and with deep affliction by his friends, that it had been printed and circulated by the usurpers, that it had done more than all the libels of the Whigs to inflame the nation against him, and that it had furnished those naval officers who had promised him support with a plausible pretext for breaking faith with him, and for destroying the fleet which was to have convoyed him back to his kingdom. He continued to be deaf to the remonstrances of his best friends in England till those remonstrances began to be echoed at Versailles. All the information which Lewis and his ministers were able to obtain touching the state of our island satisfied them that James would never be restored unless he could bring himself to make large concessions to his subjects. It was therefore intimated to him, kindly and courteously, but seriously, that he would do well to change his counsels and his counsellors. France could not continue the war for the purpose of forcing a Sovereign on an unwilling nation. She was crushed by public burdens. Her trade and industry languished. Her harvest and her vintage had failed. The peasantry were starving. The faint murmurs of the provincial Estates began to be heard. There was a limit to the amount of the sacrifices which the most absolute prince could demand from those whom he ruled. However desirous the Most Christian King might be to uphold the cause of hereditary monarchy and of pure religion all over the world, his first duty was to his own kingdom; and, unless a counterrevolution speedily took place in England, his duty to his own kingdom might impose on him the painful necessity of treating with the Prince of Orange. It would therefore be wise in James to do without delay whatever he could honourably and conscientiously do to win back the hearts of his people.

Thus pressed, James unwillingly yielded. He consented to give a share in the management of his affairs to one of the most distinguished of the Compounders, Charles Earl of Middleton.

Middleton's family and his peerage were Scotch. But he was closely connected with some of the noblest houses of England; he had resided long in England; he had been appointed by Charles the Second one of the English Secretaries of State, and had been entrusted by James with the lead of the English House of Commons. His abilities and acquirements were considerable; his temper was easy and generous; his manners were popular; and his conduct had generally been consistent and honourable. He had, when Popery was in the ascendant, resolutely refused to purchase the royal favour by apostasy. Roman Catholic ecclesiastics had been sent to convert him; and the town had been much amused by the dexterity with which the layman baffled the divines. A priest undertook to demonstrate the doctrine of transubstantiation, and made the approaches in the usual form. "Your Lordship believes in the Trinity." "Who told you so?" said Middleton. "Not believe in the Trinity!" cried the priest in amazement. "Nay," said Middleton; "prove your religion to be true if you can; but do not catechize me about mine." As it was plain that the Secretary was not a disputant whom it was easy to take at an advantage, the controversy ended almost as soon as it began. 429 When fortune changed, Middleton adhered to the cause of hereditary monarchy with a stedfastness which was the more respectable because he would have had no difficulty in making his peace with the new government. His sentiments were so well known that, when the kingdom was agitated by apprehensions of an invasion and an insurrection, he was arrested and sent to the Tower; but no evidence on which he could be convicted of treason was discovered; and, when the dangerous crisis was past, he was set at liberty. It should seem indeed that, during the three years which followed the Revolution, he was by no means an active plotter. He saw that a Restoration could be effected only with the general assent of the nation, and that the nation would never assent to a Restoration without securities against Popery and arbitrary power. He therefore conceived that, while his banished master obstinately refused to give such securities, it would be worse than idle to conspire against the existing government.