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THREE 
 
 English Statesmen: 
 
 A COURSE OF LECTURES 
 
 ON THE 
 
 POLITICAL HISTORY of ENGLAND. 
 
 By GOLDWIN SMITH. 
 
 1867 
 
 NEW YORK- 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 
 
 FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
 18 6 7. 
 
; 
 
 
TO 
 
 THOMAS BAYLEY POTTER, M.P., 
 
 A STAUNCH FRIEND OF 
 HUMANITY AND JUSTICE IN THEIR TIME OF NEED, 
 
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 THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN. 
 
 i 
 
 Let us never glorify revolution. Statesman- 
 ship is the art of avoiding it, and of making 
 progress at once continuous and calm. Revolu- 
 tions are not only full of all that a good citizen 
 and a good Christian hates while they last, but 
 they leave a long train of bitterness behind. 
 The energy and the exaltation of character 
 which they call forth are paid for in the lassi- 
 tude, the depression, the political infidelity which 
 ensue. The great spirits of the English Revolu- 
 tion were followed by the men of Charles II. 
 Whatever of moral grandeur there was in the 
 French Revolution was followed by Bonapartism 
 and Talleyrand. Even while the great men are 
 on the scene, violence and one-sidedness mar 
 their greatness. Let* us pray that all our polit- 
 
8 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 ical contests may be carried on as the contests of 
 fellow-citizen, and beneath the unassailed majes- 
 ty of law. But the chiefest authors of revolu- 
 tions have been not the chimerical and intemper- 
 ate friends of progress, but the blind obstructers 
 of progress; those who, in defiance of nature, 
 struggle to avert the inevitable future, to recall 
 the irrevocable past ; who chafe to fury by dam- 
 ming up its course the river which would other- 
 wise flow calmly between its banks, which has 
 ever flowed, and which, do what they will, must 
 flow forever. 
 
 If a revolution ever was redeemed by its 
 grandeur, it was the revolution which was open- 
 ed by Pym, which was closed by Cromwell, of 
 which Milton was the apostle and the poet. 
 The material forces have been seen in action on a 
 more imposing scale, the moral forces never. 
 Why is that regard for principle which was so 
 strong among us then, comparatively so weak 
 among us now ? The greatest member of Parlia- 
 ment that ever lived, the greatest master of the 
 convictions and the feelings of the House of 
 Commons, was not Robert Peel, but John Pym. 
 But if Pym, in modern garb and using modern 
 phrase, could now rise in his old place, his words, 
 though as practical as they are lofty, would, I 
 fear, be thought " too cleve^ for the House." Is 
 
Pym. 9 
 
 it that wealth, too much accumulated and too lit- 
 tle diffused, has placed the leadership of the na- 
 tion in less noble hands ? 
 
 We must not regard this revolution merely as 
 the struggle of the English House of Commons 
 against the tyranny of Charles I. It was part of 
 a European conflict between two great opposing 
 currents of opinion, one running toward the fu- 
 ture, the other toward the past. The Reforma- 
 tion, like all really great movements, was relig- 
 ious ; but acting on the deepest part of humani- 
 ty, it impelled forward the whole nature of man ; 
 and the reaction against it accordingly was a re- 
 action of all the powers of the past! In Spain 
 the reaction, both political and ecclesiastical, had 
 triumphed through the alliance of the Inquisition 
 and the kings. In France the political reaction 
 had triumphed through the policy of Richelieu, 
 whom some, thinking more of organization than 
 of life, numbered with the friends of progress; the 
 rest was to be done by Louis XIV. In Ger- 
 many, Austria and the Catholic League had near- 
 ly crushed the independence of the Protestant 
 states, and made a Catholic empire of the land of 
 Luther. At first the Reformation, with liberty 
 in its train, had spread over all the nations that 
 spoke a Teutonic tongue ; it had spread over a 
 great part of France ; it had gained a footing in 
 
 A2 
 
io Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Italy and Spain. Now, England and Holland 
 seemed to stand almost alone. It was a crisis as 
 perilous as that of the Armada. How natural to 
 humanity, wearied and perplexed with change, is 
 this yearning for the thrones and for the altars 
 of the past ! 
 
 In England, however, not only was there this 
 conflict between the Eeformation and its enemies. 
 Here, the real reformation was still to come. 
 The reformation of Henry VIII. was a royal ref- 
 ormation, which put the king in the place of the 
 pope. The people were now to have their ref- 
 ormation, a reformation of conviction, which put 
 conscience in the place both of pope and king. 
 
 I take for granted a knowledge of the reign 
 of James I. ; the glories of Elizabeth lighting 
 up the shame of her successor; the fatal ques- 
 tion whether sovereign power resided with the 
 king or with the parliament, kept undecided by 
 her tact, forced to decision by his folly; the 
 weaknesses of a sovereign who seemed born to 
 advance constitutional liberty by provoking re- 
 sistance which he could not quell, and proclaim- 
 ing principles of absolutism which he could not 
 sustain; the close alliance between prerogative 
 and the priest party, the king insulting the 
 Puritan divines at the Hampton Court confer, 
 ence, and the bishops prostrate in grateful ecsta- 
 
Pym. ii 
 
 sies at his feet; tlie government of favorites, 
 whose names were by-words of infamy ; the ju- 
 dicial murder of Raleigh ; the disgrace of Chief- 
 Justice Coke, and of the common law in his per- 
 son ; the divorce of Essex ; the murder of Over- 
 bury ; the mysterious threats by which the mur- 
 derers appealed not in vain to the guilty con- 
 science of the king ; the uprising of the Com- 
 mons ; the Protestation of Right ; the storm of 
 national resentment to which the court sacrificed 
 Bacon — Bacon, who served darkness in the hope 
 that when he had raised himself to power his 
 science would make the darkness light, the dupe 
 of a dream of beneficent despotism, a warning to 
 fastidious minds if they would work for the peo- 
 ple to work with and by the people. 
 
 I take for granted, too, a knowledge of the 
 early part of the life and reign of Charles : the 
 ominous episode of the Spanish match ; the 
 scenes of duplicity which followed, already re- 
 vealing the dark spot in Charles's character ; the 
 ascendancy of Buckingham, safely intrenched in 
 favor, more safely than ever Strafford was, be- 
 cause his mind was not above that of his master ; 
 the coronation, in which the bishops and their 
 paraphernalia played so conspicuous a part; the 
 brief honey-moon of the new king and his parlia- 
 ment; the renewal of the struggle; Charles's 
 
12 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 policy oscillating between government by Parlia- 
 ment and government by prerogative, and both 
 ways fatally to himself; his foreign policy oscil- 
 lating between the support of Protestant free- 
 dom, for which the nation called, and the support 
 of Catholic absolutism, toward which his own 
 heart yearned ; the French queen, with her 
 French notions of what a king and a queen 
 should be; the beginnings of arbitrary taxation 
 and military rule ; the " great, warm, and ruffling 
 parliament," as Whitelocke calls it, by which 
 those encroachments were withstood ; the Peti- 
 tion of Right, that complement of the Great 
 Charter, which declares that Englishmen shall 
 never be subject to martial law, and which if it 
 be tampered with in our day, though it be in the 
 person of the humblest English subject, we pur- 
 pose, after the example of our great forefathers, 
 to make good. 
 
 At last Charles broke with his parliament, 
 passionately dissolved it amid a scene of tem- 
 pestuous violence (the speaker being held down 
 in his chair till the protest of the Commons had 
 been made), and by proclamation forbade any 
 man to talk of a parliament being ever held 
 again. The leader of the Commons, Sir John 
 Eliot, was thrown into the Tower. There he 
 sank at last beneath the bad air and the chills of 
 
Pym. 13 
 
 his prison-house, constantly refusing, as a cham- 
 pion of the law, to do homage to lawlessness by 
 submission. " My lodgings are removed, and I 
 am now where candle-light may be suffered, but 
 scarce fire." So he writes when he is dying of 
 consumption. The court knew what they were 
 doing. " I must tell you," writes Lord Cotting- 
 ton to the renegade Strafford, "that your old, 
 dear friend Sir John Eliot is very like to die." 
 His family petitioned for leave to bury him 
 among his fathers in his Cornish home. The 
 king wrote at the foot of the petition, " Let Sir 
 John Eliot's body be buried in the church of 
 that parish where he died." But Sir John 
 Eliot's spirit rose in the king's path in a decisive 
 hour. 
 
 Then followed eleven years of government by 
 prerogative — in place of Parliament, the triune 
 despotism of the Privy Council, the Star Cham- 
 ber, the Court of High Commission ; in place of 
 laws, proclamations ; in place of courts of law, 
 courts of arbitrary power ; in place of legal taxa- 
 tion by Parliament, forced loans, monopolies, 
 feudal and forest extortions, ship-money ; the ten- 
 ure of the judges made during the king's pleas- 
 ure, that they might be perfect slaves to the 
 king's will ; the tamperings with the bench, by 
 which old Judge Whitelocke warned Laud he 
 
14 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 would in the end raise a flame in the nation ; the 
 " Book of Sports" put forth not only to do de- 
 spite to the Puritan Sabbath, but to make a mer- 
 ry England, free from political thought; the 
 Protestant cause abroad openly abandoned ; the 
 strength of the nation declining as the power of 
 the crown rose, and Barbary pirates riding tri- 
 umphant in the Channel; Strafford and Laud 
 with their policy of Thorough; Laud, Primate 
 and Chancellor, extirpating freedom of thought 
 in England ; Strafford, lord deputy of Ireland, 
 making ready there an army for the completion 
 of the joint work, and reading us two lessons 
 which from so able an enemy we shall do well to 
 learn; first, that a standing army is a standing 
 menace to public liberty ; and, secondly, that ar- 
 bitrary government in a dependency is the step- 
 ping-stone to arbitrary government at home. 
 Hopelessly as it seemed at the time, Hampden 
 withstood ship-money: he was cast in his suit 
 before a servile and unjust court, but he proved 
 that in a righteous cause a defeat before an un- 
 just court may be a victory before the people. 
 
 "With tyranny in the State, tyranny in the 
 Church went hand in hand. Intimate is the con- 
 nection between political freedom and freedom 
 of the soul ; eternal is the alliance of the Lauds 
 and the Straffords against both. Reaction in the 
 
Pym. 1 S 
 
 State and reaction in the Church, a Komanizing 
 clergy, and a government tending to martial law, 
 these are the joint characteristics not of one age 
 alone. The dry bones of the Tudor episcopate 
 had now begun to live with a portentous life of 
 priestly ambition, the source of which was Koine, 
 and which soon sought union with its source. 
 To unprotestantize the Church of England, Laud 
 labored with canons and ordinances, with books 
 and sermons, with preferments for the compliant, 
 with whips, pillories, and banishment for recu- 
 sants, at a rate which happily for us left prudence 
 as well as charity and humanity behind. Prot- 
 estant preachers were driven from their pulpits, 
 harried out of the kingdom— among them the 
 favorite preacher of an obscure sectary named 
 Cromwell. The altar was set up again in place 
 of the communion table. The eucharistic miracle, 
 the talisman of priestly power, was again per- 
 formed. Clerical celibacy, monachism, the confesA 
 sional, were coming in due course. Persons of \ 
 quality especially embraced a religion of flowers 
 and incense^ of millineries and upholsteries, of in-/ 
 sinuatmg directors. . Only some spirits, too impa- 
 tient and too logical, could not be kept from cut- 
 ting short the process and going at once to 
 Rome. The Protestant refugee churches in En- 
 gland were crushed; it seems their members 
 
1 6 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 kept some trade secrets to themselves, and did 
 not contribute so much as was to "be desired to 
 the wealth of the kingdom. The communion of 
 the Protestant churches abroad, which Hooker 
 had acknowledged, was renounced, because hav- 
 ing no bishops they could not be Christian ; and 
 this no doubt was called the reunion of Christen- 
 dom. To all this the hearty support of the 
 Court was given, and it was well earned. The 
 High Church clergy preached the Loan as vigor- 
 ously as the Real Presence or the Apostolical 
 Succession. The court divine, Manwaring, said 
 in one of his famous sermons, " that the first of 
 all relations was that between the Creator and 
 the creature ; the next between husband and 
 wife ; the third between parent and child ; the 
 fourth between lord and servant ; and that from 
 all these arose that most high, sacred, and tran- 
 scendent relation between king and subject." In 
 another passage he asks himself i(t Why religion 
 doth associate God and the king?" and he answers, 
 " that it may be for one of three reasons ; be- 
 cause in Scripture the name of god is given to an- 
 gels, priests, and kings ; or from the propinquity 
 of offenses against God and his anointed king ; 
 or from the parity of beneficence which men en- 
 joy from sacred kings, and which they can no 
 more requite in the case of the king than in the 
 
Pym. 17 
 
 ease of God." He reasons, " that as justice, proper- 
 ly so called, intercedes not "between God and 
 man, nor between the prince, being the father, 
 and the people as children (for justice is between 
 equals), so can not justice be any rule or medium 
 whereby to give God or the king his right." 
 And again, he draws a comparison between the 
 dignity of angels and that of kings from which it 
 is plain that bishoprics are not in the gift of the 
 angels. This in the Chapel Eoyal, where, as 
 Pym said, that doctrine was already so well be- 
 lieved that no man needed to be converted. 
 Manwaring, Sibthorpe, and Montagu belong as 
 yet not wholly to the past ; but the members of 
 the Church of England have the happiness of 
 knowing that there are some at least among her 
 clergy in high places who labor, and labor suc- 
 cessfully, to lay her foundations not in political 
 power but in the free affection of the people ; to 
 present her as the friend and the consecrator, not 
 as the enemy, of human progress ; and to ally her 
 not with injustice but with justice. 
 
 When Charles dismissed his parliament, the 
 day was going hard with the Protestant cause in 
 Germany, the great scene of the conflict, to which 
 the eyes of all Protestants were wistfully and 
 sadly turned. Tilly and "Wallenstein were carry- 
 ing all before them ; and the last hope of Protest- 
 
1 8 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 autism seemed to expire when the King of Den- 
 mark was overthrown. Suddenly a light shone 
 in the north. Gustavus Adolphus appeared 
 upon the scene. Leipsic, the Gettysburg of the 
 seventeenth century, was fought ; and the tidings 
 of a great deliverance and the name of a great 
 deliverer made the heart of the oppressed to 
 leap for joy, and loosened the knees of the op- 
 pressor. English and Scottish soldiers of Gusta- 
 vus, the Garibaldians of their day, came back, not 
 a few to England, many to Scotland, with Gari- 
 baldian memories and sentiments in their hearts. 
 
 Then Laud laid his rash hand upon the relig- 
 ious independence of Scotland ; and the Scotch 
 nation, nobles and commons, ministers and peo- 
 ple, wonderfully fused together by fiery enthusi- 
 asm, poured like a lava torrent on the aggressor. 
 English sympathies fought on the Scottish side ; 
 English soldiers refused to conquer for Laud. 
 Strafford's Irish army was not ready. Govern- 
 ment by prerogative fell, and Charles called a 
 parliament. 
 
 After eleven years without parliaments, most 
 of the members were new. But they had not to 
 seek a leader. They had one whom all accepted 
 in John Pym. Pym had been* second only to 
 Sir John Eliot as a leader of the patriot party in 
 the reign of James. He was one of the twelve 
 
Pym. 19 
 
 deputies of the Commons when James cried, 
 with insight as well as spleen, " Set twal chairs ; 
 here be twal kings coming." He had stood 
 among the foremost of those " evil-tempered spir- 
 its" who protested that the liberties of Parliament 
 were not the favors of the crown, .but the birth- 
 right of Englishmen, and who for so doing were 
 imprisoned without law. He had resolved, as he 
 said, that he would rather suffer for speaking 
 the truth, than the truth should suffer for 
 want of his speaking. His greatness had in- 
 creased in the struggle against Charles I. He 
 had been one of the chief managers of the im- 
 peachment of Buckingham ; and for that service 
 to public justice, he had again suffered a glorious 
 imprisonment. He had accused Manwaring ; he 
 had raised a voice of power against the Koman- 
 izing intrigues of Laud. In those days, he and 
 Strafford were dear friends, and fellow -soldiers 
 in the same cause. But when the death of Buck- 
 ingham left the place of First Minister vacant, 
 Strafford sought an interview with Pym at 
 Greenwich ; and when they met began to talk 
 against dangerous courses, and to hint at advanta- 
 geous overtures to be made by the court. Pym cut 
 him short: "You need not use all this art to tell me 
 that you have a mind to leave us. But remember 
 what I tell you— you are going to be undone. 
 
20 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 And remember also, that though you leave us, I 
 will never leave you while your head is upon 
 your shoulders !" Such at least was the story 
 current in the succeeding age of the last inter- 
 view between the Great Champion of Freedom 
 and the Great Apostate. 
 
 Pym was a Somersetshire gentleman of good 
 family ; and it was from good families — such fam- 
 ilies at least as do not produce Jacobins — that 
 most of the leaders of this revolution sprang. I 
 note it, not to claim for principle the patronage 
 of birth and wealth, but to show how strong that 
 principle must have been which could thus move 
 birth and wealth away from their natural bias. 
 It is still true, not in the ascetic, but in the moral 
 sense, that it is hard for a rich man to enter into 
 the kingdom of heaven ; and when we see rich 
 men entering into the kingdom of heaven, hazard- 
 ing the enjoyment of wealth for the sake of prin- 
 ciple, we may know that it is no common age. 
 Oxford was the place of Pym's education, and 
 there he was distinguished not only by solid ac- 
 quirements, but by elegant accomplishments, so 
 that an Oxford poet calls him the favorite of 
 Apollo. High culture is now rather in disgrace 
 in some quarters, and not without a color of rea- 
 son, as unbracing the sinews of action and de- 
 stroying sympathy with the people. Neverthe- 
 
Pym. 2 1 
 
 less, the universities produced the great states- 
 men and the great warriors of the Commonwealth. 
 If the Oxford of Pym, of Hampden, and of Blake, 
 the Oxford of Wycliffe, the Oxford where in still 
 earlier times those principles were nursed which 
 gave us the Great Charter and the House of 
 Commons — if this Oxford, I say, now seems by 
 her political bearing to dishonor learning, and by 
 an ignoble choice does a wrong to the nation 
 which Lancashire is called upon to redress — be- 
 lieve me, it is not the University which thus of- 
 fends, but a power alien to the University and 
 alien to learning, to which the University is, and, 
 unless you rescue her, will continue to be, a slave. 
 
 It is another point of difference between the 
 English and the French revolutions that the 
 leaders of the English Revolution were as a rule 
 good husbands and fathers, in whom domestic af- 
 fection was the root of public virtue. Pym, 
 after being for some time in public life, married, 
 and after his marriage lived six years in retire- 
 ment — a part of training as necessary as action 
 to the depth of character and the power of sus- 
 tained thought which are the elements of great- 
 ness. At the end of the six years his wife died, 
 and he took no other wife but his country. 
 
 There were many elements in the patriot par- 
 ty, united at first, afterward severed from each 
 
22 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 other by the fierce winno wing-fan of the struggle, 
 and marking by their successive ascendancy the 
 changing phases of the revolution : Constitution- 
 al Monarchists, aristocratic Kepublicans, Kepub- 
 licans thorough-going, Protestant Episcopalians, 
 Presbyterians, Independents, and in the abyss be- 
 neath them all the Anabaptists, the Fifth Mon- 
 archy men, and the Levellers. Pym was a friend 
 of constitutional monarchy in politics, a Protest- 
 ant Episcopalian in religion; against a despot, 
 but for a king; against the tyranny and political 
 power of the bishops, but satisfied with that 
 form of church government. He was no fanatic, 
 and no ascetic. He was genial, social, even con- 
 vivial. His enemies held him up to the hatred 
 of the sectaries as a man of pleasure. As the 
 statesman and orator of the less extreme party, 
 and of the first period of the revolution, he is the 
 English counterpart of Mirabeau, so far as a Chris- 
 tian patriot can be the counterpart of a Voltairean 
 debauchee. 
 
 Nor is he altogether unlike Mirabeau in the 
 style of his eloquence, our better appreciation of 
 which, as well as our better knowledge of Pym 
 and of this the heroic age of our history in gener- 
 al, we owe to the patriotic and truly noble dili- 
 gence of Mr. John Forster, from whose researches 
 no small portion of my materials for this lecture 
 
Pym. 23 
 
 is derived. Pym's speeches of course are seven- 
 teenth-century speeches ; stately in diction, some- 
 what like homilies in their divisions, full of 
 learning, full of Scripture (which then, "be it re- 
 membered, was a fresh spring of new thought), full 
 of philosophic passages which might have come 
 from the pen of Hooker or of Bacon. But they 
 sometimes strike the great strokes for which 
 Mirabeau was famous. Buckingham had plead- 
 ed to the charge of enriching himself by the sale 
 of honors and offices, that so far from having en- 
 riched himself he was £100,000 in debt. " If this 
 be true," replied Pym, " how can we hope to sat- 
 isfy his immense prodigality ; if false, how can 
 we hope to satisfy his covetousness ?" In the 
 debate on the Petition of Eight, when Secretary 
 Cooke desired in the name of the king to know 
 whether they would take the king's word for 
 the observance of their liberties or not, " there 
 was silence for a good space," none liking to re- 
 ject the king's word, all knowing what that word 
 was worth. The silence was broken by Pym, 
 who rose and said, " We have his majesty's coro- 
 nation oath to maintain the laws of England; 
 what need we then to take his word V And 
 the secretary desperately pressing his point, and 
 asking what foreigners would think if the people 
 of England refused to trust their king's word, 
 
24 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Pym rejoined, " Truly, Mr. Secretary, I am of the 
 same opinion that I was, that the king's oath is 
 as powerful as his word." In the same debate 
 the courtiers prayed the House to leave entire 
 his majesty's sovereign power — a Stuart phrase, 
 meaning the power of the king when he deemed 
 it expedient to break the law. " I am not able," 
 was Pym's reply, " to speak to this question. I 
 know not what it is. All our petition is for the 
 laws of England; and this power seems to be 
 another power distinct from the power of the 
 law. I know how to add sovereign to the king's 
 person, but not to his power. We can not leave 
 to him a sovereign power, for we never were pos- 
 sessed of it." 
 
 The English Revolution was a revolution of 
 principle, but of principle couched in precedent. 
 What the philosophic salon was to the French 
 leaders of opinion, that the historical and anti- 
 quarian library of Sir Robert Cotton was to the 
 English. And of the group of illustrious men 
 who gathered in that library, none had been a 
 deeper student of its treasures than Pym. His 
 speeches and state papers are the proof 
 
 When the parliament had met, Pym was the 
 first to rise. We know his appearance from his 
 portrait — a portly form, which a court waiting- 
 woman called that of an ox ; a forehead so high 
 
Pym. 25 
 
 that lampooners compared it to a shuttle; the 
 dress of a gentleman of the time : for not to the 
 cavaliers alone belonged that picturesque cos- 
 tume and those pointed beards, which furnish the 
 real explanation of the fact that all women are 
 Tories. Into the expectant and wavering, though 
 ardent, minds of the inexperienced assembly he 
 poured, with the authority of a veteran chief, a 
 speech which at once fixed their thoughts, and 
 possessed them with their mission. It was a 
 broad, complete, and earnest, though undeclama- 
 tory, statement of the abuses which they had 
 come to reform. For reform, though for root- 
 and-branch reform, not for revolution, the Short 
 Parliament came : and Charles might even now 
 have made his peace with his people. But 
 Charles did not yet see the truth: the truth 
 could never pierce through the divinity that 
 hedged round the king. The Commons insisted 
 that redress of grievances should go before sup- 
 ply. In a moment of madness, or what is the 
 same thing, of compliance with the counsels of 
 Laud, Charles dissolved the parliament, imprison- 
 ed several of its members, and published his rea- 
 sons in a proclamation full of despotic doctrine. 
 The friends of the crown were sad, its enemies 
 very joyful. Now, to the eye of history, begins 
 to rise that scaffold before Whitehall 
 
 B 
 
26 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Once more Charles and Strafford tried their 
 desperate arms against the Scotch; and once 
 more their soldiers refused to fight. Pym and 
 Hampden, meanwhile, sure of the issue, were 
 preparing their party and the nation for the de- 
 cisive struggle. Their head-quarters were at 
 Pym's house, in Gray's Inn Lane ; but meetings 
 were held also at the houses of leaders in the 
 country, especially for correspondence with the 
 Scotch, with whom these patriot traitors were 
 undoubtedly in league. A private press was 
 actively at work. Pym was not only the orator 
 of his party, but its soul and centre ; he knew 
 how not only to propagate his opinions with 
 words of power, but to organize the means of 
 victory. And now Charles, in extremity, turned 
 to the middle ages for one expedient more, and 
 called a Great Council of Peers, according to 
 Plantagenet precedents, at York. Pym flew at 
 once to York, caused a petition for a parliament 
 to be signed by the peers of his party there, and 
 backed it with petitions from the people, one of 
 them signed by 10,000 citizens of London. This 
 first great wielder of public opinion in England 
 was the inventor of organized agitation by peti- 
 tion. The king surrendered, and called a parlia- 
 ment. Pym and Hampden rode over the coun- 
 try, urging the constituencies to do their dut} r . 
 
Pym. 27 
 
 The constituencies did their duty, as perhaps they 
 had never done it before, and have never done it 
 since. They sent up the noblest body of men 
 that ever sat in the councils of a nation. The 
 force of the agitation triumphed for the moment, 
 as it did again in 1830, over all those defects in 
 the system of representation which prevail over 
 the public interest and the public sentiment in 
 ordinary times. The Long Parliament met, 
 while round it the tide of national feeling swell- 
 ed and surged, the long-pent-up voices of na- 
 tional resentment broke forth. It met not for re- 
 form, but for revolution. The king did not ride 
 to it in state ; he slunk to it in his private barge, 
 like a vanquished and a doomed man. 
 
 Charles had called to him Strafford. The earl 
 knew his danger ; . but the king had pledged to 
 him the royal word that not a hair of his head 
 should be touched. He came foiled, broken by 
 disease, but still resolute, prepared to act on the 
 aggressive, perhaps to arraign the leaders of the 
 Commons for treasonable correspondence with 
 the Scotch. But he had to deal, in his friend 
 and coadjutor of former days, with no mere 
 rhetorician, but with a man of action as saga- 
 cious and as intrepid as himself. Pym at once 
 struck a blow which proved him a master of 
 revolution. Announcing to the Commons that 
 
28 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 he had weighty matter to impart, he moved that 
 the doors should be closed. When they were 
 opened, he carried up to the Lords the impeach- 
 ment of the Earl of Strafford. The earl came 
 down to the House of Lords that day with his 
 brow of imperial gloom, his impetuous step, his 
 tones and gestures of command: but scarcely 
 had he entered the house when he found that 
 power had departed from him; and the terrible 
 grand vizier of government by prerogative went 
 away a fallen man, none unbonneting to him, in 
 whose presence an hour before no man would 
 have stood covered. The speech by which Pym 
 swept the house on to this bold move, so that, as 
 Clarendon says, " not one man was found to stop 
 the torrent," is known only from Clarendon's out- 
 line. But that outline shows how the speaker 
 filled the thoughts of his hearers with a picture 
 of the tyranny, before he named its chief author, 
 the Earl of Strafford ; and how he blended with 
 the elements of indignation some lighter pas- 
 sages of the earl's vanity and amours, to mingle 
 indignation with contempt and to banish fear. 
 
 Through the report of the Scotch Commission- 
 er Baillie we see the great trial, to which that 
 of Warren Hastings was a parallel in splendor, 
 but no parallel in interest — Westminster Hall 
 filled with the Peers, the Commons, the foreign 
 
Pym. 29 
 
 nobility, come to learn if they could a lesson in 
 English politics — the ladies of quality, whose 
 hearts (and we can pardon them) were all with 
 the great criminal who made so gallant and skill- 
 ful a fight for life, and of whom it was said that, 
 like Ulysses, he had not beauty, but he had the 
 eloquence which moved a goddess to love. 
 Among the mass of the audience the interest, in- 
 tense at first, flagged as the immense process 
 went on ; and eating, drinking, loud talking filled 
 the intervals of the trial. But there was one 
 whose interest did not flag. The royal throne 
 was set for the king in his place ; but the king 
 was not there. He was with his queen in a pri- 
 vate gallery, the lattice-work of which, in his 
 eagerness to hear, he broke through with his 
 own hands. And there he heard, among other 
 things, these words of Pym: "If the histories of 
 eastern countries be pursued, whose princes order 
 their affairs according to the mischievous princi- 
 ples 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." 
 
 I need not make selections from a speech so 
 well known as that of Pym on the trial of Straf. 
 ford. But hear one or two answers to fallacies 
 which are not quite dead yet. To the charge of 
 
3<d Three English Statesmen, 
 
 arbitrary government in Ireland, Strafford had 
 pleaded that the Irish were a conquered nation. 
 " They were a conquered nation," cries Pym. 
 " There can not be a word more pregnant or fruit- 
 ful in treason than that word is. There are few 
 nations in the world that have not been conquer- 
 ed, and no doubt but the conqueror may give 
 what law he pleases to those that are conquered ; 
 but if the succeeding pacts and agreements do 
 not limit and restrain that right, what people can 
 be secure? England hath been conquered, and 
 Wales hath been conquered; and by this reason 
 will be in little better case than Ireland. If the 
 king by the right of a conqueror gives laws to 
 his people, shall not the people, by the same rea- 
 son, be restored to the right of the conquered to 
 recover their liberty if they can V } Strafford had 
 alleged good intentions as an excuse for his evil 
 counsels. " Sometimes, my lords," says Pym, 
 " good and evil, truth and falsehood, lie so near 
 together that they are hard to be distinguished. 
 Matters hurtful and dangerous may be accom- 
 panied with such circumstances as may make 
 them appear useful and convenient. But where 
 the matters propounded are evil in their own na- 
 ture, such as the matters are wherewith the Earl 
 of Strafford is charged, as to break public faith 
 and to subvert laws and government, they can 
 
Pym, 31 
 
 never be justified by any intentions, bow good 
 soever they be pretended." Again, to the plea that 
 it was a time of great danger and necessity, Pym 
 replies : " If there were any necessity, it was of 
 his own making ; he, by his evil counsel, had 
 brought the king into a necessity; and by no 
 rules of justice can be allowed to gain this ad- 
 vantage by his own fault, as to make that a 
 ground of his justification which is a great part 
 of his offense. 
 
 Once, we are told, while Pym was speak- 
 ing, his eyes met those of Strafford, and the 
 speaker grew confused, lost the thread of his 
 discourse, broke down beneath the haggard 
 glance of his old friend. Let us never glorify 
 revolution ! 
 
 It is commonly said that Pym and Hampden, 
 finding that the evidence for the impeachment 
 had failed, made short work with their victim by 
 an Act of Attainder. Mr. Forster has discovered 
 proof that Pym and Hampden were personally 
 against resorting to an Act of Attainder, and in 
 favor c€ praying judgment on the evidence in the 
 regular way; but the opinion of the majority 
 being opposed to theirs, they went with the rest. 
 Guilty of treason against the king Strafford was 
 not, for the king was his accomplice. But he was 
 guilty, and he stood and stands clearly convicted 
 
32 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 of that wliicli Pyni charged him — treason against 
 the nation. He had " endeavored by his words, 
 actions, and counsels, to subvert the fundamental 
 laws of England and Ireland, and to introduce an 
 arbitrary and tyrannical government." The Act 
 of Attainder was not in those days what it would 
 be in ours, an instrument of which no just man 
 would make use against the worst and most 
 dangerous of criminals. It had a place in juris- 
 prudence, and would have been used on the like 
 occasion as freely by one party as by the other. 
 In this case the process had been perfectly judi- 
 cial, and the Act of Attainder did no more than 
 punish treason against the nation, as the Statute 
 of Treasons would have punished treason against 
 the king. " Shall it be treason," asked Pym, al- 
 luding to that statute, " 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 a stamp and character of servitude on them, 
 whereby they shall be disabled to do any thing 
 for the service of the king and the c6mmon- 
 wealth?" And he justly reasoned that laws 
 would be vain if they had not a power to pre- 
 serve themselves, if any aspirant to arbitrary 
 power might with impunity compass their sub- 
 version. Falkland voted for the Act of Attain- 
 
Pytn. n 
 
 der, and Falkland would not nave voted for legis- 
 lative murder. 
 
 The Lords hesitated ; left to themselves they 
 would have shrunk from convicting on a capital 
 charge. But the popular clamor was loud and 
 terrible. The Lords showed what in them is 
 called tact, and the Bill of Attainder passed. 
 
 The king had pledged his word that not a hair 
 of Strafford's head should Ibe harmed ; and to a 
 chivalrous mind the release which Strafford sent 
 him would have made the pledge doubly strong. 
 But the king had casuists about him, and the 
 queen hated Strafford as the rival of her power, 
 though she allowed that he had fine hands. Be- 
 fore the trial, Charles had attempted to save his 
 minister by making overtures to the leaders of 
 the opposition, which, as they would have come 
 in as a party on their own principles and with 
 full securities, they were not only entitled but 
 bound as an opposition to accept. But the ne- 
 gotiation was broken off by Bedford's death. 
 Charles still tried influence and entreaty. But 
 the discovery of the queen's plot (for hers it 
 probably was), to bring up the army and over- 
 awe the parliament, sealed Strafford's doom. 
 And so that promise made in the conference at 
 Greenwich was kept to the letter. Better had it 
 not been so. Better to have been satisfied with 
 
 B2 
 
34 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 establishing the principle that treason against the 
 nation was as high a crime as treason against the 
 king, and then to have exalted and hallowed the 
 national cause by mercy. The other course ex- 
 alted and half hallowed the crime. But it seems 
 to have been the feeling of all patriots that the 
 constitution could not be safe while Strafford 
 lived. It was the moderate and chivalrous Essex 
 that uttered the hard words — " Stone dead hath 
 no fellow." Falkland was a party to the death 
 of Strafford ; so was Hyde, who, while he labors 
 to create the contrary impression, unwittingly be- 
 trays himself by a subsequent admission, that 
 throughout these transactions he and Falkland 
 had never differed from each other. So was Lord 
 Capel, though afterward, when all was changed, 
 himself dying as a royalist on the scaffold, he pro- 
 fessed to repent of his vote. 
 
 Laud was impeached also. Surely no man 
 ever tried the sufferance of his kind more severely 
 than this persecutor in the name of an authority 
 which was itself the rebel of yesterday. There is 
 something singularly tyrannical in High Anglican 
 pretensions. The victims of Laud had seen with 
 their own eyes the introduction of the doctrines 
 and the practices which they were called upon to 
 accept as the immemorial and unbroken tradition 
 of an immutable and infallible church. Laud 
 
Pym. 35 
 
 had learned government in the petty despotism of 
 a college. He was subject, as his friends said, to 
 some infirmities of temper ; " that is," remarks Mr. 
 Hallam, "he was choleric, harsh, vindictive, and 
 even cruel to a great degree." In the case of Fel- 
 ton he wished to revive the use of torture ; but 
 this was too much, even for the judges of Charles 
 I. Clarendon tries to make out that he suffered 
 for his impartial severity to the vices of the great. 
 No doubt he was rude, rude as he would have 
 been to college under-graduates, to all orders of 
 men, and he made himself some enemies of rank 
 thereby. But he rose in life as the creature and 
 parasite of Buckingham. He tried, say High 
 Church writers, with complacency, to win Buck- 
 ingham to the Church's cause. To the Church's 
 cause, no; but to some cause which needs the 
 patronage of Buckinghams. Which element pre- 
 dominated in his character, that of the bigoted 
 and intolerant priest, or that of the ecclesiastical 
 adventurer, it is not easy to say : perhaps the Bo- 
 man archives, when they are explored, may throw 
 some light upon the subject. No man ever so 
 distinctly conceived the alliance between civil and 
 ecclesiastical tyranny. Who could conceive it so 
 distinctly as the ambitious head of a hierarchy 
 which was a creature of the State ? When he 
 had got the great political offices placed in clerical 
 
2,6 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Lands, lie thought that all that man conld do had 
 been done for the Chnrch of God. Over the 
 •porch of St. Mary's Church at Oxford stand a Vir- 
 gin and Child, placed there by Laud. The Virgin 
 she seems to be ; but look closer, the circlet round 
 her head is not a heavenly crown, but the coronet 
 of a peeress. She is Political Eeligion, and in 
 her arms she bears the infant Unbelief. 
 
 Pym spoke of course in support of the im- 
 peachment of Laud. He denounced in language 
 strong but not virulent the perversion of God's 
 law to defend the lawlessness of man, the abuse 
 of the ministry ordained for the instruction of 
 souls to the promotion of violence and oppres- 
 sion. He remarked that "those who labored in 
 civil matters to set up the king above the laws of 
 the kingdom, did yet in ecclesiastical matters la- 
 bor to set up themselves above the king." Laud 
 was consigned to the Tower ; but no farther pro- 
 ceedings were taken against him till the hand of 
 death was on Pym ; and I am persuaded that had 
 Pym lived, Laud would not have died. It was 
 the narrower and more cruel Presbyterians that 
 brought the old man to the block. 
 
 And now that promise of a clean sweeping of 
 the house from floor to roof, which Pym whis- 
 pered in Clarendon's ear at the meeting of the 
 parliament, was vigorously kept. All the engines 
 
Pym. 37 
 
 of the tyranny were demolished ; all its chief 
 agents deprived and banished. The return to 
 government without parliaments was barred by 
 the Triennial Act. Ship-money judges learned, 
 and bequeathed to all who might like them be 
 tempted to pervert law to the purposes of power, 
 the lesson that the justice of a nation, though it 
 sleeps, may not be dead. A doubt was raised 
 whether the king would consent to the punish- 
 ment of so many and such high delinquents. 
 "Shall we therefore doubt of justice," said Pym, 
 " because we have need of great justice 3" 
 
 It is mournful to say that one of the com- 
 plaints against the king was his lenity to Popish 
 priests. But in him, the persecutor of the Puri- 
 tans, this lenity was not toleration, but conniv- 
 ance. When the law, hateful as it was, was as- 
 serted, and the priests were left to the Commons, 
 their lives were safe — safer, as Clarendon peevish- 
 ly says, than if they had been pardoned under 
 the great seal. Pym declared expressly that he 
 did not desire any new laws against Popery, or 
 any rigorous courses in the execution of those al- 
 ready in force : he was far from seeking the ruin 
 of their persons or estates ; only he wished they 
 might be kept in such a condition as to restrain 
 them from doing hurt. To restrain them from 
 doing hurt was unhappily in those days part of 
 
38 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 a statesman's duty. They were , liegemen and 
 soldiers of that successor of the apostles whose 
 confederates were Philip II. and Charles IX., and 
 who struck a medal in honor of the massacre of 
 St. Bartholomew. 
 
 And now, all these reforms having been accom- 
 plished, all these offenders punished, all these se- 
 curities for lawful government provided, the king 
 having even assented to the act which, in clear 
 contradiction to his prerogative, forbade the dis- 
 solution of the then parliament without its own 
 consent, was it not time to bring the movement 
 to a close, and to replace the sovereign power, 
 which the parliament had virtually seized, in the 
 king's hands % So thought many who had up to 
 this point been zealous reformers, and some, at 
 all events, whose opinions we are bound to treat 
 with respect. So thought not Pym and Hamp- 
 den. To them it seemed that the king could not 
 be trusted ; that the last clay of the parliament 
 would be the last of his good faith ; that they 
 must go on till they had left him no power to 
 undo the work which had been done. They re- 
 membered the double answer to the Petition of 
 Eight. They remembered, as they showed on all 
 occasions, the fate of Sir John Eliot. "We have 
 good reason, they perhaps had better reason, to 
 believe that the court was still hostile, still in- 
 
Pym. 39 
 
 triguing, still aiming at a counter revolution; 
 and Clarendon owns that Charles had been per- 
 suaded to consent to measures which he abhorred, 
 on the ground that they might be afterward re- 
 voked on the plea of duress. To the last it 
 proved hard to bind this anointed king. But 
 let us not forget to say emphatically, that the 
 leaders of the Commons needed all this to justify 
 them in giving the word for revolution. 
 
 They prepared a great appeal to the nation, 
 which took the shape of the Grand Eemonstrance. 
 Charles now went to Scotland, ostensibly to set- 
 tle matters there and disband the armies, really 
 to make himself a party, and provide himself with 
 weapons against the leaders of the opposition. 
 Episcopacy being at this time threatened with 
 abolition, he assured its friends that if they could 
 keep the Church safe during his absence, he would 
 undertake for its safety on his return. Hampden 
 went, with other delegates of the parliament, to 
 watch him, while Pym remained at the centre of 
 affairs, one proof among many that able, powerful, 
 and revered as Hampden was, Pym, not Hamp- 
 den, was the real chief. The higher social posi- 
 tion of Hampden is perhaps the main source of 
 the contrary impression. King Pym was the 
 name given to Pym by the lampooners, and 
 though in jest they spoke the truth. " The most 
 
4-0 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 popular man," says Clarendon, " and the most 
 able to do hurt, that hath lived in any time." 
 The most able to do hurt, that is the phrase : how 
 can a leader of the people use his power for good % 
 And now came the sinister news of the attempt 
 to make away with or kidnap the covenanting 
 chiefs in Scotland ; and close upon it, at once ter- 
 rible and maddening to Protestant hearts, the 
 tidings of the rising of the Catholics and of the 
 massacre of the Protestants in Ireland. The king 
 was innocent of the Irish rebellion ; it was simply 
 a natural episode in the Irish land question. But 
 he wrote to Secretary Nicholas, " I hope this ill 
 news of Ireland will hinder some of those follies 
 in England." 
 
 It did not hinder the preparation of the Grand 
 Kemonstrance. But a chivalrous royalist tried to 
 hinder all the follies in a more practical way. A 
 letter was one day delivered to Pym in the house 
 by a messenger who had received it from a horse- 
 man in grey. When it was opened, there dropped 
 from it a rag which had been taken from a plague 
 sore, and was of course full of infection. The 
 writer intimated that, if this did not do the busi- 
 ness, a surer weapon would be tried. A surer 
 weapon, it seems, was tried, but it struck the 
 wrong man. The world improves, though slow- 
 ly. Then it was the stab of the assassin's 
 
Pym, 41 
 
 dagger ; now it is only the stab of the assassin's 
 tongue. 
 
 And now the Grand Eemonstrance was ready. 
 Manifestly drawn by Pym, it recites through a 
 long series of clauses, but with monumental grav- 
 ity and terseness, the grievances for which Par- 
 liament had extorted redress, and concludes, in 
 effect, by calling on the nation to support its 
 leaders in making the work good against evil 
 counselors and reaction. On the morning of 
 the 23d of November, 1641, it lay engrossed 
 upon the table of the House of Commons ; not 
 the present House of Commons, as Mr. Forster re- 
 minds us, but the narrow, ill-lighted, dingy room 
 in which for centuries some of the world's most 
 important work was done. And never, perhaps, 
 did that old room, never did any hall of debate, 
 witness such an oratoric struggle as the debate on 
 the Grand Eemonstrance. The speakers were 
 Pym, Hampden, Falkland, Hyde, Culpepper, Or- 
 lando Bridgman, Denzil Hollis, "Waller, Glyn, 
 Maynard, others of name. The stake was the 
 revolution and the fortunes of all who were em- 
 barked in it. Cromwell said that if they had lost 
 he would have left England. The forces were by 
 this time evenly balanced, for secession to the 
 court had made great gaps in the patriot array, 
 and in the royalist ranks were now seen not only 
 
42 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Digby, Hyde, Culpepper, "but Falkland — Falk- 
 land, in whose house, the free resort of all learn- 
 ing, a college, as his friend calls it, situated in a 
 purer air, no small part, perhaps, of the intellect- 
 ual elements of the revolution had been formed. 
 There were many waverers whose votes were still 
 to be lost or won. From noon to past midnight 
 the battle raged ; for a battle it was of orators, 
 not dictating pamphlets to the reporters, but grap- 
 pling with each other for victory. The merest 
 skeleton, alas! of the speeches alone remains. 
 Pym rose when the debate was at its height, re- 
 plying to the leaders on the king's side — Hyde, 
 Falkland, Culpepper, and Sir Edward Dering. 
 That the house was thinned by fatigue before the 
 division has been proved to be a mistake ; though 
 there were many trimmers who stayed away al- 
 together. At midnight the Remonstrance was 
 carried by eleven — 159 to 148. So charged was 
 the air with the electricity of that fierce debate, 
 that when the royalist Palmer attempted to pro- 
 test, a tumult arose in which, as one who was 
 present says, they had almost sheathed their 
 swords in each others' breasts. In the following 
 clays the exasperated majority proceeded to vio- 
 lent measures against members of the minority. 
 Let us never glorify revolution ! 
 
 Now Charles arrived from Scotland, inflamed 
 
Pym. 43 
 
 by contact with the fiery spirit of Montrose, and 
 bringing the proofs he had sought of the com- 
 plicity of the opposition leaders with the Scotch. 
 He found the royalist reaction strong, many gained 
 over by the queen, the students of the Temple hot 
 in his favor, a royalist lord mayor, who got up 
 for him an enthusiastic reception in the city. He 
 was in an atmosphere of violence. Whitehall 
 was thronged with disbanded officers and soldiers, 
 ready at his command to fall on. The parliament, 
 by a bold act of sovereign power, had raised for 
 .itself a guard. Soon the names of Cavalier and 
 Eoundhead were heard ; soon blood was shed, and 
 the hand which unfolds the book of history turned 
 the red page of civil war. The French queen, ig- 
 norant that in England a nation lay behind the 
 parliament, thought the time had come for crush- 
 ing the ringleaders and stamping out the revolu- 
 tion. Even now it seems Charles wavered be- 
 tween two policies, and made some overtures to 
 Pym. Then he gave ear to the queen and Digby, 
 impeached the five members, and went himself, 
 with an armed train, to seize them in the House 
 of Commons. All know how the attempt was 
 foiled; how Lady Carlyle — a storm-bird of this 
 revolutionary storm, the political devotee first of 
 Strafford, and when Strafford fell, of his conqueror 
 — conveyed a warning to Pym ; how the queen 
 
44 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 cried joyfully that the king was master again of 
 his kingdom, and found that she had spoken too 
 soon; how Charles entered the . House, looked 
 toward the place, on the right hand near the bar, 
 where Pym sat, found that he and all the " birds" 
 were " flown ;" left the House amid cries of " Privi- 
 lege f tried the city ; found there now, instead of 
 an enthusiastic greeting, shouts of " To your tents, 
 O Israel ;" and departed from Whitehall to return 
 once more ; how the five members were brought 
 back in triumph, " and," as Clarendon says, with 
 an irony too near the truth, "set upon their 
 thrones again ;" and how four thousand freehold- 
 ers of Buckinghamshire rode up to protect their 
 Hampden. Where are those four thousand free- 
 holders of Buckinghamshire now ? And where 
 then our English Hampden stood, speaking for 
 English liberty, who stands now upholding mar- 
 tial law as the suspension of all law ? 
 
 Pym must now have seen that he had to con- 
 duct a civil war. His first task w T as to strength- 
 en the weak knees of the Lords. The special 
 grievance of the Lords, the preference of upstart 
 ecclesiastics to the great nobility in appointments 
 to the offices of the State, had long ago been re- 
 dressed ; they saw that matters were going too 
 far for an aristocracy, and they had begun by 
 their qualms greatly to disturb the unity of ac- 
 
Pym. 45 
 
 tion. They liad thrown out the bill for taking 
 away the votes of the "bishops. A great popular 
 demonstration was got up against obstruction. 
 Pyin carried the petitions of the people to the 
 Lords, and backed them with a speech, in which he 
 said that the Commons " would be sorry that the 
 story of that parliament should tell posterity that 
 in so great a danger and extremity the House of 
 Commons should be enforced to save the king- 
 dom alone." The Lords again showed tact ; 
 they passed the bishops' bill with only three 
 dissentient voices, and they also passed the bill 
 giving Parliament the command of the militia. 
 
 The passing of the bill for taking away the 
 bishops' votes was a matter of vital necessity to 
 Pym, who though himself, as has been said already, 
 an Episcopalian, and the reverse of a fanatic, was 
 thrown more and more, as the struggle went on 
 and the moderates seceded, on the Presbyterians 
 and the Independents. From the Independents 
 we may be sure his cultivated statesmanship 
 would shrink; but as a leader he must have 
 noted that the unwavering courage and devotion 
 of these men, their fixity of purpose, their terrible 
 force, stood out more clearly as the sky darken- 
 ed and the storm came on. Mirabeau marked 
 the intensity of conviction which was to give ul- 
 timate ascendancy to the chief of the Jacobins. 
 
46 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Pym may have marked the same thing in Crom- 
 well. 
 
 The final rupture between the king and the 
 Commons took place on the demand of the par- 
 liament for the control of the military forces of 
 the kingdom. No doubt if Charles had yielded 
 to this demand, nothing would have been left 
 him but the name and state of a king. And 
 yet while the king had the power of the sword, 
 could a constitution which he desired to over- 
 throw be secure % The question is not made less 
 grave by the substitution of a standing army for 
 a militia. It may one day present itself again. 
 In truth it does partly present itself whenever 
 an attempt is made to bring the Horse Guards 
 under constitutional control. 
 
 A pause ensues of eight months, during which 
 all Englishmen are choosing their parts, all pre- 
 paring for civil war ; the king's pursuivants and 
 his commissions of array are being encountered 
 by the commissioners and the ordinances of the 
 parliament ; the old corselet and steel-cap, the 
 old pike, and sword, and carbine are being taken 
 down from the wall where they had hung since 
 the time of the Armada; the hunter and the 
 farm-horse are being trained to stand fire ; squad- 
 rons of yeomen, battalions of burghers are being 
 drilled by officers who had served under Gusta- 
 
Pym. v 47 
 
 vus ; French and German engineers are organiz- 
 ing the artillery; uniforms are being made for 
 Newcastle's white-coats, Hampden's green-coats, 
 Lord Saye's blue-coats, the City' of London's red- 
 coats ; banners are being embroidered with mot- 
 toes, loyal or patriotic ; friends who have taken 
 opposite sides with sad hearts are waving a last 
 farewell across the widening gulf to each other. 
 Sir William Waller, the parliamentarian general, 
 writes to his future antagonist, the royalist gen- 
 eral, Sir Ralph Hopton — " My affections to you 
 are so unchangeable, that hostility itself can not 
 violate my friendship to your person ; but I must 
 be true to the cause wherein I serve. 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. The God of peace in his good time 
 send us peace, and in the mean time fit us to re- 
 ceive 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 honor, and 
 without personal animosities." Not only friend 
 against friend, neighbor against neighbor, but 
 father against son, son against father, brother 
 against brother, women's hearts torn between the 
 husband who fought on one side, the father and 
 brother who fought on the other ; those who last 
 
48 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 Christmas met round the same board, before next 
 Christmas to meet in battle. If the High 
 Church bishops and clergy were too roughly- 
 handled, as unhappily they were, let it be re- 
 membered that this was their war. It was truly 
 called Bellum Episcopale. " I have eaten the 
 king's bread," said Sir Edmund Verney, the 
 king's standard-bearer, " near thirty years, and I 
 will not do so base a thing as to forsake him. 
 I 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 ; for I will deal freely with you, I have 
 no reverence for the bishops, for whom this quar- 
 rel subsists." Sir. Edmund's presentiment was 
 true ; the first battle released him from this 
 struggle between his conscience and his chivalry. 
 Let it be noted, however, that the injunction 
 of Sir William Waller was not unobserved. 
 This war was on the whole carried on in a way 
 of honor ; and if not without personal animosity, 
 at least without the savage cruelty which has 
 marked the civil wars of some nations. It was 
 waged like a war of principle, like the war of a 
 self-controlled and manly race. It was entered 
 upon too, by the Commons at least, in the right 
 spirit, as a most mournful necessity, with public 
 humiliation and prayer. The play-houses were 
 
Pym. 49 
 
 closed by an ordinance of the Parliament as in a 
 time of national sorrow. These hypocrites, say 
 royalists, knelt down to pray, and rose np again 
 to shed innocent blood. And does not every re- 
 ligions soldier, when he goes into battle, do the 
 same? 
 
 The king had now on his side almost all the 
 nobility, most of the wealthier gentry, and the 
 more backward parts of the country, in whicli 
 the feudal tie between the land-owners and the 
 peasantry was still strong ; such as the western 
 counties, Wales, and part of the north. Of 
 course he had the Episcopalian clergy, and the 
 cathedral towns and universities which were un- 
 der their influence. Oxford, once the intellect- 
 ual head-quarters of Simon de Montfort, was now 
 the head-quarters of Charles. The Koman Cath- 
 olics also were with him ; he and they were in 
 the same plot against liberty, though they did 
 not yet quite understand each other. Pym and 
 the Commons were strong in the more advanced 
 and commercial districts, especially in the eastern 
 counties. They had all the great towns, even 
 those in the districts favorable to the enemy. 
 'The town of Manchester," says Clarendon, 
 " had from the beginning, out of that factious 
 humor which possessed most corporations, and 
 
 the pride of their wealth, opposed the king, and 
 
 C 
 
5<3 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 declared magisterially for the parliament." Bir- 
 mingham, too, according to the same authority, 
 " was of as great fame for hearty, willful, affected 
 disloyalty to the king as any place in England?' 
 London was the head-quarters ; not a London of 
 warehouses at one end and Belgravias at the 
 other, but a great city democracy, still warlike, 
 as the conduct of the train-bands at Newbury 
 proved, and devoted with heart and purse to the 
 cause. Above all, the Commons had the lesser 
 gentry and the independent yeomanry, every- 
 where attached to the cause by its religious side. 
 Those independent yeomanry, with high hearts 
 and convictions of their own, who filled the ranks 
 of the Ironsides, who conquered ,for English lib- 
 erty at Marston, Naseby, and Worcester, in their 
 native England are now seen no more. Here 
 they have left a great, perhaps a fatal, gap in the 
 ranks of freedom. But under Grant and Sher- 
 man they still conquer for the good cause. 
 
 Foreign powers stood neutral. Happily for 
 us, Laud's desire of reunion with Rome had not 
 been fulfilled, and the Anglican reaction in En- 
 gland remained isolated from the Catholic reac- 
 tion in the rest of Europe. The Anglican Pope 
 could not stoop to submission, and Rome would 
 hear of no compromise. To all offers of com- 
 promise, to all offers of any thing but submission, 
 
Pym. 51 
 
 she then said non possuvnus, and she says non 
 possumus still. So the Catholic powers left 
 Charles to the doom of a heretic prince, and 
 when his head fell on the scaffold, took the op- 
 portunity of buying his fine collection of works 
 of art. Spain played her own game in Ireland ; 
 and Richelieu throughout the whole of these 
 transactions had been intriguing with the lead- 
 ers of the Commons. The sympathies of the 
 States of Holland were with the parliament, 
 those of the House of Orange with the king. 
 
 Standing army in those days there was none ; 
 if there had been, Charles would have crushed 
 liberty. The navy was on the side of the Com- 
 mons. The sailors were inclined to Puritanism, 
 and they were the sons of those who had fought 
 against the Armada. 
 
 The voice of the cannon was heralded by vol- 
 leys of paper missiles from both sides. This is 
 the stormy birth-hour of our newspaper press ; 
 and it is instructive to see that, from the first, 
 the party of " blood and culture" held its own 
 in ruffianism and ribaldry. A statelier war 
 of manifestoes meanwhile was waged between 
 Pym in the name of the Commons, and Claren- 
 don in the name of the king. Hallam thinks 
 that Clarendon had the best of it. Mr. Forster 
 scouts the idea. But I am of Hallam's mind. 
 
52 Three English Statesmem. 
 
 Pyni is trying to make the parchment of legality 
 cover a revolution ; and so stretched, the parch- 
 ment cracks, as Clarendon does not fail to mark. 
 Yet Pym was wise in presenting his cause as le- 
 gally as possible to a law-loving people, who had 
 not learned to think of law apart from a king. 
 Nor does he fail to display his power, which lay 
 especially in unmasking fallacies of principle. 
 Hyde had argued that the king had as good a 
 title to his town of Hull and its magazines, as 
 any of his subjects had to their houses and lands, 
 and that to dispose of the place without his con- 
 sent would shake the foundations of property in 
 general. " Here," replies Pym, " that is laid 
 down for a principle which would indeed pull 
 up the very foundation of the liberty, property, 
 and interest of every subject in particular, and 
 of all the subjects in general, if we should admit 
 it for a truth that his majesty hath the same 
 right and title to his towns and magazines 
 (bought with the public money, as we conceive 
 that at Hull to have been) that every particular 
 man hath to his house, lands, and goods ; for his 
 majesty's towns are no more his own than his 
 people are his own ; and if the king had a prop- 
 erty in all his towns, what would become of the 
 subjects' property in their houses therein?" 
 
 A provisional government of five peers and 
 
Pym. 53 
 
 ten commoners was formed, under the name of 
 the Committee of Safety, and installed at Derby 
 House. At its head was Pym. Hampden went 
 down to his county to muster his yeomen, and 
 to second and perhaps watch Essex, a military 
 grandee of rather lukewarm sentiments, though 
 honorable and trustworthy, whom it was thought 
 politic to make commander-in-chief. Pym in his 
 youth had been in the Exchequer ; and the 
 Chancellorship of the Exchequer was the office 
 destined for him when he and his friends were 
 on the point of forming a government. He now 
 used his financial knowledge to organize the 
 finance of the Commons in the way of regular 
 taxation extending over all the districts in their 
 power, to the envy of Clarendon, whose side was 
 supplied only by irregular contributions and by 
 the rapine, as wasteful as it was odious, of Ku- 
 pert. " One side," says Clarendon, mournfully, 
 "seemed to fight for monarchy with the weapons 
 of confusion, and the other to destroy the king 
 and government with all the principles and regu- 
 larity of monarchy." 
 
 Toward the end of October, 1642, whatever 
 there may have been on Pym's brow, deep care 
 must have been in his heart, for the king was 
 moving southward on London, Essex was wait- 
 ing on his march, and a battle was at hand. 
 
54 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Accordingly, on Monday, the 24th, came first, 
 borne on the wings of fear, the news of the great 
 defeat ; then better news, then worse news again ; 
 then Lord Wharton and Mr. Strode from the army, 
 with authentic tidings of the doubtful victory 
 of Edgehill. Edgehill, the king's evening halt- 
 ing-place, looks out from the brow of the high ta- 
 ble-land on a wide champaign ; and immediately 
 below lies the little town of Keynton, the even- 
 ing halting-place of Essex. Between Edgehill and 
 Keynton is a wood called the Graves, the burial- 
 place of five thousand Englishmen slain by En- 
 glish hands, among them it was said of a soldier 
 to whom death was made more bitter by the 
 thought that he had fallen by the carbine, in 
 vain avoided, of his brother. There, on the Sab- 
 bath day, October 23, Roundhead and Cavalier 
 first tried the bitter taste of civil war. From 
 two o'clock till nightfall the plain between Edge- 
 hill foot and Keynton was filled with the wild 
 and confused eddies of a battle fought by raw 
 troops under inexperienced commanders. The ac- 
 tion was, however, a sort of epitome of the war. 
 It began with the desertion to the enemy of a 
 body of Parliamentary horse under Fortescue, 
 named by his sponsors, in prophetic irony, Sir 
 Faithful. Rupert with his cavalry carried all be- 
 fore him, rode headlong off in pursuit, and return- 
 
Pym. 55 
 
 ed with his wearied horsemen to find the Parlia- 
 mentary infantry in possession of the field, and 
 the king's person in great danger. The army of 
 the Commons was enabled to hold its ground 
 that night and the next day, and thus to gain 
 the semblance of a victory — a semblance which 
 was the saving of the cause — by the zeal of the 
 country people, who eagerly brought them pro- 
 visions, while the king's soldiers, when they went 
 out to forage, were knocked upon the head. 
 But as yet there was no Cromwell in command, 
 and the serving-men and tapsters in the army 
 were too many, the Ironsides were too few, as in 
 the Federal army at Bull's Kun there was too 
 much of New York and too little of Illinois. 
 Edgehill was, in fact, our Bull's Run. The panic 
 of the Parliamentary horse at the first charge of 
 the Cavaliers was shameful. Some must have 
 fied still earlier, if there be any truth in Claren- 
 don's statement that though the battle began so 
 late, runaways, and not only common soldiers, 
 but officers of rank, were in St. Albans before 
 night-fall. If the Times' s correspondent had been 
 there, he would certainly have reported that En- 
 glishmen would not fight. Our natio'n, like the 
 American nation of late, had to go through great- 
 er trials, and be thrown more upon its nobler 
 self, before it could deserve victory. 
 
56 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 The Commons voted Essex £5,000 for his 
 success. But meanwhile the king was taking 
 Banbury, and in a fortnight he was before Lon- 
 don. The Commons^had gone into the conflict, 
 like the people of the Northern States, full of 
 overweening confidence in their superior numbers 
 and resources, and ignorant of the bitterness of 
 war. They had now found to their cost that an 
 aristocracy and its dependents, used, the masters 
 to command and the servants to obey, have a 
 great advantage over a democracy in the field, 
 till the democracy have learned the higher dis- 
 cipline of intelligent submission to command for 
 the sake of their own course. From the pinna- 
 cle of exaltation they fell into the depth of dis- 
 couragement ; and the thirteen months of life 
 which remained to Pym were months of incessant 
 struggle against despondency, defection, and dis- 
 aster. The peers soon began to fall away. The 
 few members of the Upper House who stayed at 
 Westminster were a perpetual source of timid 
 councils. Essex himself, though he kept his 
 faith, felt the bias of his order; he was at best 
 far from a great general, and his operations in 
 the field were apt to be affected by fits of politi- 
 cal moderation. The fortune of war was on the 
 whole decidedly in favor of the king. The 
 Fairfaxes were defeated at Atherton. Sir Wil- 
 
Pym. 57 
 
 liam Waller, after the brief career of victory 
 which gained him the nickname of William 
 the Conqueror, met with a bloody and decisive 
 overthrow at Roundway Down. Bristol was 
 surrendered by Fiennes, the only notable instance 
 of a want of military courage among these lead- 
 ers who, many of them so late in life, had 
 changed peaceful arts for war. Only in the asso- 
 ciation of the eastern counties, where Cromwell 
 fought under Lord Mandeville, the light of hope 
 still shone. The discovery of the plot formed by 
 Waller, who had been a leading patriot in the 
 debate on the Grand Remonstrance, to deliver 
 London to the king, revealed the abyss on the 
 edge of which the leaders of the Commons stood. 
 A mob of women, and women in men's clothes, 
 came to the House of Commons, calling for the 
 traitor Pym, and it was necessary to disperse 
 them with cavalry. Hampden, Pym's second 
 self, and the second pillar of the cause, fell in a 
 petty skirmish on Chalgrove Field. Yet Pym 
 seems to have remained master of the burning 
 vessel, tossed as she was upon a raging sea. 
 He managed the war, kept watch against conspir- 
 acy, held together the discordant and wavering 
 party in Parliament, sustained by his eloquence 
 the enthusiasm of the city. Unable to quell the 
 
 tendency of the peace party to treat, he adroitly 
 
 C2 
 
58 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 fell in with it ; went down himself to the city, 
 which had become infuriated at the report of 
 negotiations, to vindicate the character of the 
 Parliainet, and thus remaining master of the 
 negotiations, prevented them- from degenerating 
 into surrender. While the king, made confident 
 by success, was issuing proclamations promising 
 pardon to all but leading rebels, Pym daringly 
 impeached the queen for the part which she was 
 taking in the war. The queen was not in his 
 hands, nor likely to be ; and if she had been she 
 would have been safe. The move was intended 
 only to commit Parliament past recall, and to 
 hurl defiance at the king. The Presbyterians 
 were secured by the appointment of the Assem- 
 bly of Divines to reform the Church after their 
 model. But it is evident that the free nature of 
 Pym, and the free natures of other men like 
 Pym, struggled hard and long before they could 
 consent to bow their necks to the yoke of the 
 Calvinistic covenant, on which condition alone 
 the aid, now indispensable, could be obtained 
 from the Scotch. 
 
 The tide still ran for the king. Gloucester, 
 the last stronghold of the Commons in the west, 
 was in peril. Essex had sent to the Houses 
 proposals for an accommodation, the rejection of 
 which Pym and St. John, by their utmost efforts, 
 
Pym. 59 
 
 could only just procure. Then Pym went down 
 to the tent of Essex, tried on the moody and 
 jealous aristocrat the powers of persuasion which 
 had carried the Grand Eemonstrance, and tried 
 them not in vain. Essex marched: Gloucester 
 was relieved; the king was worsted at New- 
 bury ; and a ray of victory breaking from the 
 cloud, shone upon Pym's last hour. 
 
 Work tells upon the sensitive organizations 
 of men of genius. Pym had been working, as 
 the preacher of his funeral sermon tells us, from 
 three in the morning till evening, and from even- 
 ing again till midnight. He must have borne a 
 crushing weight of anxiety besides. The loath- 
 some fables invented by the royalists are not 
 needed to account for the failure of his health. 
 He met his end, if we may trust the report of 
 his friends, with perfect calmness. At the last, 
 we are told, he fell into a swoon, and when he 
 recovered his consciousness, seeing his friends 
 weeping round him, he told them that he had 
 looked death in the face, and therefore feared not 
 the worst he could do ; added some words of re- 
 ligious hope and comfort ; and, while a minister 
 was praying with him, quietly slept with God. 
 Funeral sermons are not history. No character 
 is flawless, least of all the characters of men who 
 lead in violent times. But if the cause of En- 
 
6o Three English Statesmen. 
 
 glish liberty was a good cause, Pym's conscience, 
 so far as we can see, might well bid Mm turn 
 calmly to his rest. 
 
 The King of the Commons was "buried with 
 the utmost pomp and magnificence in the resting- 
 place of kings. The body was borne from 
 Derby House to Westminster Abbey by ten of 
 the leading members of the House of Commons, 
 followed by both Houses of Parliament in full 
 mourning, by the Assembly of Divines, and by 
 many gentlemen of quality, with two heralds of 
 arms before the corpse bearing the crest of the 
 deceased. This last piece of state shows how 
 near we still are to feudalism, how far from the 
 Sans-culottes. Ten thousand pounds were voted 
 to pay Pym's debts, a proof that he had not 
 grown rich by the public service. No doubt he 
 had been obliged to keep some state and hos- 
 pitality, as head of the provisional government, 
 at Derby House. A pension was also voted to his 
 son, who bore arms for the Parliament, but after 
 the Kestoration sank into a baronetcy — one 
 proof among many that public virtue is not 
 hereditary and that its titles ought not to be so. 
 Nor did Oxford fail in its way to do honor to 
 the departed chief. The news of Pym's death 
 had been long eagerly expected there, and when 
 it arrived, bonfires were lighted, and there was 
 
Pym, 6 1 
 
 high carousing among the Cavaliers. He was 
 gone, the man most needful to the common- 
 wealth, and, as it seemed, at the hour of her 
 utmost need. But before he went he had turned 
 the tide, and he bequeathed victory to his cause. 
 Had Pym lived and remained master of the 
 movement, what would have been the result ? 
 Into what port did he mean to steer his revolu- 
 tion ? To have embarked on the sea of civil war 
 without a port in view would not have been the 
 part of a great man. The indications are very 
 slight in themselves ; but taken with the circum- 
 stances and the reason of the case, they may per- 
 haps amount to probability. If my surmise is 
 right, Pym would have preserved the monarchy, 
 he would not have changed the family, but he 
 would have changed the king. He would have 
 put the king's nephew, Prince Charles Louis, the 
 eldest son of the Protestant heroine, Elizabeth 
 Queen of Bohemia, on the English throne. The 
 prince, unlike his brothers Rupert and Maurice, 
 had shown sympathy with the Commons, and he 
 was received at London with much state just 
 about the time when Pym died. English histo- 
 ry presented to Pym's historic mind more than 
 one example of such a change of king. Thus he 
 would have done in 1643 what was afterward 
 done in 1688, but he would probably have done 
 
62 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 it with a stronger and more statesman-like hand, 
 less in the interest of the aristocracy and the 
 hierarchy, and more in the interest of the nation. 
 At the Restoration, Pyra's body was torn, 
 under a royal warrant, from its tomb, and 
 thrown with the bodies of other rebels below 
 the rank of regicide into a pit in the adjoin- 
 ing church-yard. The great man of the heroic 
 age lies not beside the parliamentary tacticians 
 whom our age calls great. As you stand on 
 the north side of the nave of St. Margaret's 
 Church, where some canons' houses once were, 
 your feet are on the dust of Pym, of Blake and 
 Dean, of Strode, of May the parliamentary histo- 
 rian, of Twiss the Prolocutor of the Assembly 
 of Divines, of Dorislaus the martyred envoy of 
 the Commonwealth, of Cromwell's mother, whom 
 also the chivalry and piety of the Restoration 
 tore out of her grave. Hampden had fallen and 
 been buried in his own county, or his dust too 
 would be there. In the vestibule of that vast 
 and sumptuous but feebly conceived and effem- 
 inately ornamented pile, no unmeet shrine of 
 Plutocracy, the present House of Commons, 
 stand on either hand the statues of parliamentary 
 worthies. Pym is not there. Ignorance proba- 
 bly it is that has excluded the foremost worthy 
 of the mall. Pym does not look down on the 
 
Pym. 63 
 
 men who now fill the house which once he led : 
 nor do they read on the pedestal of his statue 
 the moral of his political life — "The best form 
 of government is that which doth actuate and 
 dispose every part and member of a state to the 
 common good." But Pym has a statue in histo- 
 ry, and seldom has there been more need for un- 
 veiling it than now. 
 

 
 
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 CROMWELL 
 
II. 
 
 CROMWELL. 
 
 I have called my subject " Cromwell." I 
 ought, perhaps, rather to have called it the Pro- 
 tectorate. For to that part of Cromwell's life 
 what I have to say will be almost entirely con- 
 fined. I speak of him not as a general, or as a 
 party leader, but as a prince. 
 
 In the early debates on religion, amid the great 
 orators of the Parliaments of Charles, there had 
 stood up a gentleman farmer of Huntingdonshire, 
 a fervent Puritan, with power on his brow and in 
 his frame, with enthusiasm, genius, even the ten- 
 derness of genius in his eye; but in a dress which 
 scandalized young courtiers, and with an unmu- 
 sical voice, his sentences confused, his utterance 
 almost choked by the vehemence of his emotion. 
 On him God had not bestowed the gift of soul- 
 enthralling words ; his eloquence was the thun- 
 der of victory. 
 
 Victory went with him where he fought, when 
 she had deserted the standards of all the other 
 
68 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 chiefs of his party. Hope shone in him " as a 
 pillar of fire," when her light had gone out in all 
 other men. He came to the front rank from the 
 moment when debating was over, and the time 
 arrived for organizing war. From the first he 
 rightly conceived the condition of success — a sol- 
 diery of yeomen fearing God, fearing nothing else, 
 submitting themselves for the sake of their cause 
 to a rigid discipline, as the only match for the 
 impetuous chivalry of the Cavaliers : and his con- 
 ception was embodied in the Ironsides. Marston 
 crowns the first period of his career. It was won 
 by the discipline of his men. Then came the 
 struggle between his party, who wished to con- 
 quer, and the Presbyterians, who but half wished 
 to conquer, who by this time hated the sectaries 
 in their own ranks more than the common enemy, 
 and whose aristocratic leaders now saw plainly 
 that the revolution was going beyond the objects 
 of an aristocracy, and that it was likely to do too 
 much for the people. The Self-denying Ordi- 
 nance set aside the Presbyterian commanders. It 
 included in its operation Cromwell. But Fair- 
 fax desired him, before he resigned his command, 
 to perform one service more ; and it was felt, as 
 it could not fail to be felt, that to part with him 
 was to part with victory. This, as far as I can 
 see, not any intrigue of his, is the true account of 
 
Cromwell. 69 
 
 Lis retention in command. Naseby was won by 
 him with his new model army; it made him the 
 first man in England ; though since Marston the 
 adverse factions had been viewing his rising 
 greatness with a jealous eye, and vainly plotting 
 his overthrow. Then came the captivity and the 
 death of the king, with the interlude of Hamil- 
 ton's Scotch invasion, and the victory of Preston, 
 gained in Cromwell's fashion, which was not to 
 manoeuvre, but to train his men well, march 
 straight to his enemy, and fight a decisive battle 
 — a fashion natural perhaps to one who had not 
 studied the science of strategy, but at the same 
 time merciful, since no brave men perished other- 
 wise than in fight, the loss of life was compara- 
 tively small, the results immense. Cromwell is 
 now the general of the Commonwealth : he con- 
 quers Ireland; he conquers Scotland; the "crown- 
 ing mercy" of Worcester puts supreme power 
 within his grasp. After a pause, he makes him- 
 self Protector. 
 
 There are two points, dark spots as I think 
 them, in his career on which I must dwell to pay 
 a tribute to morality. The execution of the king 
 is treated by cynical philosophy in its usual strain : 
 "This action of the English regicides did in effect 
 strike a damp like death through the heart of 
 flunkeyism universally in this world; whereof 
 
70 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 flunkeyism, cant, cloth - worship, and whatever 
 other ugly name it have, has gone about incurably 
 sick ever since, and is now at length in these gen- 
 erations very rapidly dying." This is not the 
 tone in which the terrible but high-souled fanat- 
 ics who did it would have spoken of their own 
 deed. They at least so far respected the feelings 
 of mankind, or rather their own feelings, as to 
 drape the scaffold with black. Cromwell would 
 have saved the king; he would probably have 
 made terms with him, and, if he could have trust- 
 ed him, set him again upon his throne. Himself 
 a most tender husband and father, he had seen 
 Charles amid his family, and had been touched. 
 But Charles could not see that he was fallen ; his 
 anointed kingship was still fact-proof. He tried 
 to play off one of the two contending parties 
 against the other when it was a matter of life 
 and death to them both. Cromwell discovered 
 his duplicity. He then tried to frighten Charles 
 out of the kingdom, by sending him an intima- 
 tion at Hampton Court that there were designs 
 against his life. Charles fled from Hampton 
 Court, but, his flight being mismanaged, he be- 
 came a prisoner in the Isle of Wight. There he 
 negotiated with the Parliament, in which the ene- 
 mies of Cromwell and the Independents were 
 still strong. At the same time he was carrying 
 
Cromwell. 7 1 
 
 on the intrigues with the Royalist faction which 
 produced the rising in Kent and the invasion of 
 England by Hamilton. Before the army march- 
 ed against Hamilton, the officers, exasperated at 
 having their lives and their cause thus again put 
 in peril, after so many bloody fields, by the du- 
 plicity of the king, held a prayer-meeting at 
 Windsor, and there resolved — " That it was their 
 duty, if ever the Lord brought them back in 
 peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, 
 to an account for the blood he had shed and the 
 mischief he had done to his utmost against the 
 Lord's cause and the people in these poor na- 
 tions." They had before them a precedent in the 
 case of Mary Stuart. When they returned vic- 
 torious, they signed a petition " for justice and a 
 settlement of the kingdom." Cromwell sends the 
 petition to Fairfax, with a letter, saying, that he 
 finds among the officers of his regiment a great 
 sense of the sufferings of the kingdom, and a 
 great zeal to have impartial justice done upon of- 
 fenders. He adds that he does himself from his 
 heart concur with them, and believes that God 
 has put these things into their hearts. Thus the 
 king was brought to trial and to the scaffold. 
 This, so far as I can see, is the real account of 
 Charles's death, and of Cromwell's share in it. 
 Of Cromwell's own, there is, touching this the 
 
72 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 gravest and most questionable act of his life, no 
 recorded word. He does not touch on it in his 
 speeches or his letters ; he appears not to have 
 touched on it in conversation with his friends. 
 Never did a man more completely carry his se- 
 cret with him to the grave. That the execution 
 of the king was a fatal error of policy is a thing 
 so clear to us, that we can scarcely suppose one 
 so sagacious as Cromwell to have been altogether 
 blind to it ; and it is, therefore, reasonable to 
 suppose that his course was determined not by 
 policy, but by sympathy with the feelings of his 
 soldiers. The fierce and hard Old Testament 
 sentiments which were in their hearts were in 
 his heart too. Nothing, unhappily, can be less 
 true than that the act of the regicides struck a 
 damp through the heart of fiunkeyism, or that 
 flunkeyisni has gone about incurably sick of it 
 ever since. It is liberty, if any thing, that has 
 gone about sick of it. The blood of the royal 
 martyr has been the seed of flunkeyism from that 
 day to this. What man, what woman, feels any 
 sentimental attachment to the memory of James 
 II. ? There would have been less attachment, if 
 possible, to the memory of the w T eak and perfid- 
 ious Charles, if his weakness and his perfidy had 
 not been glorified by his death. 
 
 The other point is the slaughter of the garri- 
 
Cromwell. y ? 
 
 sons of Drogheda and Wexford. Here again the 
 cynical philosophy, which from a satiety as it 
 seems, of civilization we are beginning to affect 
 exults in the blow dealt to what it calls false 
 philanthropy, rose-water, universal pardon and 
 benevolence. It is to be hoped that these phi- 
 losophers will, as soon as possible, tell us what 
 philanthropy is not false, lest we should all be- 
 come brutes together. The war in Ireland had 
 been on both sides a war of extermination. The 
 Catholics had begun it by a great massacre of 
 the Protestants, on the reality or the atrocity of 
 which it seems to me idle to cast a doubt, though 
 assuredly if such deeds could ever be pardoned, 
 they might be pardoned in a people so deeply 
 wronged, so brutalized by oppression, as the 
 Catholics of Ireland then were. These very gar- 
 risons had taken part, or were believed to have 
 taken part, in cruelties worse than those com- 
 mitted by Nana Sahib. The feeling of English 
 Protestants against the Papist rebels of Ireland, 
 which of course Cromwell could not help shar- 
 ing, was at least as strong as that of English- 
 men in our own time against the Indian muti- 
 neers. Cromwell summoned both places to sur- 
 render, with an implied offer of mercy, before he 
 stormed. The laws of war in those days were 
 far less humane and chivalrous than they are 
 
74 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 now : the garrison of a place taken by storm was 
 not held to have a right to quarter. The Cath- 
 olic hero, Count Tilly, had put not only the garri- 
 son but the inhabitants of the great Protestant 
 city of Magdeburg to the sword ; and the same 
 thing had been done by Alva and other generals 
 on the Catholic side. Cromwell says in his dis- 
 patch : " I am persuaded that this is a righteous 
 judgment of God upon these wretches, who have 
 imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood ; 
 and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of 
 blood for the future, which are the satisfactory 
 grounds to such actions, which otherwise can not 
 but work remorse and regret." This excuse is 
 not sufficient, if any innocent persons were in- 
 volved in the slaughter ; no excuse can be suffi- 
 cient for the shedding of innocent blood on any 
 occasion or under any pretense, except in fair bat- 
 tle. But it is at all events the excuse of a moral 
 and reasonable being. "Burst thou wed the 
 heaven's lightning and say to it, Godlike one V 
 This, I think, is the excuse of one who, under the in- 
 fluence of a literary theory, has for the moment di- 
 vested himself of his morality and of his reason too. 
 We pass on then to the Protectorate. Great 
 questions concerning both the Church and the 
 State are still open ; and till they are settled the 
 judgment of history on Cromwell can scarcely be 
 
Cromwell. 75 
 
 fixed. To some the mention of his reign still re- 
 calls a transient domination of the powers of 
 evil breaking through the divine order of the 
 political and ecclesiastical world. Others regard 
 his policy as a tidal wave, marking the line to 
 which the waters will once more advance, and 
 look upon him as a ruler who was before his 
 hour, and whose hour perhaps is now come. 
 Here we must take for granted the goodness of 
 his cause, and ask only whether he served it faith- 
 fully and well. 
 
 Of his genius there is little question. Claren- 
 don himself could not be blind to the fact that 
 such a presence as that of this Puritan soldier 
 had seldom been felt upon the scene of history. 
 Necessity, "who will have the man and not the 
 shadow," had chosen him from among his fellows 
 and placed her crown upon his brow. I say 
 again let us never glorify revolution ; let us not 
 love the earthquake and the storm more than the 
 regular and beneficent course of nature. Yet 
 revolutions send capacity to the front with vol- 
 canic force across all the obstacles of envy and of 
 class. It was long before law-loving England 
 could forgive one who seemed to have set his 
 foot on law ; but there never perhaps was a time 
 when she was not at heart proud of his glory, 
 when she did not feel safer beneath the aegis of 
 
j 6 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 his victorious name. As often as danger threat- 
 ens us, the thought returns, not that we may 
 have again a Marlborough or a Black Prince ; 
 but that the race which produced Cromwell may, 
 at its need, produce his peer, and that the spirit 
 of the Great Usurper may once more stand forth 
 in arms. 
 
 Of Cromwell's honesty there is more doubt. 
 And who can hope, in so complex a character, 
 to distinguish accurately the impulses of ambi- 
 tion from those of devotion to a cause? Who 
 can hope, across two centuries, to pierce the secret 
 \ of so deep a heart % We must not trust the en- 
 vious suggestions of such observers as Ludlow or 
 even Whitelocke. Suspicions of selfish ambition 
 attend every rise, however honest, however in- 
 evitable, from obscurity to power. Through " a 
 cloud not of war only but detraction rude, 1 ' the 
 11 chief of men" had " ploughed his glorious way 
 to peace and truth." These witnesses against 
 him are not agreed among themselves. Ludlow 
 is sure that Cromwell played the part of an arch- 
 hypocrite in pressing Fairfax to command the 
 army of Scotland ; but Mrs. Hutchinson is sure 
 that though he was an arch-hypocrite on other 
 occasions, on this he was sincere. After the 
 death of the king, after the conquest of Ireland, 
 when the summit of his ambition must have been 
 
Cromwell. J J 
 
 full in his view, he married his eldest son Eich- 
 ard to the daughter of a private gentleman, bar- 
 gaining anxiously though not covetously about 
 the settlement, and caring, it seems, for nothing 
 so much as that the family with which the con- 
 nection was formed should be religious. Can 
 Eichard have been then, in his father's mind, heir 
 to a crown ? 
 
 Cromwell was a fanatic, and all fanatics are 
 morally the worse for their fanaticism : they set | 
 dogma above virtue, they take their own ends for 
 God's ends, and their own enemies for His. But 
 that this man's religion was sincere .who can 
 doubt ? It not only fills his most private letters, 
 as well as 'his speeches and dispatches, but it is 
 the only clue to his life. For it, when past forty, 
 happy in his family, well to do in the world, he 
 turned out with his children and exposed his life 
 to sword and bullet in obscure skirmishes as well 
 as in glorious fields. On his death-bed his 
 thoughts wandered not like those of Napoleon 
 among the eddies of battle or in the mazes of 
 state-craft, but among the religions questions of 
 his youth. Constant hypocrisy would have been 
 fatal to his decision. The double-minded man is 
 unstable in all his ways. This man was not un- 
 stable in any of his ways: his course is as 
 straight as that of a great force of nature. There 
 
78 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 is something not only more than animal, but 
 more than natural in his courage. If fanatics so 
 often beat men of the world in council, it is part- 
 ly because they throw the die of earthly destiny 
 with a steady hand as those whose great treas- 
 ure is not here. 
 
 Walking amid such perils, not of sword and 
 bullet only, but of envious factions and intrigu- 
 ing enemies on every side, it was impossible that 
 Cromwell should not contract a wariness, and 
 perhaps more than a wariness of step. It was 
 impossible that his character should not in some 
 measure reflect the darkness of his time. In es- 
 tablishing his government he had to feel his way, 
 to sound men's dispositions, to conciliate different 
 interests ; and these are processes not favorable to 
 simplicity of mind, still less favorable to the ap- 
 pearance of it, yet compatible with general hon- 
 esty of purpose. As to what is called his hyp- 
 ocritical use of Scriptural language, ScrijDtural 
 language was his native tongue. In it he spoke 
 to his wife and children, as well as to his armies 
 and his Parliaments : it burst from his lips when 
 he saw victory at Dunbar : it hovered on them in 
 death, when policy, and almost consciousness, was 
 gone. 
 
 He said that he would gladly have gone back 
 to private life. It is incredible that he should 
 
Cromwell. 79 
 
 have formed the design, perhaps not incredible 
 that he should have felt the desire. Nature no 
 doubt with high powers gives the wish to use 
 thern; and it must be bitter for one who knows 
 that he can do great things, to pass away before 
 great things have been done. But when great 
 things have been done for a great end on an 
 illustrious scene, the victor of Naseby, Dunbar, 
 and Worcester, the saviour of a nation's cause, 
 may be ready to welcome the evening hour of 
 memory and repose, especially if, like Cromwell, 
 he has a heart full of affection and a happy home. 
 Of the religion of hero-worship I am no dev- 
 otee. Great men are most precious gifts of heav- 
 en, and unhappy is the nation which can not pro- 
 duce them at its need. But their importance 
 in history becomes less as civilization goes on. 
 A Timour or an Attila towers unapproachably 
 above his horde : but in the last great struggle 
 which the world has seen, the Cromwell was not 
 a hero, but an intelligent and united nation. 
 And to whatever age they may belong, the great- . 
 est, the most godlike of men, are men, not gods. 
 They -are the offspring, though the highest off- 
 spring, of their age. They would be nothing 
 without their fellow-men. Did Cromwell escape 
 the intoxication of power which has turned the 
 brains of other favorites of fortune, and bear him- 
 
80 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 self always as one who held the government as a 
 trust from God ? It was because he was one of 
 a religious people. Did he, amid the temptations 
 of arbitrary rule, preserve his reverence for law, 
 and his desire to reign under it % It was because 
 he was one of a law-loving people. Did he, in 
 spite of fearful provocation, show on the whole 
 remarkable humanity \ It was because he was 
 one of a brave and humane people. A somewhat 
 larger share of the common qualities — this, and 
 this alone it was which, circumstances calling him 
 to a great trust, had raised him above his fellows. 
 The impulse which lent vigor and splendor to 
 his government came from a great movement, not 
 from a single man. The Protectorate with its 
 glories was not the conception of a lonely intel- 
 lect, but the revolutionary energy of a mighty na- 
 tion concentrated in a single chief. 
 
 I can never speak of Mr. Carlyle without pay- 
 ing grateful homage to the genius which pro- 
 duced the " French Revolution." That work is 
 his best, partly perhaps because it is free from a 
 hero. His " Cromwell" is hero-worshijD, and 
 therefore it is not true ; but like the alchemists 
 who made real chemical discoveries while they 
 were in search of their visionary gold, though he 
 has failed to reveal a god, he has not failed to help 
 us in our study of the character of a great man. 
 
Cromwell. 8 1 
 
 Carlyle prostrates morality before greatness. 
 His imitators prostrate it before mere force, 
 which is no more adorable than mere fraud, the 
 force of those who are physically weak. We 
 might as well bow down before the hundred- 
 handed idol of a Hindoo. To moral force we 
 may bow down : but moral force resides and can 
 reside in those only whose lives embody the mor- 
 al law. It is found in the highest degree in 
 those at whom hero-worship sneers. Hero-wor- 
 ship sneers at Falkland : yet Falkland by his 
 purity and his moderation has touched and influ- 
 enced the hearts of his countrymen forever. We 
 shall come to the vulgar worship of success, and 
 be confounded with those who look upon mis- 
 fortune as the judgment of heaven upon the van- 
 quished, li The judgment of heaven was upon 
 them, sir," said a Tory bishop, speaking of the 
 regicides, to Quin ; " the Judgment of heaven was 
 'upon them— almost all of them came to violent 
 ends." " So, my lord," replied Quin, " did almost 
 all the Apostles." What makes us men, not 
 brutes, if it is not that we reverence ourselves, 
 and listen to the god in our own breasts, instead 
 of blindly following the animal whom victory in 
 a conflict of force has marked out as the leader 
 of our herd ? 
 
 Neither force do I worship in Cromwell nor 
 
 D2 
 
82 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 arbitrary power. Milton was no Imperialist, no 
 admirer of the Caesars, no apologist of Nero. I 
 hope to show some ground for thinking that ar- 
 bitrary power was not dear to Cromwell's heart. 
 He was great enough, if I mistake not, and felt 
 himself great enough, to reign among the free. 
 An ignoble nature like that of Bonaparte may 
 covet despotism. A noble nature never cared for 
 the affection of a dependent or for the obedience 
 of a slave. 
 
 When a revolution is over, a government must 
 be founded at once to gather in the fruits and to 
 heal the wounds of the struggle. And the only 
 men who can found it are those who remain mas- 
 ters of the revolution. The man who remained 
 master of the English Revolution was the victor 
 of Worcester. The conquest of the Royalists 
 was not his only service, or his only claim to su- 
 preme power. In the English, as afterward in 
 the French Revolution, the fountains of the social 
 deep had at last been broken uj), and terrible 
 forms of anarchy had begun to appear. Crom- 
 well had quelled anarchy as well as tyranny. 
 With a promptness and an integrity which go 
 far toward proving his paramount devotion to 
 the public good, as well as with a courage, moral 
 and personal, which has never been surpassed, 
 and at the same time with a merciful economy of 
 
Cromwell. 83 
 
 punishment which shows how different is the 
 vigor of the brave from the vigor of the savage, 
 he had confronted and put down the great mu- 
 tiny of the Levellers. He had thus perhaps 
 saved England from a reign of terror. And they 
 were no Parisian street mob, these insurgents 
 with whom he had to deal, nor were their leaders 
 the declaimers of the Jacobin Club. They were 
 the best soldiers that ever trod a field of battle, 
 the soldiers who had gained his own victories, 
 led by men of desperate courage, and fighting for 
 a cause in which they were reckless of their lives. 
 The decimated remnant of the Long Parliament 
 was not a government. It was a Eevolutionary 
 Assembly.^ It had lost the character of a govern- 
 ment when it deposed and beheaded the king 
 who had called it ; when it abolished the other 
 house, which was as essential a part of a legal 
 parliament as itself; when it was reduced to a 
 fourth of its legal number by Pride's Purge and 
 other violent acts of the revolution. Nor was 
 it fit to become the government, though this was 
 its aim. Eevolutionary assemblies, while the 
 struggle lasts and egotism is subdued by danger, 
 often display not only courage, energy and con- 
 stancy, but remarkable self-control. So sometimes 
 do revolutionary mobs. But the struggle over, 
 the tendencies to faction, intrigue, tyranny, and 
 
84 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 corruption begin to appear. The services of the 
 Long Parliament as a Revolutionary Assembly 
 had been immense ; its name will be held in hon- 
 or while English liberty endures. But when it 
 was victorious and aspired to be the government, 
 its rule was the tyranny of a section, insufferable 
 to the great body of the nation. It was a dom- 
 inant faction, maintaining itself in power by daily 
 violence, prolonging all the evils and imperiling 
 all the fruits of the revolution. In finance it was 
 subsisting by revolutionary expedients, by the 
 sale of public property, and what was much worse, 
 by confiscation. Its office for sequestration in 
 Haberdasher's Hall was crowded every day with 
 the trembling victims of its cruel deeds. It had 
 superseded the regular courts of justice by a rev- 
 olutionary 'tribunal which had put a man to death 
 for having acted as the emissary of Charles II. at 
 Constantinople. In foreign policy it was running 
 wild. It wanted to annex the Dutch Republic, 
 and when it was thwarted in that chimerical 
 scheme it plunged the two Protestant nations into 
 a fratricidal and disastrous war. That it showed 
 in the conduct of that war great Republican vig- 
 or, and by the hand of Vane created a navy with 
 marvelous rapidity, was but a slight compensa- 
 tion for so calamitous an error. The measure by 
 which it was preparing to perpetuate its own ex- 
 
Cromwell. 85 
 
 istence was as much a usurpation as the assump- 
 tion of supreme power by Cromwell. And yet 
 what could it do without a permanent head of the 
 State ? Had it issued writs for a Free Parliament 
 and dissolved, it would not only have committed 
 suicide itself, but have plunged the nation into an 
 abyss of anarchy and confusion. 
 
 Cromwell was set up by the army : whence an 
 outcry against a government of musketeers and 
 pikemen. A government of musketeers and pike- 
 men is the greatest of calamities and the deepest 
 of degradations ; and how to escape the danger 
 of such government, which threatens all European 
 nations in their critical transition from the feudal 
 aristocracy of the past to the democracy of the fu- 
 ture, is now a pressing question for us all. But 
 the soldiers of Cromwell were not mere musket- 
 eers and pikemen. They were not like the le- 
 gionaries of Caesar and the grenadiers of Napole- 
 on, raising the idol of the camp to a despotic 
 throne. They were the best of English citizens 
 in arms for the nation's cause ; and when all was 
 over with the cause, they became the best of En- 
 glish citizens again. Through them the Involu- 
 tion had conquered ; they in truth were the Rev- 
 olution. They had no right, and they had as lit- 
 tle inclination, to set up a military tyranny ; but 
 they had a right to give a chief to the State and 
 
86 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 to support the government of the chief whom they 
 had given. It was in fact upon them and their 
 general, not upon the nation or any considerable 
 party in it, that the Parliament itself rested, and 
 they and their general were accordingly responsi- 
 ble for its acts and for the continuance of its 
 power. 
 
 Nor was the chief whom they gave to the na- 
 tion a Caesar ; much less was he a Bonaparte, an 
 unprincipled soldier of fortune vaulting on the 
 back of a Revolution to make himself an emperor. 
 The relation of Cromwell to the English Revolu- 
 tion was not that of a Napoleon, but, if it is not 
 blasphemy to mention the two names together, 
 that of a Robespierre. The chief of the Rous- 
 seauists was the leader of the most religious and 
 the deepest part of the French movement, though 
 shallow was the deepest. Cromwell was in like 
 manner himself the leader and embodiment of the 
 most religious and the deepest part of the English 
 movement. He was Puritanism armed and in 
 power, not the successful general of a foreign war. 
 I say that in the case alike of the English and of 
 the French Revolution the most religious part of 
 the movement was the deepest part. The most 
 religious part of all movements is the deepest part. 
 Beneath these social and political revolutions 
 which are now going on around us, and which 
 
Cromwell, Sy 
 
 seem to move society so deeply, do we not per- 
 ceive, deeper than all, a revolution in religion — a 
 revolution which may one day clothe itself in 
 some form of power and cast the world again in a 
 new mold ? 
 
 The form of government which Cromwell meant 
 to found was a monarchy, with himself as mon- 
 arch. I do not doubt that this was his design 
 from the time when he took supreme power into 
 his hands. But it was not to be a Stuart mon 
 archy. It was to be a Constitutional and a Prot 
 estant monarchy, with Parliamentary government 
 Parliamentary taxation, reform of the representa 
 tion, an enlightened and vigorous administration 
 the service of the State freely opened to merit 
 trial by jury, law reform, church reform, university 
 reform, the union of the three kingdoms, a pacified 
 and .civilized Ireland, and with no halting and 
 wavering foreign policy, but the glorious headship 
 of the Protestant cause in Europe ; above all with 
 that to which Milton pointed as the chief work 
 of his chief of men, that for which the leader 
 of the Independents had throughout fought and 
 suffered — liberty of conscience. Cromwell might 
 well think that he thus gave the nation all the 
 substantial objects for which it had fought. But 
 how far in this policy personal ambition may 
 have mingled with public wisdom is a question 
 
88 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 which, as I said before, can be answered by the 
 Searcher of Hearts alone. 
 
 After the foundation of the monarchy wonld 
 necessarily have come a dynasty, with all the ac- 
 cidents and infirmities to which dynasties are lia- 
 ble ; but this dynasty would have been bound by 
 stronger pledges than the Hanoverian dynasty was 
 to Protestantism and Constitutional Government. 
 
 We need not sneer at the high aspirations of 
 Vane and the Republicans. If some men did not 
 aspire too high, the world in general would fall 
 too low. But few think that a democratic repub- 
 lic would then have been possible even for En- 
 gland ; much less would it have been possible 
 for the three kingdoms, as yet most imperfectly 
 united, and two of them politically in a very 
 backward state. It must have been an oligarch- 
 ical republic like that of Holland: and it must 
 have been, for a long time at least, a party re- 
 public. Vane said that none were worthy to be 
 citizens who had not fought for liberty. There 
 would thus have been no prospect of reconcilia- 
 tion or of oblivion : the fruit of the nation's suffer- 
 ings would have been a chronic civil war. It was 
 time to make England again a nation. This a na- 
 tional government alone could do. And as mat- 
 ters stood, the government of a single chief, raised 
 in some measure above all parties, could alone be 
 
Cromwell. 89 
 
 national. Cromwell's first act after Worcester had 
 been to press on the parliament a general amnes- 
 ty, in which he was supposed as usual to have 
 some sinister end in view. The first day of his 
 reign was the last of confiscation and of ven- 
 geance. From that day every Cavalier was safe 
 in person and estate ; might, after a short proba- 
 tion, regain the full rights of a citizen ; might, by 
 mere submission to the established government 
 and without injury to his honor, became eligible 
 to the highest offices of the State. 
 
 The conduct of Cromwell has been contrasted 
 with that of Washington. The two cases were 
 quite different. In the case of Washington there 
 had not been a civil war in the proper sense of 
 the term, but a national struggle against an exter- 
 nal power, which left the nation united under a 
 national government at its close. England, as 
 Cromwell said in his rough way, stood in need of 
 a constable : America did not. 
 
 On the other hand, the insulting violence of the 
 manner in which Cromwell turned out the Long 
 Parliament is not to be justified. That scene 
 leaves a stain on his character as a man and as a 
 statesman. By thus setting his heel on the honor 
 of those with whom he had acted, and whose 
 commission he bore, he was guilty of a breach of 
 good policy as well as of right feeling. He need- 
 
90 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 lessly stamped tlie origin of his own government 
 with the character of violent usurpation, and he 
 made for himself deadly enemies of all those on 
 whom he had trampled. It is not improbable 
 that he was hurried away by his emotions, which, 
 dissembler as he is supposed to have been, some- 
 times got the better, to an extraordinary ex- 
 tent, of his outward self-control: aud that, hav- 
 ing wound himself up by a great effort to a 
 doubtful act, he went beyond his mark, and 
 launched out into language and gestures which to 
 those who witnessed them seemed insane. In his 
 first speech to the Little Parliament, he paid at 
 least a tribute of homage to legality and right feel- 
 ing. " I speak here in the presence of some that 
 were at the closure of our consultations, and as 
 before the Lord — the thinking of an act of vio- 
 lence was to us worse than any battle that ever 
 we were in, or that could be, to the utmost hazard 
 of our lives : so willing were we, even very tender 
 and desirous, if possible, that these men might quit 
 their places with honor." Be it remembered, too, 
 that there was no insolent parade of military pow- 
 er. Cromwell went down to the house not in uni- 
 form, but in plain clothes. Much less were there 
 the arrests, the street massacres, and the deporta- 
 tions, which constitute the glory of a coup cVetat 
 in France. 
 
Cromwell. 9 1 
 
 To restore the Constitutional and Protestant 
 monarchy in his own person was Cromwell's aim. 
 In this enterprise he had against him all the par- 
 ties ; bnt he might flatter himself that he had 
 the secret wishes and the tendencies of the nation 
 on his side. He had in his favor the divisions 
 among his enemies, which were such that they 
 could scarcely ever act in concert; his own sur- 
 passing genius ; a temperament which never knew 
 despair ; a knowledge of men gained by reading 
 the heart when it is most open, at the council- 
 board in dangerous extremity, or on the eve of 
 battle by the camp-fire side. And the army, 
 though opposed in the main to his design of re- 
 storing the monarchy, was bound to his person by 
 the spell of victory. 
 
 The step from civil war to legal government can. 
 not be made at once. There must be a period of 
 transition, during which government is half milita- 
 ry, half legal, and while law is gradually resuming 
 its sway, the efforts of the defeated parties to pre- 
 vent a government from being founded will have to 
 be repressed by force. It will be the duty of the 
 head of the government to see that his measures 
 of repression are strong enough and not too 
 strong; that he hastens, as much as the enemies 
 of the government will permit, the restoration 
 of the reign of law. Cromwell well understood 
 
92 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 the true doctrine of political necessity. "When 
 matters of necessity come," he said to his par- 
 liament, " then without guilt extraordinary reme- 
 dies may be applied ; but if necessity be pretend- 
 ed, there is so much the more sin." He did not 
 allow the government to be military for an hour; 
 but at once summoning the Barbones Parliament, 
 rendered up his authority into their hands. " To 
 divest the sword of all power in the civil adminis- 
 tration" was the declared object of the great sol- 
 dier in summoning this assembly. A parliament 
 the assembly is called ; but it was not elective 
 or representative ; it was a convention of Puritan 
 notables called by Cromwell. It was denounced 
 at the time and has since been commonly regard- 
 ed as a junta of fanatics who wanted to sweep 
 away law, learning, and civil society to make 
 room for the code of Moses and the reign of the 
 saints. It went to work in eleven committees; 
 for the reform of the law ; for the reform of pris- 
 ons ; for the reform of the finances and the light- 
 ening of taxation ; for Ireland ; for Scotland ; for 
 the army; for petitions; for public debts; for the 
 regulation of the commissions of the, peace and 
 the reform of the poor-law ; for the advancement 
 of trade ; for the advancement of learning. 
 Among its proceedings we find measures for the 
 care of lunatics and idiots, for the regular per- 
 
Cromwell. 03 
 
 formance of marriages and the registration of 
 births and deaths, for probate of wills in all coun- 
 ties, for law reforms which pointed both to a 
 more speedy and cheaper administration of justice 
 and to the preparation of a simple and intelligible 
 code of law. We have not yet carried into effect 
 the whole programme of these mad fanatics ; but 
 we have carried into effect a good part of it, and 
 we are hoping to carry into effect the rest. But 
 the Barbones Parliament was wanting in knowl- 
 edge of government : it attempted too much and 
 it went too fast, common faults in a revolution, 
 when the minds of men are stimulated to the 
 morbid activity of political thought. It aroused 
 the formidable opposition of all the lawyers and 
 of all the ministers of religion : it showed an incli- 
 nation prematurely to reduce the army, which, it 
 is idle to doubt, was still the indispensable sup- 
 port not only of the general's power, but of the 
 cause ; and, moreover, it did not do the essential 
 thing; it did not take measures for the founda- 
 tion of a government, while it had no title to be 
 the government itself. Cromwell determined to 
 bring its sittings to an end. As usual, it is 
 thought that he was playing a deep game, that he 
 had foreseen that the Barbones Parliament must 
 fail and that its failure would render him more 
 indispensable than ever. A deep game indeed, 
 
94 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 to bring together the leading men among yonr 
 own friends, discredit them by failure, and then 
 make them yonr enemies by sending them away ! 
 If Cromwell intended that the Barbones Parlia- 
 ment should prove a failure, he took a strange way 
 to his end, for he undoubtedly summoned to it 
 the best men he could find — men so good that his 
 enemies were greatly chagrined at seeing an as- 
 sembly so respectable answer to his call. The 
 Machiavellian theory of his conduct was easily 
 framed after the event: no sagacity could have 
 framed it before. 
 
 Cromwell now called a council of leading men, 
 civilians as well as soldiers, to settle the govern- 
 ment : and this council made him Lord Protector 
 of the three kingdoms, with the provisional con- 
 stitution called the Instrument of Government. 
 And if Cromwell set up arbitrary power, here is 
 the arbitrary power which he set up. The ex- 
 ecutive government is to be vested in an elective 
 Protector and a Council of State. The members 
 of the Council of State for the first turn are 
 named in the Instrument. When a vacancy oc- 
 curs, Parliament is to elect six candidates; of 
 these six the Council of State is to choose two, 
 and of these two the Protector is to choose one. 
 The powers of legislation and taxation are to be 
 vested in Parliament alone, the Protector having 
 
Cromwell. 95 
 
 only a suspensive veto for twenty days. A Par- 
 liament is to be held once at least in every three 
 years. The Protector is to have the disposal of 
 the army with the consent of the Parliament 
 when Parliament is sitting, of the elective Coun- 
 cil of State when it is not. In the event of war, 
 Parliament is at once to be convoked. The Pro- 
 tector and the Council are empowered to frame 
 ordinances for the government of the country till 
 Parliament meets ; a temporary provision, which 
 only gave a legal character to an inevitable exer- 
 cise of power. It was probably designed by the 
 chief framers of the Instrument that the elective 
 Protector should make way for an hereditary 
 king ; but no design was ever entertained of de- 
 parting from the constitutional principles on 
 which this settlement was based: on the con- 
 trary, those principles were afterward most dis- 
 tinctly ratified in the document called the Peti- 
 tion and Advice, under which Cromwell was in- 
 vited to take upon him the title of king. The 
 Protector declared himself content to submit to 
 all these limitations of his power, and ready to 
 submit to farther limitations, if by so doing he 
 could satisfy the Parliament and give peace to 
 the nation. 
 
 The constitution enacted by the Instrument 
 presents several points of interest. Government 
 
96 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 under it can hardly be party government, the 
 members of the Council of State being elected 
 by personal merit, for life, and under conditions 
 which prevent the Council from becoming a 
 cabinet or cabal. Provision is made for the per- 
 manent existence of a national council, even in 
 the Parliamentary recess. The army is brought 
 thoroughly under the constitution. The nation 
 is secured against the danger of being entangled 
 in a war, without its own consent, by the minis- 
 ters of the crown. The organic legislation of 
 Cromwell's time may still deserve the considera- 
 tion of constitutional reformers, if the nation 
 should ever desire to emancipate itself from the 
 government of party, which by its faction-fights, 
 its rogueries, its hypocrisies, the ascendancy which 
 it gives to mere Parliamentary gladiators — if the 
 name of gladiator is not profaned by applying it 
 to the hero of a venomous tongue — and by its 
 failures at home and abroad, must be beginning 
 to breed serious thoughts in the mind of every 
 independent lover of his country. 
 
 The Instrument embodied a measure of Par- 
 liamentary Reform, which Clarendon says was 
 fit to be more warrantably made and in a better 
 time. The representation was fairly re-distributed 
 on the basis of population. The small boroughs 
 were swept away. Representatives were given 
 
Cromwell. 97 
 
 to large towns hitherto unrepresented, Manches- 
 ter among the number. The county representa- 
 tion was greatly increased ; Yorkshire, for exam- 
 ple, having fourteen members. Not only real 
 but personal property was admitted as a qualifi- 
 cation for the county franchise, every person be- 
 ing empowered to vote who had property of any 
 kind to the value of £200, so that the copy-hold- 
 ers, of whom there were a large number at that 
 period, would have been enfranchised, as well as 
 the leaseholders for lives, who were also a nu- 
 merous class. Tenants at will, on the other hand, 
 would not have been enfranchised unless they 
 had independent property, to the requisite value, 
 of their own. The result would have been most 
 worthy and independent county constituencies, 
 consisting in great measure of the yeomen, whose 
 political virtue and military valor had just saved 
 and still sustained the country. The borough 
 franchise, with all its varieties of suffrage, was 
 left untouched. If this measure still does not 
 sound democratic, we must bear in mind that 
 serfage had but recently ceased to exist in En- 
 gland, while its traces still lingered in Scotland ; 
 that the manufacturing interest and the artisan 
 class were in their infancy ; that this was the last 
 stage of the feudal, whereas ours is the industrial 
 
 era. To know the value of Cromwell's Reform, 
 
 E 
 
98 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 we have only to consider what the rotten bor- 
 oughs, to which the Restoration of course revert- 
 ed, did for us in the two centuries which follow- 
 ed the Protectorate. 
 
 The Protector was now installed with mod- 
 erate state, and on the next 3d of September, his 
 lucky day, he took the first great step toward the 
 restoration of Constitutional Government by meet- 
 ing his first Parliament. That Parliament proved 
 refractory. Instead of voting the necessary sup- 
 plies and doing the business of the country, its 
 members fell to questioning the right of the Pro- 
 tector. The answer to their questionings was 
 simple. If they wanted divine right, it was by 
 the Protector's hand that God had saved them 
 all. If they wanted human right, it was by vir- 
 tue of his writ that they were there. In the end 
 it was found necessary to put to each member a 
 test, in the form of an engagement to be faithful 
 to the established government by a single person 
 and a parliament. The test was nothing more 
 than was implied in the writ under which each 
 member had been elected ; yet many of the Re- 
 publicans refused it and were excluded. Even 
 after this purging, the Parliament remained in- 
 tractable. It silent its time in the persecution of 
 a Socinian, and showed a tendency to tamper 
 with the fundamental principle on which Crom- 
 
Cromwell. 99 
 
 well always insisted — liberty of conscience. The 
 Protector at last dissolved it, with thunder in his 
 voice and on his brow ; and in doing so he did 
 well. 
 
 He was now driven again to govern for a time 
 without Parliament ; and the Koyalist plots and 
 risings obliged him to appoint major-generals. 
 But his government was taking root. The na- 
 tion felt the beneficence of his administration; 
 the glories of its foreign policy touched its heart. 
 Men contrasted them with the ignominy of the 
 Stuarts, as when the Stuarts were restored they 
 had reason to do again. The tidings of Blake's 
 victories were ringing through England when 
 the Protector again met a Parliament. 
 
 This time nothing was to be risked. The 
 known malcontents were from the first excluded. 
 Their exclusion, though veiled under a legal 
 form, was an act of arbitrary power. The justifi- 
 cation for it was, that if these members had been 
 allowed to take their seats, they would have 
 done their best to overturn the government; that, 
 if they had overturned the government, they 
 would have brought in not the Eepublic of 
 which Vane dreamed, nor the reign of the Saints 
 of which Harrison dreamed, nor the Covenanted 
 King and the Calvinistic Church of which the 
 Presbyterians dreamed, but the Stuarts ; and that 
 
ioo Three English Statesmen. 
 
 if they had brought in the Stuarts, they would 
 have canceled the revolution, wrecked the cause, 
 and set their own heads on Temple Bar. 
 
 After the exclusion, the Parliament still num- 
 bered three hundred and sixty members, friendly 
 in the main. And now the time was come for 
 the great attempt. A long train of wagons 
 bore through London streets the spoils and tro- 
 phies of Blake's victories over Spain. A poet 
 was writing — 
 
 "Let the brave generals divide that bough, 
 Our great Protector hath such wreaths enow : 
 His conquering head has no more room for bays, 
 Then let it be as the glad nation prays ; 
 Let the rich ore forthwith be melted down, 
 And the State fixed by making him a crown : 
 With ermine clad and purple let him hold 
 A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold. " 
 
 By the series of resolutions called the Petition 
 and Advice the Protector was invited to take 
 upon him the government by a higher title, and 
 with a second house, which was to consist of 
 seventy members to be named by the chief mag- 
 istrate with the consent of Parliament. Then fol- 
 lowed the most anxious deliberation in Crom- 
 well's life. He spoke himself of royalty with in- 
 difference, as a feather in the cap, the shining 
 bauble for crowds to kneel and gaze at. I am 
 ready, for my part, to believe that a man who has 
 done such things in such a cause may, by the 
 
Cromwell. 101 
 
 grace of heaven, keep his heart above tinsel. But 
 we know why the title of king might, apart from 
 any love of tinsel, seem essential to his policy. 
 The lawyers could not get on without it; the 
 people, as they then were, craved for it. It was 
 constitutional, whereas that of Protector was not 
 constitutional: it saved persons adhering to the 
 king de facto under the statute of Henry VII., 
 whereas that of Protector did not. But the stern 
 Kepublicans of the army were resolute against 
 monarchy. It was not for a king that they had 
 shed their blood. To their opposition Cromwell 
 for the present yielded. Probably he not only 
 yielded to it, but respected it. To be turned 
 from his course by fear, it has been truly said, 
 was not a failing to which he was prone. But 
 ardent, sanguine, inexhaustible in resources as he 
 was, he was the victim of no illusions. He knew 
 the difference between the difficult and the im- 
 possible ; he faced difficulty without fear, and he 
 recognized impossibility without repining, and 
 again turned his mind steadily toward the future. 
 
 So Cromwell mingled not with the crowd of 
 kings. He wore no crown but "Worcester's 
 laureat wreath," and the more laureat wreath of 
 Milton's verse. Fate ordained that he should 
 stand in history a chief of the people. 
 
 Part of the Petition and Advice however was 
 
102 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 carried into effect. The Protectorate had been 
 elective. The Protector was now empowered to 
 name his successor. There had hitherto been 
 only one House of Parliament : there were now 
 to be two, and the still half-feudal instincts of 
 the nation were to be indulged with a House of 
 Lords. This was the first Parliamentary settle- 
 ment of the new constitution; the Instrument 
 of Government under which the Protector had 
 hitherto acted having been framed as a provision- 
 al arrangement by a council of military and po- 
 litical chiefs. To mark the legal commencement 
 of his power the Protector was installed with 
 more solemnity than before, and with ceremonies 
 more resembling a coronation, the account of 
 which is given us by Whitelocke, who, though 
 no lover of Cromwell, seems to have been im- 
 pressed with the scene. In Westminster Hall, 
 under a canopy of state, was placed a chair of 
 state upon an ascent of two degrees, with seats 
 down the hall for the parliament, the dignitaries 
 of the law, the mayor and aldermen of London. 
 Thither on the 26th of June, 1657* went the Pro- 
 tector with his council of state, his ministers, his 
 gentlemen, sergeants-at-arms, officers, and heralds. 
 His Highness standing under the canopy of state, 
 the Speaker, in the name of the Parliament, put 
 on him a robe of purple velvet lined with ermine, 
 
Cromwell. 103 
 
 delivered to him the Bible, richly gilt and 
 bossed, girt on him the sword of State, and put a 
 golden sceptre into his hand. The same func- 
 tionary then gave him the oath to observe the 
 constitution, with solemn good wishes for the 
 prosperity of his government. Mr. Manton, the 
 chaplain, next by prayer recommended the Pro- 
 tector, the parliament, the council, the forces by 
 land and sea, the whole government and people 
 of the three nations to the blessing and protec- 
 tion of God. Then the people gave a shout and 
 the trumpets sounded. The Protector took his 
 seat in the chair of State, with the ambassadors 
 of the friendly nations and the high officers of 
 the Protectorate round him ; and as he did so 
 the trumpets sounded again, heralds proclaimed 
 the title of his Highness, and the people shouted 
 once more " God save the Lord Protector." So 
 looked sovereignty when for a moment it emerged 
 from feudalism and showed itself in the aspect of 
 the modern time. At the gorgeous coronation 
 of Napoleon, some one asked the Republican 
 General Augereau whether any thing was want- 
 ing to the splendor of the scene ? " Nothing," 
 replied Augereau, " but the presence of the million 
 of men who have died to do away with all this." 
 There was not much in Cromwell's installation 
 to do away with which any man of sense had 
 
104 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 died. We got "back afterward to the more au- 
 gust and venerable ceremony, with the bishops, 
 the anointings, the champion in armor, and the 
 glorious expense, which the finances of the Pro- 
 tectorate could ill bear. At the coronation of 
 George III., as Horace Walpole tells us, Lord 
 Talbot, the Lord Steward, had taught his horse 
 to back all down the hall after his rider had de- 
 livered the cup to the king; but the too well- 
 trained animal insisted on backing into the hall 
 and going all up it with its tail in the king's 
 face. 
 
 The second Parliament wasted time and vio- 
 lated the Protector's principles by the persecu- 
 tion of Naylor, a poor victim of the religious 
 frenzy which had seized many weak natures in 
 the vortex of a religious revolution. But it voted 
 supplies, and on the Avhole acted cordially with 
 the Protector. Hope dawned on the grand en- 
 terprise. 
 
 Its dawn was ag;ain overcast. When Parlia- 
 ment met after the recess, it was with the ex- 
 cluded members restored to their seats, and with 
 an Upper House. The Upper House was a fail- 
 ure. An old aristocracy may be patched to any 
 extent, especially if some freedom is allowed in 
 constructing Norman pedigrees; but to make a 
 new one when the age of conquest and conquer- 
 
Cromwell. 105 
 
 ing races is past, is happily not an easy thing. 
 Cromwell got few men of territorial or social con- 
 sequence to sit, and he incurred many damaging 
 refusals. He said that he wanted something to 
 stand between him and the Lower House his 
 direct contests with which were no doubt bring- 
 ing a heavy strain upon his government. But to 
 make up his House of Lords, he had to take 
 many of his supporters from the Lower House, 
 where the great battle of supplies was to be 
 fought, and probably to break up the lead for 
 the government there. The result was that the 
 Lower House fell foul of the Upper, and the ship 
 became unmanageable once more. At the same 
 time, and perhaps in consequence of the distress 
 of the Government, conspiracies, both Koyalist 
 and Eepublican, had broken out on the most for- 
 midable scale. It was necessary at once to dis- 
 miss Parliament, and to deal with this danger. 
 And so effectually was it dealt with, though at a 
 small cost of blood, that, after this, the Koyalists 
 rose no more. The hopes of that party, in the 
 eyes of the shrewdest judges in Europe, were 
 dead : and Charles Stuart could scarcely obtain 
 common courtesy, much less recognition or sup- 
 port, from Mazarin or Don Louis de Haro. Only 
 the Presbyterians had the power which, when 
 
 Cromwell was gone, they used with such happy 
 
 E 2 
 
106 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 results to the nation and themselves, of setting 
 the Stuarts again upon the throne. 
 
 In these contests with refractory parliaments, 
 the great soldier and statesman had to play the 
 part of an orator. He was too old to learn a new 
 art. He did not prepare his speeches ; and when 
 he was ashed to write down one of them a few 
 days after it had been delivered, he declared that 
 he could not remember a word of it. Clumsier 
 or more uncouth compositions than the reports 
 which have come down to us, the records of bad 
 oratory do not contain. The grammar is hope- 
 less, the metaphors and confusions of metaphor 
 most grotesque — " God kindling a seed" — " the 
 Lord pouring the nation from vessel to vessel, till 
 He poured it into your lap." The last editor 
 only makes the matter worse by his running 
 commentary of admiring ejaculations. But the 
 speeches are not kings' speeches. There runs 
 through them all a strong though turbid tide of 
 thought. They are the utterances of one who 
 sees his object clearly, presses toward it earnest- 
 ly, and struggles to bear forward in the same 
 course the reluctant wills and wavering intellects 
 of other men. The great features of his situation, 
 the great principles on which he was acting, are 
 brought out, as M. Guizot says, with a breadth 
 and force which are a strong proof of a states- 
 
Cromwell. 107 
 
 man-like intellect, and not a small proof perhaps 
 of good faith. But he pleaded to deaf ears. It 
 is vain to rail at those who refused to listen to 
 him, and who thwarted him to the end. They 
 were not great men. They were contending, 
 many of them at least, in singleness of heart, for 
 what they believed to be the good cause. They 
 might say with truth that Cromwell had changed ; 
 that the language of the Revolutionary Soldier 
 was not that of the Head of the State ; that his 
 mind had grown more comprehensive, his vision 
 clearer since he had risen to a higher point of 
 view and into serener air : and, as he had 
 changed, they might represent him to themselves 
 as a renegade and a traitor. These misunder- 
 standings between men who yesterday stood side 
 by side are another mournful part of revolutions. 
 We owe those who resisted Cromwell forbear- 
 ance and respect. So far as they were struggling 
 for English law against what they believed to be 
 lawless power, we owe them gratitude. Princi- 
 ples are worth incomparably more than any pos- 
 sible benefits of any one man's rule. Yet the 
 conduct of these patriots brought ruin on all 
 they loved. 
 
 When Parliament refused the necessary sup- 
 plies, the Protector was compelled to levy the 
 old taxes by an ordinance in Council : but he 
 
108 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 did this with manifest reluctance, and with a 
 manifest desire to return to Parliamentary taxa- 
 tion, as well as to Parliamentary government in 
 other respects. The spoils of the Spanish gal- 
 leons helped his finances for a time. A less no- 
 ble source of supply was an income-tax of ten per 
 cent, levied on the Koyalists after their great re- 
 volt. In that great resource, frugality, the gov- 
 ernment of Cromwell was rich ; considering what 
 it did, it was the cheapest government England 
 ever had. But the truth is, greatness is generally 
 cheap : it is littleness aping greatness that is so 
 dear. The Protector offered to lay the financial 
 administration open to the most rigorous inspec- 
 tion. He was not afraid, he said, on that score 
 to face the nation. He was ready, in fact, to do 
 any thing, except to allow the government to be 
 overturned : rather than that, he said, he would 
 be rolled with infamy into his grave. 
 
 All this time he had been struggling with a 
 series of plots against his power and his life. 
 The ground on which his tottering throne was 
 reared heaved on all sides with conspiracy and 
 rebellion. The plotters were not only Royalists 
 but fanatical Republicans, leaguing themselves 
 in their frenzy with Royalists to their own de- 
 struction. To the Republicans Cromwell be- 
 haved as to old friends estranged. The utmost 
 
Cromwell. 109 
 
 that he did was to put them for a time in safe 
 keeping, when they would have laid desperate 
 hands on the life of their own cause. He was 
 careful too of their honor; and so long as they 
 would be quiet, never put to them any oath or 
 test. With the Royalists he dealt rigorously, as 
 old enemies, yet mercifully, as all fearless natures 
 do. When they had risen in arms against him, 
 he placed them under the control of the Major- 
 Generals, and laid on them, not a fine of the tenth 
 part of their property, but an income-tax of ten 
 per cent. It is said that this taxing of the Roy- 
 alists was a breach of the Act of Oblivion. It was 
 so ; but what was their insurrection ? 
 
 In the punishment of political offenses, Crom- 
 well did his best to return from the revolutionary 
 high courts of justice to trial by jury. The first 
 case with which he had to deal was that of Lil- 
 burn, an aimless and egotistical agitator, though 
 otherwise pure and brave, who had returned from 
 exile merely to prevent the settlement of the na- 
 tion. Lilburn was sent before a jury ; but the 
 jury being strong partisans, and the court being 
 crowded with the friends of the accused, the gov- 
 ernment failed to obtain a conviction, and was 
 driven to the worst course of all — that of mixing 
 force with law, by keeping Lilburn in custody 
 after his acquittal. The conspirators in Vowell 
 
no Three English Statesmen. 
 
 and Gerrard's plot, and those in Slingsby's plot, 
 were sent before a high court of justice. But 
 Cromwell's high court of justice was not like the 
 French revolutionary tribunal, or an Irish or Ja- 
 maica court-martial. It consisted of a large num- 
 ber of judges, inpluding the highest functionaries 
 of the law, it sat publicly, proceeded deliberately, 
 and observed the legal rules of evidence : nor, 
 unless to murder the Protector and overturn the 
 government was no offense, does the slightest sus- 
 picion rest upon it of having shed one drop of in- 
 nocent blood. The Royalists taken in Penrud- 
 dock's rebellion were tried before juries in the 
 counties where the rebellion occurred : so little 
 known to this military despot were our present 
 theories of martial law. The daggers of the Roy- 
 alists were always threatening the Protector's life. 
 And not their daggers only : a proclamation was 
 circulated in the name of the exiled king, prom- 
 ising great rewards and honors to whoever would 
 take the usurper off with pistol, sword, or poi- 
 son. It is commonly believed that his nerves 
 were completely shaken by the fear of assassina- 
 tion; but the well-known passage of Hume, de- 
 scribing the Protector's agonies of alarm, is a rhe- 
 torical improvement on the passage in the rabidly 
 Royalist work of Dr. Bates, the court physician 
 to Charles II., and I believe the statement has no 
 
Cromwell. in 
 
 trustworthy foundation. Cromwell, of course, 
 took the necessary precautions, and as the author 
 of " Killing no Murder" assured him, great pre- 
 cautions were necessary; but there is nothing in 
 his bearing or in his policy to the end of his life 
 to show that fear had shaken his fortitude ; and 
 assuredly it did not shake his clemency. Of the 
 forty men arrested for Vowell and Gerrard's plot, 
 three only were sent before the high court of jus- 
 tice, and of those three one was spared. In Slings- 
 by's plot five persons only suffered, though it was 
 a formidable conspiracy to deliver Hull to the 
 Spaniards, and at the same time to raise an insur- 
 rection in London, which would have filled the 
 city with fire and blood. Few besides the actual 
 leaders suffered death for Penruddock's rebellion, 
 though a good many of their followers were trans- 
 ported. Fear for his government, though his life 
 was in no danger, impelled Bonaparte to murder 
 a Bourbon prince who had approached his frontier. 
 Ormond, Cromwell's most formidable, as well as 
 his* most honorable enemy, came to London in dis- 
 guise to get up a plot against the government. 
 His presence was detected. Cromwell took Lord 
 Broghil, Ormond's former associate, aside, and said 
 to him, " If you wish to do a kindness to an old 
 friend, Ormond is in London; warn him to be- 
 gone." Those were harder times than ours, and 
 
112 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 <b 
 
 civil war begets recklessness of human life: but the 
 strongest man of those times in his true strength 
 has bequeathed a lesson to the emasculate senti- 
 mentalism which counterfeits manliness by affect- 
 ing sympathy with deeds of violence and blood. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the Stuart princes 
 and their advisers were privy to assassination 
 plots. Cromwell had threatened that if they 
 used assassins, he would make it a war of assas- 
 sination. But he was not a Stuart prince, and 
 he never degraded his nobler nature by putting 
 his threat in execution. 
 
 Algernon Sidney, stanch republican as he 
 was, told Burnet that the Protector had just no- 
 tions of public liberty. In one respect at least 
 he had juster notions of liberty than his parlia- 
 ments, for he stood out against them for freedom 
 of conscience, and his veto on acts of persecution 
 was one of the powers which he would never let 
 go. " To save free conscience" was the special 
 task to which he had been called by one who un- 
 derstood the interests of freedom of conscience 
 well, and he seems to have performed that work 
 faithfully according to his lights, which it is es- 
 pecially necessary, with reference to this subject, 
 to bear in mind were not those of an inspired 
 hero, but those of an uninspired Puritan of the 
 seventeenth century, sitting at the feet of Hugh 
 
Cromwell. 113 
 
 Peters and in thralldom to Hugh Peters's su- 
 perstitions, believing in the necessity of Dog- 
 ma, and believing, we may . be quite sure, in 
 witchcraft. Theoretically, of course, his tolera- 
 tion embraced only Protestants and Trinitari- 
 ans, all sects of whom he desired to see not only 
 at peace with each other, but united, in spite of 
 those secondary differences which he deemed of 
 no importance compared with the vital principles 
 of the Christian faith. But the greatness of his 
 nature carried him beyond his theory, and in all 
 cases we find him practically the enemy of perse- 
 cution. He snatched Biddle, the Socinian, from 
 the fangs of Parliament, placed him in mild con- 
 finement, and, so soon as it was safe, set him free. 
 He tried to procure the formal re-admission of 
 the Jews to England, from which they had been 
 banished since the time of Edward I., and, fail- 
 ing in this, he protected individual Jews who set- 
 tled in this country. He left the Koman Cath- 
 olics practically unmolested in conscience and in 
 their private worship, while they were burning 
 Protestants alive wherever they had the power, 
 though he could not have permitted the open cel- 
 ebration of the mass without causing an out- 
 break among the people. The persecution of 
 Catholic priests, which had been going on during 
 the latter days of the Parliament, soon abated 
 
H4 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 when he became Protector. At one time he 
 launched some fierce ordinances both against the 
 Catholics and the Anglicans, not on account of 
 their religious opinions but on account of their 
 political j)lots and insurrections. Generally the 
 Anglicans enjoyed' under him as much liberty as 
 they could expect, when the foot of Laud had 
 but just been taken from the neck of the nation. 
 All sects, in fact, even the most unpopular, even 
 those which the Protector himself most hated 
 and had the bitterest reason to hate as the nurs- 
 eries not only of his political opponents but of 
 the assassins who sought his life, provided they 
 would only abstain from active attempts to over- 
 throw the government, were sure of obtaining 
 under that government the utmost measure of 
 freedom which could be expected from the most 
 liberal spirit of that age. The Presbyterians, 
 who had persecuted Cromwell with the most un- 
 relenting malignity, were never persecuted by 
 him. On the contrary, his scheme of church 
 polity comprehended them, and he was most de- 
 sirous that they should come in. It was in this 
 matter of freedom of conscience that the man 
 was most before his age, and that the most mo- 
 mentous issues hung upon his life: issues how 
 momentous we see from the religious perplexity 
 and distress into which, partly by the reversal 
 
Cromwell. 1 1 5 
 
 of his policy, we have been brought. Reasons 
 have been already given for believing that this 
 was in him, not the toleration of indifference, bnt 
 the real toleration of a man of strong conviction. 
 Much as his mind had grown in stature, he re- 
 mained to the last open to the impressions even 
 of very fanatical preachers of the doctrines which 
 had been the spring of his own spiritual life. 
 He liked to commune with such enthusiasts as 
 Foxe. This may have been, and no doubt was, 
 partly policy : it was to persecuted sectaries that 
 the government of the Independent chief es- 
 pecially appealed. But great simplicity of relig- 
 ious feeling is compatible with high intellect : 
 and, after all, the enthusiasts, who, whenever the 
 spirit of the world is deeply moved, come forth 
 preaching a more equal state of society, and a 
 brotherhood of man, are they the people whom 
 the profoundest political philosophy would most 
 despise? Are they mere dreamers, or do they 
 dream of that which is to come ? 
 
 When we consider that the Protector's reign 
 lasted but five years and that it was a constant 
 struggle for the existence of his government 
 and his own life, and when we think what he 
 achieved, we must allow that his administration 
 was as high a proof of practical capacity as was 
 ever given by man. Or rather, it was as high a 
 
1 1 6 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 proof as ever was given of the power of a nation 
 when, in a moment of extraordinary exaltation, 
 the nation finds a worthy organ in its chief. 
 
 In the department of justice, the Protector put 
 upon the bench the best judges probably that 
 England had ever had, and at their head Sir 
 Matthew Hale. He made strenuous efforts to re- 
 form those monstrous delays and abuses of the 
 Court of Chancery, which afterward insulted rea- 
 son and sullied public justice for nearly two 
 hundred years. He wished to reform the crim- 
 inal law, which the Tudor despots and their aris- 
 tocratic parliaments had made a code of blood. 
 " It was a scandalous thing," he said, " that a 
 man should be hanged for a theft of twelvepence 
 or sixpence when greater crimes went unpunish- 
 ed." A man of the people, he did not share the 
 aristocratic recklessness of plebeian blood, which 
 had lavished, and which when he was gone lav- 
 ished still more, capital punishment for vulgar 
 offenses, while the worse offenses of the privi- 
 leged class went free. Had he succeeded, the 
 work of Romilly would have been performed, in 
 part at least, two centuries before. 
 
 Every thing was done to foster commerce, and 
 that interest seems at this time to have received 
 a permanent impulse, which bore it prosperously 
 onward even through the maladministration 
 
Cromwell. 
 
 117 
 
 and the naval disasters of the Kestoration. A 
 Committee of Trade was formed, and White- 
 locke, who was one of its members, says that this 
 was an object on which the Protector's heart was 
 greatly set. Other than territorial interests were 
 now held to deserve care. If on the subject of 
 navigation laws Cromwell was a Protectionist, so 
 on the same subject was Adam Smith. Slowly 
 the light dawns even on the highest peaks of 
 thought. 
 
 A navy had been created by the Parliament 
 in the war with the Dutch ; when Vane, at the 
 head of the Admiralty, had shown that energy, 
 purity, and public spirit, added to intellect, will 
 make a great administrator, even of a man who 
 has not passed his life in office. But the Pro- 
 tector fostered that navy so well that if Blake is 
 the father of our naval tactics, Cromwell is the 
 father of our naval greatness. 
 
 The army, which found no equal in the 
 field, and on whose invincible prowess Clarendon 
 could not help dilating when it was disbanded 
 by Charles II., was in discipline equally without 
 a peer. Though the Protector's power rested on 
 the soldiery, their license, if ever it broke out, 
 was rigorously repressed. In this so-called mili- 
 tary government, no soldier was above the law. 
 The swaggering truculence of the praetorian to- 
 
1 1 8 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 ward fellow-citizens has no connection with the 
 military qualities which are the pledges of victo- 
 ry over the enemy in the field. 
 
 Among the Chancellors of the University of 
 Oxford, the name of Oliver stands a startling re- 
 ality in a line of stately buckram. Cromwell 
 was not, like Pym and Hampden, highly culti- 
 vated ; but he had been bred at a classical school 
 and at Cambridge ; and, what was of more conse- 
 quence, he had been trained intellectually by 
 converse with the highest intellects on the high- 
 est subjects of the time. No brutal soldier, no 
 drill-sergeant, was he ; nor does his policy as a 
 democratic chief afford any reason for believing 
 that democracy will be the enemy of culture. 
 Though unlearned himself, he fostered learning ; 
 he saved and protected the Universities of Ox- 
 ford and Cambridge. He founded the Universi- 
 ty of Durham. Learned men and men of intel- 
 lect of the opinions most opposed to his own, 
 studied and wrote in security beneath his rule. 
 Turn where you will, you find him, when he is 
 left to himself, sympathizing with what is noble, 
 and a magnanimous friend to freedom. Alone 
 of English princes, he set himself to draw merit 
 and promise from the Universities into the serv- 
 ice of the State. The men whom he placed at 
 the head of Oxford were Puritans of course, but 
 
Cromwell. 1 1 9 
 
 tliey were learned men and ruled well ; and the 
 University improved in nothing, except in politi- 
 cal and religious principles, when they were gone. 
 
 Cromwell's church reform, as well as his uni- 
 versity reform, was Puritan, but it was compre- 
 hensive. It was directed more to piety than 
 doctrine, and it imposed no tests. It left an 
 Established Church; but it enlarged the liber- 
 ties of that Church to the utmost extent possible 
 to the reformer, or even conceivable by his mind ; 
 and aimed at making the Establishment national 
 by taking in the whole nation, not by crushing 
 the nation into a sect. It gave the people good 
 ministers. Not only was it the most liberal set- 
 tlement of its time, but nothing so liberal follow- 
 ed for ages afterward. Baxter, who was no friend 
 of Cromwell's, allows that the Protector's com- 
 missioners " put in able and serious preachers, 
 who lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion 
 soever they were, so that many thousands of souls 
 blessed God." And thus the people gained that 
 for which Cromwell himself had taken arms, and 
 which in his eyes was the great object of the 
 civil war. 
 
 The conquest of Scotland was followed by an 
 incorporating union. Thus was achieved what, 
 down to that time, had been the greatest object 
 of English policy. Representatives of Scotland 
 
120 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 were called to the Protector's Parliaments. The 
 country was necessarily occupied for some time 
 by an army : but that army did not insult or op- 
 press the people. As Independents, no doubt 
 they paid scanty respect to the divine right of 
 the Kirk. They sometimes took the word of God 
 out of His minister's mouth, and sat in derision 
 on the stool of repentance. In a few cases, it is 
 to be feared, they guided Scottish maidens in 
 paths which did not lead to heaven. But their 
 conduct generally seems to have been better than 
 that of any other soldiers in a conquered coun- 
 try. So far is religious fanaticism from being 
 the root of all vice in man. The heritable juris- 
 dictions, with their oppressive absurdities, were 
 swept away, and Scotch law courts, the greatest 
 nests of corruption in the legal world, saw for a 
 time the unwonted face of justice. " Deil think 
 them, a ween kinless loons," was the pensive re- 
 flection of an old Scotch jobber. These were 
 fine days everywhere for kinless loons. " We 
 count those years," says Burnet, " years of great 
 prosperity." The patriot statesmen of the Resto- 
 ration dissolved the Union, and undid the Pro- 
 tector's work, that they might exercise in Scot- 
 land a provincial despotism, unchecked even by 
 a Parliament of Cavaliers. 
 
 The Irish talk of the curse of Cromwell. 
 
Cromwell. 
 
 121 
 
 They ought rather to talk of the curse of the 
 Cromwellians. The real oppressors were the 
 military adventurers and the State creditors, to 
 whom the Long Parliament had assigned as pay- 
 ment the confiscated lands of the Irish land- 
 owners implicated in the rebellion. That Crom- 
 well intended to exterminate the Irish is an ex- 
 ploded fable : from the moment when the rebel- 
 lion was suppressed, he bade the mass of the 
 Irish people dwell in security and peace. His 
 rule unhappily was that of a Puritan over Pa- 
 pists, of an Anglo-Saxon conqueror over conquer- 
 ed Celts, and this in an age when the highest 
 minds were almost inevitably victims to preju- 
 dices of religion and race of which the lowest 
 minds ought now to be ashamed; but still it was 
 the best government that Ireland had ever had. 
 By uniting Ireland to England and calling her 
 representatives to his parliaments he brought her 
 under imperial rule, the surest protection against 
 local tyranny that he could give. Has policy in 
 this respect was ratified after another century 
 and half of disunion and ascendancy by Pitt, or 
 rather by those calamities which great men avert, 
 but which to ordinary men are the only teachers 
 of wisdom. The chiefs of the Irish government 
 and law were appointed not by a Dublin faction, 
 but by him. He sent over an excellent viceroy 
 
122 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 in the person of his son Henry, to whom he gave 
 counsels of gentleness and moderation; and with 
 complaints of the wrongs done to the Irish people 
 we find mingled the mention of the Protector's 
 name as that of a power (though, no doubt, he 
 was too distant a power) of justice. He even saw 
 with a statesman's eye what Ireland from its very 
 backwardness and unsettlement might be made to 
 do for England. In a conversation with Ludlow, 
 after dwelling on the delays and expensiveness 
 of English law, he added that Cooke, the Chief- 
 Justice whom he had sent to Ireland, determined 
 more causes in a week than Westminster Hall in 
 a year. " Ireland," he went on to say, " is a clean 
 paper, and cajDable of being governed by such 
 laws as shall be found most agreeable to justice, 
 and these may be so administered there as to af- 
 ford a good precedent to England itself, where, 
 when we shall once perceive that property may 
 be preserved at so easy and cheap a rate, we 
 shall never, allow ourselves to be cheated and 
 abused as we have been." It is not in the matter 
 of conveyancing only that Ireland is a clean pa- 
 per, where such laws may be tried as shall be 
 most agreeable to justice and good precedents es- 
 tablished for England herself. 
 
 Of Cromwell's colonial policy the records must 
 be sought in colonial archives. The American 
 
Cromwell. 123 
 
 historian, Mr. Bancroft, says: "Cromwell de- 
 clared himself truly ready to serve the brethren 
 and the churches in New England. The declara- 
 tion was sincere. The people of New England 
 were ever sure that Cromwell would listen to 
 their requests and would take an interest in all 
 the details of their condition. He left them in- 
 dependence and favored their trade. When his 
 arms had made the conquest of Jamaica he offer- 
 ed them the island, with the promise of all the 
 wealth which the tropical climate pours into the 
 lap of industry, and though they frequently 
 thwarted his views they never forfeited his re- 
 gard." " English history," proceeds Mr. Ban- 
 croft, u must judge of Cromwell by his influence 
 on the institutions of England. The American 
 colonies remember the years of his power as the 
 period when British sovereignty was, for them, 
 free from rapacity, intolerance, and oppression. 
 He may be called the benefactor of the English 
 in America, for he left them to enjoy unshackled 
 the benevolence of Providence, the freedom of 
 industry, of commerce, of religion, and of govern- 
 ment." Cromwell and Chatham, these are the 
 two English statesmen the memory of whose 
 sympathy America still cherishes; and were 
 Cromwell and Chatham "great un-Englishmen" 
 and traitors to their country ? 
 
124 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 But it is to the foreign policy of Cromwell 
 that his country, even when she honored his name 
 least, has always looked back with a wistful eye. 
 Unhappily it is a policy apt not only to be ad- 
 mired but to be travestied by wretched imitators 
 when the age for it is past. Such imitations are 
 the mockery and the bane of greatness. These 
 are not the days of commercial monopoly ; Spain 
 is not now excluding the trade of all nations 
 from the western waters, and forcing them to 
 open the high-road of mercantile enterprise by 
 arms; nor is Europe now divided between Ca- 
 tholicism and Protestantism, waging against each 
 other internecine war. The intense spirit of nar- 
 row nationality produced by the disruption of 
 Christendom has now begun to give place again, 
 if not to a new Christendom, at least to some- 
 thing like a community of nations. Cromwell's 
 was a war policy ; and so far as it was a war 
 policy, it was a bad policy, if Christianity be 
 true. But it was not a policy of mere aggran- 
 dizement. It was the companionship of a cause, a 
 cause now out of date, but the best, the purest, 
 and the loftiest which the chief of Puritanism 
 knew. Why did Cromwell league with France 
 against Spain when the power of Spain was de- 
 clining, when that of France was on the point of 
 rising to a height which threatened the liberty 
 
Cromwell. 125 
 
 of all nations? The answer is — first, that the 
 decline of Spain was scarcely yet visible, even to 
 the keenest eye; the vast dependencies, which 
 we know now to have been one cause of her de- 
 cay, were still thought to be the pillars of her 
 towering greatness : secondly, that if Cromwell's 
 dynasty had endured, the France of Louis XIV. 
 would not have become the tyrant of Europe, for 
 that which made her so was the prostration of 
 England under the feet of the French king, and 
 this was the w^ork of the Restoration : but, third- 
 ly, that Spain was the power of persecuting Ca- 
 tholicism, and that France, under Mazarin, 
 though Catholic, was tolerant compared with 
 Spain. To form a great Protestant league, and 
 put England at its head again, was a policy 
 which, unlike that of modern diplomatists, all the 
 nation could understand, which carried the heart 
 of the nation with it, and had the moral forces, 
 as well as arms, upon its side. The Protector 
 stepped into the place of Gustavus Adolphus, as 
 the head of Protestant Christendom. The first 
 embassy which he sent was to the daughter of 
 Gustavus; and Christina, before the madness 
 which mingled with the heroic blood of Vasa 
 had made her its prey, knew and acknowledged 
 her father's heir. Her master of the ceremonies 
 was not so kind ; but Whitelocke made his entry 
 
126 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 into the Swedish capital in a snow-storm, and it 
 was a hard trial for a master of the ceremonies to 
 stand bare-headed in a snow-storm bowing to the 
 ambassador of a regicide republic. A policy of 
 mere aggrandizement, without the champion- 
 ship of a cause, is not a Cromwellian policy, nor 
 are its authors the heirs of Cromwell. Their 
 meanness stands contrasted with the majesty of 
 the Protector. We have seen that, according to 
 Mr. Bancroft, Cromwell offered Jamaica to the 
 colonists of New England; and if he annexed 
 Dunkirk, it was in those ports that, within the 
 memory of living men, Parma had mustered his 
 army of invasion to be convoyed by the Arma- 
 da. Cromwell would have made England the 
 head at once of Protestantism and of Christen- 
 dom. As chief of Christendom, he chastised the 
 pirates of Tunis and Algiers, then the terror of 
 Christian mariners on all seas. At home he was 
 struggling for his government and his life with a 
 swarm of enemies ; abroad, under his outstretch- 
 ed arm, the Protestants of France and Savoy 
 worshiped God in peace. I am not an adhe- 
 rent of non-intervention, if it means that En- 
 gland is to have no sympathies, that she is never 
 to interpose for the defense of right or for the 
 redress of wrong. I believe that when she is 
 again a united nation, though she will not med- 
 
Cromwell. 127 
 
 die or bluster, she will make herself felt in the 
 world once more. Till she is united, no doubt 
 she must remain a nullity in Europe : no foreign 
 minister can act with effect, except as the organ 
 of the nation and with the nation at his back. 
 The case of the Protestants of Savoy stirred the 
 Protector's soul from its very depths : his feel- 
 ings were expressed by the pen of Milton ; and 
 surely never did such a secretary serve, such a 
 prince in such a cause. Cromwell did not send 
 vaporing dispatches; he interposed effectually, 
 and right was done. He talked of making the 
 name of an Englishman as respected as that of a 
 Roman in a strain suited to those days, not suit- 
 ed to ours. But he did not seek to win respect 
 for the English name by ignoble swagger, or by 
 trampling on the weak. He spared the dignity 
 even of the Duke of Savoy, though if the Duke 
 had refused justice, he would have struck him to 
 the dust. 
 
 The part of a conqueror, which Europe expect- 
 ed that Cromwell would assume in his own per- 
 son, his good sense at once renounced : and on 
 the evening of Worcester he sheathed his sword 
 forever. Mr. Hall am, who was infected with the 
 Whig worship of Napoleon, speaks of his idol as 
 the child of philosophy and of enlightenment, and 
 contrasts him with Cromwell, who, he says, " had 
 
128 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 sucked the dregs of a besotted fanaticism." I 
 find it difficult to conceive any fanaticism either 
 so besotted or so cruel as that which leads a man 
 to sacrifice the lives of millions and the happiness 
 of hundreds of millions to his own " star." 
 
 " Cromwell," says Burnet, " studied to seek out 
 able and honest men and to employ them, and so 
 having heard that my father had a very good rep- 
 utation in Scotland for piety and integrity, though 
 he knew him to be a Royalist, he sent to him de- 
 siring him to accept a judge's place, and do justice 
 in his own country, hoping only that he would 
 not act against his government ; but he would 
 not press him to subscribe or swear to it." This 
 man had indeed a royal eye for merit and a royal 
 heart to advance it in the state. Nor was he too 
 nice in scrutinizing the opinions of able men, nor, 
 so long as they served England well, did he too 
 curiously inquire how they would serve him. 
 Here again he stands contrasted with Bonaparte, 
 whose first thought in advancing men was their 
 subserviency to himself, who even avoided pro- 
 moting officers of the artillery, because that 
 service had the character of being republican. 
 There is no pledge of greatness so rare, so deci- 
 sive, or so noble as the choice of associates who 
 will not be tools. Blake was a Republican. 
 Lockhart, the chief instrument of the Protector's 
 
Cromwell. 129 
 
 foreign policy and the first diplomatist of the 
 day, was an old Royalist,. whose value Cromwell 
 had discerned. He was employed again as am- 
 bassador at Paris under Charles II., and still 
 showed something of the spirit of the Protector- 
 ate in altered times. The King of France once 
 produced a private letter from Charles, obtained 
 by corrupt influence and contrary to Lockhart's 
 public -instructions. " Sire," said Lockhart, " the 
 King of England speaks to your majesty only 
 through me." Sir Matthew Hale had been coun- 
 sel to Strafford and the king : and he well justi- 
 fied the Protector's choice by boldly braving the 
 wrath of the Protector himself, who, tried beyond 
 endurance by the resistance to the establishment 
 of his government, had been betrayed into one of 
 those brief outbreaks of arbitrary violence which, 
 though culpable in themselves, illustrated the 
 more signally his general desire to govern under 
 the law. Royal natures, even on a throne, love 
 simplicity of life. The Protector kept such state 
 as became the head of a great nation, but it was 
 a modest state, unlike the tawdry pageantry of 
 the court of Bonaparte. A man of little refine- 
 ment and accustomed to the comradeship of the 
 camp, Cromwell in private was apt to relieve his 
 burdened mind with rude humor, boisterous mer- 
 riment, and even coarse practical jokes. But 
 
 F 2 
 
130 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 when lie received foreign ambassadors, lie knew 
 how to show himself the head of a great nation 
 and the peer of kings. A leading part of his en- 
 tertainments was music, of which he was very 
 fond. The court was the first household in En- 
 gland, and, as enemies confessed, a good pattern 
 to the others, let Mrs. Hutchinson, in her jealousy 
 of the Cromwell women, say what she will. 
 Whitehall was the scene of work. But some- 
 times the Protector shuffled off that terrible coil 
 of business and anxiety, and his life-guards waited 
 to escort him (their escort was no needless pa- 
 geantry) in his ride to Hampton Court. There 
 he refreshed his soul with quiet and country air. 
 Thither an organ had been brought from the 
 chapel of Magdalen College at Oxford, to chase 
 away for an hour the throng of cares. But the 
 Protector's chief comfort and delight was in his 
 family, to which through all the chances and 
 changes of his life, in trial alike and in victory, 
 his heart had turned. They were all gathered 
 round him in the hour of his greatness and of his 
 peril, and remained bound by strong affection to 
 him and to each other. One was missing, the 
 eldest son, Oliver, who had fallen in battle for the 
 cause, and whose image, as we know from Crom- 
 well's last utterances, never left his father's heart. 
 Among the rest the Protector's mother, ninety 
 
Cromwell. 131 
 
 years old, was brought to a scene strange to her 
 and in which she had little comfort, for every re- 
 port of a gun she heard seemed to her her son's 
 death, and she could not bear to pass a day with- 
 out seeing him with her own eyes. We may 
 trust the brief account of her end which is found 
 among the dry state papers of the unimaginative 
 Thurloe : — " My Lord Protector's mother, ninety- 
 four years old, died last night. A little before 
 her death she gave my lord her blessing in these 
 words : c The Lord cause His face to shine upon 
 you and comfort you in all your adversities, and 
 enable you to do great things for the glory of 
 your most High God, and to be a relief unto His 
 people. My dear son, I leave my heart with thee. 
 A good night.' " 
 
 I have estimated Cromwell highly. I see no 
 reason why his nation in his age should not in the 
 terrible but fruitful throes of a revolution have 
 brought forth one of the greatest of the sons of 
 men. " A larger soul never dwelt in a house of 
 clay," said one who had been much about his per- 
 son, after his death, when flattery was mute. 
 His greatness is not to be compared to that of con- 
 querors. Ten years more of Alexander and we 
 should have had ten more satrapies. Ten years 
 more of Napoleon and we should have had ten 
 more conquests at once profligate and insensate, 
 
132 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 civilization put back ten degrees more, the barba- 
 rous war spirit made ten degrees more powerful in 
 the world. Ten years more of Cromwell and the 
 history of England and of Europe might have 
 been changed. In England we should have had 
 no revival of the absolutist and Romanizing mon- 
 archy of the Stuarts ; no resurrection of the Cav- 
 alier party under the name of Tories ; no waste of 
 the nation and disturbance of its progress by the 
 renewal of that barren struggle; no restoration 
 of the hierarchy ; and if an hereditary House of 
 Lords, one at all events that could not have fan- 
 cied itself Norman, and must almost inevitably 
 have assumed more of the character of a national 
 Senate. In Europe, there would have been no 
 domination of Louis XIV. ; no extermination of 
 French Protestantism ; probably no such crisis as 
 that of the French Revolution. 
 
 And now the Protector's foot was on the thresh- 
 old of success. His -glory, the excellence of his 
 administration, his personal dignity and virtues 
 were founding his government in the allegiance of 
 the people. The friends of order were beginning 
 to perceive that their best chance of order lay in 
 giving stability to his throne. Some of the great 
 families, acting on this view, had connected them- 
 selves by marriage with his house. His finances 
 were embarrassed ; but he was about again to 
 
Cromwell. 133 
 
 meet a Parliament which would probably have 
 voted him supplies and concurred with him in 
 settling the constitution. His foot was on the 
 threshold of success ; but on the threshold of suc- 
 cess stood Death. It was death in a strange form 
 for him : for after all his battles and storms and 
 all the plots of assassins against his life, this ter- 
 rible chief died of grief at the loss of his favorite 
 daughter and of watching at her side. 
 
 Up that steep and slippery path of worldly 
 greatness, so dangerous to the simplicity of faith 
 and virtue, the religious farmer of Huntingdon- 
 shire had wandered far away from the Puritanism 
 of his youth. He felt it, and when his end was 
 near he asked his chaplain whether those who 
 had once been in a state of grace could fall from 
 it. ' He was assured that they could not. Then 
 he said, " I am saved, for I am sure that I was 
 once in a state of grace." The Calviriistic formula 
 has become obsolete for most of us : but we may 
 still trust that he who has once sincerely devoted 
 himself to God's service is not often allowed to 
 become an enemy of God. 
 
 At the time of his installation, the Protector 
 had executed the power given him by Parliament 
 of naming a successor. He had sealed up the pa- 
 per and addressed it to Thurloe, but had kept 
 both the. paper and its secret to himself. In his 
 
134 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 last illness, at Hampton Court, he sent to London 
 for the paper, telling the messenger that it was 
 on his study-table at Whitehall; but the paper 
 could not be found. Whose name did it contain \ 
 I doubt not, that of Richard Cromwell. Perhaps 
 the Protector's memory had failed him, and he 
 had really destroyed the paper, still expecting 
 that Richard would succeed not as Protector un- 
 der the power of nomination, but by act of Par- 
 liament as hereditary king. Nor do I see any rea- 
 son to question Thurloe's statement -that the Pro- 
 tector named Richard his successor by word of 
 mouth just before he died. What else was to be 
 done 3 Richard was weak, as his father must too 
 well have known ; but he was popular and blame- 
 less, and had the shadow of hereditary right. 
 Henrv Cromwell was a man of mark as well as 
 of worth, but not of mark enough to bear the bur- 
 den unsupported by any other claim. Among 
 the generals there was not one to be thought of 
 since Ireton was gone. We know the rest. How 
 military ambition broke loose: how anarchy en- 
 sued. Anarchy, not Cromwell's government, 
 brought on the restoration. At last the nobler 
 spirit of the nation rose again. But the Revolu- 
 tion of 1688 was an aristocratic revolution ; and 
 there were other interests for which men had 
 given their lives at Marston and Naseby, and 
 
Cromwell. 135 
 
 with which, when Cromwell died before his time, 
 all was over for many a day. 
 
 All was over here, and once more there was 
 an illustration of the frailty of systems and insti- 
 tutions w^hich depend on a single life. But the 
 counsels of Providence never depend upon a sin- 
 gle life. Just as the great struggle was com- 
 mencing in England, a little bark put forth on 
 the Atlantic, unnoticed amidst the great events 
 and the great actors of the time. Its passengers 
 were Puritan peasants, hunted out of their homes 
 by the Anglican hierarchy and its persecuting 
 agents. It bore English Democracy, safe beyond 
 the reach of the English reaction, to the shores 
 of the New World. There, too, it has encounter- 
 ed its old foes, the enemies of liberty, both of 
 body and soul. But there it has triumphed : it 
 has triumphed for itself, and it has triumphed 
 for us all. 
 
TT. 
 
 Qifyo 
 
m. 
 
 PITT.— I. 
 
 The European movement which ended in the 
 French Revolution, like that which ended in the 
 Reformation, like all great movements of human- 
 ity, was complex in its nature. It was at once 
 religious and political, and it extended to all the 
 other parts of human life. In religion it was 
 almost entirely critical and destructive. To our 
 generation was left the heavy task of renovating 
 faith. The religion of Rousseau, indeed, proved 
 itself the strongest among the elements which 
 struggled for mastery in the Revolution. We 
 can understand how at the time it breathed in its 
 freshness like the breath of morning into the 
 feverish atmosphere of French life. But it was 
 merely a bastard Christianity, emotional, senti- 
 mental, based on no conviction. The great serv- 
 ice done to religion during the eighteenth cen- 
 tury was the advancement of toleration, to which 
 Frederic the Great, tyrant as he was in politics, 
 was a real friend ; though it was the toleration 
 
14° Three English Statesmen, 
 
 of indifference, not the toleration of those who, 
 with deep convictions, and because they have 
 deep convictions, reverence conscience as the 
 source, and liberty of conscience as the sole guar- 
 antee, of truth. In the political sphere also the 
 movement was merely destructive ; it pulled 
 down feudalism without building up any thing 
 in its place, and it has left European society 
 generally in a chaotic state, from which the na- 
 tions have sought refuge in democratic despotism, 
 pending the evolution of a sound and permanent 
 order of things. Two political ideals, however, 
 this century produced; the half-classical, half- 
 Christian Eepublicanism of Rousseau, and the en- 
 lightened and beneficent despotism, having its 
 imaginary type in China, which was the Utopia 
 of Voltaire. In jurisprudence and political econ- 
 omy, on the other hand, there were positive and 
 great results : in jurisprudence, the reforms of 
 law, especially the law of succession to property 
 and the penal code, of which the Code Napoleon 
 is the most scientific embodiment, though the 
 philosophy of the previous century was the 
 source ; in economy, free trade, and all the bene- 
 fits which the world has received from the princi- 
 ples enunciated by Hume, Turgot, and, greatest 
 of all, Adam Smith. 
 
 The first part of Pitt's life — that part which 
 
Pitt. 141 
 
 forms the subject of this evening's lecture — is a 
 product of the economical, and in some measure 
 also of the political, part of this European move- 
 ment, limited by the conditions imposed on the 
 leader of an aristocratic assembly and a minister 
 of the English crown ; the second part, which 
 will form the subject of the following lecture, is 
 a -product of the reaction against the religious 
 and political part of the same movement when it 
 had arrived at its revolutionary crisis and over- 
 turned the French Church and Throne. During 
 the first part of his life, Pitt is to be classed with 
 the philosophic and reforming kings and minis- 
 ters before the Revolution, whose names ought 
 not to be forgotten, though the Jacobins chose to 
 call the year of their frenzy the year One ; with 
 Joseph II. ; with Pombal, Aranda, and Choiseul, 
 the overthrowers of Jesuitism ; with Tanucci, 
 with Leopold of Tuscany, with Turgot, with Fred- 
 eric of Prussia, and with Catherine of Hussia, so 
 far as Catherine and Frederic were organs of phi- 
 losophy and reform. During the second part, he 
 tends, though he does not actually sink, to the 
 level of the Metternichs, the Polignacs, the Perce- 
 vals, and the Eldons. The Pitt of my present 
 lecture and the Pitt of my next stand in strong 
 contrast to each other, though the connection is 
 quite intelligible and signally illustrates the 
 
142 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 power of circumstances over any but the strong- 
 est men. The same change is seen in the lives 
 of Joseph and Catherine and other reformers in 
 high places, who, when the Eevolution came, 
 found out that their trade was that of king. It 
 is seen in the English aristocracy, the more intel- 
 lectual of whom had, like the French aristocracy, 
 been affecting scepticism and Republicanism, as 
 we may learn from Horace Walpole, who is al- 
 ways throwing out light Voltairian sentiments 
 and cutting off the head of Charles I. This even- 
 ing we speak of the happier Pitt, of him whose 
 monuments remain in free trade, an improved fis- 
 cal system, religious toleration, the first steps to- 
 ward colonial emancipation, the abolition of the 
 slave trade, the condemnation of slavery. An- 
 other evening we shall speak of the Pitt whose 
 monuments remain in six hundred millions of 
 debt, and other evils political and social, of which 
 the bitter inheritance has descended to us and 
 will descend to generations yet to come. 
 
 William Pitt was born beneath a roof illus- 
 trious, but not likely to give birth to an apostle 
 of economical reform. What the inglorious fru- 
 gality of Walpole had saved, Chatham had squan- 
 dered in victory ; and he had added a heavy bur- 
 den of debt besides. But the father bequeathed 
 to his child the example of purity, of patriotism, 
 
Pitt. 143 
 
 of a high aspiring spirit, which soared, if not to 
 the summit of political heroism, at least far above 
 the place-hunters and intriguers of the time. He 
 bequeathed to him also of his eloquence, not the 
 incommunicable fire, but so much as assiduous 
 culture under a great master could impart, and 
 sent him into public life a youthful prodigy in 
 the accomplishment by which we choose our 
 statesmen. From the conversation of Chatham 
 and of Chatham's friends, Pitt, who was brought 
 up at home, must also have learned much ; and 
 thus his parliamentary maturity at twenty-one, 
 though a wonder, is not a miracle. 
 
 I have noticed that Pitt was brought up at 
 home. He was nevertheless no milksop. We 
 complacently accept it as a full set-off against all 
 the evils of public schools, that they make boys 
 manly. It is easy to see how by cutting boys off 
 from intercourse with men and women, and con- 
 fining them to the society of boys, you may make 
 them hard ; but not so easy to see how you can 
 make them manly. Pitt brought up in the house 
 of Chatham is, of course, too exceptional a case to 
 reason from : but no want of manliness, either of 
 mind or character, was seen in this boy when he 
 became prime minister at twenty-four. 
 
 He, however, went to Cambridge at fourteen, 
 and stayed there seven years, during which he 
 
144 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 * was regular and read hard, owing, it may "be, 
 partly to the weakness of his health, which by 
 debarring from physical sports and enjoyments, 
 has perhaps turned not a few men into the path 
 which leads to intellectual greatness. We are 
 beginning to know the power of education, and 
 the significance of the question, what sort of cul- 
 ture it was that was undergone by a future chief 
 of the state. The classics, a school at once of taste 
 and of the political character formed by a rather 
 narrow and heathen love of liberty, were the 
 staple of Pitt's training, as they had been those 
 of the English statesmen before him. To these 
 he added the discipline of mathematics, some 
 jurisprudence, some experimental philosophy, and 
 a good deal of general literature, including history. 
 Historical philosophy was not then in exist- 
 ence : it might have taught him, the destined 
 ruler of his country at the epoch of the French 
 Revolution, to view with intelligence and meet 
 with calmness the tremendous phenomena of his 
 time. But above all he read the work, then new 
 and unknown to his elder rivals, of Adam Smith, 
 to which, in his great budget-speech of 1792, he 
 referred as furnishing the best solution to every 
 question connected with political economy and 
 with trade. Pitt was Aclam Smith's first power- 
 ful disciple. And from this source he drew not 
 
Pitt. 145 
 
 only the principles of his commercial reforms and 
 his "budgets, but a talisman of command. The com- 
 mercial and manufacturing interests were rapidly 
 rising in importance, and with these interests Pitt 
 alone of the party leaders had qualified himself to 
 deal. The aristocratic statesmen, with their pure- 
 ly classical training, seldom stooped to any thing 
 so low as economy or finance. Fox avowed his 
 ignorance of political economy ; he used to say he 
 did not know why the funds went up or down, 
 but he liked to see them go down because it vex- 
 ed Pitt. Sir Francis Dashwood was thought 
 good enough for the Chancellorship of the Ex- 
 chequer, though a sum of iive figures was said to 
 be an inscrutable mystery to his mind. The stu- 
 dent of the " Wealth of Nations" might have 
 learned, and perhaps he did learn, from it, other 
 things besides those which he mentioned in his 
 budget-speech. Free principles hang together, 
 and Adam Smith is, in an unobtrusive way, the 
 apostle of Democracy as well as of Free Trade. 
 
 Pitt's tutor was Pretyman, better known in 
 the annals of ecclesiastical rapacity by his later 
 name of Tomline. This man seems to have done 
 the classical and mathematical part of his duty 
 well : Pitt at least was grateful to him, and 
 gorged him — to satiate him was impossible — 
 with preferment, till George III. cried " Hold, 
 
146 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 enough." Tomline thus enriched, provided with 
 the means of enriching his whole tribe, and hav- 
 ing inherited a private fortune besides, subscribed, 
 among others, £1,000 toward the payment of 
 Pitt's debts, which sum he afterward tried to get 
 repaid to him by the nation. 
 
 Bad physicians advised the stripling to drink 
 port, the panacea and almost the physical gospel 
 of the age ; and he followed their advice with a 
 vengeance. Hence disease and mortal languor in 
 his prime; hence the constitution early decayed 
 which succumbed to the blow of Austerlitz. Lord 
 Stanhope — to whose most valuable biography, 
 which forms the foundation of this lecture, let me 
 here acknowledge my great obligations — Lord 
 Stanhope says that Pitt was only once seen drunk. 
 There are traditions of a different kind. In all 
 other respects Pitt's character, like that of his 
 great father, was pure ; and though the wits 
 might scoff at the idea that genius and morality 
 could exist together, his purity gave him a great 
 advantage in self-control, in conscientious indus- 
 try, in dignity of bearing, in the confidence of the 
 community — especially of the middle classes — 
 over his chief rival, who, though he had a warm 
 heart and noble sympathies, was a rake, a gam- 
 bler, corrupt himself, and a corrupter of the youths 
 about him. Of religion there was little to be 
 
Pitt, 147 
 
 had in those days ; and of that little not mnch re- 
 sided in Mr. Pretynian. Pitt was regular in his 
 attendance at the college chapel. He also read 
 theology with his tutor, and some would have us 
 believe that he became a theologian at once most 
 learned and most orthodox, armed at all points to 
 maintain the Thirty-nine Articles against all here- 
 sies, whether on the side of Popery or Dissent ; 
 while, on the other hand, there is a tradition that, 
 by his own avowal, Butler's " Analogy" raised in 
 his mind more doubts than it solved, wherein he 
 would by no means have been unique. But it is 
 plain that he had not that strong and present 
 sense of things unseen by which the noblest char- 
 acters have been sustained. So far as integrity 
 and real desire of the public good would carry 
 him, he could go : but when the great trial came, 
 the trial which called for complete self-sacrifice, 
 the sustaining force was wanting, conscience yield- 
 ed to ambition, and the son of the morning fell. 
 
 As Chatham's son, Pitt entered public life as a 
 Whig. But Whig, by this time, meant little 
 more than Gruelf or Ghibelin. The Whigs were 
 a party, and an illustrious party, while they were 
 making the Kevqlution of 1688, and afterward 
 while they were defending the Eevolution settle- 
 ment against Louis XIV. abroad and the Jaco- 
 bites at home. But that struggle over> they be- 
 
148 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 came an oligarchy of great houses squabbling 
 among themselves for the high offices of state. 
 The long scene of degradation which ensued had, 
 for a time, been broken by the rise of Chatham, a 
 middle-class minister putting the oligarchy under 
 his feet, though to do it he was obliged himself to 
 connive at corruption, and allow a duke to do for 
 his government the work which the great Com- 
 moner abhorred. In this party government of 
 ours, which we take for an eternal ordinance of 
 nature, though it is but an accident of yesterday, 
 every thing depends on the existence of a real 
 division of opinion on some important question. 
 When the great questions are for the time out of 
 the way, party government degenerates into a 
 chronic faction-fight between a connection which 
 wants to get place and a connection which wants 
 to keep it. At this time the great questions were 
 out of the way, there was no real division of par- 
 ties, and a reign of cabal and corruption naturally 
 ensued. All the factions alike used power for 
 class purposes ; the nation had little interest in 
 their scuffles, and no hope but that by some acci- 
 dent a man of heart and brain might get into his 
 hands a measure of indejDendent power, and use it 
 partly for the public good. 
 
 Pitt took his seat when only just of age for the 
 nomination borough of Appleby, and at once 
 
PitL 149 
 
 came forward in debate. His command of round- 
 ed sentences was already fearful; assuredly no 
 youth ever wrote such stately dispatches to his 
 mother. He gave the House without delay a 
 taste of his oratorio training, and early showed 
 his greatest gift as an orator, the power of lofty 
 sarcasm, which, in a House not much in earnest, 
 is so telling, both in its direct effect, and because, 
 unlike open invective, it suggests a reserve of pow- 
 er. Those stately speeches of his, with their long 
 rolling periods, were, no doubt, very imposing 
 when they were delivered with an imperial bear- 
 ing and haughty gestures from the summit of 
 Parliamentary command. But the best of them, 
 and those best reported, can scarcely be placed 
 in the small number of orations which deserve 
 to live beyond the hour. They contain few 
 memorable words. That fusion of reason in the 
 fire of passion, the attribute of the highest elo- 
 quence, is not there. They are the works of tal- 
 ent, but not of genius. 
 
 The war with the American Colonies had al- 
 most run its guilty and disastrous course, and 
 was drawing near its shameful end. The North 
 ministry tottered to its fall. It was upheld only 
 by the personal support of the king, who, like 
 kings in general, was still for war. Pitt went 
 into strong opposition. He denounced the war 
 
150 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 with a vehemence which, we should have thought, 
 would have seemed inexpiable to the king. He 
 supported Burke's motion for retrenchment. He 
 took up Parliamentary Reform warmly, and made 
 the question his own. This he did with his guns 
 leveled directly against the corrupt influence of 
 the court — "an influence," he said, "which has 
 been pointed at in every period as the fertile 
 source of all our miseries — an influence which has 
 been substituted in the room of wisdom, of activ- 
 ity, of exertion, and of success — an influence which 
 has grown with our growth, and strengthened 
 with our strength, but which unhappily has not 
 diminished with our diminution, nor decayed with 
 our decay." The court was so discredited and de- 
 tested that on his motion for a select committee 
 Pitt was only beaten by 20. It has been remarked 
 that the Reformers never had so good a division 
 again till 1831. Pitt also voted for the motion of 
 the Radical Alderman Sawbriclge to shorten the 
 duration of parliaments. If this bright archangel 
 of Toryism had sat long in opposition he might 
 have become a minister of the Darker Power. 
 
 North fell ; and over the prostrate favorite of 
 the court Fox and Rockingham entered the royal 
 closet by storm. On Rockingham's death Fox 
 pressed the Duke of Portland on the king as first 
 minister, but the king carried Lord Shelburne, 
 
Pitt. i $ j 
 
 one of Chatham's old connection ; and Pitt, whose 
 aspiring boyhood had refused office without a 
 seat in the cabinet under Rockingham, came into 
 Shelburne's cabinet at twenty-three as Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer. The foot of Adam Smith was 
 on the steps of power. 
 
 The Shelburne ministry had to make peace 
 with the Americans, and with their allies, France 
 and Spain ; but on the preliminaries of peace the 
 Government was overthrown by the profligate co- 
 alition of Fox and North. Profligate that coa- 
 lition was, not so much because it violated politi- 
 cal principle, for none of these factions had much 
 political principle to violate, as because it violated 
 personal honor. Fox had spoken of North in 
 terms which made an alliance between them, 
 manifestly concluded for the sake of getting back 
 into place, equally infamous to them both. The 
 king struggled ; he turned to Pitt ; and the daz- 
 zling offer of the premiership was refused by a 
 far-sighted youth of twenty-three. Then the king 
 was forced to go under the yoke ; but this time 
 the nation was with him, and his defeat was a 
 moral victory. 
 
 A constitutional monarchy, according to the 
 classic aphorism of M. Thiers, is one in which the 
 king reigns and does not govern; in the less 
 pointed words of Lord North, one in which the 
 
152 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 king has only the appearance of power. This 
 highly artificial arrangement — for highly artificial 
 it is when we consider that the king is treated, 
 even in onr addresses to Heaven, as though he were 
 the real ruler, and we his obedient subjects — is 
 commonly taken to be coeval with the monarchy of 
 England. It came into existence a century and a 
 half ago, and has not continued without interrup- 
 tion since that time. The feudal kings, like the 
 Saxon kings before them, not only reigned but 
 governed, and were deposed, and sometimes put 
 to death, if they governed ill. The Tudors were 
 despots. The Stuarts tried to be. William III., 
 though a foreigner, and dependent on the Whigs 
 for his crown, was at the head of his own govern- 
 ment, had no foreign minister but himself, at a 
 time when foreign policy was the most important 
 department, and vetoed the Triennial Act. Anne 
 changed the government and the policy of the 
 country at the whim of her waiting- woman. The 
 first constitutional king was George I., a foreign- 
 er like William, very stupid, which William was 
 not, unable to speak English, with a Pretender 
 across the water, and absolutely in the hands of 
 his Whig patrons. George II. was pretty much 
 in the same case, and accordingly he was only one 
 degree less constitutional than his father. But 
 George III., as he told Parliament in graceful 
 
Pitt. 153 
 
 compliment to the shades of his ancestors, was 
 born a Briton. " What lustre," responded the 
 peers, " does it add to the name of Briton when 
 you, sir, esteem it among your glories." Jacobin- 
 ism was defunct ; and the last non-juring bishop 
 died about this time, an apothecary at Shrews- 
 bury, owning that Providence had declared itself 
 for the Hanover line. Therefore, George III. was 
 not constitutional : he wished not only to reign 
 but to govern. He is surely not much to be 
 blamed for that wish. Hearing a prayer put up 
 every Sunday, that he might be enabled to rule 
 well, he might not unnaturally conceive that it 
 was a part of his duty to rule. Despotic ideas 
 had been carefully infused by his mother and Lord 
 Bute into a mind which the absence of any other 
 culture left entirely open for their reception ; for 
 never had a born Briton so un-British an educa- 
 tion. The Parliament of that day was not a free 
 Parliament, but an oligarchical and rotten-bor- 
 ough Parliament ; and we might have sympa- 
 thized with the Mug if he had really intended to 
 override the factions, put the oligarchy under the 
 feet of a national trustee, promote merit in the 
 public service without regard to connection, and 
 govern in the interest of the whole nation. Un- 
 fortunately, George the Third's idea of merit was 
 
 Lord Bute and Mr. Jenkinson, and his idea of gov- 
 
 G2 
 
154 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 erning in the interest of the whole nation was the 
 American war. It was unlucky, too, if the new sys- 
 tem was to restore purity, that it was itself support- 
 ed by corruption ; and that in this corruption, 
 and in the coarsest form of it — that connected 
 with elections — the king himself took an active 
 part. If any one, in his hatred of oligarchy, 
 dreams of a patriot king, let him awake from that 
 dream. Sooner than a patriot king, he will find 
 an oligarchy ready to divest itself of power. 
 
 George III. tried unconstitutional monarchy, 
 first by Lord Bute, a walking-gentleman, and 
 failed ; then by Lord North, a good man of busi- 
 ness and a good parliamentary tactician, but pliant 
 enough to submit to government by departments ; 
 that is, a government in which the king was first 
 minister, and the departments against their con- 
 sciences carried on the king's American war. 
 But the end of that war brought the system to 
 the ground amidst a storm of odium ; and only 
 the superior odium of the coalition could have 
 given the king a third chance. A third chance 
 he now had, and having twice before got hold of 
 a tool who was not strong enough to be a minis- 
 ter, he now got hold of a minister who was rather 
 too strong to be a tool. 
 
 The coalition deserved to fall, but not on the 
 measure on which it fell. It had become necessa- 
 
Pitt 155 
 
 ry for humanity, and for the honor of the country, 
 to arrest the servants of the East India Company 
 in their career of crime. The government brought 
 in a bill taking India out of the hands of the 
 Company and putting it into the hands of a board 
 of seven commissioners to be named for the first 
 time by Parliament and afterward by the crown. 
 There can be no doubt that the measure was 
 framed in good faith. Burke, whose zeal for 
 Indian reform none will question, was its framer. 
 Fox himself, with all his faults, was a true friend 
 of humanity : let us honor his name for it, at a 
 time when contempt for humanity and sympathy 
 with cruelty is cultivated by feebleness as a proof 
 of vigor, and lauded by public instructors as a 
 healthy English tone. As, however, the majority 
 in Parliament were to have the nominations for 
 the first time, a cry was got up that the party in- 
 tended, by the appropriation of overwhelming pat- 
 ronage, to perpetuate itself in power. Set, up by 
 Pitt and the opposition, this cry was swelled of 
 course by the whole East Indian interest, which 
 by buying rotten boroughs had made itself a 
 great parliamentary power, and was beginning, 
 in the secret counsels of Providence, to avenge, 
 by its pestilential influence on English politics, 
 the wrongs of the Hindoo. The great standing 
 army, estranged from the ideas of English citizen- 
 
156 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 ship and from reverence for English liberties, 
 which is now being trained up in India, may per- 
 haps one day carry farther the work of retribution, 
 and teach people that they can not practice rapine 
 in another country, even under pretense of propa- 
 gating Christianity, and with the tacit sanction of 
 their bishops, without entailing some consequences 
 on their own. The king was in a paroxysm of 
 rage and fear at the prospect of having so much 
 power taken out of his hands. The bill, however, 
 passed the Commons by a large majority, and 
 was on the point of passing the Lords, when 
 Lord Temple, who had before been carrying on a 
 most unconstitutional correspondence with the 
 king against the ministers, crept to the royal 
 ear, and received from his majesty a paper to be 
 handed about among the Lords in the following 
 terms : " His Majesty allowed Earl Temple to 
 say that whoever voted for the India Bill was 
 -not only not his friend but would be considered 
 by him as an enemy ; and if these words were 
 not strong enough, Earl Temple might use what- 
 ever words he deemed stronger and more to the 
 purpose." The only words which could have 
 been stronger and more to the purpose would 
 have been some having reference to more substan- 
 tial motives than affection for the royal j>erson. 
 By a free use of this august document, the India 
 
Pitt. 157 
 
 Bill was thrown out ; and the Coalition ministers 
 fell, most of them in transports of rage, Lord 
 North, with his usual good-humor, declining to 
 get out of bed at twelve o'clock at night to give 
 up the seals, and forcing the royal envoy, who 
 came at that unseasonable hour, to have an in- 
 terview with Lady North, as well as with himself. 
 For a moment, Temple, the author of the plot, 
 was secretary of state ; but he immediately van- 
 ished under a cloud of mystery which has never 
 been cleared away. Lord Stanhope is inclined 
 to think that . Lord Temple having saved the 
 monarchy by a back-stairs intrigue, wished to as- 
 sure its salvation by getting himself made a duke; 
 and that the king, faithful to first principles, even 
 in this supreme hour of political extremity, would 
 make none but royal dukes. A more obvious 
 solution is that Temple, like most intriguers, was 
 a coward, and that his heart failed him as he 
 touched his prize. "What is certain is, that Lord 
 Temple went to Stowe. Meanwhile the king 
 had turned again to Pitt; and Pitt was prime 
 'minister, and not only prime minister, but, as the 
 rest of the cabinet were mere respectabilities, sole 
 minister at twenty-four. 
 
 Unluckily there was now a taint on his appoint- 
 ment, which there would not have been if he had 
 dared to accept the prime ministership) before. 
 
158 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Lord Stanhope defends the king and his partners 
 in this transaction. He says the rules of the con- 
 stitution were not then settled. The principle 
 that the king was not to take notice of any thing 
 depending in Parliament had been asserted, as I 
 apprehend, against the Stuarts. But be this as it 
 may, if the rules of the constitution were not set- 
 tled, the rules of honor were ; and the rules of 
 honor, while they permitted the king to dismiss 
 his ministers openly and appeal against them to 
 the country, did not permit him to stab them in 
 the dark. But, says Lord Stanhope, Pitt at all 
 events stands clear. His conduct was excusable 
 perhaps ; but if the transaction was criminal, he 
 was not guiltless. He was an accomplice after 
 the fact. He screened Lord Temple in Parliament. 
 He accepted the fruits of the intrigue. Afterward, 
 he was himself called upon to confront the prej- 
 udices of the king. George III. was cunning, 
 and though he might quail before the haughty 
 son of Chatham, he must have felt in his heart 
 that Pitt had once been his accomplice. 
 
 Then came the famous struggle of the young 
 minister at the head of a minority, and without a 
 colleague to support him in the House of Com- 
 mons, against the superior forces and the veteran 
 chiefs of the Coalition. The merit of Pitt in this 
 struggle has been overrated. The Opposition 
 
Pitt. 159 
 
 made him a present of the victory. They should 
 have proceeded not passionately but vigorously 
 against Temple, and treated Pitt with cool for- 
 bearance, so as to avoid making him an object of 
 national sympathy. They proceeded passionately 
 but by no means vigorously against Temple, and 
 they assailed Pitt with a ferocity which arrayed 
 the sympathies of all men on his side. The fact 
 is, however, that Pitt played a winning game 
 from the beginning. The numbers of the majori- 
 ty in the house were no measure of their hold on 
 the country. The nation was weary of cabals 
 which bandied power from one set of place-hunt- 
 ers to another. Its heart yearned toward the 
 young, and as it hoped pure and patriotic, son of 
 Chatham. The Tories wished the king to choose 
 his own ministers. The few Radicals that there 
 were hated the great Whig houses. The Coali- 
 tion was hated by all. 
 
 In the middle of the struggle the Clerkship of 
 the Pells (a sinecure office with an income of 
 £3,000 a year) fell vacant. The minister might 
 have taken it himself, and Pitt was poor. He 
 fancied that if he lost his place he should have to 
 go back to the bar. But he used the windfall to 
 redeem a pension which had been improperly be- 
 stowed by the other party, thus placing his own 
 purity in contrast with their corruption. As a 
 
160 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 minister lie waged no war on great sinecures, and 
 he held the Wardenship of the Cinque Ports him- 
 self. But this act proved at least that he was 
 playing a high game, and that he would not let 
 his cupidity stand in the way of his ambition. 
 He showed sagacity, too, in putting off the disso- 
 lution, and thus giving the Opposition rope to 
 hang themselves, and the tide of opinion time to 
 rise in his favor. Even in the House, the Oppo- 
 sition was at the last gasp; and when urged by 
 its leaders to throw out the Mutiny Bill, it no 
 longer answered the spur. A last effort was 
 made by a devoted adherent in the falling hour 
 of the great Whig houses. The day before the 
 dissolution somebody stole the Great Seal. But 
 the fortitude and resource of the young minister 
 were equal to the occasion, and a new Great Seal 
 was at once made. 
 
 When Pitt at last went to the country, there 
 was a rout of the Opposition never paralleled ex- 
 cept when the Whigs, in their turn, threw the 
 Tories to the reformed constituencies in 1832. 
 The great majority with which Pitt returned to 
 the House was a medley, in which high Tories 
 were mixed up with Alderman Sawbridge and 
 John Wilkes. But he rapidly gave it consistency 
 by making his name the symbol of prosperity and 
 sound finance, and by attaching commerce, whose 
 
Pitt. 161 
 
 interests he alone understood, firmly to his "banner. 
 Soon he was all-powerful, and the beginning of 
 his reign is an epoch in our history. There had 
 been no revolution. All the cabinet were peers 
 except Pitt himself; and he was an earl's son. 
 He had come into power by the personal favor of 
 the king. He could do nothing against the king 
 or his order. But with these restrictions, he wish- 
 ed to rule for the public good. His intellect was 
 probably not so high as that of Turgot, but it 
 was more practical: and his task was not, like 
 that of Turgot, almost hopeless. Bright years, 
 years bright for himself — and, on the whole, bright 
 for his country — lay before him. Such a part 
 can scarcely ever be played again. In ordinary 
 times, connection and experience must rule. But 
 it is possible that, under certain circumstances, the 
 House of Commons may once more weary and dis- 
 gust the nation; and that a statesman of high 
 bearing and known public spirit may once more 
 appeal with success from cabal and faction to the 
 heart of the people. 
 
 The highly aristocratic composition of Pitt's 
 cabinet is a proof that there had been no revo- 
 lution : it has also been justly cited as one of the 
 many confutations of the theory that the Tories 
 are less oligarchical than the Whigs. Under the 
 influence of this theory, Lord Stanhope, a moder- 
 
1 62 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 ate Tory, sometimes lapses into language funda- 
 mentally democratic. "In 1784 the independent 
 freeholders of Yorkshire boldly confronted the 
 great houses" — this is an appeal to a dangerous 
 spirit, unless care is taken to insert " Tory" before 
 " freeholders," and " Whig" before " great houses." 
 The fact seems to be that the Tories being, 
 through some cause unexplained by political 
 science, rather more stupid than the Whigs, have 
 been rather more often obliged to take adven- 
 turers into pay ; but they do this for oligarch- 
 ical purposes, and an oligarch is not the less an 
 oligarch because he keeps a bravo. 
 
 The young conqueror sullied his triumph by 
 most ungenerous conduct to his rival on the sub- 
 ject of the Westminster Scrutiny. He had the 
 mortification, as deserved as it was bitter, of find- 
 ing himself at last placed in a minority by the 
 more generous feeling of his own followers. In 
 one of these debates, which, in spite of the aristo- 
 cratic character of the speakers, were as rancorous 
 and personal as any thing in an American Con- 
 gress, Fox made a really great speech, in which 
 he read his young rival a well-merited lecture on 
 the expediency of moderation in the use of victory. 
 Nothing can exceed the pertness and bad taste of 
 Pitt's reply — "I am not surprised if he should 
 pretend to be the butt of ministerial persecution ; 
 
Pitt. 163 
 
 and if, by striving to excite the public compassion, 
 lie should seek to reinstate himself in that popu- 
 larity which he once enjoyed, but which he so un- 
 happily has forfeited. For it is the best and most 
 ordinary resource of these political apostates to 
 court and offer themselves to persecution, for the 
 sake of the popular predilection and pity which 
 usually fall upon persecuted men; it becomes 
 worth their while to suffer for a time political 
 martyrdom, for the sake of the canonization that 
 awaits the suffering martyr ; and I make no doubt 
 the right honorable gentleman has so much pen- 
 etration, and at the same time so much passive 
 virtue about him, that not only would he be glad 
 to seem a poor, injured, persecuted man, but he 
 would gladly seek an opportunity of even really 
 suffering a little persecution if it be possible to 
 find such an opportunity." It must have been 
 difficult for an opponent, or for any one indeed 
 but a partisan, to help very cordially abhorring 
 the gifted youth, from whose lips flowed unbidden 
 such perfect periods as these ; especially when at 
 his back was a mob of Tory squires, under the 
 famous Eolle, hooting down the speakers on the 
 other side — a habit perhaps not yet quite extinct. 
 If there was any one in that assembly to whom 
 the term apostate might with justice have been 
 applied, it was the vehement advocate of Parlia- 
 
164 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 mentary Reform as the great antidote to secret in- 
 fluence who now stood, through a most flagrant 
 exercise of secret influence, first minister of the 
 crown. 
 
 Pitt's great glories are economical and financial. 
 In that sphere, as he touched neither prerogative 
 nor privilege, royalty and aristocracy allowed him 
 to have free play. They even formed his support 
 in contending against the commercial tyranny of 
 protection. 
 
 He found the finances after the American war 
 and the North administration in a desperate 
 state. There were 14 millions of unfunded debt ; 
 exchequer bills were at 20 discount ; consols were 
 at 56. The customs were so laid on that the 
 smuggling trade in tea was double the lawful 
 trade in amount. The pupil of Adam Smith set 
 all this right, brought income by bold taxation to 
 a level with expenditure, and applying the prin- 
 ciple which he was the first to grasp — that reduc- 
 tion of duties will increase revenue by increasing 
 consumption — transferred the gains of the ^mug- 
 gier to the national exchequer. He was at the 
 same time enabled to do away with a number of 
 places in the customs and excise, and thereby 
 not only to reduce the national expense, but to 
 stanch some of the sources of corruption. He 
 thus, in spite of some occasional waste in anna- 
 
Pitt. 165 
 
 ments, the debts of the Prince of Wales, and the 
 voracity of the civil list, turned deficit into sur- 
 plus, and saved England perhaps from a crash 
 like that to which deficit was hurrying France. 
 He was also the author of the reform which put 
 up loans to the highest bidder, instead of making 
 them government patronage, with a toll to cor- 
 ruption. 
 
 Adam Smith had denounced funding. His pu- 
 pil, when obliged to borrow, borrowed in the five 
 rather than in the three per cents, to keep down 
 the capital debt and improve the chance of pay- 
 ing off. He had not read Lord Macaulay, who 
 from the growth of suburban villas " embosomed 
 in gay little paradises of lilacs and roses," proves 
 that a funded debt of eight hundred millions is no 
 burden to the nation. He had not learned that in 
 the case of a national debt, debtor and creditor are 
 the same, so that, as it seems, we might as well 
 simplify the transaction by the use of the sponge. 
 Still less, probably, had he, like Lord Macaulay, 
 discerned the recondite truth, that the practice of 
 fighting with soldiers hired at the expense of pos- 
 terity, which removes the last restraint on war, is 
 favorable to the ascendancy of intellect over force. 
 He might have asked Lord Macaulay, if a nation- 
 al debt was a blessing, why it should not be 
 doubled ? 
 
1 66 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 In his anxiety to reduce the debt Pitt was 
 caught by the project of a sinking fund. When 
 national debts grew heavy, various projects were 
 devised in different countries for conjuring them 
 away without the unpleasant process of paying. 
 The Mississippi scheme and the South Sea scheme 
 were among the number. Tampering with the 
 currency was a coarse expedient. The simplest 
 was that of the French finance minister, Abbe 
 Terrai, who repudiated 'fifty per cent, and proved 
 that the glory of repudiation is not monojDolized 
 by republics. The sinking fund was a project for 
 conjuring away the debt by the magic of com- 
 pound interest. People think that money at com- 
 pound interest grows of itself like a plant. But 
 compound interest, in the case of individuals, is 
 merely compound savings re-invested, and com- 
 pound diversions of capital from other investments. 
 In the case of a national sinking fund it is com- 
 pound payments made by the nation to itself. Of 
 course, as soon as the question arises between far- 
 ther borrowing, perhaps at a high rate of inter- 
 est, for some pressing emergency, and dipping into 
 the sinking fund, the sinking fund goes to the 
 wall. There are only three courses for nations ) 
 which have run into debt — to bear the debt for- ) 
 ever, to become bankrupt, or to remain at peace, 
 retrench and pay. 
 
Pitt. 167 
 
 It does seem,* however, that a nation ought to 
 take advantage of its immortality, and to borrow 
 on terminable rather than on perpetual annui- 
 ties. To the mortal creditor there is no difference 
 between an annuity for the longest span of mortal 
 interest and an annuity forever. To the immor- 
 tal nation there is, between a burden for a centu- 
 ry and a burden forever, all the difference in the 
 world. 
 
 Destiny mocks the hopes of man. This is the 
 minister of whom it was too truly said — "Mr. 
 Pitt's memory needs no statues. Six hundred 
 millions of irredeemable debt are the eternal rec- 
 ord of his fame." He ought, from his early stud- 
 ies and experiences, to have felt more strongly the 
 injustice of laying burdens on other generations 
 without their own consent. In barbarous ages, 
 people when they went to war fought themselves. 
 Civilization taught them to hire, impress, or kid- 
 nap other people to fight for them. Still there 
 was a check on war while those who made it had 
 to pay. Taxation of the present was confined 
 within narrow limits; it provoked unpleasant 
 outcries, sometimes it provoked resistance. So the 
 expedient was hit upon of taxing the mute and 
 unresisting future. The system was perfected by - 
 degrees. At first the' government only anticipa- 
 ted payments which they might, with some color 
 
1 68 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 <b 
 
 ? 
 
 or reason, call their own. Then they mortgaged 
 particular sources of revenue. Funding with us 
 dates from William III. ; hence to the author of 
 the great Whig epic, of which William is the 
 Achilles, the system seems all lilacs and roses. 
 
 Pitt's financial speeches were as notable as his 
 budgets. Inferior, no doubt, in knowledge to 
 those of Peel, they are superior in form, which is 
 something when people are to be instructed on a 
 subject to most men at once repulsive and obscure. 
 
 In the mind of Pitt, as in that of Adam Smith, 
 as in that of Cobden, as in the councils of Provi- 
 dence, free trade was connected with a policy of 
 peace and good-will among nations. Pitt, too, 
 was " an international man." Since the religious 
 wars of the sixteenth century, hatred had been 
 the law of Christendom. International malignity 
 had been organized under the name of the Bal- 
 ance of Power. Each nation had thought itself 
 prosperous just so far as it could prevent the 
 prosperity of others. Hence protection, the colo- 
 nial system, and commercial as well as diplomatic 
 wars. Chatham's glory had been bound up with 
 these notions, especially with the notion of eter- 
 nal enmity between England and France. But 
 Chatham's son, enlightened by a better teacher, 
 commenced the work of healing, through free 
 commercial intercourse, the divisions of Chris- 
 
Pitt 169 
 
 tendom. The precursor of Cobden, lie carried, 
 against strong opposition, a commercial treaty 
 with France. Fox was a man of larger sympa- 
 thies than Pitt, and if he had been in power 
 would probably have been on the whole a better 
 foreign minister ; but party, sacred party, hurried 
 him and his liberal friends into denouncing the 
 treaty on the most illiberal grounds of interna- 
 tional jealousy. In defending it, Pitt combated, 
 in language which Cobden might have used, the 
 doctrine that France must be the unalterable 
 enemy of Britain. He treated as monstrous, and 
 as founded neither in nature nor in history, the 
 position that one nation could be the unalterable 
 enemy of another. He called it a libel on socie- 
 ty, as supposing the existence of diabolical malice 
 in the original frame of man. He was obliged to 
 pay some homage to the war spirit, as in truth 
 does Adam Smith ; and he urges that whatever 
 enriches us will, when the time comes, give us the 
 sinews of war. But he returns to less equivocal 
 ground in showing that the chances of war will 
 be diminished when nations are bound together 
 by free trade. The chances of war will be dimin- 
 ished. Let us not, in the face of so many victo- 
 ries of principle, honor, passion over mere inter- 
 est, imagine that any bond of mere interest can 
 
 do more. If to slake a fierce hatred or to uphold 
 
 H 
 
170 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 a great cause men will sacrifice their lives, much 
 more will they for a time sacrifice the luxuries 
 for which they are dependent on foreign trade. 
 The only sure guarantee of peace is morality. 
 The next greatest is not commerce but freedom, 
 which puts down standing armies. A commer- 
 cial treaty is a poor set-off against the mischief 
 done by a military despotism, the great embodi- 
 ment and consecration of the war spirit in the 
 world : and if we were to truck our abhorrence 
 of military despotism fox such a treaty, we should 
 find — to put the question on the lowest ground 
 — that we had bought our mess of pottage far too 
 dear. 
 
 Adam Smith had advocated the union of Ire- 
 land with England. He had pointed out that 
 free trade with England would far more than 
 make up to Ireland for the increase of taxation — 
 that by the union of his own country with Eng- 
 land, the Scotch people had been delivered from 
 the Scotch aristocracy — that by the same process 
 Ireland " might be delivered from a much more 
 oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy the most 
 odious of all, an aristocracy of political and relig- 
 ious prejudice, which, more than any other distinc- 
 tions, animated the insolence of the oppressor and 
 the hatred of the oppressed, and made the natives 
 of the same country greater enemies than those 
 
Pitt 171 
 
 of different countries ever were." At this time 
 the relations between Ireland and England were 
 such as could not be endured. The Protestant Re- 
 publicans of the North of Ireland — they, mind, not 
 the Catholics — taking advantage of the weakness 
 of England after her reverses in the American war, 
 and catching the infection of the American Revolu- 
 tion, had risen in arms, under pretense of forming 
 a volunteer army for the defense of the kingdom, 
 and extorted legislative independence. The result 
 was not, be it remarked, a Federal union, with a 
 Federal Government having a definite province of 
 its own, but two independent Parliaments under 
 one crown; and the crown being constitutional, 
 the two Parliaments were two sovereign powers. 
 There was an hourly danger of a divergence pol- 
 icy, even on questions of peace and war. At the 
 same time, the Catholics remained excluded from 
 the Irish Parliament, and Protestant ascendancy 
 was thus left rampant, without any imperial con- 
 trol. The consequence was that Ireland was 
 ruled, and her policy kept in union with that of 
 England by systematic corruption. Mr. Massey, 
 the recent historian of this period, has found, 
 among the original papers with which his work 
 is enriched, a sort of chart of the Irish Parliament, 
 drawn up confidentially for the guidance of 
 Pitt:— 
 
172 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 " H. H., son-in-law to Lord A., and brought 
 into Parliament by him. Studies the law ; wishes 
 to be a Commissioner of Barracks, or in some sim- 
 ilar place. Would go into orders, and take a 
 living. 
 
 " H. D., brother to Lord C. Applied vfor office, 
 but as no specific promise could be made, has 
 lately voted in opposition. Easy to be had, if 
 thought expedient. A silent, gloomy man. 
 
 " L. M. refuses to accept <£500 a year ; states 
 very high pretensions for his skill in House of 
 Commons' management. Expects <£1000 a year. 
 — N. B. : Be careful of him. 
 
 " J. N. has been in the army, and is now on 
 half pay : wishes a troop of dragoons, or full pay. 
 States his pretensions to be fifteen years 5 service 
 in Parliament. — 1ST. B. ; Would prefer office to 
 military promotion : but already has, and has long 
 had, a pension. Character, especially on the side 
 of truth, not favorable. 
 
 " B. P., independent, but well disposed to gov- 
 ernment. His four sisters have pensions, and his 
 object is a living for his brother. 
 
 " T. P., brother to Lord L., and brought in by 
 him. A captain in the navy. Wishes for some 
 sinecure employment." 
 
 On the government side were the members for 
 eighty-six proprietary seats, the owners of which 
 
Pitt. 173 
 
 had let theni out for titles, offices, or pensions. 
 Sir Arthur Wellesley, at a later period, found 
 that a zealous supporter of the government had 
 been endeavoring to strengthen the Union by ap- 
 propriating to his own use the gold provided for 
 the collars of the order of St. Patrick, and putting 
 copper in its place. Meantime famine, with pes- 
 tilence in its train, stalked among the Irish people, 
 who were reduced to the level of beasts in every 
 thing except that they had the capacity of suf- 
 fering as men. Does history afford a parallel to 
 that agony of seven centuries which has not yet 
 reached its close ? But England is the favorite 
 of Heaven, and when she commits o|3pression it 
 will not recoil on the oppressor. 
 
 Pitt brought in a measure of free trade with 
 Ireland which was intended no doubt to pave the 
 way for union. Party, combined perhaps with 
 some real ignorance and prejudice, again led the 
 Foxites to the side of illiberality and wrong. Their 
 liberalism at the best was, in fact, a narrow thing. 
 Even Burke is found on this question fighting, an 
 Irishman against Ireland, as well as an economist 
 against free trade. And this time the Opposition 
 had more than one power of evil on their side. 
 In Ireland the jealous fears of ascendancy and job- 
 bery were aroused. In England Protection was 
 strong. Shall I tell it — eighty thousand Lan- 
 
174 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 cashire manufacturers signed a petition against 
 free trade ! All men are alike selfish, and till 
 their selfishness is enlightened, all are protection- 
 ists. Pitt fought gallantly against this host of 
 prejudices and cupidities. He was beaten, but 
 his power was too strong to be shaken by the 
 defeat. 
 
 In the article of corn, Pitt was himself a pro- 
 tectionist. He is taxed with apostasy by Gren- 
 ville, who had studied Adam Smith with him, and 
 who was a thorough-going adherent of free trade. 
 Probably the disturbing cause in his mind was a 
 remnant of the war theory of international policy, 
 which assumes that each nation is a garrison, and 
 must be ready to feed itself in case of siege. 
 However, the case against the Corn Laws then 
 was not so strong as it is now. There was not 
 then the vast manufacturing and mining popula- 
 tion which Protection afterward compelled to 
 live on the produce of an insufficient agricultural 
 area, till it reached starvation prices, for the ben- 
 efit of the landlords. 
 
 But what became of Parliamentary Reform? 
 At the opening of his ministry Pitt still hoisted 
 reform colors — still professed his determination to 
 press that which, as he said, " alone could entitle 
 Englishmen to the appellation of free, and ensure 
 to wise, to virtuous, and to constitutional endeav- 
 
Pitt 175 
 
 ors a victory over factious ambition, and corrupt 
 venality, the great question of Parliamentary Re- 
 form." But the reformer grew very tame in the 
 minister. When he did bring a measure forward 
 it was not like his first, a liberal disfranchisement 
 of rotten boroughs and redistribution of seats, the 
 same which had been proposed by Chatham ; but 
 a paltry plan for gradually buying up rotten bor- 
 oughs, with the consent of the borough-mongers, 
 and transferring the seats to counties. Even this 
 was thrown out. The borough-mongers were 
 shocked at the idea of treating the franchise as a 
 matter of property to be bought or sold. The 
 minister evidently did not put forth his power in 
 support of the measure which consistency required 
 him to propose ; and if he succeeded in persuad- 
 ing his dearest friends that his heart was in it, 
 that only shows that his dearest friends did not 
 always see to the bottom of his heart. It must 
 be borne in mind, however, .that when Pitt first 
 came forward as a Parliamentary Reformer, at the 
 close of the American war, there was great public 
 discontent : he had made the nation contented, 
 and now there was apathy. Yet had a good 
 measure passed, the government and the nation 
 alike would have felt a calm confidence in the 
 soundness of their institutions, which would have 
 prevented the panic dread of French infection, 
 
176 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 and saved us from the revolutionary war. This 
 was the accepted season, and it departed, not to 
 be recalled. 
 
 Sinecureisin, as I said "before, gross as it then 
 was, Pitt scarcely attempted to attack, though 
 with his customs' reforms a number of useless 
 places fell. He even goes out of his way to com- 
 mend Addington for bestowing a colossal sinecure 
 on his nephew, a boy of sixteen. Perhaps he 
 thought corruption good enough for Addington 
 and kept purity for himself. But the task would 
 have been a hard one ; it might even have cost 
 him the power which he was using, on the whole, 
 for the public good. In the last hour of the 
 French monarchy, when the handwriting was on 
 the wall, the reforming ministers found it impos- 
 sible to reduce sinecures and pensions. The min- 
 istry of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Eobert 
 Peel estranged Tory support from them when 
 they tried to save Toryism by the same means. 
 It is vain to appeal to these people to give up the 
 abuses in order to save the system. What they 
 care for is not the system but the abuses. 
 
 -There was one kind of corruption of which 
 Pitt himself was the prince. In the course of his 
 ministry he created or promoted in the peerage 
 one hundred and forty peers. The great mass of 
 these creations and promotions were not for merit 
 
Pitt 1 7 7 
 
 of any kind, but for political support. If the 
 Peerage of England intends, as it seemed from the 
 language -held in the debate on life-peerages that 
 it did intend, to set up a divine right against the 
 nation, it had better not look into its own annals ; 
 for taking those annals from the days of Henry 
 VIII. and his minions, the real commencement of 
 our present nobility (the feudal nobility having 
 been destroyed in the Wars of the Roses), it 
 would* perhaps be difficult to find a group of fam- 
 ilies whose ennoblement had less to do with hon- 
 or. The Stuarts sold peerages for money ; later 
 peer-makers have sold them for votes. " Besides 
 these appointments" — says Lord Stanhope, after 
 giving an account of the accession of the Duke of 
 Portland and his friends to Pitt's government — 
 " beside these appointments, two or three peerages, 
 and two or three places of less amount, gratified 
 some less leading members of the same connection." 
 And not only the " less leading members of the 
 connection," who were thus gratified, but their 
 descendants to the end of time, even though they 
 might degenerate from the littleness of their 
 sires, were to have a sacred and indefeasible right 
 of legislating for a great nation. JSTot only so, but 
 if they did not choose to leave their country 
 houses or Newmarket for a division, they were to 
 
 have the right of deciding by proxy the destinies 
 
 112 
 
178 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 of England. Is this to be classed among the 
 anomalies which are no evils ? Is not every 
 anomaly an evil which can not be thought of, 
 which can not be mentioned to a foreigner, with- 
 out shame % I call this use of peerages, and I may 
 add that of baronetcies, a kind of corruption. It 
 is the most potent of all kinds of corruption, when 
 the persons to be corrupted are wealthy men, 
 wealthy upstarts perhaps, craving, as such men 
 crave, for hereditary rank. Even the social posi- 
 tion which a minister can partly bestow, is no 
 small source of influence in such a community as 
 ours. Walpole's bribery-fund was perhaps £50,- 
 000 a year : a peerage, it may be even a baronet- 
 cy, to an ambitious millionaire is worth £50,000. 
 Therefore, it is not wealth that will keep a mem- 
 ber of parliament entirely above corruption. 
 The only thing that will keep him entirely above 
 corruption is honor. 
 
 There can be no mistake as to the objects with 
 which, in Pitt's day, the power of conferring peer- 
 ages was used. " At the close of the elections," 
 says Lord Stanhope, " the king showed his entire 
 approval of his minister by the grant — perhaps a 
 little lavish — of seven new peerages. The others 
 were to baronies ; but one, Sir James Lowther, 
 whose influence at Appleby had not been forgot- 
 ten, was raised at once to higher rank, as Earl of 
 
Pitt. 1 79 
 
 Lonsdale." I believe it would be putting the 
 case mildly to say that the beneficent influence of 
 Sir James Lowther at Appleby was the only 
 public service by which he had merited public 
 honor. Irish peerages, of course, were granted 
 with even a more shameful prodigality than the 
 English, just as the Irish pension-list received 
 spies and cast-off mistresses, whose names on the 
 English pension-list would scarcely have been en- 
 dured. Pitt was on the point of making a loan- 
 contractor an Irish peer because he had parlia- 
 mentary influence in England. And this is call- 
 ed "recruiting the peerage." So recruited, as 
 Pym said in another great peer-making epoch, 
 "honor itself would become a press." Perhaps 
 Pitt was sensible of this danger, when, in framing 
 the Regency Bill, he withheld from the Prince of 
 Wales the power of creating peers, which would 
 have been exercised under the advice of Fdx. 
 
 Pitt's admirers plead guilty on his behalf to 
 the charge of not patronizing men of letters. 
 But patronage of men of letters was going out of 
 fashion, and it was happy for literature that it 
 was so. How can a statesman have leisure to 
 discriminate literary merit ? And if he can not 
 discriminate, how can we desire that he should 
 patronize? Of course he can be told what 
 writers are on his own side in politics, and he can 
 
180 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 see who flatter him in their prefaces ; but this is 
 not what learning or the public wants. A mu- 
 nificent despot, such as Louis XIV., may foster a 
 court literature : a munificent party-chief, such as 
 the Whig leaders in the reign of Anne, may foster 
 a party literature. A healthy literature needs no 
 fostering but that of freedom. The best patron 
 of intellect is an educated people. 
 
 The newspaper press was not a great power in 
 Pitt's day. In laying a stamp duty on newspa- 
 pers, he speaks of it jestingly as an interest with 
 which the members of the House would desire to 
 stand well. If it had been a great power, he 
 would have deserved gratitude for not tampering 
 with journalists. 4 The anonymous press has 
 done great service to reform, a service which 
 nothing else could .have done. But if its inde- 
 pendence should ever be lost — if its great organs 
 should ever by patronage or social influence be 
 made secretly subservient to the purposes of a dis- 
 honest minister, if its chiefs should ever forget the 
 sacredness of their mission in the " gilded saloons" 
 of power — it would itself become the most potent 
 and terrible, as well as the vilest, of all the en- 
 gines of corruption. Political evil is Protean in 
 its forms. New diseases, new dangers arise as 
 civilization advances ; and the corruption of an 
 anonymous press is by no means among the least. 
 
Pitt. 181 
 
 The reform of tlie Libel Law, in the interest 
 of liberty, received Pitt's cordial support. He 
 was too great, at all events, to fear free criticism ; 
 though we may guess what he would have said 
 of the use of attacks on private character as a 
 mode of carrying on political war. Of no other 
 law reforms was he the author. Yet he had be- 
 fore him a code which ought to have made any 
 statesman a law reformer — a code truly and fear- 
 fully aristocratic— a code which, for the lower 
 orders, was indeed written in blood — a code 
 which, while dueling and other offenses of persons 
 of quality were practically overlooked, inflicted 
 capital punishment with an almost unparalleled 
 recklessness of human life on the petty offenses 
 of the poor — a code which was the proof of a 
 deeper barbarism than the native ferocity of the 
 untutored savage. This work was left to Mack- 
 intosh and Romilly. Unconsciously and invol- 
 untarily perhaps Pitt contributed to law reform. 
 He put Eldon at the head of the law. And with 
 Eldon at the head of the law, reform could no 
 longer be delayed. 
 
 Humanity, however, honors Pitt as the con- 
 stant and powerful opponent of the slave-trade. 
 Perhaps he deserves in one respect to be honored 
 above Wilberforce and Clarkson, inasmuch as 
 the responsibility of the statesman is greater than 
 
1 82 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 that of the private reformer. On this question 
 he remained true to his better self, when on all 
 other questions he had passed to the side of re- 
 action. In 1799 he carried through the Com- 
 mons a bill for the partial abolition of the trade, 
 which, to his great grief, was thrown out by the 
 Lords, on grounds which it must be left to the 
 advocates of hereditary virtue to explain. His 
 speech against the slave-trade in 1792 is justly 
 regarded as about his best. A few years before, 
 an action relating to a policy of insurance on the 
 value of certain slaves had been tried in the 
 King's Bench. The question was, whether the 
 loss of the slaves had been caused by perils of 
 the sea. A slave-ship, with four hundred and 
 forty-two slaves, was bound from the coast of 
 Guinea to Jamaica. Sixty of the slaves died on 
 the passage from overcrowding, but in 'respect of 
 these it was not contended that the underwriter 
 was liable. The captain, having missed Jamaica, 
 found himself short of water, and under the ap- 
 prehension of scarcity, but before his crew and 
 passengers had been put on short allowance, he 
 threw ninety-six of the sickliest slaves overboard. 
 A fall of rain now gave him water for eleven 
 days, notwithstanding which he drowned twenty- 
 six more of the slaves. Ten in despair threw 
 themselves overboard, for a negro is human 
 
Pitt. 183 
 
 enough to feel despair. The ship arrived in port 
 before the water was exhausted. "Thus," says 
 Mr. Massey, " one hundred and thirty-two human 
 beings, if negroes are human beings, were willfully 
 murdered." But the city jury found that they 
 were chattels, lost by perils of the sea, and gave 
 i£32 damages for each slave thrown overboard. 
 The court granted a new trial on the ground that 
 there was no such necessity for drowning the 
 sesond batch of slaves as to constitute a loss by 
 perils of the sea. There was not a thought, as 
 Mr. Masey remarks, of proceeding against the 
 captain or his crew for homicide. And this is a 
 law-case of the nation which was conquering In- 
 dia to introduce a higher civilization, and which 
 justified its treatment of the Africans on the 
 ground that they were incorrigible barbarians. 
 One of the proofs of African barbarism adduced 
 by the slave-traders was that a boy had been 
 put to death by an African because a trader had 
 refused to buy him as a slave. Pitt replies that 
 the real reason why the boy had been put to 
 death was that he had three times run away 
 from his African master, who, by the native cus- 
 tom, had to pay his value every time he was 
 brought back to him, and failing to dispose of 
 him to the English slave-traders, killed him in an- 
 ger, or to avoid having to pay for him again. He 
 
184 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 cites a law from the West India Statute Book, 
 enacting that " if any negro or other slave shall 
 withdraw himself from his master for the term 
 of six months, or any slave that was absent shall 
 not return within that time, it shall be adjudged 
 felony, and every such person shall suffer death." 
 He then bids the House compare the sudden 
 wrath of the wild African, which slew the negro 
 after the third offense, with the deliberate legisla- 
 tion of the civilized planter, which puts him to 
 death for the first, and say on which side the bar- 
 barism lies. The answer must be of course that 
 the barbarism lies on the side which has not En- 
 field rifles but only bows and arrows. The slav- 
 ery party of those days had not all the lights of 
 science that the Anthropologists have now; but 
 by the light of their own cupidity they had dis- 
 covered the argument that the negro was by 
 nature incapable of civilization. Pitt asks what 
 a Roman senator would have said of the Britons 
 — whether he would not have said with confi- 
 dence : u There is a people that will never rise to 
 civilization ; there is a people destined never to 
 be free — a people without the understanding 
 necessary for the attainment of useful arts, de- 
 pressed by the hand of nature below the level of 
 the human species, and created to form a supply 
 of slaves for the rest of the world V 
 
Pitt. 185 
 
 It was deposed on the side of the slave-owners 
 that the middle passage was a very happy part 
 of the negro's life ; the air of the hold was exact- 
 ly suited to his tropical constitution; when on 
 deck he made merry and danced his national 
 dances. The privy council on inquiry found 
 that, the better to secure the comfort of the 
 negroes in their tropical hold, they were chained 
 two and two together or fastened by ring-bolts to 
 the lower deck ; that they were allowed one pint 
 of water each daily under the line, with two meals 
 of yams and horse-beans; and that after their 
 meals they were made to take exercise by jump- 
 ing on the deck in their irons under the lash. 
 These were their national dances. There was one 
 argument for the slave-trade which seems not to 
 have been urged. The reformers did not at this 
 time venture to propose the abolition of slavery ; 
 and, of the two, slave-trading was rather better 
 than slave-breeding. 
 
 Of the Church Pitt seems to have had no con- 
 ception, except as an establishment, the prizes of 
 which were to be bestowed with some regard for 
 piety and learning, but with a primary regard to 
 personal and political connection. He gave Tom- 
 line a fat bishopric and a fat deanery at the same 
 time. One instance Lord Stanhope has found in 
 which he resisted the solicitation of a powerful 
 
1 86 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 man in order to reward a curate who had done 
 his duty. He is disclosed to us in the life of his 
 great friend Mr. Rose, coolly using a deanery as a 
 political bribe, and enjoining his agent to see that 
 the object bargained for is secured. No thought 
 of purifying the Church as the spiritual organ of 
 the nation seems to have arisen in his mind. A 
 strange spiritual organ for the nation the Church 
 then was. Lord S*fcanhope has given us the fol- 
 lowing correspondence : 
 
 The Bishop of Lichfield {Dr. Cormoallis) to Mr. Pitt. 
 
 "Wimpole Street, June 10, 1791. 
 
 " Sir, — After the various instances of neglect and con- 
 tempt which Lord Cornwallis and I have experienced, not 
 only in violation of repeated assurances, but of the strong- 
 est ties, it is impossible that I should not feel the late dis- 
 appointment very deeply. 
 
 "With respect to the proposal concerning Salisbury, I 
 have no hesitation in saying that the See of Salisbury can 
 not be in any respect an object to me. The only arrange- 
 ment which promises an accommodation in my favor is the 
 promotion of the Bishop of Lincoln to Salisbury, which 
 would enable you to confer the deanery of St. Paul's 
 upon me. I have the honor to be, etc., 
 
 " J. Lichfield and Coventry." 
 
 Mr. Pitt to the JBishop of Lichfield. 
 
 "Downing Street, Saturday night, June 11, 1791. 
 " My Lord, — On my return to town this afternoon I 
 found your lordship's letter. I am willing to hope that on 
 
Pitt 187 
 
 farther consideration, and recollecting all the circumstances, 
 there are parts of that letter which you would yourself 
 wish never to have written. 
 
 " My respect for your lordship's situation, and my regard 
 for Lord Cornwallis, prevent my saying more than that un- 
 til that letter is recalled your lordship makes any farther 
 intercourse between you and me impossible. 
 
 " I have the honor to be, etc., 
 
 "W.Pitt." 
 
 The Bishop of Lichfield to Mr. Pitt. 
 
 " Wimpole Street, June 11, 1791. 
 " Sir, — Under the very great disappointment which I 
 have felt upon the late occasion, I am much concerned that 
 I was induced to make use of expressions in my letter to 
 you of which I have since repented, and which upon con- 
 sideration I beg leave to retract, and I hope they will 
 make no unfavorable impression upon your mind. 
 
 "Whatever may be your thoughts regarding the sub- 
 ject-matter of the letter, I trust that you will have the can- 
 dor to pardon those parts of it which may r/ppear to be 
 wanting in due and proper respect to you. 
 
 " And believe me to have the honor, etc., 
 
 " J. Lichfield and Coventry." 
 
 Mr. Pitt to the Bishop of Lichfield. 
 
 "Downing Street, June 12, 1791. 
 " My Lord, — I have this morning received the honor of 
 your lordship's letter, dated the 11th, and have great satis- 
 faction in being able to dismiss from my mind any impres- 
 sion occasioned by a paragraph in the former letter which 
 I received from you. 
 
 " "With respect to any farther arrangement, I can only 
 
1 88 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 say that I have no reason to believe that the Bishop of 
 Lincoln would wish to remove to Salisbury ; but, if he were, 
 I should certainly have no hesitation in recommending 
 your lordship for the deanery of St. Paul's. 
 
 " \ have the honor to be, etc., 
 
 " William Pitt." 
 
 He that desiretli a bishopric, clesireth a good 
 thing, but he that desiretli a bishopric and a dean- 
 ery together, desireth a still better thing : so, no 
 doubt, Dr. Cornwallis would have interpreted the 
 Scripture. And, be it observed, the covetousness 
 of the man, his meanness, his flagrant unworthi- 
 ness to hold any spiritual office, make no bad im- 
 pression whatever on Pitt's mind. The only thing 
 that makes a bad impression on his mind is the 
 injurious expressions touching himself. When 
 these have been retracted, he is quite ready to 
 promote Dr. Cornwallis higher in the Church. 
 
 In another case we have an aspirant resorting to 
 the ingenious artifice of writing to thank the min- 
 ister for a blissful rumor which assigned to him a 
 mitre then vacant. The minister has the pain of 
 informing him that the rumor is unfounded. 
 
 Lord Stanhope gives the correspondence be- 
 tween Pitt and Dr. Cornwallis, with the warning 
 that such a case could not occur now, A case so 
 gross and palpable could not occur now. But 
 may not things really just as bad occur now ? 
 
Pitt. 189 
 
 May not a political tactician, and one to whom 
 regard for spiritual interests could scarcely be 
 ascribed except in jest, use spiritual preferment 
 to purchase the political support of a great relig- 
 ious party as cynically as ever the support of the 
 lords of rotten boroughs was purchased by Pitt ? 
 May we not, in return, hear religious adulation 
 poured forth by Pharisaic lips to a patron whose 
 only title to respect, in a religious point of view, is 
 that he is not a Pharisee ? May we not see men 
 who profess to be pre-eminently Christian sup- 
 porting a policy pre-eminently un-Christian, be- 
 cause its author puts ecclesiastical power into their 
 hands? May we not see a religious connection, 
 yesterday independent, to-day laying down its in- 
 dependence and its influence for good in the ante- 
 chamber of a minister ? May we not see divines, 
 the authorized guardians of ^he truth, shaping 
 their doctrine to the taste of the great bishop- 
 maker of the day ? And if this is so, are we really 
 much better off now than we were in the days of 
 Pitt and Dr. Cornwallis ? 
 
 The highest rule of duty which Pitt knew in 
 the use of Church patronage he kept. He was 
 stanch to his friends. He had high words with 
 the king because the king insisted on making 
 Moore, instead of Tomline, Archbishop' of Can- 
 terbury. Tomline evidently thought that though 
 
190 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 the country was in the midst of a great war, the 
 government ought to have resigned. 
 
 "Whether Pitt had been at all touched by the 
 scepticism of his century or not, he had imbibed 
 its toleration. He was always in favor of Ko- 
 man Catholic Emancipation. He was not disin- 
 clined to the repeal of the Test and Corporation 
 Acts. But he consulted the bishops. It is won- 
 derful that of fourteen bishops two were in favor 
 of the repeal. We maintain a political hierarchy, 
 and we must accept the natural results. It does 
 not lie in the mouths of Non-conformists, who 
 have political power in their hands and fail to 
 use it for the assertion of religious freedom, to 
 rail at the evils of the Establishment; for the 
 blame of those evils rests on them. I say it in 
 no spirit of irony, but with sincere conviction; 
 the marvelous thing in the character of the state 
 bishops is not the illiberality of the many, but 
 the liberality of the few. Pitt's episcopal ad- 
 visers erred under the almost irresistible pressure 
 of the circumstances in which, not their own act, 
 but the act of the community, had placed them. 
 Yet could they have had their way, these ques- 
 tions would long ago have been solved by civil 
 war. Warned by his oracles — the keepers of 
 the state conscience — Pitt resisted a motion for 
 the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. 
 
PitL 191 
 
 You can see that, like Peel resisting Catholic 
 Emancipation and the repeal of the Corn Laws, 
 he is struggling against the dawning light within 
 him, as well as against the arguments from with- 
 out. His reasoning is founded on the assump- 
 tion with which we are now being made again 
 familiar, that no man has any political rights, and 
 that it rests entirely with the dominant party in 
 the state to dole out to their fellow-citizens just 
 as much of political freedom and justice as they 
 may think compatible with the ascendancy of 
 their own opinions and with the safety of the 
 political arrangements by which that ascendancy 
 is preserved. Such advantages as he gains are 
 due to the weakness of his opponents, who, 
 though their hearts were on \h& side of justice, 
 had not yet learned, as indeed few public men 
 have even now learned, to examine boldly the 
 duty of the state in matters of opinion. The re- 
 volting profanation of the sacrament, which the 
 Test and Corporation Act involved, as it did not 
 shock the clergy, naturally did not shock the 
 man of the world. 
 
 The commutation of tithes into a corn-rent 
 was Pitt's only Church reform. It was destined 
 mainly for Ireland. I have seen among some 
 papers of Sir Robert Peel a picture of the levy- 
 ing of tithe in a Catholic's farm-yard by a Prot- 
 
192 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 estant parson, who is just seizing the tenth pig, 
 while soldiers with fixed bayonets stand by to 
 support the law. The picture is a caricature of 
 course, but caricature itself could scarcely add 
 deformity to the truth. Pitt, in his letter to the 
 lord-lieutenant, hopes that the Irish clergy will 
 take a sober and dispassionate view of the mat- 
 ter; that they will understand how much easier 
 it is for them, by persisting in an odious system, 
 to imperil the government than for the govern- 
 ment to uphold them ; that they will propose an 
 accommodation, which, originating with them, 
 would not be unbecoming. He appealed for a 
 sober and dispassionate consideration of an angry 
 question to men whose whole existence was a 
 fierce conflict with a hostile nation. His plan 
 was rejected, and he gained nothing but the 
 credit with posterity of having been before his 
 time. 
 
 To pass from home government to the depend- 
 encies, Pitt had thrown out the India Bill of 
 Fox, but he could not help bringing in one of 
 his own. The company's servants — their cupid- 
 ity inflamed to the utmost by the sight of such 
 gorgeous booty — had burst through the frail bar- 
 rier which divides the rapacious trader from the 
 robber, and were heaping up fortunes by violence 
 and fraud, hardly paralleled, to borrow the words 
 
Pitt. 193 
 
 of Mr. Massey, in the dark and bloody annals of 
 conquest. Pitt was trammeled by Ms opposi- 
 tion to Fox's measure, and by his alliance with 
 the East India interest and the nabobs who sat 
 for its rotten boroughs. The result was a half 
 measure— the double government which sham- 
 bled on in its awkwardness till the Sepoy Mu- 
 tiny, by breaking up the army on which the do- 
 minion of the company rested, and thus destroy- 
 ing one of the two powers, gave the system a 
 final blow. The abuse of Indian patronage, the 
 dread of which had been worked against Fox's 
 bill, was not avoided by that of Pitt. The cor- 
 rupt dominion of Dundas in Scotland was main- 
 tained to a great extent at the expense of the 
 Hindoo. And we soon find Lord Sydney, an 
 honorable member of the cabinet, complaining 
 of the monopoly of army appointments in India 
 by Scotchmen; of " insatiable ambition," "sordid 
 avarice," "base work," and "the character of men 
 whom he had imprudently treated with great 
 openness, but who should never come into his 
 room again while he had a bolt to his door." 
 Perhaps there is still something in the feelings 
 of Scotchmen, even of pious Scotchmen, toward 
 the oppressed people of dependencies, which 
 savors of the old time. It may be doubted, 
 however, whether the failure to incorporate India 
 
194 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 completely with England ought to be reckoned 
 among the demerits of the bill. Writers on the 
 government of dependencies have not sufficiently 
 considered the consequences of the relation to the 
 character of the imperial country. The effect of 
 incorporating a vast despotism like India with 
 a free nation perhaps remains yet to be seen. 
 There is a poison which is imbibed daily though 
 it is not perceived ; which was imbibed, though 
 it was not perceived, by Imperial Spain. 
 
 In the case of Hastings, the accusers being 
 Whigs, the Tories of course took the part of the 
 accused, with whom, indeed, as a representative 
 of arbitrary and sanguinary violence, they had 
 sympathies of a more specific kind. Pitt, as is 
 well known, turned round in the middle, and to 
 the dismay of the mass of his party, who voted 
 against him, carried the impeachment by the 
 votes under his absolute command. His conver- 
 sion was so mysterious that it was ascribed to 
 jealousy of Hastings. But we may safely regard 
 it as conscientious, and as having been delayed 
 only by his inability to look thoroughly into the 
 case at an earlier stage. Hastings was a great 
 criminal, and one who, for the honor and in the 
 highest interest of the country, ought to have 
 been brought to justice; though he might have 
 pleaded, in extenuation of his guilt, the evil ne- 
 
Pitt. 195 
 
 cessities of conquest, for which his masters were 
 more responsible than he. He was absolved, and 
 afterward honored, because his crimes had served, 
 or were supposed to have served, the aggrandize- 
 ment of England. And if the aggrandizement 
 of England is a redeeming motive before God 
 as well as before the House of Lords, all, no 
 doubt, will be well. Then there will be no 
 danger of retribution, though our press, reflecting 
 too faithfully the morality of the nation, should 
 preach, under the thin disguise of rhetoric, doc- 
 trines which in their naked form could be avow- 
 ed only in the cavern of a bandit or on the deck 
 of a buccaneer. 
 
 Hastings and his party complained, with some 
 reason, of the length of a trial conducted by a 
 tribunal the dilatoriness of which equaled its un- 
 trustwor.thiness for the purposes of justice. It 
 was about this time that a woman died in Devon 
 County Jail, after an imprisonment of forty-five 
 years, for a debt of .£19. 
 
 Parliament, however, displayed in the case of 
 Hastings a higher sense of justice and of the na- 
 tional honor than it displays in cases of wrong 
 done to the subject races in the present day. 
 The conscience of the nation had not then become 
 seared by the long exercise of empire ; a pervert- 
 ed code of imperial morality had not had time to 
 
196 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 grow up, nor had the plea that an act was done 
 in the interest of the dominant race yet become 
 familiar and persuasive to English minds. On 
 these questions we grow worse; and we shall 
 probably continue to grow worse till for us, as 
 for the American slave-owner, the end arrives, 
 and we find that neither the approbation of our 
 press, nor the acquiescence of our state clergy, is 
 the connivance of the Power which, after all, rules 
 the world. 
 
 Adam Smith had proposed that the colonies 
 should be represented in the British Parliament. 
 Such was his cure for the conflict between impe- 
 rial supremacy and colonial liberty, which was 
 gathering to a head while he wrote. At the 
 time, it was answered that this plan would be 
 impracticable on account of the distance. With 
 regard to the Australian colonies, the same objec- 
 tion would be fatal now. You could not, after a 
 dissolution, wait till the returns to the writs had 
 been made from Sidney and Melbourne, before 
 re-assembling Parliament. But the more fatal ob- 
 jection is that the colonies have national Parlia- 
 ments of their own, and that to let them send 
 members to the national Parliament of England 
 also, and have a voice in our national questions, 
 while we should have none in theirs, would in- 
 volve a confusion of functions full of absurdity 
 
Pitt 197 
 
 and injustice. If you have any common assem- 
 bly for the mother country and the colonies, it 
 must be a Federal Council, dealing with the in- 
 terests of the empire apart from those of the sev- 
 eral nations : and this Federal Council must in 
 Federal questions be above the national govern- 
 ment of Great Britain, an arrangement which 
 Great Britain would never endure. A moral, 
 commercial, and diplomatic union of all the com- 
 munities of the Anglo-Saxon race, including what 
 must soon become the greatest of those communi- 
 ties, the United States of America, is no dream, 
 and if a national policy is pursued, may be made 
 a glorious reality. But a political union of all 
 these communities, or of those still under the 
 nominal rule of Britain, scattered as they are over 
 the globe, is a dream, and one from which we 
 shall soon awake. Colonial Emancipation, while 
 the tie of affection remains unbroken, is the only 
 mode of securing that to which we all alike cling, 
 that of which we all alike are proud. There is 
 no reason why it should not be accompanied 
 with a mutual retention of the rights of citizen- 
 ship, so that an Englishman might, to all intents 
 and purposes, be an Australian in Australia, and 
 an Australian be an Englishman here. There is 
 no reason why the colonies should not keep the 
 old flag. The only thing which need be given 
 
198 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 up, and this Nature proclaims aloud must be 
 given up, is the political dependence of a nation 
 on one side of the globe upon a nation at the 
 other. Toward Colonial Emancipation Pitt made 
 the first step, still partly guided herein by his 
 great teacher, who, though he had proposed a 
 plan which was not feasible for the political in- 
 corporation of the colonies with the mother coun- 
 try, had placed their uselessness as dependencies 
 in a clear light. The Canadas, which had re- 
 mained ours when we lost the British Colonies in 
 America, had hitherto been governed as depend- 
 encies. Pitt now gave each of them a Parlia- 
 ment of its own, and thus, in fact, made them sep- 
 arate nations, though to complete the severance 
 would have been a measure at once out of the 
 range of his vision, and beyond his power. The 
 people of French Canada being Catholics, their 
 admission to political rights was, in fact, Catholic 
 Emancipation. The good king and his spiritual 
 advisers appear to have made no objection to this 
 feature of the plan. Perhaps it was thought that 
 Providence, for commercial objects, winked in a 
 colony at that which it would have visited as im- 
 piety at home. There is a beautiful plasticity in 
 our political religion. Intent on producing an- 
 other England beyond the Atlantic, Pitt provided 
 for the endowment of a State Church, and for the 
 
Pitt. 1 99 
 
 creation of a peerage in the colony. Ungrateful 
 Nature has refused both boons ; though, in the 
 plans now framed for Canadian Confederation, 
 there is a proposal for a mock House of Lords, 
 not hereditary, but for life, the proper materials 
 for which the colonies, from the instability of 
 wealth and the absence of any social distinctions 
 there, will fail to furnish, and which, if it is set 
 up, will, I venture to predict, in the end breed 
 confusion. Pitt had no philosophy of history to 
 teach him that progress is the law of things, that 
 though the essence of religion and morality does 
 not change, all besides is ever changing, that the 
 scroll is not yet all unrolled, and that Providence 
 does not mean merely to repeat itself over again 
 in the new world. He did not know that feudal- 
 ism had performed its part in the development of 
 humanity, that of a school-master, to train society 
 for a larger freedom ; that it was bound up with 
 military aristocracy, the offspring of conquest, 
 which with the age of conquest and military as- 
 cendancy passes away ; that it was based on a 
 tenure of land, which the English race had dis- 
 carded from the moment when it set foot on the 
 new shore. What is more, Pitt when he tried 
 the experiment had not, like us, seen the experi- 
 ment fail. 
 
 JSTor is Pitt's sagacity much to be impeached 
 
200 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 because, under an unhappy star, he founded Bot- 
 any Bay. Leave Nature to herself and she will 
 choose the germs of new nations well. Wise, be- 
 yond the reach of human wisdom, in all her proc- 
 esses, she does not forget her wisdom in this most 
 momentous process of propagating humanity over 
 its destined abodes. Careful in the selection, of 
 the right seed for a plant, she is not careless in 
 selecting the right colonists. Left to herself she 
 selects the flower of English worth, the founders 
 of New England ; when man undertakes to select 
 for her, he selects the convicts of Botany Bay, and 
 taints the being of future communities at its 
 source with the pestilence of a moral lazar-house. 
 But the severance of the American Colonies was 
 supposed to be a fatal blow to the prosperity of 
 England, which only the foundation of new colo- 
 nies could countervail, though, as we all know, it 
 proved an immense gain, and turned the driblet 
 of restricted commerce into a mighty current of 
 wealth. Our jails too, dens of the most hideous 
 depravity, filth, and cruelty, called loudly for de- 
 pletion, and the dream was a flattering one of turn- 
 ing the felony of England into the virtue and in- 
 dustry of other lands. Still mischief was done, 
 mischief of which the traces are not wholly effaced 
 yet. But I am falling into a repetition of what I 
 have said on the subject of colonies elsewhere. 
 
Pitt, 20 1 
 
 Toward tlie American Colonists Chatham's son 
 inherited the feelings of Chatham. Not only did 
 he, as a member of the Shelburne government, 
 gladly take part in making peace with them, but 
 he desired in matters of trade to treat them, to 
 the utmost of his power, as though they were En- 
 glishmen still. And they are Englishmen still, 
 if the England which, notwithstanding all that 
 the evil agents of a selfish faction have done to 
 breed bitterness between us, her Colonists still 
 love, will show that she still loves them. This 
 was treason and revolution yesterday : it is ortho- 
 doxy and Conservatism to-day. 
 
 It is said of Sir Robert Peel by a French 
 statesman, that he had no foreign policy but peace 
 and good-will among nations. The same thing 
 may be said of Pitt during the first ten years of 
 his power. He was remarkably free from the 
 vice of diplomacy. He did not meddle except 
 when he was called upon to do so, and then he 
 quietly and with dignity maintained the honor of 
 the country. It is well for the nation when the 
 chancellor of the exchequer is the most powerful 
 man in the government, because his ambition is 
 opposed to war. The son of Chatham, while he 
 was himself, and before he became the organ of 
 a panic-stricken and infuriated faction, was emi- 
 nently a peace minister. In 1792, while all the 
 
 12 
 
202 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 world was arming, he was cutting down arma- 
 ments; his army that year was only 18,000 men, 
 and his army estimates only £1,800,000. "When 
 shall we see such estimates again ? 
 
 Once, indeed, the minister was led into making 
 a demonstration against the aggrandizement of 
 Russia, in which he failed to carry the nation 
 with him. There are politicians who would say 
 that he stood alone in his prophetic wisdom. 
 Probably he would at the time have succeeded 
 in exciting the nation more if India had then been 
 to us what it is now, and the safety of the ap- 
 proaches to it had been as great an object of so- 
 licitude. The Crimean war must be set down 
 partly to the account of India ; and so must the 
 false bent given to our diplomacy in the East, as 
 will appear when, in the question of the Eastern 
 nationalities, Nature has asserted her power, and 
 produced, in spite of diplomacy, Christian commu- 
 nities which by a more genial policy we might 
 have made our friends. This is not the place for 
 a discussion of the Russian peril. Mr. Massey 
 holds the usual language on the subject : " Russia 
 had begun to unfold those gigantic schemes of 
 aggrandizement which modern statesmen have 
 justly regarded as menacing the independence 
 and civilization of the continent with a new ir- 
 ruption from the northern hive." The old irrup- 
 
Pitt 203 
 
 tions from the northern hive were those of nomad 
 hordes. They were in a word not invasions bnt 
 vast migrations. The modern Russians, however 
 backward, are a settled nation, and will scarcely, 
 like the Goths and Huns of old, put their wives 
 and children into their wagons and descend with 
 their herds upon the south. The Christianity 
 which ought to restrain their lusts of military 
 aggrandizement is unhappily itself neutralized by 
 a State Church, which, as usual, instead of being 
 the reproving conscience, makes itself the servile 
 organ of the passions of the government by 
 which it is maintained. But it is in the govern- 
 ment, not in the Russian people, that this lust of 
 aggrandizement resides. In this case also the be- 
 ginning of political freedom will probably be the 
 end of military rapacity ; and, since the emancipa- 
 tion of the serfs, the beginning of political free- 
 dom can scarcely be far distant. The fear that 
 Europe will soon be either Republican or Cossack 
 does not seem to me chimerical ; but the fear that 
 it will be Cossack does. 
 
 The minister also met with a check in bring- 
 ing forward a proposition, which was not his 
 own but the Duke of Richmond's, for the forti- 
 fication of the arsenals. Party came in as usual, 
 regardless of the safety of the country when the 
 paramount interest of faction was to be served. 
 
204 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 But the feeling upon which party played seems 
 to have been confidence in the sufficiency of the 
 wooden walls. The nation might, at all events, 
 and may still truly say, that government has at 
 its command a great fleet, maintained at a vast 
 expense to the nation, and that it is "bound, with 
 this fleet, to maintain an ascendancy in the Brit- 
 ish waters, which if it would do, we should stand 
 in little need of fortifications. But the fleet is 
 scattered in petty squadrons over the world, for 
 the nominal defense of distant colonies and de- 
 pendencies, and for the hollow pretense, which 
 could not now be sustained six months after the 
 outbreak of a great war, of dominating in the 
 Mediterranean, The country is continually pour- 
 ing millions into the naval estimates, only to be 
 told that its own shores are defenseless, and that 
 millions more must be spent in fortifying them 
 against French invasion, 
 
 As a member of Shelburne's government, Pitt 
 had been called on to defend, among the other 
 articles of the peace with America and her allies, 
 the abandonment of the clause in the treaty of 
 Utrecht, providing for the demolition of Dunkirk. 
 North denounced the article, on the ground that 
 though Dunkirk was no longer of real impor- 
 tance, the presence of onr commissioners on the 
 enemy's territory was to be desired, because it 
 
Pitt. 205 
 
 perpetuated the memory of former victories, ex- 
 alted the dignity of Great Britian, and humbled 
 the pride of France. Such has hitherto been the 
 code of honor among nations. Among men true 
 dignity is inoffensive, and he who is most careful 
 of the honor of others is thought likely to be 
 most careful of his own. Shelburne, like Chat- 
 ham and Stanhope — two ministers of spirit as 
 well as sense — "before him, had proposed to give 
 Gibraltar up to Spain for an equivalent. Three 
 times round that barren rock had the waters — 
 Nature's destined portal of peaceful commerce, 
 and her destined highway of kindly intercourse 
 among the nations of Christendom — been dyed 
 with Christian blood and covered with floating 
 agony. It does not command the entrance to the 
 Mediterranean. It has made Spain our enemy in 
 every war of the European Powers. When 
 almost paralyzed by decrepitude, she dragged 
 her feeble limbs again and again to the attack, 
 that she might remove this stain on her escutch- 
 eon, this eyesore of her honor. The recovery of 
 it would be the greatest bribe that a military ad- 
 venturer rising to power in Spain could offer to 
 his countrymen : and perhaps the day may not 
 be far distant when such a crisis may occur. But 
 let us by no means exercise any foresight in the 
 matter. Foresight is unworthy of a practical 
 
206 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 nation. A passage m one "of Pitt's letters seems 
 to indicate that he opposed Lord Shelburne on 
 this occasion. But, if he did, it must be borne 
 in mind that we had then no other station in 
 the Mediterranean. Minorca had been lost: 
 Malta was not yet ours. Pitt said " some naval 
 station in the Mediterranean is absolutely indis- 
 pensable, but none can be found so desirable and 
 secure as Malta." If we cite great authorities, 
 we must remember the circumstances under which 
 they spoke. But again I am repeating what I 
 have said more than once before. 
 
 In the midst of his useful course Pitt was 
 almost thrown out of power by the illness of the 
 king, which, if it had lasted longer, would have 
 made the Prince of Wales regent, and transfer- 
 red the government to his friends; one of the 
 many warnings to nations in search of a consti- 
 tution not to embrace ours without considering 
 all the liabilities of so peculiar and complex a 
 machine. The Prince of Wales, partly from filial 
 feeling, partly perhaps like D'Orleans Egalite, 
 for the sake of another forbidden pleasure, flirted 
 with Liberal principles, which, however, of course, 
 lost forever their place in what he was fond of 
 calling his heart, the instant that his foot touched 
 the throne. The debates on the Regency Bill, 
 under the guise of a great constitutional discus- 
 
Pitt. 207 
 
 sion, were a scuffle for power between two fac- 
 tions which had accidentally changed their posi- 
 tions with regard to royalty for the monient, and 
 got hold each of the other's cant ; so that if Pitt 
 could say that he had un-Whigged Fox, Fox 
 might have said that he had un-Toried Pitt. 
 These scenes revealed on the critical eve of the 
 French Revolution the scandals of Royalty — a 
 king, in whom the ray of reason barely flickered, 
 swaying the destinies of a nation — the princes 
 mocking at the affliction of their father — the 
 queen receiving with complacency the duelist 
 who had nearly killed her detested child. Not 
 long before had occurred tlie episode of the 
 Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert, in which 
 the prince broke every law of honor, and put up 
 his bosom friend to tell a lie for him in the 
 House of Commons. But there are extenuating 
 circumstances in this case. First, the prince, like 
 all princes, had been sacrificed to the public good : 
 he had never known equal friendship, heard the 
 voice of truth, or learned self-control and honor 
 in the school of other men. Secondly, his love 
 for Mrs. Fitzherbert was undoubtedly deep and 
 sincere; a lawful marriage with her might have 
 been the means of reclaiming him. Thirdly, he 
 had not made the laws which, in the case of royal 
 marriages, sacrificed affection to policy; and, heir 
 
208 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 to a kingdom as he was, lie might have envied 
 the meanest servant in his train whose hand and 
 heart were free. He was afterward married to 
 a woman whom he had never seen, and the sight 
 of whom caused him at once to call for brandy, 
 while farther researches have revealed that he 
 drowned the horrors of his wedding in an enor- 
 mous potation of liqueur. His mother had "been 
 called down from her nursery one afternoon to 
 dine at table with the family, and introduced to 
 a stranger, who after dinner led her into the next 
 room, and went through the form of marriage 
 with her as the deputy of the King of England. 
 When she was brought to St. James's, never hav- 
 ing seen her destined husband, she was going to 
 fall down at the feet of the wrong man. 
 
 The people showed their sympathy and their 
 loyalty when the king recovered. They passed 
 from mouth to mouth, and engraved on their 
 rings and snuff-boxes the words of the honest 
 Lord Chancellor Thurlow: "When I forget my 
 king may my God forget me." They had not 
 heard Burke's exclamation, "The best thing he 
 can do for you," or the more pungent but highly 
 improper comment of the graceless Wilkes ; nor 
 had they seen Pitt run out of the House crying, 
 " Oh what a rascal." In the course of the great 
 struggle between the king's party and that of the 
 
Pitt. 
 
 209 
 
 prince, when the king's friends were holding a 
 cabinet at "Windsor, as they rose to go, the honest 
 lord chancellor's hat was missing. It was brought 
 to him from the prince's room. 
 
 And now the sun of Pitt's glory has reached 
 its zenith. It declines toward the West and 
 night. 
 
IV. 
 
 P ITT. — II. 
 
 \ 
 An optimist view of history will not hold 
 
 good, any more than an optimist view of nature. 
 All will be well in the sum of things, but in the 
 mean time calamities occur. No greater calamity 
 ever occurred, no greater disaster ever befell the 
 cause of human progress, as it seems to me, than 
 the revolution which brought the Liberal move- 
 ment of the eighteenth century to a violent crisis 
 in France. Apart from the faults of political 
 character, the want of self-control, the want of mu- 
 tual confidence, the levity, and worst of all the cru- 
 elty, which have marked all their revolutions, the 
 French were from their circumstances, and from 
 the evil training which they had undergone, quite 
 unfit to take the political destinies of the world 
 into their hands. The abuses of their own gov- 
 ernment were so flagrant, the obsoleteness of their 
 own institutions was so manifest, that the thought 
 of caution and moderation was banished from 
 their minds, and they were content with nothing 
 
214 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 short of introducing a new order of things, a new 
 political creation as it were, dating from the day 
 of their revolt, which they sought to extend to na- 
 tions unwilling to accept it, or unripe for a great 
 change. They had no middle class accustomed to 
 government, ready to take power into its hands, 
 and furnish wise rulers to the state when the aris- 
 tocracy had been overthrown. The peasantry and 
 the populace of their towns were "brutalized to the 
 last degree by ignorance and oppression. The 
 court and the aristocracy were too utterly corrupt 
 and effete to show any moral courage or attempt 
 to control the crisis which they had themselves, 
 by dallying with Liberalism and Scepticism, help- 
 ed to bring on ; they threw the reins on the neck 
 of a frenzied people, and betook themselves, for the 
 most part, to ignominious flight. In the whole 
 nation, though there were generous aspirations, 
 there was no faith. The state superstition had 
 been renounced by all men in their hearts, even 
 by its state supporters, even by its own priests : 
 but its political ascendancy had been the upas 
 shade which had forbidden any other religion to 
 grow. The creed of Rousseau was not a faith but 
 an emotion, capable of impelling, not of control- 
 ling or sustaining men. Here, as Quinet in his re- 
 cent work has pointed out, lay the root of the 
 whole failure. Institutions, antiquated and decay- 
 
Pitt 2 1 5 
 
 ed, may fall or be pulled down ; but humanity can 
 advance into a new order of things only when it ( 
 is borne forward on the wings of a new faith. 
 And not a step will be made toward the attain- 
 ment of a new faith by guillotining all the tyrants 
 and oligarchs in the world. 
 
 First there was a revolutionary movement in 
 which the generous hopes and glorious promises 
 which fascinated the youth of Wordsworth, South- 
 ey, and Coleridge were blended with the premon- 
 itory symptoms of the crimes and horrors to come, 
 and accompanied by an explosion of chimeras, of 
 rhetoric, of theatrical egotism, and of political 
 folly, the fearful significance of which is plain to 
 the retrospective eye of history. Then ensued 
 Anarchy and the Eeign of Terror, which has left 
 so deep and almost ineffaceable a stain on the 
 cause of Progress, and from the effects of which 
 that cause has suffered ever since, and is suffering 
 to this hour. After Anarchy and the Terror came 
 a military despotism which, by its piratical tyran- 
 ny over Europe, put the hearts of all nations on 
 the side of the national despots, who presented 
 themselves as the only saviors from the rule of a 
 foreign conqueror and the insolent myrmidons of ^ 
 his oppression. Not only George III. and his 
 Tory ministers, not only the half-Liberal monarchy 
 of Prussia, but an Emperor of Austria, a Bourbon 
 
216 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 King of Spain, became in the eyes of their tram- 
 pled subjects liberators and friends of freedom. 
 We are all glad that the Treaty of Vienna has 
 been torn up ; but it ought to be borne in mind 
 that it was in its origin, partly indeed a counter- 
 revolutionary arrangement of the despots, but 
 partly also a military arrangement, framed, not 
 without necessity, to secure Europe against the 
 cruel rapacity of France. The conquests of Na- 
 poleon may have hastened the fall of feudalism, 
 which in any case was inevitable ; but what was 
 this compared with the mischief done by the de- 
 struction of human life and of the fruits of human 
 labor by the reaction created in favor of the old 
 dynasties and institutions, by the evil passions 
 everywhere aroused, above all by the permanent 
 impulse given to the great curse of this genera- 
 tion, the system of standing armies, and generally 
 to the war spirit among nations ? The Code Na- 
 poleon is vaunted as though it had sprung from 
 the conqueror's brain, and been propagated by his 
 arms ; but in fact it is merely the embodiment 
 of the more enlightened and humane theories of 
 jurisprudence which had been gaining ground 
 throughout the eighteenth century, and had been 
 to a great extent carried into effect by paternal 
 despots, such as Leopold of Tuscany and Freder- 
 ic the Great. And against the Code Napoleon 
 
Pitt, . 21 J 
 
 we have to set the revival for the evil purposes of 
 despotism of the state religion and the state priest- 
 hood of France. 
 
 To the Napoleonic despotism France, after a 
 brief interlude of uncongenial freedom, has re- 
 turned ; and this despotism is the keystone of the 
 system of standing armies and government by 
 force in Europe. Like Slavery, it is inherently 
 propagandist; and it has infected the govern- 
 ing class, even in this country, with a tendency 
 to violence "and martial law. Better than the 
 Bourbon despotism it may be, inasmuch as it 
 openly embraces social equality and religious 
 toleration, though it covertly undermines the 
 first by the creation of a military aristocracy, and 
 the second by its alliance with an obscurantist 
 and Jesuitical priesthood. But if any one is in- 
 clined to take Bonapartism at its own estimate, 
 and to concur in calling a Bonaparte a Messiah, 
 let him first consider the progress which had been 
 made under the forms of the old institutions by 
 Frederic the Great, Joseph the Second, and Will- 
 iam Pitt. 
 
 I do not wish to excuse, much less to justify, 
 the despots of the Coalition. By their conspira- 
 cy, by their invasion of France, by the outrageous 
 threats which, through the proclamation of the 
 
 Duke of Brunswick, they uttered against the 
 
 K 
 
218 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 independence of the French people, they commit- 
 ted at once a great blunder and a great crime, 
 and they reaped the bitter fruits of their offense. 
 Wisdom, by the lips of old Kaunitz, had warned 
 them of their proper course — to draw a cordon 
 round the eruption and let the volcano consume 
 its own entrails, as it assuredly would have done. 
 They chose, instead of this, to tap the crater, and 
 bring the lava-torrent down upon themselves. 
 Their attack at once threw the Revolution into 
 the hands of the violent party, and was the proxi- 
 mate cause of the massacres of September and of 
 the Reign of Terror. It made the Revolution 
 military. The creed of the Voltairians was a 
 creed of peace. Voltaire is never so good as 
 when he is ridiculing the cruel folly which crimps 
 a number of ignorant and innocent peasants, 
 dresses them up in uniform, teaches them to 
 march and wheel, and sends them off to kill and 
 be killed by another army of peasants, ignorant 
 and innocent like themselves, as a sacrifice to 
 what is called the honor of kings. The teachings 
 of Rousseau were, if possible, more pacific than 
 those of Voltaire. Robespierre by conviction 
 and interest was averse to war. And if the Gi- 
 rondins in their egotism were ready, against their 
 principles, to invoke a war for the objects of their 
 ambition, the army of the monarchy having been 
 
Pitt 219 
 
 utterly broken up, France was without an army ? 
 till the advance of the Duke of Brunswick gave^ 
 her an army of despair. But we must weigh the 
 misdeeds even of the Coalition of Pilnitz in a just 
 balance. The trade of these men was to be kings : 
 the world, time out of mind, had sanctioned that 
 trade : in many of the nations over which they 
 ruled, and which were too backward for free in- 
 stitutions, the trade was necessary still. But the 
 French Eevolution proclaimed itself universal, 
 and threatened all the thrones and altars of the 
 world with change. It has been much praised 
 for having done so, as though it had soared be- 
 yond the narrow bounds of national self-interest 
 which limited the vision of revolutionists in other 
 nations. Such proclamations cost no self-sacri- 
 fice ; they may spring from vanity and folly as 
 well as from breadth of sympathy and catholicity 
 of view ; their value must be estimated by the 
 acts which follow ; and the acts of the proclaimers 
 of universal brotherhood, in this instance, toward 
 foreign nations, as well as toward each other, were 
 unhappily the acts of brothers Cain. Those who 
 were the first to welcome them with open arms 
 were the first to feel their rapacity and insolence. 
 But, at all events, the announcement of universal 
 revolution could not fail to arouse the instinct of 
 self-preservation in established governments, and 
 
220 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 such a combination as the Coalition of Pilnitz 
 was morally certain to result. Neither the 
 English Revolution of the seventeenth century 
 nor the American Revolution proclaimed itself 
 universal; both of them entered at once into 
 friendly relations with other governments of 
 whatever form ; yet these revolutions did more 
 in the end than the French Revolution for the 
 liberties of mankind. 
 
 We may be thankful, at all events, that the 
 fortunes of humanity, in this its critical transition 
 from feudalism to the era of equality and justice, 
 are now partly placed in other hands ; and that 
 from the extinct volcano of Jacobinism we may 
 turn to a United Italy and a United Germany, 
 unsullied by terrorism and full of hope. 
 
 There can be no sadder proof of the bad effects 
 of the French Revolution on the general interest 
 of Progress than the conversion of Pitt to the 
 side of the Reaction. He was as far as possible 
 from wishing to attack the revolution. Probably 
 he sympathized with it while it kept terms with 
 reason and humanity. He had entered into the 
 most friendly relations with the American Re- 
 public, notwithstanding the influence of the Amer- 
 ican Revolution on Ireland. In 1792, when vio- 
 lence had already begun in France, he reduced 
 his army, struck off two thousand seamen, and 
 
Pitt 221 
 
 held out the highest hopes of farther relief from 
 taxes within the next fifteen years. " For al- 
 though," said he, in his budget-speech, " we must 
 not count with certainty on the continuance of 
 our present prosperity during such an interval, 
 yet unquestionably there never was a time in the 
 history of this country when, from the situation 
 of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fif- 
 teen years of peace than we may at the present 
 moment." He looked forward to the abolition of 
 customs' duties, which would have been at the 
 same time the inauguration of free trade. All 
 his plans and hopes were bound up with peace. 
 He stood aloof from the Congress of Pilnitz. 
 Had his action been free, he would probably have 
 stood aloof to the end. 
 
 The fears and passions of the court, the aristoc- 
 racy, and the clergy, had, however, been aroused ; 
 the progress of the revolution daily increased the 
 excitement among these classes, and it was raised 
 to the highest pitch by the declamations of Burke. 
 As an economical and Indian reformer, Burke, in 
 the earlier part of his career, had been one of the 
 best organs of the movement, into the reaction 
 against which he now flung himself headlong. If 
 the greatness of offenses were to be measured, not 
 by the badness of the intention, but by the bad- 
 ness of the effect, few greater offenses would ever 
 
222 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 have been committed than the publication of the 
 " Reflections on the French Eevolution." It was 
 the special duty of a political philosopher at that 
 moment to allay passion, to bring the nation un- 
 der the dominion of its reason, and to enable it to 
 meet calmly and wisely the tremendous crisis 
 through which Europe was evidently about to 
 pass. Mr. Buckle thinks that Burke, who up to 
 this time had been the first of statesmen, now 
 suddenly went mad. But the truth is, that two 
 of his best treatises, the " Letter to Sir Hercules 
 Langrishe" and the " Thoughts on Scarcity," were 
 written after the "Reflections on the French Rev- 
 olution." In a certain sense he had always been 
 mad ; his reason had always been liable to be 
 overpowered by his imagination ; he had always 
 in his moments of passion been incapable of self- 
 control ; he had always had in him that which is 
 commonly the root of madness, for he was a great 
 egotist, and his egotism is always breaking out 
 under the thin disguise of an affected self-depreci- 
 ation. He had lost the ear of the House of Com- 
 mons as much by his extravagance and rant as 
 by his prolixity ; he had come to be regarded not 
 only as a dinner-bell but as a fool ; and if we are 
 scandalized at the exclusion of this man of genius 
 from the cabinet, people in 1789 would have been 
 more scandalized at his admission. " Folly per- 
 
Pitt. 223 
 
 sonified," lie was called by one who had just been 
 hearing his speech on the Regency Bill ; and the 
 same witness says that he finished his wild speech 
 in a manner next to madness. When the house 
 would not listen to his ravings, he called them a 
 pack of hounds. He described the lord chancel- 
 lor as a man with black brows and a large wig, 
 and said he was fit to do an act worse than high- 
 way robbery. He spoke in offensive language 
 even of the afilicted king. He called upon the 
 clerk to read the Great Charter because a bill for 
 the reduction of offices trenched on some vested 
 interests. He took a dagger out of his pocket, 
 and hurled it on the floor of the House, as a sym- 
 bol of the atrocity of the French Revolution; 
 upon which Sheridan remarked that he had 
 brought the knife, but he had forgotten to bring 
 the fork. He deserves the national gratitude for 
 having summoned Hastings before the bar of jus- 
 tice ; but the violence of his sallies in the course 
 of the trial gave a great advantage to the accused. 
 Though he was by principle a free trader, his par- 
 ty passions had led him to oppose Pitt's measure 
 for free trade with Ireland. He was now dis- 
 credited, somewhat neglected by his friends, rest- 
 less from mortified self-love, and ready for an out- 
 break. Mad in any other sense he was not. 
 No doubt in the " Reflections" he is sincere. 
 
224 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 He was a worshiper of constitutional monarchy. 
 It was his Fetish. He loved and adored it with 
 the passionate loyalty which, as an Irishman in 
 his own country, he would have felt toward the 
 chief of his clan. Politics were his religion, to 
 which, in his mind, any other religion was sub- 
 servient, as he showed when, for political pur- 
 poses, he supported the imposition of the Thirty- 
 Nine Articles on the reluctant consciences of 
 clergymen who had petitioned for relief. His 
 philosophy afforded no firm and lofty ground of 
 immutable faith in things unseen, from which he 
 could form a rational estimate of political sys- 
 tems, as things merely subservient to the higher 
 life of man, venerable only for their utility, not to 
 be altered without good reason, but when there 
 was good reason, to be altered or abolished with- 
 out superstitious scruple, and destined like all 
 other parts of the outward vesture of humanity 
 to pass away before the end. He did not know 
 that, while many things that are of man are good, 
 nothing is sacred but that which is of God. He 
 was not so much an advocate as a priest of the 
 constitution and its mythical founders ; he preach- 
 ed sermons on it as fervent as those of Bossuet, 
 and defended its absurdities by arguments which 
 his piety suggested as strange as ever a Koman 
 friar used in defense of his superstitions. Ac- 
 
Pitt 225 
 
 cording to him it was ordered by a sort of divine 
 wisdom that Cornwall should have as many mem- 
 bers as Scotland, because the representation was 
 thus prevented from being too closely connected 
 with local interests. When the French Revolu- 
 tion got beyond his consecrated type, it forfeited 
 his sympathies, and with a nature so passionate 
 as his, to forfeit sympathy was to incur hatred. 
 
 I do not complain of his strictures on the folly 
 and incompetence of the French Revolutionists. 
 Here he could scarcely go beyond the truth. 
 But I complain of his blindness, which charity, 
 making the utmost allowance for the frenzy of 
 rhetoric, can scarcely pronounce altogether invol- 
 untary, to the evils of the French monarchy and 
 church — I should rather say his raving panegyrics 
 on things shocking to sense and virtue. " Ideas 
 furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagina- 
 tion" — " decent drapery of life" — "vice losing half 
 its evil by losing all its grossness" — is it possible 
 that he can sincerely have applied snch terms to 
 the system of Louis XV., of the Eegent Orleans, 
 of Cardinal Dubois ? Knowing, as he must have 
 done, the character of the French aristocracy, can 
 he in perfect goo$ faith have uttered in relation 
 to them the blasphemous extravagance that there 
 were two sources of all good in Europe, the spir- 
 it of religion and the spirit of a gentleman? 
 
 K2 
 
226 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Knowing, as he must have done, the condition of 
 the French people, and the responsibility of the 
 court for their misery, can he have failed to be 
 aware of the sophism of which he was guilty in 
 presenting that court under the image of the 
 dauphiness as a star rising full of beauty and 
 beneficence over the horizon of Versailles ? That 
 this beautiful and beneficent monarchy was bank- 
 rupt is a fact of which its devotee just shows him- 
 self conscious, and the remedy suggested by the 
 great public moralist is in effect robbery of the 
 public creditor, which he thinks preferable to any 
 appropriation of the property of the State Church. 
 He defends the ecclesiastical sinecurism so enor- 
 mous in France, on the ground that ecclesiastics 
 make as good a use of property as laymen; an argu- 
 ment which would prove that there can scarcely 
 be too much corruption in the Church. His po- 
 litical philosophy does not enable him, in his anti- 
 revolutionary transports, to distinguish between 
 the character of feudalism in its own day and its 
 character when its day was past, or between the 
 situation and the difficulties of the English nation 
 in 1688 and those of the French people in 1789. 
 In this vituperation of the National Assembly 
 and the movement party in France, if he is some- 
 times telling, he sometimes sinks to the level of a 
 scold. His declamations against declaimers, his 
 
Pitt 227 
 
 sophistical attacks upon sophisters, the contempt 
 which he the economical reformer affects for econ- 
 omists and calculators, would move a smile if 
 we did not know how terrible their effect had 
 been. He talks unctuously of religion, and lash- 
 es himself and his readers into fury against 
 French Atheism. Soon we find him at the feet 
 of Catherine of Russia, a Voltairian in creed, and 
 more than a Voltairian in practice, conjuring her, 
 with fulsome flattery, to " lend the aid of her un- 
 scrupulous arms in crushing the objects of his 
 political aversion. Burke broke with his old 
 party : he won the affection, almost the worship, 
 of a new party, the fierce applause of a new audi- 
 ence. He received a pension, and the promise of 
 a peerage, from the court and the Tory Govern- 
 ment. His eminence entitled him to a pension if 
 any body was to be pensioned, and to a peerage 
 if he, a peer of intellect, cared to be a lord. But 
 that he should accept these rewards of his change 
 of party was another proof of the truth of his 
 own statement — that the age of chivalry was 
 gone. 
 
 Of course the clergy were deeply moved, and 
 the drum ecclesiastic beat to arms. Horsley, the 
 leading political bishop of the day, and a sort of 
 ecclesiastical henchman of Pitt, is known as the 
 author of the maxim "that the people have no- 
 
228 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 thing to do with the laws but to obey thein." 
 This prelate preached a sermon, published in his 
 works, in which, correcting the imperfect views of 
 the Founder of Christianity, he lays it down that 
 a conscientious submission to the sovereign power 
 is, no less than brotherly love, a distinctive badge 
 of Christ's disciples — in other words, that the dis- 
 tinctive badge of Christians is to love one another 
 and be Tories. He thanks God that in the 
 Church of England both these marks of genuine 
 Christianity have ever been conspicuous, He 
 then proceeds to say " that in the exercise of 
 brotherly love, it is perhaps the amiable infirmity 
 of Englishmen to be too easy in admitting the 
 claim of a spiritual kindred — that the times com- 
 pel him to remark that brotherly love embraces 
 only brethren — that the term of holy brother- 
 hood is profaned by an indiscriminate application 
 — that if persons living under the British consti- 
 tution have dared to exult in the proceedings of 
 the French revolutionists, with them it is meet 
 that we abjure all brotherhood : a claim on our 
 charity these miserable men may have, they have 
 none on our brotherly affection." If this was 
 preached by a man of sense and learning in a re- 
 sponsible position and before an intelligent audi- 
 ence, we may imagine what was preached from the 
 rural pulpit before the squire. It is to be borne 
 
Pitt. 229 
 
 in mind, however, that if the State bishops and 
 clergy, who supposed their wealth and their priv- 
 ileges to be in danger, inveighed against the impi- 
 ety of revolution, so did Robert Hall, fascinated as 
 he had been at first by its political promises and 
 hopes. The French atheists shocked all decency, 
 as well as all religion. 
 
 It must be added that Fox behaved unwisely. 
 His generous heart was on the side of liberty : but 
 there was too much in him of the Palais Royal, 
 too much of the former member of the gambling 
 club at Almack's, where people played for des- 
 perate stakes, with masks to conceal their emo- 
 tions and a wild masquerading dress to typify 
 their delirious excitement. The political arena 
 was to him still a gambling-table : and his strong 
 point was not self-control. He ought, in the inter- 
 est of his cause, to have repressed the ardor of his 
 sympathies, to have blamed the excesses while he 
 showed the benefits of the Revolution, to have 
 pointed out how inevitable it was in France, how 
 different was the case of the English from that of 
 the French monarchy, how small was the danger in 
 England of French contagion ; and then to have 
 insisted that for whatever danger there might be, 
 the right antidote was not war or violent repres- 
 sion, but timely measures of reform. He would 
 thus have strengthened the hands of Pitt, whom 
 
230 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 he must have known to be moderate, in resisting 
 the war tendencies of his party and of the court. 
 Instead of this he held the language of a Jacobin, 
 and at once inflamed the panic and wounded the 
 national pride by talking of the Revolution as the 
 most glorious event since Saratoga and Yorktown. 
 His hot-headed followers, of course, went beyond 
 their chief. But he was the leader of the Oppo- 
 sition, and the function of a leader of Opposition 
 is, at all costs and hazards, to assail and to em- 
 barrass the government. "While this system of 
 party government lasts it must be so. But we 
 will hope that party government is not to be the 
 end of all things; and that in the course of our 
 political changes we shall find a way of establish- 
 ing a government to which we may all feel loyal, 
 and which we may all desire to support as the 
 government, not of a party, but of the nation. 
 
 For one of his speeches Fox has been rather 
 unreasonably blamed. Speaking of the refusal of 
 the French guards to act against the people, he 
 said that the example of a neighboring nation had 
 proved the fear of standing armies to be unfound- 
 ed, since it was now shown that by becoming a 
 soldier, a man did not cease to be a citizen. This, 
 at the time, brought on a storm of denunciation, 
 which still rebellows in the histories. " All the 
 objections," says Mr. Massey, "that have been 
 
Pitt 231 
 
 urged by theoretical writers and popular orators 
 against permament military establishments, sink 
 into insignificance when compared with the ap- 
 palling magnitude of the danger attendant on an 
 armed force which is to arbitrate in disputes or 
 conflicts between the people and their rulers." Mr. 
 Massey fails to see that, as it is, the armed force in 
 the hands of the rulers all over Europe arbitrates 
 in the disputes and conflicts between the rulers 
 and the people. Standing armies are the bane of 
 the world, and to make them a perfect curse it is 
 only necessary to extinguish in the soldier the last 
 spark of the citizen and the man. Soldiers, while 
 they are soldiers, must submit to a rigid discipline, 
 and move at the word of command : it is the con- 
 dition of their calling and the dictate of their hon- 
 or. But I claim for the soldier, whether officer or 
 private, the rights of labor and of man. I claim 
 for him, in the first place, the right to dispose, like 
 other men, of his own industry ; to make the best 
 terms he can for himself, like other men, in the 
 labor market, and to give his employer warning — 
 such warning, of course, as the nature of the calling 
 may reasonably require — if fair terms are not allow- 
 ed. In this way our army might be smaller, but it 
 would be better than it is now. In the second 
 place, I claim for the soldier the right to retire, 
 and to deliver up his arms, though by no means 
 
232 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 to use them against his employer, when he finds 
 that his military duties are likely to come into 
 conflict with his duties as a citizen. There will 
 "be no fear of his exercising this right, unless the 
 heart of the nation is really against the govern- 
 ment, and when the heart of the nation is really 
 against the government, the government ought 
 not, if politics are a matter of reason and justice, 
 to have the means of putting down the nation by 
 brute force. The habit of treating the soldier for 
 a long term of years as the bondman of the gov- 
 ernment and the blind instrument of its will, is a 
 relic of barbarism, against which advancing civili- 
 zation will in the end protest. 
 
 Pressed by his own party, not supported in 
 his resistance by the Opposition, Pitt, though the 
 spirit of Adam Smith struggled hard and long 
 in him, began to slide toward war. He first 
 showed his tendency by a royal proclamation 
 against seditious writings, and by measures of 
 half hostility toward France — an Alien Bill 
 pointed against French emissaries, an act prohib- 
 iting the circulation of assignats, and another 
 prohibiting the exportation of corn and flour to 
 France. At last he himself caught, or affected to 
 catch, the panic, and held wild language about 
 his head being in danger. The French Republic- 
 ans meanwhile, by their aggressive violence and 
 
Pitt. 233 
 
 their frantic language, were giving every possible 
 handle to their enemies. To treat their wild 
 propagandising their decrees of universal revolu- 
 tion, as the ravings of madmen, whose paroxysm 
 would soon be over, and who would too surely 
 avenge their outrages on themselves, was the 
 course pointed out by wisdom : but it was not an 
 easy course for Pitt to take. The execution of 
 the king — a proceeding as disgusting in its theat- 
 rical levity, as it was shocking in its cruelty — 
 gave a death-blow to the hope of peace. The 
 French ambassador was ordered to leave the 
 kingdom, and there was war. My belief is that 
 Pitt felt he was doing wrong : but though a pat- 
 riot and a man of honor, he had not a god in his 
 breast. He could not resign power and break 
 with all his friends. Seasoning like a financier, 
 and seeing the depreciation of the French assig- 
 nats, he thought that it would be a short war. 
 When he found himself deceived in this, he made 
 earnest, even humiliating efforts, to negotiate, to 
 buy, a peace. 
 
 And what was the cause of this war which sus- 
 pended all politicaland social progress for thirty 
 years, or rather threw it back to a point which it 
 had reached early in the eighteenth century, and 
 under the fiscal burdens of which, and its perhaps 
 still heavier burdens of other kinds, we still 
 
234 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 groan? Established morality permits statesmen 
 to resort to arms without having first tried ar- 
 bitration, and this in cases where their personal 
 prejudices or rivalries may be the real obstacles 
 to a pacific settlement. But they are bound to 
 assign a definite ground of war, without which 
 there can be no assignable terms of peace. In 
 the case before us no definite ground of war has 
 been assigned down to the present day. From 
 the various authorities on the subject, you would 
 gather that England took up arms to put down 
 the Jacobins, to save herself from the contagion 
 of revolutionary principles, to punish regicide, to 
 check the territorial aggrandizement of France, to 
 establish the existence of the Supreme Being, and 
 to close the navigation of the Scheldt. 
 
 To have gone to war for the purpose of closing 
 the Scheldt would have been the act of a greater 
 maniac than the Jacobins. It would have been 
 like fighting about a right of way in the middle 
 of an earthquake. But the truth was that we 
 were concerned in the matter only as guarantors, 
 and the Dutch did not call upon us to perform 
 our guarantee. • 
 
 As Burke wrote against a Regicide peace, he 
 must have looked upon the execution of the king 
 as the ground of the war. The murder of the 
 French king was an offense against Heaven, and 
 
Pitt 235 
 
 Heaven would certainly have visited it, and did 
 visit it, though not by the thunderbolt, by a sure 
 moral retribution, as well as the still more das- 
 tardly and atrocious murder of the queen, upon 
 the savages by whom it was committed. But it 
 was no offense against us. It was in fact commit- 
 ted partly in imitation of our execution of Charles 
 I. And if the murder of the king was the cause 
 of the war, what was to be its object ? - To bring 
 the king to life again ? Or to punish his murder- 
 ers? Or to punish the whole French nation? 
 If there was to be no Regicide peace, how was a 
 war with Regicides to be brought to an end ? 
 
 The vindication of public right is another 
 ground assigned for the war. The conduct of 
 the French Eepublicans to the countries which 
 they overran was infamous. But they had vio- 
 lated no public right which we were concerned 
 to defend. The allied kings had attacked them ; 
 they had beaten the allied kings, taken the offen- 
 sive, and commenced a career of conquest in their 
 turn. This was the fortune of war. And these 
 allies of ours in the cause of public right, what 
 sort of champions of that cause were they ? Aus- 
 tria, Prussia, and Russia had just consummated 
 the partition of Poland, the most flagrant viola- 
 tion of public right in history, and one against 
 which, let them roll as many stones to the mouth 
 
236 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 of that sepulchre as they will, nature and justice 
 will protest till right is done. Not only so, but 
 when we had become their confederates, Austria 
 and Prussia took possession by robbers' law of 
 Conde and Valenciennes, in spite of the protest 
 of the Bourbons, for whom, as legitimate sover- 
 eigns of France, the allies professed to fight ; and 
 when Austria afterward, in concert with Bona- 
 parte, committed an act of brigandage by the 
 seizure of Venice, this produced in us no moral 
 repugnance to her alliance. The conduct of En- 
 gland was, as I am prepared to maintain, more 
 disinterested on the whole, as well as marked by 
 greater constancy and fortitude than that of any 
 other nation engaged on either side. Her liber- 
 ties, imperfect as they were, breathed into her 
 government a spirit of honor which was not 
 found elsewhere, and checked infamies which in 
 the secret counsels of despotism were conceived 
 without shame and perpetrated without rebuke. 
 But even England from the beginning made it a 
 war of interest as well as of alleged principle; 
 and our first act was the appropriation of the 
 Island of Tobago. 
 
 French propagandism, and especially the pro- 
 pagandist decree of the 19th November, 1792, is 
 another alleged justification of the war. But 
 this was merely the counterblast to the propagan- 
 
Pitt. 237 
 
 disni of the Duke of Brunswick. If it was law- 
 ful for the allies to declare themselves the protect- 
 ors of monarchy in France, it was equally lawful 
 for the French to declare themselves the protect- 
 ors of Republicanism in other countries. We 
 ourselves avowed, though with faltering accents, 
 that it was part of our object to change the gov- 
 ernment of France. The decree of the 19th No- 
 vember, so far as we were concerned, was empty 
 fanfaronade ; no execution could be had of it in 
 this country provided our government behaved 
 decently to our people; it might have been treat- 
 ed by England as the insult of a lunatic, which 
 touches no man's honor. 
 
 Was it against French Atheism that we went 
 to war? This probably was the leading motive 
 of the clergy. It can not have been the motive 
 of Pitt. He at least must have had sense enough 
 to know that mankind could not be convinced of 
 the existence of a beneficient Creator by filling 
 creation with blood and havoc. And who were 
 the representatives of religion % An emperor of 
 Austria, who shortened his life by self-indulgence; 
 a king of Prussia, of whom it was said, in allusion 
 to his emulation of Frederic the Great, " that he 
 had nothing of Solomon but his concubines ;" the 
 Semiramis of the North ; prince-bishops of the 
 Rhine, whose petty courts were noted as the 
 
238 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 sacred scenes of every pleasure. Among our- 
 selves, the Duke of York with, his Nancy Par- 
 sons; Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who died with 
 the name of God on his lips, but not in prayer; 
 not to mention the minister himself, who some- 
 times saw two speakers instead of one. 
 
 The great Tory authority, Sir Archibald Ali- 
 son, is very frank and explicit. He says that 
 what the government had in view was not the 
 conquest of the Republicans, but a danger nearer 
 home : that they dreaded domestic revolution if 
 pacific intercourse were any longer carried on 
 with France. He cites a remark of the Empress 
 Catherine to the effect that war is sometimes the 
 only way of giving a useful direction to the pas- 
 sions, and says that in this remark is to be found 
 the true explanation and the best vindication of 
 the French war. " The passions," he proceeds, 
 " were excited, democratic ambition was awaken- 
 ed ; the desire of power, under the name of reform, 
 was rapidly gaining ground among the middle 
 ranks, and the institutions of the country were 
 threatened with an overthrow as violent as that 
 which had recently taken place in the French Mon- 
 archy. In these circumstances the only mode of 
 checking the evil was by engaging in a foreign 
 contest, by drawing off the ardent spirits into act- 
 ive service, and in lieu of the modern desire for 
 
Pitt. 239 
 
 innovation, rousing the ancient gallantry of the 
 British people." Sir Archibald is certainly wrong 
 as to the fact, The institutions of the country were 
 not threatened with overthrow. The people were 
 loyal ; they had shown the utmost enthusiasm on 
 the recovery of the king's health. Burke himself 
 said that not one man in a hundred was a Revo- 
 lutionist. Fox's revolutionary sentiments met 
 with no response, but with general reprobation, 
 and caused even his friends to shrink from his 
 side. Of the so-called Jacobin Societies, the So- 
 ciety for Constitutional Information numbered 
 only a few hundred members, who, though they 
 held extreme opinions, were headed by men of 
 character, and were quite incapable of treason or 
 violence. The Corresponding Society was of a 
 more sinister character; but its numbers were 
 computed only at 6000, and it was swallowed up 
 in the loyal masses of the people. The mob at 
 Birmingham rose for Church and king, and sack- 
 ed the house of Priestley because he was an Athe- 
 ist, or, what was the same thing, a man of science. 
 A Tory mob at Manchester treated Mr. Walker, a 
 respectable Reformer of the place, in a similar 
 manner. We had a Parliament of rotten bor- 
 oughs, but still a Parliament ; a law framed more 
 in the interest of the rich than of the poor, but 
 still a law; a free press ; trial by jury and habeas 
 
240 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 corpus, no letters de cachet, no Bastille. The 
 State Church was unjustly privileged, but not 
 persecuting ; and the Dissenters, if they did not 
 love the Test and Corporation Acts, had no desire 
 to worship the Goddess of Reason in the form of 
 a naked prostitute on the altar of St. Paul's. 
 The religious middle classes were soon repelled by 
 the impieties of the Revolution, social enthusiasts 
 like Coleridge and Southey by its atrocities, all 
 men of sense by its monkeyism and its madness. 
 Foreign emissaries can do nothing except where 
 there is widespread disaffection among the people. 
 The army, navy, yeomanry, and militia were per- 
 fectly sound. Volunteers in large numbers an- 
 swered the call of the government. At the threat 
 of a French invasion the nation would have risen 
 as it had risen against the Armada. In Ireland 
 alone there was real and just hatred of the gov- 
 ernment : but the long pressure of an iron tyran- 
 ny had crushed Ireland into mute despair : and 
 in this case, as in all cases, Irish disaffection was 
 rendered dangerous only by the war which 
 brought it the aid of foreign arms. The govern- 
 ment had but to rule well, tread steadily in the 
 path of moderate reform, and keep the defenses 
 in good order. England would then have passed 
 unscathed through the crisis, and the wisdom 
 of her rulers would have ensured the gratitude 
 
Pitt, 241 
 
 of the nation. But supposing that the reverse 
 had been the case : supposing that the Tory pan- 
 ic had been as well founded as it was ground- 
 less ; — does the morality of Sir Archibald Alison 
 and his party sanction the maxim of the virtuous 
 Catherine, that governments are at liberty to di- 
 vert troublesome aspirations into the channel of a 
 foreign war ? Is there any thing more dangerous 
 than this in the ravings of the Jacobins? Is 
 there any thing more immoral in Machiavelli? 
 The principle, no doubt, is intended for the ex- 
 clusive use of such governments as Tories desire to 
 uphold. But its application can not be arrested 
 there. If the Tories had a right to divert revo- 
 lutionary sentiment into the channel of war, the 
 Jacobins had a right to divert reactionary senti- 
 ment into the same channel: and Napoleon had 
 the same right to get rid in the same manner of 
 the sentiments which, as he declared, threatened 
 the stability of his throne. 
 
 The same remark applies to the excuse found- 
 ed on the danger of political contagion. Are all 
 governments to be alike licensed to make war 
 with their neighbors for the purpose of political 
 quarantine % Is the privilege to be extended to 
 republics disquieted by the neighborhood of mon- 
 archies and aristocracies, as well as to monarchies 
 and aristocracies disquieted by the neighborhood 
 
 L 
 
242 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 of republics ? Or is it taken for granted that no 
 free commonwealth can be so ill-rooted in the af- 
 fection of its citizens, or so wicked as to make use 
 of such a power % 
 
 It is sad to say it, but when Pitt had once left 
 the path of right, he fell headlong into evil. To 
 gratify the ignoble fears and passions of his party, 
 he commenced a series of attacks on English lib- 
 erty of speaking and writing which Mr. Massey, 
 a strong anti-revolutionist, characterizes as unpar- 
 alleled since the time of Charles I. The country 
 was filled with spies. A band of the most infam- 
 ous informers was called into activity by the gov- 
 ernment. Men were prosecuted for loose or 
 drunken words, of which no man of sense would 
 have taken notice, and for speculative opinions 
 with which no government had a right to inter- 
 fere. An attorney, named Frost, for saying in a 
 coffee-house, where he could not have intended to 
 conspire, and out of which he was, in fact, kicked 
 by the company, that he was for equality and no 
 king, was tried before Lord Kenyon, a high Tory 
 judge, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, 
 to stand in the pillory, to find security for good 
 behavior, and to be struck off the roll. The courts 
 of quarter session, with their benches of Tory 
 squires, were employed to try political cases by 
 the government, to which their character as tri- 
 
Pitt, 243 
 
 bunals must have been too well known. Associa- 
 tions were formed under government patronage, 
 for the detection and prosecution of sedition, and 
 thus the impartiality of the jury was tainted at 
 its source. There was a Tory reign of terror, to 
 which a slight increase of the panic among the up- 
 per classes would probably have lent a redder hue. 
 Among other measures of repression the Ha- 
 beas Corpus Act was suspended ; and the liber- 
 ties of all men were thus placed at the mercy of 
 the party in power. The Habeas Corpus Act is 
 an Act of Parliament which Parliament may sus- 
 pend. But the security of all English freemen 
 from arbitrary arrest, as well as from any punish- 
 ment without a trial by their peers, rests not on 
 the Habeas Corpus Act, but on the great clause 
 of the Great Charter, of which the Habeas Cor- 
 pus Act is merely a supplement and guarantee. 
 And the Great Charter is not an Act of Parlia- 
 ment : it is a fundamental covenant between the 
 government and all the people of these realms, 
 a covenant which was before Parliament, which 
 is above Parliament, and with which if Parlia- 
 ment tampers, it may continue to reign by force, 
 but it will no longer reign by right. The tyran- 
 ny of the crown is past : it is the tyranny of the 
 House of Commons against which we have now 
 to guard. A House of Commons, not the prerog- 
 
244 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 ative of the crown, was Pitt's instrument in his 
 aggressions upon public liberty. " I called a Par- 
 liament in Ireland," was the plea of Strafford, 
 when he was accused of arbitrary government. 
 " Parliaments without parliamentary liberties ," 
 replied Pyra, " are but a fair and plausible way 
 to servitude." A class Parliament is an oligarchy 
 with a broad basis, more powerful for iniquity 
 than any crown. 
 
 In the cases of Home Tooke and his associates, 
 the government well knew that there was no real 
 evidence of treason. The charge of constructive 
 treason was brought in instead of that of sedition, 
 to make an impression on the nation and possess 
 the public mind with the idea that there were 
 terrible conspiracies, on foot. But to bring men 
 to trial for their lives for such a purpose was a 
 profanation of the 'courts of justice. The con- 
 structive treason was made out thus : " The pris- 
 oners had issued a prospectus for a convention. 
 To issue a prospectus for a convention was to 
 enter into a conspiracy to compel the king to 
 govern otherwise than by the laws. A conspira- 
 cy to compel the king to govern otherwise than 
 by the laws was a conspiracy to depose him from 
 the royal state, title, power, and government. 
 Such an attempt must lead to resistance. Eesist- 
 ance must lead to the deposition of the king, and 
 
Pitt. 245 
 
 his deposition must endanger his life." Such was 
 the substance of the capital indictment which it 
 took the attorney-general nine hours to state. 
 Supposing that policy could ever find a place in 
 the proceedings of public justice, no sound policy 
 could lead the government to incur an ignominious 
 defeat. Sir Archibald Alison says the trials did 
 good, because the acquittal of the prisoners 
 showed the public that liberty was not on the 
 decline, and the people, satisfied with this great 
 victory over their supposed oppressors, relapsed 
 into their ancient loyalty. A profound way of 
 attaching the people to the government — to ex- 
 hibit it to them as a tyrannical aggressor defeat- 
 ed in an attempt to wrest law to the purposes of 
 judicial murder ! 
 
 It was in one of these State trials, where the 
 accused, Major Cartwright, was the leader of a 
 Parliamentary Reform Association, that the Pitt 
 of former days, the Pitt who had once been a 
 member of the same association and the foremost 
 champion of its principles, was put into the wit- 
 ness-box by the defense to bear witness against 
 Pitt the renegade from Reform, the persecutor of 
 Reformers in these evil times. Pitt might plead 
 that circumstances were altered, and that when 
 circumstances are altered, honorable men may 
 change. Honorable men may change, and that 
 
246 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 they should have full liberty of change is essen- 
 tial to the public interest and to the integrity of 
 public life. But no great nature ever passes a 
 sponge over its former self: no great nature ever 
 persecutes old friends. 
 
 It was in one of these trials, too, that Eldon, 
 then Sir John Scott and attorney-general, opened 
 his attempt to procure the capital conviction of 
 a man who he knew had done nothing w T orthy of 
 death with a pathetic exordium on his own dis- 
 interestedness and virtue. " He should have 
 nothing to leave his children but his good name." 
 And then he wept. The solicitor-general wept 
 with his weeping chief. " What is the solicitor 
 weeping for?" said one bystander to another. 
 " He is weeping to think how very little the at- 
 torney will have to leave his children." 
 
 The juries at quarter sessions of course gave 
 the verdicts desired by their proprietors on the 
 bench. The London juries on the whole behaved 
 well, and deserve our gratitude for their guardian- 
 ship of public liberty in its hour of trial. They 
 had not then been so entirely relieved of appre- 
 hension for their own liberties as to make them 
 regardless of the liberties of others. The judges 
 behaved not so well. The tenure of the judges 
 is independent. But after all they belong to a 
 political party, and they belong to a social class ; 
 
Pitt 247 
 
 and these are influences which, even on the 
 judgment-seat, only the highest and strongest na- 
 tures can entirely put aside. How to appoint 
 judges who shall be strictly impartial in political 
 cases, is, I fear, a problem still to be solved. 
 But the judge who does in political cases show 
 himself above every thing but justice is one of 
 the greatest and noblest benefactors of his kind ; 
 he presents law in its highest majesty to the rever- 
 ence of the people ; and extinguishes in the hearts 
 of men the sources of violence and revolution. 
 
 In Scotland the Tory reign of terror was worse 
 than in England. In Scotland there was scarcely 
 the mockery of a representation of the people. 
 The entire electoral body was not more than four 
 thousand. Edinburgh and Glasgow had each a 
 constituency of thirty-three electors. The county 
 of Bute had one resident elector, who constituted 
 the meeting, called over the freeholders, answered 
 to his own name, moved and seconded his own 
 nomination, put the question to the meeting, and 
 unanimously elected himself. Every county and 
 borough was in the hands of some proprietor. 
 The whole country was one nest of jobbery and 
 corruption, managed in the interest of the Tories, 
 or I suppose we must say of religion and the Su- 
 preme Being, by that eminent servant of Heaven, 
 Mr. Dundas. The juries partook of the general 
 
248 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 slavishness, the judges were fiercer Tories than 
 the judges in England, and much less honest. 
 Thomas Muir, a young advocate of high talents 
 and attainments, was an active champion of par- 
 liamentary reform, as any man in Scotland who 
 had not the spirit of a serf would have been, and 
 had been a delegate to the Edinburgh convention 
 of Associated Friends of the People. An indict- 
 ment for sedition was preferred against him by 
 the government. "Every incident of the trial," 
 says Sir Erskine May, the author of the " Consti- 
 tutional History of England," "marked the un- 
 fairness and the cruel spirit of his judges. In 
 deciding on the relevancy of the indictment, they 
 dilated upon the enormity of the offenses charged, 
 which in their judgment amounted almost to 
 high treason, the excellence of our constitution, 
 and the terrors of the French Revolution. It 
 was plain that any attempt to amend our institu- 
 tions was in their eyes a crime. All the jury- 
 men, selected by the sheriff and picked by the 
 presiding judge, were members of an association 
 at Goldsmiths' Hall who had erased Muir's name 
 from their books as an enemy to the constitution. 
 He objected that such men had already pre- 
 judged his cause ; but he was told that he might 
 as well object to his judges, who had sworn to 
 maintain the constitution. The witnesses for the 
 
Pitt. 249 
 
 crown failed to prove any seditions speeches, 
 while they all bore testimony to the earnestness 
 with which Muir had counseled order and obedi- 
 ence to the law. Throughout the trial he was 
 browbeaten and threatened by the judges. A con- 
 temptible witness against him was caressed by 
 the public prosecutor, and complimented by the 
 court ; while a witness for the defense was hastily 
 committed for concealing the truth, and Muir, 
 when he offered to speak on his witness's behalf, 
 was silenced and told that he had no right to in- 
 terfere in the business. In the spirit of a bygone 
 age of judicature the lord advocate denounced 
 Muir as a demon of sedition and mischief. He 
 even urged it as a proof of guilt that a letter had 
 been found among his papers addressed to Mr. 
 Fyshe Palmer, who was about to be tried for sedi- 
 tion." Let us hope that the age of judicature, 
 when a dominant party in possession of party 
 courts of justice, or of those still more convenient 
 instruments, courts of martial law, could murder 
 the objects of its political hatred under the form 
 of a trial, is as completely by-gone as Sir Erskine 
 May imagines. Scroggs and Jeffreys are in their 
 graves of infamy ; but their spirit is not quite 
 dead. Muir defended himself gallantly, and drew 
 from the audience applause, which one of the 
 
 judges noticed as a proof of the seditious feelings 
 
 L 2 
 
250 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 of the people. He asserted that lie was brought 
 to trial for promoting parliamentary reform. 
 " The Lord Justice-Clerk Braxfield," remarks. Sir 
 Erskine May, " confirmed this assertion by charg- 
 ing the jury that to preach the necessity of re- 
 form at a time of excitement was seditious." The 
 judge harangued the jury against parliamentary 
 reform. "The landed interest," he said, "alone 
 had a right to be represented : as for the rabble 
 who had nothing but personal property, what 
 hold had the nation on them V Another judge 
 said, " If punishment adequate to the crime of se- 
 dition were to be sought for, it could not be 
 found in our law, now that torture was happily 
 abolished." Torture is not abolished, if the theo- 
 ries now maintained by servile lawyers and pre- 
 rogative politicians on the subject of martial law 
 be true : if these theories be true, English free- 
 men are still liable to torture. Muir was sen- 
 tenced to transportation for fourteen years. " Of 
 the three Koman punishments, crucifixion, expo- 
 sure to wild beasts, and deportation," said one 
 of the judges, "we have chosen the mildest." 
 Chosen the mildest he had not, but a people not 
 so barbarous as its rulers had forced him to take 
 it. In another trial, a judge said, in summing up 
 to the jury, " Gentlemen, the right of universal 
 suffrage the subjects of this country never enjoy- 
 
Pitt. 251 
 
 ed ; and were they to enjoy it, they would not 
 long enjoy either liberty or a free constitution. 
 You will therefore consider whether telling the 
 people that they have a just right to what would 
 unquestionably be tantamount to a total subver- 
 sion of the constitution, is such a writing as any 
 person is entitled to compose, to print, and to 
 publish." Under such law, delivered from the 
 bench of justice, a man was condemned to trans- 
 portation for seven years. If, as Pym said, parlia- 
 ments without parliamentary liberties are but a 
 fair and plausible way to servitude, jury trial 
 without impartial judges and honest juries is but 
 a fair and plausible way to murder. 
 
 Was Pitt answerable for all this? He was. 
 With full knowledge of the facts he defended 
 these outrages and their perpetrators in Parlia- 
 ment. The infamy can not be wiped away from 
 his once pure and patriotic name. Lord Stan- 
 hope pleads that these and still more violent 
 measures were demanded by the temper of the 
 time. Does not the very fact, that the temper of 
 the time was what Lord Stanhope states it to have 
 been, prove that there was no danger of revolu- 
 tion, and therefore not even that wretched justifi- 
 cation for these outrages on liberty and law? 
 And if the demand of a party was a warrant for 
 violence in the case of the Tories, was it also a 
 
252 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 warrant for violence in the case of the Jacobins ? 
 It seems that Pitt even sank so far below his 
 nobler self as to entertain the thought of taking 
 advantage of the free language of his rival, Fox, 
 and committing him to the Tower. 
 
 The worst reign of Terror, however — a Eeign 
 of Terror in no figurative sense — was in Ireland. 
 Unhappy Ireland, and still more unhappy En- 
 gland if Ireland is always to be our weakness and 
 our shame, the standing confutation alike of our 
 boasted statesmanship and of our boasted love 
 of justice! In 1795, the Duke of- Portland and 
 the Whig section of the cabinet, I fear against 
 the wishes of Pitt, had sent over Lord Fitzwilliam 
 as lord-lieutenant, with a policy of relief and con- 
 ciliation. But Fitzwilliam had been too open in 
 proclaiming his mission ; he had been too hasty 
 in setting his heel on the agents of tyranny and 
 corruption ; most fatal error of all, he had dis- 
 missed one of the great robber house of Beres- 
 ford. The whole nest of jobbers were immediate- 
 ly alarmed ; and as the means of arresting justice 
 they naturally had recourse to religion. They 
 appealed against Catholic relief to the conscience 
 of the king. We are frail beings, but conscience 
 is always obeyed when she bids us deny a right 
 to others. Fitzwilliam fell ; not, it is to be fear- 
 ed, to the displeasure of Pitt, and was succeeded 
 
Pitt. 253 
 
 by Lord Camden. Catholic relief was thrown 
 out by the Irish Parliament, the government now 
 declaring against it. Not contented with this, 
 the Protestants began to organize themselves for 
 the repression of the Catholics; the Catholics 
 organized on their side ; and the hatred of the 
 rival races and creeds burst forth. 
 
 I have myself sought and found in the study 
 of Irish history the explanation of the paradox, 
 that a people with so many gifts, so amiable 
 naturally, so submissive to rulers, and everywhere 
 but in their own country industrious, are in their 
 own country by-words of idleness, lawlessness, 
 disaffection, and agrarian crime. But I will here 
 follow Mr. Massey, not only one of the most mat- 
 ter-of-fact of writers, but a most unquestionable 
 enemy to revolution, Mr. Massey writes thus : 
 " Lord Carhampton, the general commanding the 
 forces in the disturbed districts, let loose his 
 troops upon the wretched peasantry. It was 
 enough for a magistrate, a squireen, or even a 
 farmer to point out any person as suspected, to 
 have his habitation burned down, his family , turn- 
 ed adrift, and himself either shot or transported, 
 without trial, without warrant, without inquiry. 
 An Act of Indemnity was passed by the Irish 
 Parliament, in the session of 1796, to protect 
 these enormities ; and the Insurrection Act gave 
 
254 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 theni for the future the sanction of law. The 
 suspension of the habeas corpus completed this 
 barbarous code, which, in effect, outlawed the 
 whole people of Ireland." The government 
 armed a great body of Protestant yeomanry, 
 who were allowed to wear the Orange ribbon, 
 the badge of ascendancy. "The cruelties," says 
 Mr. Massey, " perpetrated by these men, both 
 before the rebellion, and while it was raging, and 
 after it was suppressed, differed only in degree 
 from the worst enormities of the French revolu- 
 tionists. Under the authority to search for con- 
 cealed arms, any person whom any ruffian, call- 
 ing himself a Protestant and a loyalist, and either 
 with or without a military uniform, chose to sus- 
 pect or to pretend to suspect, was liable to be 
 seized, tortured, and put to death. Hundreds of 
 unoffending people, and people who were guilty 
 of no other offense than professing the creed of 
 their fathers, and of letting fall a word of discon- 
 tent, were flogged till they were insensible, or 
 made to stand upon one foot on a pointed stake. 
 These were the most ordinary punishments. 
 Sometimes the wretched victim was half hanged, 
 or the scalp was torn from the head by a pitched 
 cap. Catholics and reputed malcontents of the 
 better class were subjected to still worse treat- 
 ment. Militia and yeomanry, as well as the regu- 
 
Pitt 255 
 
 lar troops, were billeted on them at free quarters; 
 and this billet appears to have been invariably 
 construed as an unlimited license for robbery, 
 devastation, ravishment, and, in case of resistance, 
 murder.' 7 1 
 
 Sir Kalph Abercromby, on assuming the com- 
 mand of the army in Ireland, branded these 
 ruffians in general orders as formidable to every 
 body but the enemy. To him it did not appear 
 essential to the honor of the profession that a 
 soldier should be licensed to play the butcher. 
 But he was at once hustled out of his command. 
 The Catholics, if they had not been goaded to 
 despair, would not have risen. Their priests had 
 no sympathy with the Atheists of the French 
 Eepublic. But the conduct of the Protestants 
 and of the government drove them into the arms 
 of France and of the revolutionary conspirators 
 of their own country, who were mostly not Cath- 
 olics, but Protestants, if they had any religion at 
 all. When the Catholic peasantry did rise, they 
 rose with the ruthless fury of tortured and em- 
 bruted slaves, and perpetrated nameless atrocities 
 in their turn. Then the saturnalia of martial 
 law were proclaimed; and under cover of that 
 proclamation, the vengeance of the dominant race 
 was poured out, as we have just seen the ven- 
 geance of a dominant race poured out, upon the 
 
 * 
 
256 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 victims of its hate. Of that phrase martial law, 
 absurd and self-contradictory as it is, each part 
 has a meaning^ The term martial suspends the 
 ,Tight~of citizen's to legal trial ; the term law sus- 
 pends the claim of an enemy to quarter and the 
 other rights of civilized war. The whole com- 
 pound is the fiend's charter ; and the public man 
 who connives at its introduction, who fails in his 
 day and in his place to resist it at whatever cost 
 or hazard to himself, is a traitor to civilization 
 and humanity, and though official morality may 
 applaud him at the time, his name will stand 
 in history accursed and infamous forever. The 
 first notable case under martial law in Ireland 
 was that of Sir Edward Crosbie, a gentleman re- 
 siding near Carlow, where a rising had taken 
 place. I will give the case in the words of Mr. 
 Massey. " It unfortunately happened," says that 
 writer, " that the miserable rabble, before enter- 
 ing the town, had paraded in the grounds of Sir 
 Edward Crosbie, who resided at a distance of a 
 mile and a half from Carlow. There was not a 
 title of proof that this gentleman was in any way 
 connected with the rioters, or that he had invited 
 them to assemble on his lawn at midnight, pre- 
 paratory to their lawless proceedings. He had 
 not accompanied them, nor did it appear that he 
 held any communication with them. But Sir 
 
Pitt. 257 
 
 Edward was a friend to Parliamentary Keforni, 
 and hostile to the oppression of the tenantry by 
 their landlords. To "be friendly to the poor and 
 to reform was presumptive evidence of disaffec- 
 tion ; and presumptive evidence of disaffection 
 was sufficient proof of complicity in the rebellion. 
 The day after the attempt on Carlow several per- 
 sons were seized, tried by court-martial, and 
 hanged for this offense. Among others Sir Ed- 
 ward Crosbie was dragged before a set of igno- 
 rant, blood-thirsty ruffians, who styled themselves 
 a court-martial. There was not a particle of evi- 
 dence which could have had the least weight 
 with a fairly constituted court, though Catholic 
 prisoners had been, by torture and promises of 
 pardon, converted into witnesses against the ac- 
 cused. Numerous loyalists came forward to 
 state what every body in the neighborhood knew, 
 that Sir Edward was a good subject of his majes- 
 ty, as well as one of the few humane and accom- 
 plished gentlemen that Ireland possessed. But 
 these witnesses were excluded from the place 
 where the proceedings were held by the bayonets 
 of the soldiery. A gentleman of rank and for- 
 tune, who thought that Parliament should be re- 
 formed, and that squireens should not be permit- 
 ted to grind and insult the peasantry, was a dan- 
 gerous member of society, and must be made an 
 
258 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 example of to deter others. Accordingly, Sir Ed- 
 ward Crosbie was doomed to death by a court- 
 martial, the president of which was an illiterate 
 fellow who could not spell. The sentence was 
 immediately put in execution at the gallows ; and 
 the remains of the murdered gentleman were 
 abused in a manner shocking to humanity." 
 The passages of history which derive their char- 
 acter from the lower and viler passions are apt to 
 repeat themselves with great fidelity. 
 
 Lord Cornwallis, who had at length been sent 
 over by Pitt, in the place of the wretched Camden, 
 to stop these orgies of blood, states in one of his 
 letters that under martial law " numberless mur- 
 ders are hourly committed without any process 
 or examination whatever." " The yeomanry," he 
 says, " are in the style of the loyalists in America, 
 only much more numerous and powerful, and a 
 thousand times more ferocious. These men have 
 served their country, but they now take the lead 
 in rapine and murder. The Irish militia, with few 
 officers, and those chiefly of the worst kind, follow 
 closely on the heels of the yeomanry in murder 
 and every kind of atrocity ; and the Fencibles 
 take a share, although much behindhand with the 
 others. The language of the principle persons of 
 the country all tends to encourage this system of 
 blood ; and the conversation, even at my table, 
 
Pitt. 259 
 
 where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent 
 it, always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, etc. 
 And if a priest has been put to death, the greatest 
 joy is expressed by the whole company." He 
 asserts from his own knowledge of military affairs 
 that of the numbers of the enemy reputed to be 
 killed, a very small proportion only are really kill- 
 ed in battle — and adds that " he is afraid that any 
 man in a brown coat, who is found within several 
 miles of the field of action, is butchered without 
 discrimination." He describes the principal per- 
 sons of the country and the members of both 
 Houses of Parliament as "averse to all acts of 
 clemency, and desiring to pursue measures that 
 would terminate in the extirpation of the inhabit- 
 ants and the destruction of the country." Lord 
 Cornwallis was no friend of rebels : he had com- 
 manded against rebels in America : he was a Tory : 
 he showed no weakness in quenching the embers 
 of the insurrection in Ireland. But a burst of loyal 
 execration arose against his detestable clemency. 
 Dr. Duiguenan, the organ of the Orange party, 
 wrote to Lord Castlereagh that the conduct of 
 the lord-lieutenant had rendered him an object 
 not only of disgust, but of abhorrence to every loy- 
 al man. " You write," says Cornwallis to General 
 Eoss, " as if you believed that there was any foun- 
 dation for all the lies and nonsensical clamor about 
 
260 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 rny lenity. On my arrival in this country, I put 
 a stop to the burning of houses and murder of the 
 inhabitants by the yeomen, or any other person 
 who delighted in that amusement ; to the flogging 
 for the purpose of extorting confession, and to the 
 free quarters, which comprehended universal rape 
 and robbery throughout the country." A party 
 of the Mount Kennedy corps of yeomanry (again 
 I tell my story in the words of Mr. Massey) were, 
 on an autumn night in the year 1798, patrolling 
 the village of Delbary, in the county of Wicklow. 
 Two or three of the party, led by Whollaghan, 
 one of their number, entered the cottage of a la- 
 boring man named Dogherty, and asked whether 
 there were any bloody rebels there ? The only in- 
 mates of the cabin were Dogherty's wife and a 
 sick lad, her son, who was eating his supper. 
 Whollaghan asked if the boy was Dogherty's son, 
 and being told he was — "Then you dog," said 
 Whollaghan, " you are to die here." " I hope not," 
 answered the poor lad ; and he prayed, if there 
 was any charge against him, to be taken before 
 Mr. Latouche, a magistrate in the neighborhood, of 
 known humanity and justice. The fellow replied 
 that he cared nothing for Latouche, and raised his 
 gun. The mother entreated him, for the love of 
 Grod, to take her life instead of her child's. Whol- 
 laghan, with a volley of abuse, pulled the trigger 
 
Pitt. 261 
 
 twice, but the piece missed fire. A comrade then 
 handed him another gun ; and the mother rushed 
 at the muzzle to shield her son. In the struggle 
 the piece went off, and the ball broke young 
 Dogherty's arm. When the boy fell, the assassins 
 left the cabin ; but Whollaghan returned, and 
 seeing the lad supported by his mother, cried out, 
 " Is not the dog dead yet V " Oh, yes, sir," said 
 the poor woman, " he is dead enough." " For 
 fear he is not," said Whollaghan, " let him take 
 this." And with a deliberate aim he fired a 
 fourth time, and Dogherty dropped dead out of 
 his mother's arms. Whollaghan was tried for the 
 murder, not by a civil tribunal as he should 
 have been, but by court-martial. The facts were, 
 not disputed ; but the defense was that the poor 
 boy had been a rebel, and that the prisoner was 
 a humane and loyal subject. That the Dogh- 
 ertys were rebels is probable enough; as in- 
 deed, says Mr. Massey, whom I am still follow- 
 ing, it was hardly possible that a Catholic peas- 
 ant could have been any thing else. But no 
 legal evidence of the fact was tendered; and 
 the hearsay, which was admitted, was about as 
 credible as the oath of the Orangemen who came 
 to give Whollaghan a character for humanity. 
 The real defense was that the prisoner and his 
 companions had been sent out with general orders 
 
262 Three English Statesmen. - 
 
 to shoot any body they pleased. " The court," 
 remarks Mr. Massey, " seemed to have been of 
 opinion that such orders were neither unusual or 
 unreasonable; and it is difficult to extract from 
 their finding that they thought the prisoner had 
 been guilty even of an error in judgment." 
 They found that " the prisoner did shoot and kill 
 Thomas Dogherty, a rebel ; but acquitted him of 
 any malicious or willful intention of murder." 
 
 Their sentiments seem, in fact, to have been 
 pretty much the same as those which prevail in 
 high official regions now. The trial took place 
 at Dublin. The president of the court-martial 
 was one of the leading members of that order 
 who are the guardians of an honor and a moral- 
 ity above those of the common herd : he was the 
 Earl of Enniskillen. 
 
 In Tipperary, Mr. Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald, 
 a man of conspicuous loyalty, was made high-sher- 
 iff, and acted as a sort of provost-marshal in that 
 district. His plan, says Mr. Massey, was to seize 
 persons whom he chose to suspect, often without 
 the slightest ground, if not from sheer malice, 
 and by dint of "the lash and threats of instant 
 death, to extort confessions of guilt and accusa- 
 tions of other persons. He recommended himself 
 especially to the approbation of all loyal men by 
 attacking a somewhat higher class of persons 
 
Pitt 263 
 
 than most of his compeers ventured to attack. 
 Mr. Wright, a teacher of languages at Clonmel, 
 and a man of good family, heard that he was sus- 
 pected. He hastened to deliver himself up, in 
 the hope that he might thus save his character 
 and life. But Fitzgerald was not to be disap- 
 pointed of his victim. He received Mr. "Wright 
 with a torrent of abuse, and ordered him to fall 
 on his knees to receive his sentence. " You are a 
 rebel," said he, " and a principal in this rebellion. 
 You are to receive five hundred lashes, and then 
 to be shot." The poor man begged for time, and 
 was so rash as to ask for a trial. This aroused 
 Fitzgerald to fury ; he railed at his prisoner for 
 daring to open his mouth after he was condemn- 
 ed. Wright was hurried to the flogging ladders, 
 which were erected in the main street ; and ex- 
 pecting immediate death, had placed his hat be- 
 fore his face while he muttered a prayer. Fitz- 
 gerald with his own hand tore away the hat, 
 trampled on it, dragged his fainting victim by the 
 hair, kicked him, and finally slashed him with a 
 sword, drawing blood. Wright was then fasten- 
 ed to the ladder. Fifty lashes had been inflicted, 
 when a Major Eiall came up and asked what 
 Wright had done. The sheriff answered by fling- 
 ing Eiall a note taken from the person of Wright, 
 as a justification of the punishment to which he 
 
264 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 was subjected. The note was in French — a lan- 
 guage of which Fitzgerald was wholly ignorant — 
 and contained two lines excusing the writer for 
 having failed in a visiting engagement. Riall as- 
 sured Fitzgerald that the note was perfectly 
 harmless ; nevertheless, the lash continued to de- 
 scend until the quivering entrails were visible 
 through the flayed flesh. The hangman was then 
 ordered to apply his thongs to a part of the body 
 which had not yet been torn, while the sheriff 
 himself went to the general in command of the 
 district for an order to put his prisoner to death. 
 The order, however, was not given, and Wright 
 was released. 
 
 To add to the bright roll of English honor, 
 Mr. Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald received a pen- 
 sion, and, at the Union, was made a baronet of 
 the United Kingdom. 
 
 These men were not fiends ; they were a domi- 
 nant class, the planter-class of Ireland, maddened 
 with cruel panic and administering martial law. 
 It is good that these things should be recalled to 
 mind when we see men of letters and artists, who 
 have been brought up in the air of English liber- 
 ty and within the sound of Christian church bells, 
 proposing to blow Fenians from guns, and to re-en- 
 act on Irish insurgents the atrocities which mark- 
 ed the putting down of the Indian mutineers. 
 
PitL 265 
 
 Ireland had what one of our prelates calls a 
 Missionary Church ; that is an establishment pro- 
 fusely endowed out of the penury and the misery 
 of the Irish people ; and the bishops and clergy 
 of which were intended, I suppose, to be placed 
 by their wealth and privileges above the passions 
 of any class, and enabled boldly to preach justice 
 and mercy. What were they doing? Were 
 they preaching justice and mercy, or were they 
 doing what the prelates and clergy of the planter 
 church of Jamaica do now — drawing up certifi- 
 cates of Christian character for men whose hands 
 were red with innocent blood? It is a point 
 which I have never been able clearly to ascertain. 
 
 There is nothing in this revolting history more 
 revolting than the cant about loyalty. Loyalty 
 is not due from the conquered and the oppressed 
 to the conqueror and oppressor. Nothing is due 
 but submission, which the conqueror and oppress- 
 or must enforce as best he can. 
 
 The Indemnity Act passed by the Irish Parlia- 
 ment unfortunately proved insufficient to cover 
 all these acts of the supporters of order, and es- 
 pecially the use of torture. Certain bloody-mind- 
 ed persecutors, pseudo-philanthropists, and Hi- 
 berno-philists were proceeding to appeal to the 
 courts of law against indiscriminate butchery, tor- 
 ture, and arson. So the Parliament — of the tem- 
 
 M 
 
266 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 per and language of whose members, Lords and 
 Commons alike, we have heard Lord Cornwallis's 
 description — passed a more comprehensive Act, 
 which effectually screened every murderer, tor- 
 turer, and incendiary from the law. Safe under 
 this Act, Fitzgerald, when arraigned before a jury, 
 vaunted his exploits in the face of justice. He 
 named several persons whom he had flogged un- 
 der circumstances more aggravated than those be- 
 fore the court. He mentioned one man who had 
 cut his throat to escape the horrors and ignominy 
 of torture. He admitted or boasted that in his 
 search for rebels he had flogged many persons 
 who had proved to be perfectly innocent. Lord 
 Avonmore, who tried the case, did not dissemble 
 his grief and indignation at having to administer 
 such a law as that which had recently been enact- 
 ed. After dwelling on the flagrancy of the out- 
 rage, for which he said no damages would have 
 been too great, he ended by saying that the 
 words of the Act placed an insuperable bar be- 
 tween injury and redress, and set all equity and 
 justice at defiance. And with that he dashed - 
 the Act upon the cushion, and threw himself 
 back on his seat. 
 
 Lord Moria brought the state of things in Ire- 
 land before the British Legislature; of course 
 without effect. The government supported their 
 
Pitt. 267 
 
 subordinates. If it is the duty of governments 
 to support their subordinates, the people must 
 support themselves. Statesmen are learning to 
 make an easy reputation for chivalry by support- 
 ing their subordinates at the expense of human- 
 ity Justice, and the honor of the nation. Public 
 morality requires that a subordinate should be 
 supported in difficulty always, in error sometimes, 
 in crime never. 
 
 Lord Stanhope charitably ascribes these hor- 
 rors, in the refusal of all inquiry into which he 
 apparently concurs, to a helpless crisis in human 
 affairs, such as is described by the Cardinal de 
 Eetz, caused by accident and mischance, not by 
 the faults or errors of mankind. It was no help- 
 less crisis, but the natural consequence of Protest- 
 ant ascendancy in Ireland, sustained by the oli- 
 garchical government and hierarchy of this coun- 
 try. They were the authors before God of the 
 Eebellion, though the people died for it by earth- 
 ly law. And how far, I ask again, is the benefit 
 of these excuses to extend % If ever the hand of 
 fate was seen in history, it was in the history of 
 the French Kevolution. If ever a crisis could be 
 called helpless, it was that of 1793. Is this to 
 absolve the Jacobins? No; there have been 
 misfortunes in Irish annals— misfortunes which 
 were not faults — misfortunes which the rulers of 
 
268 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Ireland in past times may fairly plead in their 
 own excuse at the bar of history. The partial 
 nature of the Anglo-Norman Conquest of Ireland, 
 which led to the formation of an English pale in- 
 stead of a national aristocracy mingling in course 
 of time with the native race, was the original 
 spring from which this bitterness flowed. But 
 Protestant ascendancy was a fault, not a misfor- 
 tune. And the obstinate maintenance in the in- 
 terest of a class of an alien church and an alien 
 land law in Ireland are faults, not misfortunes, 
 now. The guilt of the consequences in the eye 
 of Heaven rests on the government, though still, 
 by earthly law, the people pay the penalty. 
 
 The appearance of Hoche and his French ar- 
 mament of liberation in Bantry Bay was a warn- 
 ing which could not be neglected. Irish disaffec- 
 tion, if it is not formidable in itself, will always 
 be formidable when it is backed by foreign aid. 
 If Hoche had landed, he would, for the time at 
 least, have been master of Ireland. The Orange 
 yeomanry and militia, though they could murder, 
 burn, and torture, could not stand before an enemy, 
 as they showed when they were led against the 
 small French force afterward landed by Humbert. 
 And with steam instead of sails Hoche would 
 have landed. It had become manifest that the 
 Orange government of Ireland was not only crim- 
 
Pitt. 269 
 
 inal but dangerous. Pitt now resolved to carry 
 the Union, and the Union was carried. It was 
 carried through an Irish Parliament in which the 
 Irish people were not represented, and which had 
 no sort of right or title to dispose of the independ- 
 ence of the nation. And through that Parlia- 
 ment it was carried by bribery and corruption of 
 every kind, including the prostitution of honors 
 and offices as well as pensions, so foul and infamous 
 that men of honor such as Lord Oornwallis, who 
 were employed in the operation, shrank with 
 loathing from their task. One million two hun- 
 dred and sixty thousand pounds were distribu- 
 ted among the proprietors of boroughs as compen- 
 sation for the loss of their means of preying on 
 the State, and the peerage was again recruited 
 with houses which derive from this noble origin 
 their divine right of legislating for the nation. 
 The acquiescence of the Catholics was procured 
 by fraud ; the hope of emancipation was distinct- 
 ly held out to them as the price of their concur- 
 rence, and and was not fulfilled. The Union was 
 a good and an indispensable measure. It was, 
 as Pitt saw, the only chance of saving Ireland 
 from Protestant ascendancy and provincial tyr- 
 anny : and legally of course it is perfectly valid. 
 To give it moral validity, it requires the free rati- 
 fication of the Irish people. When the Union is 
 
270 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 what Pitt declared it was to be, a union of equal 
 laws, that ratification will be obtained. 
 
 J itt is generally held to have been a bad war 
 minister. That he was not a successful war minis- 
 ter is certain : and in war, if in any thing, minis- 
 ters may be judged by their success. His navy 
 gained victories by dint of British seamanship 
 and courage. His military operations ended al- 
 most uniformly in disaster. His forces were never 
 found on a decisive field. Like a bad chess-play- 
 er he ran over the board taking pawns, while the 
 adversary was checking his king. He carried 
 his victorious arms from Tobago to St. Domingo, 
 from St. Domingo to St. Lucia, and from St. Lu- 
 cia to Guadaloupe. This was the traditional 
 mode of making war on France ; and he did not see 
 how different was the France on which he had 
 now to make war. Meantime his allies were be- 
 ing beaten in battles, which, if they had been 
 won, would have given him as many sugar islands 
 as he pleased; and which, being lost, swept 
 away the sugar islands in the general ruin. When 
 Bonaparte and the best army of France were in 
 Egypt and off the board, Pitt took advantage of 
 their absence, not to join his allies in dealing a de- 
 cisive blow, but to make an isolated descent on the 
 enemy's country, the weakest operation in propor- 
 tion to the force employed which can be under- 
 
Pitt. 271 
 
 taken, and one which in this case ended in igno- 
 minious failure. He had not his father's eye for 
 men. Chatham would have brought Nelson to the 
 front before. When Nelson had won the Nile, 
 Pitt only gave him the lowest rank in the peerage, 
 and said, in defense of this parsimony in reward- 
 ing merit, that Nelson would live as the winner 
 of the greatest of naval victories, and that no one 
 would ask whether he had been made a baron, 
 a viscount, or an earl. This, when the 'highest 
 rank in the peerage was being every day bestow- 
 ed on political subserviency, and even on politi- 
 cal corruption: when Sir James Lowther was 
 made an earl direct for his influence at Appleby. 
 Pitt is open to a worse censure than that of mere- 
 ly failing to distinguish merit. When he allowed 
 himself to be made minister by an unconstitution- 
 al use of the king's personal influence, he had sold 
 himself to the fiend, and the fiend did not fail to 
 exact the bond. Twice Pitt had the criminal 
 weakness to gratify the king's personal wishes by 
 entrusting the safety of English armies and the 
 honor of England to the incompetent hands of 
 the young Duke of York. This absurd prince- 
 ling actually objected to acting under the com- 
 mand of Clarifait, the most competent and emi- 
 nent of the allied generals : and to gratify his con- 
 ceit, the command-in-chief was assumed by the 
 
272 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 * 
 emperor the arch-incompetency of all. But after 
 
 all, could promotion by merit be expected at the 
 hands of governments whose essence was privi- 
 lege \ It was against promotion by merit that 
 they were righting. To accept promotion by mer- 
 it would have been to accept the revolution. 
 
 In the sixth year of the war, the nation was 
 brought to the brink of destruction by a mutiny 
 in the fleet, caused entirely by the vices of the 
 administration. The pay of the sailors and their 
 pensions had not been increased since the time of 
 Charles II., in spite of the immense rise of prices 
 since that period, which must have been felt more 
 than ever in time of war. This, while millions 
 were being paid to borough-mongers and sinecur- 
 ists, and when Tomline was not satisfied unless 
 he had a rich bishopric and a rich deanery too. 
 Light weight of provisions was served, a sailor's 
 pound being fourteen ounces instead of sixteen ; 
 and even for this short weight the sailors were 
 dependent on pursers taken from a low class, 
 who cheated them without limit. The distribu- 
 tion of prize-money was most unfair ; the disci- 
 pline most vexatious ; the officers, who were ap- 
 pointed entirely by interest, were incompetent 
 and tyrannical; and seamen who had fought the 
 battles of the country, seamen scarred with hon- 
 orable wounds, were sworn at and abused like 
 
Pitt. 273 
 
 dogs by insolent and worthless boys. At last 
 the sailors rose and respectfully demanded redress. 
 The government, conscious of its guilt, was com- 
 pelled to accede to their demands, and even to 
 dismiss a number of officers from the service. 
 But the spirit of mutiny once roused, naturally 
 broke forth again in a more turbulent and dan- 
 gerous form. It was suppressed at last, and jus- 
 tice of course was done on the principal muti- 
 neers, who were hanged or flogged through the 
 fleet. It must be owned, however, that even in 
 the case of the worst offenders, justice was tem- 
 pered with mercy, for no lord of the admiralty 
 was either flogged or hanged. Since that time, 
 and owing originally to the mutiny, the navy 
 has been in a sounder state. Neither that nor 
 any service will be in a perfectly sound state till 
 dismissal is the highest punishment. And now 
 — Democracy is such an ungrateful thing — can 
 any one point out to us an instance in history, 
 from Athens down to the American Republic, in 
 which a Democracy treated its defenders as the 
 \ British seaman was treated before the mutiny at 
 Spithead % Democracy does not build Blenheims 
 and create vast estates for the general or the ad- 
 miral ; but it is just, and it can not help being 
 just, to the soldier and the sailor. 
 
 What Pitt's war finance was, taxpayers need 
 
 M2 
 
274 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 not to be told. He did make an effort to keep 
 borrowing within bounds, but it soon broke 
 down, and he plunged headlong into an abyss of 
 debt. In this he was backed by a Parliament of 
 the rich and idle trained to public extravagance 
 by prodigality at home. His own recklessness 
 in private expenditure is too well known. It com- 
 pelled him to accept somewhat ignominious aid. 
 This system of laying burdens on posterity re- 
 moves, as I have said before, the last check on 
 war. Nor is it capable of moral defense. The 
 theory on which Pitt and his supporters acted — 
 that they had a right to mortgage the estate which 
 they bequeathed to posterity — assumed that the 
 earth belonged to one generation of men. The 
 earth does not belong to one generation of men, 
 but to God, who has given it to each generation 
 in its turn. 
 
 Of Pitt's war taxes the most notable were the 
 income tax and the succession tax. The income 
 tax is a tax which ought to be resorted to only 
 in time of war or in some national emergency 
 which excites the national spirit as much as war. 
 It is only when the national spirit is so excited 
 that there is a chance of true returns. In ordi- 
 nary times the income tax is a tax on honesty, a 
 premium on dishonesty, a corrupter of national 
 and especially of commercial honor. Pitt pro- 
 
Pitt. 275 
 
 posed a succession duty on real and personal 
 property alike; but the landlord Parliament 
 threw out the duty on the real property, and 
 passed that on personal property alone. There 
 are no Trades Unions in the House of Commons. 
 
 Pitt had gone into the war reckoning on the 
 failure of the French finances. While French 
 finance was recruited by despair, he was driven 
 to a suspension of cash payments. There is no 
 great mystery, I apprehend, about the character 
 and effects of this measure. It was, in fact, a 
 forced loan, which was paid off, at the expense of 
 great national suffering, by the return to cash pay- 
 ments after the war. Meantime it caused a depre- 
 ciation of the currency, which bore hard on fixed 
 incomes, while it did not affect the land-owners, 
 whose rents 'could be raised. 
 
 All political progress was, of course, suspended 
 in England, as it was over Europe generally, in 
 these disastrous years. Pitt's speeches were full 
 of clap-trap against democracy, as though equali- 
 ty were responsible for the political calamities 
 which privilege had brought on in France. He 
 now openly renounced Parliamentary Reform, 
 and began to declaim in the full Tory strain 
 against following false luminaries and abandon- 
 ing the pole-star of the British constitution. He 
 and his party maintained that the rotten borough 
 
276 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Parliament, the stench of whose corruption rose 
 to heaven, which was wasting the blood and sub- 
 stance of the people in a class war, and brutal- 
 izing them at the same time, had been found 
 amply sufficient for securing their happiness, and 
 that the system ought not to be idly and wanton- 
 ly disturbed, from any love of experiment, or 
 predilection for theory. It would be very wrong 
 to do any thing wantonly or idly, or from mere 
 love of experiment, or predilection for theory. 
 But supposing that an absurd system of repre- 
 sentation did work well, not only for those who 
 monopolize power and patronage under it, and 
 who of course find it practically excellent, but 
 for the nation : still its absurdity would be an 
 evil calling for amendment, because institutions 
 ought to command the reverence of the people, 
 which they can not do unless they are intelligi- 
 ble and consistent with reason. And if theory 
 is nothing, and if the people are already practi- 
 cally represented, where is the great danger of 
 bringing the theory into accordance with the 
 practice ! Great allowance is to be made for the 
 Tory Minister in this matter: but had he been 
 one of the first of statesmen, he would have seen 
 how sure an antidote against disaffection and 
 foreign contagion was to be found in timely and 
 moderate Reform. 
 
PitL 277 
 
 It has been said that when Pitt had once gone 
 into the war, he ought to have made it a crusade. 
 Burke complained at the time that he did not : 
 and the charge has been repeated with great am- 
 plitude of rhetoric by Lord Macaulay. If Pitt did 
 not actually proclaim a crusade, he used language 
 about the salvation of Europe wild enough to satis- 
 fy most fanatics, and the flagitious nonsense which 
 he did not talk himself, he allowed his colleagues 
 and subordinates to talk for him. So far as he re- 
 strained himself or them, he is to be praised, as 
 Lord Stanhope justly says, for not having given 
 the war a character which would have made it 
 internecine. But as to a crusade, who were to be 
 the crusaders % Would the borough-mongers and 
 the sinecurists have played the part of Tancred 
 and Godfrey ? "Would Tomline and Dr. Cornwal- 
 lis have gone forth, like the bishops of the middle 
 ages, at the head of the army of the Cross ? Burke 
 himself, the Peter the Hermit of this crusade, would 
 he have left Beaconfield and his pension to share 
 the doom of those whom he had sent forth to die? 
 Save the Sepulchre ! Save Gatton and Old Sa- 
 rum ! Save the Earldom of Lonsdale, save the 
 Clerkship of the Pells, the Wardenship of the 
 Cinque Ports, the Tellership of the Exchequer, the 
 salaries of the Six Clerks, and the Deputy Chafe- 
 wax ! Save the Deanery of St. Paul's and " the 
 
278 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 only arrangement which can offer any accommo- 
 dation in my favor !" Crusading is self-sacrifice. 
 These men were carrying on a war in their own 
 interest, with armies of peasants trepanned by 
 drink and the recruiting sergeant, with seamen 
 levied by the press-gang, and with the money of 
 future generations. They had not self-sacrifice 
 enough even to suppress for the moment their 
 own petty jealousies and interested intrigues for 
 office in the most desperate moments of the strug- 
 gle. The ruling class, I apprehend, bore little of 
 the burden. If their taxes rose, their rents and 
 tithes rose also ; and they shared a vast mass of 
 patronage besides. The great merchants who 
 supported the war were in like manner growing 
 rich, as great merchants in war often do, at the 
 expense of their less opulent rivals. Burke had 
 described them on a former occasion as snuffing 
 with delight the cadaverous scent of lucre. The 
 crusading spirit, if it was anywhere, was on the 
 side of the French youths, who went forth shoeless 
 and ragged, without pay, with nothing but bread 
 and gunpowder, to save their country from the 
 Coalition, and, as some of them thought, to over- 
 throw tyranny of body and soul, and open a new 
 reign of justice and happiness for mankind. When 
 the French Revolution had turned to the lust of 
 military aggrandizement embodied in Bonaparte, 
 
Pitt 279 
 
 the crusading spirit passed to the other side, and 
 then the leaders of England might appeal to it 
 not in vain. 
 
 Pitt did not know why he had gone to war, 
 and therefore when he found himself abandoned 
 by most of his allies, the rest requiring subsidies 
 to drag them into the field, the cause of Europe, 
 as it was called, thus renounced by Europe itself, 
 every thing going ill, and no prospect of amend- 
 ment, he did not know how or on what terms to 
 makepeace. This is called his firmness. He vague- 
 ly represented himself as fighting for security 
 for the past and reparation for the future, and his 
 words were parrotted by his party; but it was 
 not stated what the reparation or the security 
 was. He pretended at one time that there was 
 no government in France with which a treaty 
 could be made. There was always a government 
 in France, even during the Reign of Terror, obey- 
 ed by the nation and the national functionaries, 
 and with which, therefore, a treaty might have 
 been made. It signifies nothing, as every body 
 would now admit, how polluted the origin or 
 character of a foreign government may be, you 
 must treat with it as a government. If its origin 
 and character are polluted, or even questionable, 
 you need not, and if you are jealous of the honor 
 of your country and your own you will not, fling 
 
280 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 England into its arms, or eagerly place her hand 
 in the hand which has been held up to heaven in 
 perjury and is stained with innocent blood. But 
 you must treat all governments as governments ; 
 it is the only way of fixing responsibility where 
 circumstances not under your control have fixed 
 power. 
 
 Pitt, however, finding disasters thickening, did 
 struggle to make peace. He underwent great hu- 
 miliations to obtain it. His envoys waited, with 
 a submissiveness and a patience which must call 
 a blush to every English cheek, in the antecham- 
 bers of the insolent and domineering Directory. 
 He even offered to pay two of the Directors the 
 heavy bribe which they demanded. England 
 trying to bribe two sharpers to vouchsafe her a 
 peace ! But the profligate lust of aggrandizement 
 which had now taken the place of defensive 
 objects in the councils of the French Government, 
 the insufferable temper of its chiefs, the divisions 
 in the Directory between the Jacobins and the 
 party of Reaction, and at the same time the divis- 
 ions in the English cabinet between Pitt, who was 
 for peace, and Grenville, who was still for war, 
 prolonged the bloodshed and the misery for eight 
 years. At last, in 1801, peace, and an ignomini- 
 ous peace, was inevitable. Pitt has been suspect- 
 ed of having slipped out of office and put Adding- 
 
Pitt. 281 
 
 ton in to eat the dirt, meaning himself to return 
 to power when the dirt had been eaten. There 
 seems to be no ground for the suspicion, though 
 Pitt's conduct at this juncture is not easy to under- 
 stand. The ostensible cause of Pitt's retirement 
 was the king's refusal to allow him to redeem the 
 pledge which he had given to the Catholics at the 
 time of the Irish Union. Not only was his honor 
 involved, but it was of vital importance to the 
 nation, engaged in a desperate struggle, that the 
 estrangement of the Irish, from whom a large pro- 
 portion of our soldiers were drawn, should be 
 brought to an end. But the king had a con- 
 science. Pitt resigned, putting in his friend and 
 creature, Addington, merely, as I am convinced, to 
 keep his place for him till the Catholic difficulty 
 could be solved. " Mr. Pitt," said Sir James Gra- 
 ham, speaking of the Catholic Emancipation, " was 
 prepared to do the right thing at the right mo- 
 ment; but genuis gave way to madness, and two 
 generations have deplored the loss of an oppor- 
 tunity which never will return." Genius gave way 
 to madness, but to madness practiced upon by 
 genius of another kind. The chief performer was 
 Lord Loughborough, of whom when he died His 
 Majesty was pleased to say (having first assured 
 himself that the melancholy news was true) " that 
 a greater rogue was not left in his dominions." 
 
282 Three English Statesmen. 
 
 Loughborough's coadjutor was Auckland, after- 
 ward spurned as a knavish intriguer both by Pitt 
 and by the king. Their instruments in tampering 
 with the conscience of the half-insane king were 
 Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury, the odor of 
 whose nepotism has reached the nostrils even of 
 our generation, and the Primate of Ireland, who 
 was called in as a wolf to decide this question of 
 conscience as to the claims of the sheep. There 
 is scarcely a worse intrigue in history. 
 
 And now came a strange turn of affairs. 
 Scarcely was Pitt out and Addington in, when 
 Pitt sent the king a promise never to moot the 
 question of Catholic Emancipation again during 
 his life. Not only so, but he undertook, in case 
 any one else should moot the question, to find the 
 means of setting it aside. The reason alleged for 
 this strange sacrifice of a pledge and a principle, 
 was that the agitation of the king's mind on the 
 subject had brought on a recurrence of his illness. 
 If this was true, we may remark, in the first place, 
 that here is another warning to nations in search 
 of a constitution ; and, in the second place, that if 
 the state of the king's mind was ' such that he 
 could not consider a State question of the most 
 vital and pressing importance without bringing 
 on derangement, he was physically unfit for the 
 duties of his ofiice, and he ought to have given 
 
• Pitt. 283 
 
 place to a Kegent. Lord Stanhope urges the 
 claim of his Majesty's conscience to loyal forbear- 
 ance, but perhaps he does not sufficiently consid- 
 er, on the other hand, the claim of the nation to 
 existence. The doctrine that one man ought to 
 die for the people has been propounded, though 
 not by auspicious lips ; but no one has yet pro- 
 pounded the doctrine that the people ought to 
 die for one man. Not only George III., but his 
 highly conscientious son and successor, had scru- 
 ples about Catholic Emancipation and the coro- 
 nation oath : and George the Fourth's successor 
 might have had the same. This is not constitu- 
 tional government. What great measure of re- 
 form would ever have been carried, if it had re- 
 quired the free personal assent of the sovereign 
 and the majority of the House of Lords ? George 
 III. was against the abolition of the slave-trade. 
 Were the horrors of the middle passage to go on • 
 while he lived \ But the fact is, his conscience 
 was not a God-made conscience, it was a bishop- 
 made and chancellor-made conscience ; and it had 
 not the firmness any more than the purity of the 
 God-made. It would have given way under vig- 
 orous pressure, as it always did. He had ordered 
 his yacht for Hanover more than once; but he 
 countermanded it when people were firm. 
 
 One thing, at all events, ought to have been 
 
284 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 done. The secret intriguers against justice and 
 the safety of the nation ought to have been drag- 
 ged into the light of day, and made personally 
 responsible for the advice which they had given 
 the king. But how could Pitt do this — he who 
 had allowed himself to be made prime minister 
 by the secret and equally infamous intrigue be- 
 tween the king and Temple % The fiend always 
 claims his bond. 
 
 The situation, however, was now absurd. Pitt 
 was out, though by his abandonment of the Cath- 
 olic cause the sole ostensible ground of his retire- 
 ment had been removed: Addington was in, 
 equally without reason. Of course Pitt's friends 
 wished at once to take out the warming-pan and 
 put back the man. But to do this was now not 
 easy. The warming-pan did not know that it 
 was a warming-pan. It had been told by Pitt 
 when he put it in that it was the man of the cri- 
 sis. It took the flatterer at his word. It grew 
 settled and self-satisfied in place. The king, who 
 had revered the august Pitt, was attracted with 
 magnetic force to the comfortable mediocrity of 
 Addington. He addressed him in the most affec- 
 tionate terms — " The king can not find words suf- 
 ficiently expressive of his Majesty's cordial appro- 
 bation of the whole arrangements which Ids own 
 chancellor of the exchequer has wisely, and His 
 
Pitt. 285 
 
 Majesty chooses to add most correctly, recom- 
 mended." Pitt himself, though clearly conscious 
 of the disarrangement, was, for a long time, for- 
 bearing: he had enough to rest on: but his 
 younger friends were more impatient. Canning 
 lampooned Addington, who had a brother named 
 Hiley, and a brother-in-law named Bragge : 
 
 " When the faltering periods lag, 
 
 When the House receives them dryly, 
 Cheer, oh, cheer him, Brother Bragge, 
 Cheer, oh, cheer him, Brother Hiley. " 
 
 And again, when the Thames was being forti- 
 fied with block-houses: 
 
 "If blocks can from danger deliver, 
 Two places are safe from the French, 
 The one is the mouth of the river, 
 The other the treasury bench." 
 
 The same active and ingenious spirit proposed 
 to present to Addington a round-robin, telling 
 him how much every body wished him to resign ; 
 and as there was a difficulty in getting the best 
 signatures, Canning suggested that the round- 
 robin should be sent in without signatures, and 
 that Addington should be told that he could 
 have the signatures if he liked. It was proposed 
 that Addington, as being Speaker was his spe- 
 cialty, should be made Speaker of the House of 
 Lords; they would have made him Speaker of 
 
286 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 Elysium if that place liad been vacant. For 
 three years all the world was out of joint, and every 
 body was in perplexity. Mr. Wilberforce wrote 
 in his diary : " I am out of spirits, and doubtful 
 about the path of duty in these political battles. 
 I can not help regretting that Addington's tem- 
 perance and conciliation should not be connected 
 with more vigor." And then he puts up a pray- 
 er to Heaven for guidance. Heaven, I suspect, 
 left these politicans pretty much to themselves. 
 
 At last necessity, which will have the man and 
 not the warming-pan, came in the shape of the 
 renewal of the war with a danger of invasion. 
 A little subterranean work was done by the Lord 
 Chancellor Eldon, and Addington found himself 
 and his friends gently lifted out of place, and 
 Pitt quietly installed in their room, Eldon remain- 
 ing chancellor in the new administration. Lord 
 Elclon's conduct in this matter, of which many 
 hard things have been said, has been a good deal 
 cleared by Lord Stanhope. Addington, it ap- 
 pears, authorized the chancellor to open negotia- 
 tions, and all that can be said is, that he was not 
 kept informed of their progress, and was by no 
 means gratified at their result. Eldon thought 
 himself above the rules. He was the king's own 
 chancellor, not a mere member of ephemeral 
 administrations. Had not the king, when the 
 
4 
 Pitt 287 
 
 chancellor was appointed, buttoned up the great 
 seal in the breast of his coat, and taking it out 
 said — " I give it you from my heart V However, 
 after the light thrown upon the transaction by 
 Lord Stanhope, we are happy to acquiesce in His 
 Majesty's intimation to "his excellent lord chan- 
 cellor," that " the uprightness of Lord Eldon's 
 mind, and his attachment to the king, have borne 
 him with credit and honor, and (what the king 
 knows will not be without its due weight) with 
 the approbation of his sovereign, through an un- 
 pleasant labyrinth." The last two words at all 
 events are true. 
 
 Pitt came in to conduct a war, and this time 
 a necessary war ; for I am convinced that with 
 the perfidy and rapine of Bonaparte no peace 
 could-be made, that the struggle with him was a 
 struggle for the independence of all nations 
 against the armed and disciplined hordes of a 
 conqueror as cruel and as barbarous as Attila. 
 The outward mask of civilization Bonaparte wore, 
 and he could use political and social ideas for the 
 purposes of his ambition as dexterously as can- 
 non ; but in character he was a Corsican and as 
 savage as any bandit of his isle. If utter selfish- 
 ness, if the reckless sacrifice of humanity to your 
 own interest and passions be vileness, history has 
 no viler name. I can look with pride upon the 
 
288 Three English Statesmen, 
 
 fortitude and constancy which England displayed 
 in the contest with the universal tyrant. The 
 position in which it left her at its close was fair- 
 ly won : though she must now be content to re- 
 tire from this temporary supremacy, and fall back 
 into her place as one of the community of nations. 
 But Pitt was still destined to fail as a war minis- 
 ter ; and Trafalgar was soon cancelled by Auster- 
 litz. " How I leave my country !" Such, it seems, 
 is the correct version of Pitt's last words. Those 
 words are perhaps his truest epitaph. They ex- 
 press the anguish of a patriot who had wrecked 
 his country. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 N 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 THE ANCIENT FREEHOLDERS OF 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 The number of the Buckinghamshire freeholders who 
 brought up the petition in favor of Hampden, and to whom 
 reference is made in the lecture on Pym, was variously 
 estimated at the time ; by themselves it was placed as 
 high as six thousand, by their enemies as low as two thou- 
 sand. (See Mr. Forster's " Arrest of the Five Members," 
 p. 353, note.) Rushworth (iv. p. 487) says: — "This day 
 divers knights, gentlemen, and freeholders of the County 
 of Bucks, to the number of about four thousand (as they 
 were computed), came to London, riding every one with 
 a printed copy of the Protestation lately taken in his hat." 
 Clarendon says : — " As soon as the citizens and mariners 
 were discharged, some Buckinghamshire men, who were 
 said to be at the door with a petition, and had, indeed, 
 waited upon the triumph with a train of several thousand 
 men, were called in ; who delivered their petition in the 
 name of the inhabitants of the County of Buckingham, 
 and said it was brought to the town by about six thou- 
 sand men." 
 
 In " Whitelocke's Memorials" (vol. iv. p. 272) there is 
 
292 Appendix. 
 
 an entry respecting the writer's election as a knight of the 
 shire for Buckingham, which throws some light on the 
 number of the freeholders. " At the election of the knights 
 of the shire for Bucks, my friends marched into Bucks one 
 thousand horse, and were in the field above three thousand, 
 so that I was first and unanimously elected, and with me 
 Colonel Ingoldsby, Sir Richard Piggott, Mr. Hambden 
 (the son of the great man), and Mr. Granville." This was 
 under Cromwell's Reform Act, embodied in the Instrument 
 of Government, which gave votes for counties not only to 
 freeholders, but to all persons holding property, by what- 
 ever tenure, to the value of £200 ; so that probably many 
 leaseholders and copyholders took part in the election. 
 On the other hand, those who had fought for the king 
 since the commencement of the troubles were disabled from 
 voting ; and in the divided state of the other party, conse- 
 quent on the quarrel between the Presbyterians and Inde- 
 pendents, it is not likely that all the electors who remained 
 qualified would come forward to vote for a man connected 
 as Whitelocke was with the Protector. Not a few of the 
 wives of the freeholders who rode up to London to support 
 Hampden must have been widows. Whitelocke's words 
 seem to imply that the other candidates had their special 
 cavalcades of adherents as well as himself, though they 
 may have been less numerous than his own. We may feel 
 pretty sure, from the habits of life prevalent at that time, 
 that the bulk of these electors were really Buckingham- 
 shire men resident on the holdings which formed their 
 electoral qualifications. 
 
 Whitelocke gives this account of the Ironsides :— " Crom- 
 well had a brave regiment of horse of his countrymen, 
 most of them freeholders and freeholder's sons, and who up- 
 on matter of conscience engaged in this quarrel. And thus, 
 
Appendix. 293 
 
 being well armed within by the satisfaction of their own 
 consciences, and without by good iron arms, they would 
 as one man stand firmly and fight desperately." 
 
 M. Guizot, in his " History of the English Revolution," 
 notices the subdivision of land and the increase of the 
 different classes of resident proprietors as characteristic 
 of the period of Charles L, ascribing them, in part, to the 
 breaking up of the great Church estates, which had been 
 granted to courtiers, by whose prodigality they were dis- 
 persed, and to the sale of crown lands enforced by the 
 fiscal necessities of the crown. 
 
 There seems to be no doubt that in the seventeeth cen- 
 tury, and even at a later period, England contained a much 
 larger number than at present of yeomen freeholders sub- 
 sisting by the cultivation of their own land. The char- 
 acter of these men appears to be very distinctly marked 
 upon the history of our revolution. They are the heart 
 arid the sinews of the Puritan cause. In ordinary times 
 they accept the leadership of the higher gentry, as the 
 lists of Parliament show: but they have independent, 
 opinions of their own: it is upon matter of conscience that 
 they engage in the quarrel; and when the aristocracy 
 desert the cause they stand firm to it, adhere to a leader 
 of their own class, and bear him on to victory. An inde- 
 pendent yeomanry has left a similar mark in the history of 
 other countries, where that class has borne the brunt of 
 patriotic or religious struggles, and most recently and 
 signally in the history of the United States, where the 
 yeomen, especially those of the west, were, throughout 
 the late struggle with the slave-owners, the unshaken pil- 
 lars of the Republic. The farmer, though less active- 
 minded, of course, than the trader or the artisan, is, as a 
 general rule, more meditative, has more depth of character, 
 
294 Appendix, 
 
 and, when a principle comes home to him, grasps it more 
 firmly. But to make his spirit independent, he should be 
 the owner of his own land. 
 
 The remnant of these yeomen still lingers, under the 
 name of " statesmen," in Cumberland and Westmoreland, 
 where they formed, in the language of Wordsworth, " a per- 
 fect republic of shepherds and agriculturists, proprietors for 
 the most part of the land which they occupied and cultiva- 
 ted." But from the rest of England they have either alto- 
 gether disappeared, or are very rapidly disappearing. Such, 
 at least, is the conviction of all whom I have been able to 
 consult, whether general economists or persons of local 
 knowledge and experience. We have, unfortunately, no 
 published statistics, of a trustworthy kind, as to the proprie- 
 torship of land, and the changes which it has been under- 
 going. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli, indeed, in the speech in which he attacked 
 the passage in the text, boasted that there were still four 
 thousand freeholders upon the electoral register of Bucks, 
 and he implied that these were freeholders of the old yeomen 
 class, part of " the backbone of the country." There are 
 not only four thousand freeholders on the register, but four 
 thousand five hundred, the number having recently increased. 
 But an inspection of the register at once indicates and local 
 inquiry decisively confirms the indication, that, for the most 
 part, these are not freeholders of the old yeoman kind. Of 
 the 4500, 2100 only are at once occupiers and owners ; and 
 of the holdings of these 2100, more than half are at an esti- 
 mated rental of less than £14. The holdings of a large 
 proportion are in towns, as Mr. Disraeli himself is always 
 complaining, and belong to a class of electoral nuisance 
 which he is always scheming to clear away from the fair face 
 of the rural creation. The descriptions of the properties in 
 
Appendix. 295 
 
 the electoral register are not precise, but when inspected, 
 and compared with the electors' places of abode, it will be 
 found that they are seldom suggestive of a freehold farm 
 cultivated by a resident owner.* 
 
 * In speaking of this question at Guildford, I took as a specimen the 
 electoral register of the parish of Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks, not because 
 I had or pretended to have any local information as to that parish, but as 
 I stated at the time, because it happened to be the first rural parish in 
 the register of the county. I believe I gave the analysis correctly. But 
 there appears to be some discrepancy, not only between the electoral register 
 and the actual list of land-holders in the parish, some of whom are females, 
 or register their votes in other parishes, but between the impressions of 
 local informants as to the character of some of the holdings and their 
 occupants. The rector, who challenged my statement in a published letter, 
 makes 10, and according to a list with which he has since favored me, 
 even 13 " homesteads," while another informant thinks that the designation 
 of ' ' yeoman subsisting by the cultivation of his own land " can be properly 
 applied to only two holders, whose farms together comprise but 82 acres out 
 of a total acreage of 3550. The last-mentioned informant also states, 
 and is supported by other persons acquainted with the district in the 
 statement, that the class of freeholders which existed in Hampden's days 
 is quietly disappearing from that part of the country. It is useless, how- 
 ever, to carry on a discussion respecting a single disputed instance, when 
 the general fact is undisputed. I only wish to remark that my assertions 
 were not ' ' random :" they were an account of a document before me, to 
 which Mr. Disraeli had appealed. 
 
 In the same speech (or, as I should rather call it, epilogue to my 
 lecture) I alluded, in passing, to the connection of Milton with Chalfont 
 St. Giles. My words I believe were, " There Milton found a refuge, at 
 the time when Mr. Disraeli's party was in the ascendant." This seems to 
 have been turned, in an abridged report, into " Thither Milton fled from 
 the Tory mercies of the Restoration." The rector thereupon reminded 
 me with some asperity that Milton had left London to avoid the plague, 
 and that he was secured against personal danger by the Act of Indemnity. 
 Milton left London to avoid the plague ; but he came to Chalfont, I appre- 
 hend, because in that district the Hampden and Cromwell connection was 
 very strong, and he would there be safe from annoyances against which 
 no Act of Indemnity could secure him. (See Murray's Handbook for 
 Bucks, under Amersham.) My real words imported no more. Milton, 
 
296 Appendix, 
 
 The change is due, no doubt, mainly to economical causes 
 independent of legislation. Wealth has of late years 
 accumulated to an immense extent in commercial hands, 
 and the first ambition of its possessors generally is to invest 
 it in land. Prices are thus offered for land which the 
 smaller holders can not resist. The high prices of the 
 French war led land-owners into extravagance which, when 
 peace and the fall of prices arrived, probably compelled the 
 sale of many a yeoman's or small gentleman's estate. The 
 habits of the farmer class generally, and of their families, 
 have become more luxurious and expensive, and the prod- 
 uce of a small holding has not sufficed for their desires. 
 Money has also been borrowed for improvements, and the 
 land has gone in the end to pay the debt. The running 
 out of the leases on the Church and College estates has 
 converted a considerable number of holdings which were 
 practically almost freeholds into tenancies at will. 
 
 It seems impossible, however, that entails, or to speak 
 more accurately family settlements, and the law of pri- 
 mogeniture in succession to intestates, which though seldom 
 operative itself, leads the custom, should not greatly con- 
 tribute to prevent the subdivision of land. Cases have 
 been mentioned to me in which a subdivision has evidently 
 followed upon the disentailment of a great estate, among 
 others that of the great Buckingham estate, the disentail- 
 ment of which, as I am informed, has brought into existence 
 a considerable number of smaller proprietors.* 
 
 however, did not feel himself quite so safe as the Eector of Chalfont 
 
 thinks. 
 
 14 On evil days though fallen and evil tongues ; 
 In darkness, and with dangers compassed round 
 And solitude." 
 
 * I have been understood as saying that Jive hundred freeholders have 
 
 been called into existence by the breaking up of the Buckingham estates. 
 
 But this is a mistake. What I said was, that five hundred had been 
 
Appendix. 297 
 
 I shall not attempt here to enter into the economical 
 part of the question. All the ordinary laws of human 
 nature must be reversed with regard to this subject, if 
 security of tenure is not conducive to the progress of 
 agriculture, provided that the holder has wherewithal to 
 improve the land. It can scarcely be thought possible 
 that land, if it continues to bear any thing like its 
 present price, can pass to any considerable extent into the 
 hands of peasant proprietors : but if thrown into a free 
 market, it might pass to some extent into the hands of 
 smaller holders subsisting by agriculture, and from whom 
 active and successful farming might be expected. 
 
 In a political point of view, the country has reason to 
 lament the loss of a worthy and independent class of citi- 
 zens. The most independent class now are the skilled 
 artisans ; but the skilled artisans, with all their intelligence, 
 have not the political any more than they have the physi- 
 cal robustness of the yeoman : and moreover they are not, 
 like the yeoman, a military power. 
 
 In a social point of view the absence of so many of the 
 great proprietors from their estates, either wholly or dur- 
 ing the London season, and the immense interval between 
 them and the mass of the laboring population, are great 
 drawbacks from the civilizing influence which they are 
 supposed to exercise. It is open to inquiry, at all events, 
 whether a body of proprietors, tolerably educated, always 
 resident and always in immediate contact with the laborer, 
 might not be a benefical supplement to the squire and the 
 tenant-farmer, the squire pressing the tenant, the tenant 
 pressing those beneath him. 
 
 added to the number of the Buckinghamshire freeholders on the electoral 
 register, and that the recent increase, as I was informed, was partly caused 
 by the breaking up of the Buckingham estate. 
 
 N2 
 
298 
 
 Appendix. 
 
 Let artificial restrictions, such as the unnatural privilege 
 of tying up land to persons not in being, be removed ; let 
 land be brought freely into the market ; and all induce- 
 ments and influences will, in the course of nature, have 
 their just weight and find their proper level. Such, in 
 every point of view, is the dictate of the general good, 
 whatever the desire of maintaining a territorial aristocracy 
 for political purposes may have to say upon the other side. 
 
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