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This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order If, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would Involve violation of the copyright law. A UTHOR : BURTON, JOHN HILL TITLE: A HISTORY OF QUEEN ANNE PLACE: EDINBURGH DA TE : 1880 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative U Restrictions on Use: BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARHFT Original Material as Fihned - Existing Bibliographic Record »■■ ■ — ( ■v ^^k^f ' ^v ^ '^ ^. ■ " mv I > > V ' ". •t >" m ,942*069 B95 Burton, John HiU, 1809-1881. A history of the reign of Queen Anne, by JoEi HiU Bur- imr ^'^'"^"'■^'''^ ""^ ^«"^°°. W. Blackwood S^d sons. 3 V. 23*". ^.2L- Brit.— Hist.—Aime, 1702-1714. 2-26104 Library of Congress DA495.B97 n FILM SIZE:___^_ TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA (H^ IB IIB DATE FILMED: ^-iMjS, REDUCTION RATIO UJi. IN n I ALS_ _^f^ir\ HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRIDGE. CT c V Association for information and Image IManagement 1100 Wayne Avenue. Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter an 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 mm iiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiimL Inches I I I I I I I I I I i 2 3 TTTTJTT 4 1.0 m 12.8 1.4 2.5 22 I.I 2.0 1.8 1.6 1.25 ITT T MfiNUFfiCTURED TO fillM STflNDRRDS BY fiPPLIED IMOGEp INC. Columtiia ^Hmbersittp inttjeCitpof^etogorJ^y ^ LIBRARY A HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE ^% A HISTORY OF THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE BY lOHN HILL BURTON, D.C.L. HISTORIOGRAPHER-ROYAL FOR SCOTLAND AUTHOR OF 'A HISTORY OF SCOTLAND,' ETC. IN THREE VOLS. VOL. I. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXX Ail Rights reserved CONTENTS OF FIRST VOLUME. I '1^1 () x? r3 ^^ CO CHAPTER I. PAGE THE ACCESSION— THE CRISIS AND ITS TRANSIT— PERIL OP THE ABJURATION BILL— THE EXPIRING PARLIAMENT— THE QUEEN — HER DESCENT AND KINDRED — HER HUSBAND — HER FRIENDS— MARLBOROUGH, DUCHESS SARAH, GODOLPHIN— THE CORRESPONDENCE OP THE GROUP OP FRIENDS — HER CHILD- LESS CONDITION AFTER THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF GLOUCES- TER—THE NECESSITY FOR A PARLIAMENTARY REVISION OP THE SUCCESSION— THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER —HISTORICAL POSITION OF THIS HOUSE— THE CORONATION— THE PROCESSIONS— THE CEREMONIES IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND IN THE HALL— THE NEW PARLIAMENT—" QUEEN ANNE's BOUNTY " ITS CONNECTION WITH THE QUEEN's ZEAL FOR THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND— HOW ITS OBJECT WAS DEFEATED, 1-58 CHAPTER II. THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND I HIGH CHURCH AND LOW CHURCH — THE THREE GROUPS OF DISSENTERS : PRESBYTERIANS, INDE- PENDENTS, AND BAPTISTS — THE SOCIETY OP FRIENDS, AND THEIR ENEMIES — WILLIAM PENN — THE PRESBYTERIANS IN 188396 VI CONTENTS. CONTENTS. Vll OP "the shortest way with the dissenters" SCOTLAND — dissimilitude OP DISSENT IN THE TWO COUNTRIES — REMNANTS OF THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY — UNIVERSITY MEN AMONG THEM — THIS DISTINCTION LOST TO THEIR SUCCES- SORS—THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGE — SOCIAL POSITION OF THE DISSENTERS— NONJURORS — POPISH RECUSANTS — TEST AND CORPORATION ACTS — BILL AGAINST OCCASIONAL CONFOR- MITY — TENDER CONSCIENCES — APPEARANCE IN THE CONFLICT DANIEL DEFOE : HIS OFFER TO REVEAL HIS ACCOMPLICES — THE EPIS- COPAL REMNANT IN SCOTLAND, . . . 59-102 CHAPTER III. Bomegtic Affairs. THE GREAT STORM — DEVASTATION AMONG BUILDINGS — EFFECT ON THE NAVY — EVELYN'S EXPERIENCE IN FORESTS — THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE LORDS AND COMMONS, KNOWN AS THE AYLES- BURY ELECTION CASE — ITS GREAT SIGNIFICANCE AS A CONSTI- TUTIONAL INQUIRY THE EMINENCE OF THE MEN BROUGHT INTO THE DISCUSSION — ESCAPE OP THE CONSTITUTION FROM THE DANGERS APPREHENDED, . . . . 103-123 CHAPTER IV. JEntemational ©ifKcultieg. CAUSES OF DISSENSION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND — SCOT- LAND INCLUDED IN THE NAVIGATION ACT OF THE PROTECTOR- ATE — EXCLUDED IN THAT OF THE RESTORATION — DEMANDS BY SCOTLAND FOR THE OPENING OF FREE TRADE WITH ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH COLONIES REJECTED — THE PRIVILEGES EN- JOYED BY IRELAND AS A DEPENDENCY — EFFECT OF THE REVO- LUTION AND THE INTERCOURSE WITH THE DUTCH SUPREMACY OP TRADE QUESTIONS — RIVALRY OP ENGLAND AND HOLLAND FOR SUPREMACY AT SEA THE NAVIGATION ACT DESIGNED TO CRUSH THE RIVAL — INVENTION OF BANKING ITS STIMULUS TO SPECULATIVE COMPANIES — SCOTLAND STARTS THE INDIAN AND AFRICAN COMPANY, OFTEN CALLED THE DARIEN COMPANY — WILLIAM PATERSON — THE COMPANY STARTED IN LONDON AND EDINBURGH — DRIVEN OUT OP LONDON — THE DARIEN COLONY ITS CALAMITIES AND FAILURE — THE UNION COMMISSION OF 1702 CLAIM OF FREE TRADE REPEATED BY SCOTLAND — THE QUESTION DROPS— TURBULENT SCOTS PARLIAMENT OF 1703 QUARRELS — THE ACT OF SECURITY — THE LIMITATIONS —THE QUEEN ON THE AFFAIRS OF SCOTLAND, . . 124-169 CHAPTER V. E\)z TOat in tfje NetfjerlantJg anH CSermang. TERRITORIES ACCUMULATED UNDER THE SPANISH MONARCHY DEATH OF THE KING AND THE END OF HIS LINE — GENEALOGI- CAL CONDITIONS POINTING TO COUNTER-CLAIMS AND WAR THE AGGRANDISING POLICY OF LOUIS XIV. AND ITS SUCCESS— STIMU- LATED BY THE WILL OP THE KING OF SPAIN BEQUEATHING THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SPANISH DOMINIONS TO HIS GRANDCHILD — DECLARATION OF WAR AND FORMATION OF THE GRAND ALLI- ANCE—POSITION AND PERILS OF THE DUTCH— DIFFICULTY OF RAISING A FORCE IN BRITAIN RECRUITING THE TRADING SPIRIT OP THE DUTCH — DIFFICULTY TO SUPPRESS IT EVEN WITH THE ENEMY — THE RESCUE OP NYMEGUEN FROM THE FRENCH — MARLBOROUGH GOES IN COMMAND OP THE BRITISH CONTINGENT HOW HE BECAME COMMANDER OF THE ALLIED FORCE — MARL- BOROUGH's SEIZURE OP THE FORTIFIED TOWNS, . 170-233 CHAPTER VI. E\)t Mar. ( Continued. ) MARLBOROUGH RETURNS HOME — AN ADVENTURE ON THE WAY — THANKS OF PARLIAMENT — DUKEDOM CONFERRED— DEATH OF HIS ONLY SON THE WARLIKE SITUATION — PECULIAR POSITION AND CHARACTER OP THE ELECTOR OF BAVARIA HIS CHOICE OF THE FRENCH SIDE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES — VICTOR AMADEUS OF SAVOY CASTS HIS LOT WITH THE ALLIES — THE PERIOD OF INDECISIVE BATTLES AND ITS END — MARLBOROUGH's PROJECT OF SEIZING ANTWERP AS THE KEY OP THE NETHERLANDS — HOW THE OPPORTUNITY WAS LOST — KING LOUIS CARRIES THE WAR INTO GERMANY — PROJECT OF BESIEGING VIENNA — MARL- VIU CONTENTS. : borough's determination to intercept IIIM — TAKES HIS ARMY ACROSS THE WATERSHED BETWEEN THE RHINE AND THE DANUBE— DONAUWORTH STORMING OF THE SCHELLENBERG — JUNCTION WITH PRINCE EUGENE — BATTLE OF BLENHEIM, 234-308 CHAPTER VII. INFLUENCE OF THE SCOTS INDIAN AND AFRICAN COMPANY IN CARRYING THE UNION— ONE OF THEIR VESSELS SEIZED IN THE THAMES — SEIZURE IN REPRISAL OF THE ENGLISH SHIP WOR- CESTER IN THE FIRTH OF FORTH — BOARDED AND THE CREW SECURED BY THE OFFICIAL STAFF OF THE SCOTS COMPANY SUSPICIONS OP PIRACY AGAINST THE CAPTIVES— CONVICTION THAT IT WAS PERPETRATED ON ONE OF THE VESSELS OF THE SCOTS COMPANY — TRIAL FOR PIRACY AND MURDER— EXECUTION OF GREEN THE CAPTAIN AND TWO OF THE CREW — LOVAT AND " THE SCOTCH PLOT " HOUSE OF LORDS* CONDUCT OFFENSIVE TO THE SCOTS— BRINGS ON A QUARREL WITH THE COMMONS — UNION BECOMING URGENT— NEW COMMISSION APPOINTED— COM- PLETION OF THE UNION, ...» 309-350 THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE. CHAPTER I. THE ACCESSION — THE CRISIS AND ITS TRANSIT — PERIL OF THE ABJURATION BILL — THE EXPIRING PARLIAMENT — THE QUEEN — HER DESCENT AND KINDRED — HER HUSBAND — HER FRIENDS —MARLBOROUGH, DUCHESS SARAH, GODOLPHIN — THE CORRE- SPONDENCE OF THE GROUP OF FRIENDS — HER CHILDLESS CON- DITION AFTER THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER — THE NECESSITY FOR A PARLIAMENTARY REVISION OF THE SUC- CESSION—THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER — HISTORICAL POSITION OF THIS HOUSE — THE CORONATION — THE PROCESSIONS — THE CEREMONIES IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND IN THE HALL — THE NEW PARLIAMENT — " QUEEN ANNE'S bounty" ITS CONNECTION WITH THE QUEEN'S ZEAL FOR THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND— HOW ITS OBJECT WAS DEFEATED. On the morning of Sunday, the eighth day of March, in the year 1702, King William the Third died at Kensington Palace. Even to the vigilant members of the Privy Council who were assembled in the palace to watch the event, the moment could not be more distinctly fixed than by the words, "about eight of the clock in the morning." Yet, both by the theory of the constitution and by the statute law VOL. I. A ^' I #1 " :-. -eii-Ui_-.wJ m 2 THE BEGINNING. of England, at the point of time when the last breath left his lungs the reign of Anne began— a point as impalpable and indivisible as that belonging both to . December and January, accepted by the Christian world as marking the death of the old year and the birth of the new. The councillors present, "after some time, agreed to go in a body to attend her Majesty Queen Anne at her palace at St James's, to acquaint her Majesty with the decease of the late king." They at the same time directed the accession to be immediately proclaimed.^ The Privy Council, in their minute on the occasion, called the dead sovereign " King William the Third of ever-glorious memory." He was sorely missed by statesmen, who believed in him as the only effective pledge for the Protestant succession. But his was not a death to cause many domestic tears. The embalming and the usual funeral pomp took their course. It was with a certain touch of good feeling that he was laid in the same vault with his wife, Queen Mary, his love for whom was the one romance that brightened a hard nature, and a life of heavy responsibilities and arduous duties.^ 1 Minutes of Privy Council, MS. 2 " The estimate for the funeral, when designed ' from the Princesses' Chamber next the House of Lords, was ;£3500 ;' but upon other orders given by the Committee of Council for the funeral— viz., the great withdrawing-room at Kensington to be hung with black cloth, the great bed-chamber with purple cloth, a * state and canopy of the same,' a pall and canopy of purple velvet, a chariot that cost £300, eight horse-cloths of purple cloth down to the ground, the great withdrawing- [room] at St James's to be hung with the finest purple cloth, the Yeo- men of the Guard mourning liveries, with * cawles ' and black fringes for their partisans, crape bonnet-bands, black swords, gloves, &c., with other things not thought of— the estimate amounted to ^£6268, 7s. 6id." —Calendar Treasury Papers, vol. Ixxix. No. 100. THE CRISIS. 3 On the day of the death, Sunday though it was. Parliament met ; and the work of a new reign began. The doctrine that the throne is never vacant — that the sovereign never dies — was not perhaps in logical harmony with a forcible change of dynasty and a parliamentary title which had to be confirmed and proclaimed by a coronation ; but in the political conditions of the moment it was urgently expedient that it should prove successful. And it was success- ful ; for no one was ever more effectively swept into the throne by the influence of divine right than the new queen was by her parliamentary title. Yet to all who were high in the political hierarchy there was a mighty crisis ; and any possible external symp- toms of interruption to the absolute tranquillity of the hour were watched with ardent anxiety. As the crisis hastened to its climax, the pulsations of excitement and suspense radiated from London over the empire. The settlement of the crown might pass into peaceful reality; but a counter-revolution and a bloody civil war were not expectations to be derided as impracticable and visionary. There was one narrow question demanding a specific answer — Had the Abjuration Bill, for extinguishing the hopes of the Jacobites, received the royal assent ? — was it an Act of Parliament ? The curiosity that seeks to penetrate to the seclusion of palaces was, as usual, aroused in vain. There were, indeed, some things that it was well to keep shrouded in the dignity of mystery; and many of the secrets of the hour had died with their holders, before it was quite safe to let the world know them. There is thus some interest in knowing that the following morsels of THE BEGINNING. THE PALACE. 5 curious gossip were thought worthy to be preserved among the private papers of the person to whom they were addressed — that person being Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, who, as Secretary of State, shared with Godolphin supremacy in the cabinet in the early years of the new reign. The writer of the paper, whoever he or she may have been, speaks somewhat obscurely and incoherently ; but this ren- ders the document all the closer in harmony with the spirit of the moment. March 10, 1702. I am to tell you as much as I dare write. In the first place, the Abjuration was passed on Saturday night, in such a manner as never was done in any reign in the world. For the king was in so ill a condition that he could not write his name ; therefore a stamp was put into his hand, and that, by the help of others, lifted upon the paper, though the day before it was said he had refused to sign it. When they came to the Lords' House, all but the lord keeper said the king was out of danger ; but he of a sudden telling the truth, struck the others to that degree, that if you had been there to have spoke almost anything, they had not been able to have done it. But the truth is, your friends are so enraged to be left, that they absolutely neglected it, when, as Lord D says, he is sure it might have been rejected. But Lord Nor[mandyl said it was to no purpose to do anything, for he had nobody to second him ; and [it 1] will certainly be dis- puted. Yet if you would come, and as absurd as you think it for it to be now imposed, it has been moved in the House of Commons, because that where the word William is, Anne is certainly now understood. However, I am to tell you that your opposers are so amazed and confounded, that as soon as they are opposed they let all things fall ; and there never was such an opportunity to save this nation as now, for all the best party are so transported to have an English queen, that they will agree to all that is for her and her king- dom's interest. Among the mob, where one is concerned there are forty rejoicing. The Duke of Leeds and Sir Charles Hedges are sworn of the Council; and for a secret I was told by a family that is partly Irish, that the king dying before he had made a new lord-lieutenant, and the com- missioner there being by his authority, he remains so still. And he knows it ; for since the king died he has in one par- ticular acted by his secretary. Lord W[harton] has been to assure the queen of his zeal for the service, and was received just as he could have wished. One thing I can't omit, which is, that nurse Dod was with the queen yesterday morning, and from thence came to me. She said the queen asked her if my Lord Nottingham was in town; and she say- ing "No," the queen said she wondered he would go out of town just now; and to show you what an opinion it must give, when she came out the very bed chamber- women asked her why you would go, and said sure you was not against the queen." ^ ^ Hatton Finch Papers, vi., British Museum, additional manuscripts, 29588, f. 14. On the occasion of this, the first of a probably large succes- sion of references to the recent acquisitions in the manuscript department of the British Museum, I think it right to say a few words that may afford a hint to others in search of information. I was certainly aston- ished to find how rich the collection proved to be in materials peculiar to my own purpose, and equally astonished that their use had not been already exhausted. The value of the collection is not in what are properly termed State Papers, but in the private correspondence of statesmen and other eminences — private correspondence on affairs of State. Of public State Papers we may conclude that all of any importance or significance during our period are already published ; and indeed it was the great grief of a reverend gentleman who, a century ago, wrote a history of the reign of Queen Anne, to find that, after toiling for months in the State Paper Office, everything of any significance that he copied had been printed and abundantly used. It is a feature of such collections as the one I now refer to, that the papers — some of them mere scraps, others of considerable length — are apt to be unsigned. If they reached the person they were intended for, the writer was well known ; if they went astray, then it was, on the whole, desirable that the writer should not be identified. Queen Anne's letters are all unsigned, and many of Marlborough's, Godolphin's, and Peterborough's ; but the handwriting is, in these and many other instances, easily recognisable. I endeavoured in vain to discover the writer of the letter printed in the text. It was clear only that it must 6 THE BEGINNING. The new reign announced itself by instant polit- ical activity. On the 8th of March, when the Privy Council passed from the deathbed to St James's to attend on the Queen, they were received by her with a royal speech. It was noticed on this occasion, as ever afterwards when she spoke in public, that her voice was soft with a feminine melody, while, at the same time, it was distinct and sonorous.^ The speech put, in the briefest terms, the proper assurances about the maintenance of the settlement of the crown in the Protestant line, and the preservation of reli- gion, laws, and liberties. But the great point was the commencement of a policy in harmony with the prevailing impulse of the nation- — "the importance of carrying on all the preparations we are making have been some one on familiar terms with so eminent a person as Nottingham. There is a touch of the feminine in its tone. Affording materials thus peculiarly affluent for the present purpose, it api)eared to me that the collection, — revealed in the catalogue in two vol- umes, published respectively in 1875 and 1877,— of recent acquisitions to the Museum, is full of materials for enriching other periods of British his- tory and history's coadjutor archajology ; such materials, for instance, as chronicles, cartularies, county and other local histories, ecclesiastical and corporate records, registers of courts of justice, and books of heraldry and family history. The value of the collection is enhanced by the skil- fully-adjusted and well-sustained organisation for access to the whole. No one can work there without being sensible of the unfailing courtesy of the custodiers of these treasures, and their readiness to assist in ren- dering them available to every one who seeks them for the purpose of legitimate research. 1 There was a tradition that Charles II., who was sensitive to beauty in sound as well as sight, having early noticed this quality m his niece, sent her to the best school for its culture. " He ordered Mrs Barry, a famous actress, should teach her to speak, which she did with such suc- cess that it was a real pleasure to hear her." This, noted by Speaker Onslow, is confirmed by Lord Dartmouth, who, in reference to her speaking from the throne, says, "I never saw an audience more affected — it was a kind of charm." — Burnet's Own Time, ed. 1833, vol. v. 2, notes. ROYAL ASSURANCES. to oppose the great power of France," specifically declaring, '' I shall lose no time in giving our allies all assurances that nothing shall be wanting on my part to pursue the true interest of England, together with theirs, for the support of the common cause." On the 11th she addressed a solemn speech from the throne to both Houses of Parliament. Her conclud- ing words had in them a touch of warmth, as if courting reciprocity : " As I know my own heart to be entirely English, I can very sincerely assure you there is not anything you can expect or desire from me which I shall not be ready to do for the hap- piness and prosperity of England; and you shall always find me a strict and religious observer of my word." But the assurance seems to have received more suspicious criticism than reciprocity. Why did she declare her heart to be entirely English ? Was it to remind her people that they had been in the hands of one whose heart was entirely Dutch ? And yet this slighting criticism was neutralised by another, hint- ing that the remark was not original and sincere, but adopted from the speech made by her father when his secret designs were inimical to all things thor- oughly English. In a celebrated speech on a special supply for the support of his Government he had said, " I cannot express my concern upon this occa- sion more suitable to my own thoughts than by assuring you I have a true English heart, as jealous of the honour of the nation as you can be." ^ Then, the assurances by the new monarch that she would be found a strict observer of her word were found to ^ Pari. Hist., iv. 1359. 8 THE BEGINNING. have a suspicious analogy to her father's reiterated assurances that he would make it his '* endeavour to preserve this Government, both in Church and State, as it is now by law established ; " and again, when, on a solemn repetition of these words, he had uttered an assurance that the repetition was intended " the better to evidence to you that I spoke then not by chance, and consequently, that you may firmly rely upon a promise so solemnly made." ^ Parliament occupied the few remaining days of its existence in denunciations of certain pamphlets, and sermons preached on the 30th of January, the com- memoration day of the execution of King Charles I. Of the mischievous influences that might be aroused by recriminating against a commemoration sermon, we shall in a few years find a brilliant example. Nothing more could be made of the pamphlets than that they were found to hint at dangers to the par- liamentary settlement of the crown on the queen ; but neither from the substance of the pamphlets themselves, nor in a cross-questioning of those who avowed themselves authors or publishers of the culp- able pages, could a distinct announcement of where the danger might be found, be extracted.^ There 1 Pari. Hist, iv. 1351-1353. 2 As, for instance, when " the House went into consideration of the paragraphs in the 89 and 90 pages of the said book, which were read as followeth — viz. : " * Whiglove, — I find we have miscarried in our great design : the train would not take. We were very hot upon it just before the Parliament met ; all the Whig coffee-houses rung, how necessary it was to break into the Acts of Settlement, and to exclude ' " * Double. — Mum, Whiglove ; talk no more on that subject, I beseech you : fresh orders are issued out, and since we are not strong enough to make it go, we are now directed to say that never any such thing was intended by our party.' " — Cited from * Tom Double returned out of THE EXPIRING PARLIAMENT. seemed more peril in an articulate story that among the late King's papers there would be found evidence of a plan to throw Queen Anne out of the succession in consequence of dangerous communications that passed between her and her father. By appointment of the House of Lords, an august group of their number examined the King's private repositories for the satisfaction of Parliament, and found nothing to justify the story. The Lords, on this, could only vent their wrath on the distributors of the false story, while they requested her Majesty to order Mr Attorney- General to prosecute, with the utmost severity of the law, the authors or publishers " of the above-men- tioned or suchlike scandalous reports."^ The Parliament that had begun in August 1699, sat to finish the business before it as the fourteenth of William IIL and the first of Anne. If there was any peril in the strange conditions of the conferring the royal assent on the Abjuration Act, this item of critical legislation received a strengthening in the necessity for a new Act applying it to a new reign. The logic of the Abjuration Act was, that Parliament having settled the succession to the crown, and de- manded that all good citizens should loyally accept the Protestant line of succession, they were required to abjure the Jacobite line in this Act, bearing the the Country ; or, the True Picture of a Modem Whig,' &c. Another of the House's critical attacks was ' The History of the last Parliament, begun at Westminster in the Reign of King William, anno 1700,' of which Dr James Drake admitted himself to be the author. Two pam- phlets—one recommending that the Electress of Hanover and her son should be invited into the country, and another professing to denounce the Pretender — were among the productions deemed offensive in their double meaning. — Pari. Hist., vi. 18-23. ^ Pari. Hist., vi. 7. 10 THE BEGINNING. ABJURATION OATH. II / expressive title, " An Act for the further security of his Majesty's person, and for extinguishing the hopes of the pretended Prince of Wales, and all other pretenders, and their abettors."^ The immediate apology for the Abjuration Act was Louis XIV. 's acknowledgment of "the Pretender." It had been adjusted that, in failure of any representative of either of the Protestant daughters of King James, the suc- cession should open to " the excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess-Dowager of Hanover, daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the First ; " " and whereas the French king, in hopes of disturbing the peace and repose of your Majesty and your kingdoms, and creating divi- sions therein, hath, since the making of the said Act, caused the pretended Prince of Wales to be pro- claimed in your Majesty's said kingdom of France by the name, style, and title of James the Third," &c. ; and here it may be inferred that the promoters of the Act must have been conscious of adding sarcasm to defiance, since, if we follow the clause to its logical conclusion, it charges Louis XIV. with seizing the opportunity of his being unlawfully in possession of that part of the heritage of the English crown called France, for doing as he did. This Parliament came to an end in a speech from the throne on the 25th of May. Parliament, indeed, had by a recent statute of its own, adjusted, subject to the sovereign's right of prorogation, the exact du- ration of its own life. It had become the constitu- tional rule that the Parliament died with the sove- M3 & 14 Will. III. c. 6. reio-n. But the Revolution and the political conditions of the time had shaken the efiBciency of the fiction that the sovereign never dies ; and with a preamble referring to " great dangers by the invasion of for- eigners or by the traitorous conspiracies of wicked and ill-disposed persons," it is provided that the Parliament in existence at the king's death is imme- diately to assemble, and to exist " for and during the time of six months and no longer." ^ The definition of persons required to take the Ab- juration Oath is an attempt, and a successful attempt, to exhaust the gentry and the educated community. It includes all holders of public offices, civil or mili- tary, members of the universities, teachers of youth, clergy of all denominations, legal practitioners of all grades : the only considerable body apparently omitted is medical practitioners not having degrees ; but as a general remedy of omissions, the oath might be ten- dered " to any person or persons whatsoever." ^ It was adjusted that the coronation should be per- formed on the 15th of April ; and looking forward to that event, the opportunity may be taken for a brief retrospect of some conditions that give a strong political influence to what, in the ordinary fixed con- ditions of succession to the crown, is merely an august ceremonial. To count, indeed, that a coronation went for anything more, was an outrage to the absolute doctrine of divine right so influential during the dynasty of the Stewarts. Though Anne acted as queen whenever William by death ceased to be king, yet it is an established fact that the eight successive 1 7 & 8 Will. III. c. 15. 2 14 Will. III. & 1 Anne, cc. 6 and 22. . h> - ^1 12 THE BEGINNING. THE QUEEN. 13 < ' monarchs after the Conquest did no regal act until, in each instance, the coronation sanctioned his admission as monarch.-^ The doctrine that the throne is never vacant, that *'the sovereign never dies/' was a subtle invention of the canonists for the purpose of con- ferring on the "divine right " doctrines the conditions and power of an exact science. Genealogy — or the exhaustion of male descendants in the ratio of seni- ority, then taking female descendants in the same ratio, before working out collaterals in the ratio of their vicinity — was an exact science ; and if it was to rule the succession to the throne, then divine right was also an exact science. In the later calm period of uninterrupted hereditary succession the doctrine has met with approval, or at least acquiescence. It is a convenient adjunct to the working of that which really is an exact science — the application of the rule of lineal descent which exhausts the sons or other nearest male descendants according to their seniority, and then does the same by the female. Queen Anne's accession, however, followed no such abstract rule. Supposing her to have had no brother, King William's short period of sole government as thoroughly broke in upon the hereditary descent of the crown, as if he had not been the nephew of King James and the husband of his daughter. In fact. Queen Anne's reign was part of a revolutionary pro- ^ This was not generally known in our own country until, in 1830, John Allen published his learned little book, called * Inquiry into the Rise and Growth of the Royal Prerogative in England ; ' but it had been announced half a century earlier by the French archaeologists — see * L'Art de verifier les dates des faits historiques, des chartes,' &c., iii. 798 et seq. The conclusions on this matter are briefly told in the chapter on " Regnal Years of the Kings of England," in the * Chronol- ogy of History,' by Sir Harris Nicolas. cess, beginning with the Long Parliament and only subsiding as the house of Hanover became finally enthroned. In all its external conditions, however, Queen Anne's accession was as quiet and uneventful as that of any legitimate successor has been ; and it was signally acceptable to the nation at large. A slight disturbance of certain conditions tending to this happy conclusion, might have given civil war and a violent revolution instead of the peaceful succession. There were statesmen alive who remembered the death of Charles I., the Protectorate, the Restoration, and the Revolution ; and to all public men these were events perplexing the nation with fear of change. Hence the accession of Queen Anne, if it has not the in- terest attending on contest and bloodshed, has the interest attending on a narrow escape from these calamities; and the conditions to which the world owes this escape seem worthy of minute attention. It enhances the critical interest of these conditions that they only postponed the danger — they did not extinguish its causes. While they made the begin- ning and continuance of her reign easy and popular, events had occurred that limited the happy prospect to herself personally, and for the duration of her life. Already domestic calamities had passed it into absolute decrees of fate, that there were doubts and difficulties in the future, sadly weakening the hope of a final settlement without revolution and blood- shed. A large body of the British people still believed that the son of King James was in reality what he was called in Acts of Parliament and otherwise, a " Pretender," not born to Mary of Modena, the queen. {■■■ i: -> i ^ fl ■■»-• I .1 ' *! w 14 THE BEGINNING. THE QUEEN. IS III 1/ :( With these, since her elder sister's death in 1694, the Princess Anne was the legitimate heir to the throne ; and her accession dated not from the death of her brother-in-law, who might be counted a usurper, but from an event a few months earlier — the death of her father on the 19th of September 1701. And so, had any of her many infants lived to make her a happy mother, the Stewart dynasty might have survived her. But, as we shall see, it was otherwise decreed. There was little in Anne Stewart, either personal or intellectual, calculated, alone and unaided, to arouse interest or command admiration. Yet fate had so ordered that not only her position by birth and rank, but her personal qualifications, whether merits or defects — that, in short, all things about her — were endowed with sources of vast influence on the des- tinies of the British empire, and, through these, of the world at large. Hence the historian, to do his ofiice properly, must bring the character and position of the new queen to the front, with an amount of pre- cision and detail that might not have been demanded for a sovereign of grander qualities and higher force of personal character. When the genealogical sequence, giving succession to power or property, is established to the satisfac- tion of the world, any other element that pedigree can confer, has merely the decorative character of lustre. The value of this will depend on the prevail- ing habits and opinions of the age, and we shall see that the reign of the Revolution king had created an epoch of hard-working trade and money-making. To those, therefore, who could satisfy themselves that Anne legitimately held the monarchy that her father had succeeded to, it was of little moment that her mother was merely Anne Hyde, the daughter of one who no doubt was an illustrious statesman, but whose birth was in the rank of the middle class. ^ But if a subject was to be taken into the royal family, it was better thus than if the alliance had been less unequal. Falling to any of the great territorial houses already dignified by royal alliance — such as the Howards, Percys, Stanleys, and Greys — it might have alienated more of the support from that class of potentates than it gained, and might have created general suspicion lest a political power might arise between the sovereign and the other elements of the constitution, aristocratic and democratic. True, it was remembered how Queen Elizabeth had exasper- ated the great houses by the advancement to the highest oflSces of " mean persons " from her mother's kindred and their ranks ; but the political elements had changed in the lapse of more than a century, and the country had to deal with a woman who, had she been of the daring and despotic character of Eliz- abeth, could not follow her example. Then the Hyde family, though they had become great, were divided among themselves. The Earl of Clarendon was a steady Jacobite, and, though he took no part in active politics, he declined to take the oath of allegiance to his niece. Her other uncle, Rochester, took, as we shall see, a share, but not a dangerous one, in the service of his niece. * The birth of the queen's grandfather is thus recorded : " The sixth year of the reign of our most gracious sovereign lord King James, ann. dom. 1608. In this year, the two-and-twentye day of February, Henry Hide of Dinton, gent., had a son christened, named Edward."— Lister, Life of Clarendon, i. i6 THE BEGINNING. PRINCE GEORGE. 17 f. » ,1 II i I On the other hand, it would not have been matter of substantial gratification to the people to boast that their sovereign s mother inherited the blood of a foreign royalty attached to the wrong religion. Three Popish queens in succession had troubled the land with enmities and suspicions. If such a matter crossed people's thoughts, it would tell more against than in favour of Queen Anne, that her grandmother was Henrietta, the French wife of Charles 1. In the year 1683 the Princess Anne had been married to George, Prince of Denmark, the brother of King Christian V. He was forty-eight years old at the time of his wife's accession. The neutrality of his character, and the insignificance of his position, have given him something like a conspicuous place in his- tory, since it is difficult to understand how one not incapacitated by mental disease, in the midst of the temptations to ambitious aspirations so closely haunt- ing him, could have kept so utterly out of the notice of the world. On one occasion only is he known to have taken, or rather proposed to take, a step in active life — it was to accompany King William to the war in Ireland. But the sagacious leader, who knew that the prince's rank would throw him perpet- ually in the way, would take no such encumbrance to the serious task before him. The one thing for which Prince George is chiefly known to the world, is the occasion when his monotonous stupidity prompted the solitary jest that twinkles through the gloomy career and character of King James ; and it came at the gloomiest moment of his days, when his family and kindred were one by one deserting him.^ ^ 1 " What ! is Est-il-possible gone too 1 " in aUusion to the exclama- But he brought with him a spiritual qualification so valuable in those critical times that it made his treatment of the things of this world a matter of no moment. So far as he could be anything in religion he was a Protestant — a member of the house that tion by the prince as each desertion was reported. See the story at length in Macaiilay's ninth chapter. If utterances like the following got notice and sympathy among those who had the destinies of the empire in their hands, the appropriate disposal of Prince George must have been a troublesome affair : — " To begin with his Birth— Prince George of Denmark is second son of Frederick III., late king of Denmark, and Uncle to Christian V., the present king. He was born at Copenhagen in April 1653, and in 1668 he went to Travel into several parts of Europe. " As he came into the World with all the advantages of a Eoyal Birth and Education, so he has rendered both yet more conspicuous by liis matchless Vertues. By these (tho' he is not crown'd) he hath a Title to all our Hearts. " Thus the morning of his Life was clear and calm ; and ever since, his whole Life has been a continued Series of Heroick Actions ; which he began so Early that he was no sooner nam'd in the World but it was with Joy and Admiration. " Even the first Blossoms of his Youth paid us all that could be ex- pected from a ripening Manhood ; while he practised but the Rvdiments of War, he out- went all other Captains ; and has found none to sur- pass, but himself alone. The opening of his Glory was like that of Light. He shone to us from far, and disclos'd his first Beams on dis- .tant Nations. He Fought several Battles in Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, &c. And wherever he charg'd in Person, he was a Conqueror. To describe all his Victories would require a Volume ;" and so forth. — The History of Living Men, or Characters of the Royal Family, the Ministers of State, and the Principal Natives of the Three Kingdoms ; being an Essay on a Thousand Persons that are now living, with a Poem upon each Life. Dedicated to his Royal Highness Prince George of Denmark. P. 33 et seq. In the days when the penalties of sedition applied to any words tending to bring disparagement or ridicule on rulers and potentates, such a passage as this could surely have been proved to be seditious. Doubtless there is no case precisely in point, but strangely enough the arguments supporting Defoe's conviction for "The Shortest Way" fully apply to the logic of such a case— viz., that the words profess to be uttered in a just and commendable cause, but by their hyperbolical exaggera- tion they tend to arouse contempt instead of approval and respect. VOL. I. B h i8 THE BEGINNING. THE YOUNG DUKE OF GLOUCESTER. 19 had sent to Britain a Protestant queen, the wife of James L, followed by three successive Popish queens. It seemed to be thought necessary that something in the shape of official dignity should be conferred on Prince George, and he was elevated to that of " Gen- eralissimo of all her Majesty's forces by land and sea." The etymological structure of the title is ques- tionable, and it had no practical meaning ; for there was no precedent for any powers or duties attached to an office so named. A time had been, however, when George of Den- mark might have been a mighty person, as the sire of a line of sovereigns. Again and again that hope seemed realised, only to be blasted, plunging the public life of England into ever-renewed anxieties. The country had seen the two Protestant daughters of King James married — the elder twenty-one years old, and the younger nineteen. The hope attached to Queen Mary died gradually away ; but throughout the married life of her sister, while she was yet the Princess Anne, the hope had revived over and over again, only to be blasted. The promised children were so numerous that it is a question whether there were more than seventeen. Of those who existed long enough to die with the names they were baptised in, there were six— Mary, Ann, Sophia, William, a second Mary, and George. One of them, William, created Duke of Gloucester, lived for eleven years. His death in 1701, when Queen Mary had been four years dead, was such a political catastrophe as those only who remember the death of the Princess Charlotte can in some degree realise — in some degree only, for the death of the princess did not devolve on the statesmen of 1818 the perilous duty, to be presently recorded, of search- ing the world for a successor to her inheritance. This boy was one of the instances occurring from time to time, when the fate of millions seems to be bound to one fragile life. As the endurance of that life was momentous, so there was a general concen- tration of all eyes and thoughts upon the boy's health and progress. For a few years these gave confidence to the national hopes. People heard of his precocious capacities — his thirst for knowledge, and his marvel- lous capacity of acquiring it. He promised to be a hero as well as a sage. His chief enjoyment in the intervals of his studies was in drilling and reviewing a regiment of boys of his own age. He had a small park of artillery, and the other military playthings beloved by the boy in whom the nature of the ardent soldier is growing. Tales were told of tournaments and sieges in St George's Hall — one where the prince received a wound and absolutely bled. He was lik- ened to Prince Henry, the eldest son of King James I. ; and when he died, it was remembered how this elder brother of his grandfather might, had he lived, have averted the disasters that so long des- olated the land. But the two were very different. Henry was a robust and ardent athlete; but with Anne's only son the mimicry of a soldier's life was but the imparting of some touches of incident and variety to the lethargic life of an unhealthy boy. Perhaps acting the soldier and the hunter was a wholesome variation of the dreary routine of mental discipline under a succession of teachers, each endeav- ouring to pour into the child's intellect the whole ^ 20 THE BEGINNING. EXTINCTION OF A DYNASTY. 21 \ I bulk of his own pedantic learning; but the story leaves a painful impression that, had the boy been let alone, he might have lived to be a good king. Bishop Burnet, who was chief among his instruc- tors, thus describes his own contribution to the child's acquirements : " I went through geography with him. I explained to him the forms of government in every country, and the interests and trade of that country, and what was both good and bad in it. I acquainted him with all the great revolutions that had been in the world ; and gave him a copious account of the Greek and Roman histories, and of Plutarch's Lives. The last thing I explained to him was the Gothic Constitution, and the beneficiary and feudal laws. I talked of these things at dijfferent times nearly three hours a-day."^ On the 24th of July 1700, the tenth anniversary of his birth was celebrated with due splendour. " After the ceremony was over, the Duke found him- self fatigued and indisposed, and the next day he was very sick, and complained of his throat ; the third day he was hot and feverish." On the 29th, "the physicians who attended him thought it probable that he might recover; but about eleven at night he was upon a sudden seized with a difficulty of breathing, and could swallow nothing, so that he expired before midnight, being ten years and five days old." 2 1 Own Time, ii. 211. 8 There is a portrait of the Duke of Gloucester by Kneller, well known through an engraving by Houbraken. It has not the fulness in- herited by his mother from the Hydes, and has more resemblance to the known portraits of the exiled Stewarts than to those of the boy's ances- tors. It has a strong likeness to the portraits of his uncle, " the old So by the death of an unhealthy boy the destinies of a mighty empire were set adrift. The uncom- promising bigots of the divine right of kings, with sensations akin to exultation, saw here the dispen- sation of a quick and terrible judgment on the viola- tors of a sacred law. Even those who had rejected the Popish and accepted the Protestant Stewart as a compromise, were uneasy, and remembered the conduct of Queen Anne at the period of her father's flight.1 A generation trained in the belief that no other dynasty throughout the world is so firmly rooted as Pretender," taken in youth ; but with a like physical debility there is more intellectual spirit. A portrait of the mother and child by Dahl is, or recently was, in the National Portrait Gallery at South Kensington. There is an honest touch of the natural in its whole tone, refreshingly in contrast with the conventional State pictures of the period. It is attributed to the year 1695, when the boy was five years old. His face is delicate, but not unhealthy. There is, however, this peculiarity in it, that the eye catching it without premonition is apt to take it for the likeness of a girl. 1 The belief that the death of Queen Anne's children was a judgment on her for her conduct to her father, lingered down to the present century, and appeared occasionally in quarters where it might not be expected, as, for instance, the following : " Every feeling of the heart rises in in- dignation against the unnatural deed, and seeks to hide it in that blaze of light which encircles the brilliant events of her reign. If heaven in this world ever interposes its avenging arm between guilt and happi- ness, may we not consider the loss of seventeen children as the peculiar penalty which it exacted from a mother who had broken the heart of the most indulgent father ? " This passage will be found in the Edin- burgh Encyclopaedia, conducted by David Brewster, LL.D., under the head " Anne " in the alphabetical arrangement. The following passage is found in a quarter more congenial to such utterances : " Queen Mary II. and Anne, though apparently prospering in the sight of men, were not allowed to go unpunished by the just vengeance of God. Of Anne's seventeen children, not one survived to inherit the guilty parent's coronet."— The Descendants of the Stuarts : an Unchronicled Page in England's History, by WiUiam Townend (1858), p. 58. 22 THE BEGINNING. SEARCH FOR A NEW LINE. 23 ! the house of Hanover, has difficulty in realising the influence of one calamity treading on the heels of another ; and how the " fear of change perplexing nations" drove statesmen, as well as those less highly endowed, to desperate or desponding conclusions. But if any of those who profess to penetrate and announce the secrets of omniscience were to argue from results, instead of classifying the calamities of the period as a judgment for sins and follies, it would be a more rational conclusion that they were administered in order that a great people might have the satisfaction of overcoming all, and of proving the fle: ability as well as the strength of their political institutions. With this death the fruits of the PwCvolution Settle- ment were lost, and its work had to be done over again. It stimulated the leaders of the party to rapid and decided action, that ominous events were reported from abroad. Louis XIV. had formally recognised the claim of the Pretender, and the quar- rel that led to the war of the Spanish succession had broken forth. In a new settlement of the succession, the boy who had been sedulously trained at St Ger- mains by monks and Jesuit fathers was not to be named, save in oath of abjuration and sentence of attainder. There was, then, a process unparalleled in any legislative assembly, alike for its boldness and the cold logic of its method, — an exhaustive analysis of the royal family in all its branches, until Parlia- ment should reach the precise object it was in search of — a Protestant line. The promoters of this object determined to leave as little as possible to the inter- vention of accident. Since they were again to change the line of descent, let them do it securely, however far they went from home to achieve that object. It would not be securely achieved by offering the crown to any near relation of the Stewart family that would engage to live and die a Protestant. The monarchies of Europe were divided between Papal and Protestant dynasties ; and it was in one of this latter, with its Protestant traditions of policy and alliances, that safety lay. Next to the direct line were the descendants of Henrietta, the ogly daughter of Charles I.; She was married to the King of Sardinia, and their descend- ants ramified through other Popish dynasties, includ- ing the royal families of France and Spain. It was necessary, therefore, to go a generation further back, and look to the descendants of King James, through his daughter Elizabeth, the unfortunate Queen of Bo- hemia. Of these, the first in order was the grand- daughter of Elizabeth, married to the Duke of Orleans, and again running the search into the most dangerous of all quarters — the Popish and despotic monarchy of France, the " natural enemy " of Britain. Six other families of this line had to be passed over, until at last the analysis reached Sophia, Duchess of Hanover, a Protestant, the widow of a Protestant, whose son, also a Protestant, was forty years old, and a good soldier — a desirable recommendation to the destiny opened to him. Had no house properly qualified been found among the eight dynasties de- scending from the daughter of King James, the analysis must have gone back to the descendants of Henry VIII. The momentous enactment creating the new dyn- 24 THE BEGINNING. I asty is in these simple terms : *' Be it enacted and declared by the Kings most excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons, in this present Parlia- ment assembled, and by the authority of the same, that the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess-Dowager of Hanover, daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, be and is hereby declared to be the next in succession, in the Protestant line, to the imperial crown and dignity of the said realms of England, France, and Ireland, with the dominions and territories thereunto belonging, after his Majesty and the Princess Anne of Denmark, and in default of issue of the said Princess Anne and of his Majesty respectively."^ The clause is hidden among the many details of " An Act for the further limitation of the crown and better securing the rights and liberties of the subject," some of these being "rights and liberties " held to have been especially infringed by King William. Few measures carry on the face of parliamentary record so little aspect of a party triumph, of a conflict and a victory. It was quietly passed as an inevitable afiair of routine; and it was observed at the time that the Bill went through the usual stages in thin Houses. But all had been settled outside. Either it must pass as a matter of necessity, or it must be abandoned until a better opportunity came, probably as the result of a new revolution. To have opposed it would not have been merely the legitimate tactic 1 12 & 13 Will. III. c. 2. THE HOUSE OF HANOVER. 25 of a usual parliamentary Opposition ; it would have been a declaration of civil war. Long after the crisis had passed away, there arose, even in the hearts of the devotees of divine right, a sense of legitimate security in the dynastic conditions of the throne. The conditions that superseded the Plantagenets by the Stewarts were certainly legiti- mate ; but they were not satisfactory to Englishmen, who did not believe in " Father Fergus of a hundred kings," and could only carry the race of Stewart to the chief domestic ofiicer of a sovereign of far in- ferior race to the Plantagenets— a sovereign whom, indeed, these claimed as a vassal. But the lustre of the Plantagenets had been tarnished by Elizabeth, whose mother was a commoner. Queen Anne brought the same blemish to the inferior race. Her mother, Anne Hyde, was respectable and respected. She had kept "the whiteness of her soul" under conditions that tripped others of far loftier birth. She was the Pamela of the palace — a lively instance of "virtue rewarded ; " but this was no equivalent for the lustre of royal blood. ^ 1 Such a union was not likely to be achieved in cloudless serenity ; and indeed the storms it raised around the Court sadly disturbed the sunshine of the Restoration. Foul accusations were invented to blast the lady's fame, and had their oscillations of credit and utter contradic- tion. By a strange inversion of the conditions to be naturally antici- pated, the charges got encouragement from her father ; while her fair fame was upheld by the young King Charles, whose notoriety as a selfish voluptuary deserves to be lightened by this redeeming feature. The father's conduct was that of a man whose intellect is disordered by astounding revelations. For the calumnies, if they were true, " he would submit to the good pleasure of God. But if there were any reason to suspect the other"— that is, that his daughter was stainless and hon- estly married to the prince— he said to the Lords Ormond and South- ampton, who had been sent by the king to soothe his irritation, " he was ready to give a positive judgment, in which he hoped their Lord- THE BEGINNING. 'he sovereign qualification was, however, restored to the realm in its highest purity in the descendants of the Guelphs, passing back through the house of Este to connect themselves with some of the illus- trious Roman Gentes. The new dynasty was, indeed, by centuries, older in history even than the Planta- genets. It was natural to find that a race early re- nowned among the German potentates whom the aggrandisement of Charlemagne incorporated with the old Roman empire, could count an ancestry of credit and renown more remote than the races of the North seas, whose introduction to Central Europe was as marauders, attracted by rapacity for the wealth accu- mulated through ages of civilisation.^ ships would concur with him, that the king should immediately cause the woman to be sent to the Tower, and to be cast into a dungeon, under so strict a guard that no person living should be permitted to come to her ; and then that an Act of Parliament should be immedi- ately passed for cutting off her head ; to which he would not only give his consent, but would very willingly be the first man that should propose it." — Life of Clarendon, i. 378, 379. ^ We shall not easily find a more brilliant antithesis to the truth in history than the doctrines about the Hanover succession, nourished — and where that was safe, promulgated— by the Jacobites a hundred and fifty years ago. They arose in pure sincerity — the growth of imperfect methods in archaeological inquiry and in the teaching of history. The dignity of the Electorate was not palpable to those whose knowledge of political institutions was limited to their own country, with a smatter- ing from Greece, Rome, and perhaps France ; and it was a title very open to depreciation. This process naturally culminated in Scotland, through comparison with the illustrious race of Fergus. It found expression in the mingled wailings and execrations of "the Jacobite minstrelsy," where, in a sort of bathos of political comparison, it was found at last safe to hold that the Elector of the Empire was something akin to the Scots laird who held of the Crown : and once in the cate- gory of laird, the reduction to a humble grade of lairdship was simple — as, for instance : — " Wha the dell hae we got for a king But a wee, wee German lairdie? And whan we gaed tae bring him hame, He was delving in his kail-yairdie." THE queen's FRIENDS. 27 The queen's relations on the mother s side neutral in politics by their position and opinions, her husband neutral by the limitation of his capacities, her chil- dren all gone, and those who looked to the heritage of her empire selected from among distant strangers, there was a peculiar isolation in her position; and hence, perhaps, it befell that the queen's personal friends had far more influence on the destinies of her reiffn, than her husband or her nearest blood rela- tions. If the pages that are to follow tell the accurate truth, this influence will be conspicuous in the tenor of our story. The growth of her friendships is touch- ing in itself, as an effort to find something in the world dearer than greatness and power, and to enjoy a little of that simple life — so hard to be reached from the steps of the throne — where friends can confide their thoughts and aspirations to each other without their being trumpet - tongued by the un- scrupulous parasites that haunt the steps of royalty. And if it was a weakness, it was grandly exercised — it gained for the recasting of Europe that one whose name is yet the greatest among warriors, — if we count in our estimate only those whose science and achieve- ments we know with sufficient distinctness for com- parison. It secured the greatest financial minister that ever ruled Britain; and it was said — and ap- parently is true — that Marlborough, who had a powerful insight into character, would only under- take the command of the army if Godolphin were at the treasury to find and pay the money necessary for the effective support of the war. And yet, by the nation gaining both safety and glory through this, there was found in it the taint not only of royal 1)1 28 THE BEGINNING. favour, but of ''a family arrangement;" for the lord high treasurer's son and heir was married to the soldier's daughter and heiress, and it was in Godolphin's line that the honours gained by Marlborough were to last. Every one who has glanced, however slightly, over the history of this reign, becomes familiar with the name and power of Marlborough's wife, the mighty Duchess Sarah. The extent of the power held by her in Court and Council is one of the points demand- ing caution in dealing with the history of the period. It has many of the attractions of romance, creating a tendency in the seekers of the picturesque to foster it, till it becomes to the historical critic something like what the gardener finds in some classes of plants endowed with a rank prolificness that disturbs the harmony of his distribution.^ 1 Take, for instance, the * History of Great Britain from the Revolu- tion in 1688 to the Accession of George L, translated from the Latin Manuscript of Alexander Cunningham, Esq., Minister from George I. to the Republic of Venice:' 2 vols. 4to (1787). Within the palace the reign opens thus (i. 258) : "The queen, by the advice of Marl- borough, who had now the chief direction of affairs, and made no dif- ference between those who attended and those who did not, readily excused all such persons as through excessive grief or regard to decency did not appear that day at Court. From this circumstance men pre- saged everything from the hands of the queen that was fair and hon- ourable. " In the first place, care was taken by public proclamation to order all things to remain in tlie same state as they were in the time of the late king. The queen commanded her magistrates and people to continue in their duty as before, till such time as her Majesty should nominate and appoint other magistrates, and give fresh directions for the govern- ment of the kingdom by her own authority. But within the palace itself there was a very busy market of all offices of Government. For the <|ueen's relations being kept at a distance, all things were transacted by the sole authority of one woman, to whom there was no access but by the golden road ; and it was to no purpose for the Earl of Rochester to set forth his own fidelity, duty, affection, and the rights of consanguin- THE CHURCHILLS. 29 The best authority sets down that the marriage of Colonel John Churchill with Sarah Jennings " must ity " To the word " woman " the editor of the book appends in a note "The Duchess of Marlborough." Then in the index, under the head of Anne he has, " Great influence the Duchess of Marlborough possessed over her, i. 258." Then there is, " Marlborough, Duchess of, her rrreat influence over Queen Anne." Since so much meaning depends on the words " one woman," it would have been desirable to see the passage in the original Latin. , , ^. • e A sketch of the power of Sarah Jennings over the destinies ot Europe by an eloquent French historian, may amuse us by its an- tagonism to our own associations with the character of the British con- stitution ; and yet in the historical facts referred to it is not easy to denv that, as his countrymen say, the author has reason. The death of king William is supposed to have made King Louis comfortable. He was° still f'irt for the great contest, were it necessary ; but he was old and prefen-ed rest-and it seemed to have come. The Dutch, if not backed by England, would be easily settled, and the emperor was too poor to remain in the field without subsidies from England :— ** Mais la nouvelle Reine Anne etoit une femme foible et sans carac- tke • marine au Prince George de Danemarck, homme plus insignifi- cant 'encore Elle se livroit toujours aveuglement a quelque confidente qui acqueroit sur son esprit un absolu pouvoir. Elle etoit alors domi- nee par Sarah Jennings, femme de John Churchill, Comte de Marl- borough, que Guillaume IIL avoit, des le premier j urn precedent nomme commandant en chef de touted les forces dans les Provmces- Unies, et son ambassadeur aupres des Etats Generaux. . . . La Reine Anne le confirma dans les deux fonctions que lui avoient donnees son beau-frere ; elle forma en meme temps un ministere tout compose de ses amis at k la tete du quelle elle pla^a le grand Tresorier Lord Godol- phin. Ainsi une intrigue de femmes donna a I' Angleterre son plus grand general, et la plus haute gloire militaire a laquelle elle se ffit encore elev^e."— Sismondi, Histoire des Frangais, xxvi. 328, 329. Few women unambitious of renown in authorship have spoken to the world through the printing-press so amply as Duchess Sarah has There is first the ^ Account of her Conduct,' edited by Nathaniel Hook in 1742, occasionally cited in these pages. In the same year there were published ^A Review of a late Treatise entituled 'An Account,"' &c.; *A Continuation ' of this Review ; 'A full Vmdica- tion of the Duchess-Dowager of Marlborough ; ' and ' The o her side of the Question.' In 1744, * Memoirs of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough ; and in 1745 tf i«M»r""i« " 70 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. ! all the rest of the world whose consciences do not require the same restriction, and peaceably submit- ting to the laws and government he lives under, as far'as either his right as an Englishman or his duty as a Christian can require." ^ To the bulk of Englishmen of a serious class— and the Dissenters were to a man " serious "—" schism " was a heavy charge to be imputed, and a heavy weight to be felt on the conscience. The doubts and troubles of many pious writers of the day are directed always as amply to this dificulty as to the great essential questions of orthodoxy in faith. To Dissenters of Scotland— Covenanter, Cameronian, or Macmillanite— there was no such dubiety. The word schism was not much in use among these fraternities, but if any one were bound to find a meaning for it, he would apply it to all who differed from himself and his set. A time had been, indeed, when the English Presbyterian could have fairly denounced as schismatic any one who questioned the Confession of Faith, or offered disobedience to the Directory of Public Worship. So it was in the glorious days of the Westminster Assembly, when it was laying down the creed and constitution that were immediately to hold rule over all Protestantism, and ultimately over all Christendom. But that was an affair of sixty years ago, and the glorious fabric had been scattered to the winds by storm after storm sweeping past from divers points in the political horizon. The great men who gave life and lustre to that Assembly had now long gone to their rest. As in the 1 An Inquiry into Occasional Conformity : writings of the author of The True-born Englishman, i. 388. THE NONCONFORMISTS. 71 traditions of some great battle, after all the veteran leaders have been removed, those who fought as raw recruits become memorable as each arrives at old age and drops away, — so the skirts of the departing Assembly men were honoured. The last of them who lingered among men was great enough to dignify the end of all, though his greatness was not in ecclesiastical matters — this was John Wallis, the mathematician, grammarian, and teacher of the deaf to speak.^ Apart from natural regrets for the historical lustre that had departed with the skirts of the potent Assembly, the Presbyterian dissenters were reminded of incidental misfortunes in their present lot when they thought of the men of the old time. The leaders in the Assembly had been educated at the universities. So, too, had many of the succeeding generation of Nonconforming ministers, some of whom still lived. Of these were Calamy, Howe, and Bates. The restrictions that excluded their followers were too much in harmony with the long pressure of the narrow interests of " the college," on the catholic spirit of " the university," as an institution where all souls thirsting after knowledge might come and drink their fill. No doubt profound classical scholars and skilful mathematicians were bred by the universities of Eng- land ; but it could not be otherwise where so affluent an apparatus for teaching and studying was available. But co-operating with the internal economy that 1 October 28th this year (1703) died Dr John Wallis, Savilian Pro- fessor of Geometry in the University of Oxford, and last surviving member of the Assembly of Divines. — Calamy : Own Life, ii. 21. if; il »!) M 72 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. I m n^ } made the colleges available as a right only to the very wealthy, the exclusion of Dissenters served to make university education one of the distinguishing badges of a class, rendering it an object of ambition rather to attach Oxon. or Cantab, to the name, than to prove the high tone of the education by the know- ledge and accomplishments it has imparted. The tendency of all this was, until in recent times a wiser spirit began to prevail, that the frequenters of the universities were a social caste, dividing the male population of England into university men and the others ; so that any exhibition of the acquirements peculiar to Oxford or Cambridge respectively, by one who had not acquired them at their legitimate source, partook of the nature of a pretence,— like a man of meagre means making exhibition of the attributes of wealth, as by hunting or horse-racing. That there were three bodies standing under the common shade of nonconformity, does not appear to have made any one of them stronger than it would have been alone. Then, at the time of our making their acquaintance, the great Antinomian controversy had been raging through each and all of them. The reproach of Antinomianism held a slightly sarcastic inference of superstitious tenden- cies; and those who were assailed by it retaliated with a charge of Socinianism, inferring the deeper reproach of a tendency to infidelity. Here there was room for wider and deeper hatreds than any that could arise where a taste for simplicity was offended by pomps and ceremonies, or the possessor of a tender conscience was unable to reconcile some item in his brother's creed with the precepts of THE NONCONFORMISTS. 73 Scripture. Hence, wherever there was a considerable body of Dissenters, there were opposite parties cast- ing at each other words harder and bitterer than any that the Established Church had thrown at either. The laymen who made the congregations of Dissent- ing ministers were generally, as they have been in later times, men endowed with the plain but substantial virtues of the middle-class Englishman. They were moral in their lives without professing the painful austerity of the earlier Puritans; they were peaceful citizens when let alone, and men of their word in their business transactions. They were industrious and frugal, and as many of them were able men of business, they had a tendency to accumulate wealth. In London, where there were many capitalists among them, they were a powerful body ; and by a discreet use of the privilege of occasional conformity, they often held rank and office in the city and the paro- chial corporations. The wealth of the Dissenters enabled them to pur- chase influence and respect, but such tributes were tinged by a slight infusion of the venerable prejudice of the Christian against the rich Jew, and of the Mohammedan against the Parsee. It did not recon- cile the haughty Churchmen to the wealth of these neighbours that it enabled them to contribute to public benefactions, and even to aid the State itself in raising loans, and in facilitating the commerce in the national stock. Another use made by the Dissenters of the fruits of their industry gave a still more offensive feature to their liberality. It was frequently an object 1* 74 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. CHURCHMEN AND DISSENTERS. 7S of their pride that their pastor should be well en- dowed in worldly goods, and so stand in invidi- ous contrast with the pecuniary condition of his neighbour who represented the Establishment. It is true that the curate or the equally humbly endowed incumbent of a *' small living" was qualified to rise to a bishop's throne and affluence, or for the enjoy- ment of a rich deanery. But there were multitudes who knew that the chance of such a fortunate con- summation was a virtual nullity ; and then, close at hand, was the minister of the meeting-house, whom the parochial incumbent was bound in clerical etiquette to despise, living on the easy competence provided for him by an attached and generous flock.^ \ 1 Tom Brown, in his usual happy way, gives life and individuality to the attractions of the Nonconforming interest in the eyes of a worldly- minded scholar selecting his lot as a pastor. In the search after some " curacy, vicarage, or parsonage," he reflects thus : "I may possibly meet in a short time with some rich impropriator, who receives two or three hundreds a-year in ty thes, who may, out of Christian charity or generous liberality, vouchsafe to promise me ten pounds a-year besides a Sunday pudding." " But to put the best case, we shall suppose a vicarage or parsonage to become vacant of an hundred pounds value in common estimation, and the poor painful priest, standing fair in the opinion of the neighbourhood, is recommended to it : it is ten to one but there is an abigail in the patron's house that must be married." " If there be not anything of that here, and all must be done by hard silver or gold, or something equivalent, as a lease of tythe or the like— I am certainly ruined. The oath of simony wiU be a continual scourge to me, and I may wear away my unhappy life before I shall receive the money I have paid or engaged to pay." Then there are fees and costs for wax and parchments, composition for first-fruits. "The church- wardens tell me that they have a sequestration upon my living, and the profits are at their disposal till I have taken it off : and withal, that a considerable sum of money has been disbursed by them for the service of the cure during the vacancy, which must be repaid them." We follow him home to " an old rotten house ready to fall upon his head," whence he continues his story. " Besides tenths to be yearly paid to the king, and the charges of visitations, by way of procurations, synodals, and I know not what more ; the charge of my attending upon The Dissenters were to a man champions of the Revolution Settlement, but even this claim was slightly tainted in the eyes of the Churchmen who competed with them for the same merit. The Church my superiors when they are pleased to command me ; the charge of entertaining oflicers, and I know not how many sorts of men coming to me upon public business, — I shall find a charge to lie heavily upon me from my own parish. Hospitality must be kept, and none of my par- ishioners must go from me with dry lips," and per contra. " When I come to demand my dues for defraying that charge, and the mainte- nance of my family, I shall find it a hard matter to get them. If I be minded to farm out my tithes, my parishioners will bid me half the worth of them. If I take them in kind they will cheat me of little less than the half. And that which will vex me most of all, I must not dare to tell them of their injustice, for if I do I shall certainly have their ill-will, and as many mischievous tricks played me as they can possible." These items of sordid servitude are occasionally put in contrast with the happier field selected by the student for his own Christian labours. " If a church will not call me I can call a church, and without a penny charge receive the profits thereof, being king, bishop, archdeacon, and everything myself. I shall be wholly on the gaining side, and not one person the better for my preferment." " Suppose me then in a congregation as their pastor, teacher, holder- forth — call it what you please. You must know that they will be a select number of people (not like your churches, a herd made up of a few sheep and a multitude of goats), most of them of the sweet female sex (whose kindness towards their spiritual pastors or teachers is never less than their zeal for what they teach them), scattered up and down here and there in several of your parishes. And for the better edifica- tion of these precious souls, it will be in my power to choose the place of my residence or abode ; and if I do not choose a convenient place 'tis my own fault. Instead of an old rotten parsonage or vicarage house, I promise myself forty, fifty, or threescore good houses, where I shall be entertained with such fulness of delight, yea, and empire too (not like your pitiful curates or chaplains that must sneak to the groom or butler), that even the gentlemen that pretend to make gods of their landlords will be apt to envy me : and if I resolve to enter into the matrimonial state, I shall be strangely unfortunate if, instead of an abigail, I meet not with some opulent widow, or some tender-hearted virgin of no ordinary fortune." " No obligation to hospitality will lie upon me, and I shall be troubled with few visitors but such as will bring their entertainment with them, if they send' it not before them : 1^ THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. li had provided the army and gained the victory of the Eevolution. It cannot be doubted that the Dissent- ers of England, and the Presbyterians of Scotland who became the Establishment, had resisted the temp- tation of the indulgences, and refused to acknow- ledge that a repeal of the penal laws uttered by the king alone was a valid act of government. But some slight influence from what in Roman history was called the Fabian policy adhered to them. They had obtained gifts from the politic king, and some of them were yet enjoying offices which had been conferred on them when King James made his futile eflbrts to convince them and the rest of the world, that it was his design to treat them as well as he treated his fellow-Romanists, and to establish a general tolera- tion and equality of rights among all classes of Christians. Then, on his other side, the Churchman had to take an estimate of another class of Nonconformists who were called Nonjurors. Of lay Nonjurors we hear almost nothing ; but the clergy who chose that path were very conspicuous. To them the High Churchman, who despised the Dissenting minister, would sometimes look with reverence, as to one who trod a path higher and holier than his own. The representatives of the class were, of course, those five bishops who, out of the seven that had been com- mitted to the Tower, had lost their temporal rank I shall not be liable to pay one penny out of my income to bishops or chancellors, to church or poor— no, nor to the king and queen. And what a happiness, think you, will this be, to live under a Government and enjoy so much good under its protection, and not part with one farthing towards the support of it."— Dialogue between Two Oxford Scholars, published in the Works of Mr Thomas Brown, i. 6-11. 4 CHURCHMEN AND DISSENTERS. 77 and emoluments because they would not take the oath of allegiance, which indicated an adoption of the Revolution Settlement. They endured bondage rather than submit to a decree which their allegiance to their Church taught them that a king had no right to impose on them. They sacrificed the world and its gifts rather than depart from their allegiance to that same king, in the functions which they held that he and he alone could legitimately exercise. The death of King William was the loss of their champion and protector to those adherents of the Church of England who, as a distinction from the ''High Church," were called the "Low Church'' party. They were those whose attachment to the Church went no farther than conformity — the bare acceptance of its hierarchy and ceremonies. It was natural that two bodies of men so significantly sev- ered in popular nomenclature should prepare for war against each other. There followed a conflict stained by follies and malignant passions. In its historical development, however, one can see its slow but sure tendency to strengthen the Revolution Settlement, and that chiefly through the influence of the condi- tion, that the High Church counted on the sympathy of the queen. This familiarised the opponents or dubious friends of that Settlement to the rule of a sovereign who, near as /she was to the line of legiti- macy and divine rigly;, had nothing higher than a parliamentary title. > The contest began in a blow aimed at the Non- conformists or Dissenters. King William had been dead little more than half a year — the first Parlia- ment of Queen Anne was but three weeks old — when \; ili 78 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. :; i the Commons were stirred by the " Bill for prevent- ing Occasional Conformity." The '* conformity " which, though only occasional, carried the privilege of permanence, and therefore was offensive to the zealous and steady Conformists, was conformity with the provisions of the celebrated Test and Corporation Acts. The Test Act had been memorable in history by fulfilling the design of its promoters in driving the Duke of York from the post of Lord High Admiral, and supplying him with a significant hint that, unless he abandoned his championship of Popery and 'arbitrary power, he would not be permitted to retain the higher place at the head of the State that was likely to become his by hereditary succession. It was called " An Act for preventing Dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants." With the verbosity of definition deemed necessary in statutes of a penal character, it comprehended every Govern- ment ofiice, and enjoined that the holder of it shall take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and "shall also receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, according to the usage of the Church of England," '' in some parish church, upon some Lord's Day, commonly called Sunday, immediately after divine service on Sunday." Conditions of time and place were provided for facilitating the detection of defaulters; and if the occasion passed without the compliance being recorded, the defaulter's office was forfeited. There was a declaration, too, of belief— *'that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration there- of by any person whatsoever.'' All the phraseology V.i\ OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY. 79 of the Act expressive of alarm and denunciation was levelled against Papists and Popery.^ But the substantive qualification for office of taking the Sacrament according to the usage of the Church of England, and within a parish church, technically excluded all who, from whatever motive, failed to pay this homage to the Church of England. The Corporation Act dates from the beginning of the reign of Charles IL It required from all magis- trates and officers of corporations an abjuration of the Solemn League and Covenant, "and that the same was in itself an unlawful oath, and imposed upon the subjects of this realm against the known laws and liberties of the kingdom." Forty years after the Restoration there were few champions of the Covenant in England. But there was a further con- dition that all corporate officers must have taken the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England within a year before acceptance of office ; and here the Nonconformists in a body were struck. 2 But the blow was not political death to them. They were not excluded from office for creed or opinion. If they chose to perform certain conditions they were as eligible to office as the stanchest Churchman. All that was necessary was, at proper time and place, to receive the sacrament of the Church of England. Many gave this testimony of conformity, and had satisfactory reasons to give for it. They could be in friendship with the Church of England, though not of it. Both acknowledged one common enemy in Popery, and both were alive to 1 25 ch. ii. c. 2. 2 13 ch. ii. Stat. 2, chap. i. it III n,1 80 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY. 81 the policy of comforting and supporting each other against the common danger. It was a good thing for the Churches, standing on the common ground of Protestantism, to hold communion and Christian intercourse with each other in matters not involving the essentials of faith and consequent salvation. If the Dissenter was faithful, in all essentials, to his own creed, it mattered not that on occasion he par- took of the ceremonials of another denomination of Protestant Christians. So one class of Occasional Conformists justified themselves. But to those who were more fundamen- tally rigid, there was an ampler justification. As they did not believe in any saving efficacy from the acts they were required to perform, these acts were not to them religious observances. They were merely civil conditions of qualification for office. To those who indulged themselves in this vein it was a- support and refuge to reflect on the consolatory words of Elisha, when Naaman hinted the probable necessity for bowing himself down in the house of Rimmon. The Churchman's answer to both reasonings was, that the Corporation and Test Acts were passed to reserve the sources of public emolument for his own sole enjoyment ; and here stepped in the Occasional Conformist, by a legal quibble and an act of palp- able insincerity, to reap a share in the spoil. There was still a third class of Casual Conformists, less odious to him than to the serious classes of Conform- ists. These were the very considerable body who had little or no religion, and who were as ready to participate in the rites of the Church of England as to perform any other duty of an uninteresting kind. These were the objects of sweeping general attacks on the growing immorality and infidelity of the age ; but they lived on, enjoying their emoluments in personal peace, all the rancour of attack being against those who seriously professed religion, but a religion of the wrong kind. Calamy, in narrating a conference with Bishop Burnet at the climax of the Occasional Conformity contest, says : " We told his lordship, that the com- municating with the Church of England was no new practice among Dissenters, nor of a late date, but had been used by some of the most eminent of our minis- ters ever since 1662 with a design to show their charity towards that Church, notwithstanding they apprehended themselves bound in conscience ordi- narily to separate from it ; and that it had been also practised by a number of the most understanding people among them before the so doing was neces- sary to qualify for a place." ^ Among the casual but instructive traces of a sym- pathy between the Low Churchman and the Non- conformists, it is something to find the sincere mind of Calamy deriving comfort in these words of the restless casuist Chillingworth : " If a Church, sup- posed to want nothing necessary, require me to profess against my conscience that I believe some error, though never so small and innocent, which I do not believe, and will not allow me her com- munion but upon this condition — in this case the Church, for requiring this condition, is schismatical, and not I for separating from the Church." And ^ Historical Account of my own Life (2d ed.) i 473. VOL. L F If .1 82 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. as an example : " If there were any society of Chris- tians that held there were no antipodes, notwith- standing this error I might communicate with them. But if I could not do so without profess- ing their belief in this matter, then I suppose I should be excused from schism if I should forsake their communion rather than profess myself to be- lieve that which I do not believe."^ It is perhaps rather curious than important to find instances where the secular pomps of the Occa- sional Conformist in the office that his conformity had enabled him to fill are transferred to the con- venticle. The most conspicuous among these inci- dents is a few years older than the period we are now in, but it worked itself into the history of that period as a picturesque object of violent criti- cism from both sides. It is thus told : " In No- vember 1697, King William, passing through the city, Sir Humphry Edwin, Lord Mayor this year, carried the sword before him, according to custom, in a gown of crimson velvet. "This gentleman not only worshipped God pub- licly with the Dissenters according to his usual cus- tom, but carried the regalia with him, which very much disgusted many of the Church of England. Tragical were the exclamations and complaiuts made on this occasion. Among others, Dr Nichols tells the world that, ' to the great reproach of the laws and of the city magistracy he carried the sword with him to a nasty conventicle that was kept in one of the city halls ; which horrid crime 1 Quotation from " Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to Salvation." — Calamy : Own Life, i. 228. OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY. 33 one of his own party defended by giving this arro- gant reason for it, that by the Act of Parliament by which they have their liberty, their religion was as much established as ours.' " Calamy, at the conclu- sion from this his translation from the Latin of the angry High Churchman, remarks apologetically, — "Many heartily wished that this action had been waived, as tendiDg to enrage, yet were utterly to seek for the horridness of the crime. Nor could they discern the great arrogance of the plea when the religion owned in churches and meetings, having the same object in worship, the same rule of faith and life, the same essential principles, and the same aim and creed, cannot difier in any capital matter. The allowance of the law is of necessity a sufficient estab- lishment. However, this measure drew unhappy con- sequences after it, both in this reign and in that which succeeded.' " ^ How easily Dissent could shal^e hands with Estab- lishment is curiously exemplified in an incident coming under the close personal notice of Calamy. His neighbour and fellow-Nonconformist, Mr Oldfield, had been ofiered a solid preferment in the Church, through the intervention of a friend who owned a cure in the Establishment. Oldfield, after maturely considering the offer, was constrained to reject it, but as it would be a decided advancement to his friend whose living was less lucrative, he naturally put the question. Why not take it yourself ? No. His friend had undergone a change of opinion since he had entered on his present charge. He could not repeat what he did then. There was nothing in the duties 1 Calamy : Own Life, i. 400, 401. ■ 'H 84 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. i' ' of his charge to offend his conscience, but there would be in the ceremonial and obligations incident to the acceptance of any new charge. It might be difficult to admit the sufficiency of so narrow a scruple were it not strengthened by the substantial nature of the sacrifice rendered to it.^ We must suppose that in such instances had the scruples come before the time of taking orders in the Church of England the orders would not have been taken but the scruple was not strong enough to drag the acceptor back. On the other hand, there was lit- tle disposition to stigmatise the passing from Dissent into the Establishment ; and it did not always earn the character of vile and treacherous apostasy so apt to be attributed to such defections by narrow and e.xclusive religious communities. Such communities are generally fastidious in securing their church edi- fices and other temporalities from all risk of passing into heterodox hands ; and hence, while under the impression that because they take no endowments from the State they are free from the authority of the secular arm, they often become entangled m costly and harassing litigations, dragging their ten- 1 He would fain have yielded to the temptation " in hope of his doing good, and being more useful than he had any prospect of being i„ the state he was in ; yet, as for the changing of his Imng he mu be excused ; adding, that though he had no scruple remaining when he took possession of his living, against giving his assent and consent, and was not willing to lose the capacity of service he was in ''X tl^;*/"^";^; vet as to giving his assent and consent now, he had such objections C;Zt it as he could not get over.'-An Historical Account ol my own Life, &c., by Edmund Calamy, D.D.: i. 266. The editor of Calamv's life remarks that the same incapacity to accept promotion overtook Dr Samuel Clarke. He was satisfied to remain rector ot sljames's, but as to further prefem.ent, "he would take nothing which required his subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles. OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY. 85 derest mysteries through scornful criticism on ques- tions of ownership of lands and buildings. It has been noted that the titles to the church edifices of Dissenting bodies at that period were often so ad- justed as to facilitate absorption into the Establish- ment on the removal of existing impediments to an ecclesiastical fusion.^ Calamy tells us how, in his capacity of spiritual adviser, he was consulted by a gentleman " who has publicly declared himself in his judgment on the side of the Nonconformists as to their capital plea of a further reformation both as to worship and discipline, and has publicly communicated with them at the Lord's Table as well as with the Established Church, and has pleaded for such interchangeable communion with each party as requisite to the supporting that little charity that there is yet left amongst us." The practical question on which he sought solution and assurance was, '' whether such a gentleman may with a safe conscience for a while withdraw from all the worshipping assemblies of the Nonconformists, in hope and prospect of a considerable public post in which he may (probably) be capable of doing much service to the public, and particularly of serving the ^ It naturally occasionally happened that the transference of the property to the Establishment had not the unanimous assent of all con- cerned — pastor and flock. The great pulpit orator, Daniel Burgess, lost his chapel in Drury Lane — a spot he loved as best suited for the exer- cise of his powers, since it was in Queen Anne's reign, as it remained long afterwards, the centre and headquarters of the profligacy of Lon- don. The building does not now exist, but its site is easily recognis- able, as it stood between the dreary little churchyard of Drury and the theatre. When the building passed to the Establishment it was re- paired and decorated, and the raising the funds for this purpose by a theatrical performance, gave Defoe an opportunity for enlivening the town with a witty lampoon. M Miilj \ 86 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. cause of charity by his interest and influence/' After much meditating and balancing of possible results to the cause of sound religion, the honest divine came to the conclusion " that such a gentleman would bet- ter maintain his own reputation and more effectually secure his general usefulness, and particularly be more capable of serving the cause of charity among us, by a continued open adherence to his professed principle, and public acting according to it, than by a politic compliance with such as lay nothing less to heart than religion/' ^ This occurred in the year 1706. The date is of some interest, as at an earlier period the conditions might have pointed to Harley. But he had cleared himself of all entanglements years earlier, and in 1706 was Secretary of State. In the autumn of 1702, Mr Bromley moved the Commons to consider " the shameful practice of oc- casional conformity which had introduced men of republican principles into the chief places of profit and trust, and was likely to be fatal to the Govern- ment and Church established, if recourse were not had to such measures as were capable of eluding its design." Leave was given to Bromley, who was member for the University of Oxford, along with Annesley, who represented the University of Cambridge, and Henry St John, to bring in a Bill *'to Prevent Occa- sional Conformity." On the l7th of November it was read a second time, and committed. The pre- amble was,— "As nothing is more contrary to the profession of the Christian religion, and particularly to the doctrine of the Church of England than per- 1 Calamy : Own Life, ii. 56-59. |-7». OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY. 8/ secution for conscience sake." And to establish a harmony between this announcement and the legisla- tion it announced, it is set forth as a desirable object to give full effect to the Toleration Act of 1689, which had been evaded by Dissenters finding their way into the oflices, whence it was the intention of the Toleration Act to exclude them. To complete the object of the Toleration Act, by accomplishing this exclusion, the Bill provided that every person qualifying for and obtaining office, who afterwards attends a religious meeting or conventicle, where there are present more than five persons, besides the family of the house where it is held, is to forfeit a hundred pounds, and five pounds for every day of exercisinor the functions of his office after such attendance. Several amendments on the Bill were carried in the Lords, the most important being the reduction of the penalty from £100 to £20. A free conference was adjusted, but the two Houses could not be brought to a concurrence, and the Bill dropped. In the session of 1703 the Bill was again carried in the Commons, but lost on a second reading in the Lords. The debate there was adorned by a speech from Bishop Burnet, coming down to us in a shape so closely in harmony with the opinions expressed in his books that we may count it among the very rare authentic examples of the parliamentary oratory of Queen Anne's reign. ^ ^ Speaking of the mccaning of the term "occasional conformist," he said : " I myself was an occasional conformist in Geneva and Hol- land. I thought their Churches were irregularly formed under great defects in their constitution, yet I thought communion with them was lawful, for their worship was not corrupted ; but at the same time I i i •■\\ ;'; / ss THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. Calaniy tells us that " the Archbishop of Canter- bury — Teuison — made a warm speech upon this occasion, in which among others there were these expressions : * I think the practice of occasional con- formity, as used by the Dissenters, is so far from deserving the title of a vile hypocrisy, that it is the duty of all moderate Dissenters upon their own prin- ciples to do it.' " ^ In this second defeat the champions of the measure were interrupted but not stopped. They pursued their one object with a singleness of purpose and a tenacity that drew people's eyes towards them as to a continued my communion with our own Church according to the liturgy of this Church with all that came about me. And if the designs of some of the promoters of this Bill should be brought about, and I driven beyond sea — unless, among other unpardonable people, I should be first knocked on the head — in that case would communicate with the foreign Churches. So I think conformity with a less perfect Church may well consist with the continuing to worship God in a more perfect one. It remains, then, a point of opinion which Church or society is the more and. which is the less perfect. In this I am very sure our Church is the more perfect and regular, and that the separation is founded upon error and mistake, and that true edification is among us and not among them. But some of them, by an unhappy education, think otherwise, and in this they are certainly to blame as they are in every part of the separation. But if it is intended to tolerate them under their other mistakes, I do not see why this should not be tolerated likewise, since it is much less dangerous than the other practices that are not at present complained of." The bishop in his peculiar gossiping way gave the House of Lords the following note of the relations to each other of Churchmen and Dissenters in and around Salisbury : — " In my diocese, those who are Occasional Conformists out of prin- ciple, who sometimes go to church and go sometimes to meetings, are without number, who yet have no office and pretend to none. I con- fess I do not desire to press it too hard upon them, that they may not do both ; but this, instead of keeping them from meetings, hinders them from coming to church." ^ Life, ii. 26. There is no report of this speech in the Parliamentary History, but it will be found in a pamphlet referred to farther on. OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY. 89 body who had separated themselves from the ranks of ordinary political parties to give themselves over to the devoted pursuit of a separate object. They gained at this time the name of the High Church party, opening a new division in ecclesiastical politics suflSciently famous as High and Low Church.^ High Church was in a few years to have its triumph from causes not yet anticipated, but meanwhile the Occa- sional Conformity project had to be fought through difficulties. The empire was throughout shaken by various disturbing influences. There was the great war abroad, and the war at home between the two Houses in the Aylesbury Election case. There was the Scotch Jacobite plot of 1703 ; and more formidable, the Act of Security, severing the realms on the death of the queen. On the 14th of November 1704 leave was again given to bring in a Bill against Occasional Conformity. On this occasion the irrepressible Mr Bromley and his followers conceived a grand idea in the tactics of par- liamentary conflict. The nation had thrown itself into the great war, in the conviction that nothing but the ^ The passage here following from the speech by Bishop Burnet just referred to is instructive, as showing us that, at the time when he spoke, the beginning of the year 1704, the nomenclature of "High Church " and " Low Church " was only working itself into articulate meaning. " One author, who has wrote two books on behalf of this Bill, is known to be the furiousest Jacobite in England, and does not con- ceal it even in those books. In one of these he says he is once called an * High Churchman.' These are new terms of distinction. I know no High Church but the Church of Rome ; and that author, L [Lestrange], has in another book showed us how near he comes to that Church when he proposes that a treaty may be set on foot between our Convocation and the Assembly of the clergy of France ; and that we should abate the Regal supremacy and they the Papal, and then he iancies all other matters could be easily adjusted ; so here we see who are to be called High Church."— Pari. Hist., vi. 162. ijii liH l! 1 111 90 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. prostration of France would save the Protestant reli- gion and the remaining liberties of Europe. After a crisis of intense anxiety, the victory of Blenheim showed that the grand object was accomplished, if the ordinary human means were taken to keep what was gained. Foremost among these was the money which England only could furnish. It was needed for many purposes — to keep Gibraltar, which had just been gained, but more essentially to give effect to a treaty by which the King of Prussia was to supply a contingent of £8000 for the relief of the Duke of Savoy ; and if the necessary funds were not available, all might yet be lost. Here, then, was the opportunity. Mr Bromley concluded an address by moving, '' That the Bill to Prevent Occasional Con- formity might be tacked to the Land Tax Bill." The announcement of such a project points to the conditions of a time when parliamentary tactics had not achieved the adjustment now long so effect- ively secured, which enabled the three forces — the Crown, the Lords, and the Commons — to work smoothly together, and avoid the scandal of attempts to trip each other up. Tacking was a remnant of the old policy of Parliament to seek redress of griev- ances and secure conditions on the occasion of voting a supply to the Crown. It had been sometimes used in the reign of Charles IL, but even then never so palpably with the view of bullying the whole forces of the Legislature to further the objects of a section as on this occasion. But as it was a factious attempt, so it was left in the hands of the faction that devised it. Some questions of secular politics had become mixed with the cause of the Dissenters. In the OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY. 91 corporations especially, there were instances where the balance of power might be shaken so as to affect seats in Parliament if the Dissenters were politically paralysed. The nature of a tack sug- gested more dangerous suspicions. Its object was to compel the Lords and the Crown to pass the Bill with its tack to obviate all the ruin that must attend the stopping of the war. But what if the Lords and the Crown, as desperate as the Com- mons, should accept the alternative and reject the Bill ? It was believed that many Jacobites rather lamented than gloried over Marlborough's victories, as blasting the hopes they nourished of aid from France. These considerations drew off a portion of the supporters of the original Bill; and "upon the division the tack was rejected by a majority of 251 voices against 134." The Bill, with the severity of its penalties modified, was carried in the Commons and sent up on the 14th of December to the Lords. There it perished by a majority of 71 to 51 against the second reading.^ 1 The sources of information on the dispute generally are gathered up pretty amply in the Parliamentary History (vi. 59-369). There is an animated account of the whole contest in a pamphlet with this title : " The Proceedings of both Houses of Parliament in the years 1702, 1703, 1704, upon the Bill to Prevent Occasional Conformity, inter- spersed with Speeches for and against the Bill, most of which were never before printed. London : printed by Baker, at the Black Boy, in Paternoster Row, 1710." This pamphlet is more discursive than the account in the Parliamentary History, and its discursiveness professes to be in support of the measure and the laudation of its champions. But there is a grotesque excess of zeal in this laudation, apt to remind one of " The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." The loss of the tack in the Commons having been told, a list of the minority who voted for it is prefaced thus : " Since it may be looked upon by succeeding ages as a piece of injustice to the present not to give them the names of such as have rendered their memories pretious to posterity by asserting the / -•■} 92 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. The excitement about the Occasional Conformity seemed to be at its climax when it caught an ad- ditional impulse from the renowned pamphlet called * The Shortest Way with the Dissenters/ This struck a responsive nerve in all ecclesiastical parties — Roman- ists, Nonjurants, High Churchmen and Low Church- men of the Establishment, and all grades and classes of Nonconformists. It had something of a bewilder- ing character, that drove the excited readers into false positions. There is no doubt that it raised terror and wrath among the Dissenters. It is said, on the other hand, that some High Churchmen received it with warm sympathy and loud applause.^ cause of God in so noble a manner as those who were for tacking tlie occasional to the money Bill, I shall not quit the proceedings of this remarkable year without subjoining the following list." It is notice- able that in this pamphlet the oration by Bishop Burnet in the House of Lords is printed at full length, as if to afford an immediate contrast between its dignified spirit of toleration and the narrow bigotry of the " Tackers." The treatment of Episcopacy in Scotland is told with clearness and vigour. The avowed moral of the story is to let Church- men see how dangerous the Dissenters might become in England if they were to rise through toleration to the supremacy enjoyed by their Pres- byterian brethren in Scotland. But it is possible to believe in a broader latent policy of inviting the High Churchmen to consider whether they had been doing as they would be done by. It is observable that the pamphlet bears the date of 1710, when the High Churchmen were wax- ing in strength until they were able/at last to carry the law for the sup- pression of Occasional Conformity.V ^ It is seldom easy to find strict historical evidence either for or against such rumours. Oldmixon, who is bitter on Defoe, and calls this " the smartest of all his venomous libels," says " it passed some time as the genuine work of a rank Tory, and met with applause in our two famous imiversities. A bookseller now living, having an order from a fellow of a college in Cambridge for a parcel of books, just at the time of publishing * The Shortest Way,' put up one of them in the bundle, not doubting it would be welcome to his customer ; who accordingly thanked him for packing so excellent a treatise up with the rest, it being, next to the Sacred Bible and Holy Comments, the best book he ever saw." — History, ii. 301. '^ DEFOE AND 'THE SHORTEST WAY.' 93 Again the excitement drew new life when a sus- picion began to creep abroad that it was a hoax, and the suspicion of perpetrating it naturally alighted on that restless pamphleteer Defoe, who had long de- clared himself to be the champion of the Dissenters. He had already marched into the battle-field of pam- phleteering controversy in a tone of quiet earnest- ness not conformable with his usual tone, in rebuke of those who had yielded to the temptation of Oc- casional Conformity. It might have been fairly an- ticipated that one endowed with his easy political virtue would have found refuge in some one of the vindications of Occasional Conformity. But he was not of the men that may be counted on. He was stimulated by a wilful waywardness akin to honesty. Put Occasional Conformity in what shape his vindi- cators might, he would have none of it.^ Much critical laudation has been bestowed on the subtlety of the sarcasm that could thus deceive the zealots into folly. But it is scarcely a sound com- :iii i * " Nothing can be lawful and unlawful at the same time. If it be not lawful for me to dissent, I ought to conform ; but if it be unlawful for me to conform, I must dissent. Several opinions may, at the same time, consist in a country, in a city, in a family, but not in one entire person. That is impossible." What, then, shall the Dissenter who aspires to office do? "Let him boldly run the risk, or openly and honestly conform to the Church, and neither be ashamed of his honour nor his profession. Such a man all men will value and God will own. He need not fear carrying the sword to a conventicle, or bringing the conventicle to his own house. But to make the matter a game — to dodge religions, and go in the morning to Church and in the afternoon to the Meeting — to communicate in private with the Church of Eng- land, to save a penalty, and then go back to the Dissenters, and com- municate again there, — this is such a retrograde devotion that I can see no colour or pretence for in all the sacred books." — A Discourse upon Occasional Conformity. Collection of the writings of the author of The True-born Englishman, i. 313, 315. w!fw««vmiM« 94 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. mendation of any literary effort that, but for an accidental discovery it might have missed its aim. It might have gone down through a short period of angry contest into oblivion with thousands of other better utterances of its day. Such a fate does not appear to have been averted by any revelation made by Defoe himself— indeed he was fully aware that to be the known author of such a pamphlet was to be in peril. Defoe was not an accomplished satirist, in the sense of leaving behind the touch of the poisoned sting, that in either of his contemporaries. Swift or Tom Brown, would have revealed the work of his hand. Defoe turns about his victim with a resist- less but good-humoured jocularity, showing his strength rather than his venom. On this occasion the accomplishments of the satirist had to give place to those of the mimic or personator, where Defoe was supreme. He metamorphosed himself for the time into the haughty High Churchman, " whose redden- ing cheek no contradiction bears;" as years after- wards he metamorphosed himself into the shipwrecked sailor, whose dreams are disturbed by the pitiful prattle of his parrot, and who looks aghast on the footprints on the sand. ' The Shortest Way ' is a work of high rhetorical art, modelled after the example set by him who imagined the speech of Antony over the dead body of C^sar. The beginning is calm, gentle, charitable, with a touch of sadness over the fate of those stead- fast clergymen who had either to sacrifice their worldly fortunes to their loyalty, or wrong their consciences by accepting the oath to the Revolution DEFOE AND *THE SHORTEST WAY.' 95 Settlement. There is a touch of inevitable yet half- suppressed indignation when the case of the Church in Scotland is casually noticed. " If any man would see the spirit of a Dissenter let him look into Scot- land ; there they made entire conquest of the Church, trampled down the sacred orders, and suppressed the Episcopal government w^ith an absolute, and, as they suppose, irretrievable victory." " Pray, how much mercy and favour did the members of the Episcopal Church find in Scotland from the Scotch Presbyterian government ? I shall undertake for the Church of England that the Dissenters shall still receive as much here, though they deserve but little." It was naturally unlikely that readers were here to recognise the hand of him who, when he spoke for himself, ever commended the moderation exemplified by the Presbyterians of Scotland when they gained their victory over their enemies in the Eevolution Set- tlement. In these and suchlike casual sallies the pent-up wrath takes vent, until the sympathising reader is keen to have it all ; and at last he is gratified, for it can be no longer restrained. The "hot and cold objector" mutters "cruelty" and is answered. " 'Tis cruelty to kill a snake or a toad in cold blood, but the poison of their nature makes it a charity to our neighbours to destroy these creatures — not for any personal injury received, but for prevention ; not for the evil they have done, but the evil they may do." " Serpents, toads, vipers, &c., are noxious to the body and poison the sensitive life — these poison the soul, corrupt our posterity, ensnare our children, Ut' i m 96 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. m '11 i! i destroy the vitals of our happiness, our future feli- city, and contaminate the whole mass." When the secret was discovered there was a cry for the punishment of the man who attributed such opinions to the High Church party. It has been maintained that punishment in such a case was signally illogical, since passages of a like tenor could be found in the writings of High Churchmen, especi- ally those of their champion Sacheverell ; and that they were mistaken for the utterances of some one among the High Churchmen only indorsed the funda- mental truth of the charge implied by the pamphlet, that it spoke their true sentiments. But if there is to be punishment at all for clever lampoons and other passages of controversial party warfare, it might be as well vindicated in this as in many other instances. If it was true that Sacheverell said such things, was he not held to be a criminal for doing so, and was it not an offence for one citizen to fabricate criminal utterances, so that other citizens might be charged with them '? A blow had been struck at a party waxins strong and intolerant, and there was retalia- tion in the usual way. Indicted at the Old Bailey for a seditious libel, he believed that his safest course lay in a simple plea of guilty. Whether or not he was led to expect leniency he did not obtain it. His punishment was to stand three times in the pillory, and then be imprisoned until he should pay a fine of two hundred merks, and find security to keep the peace for seven years.^ Defoe had friends, personal or political, sufiiciently sincere to afi'ord him a guard of honour on the occa- 1 See Life and Times of Daniel Defoe, i. 70. ip DEFOE. 97 sion when he stood in the pillory. It depended on the temper of the times whether in London this was a service of danger. They were able to protect him from injury and insult. This was in the summer of the year 1 703. Had it been seven years later there would have been imminent risk that he and his champions might have been torn to pieces by a High Church mob. At this point it becomes necessary to reveal a docu- ment that must touch the fame of Defoe in the eyes of all who may not believe that the chief advisers of the sovereign had conspired with her to blacken it. The document is a private letter from Godolphin to Nottingham, and it tells its own story with a dis- tinctness and precision rendering unnecessary either explanation or comment. "Mr William Penn came to tell me he had ac- quainted my Lord Privy Seal that Defoe was ready to make oath to your lordship of all that he knew, and to give an account of all his accomplices in whatsoever he has been concerned, provided by so doing he may be screened from the punishment of the pillory, and not produced as an evidence against any person whatsoever. And upon my acquainting the queen with this just now at noon, her Majesty was pleased to tell me she had received the same account from my Lord Privy Seal, and seemed to think this, if there were no other, occasion for the Cabinet Council to meet here to-morrow, and has commanded me to teU you so." ^ One can imagine a touch of comic risibility gleam- ing in Defoe's thoughts when he succeeded in sending 1 17th July 1703. Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS., 29589, 628. VOL. I. G I J: ^i 98 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. i I the sternly earnest Quaker on such an errand. Though unsuccessful in averting his fate, it amply proves how important a person the London tradesman had become. Penn was then in the full blaze of one of those visita- tions of sunshine from the Court that so strangely broke in on the sombre tenor of his life. The two chief ministers of the Crown take council with the queen, and there is to be a special meeting of the Cabinet. There will be the less to surprise us in this affair when we make better acquaintance with Defoe, and perhaps find that, whatever wealth of virtues he pos- sessed, scrupulosity as a public man was not among them. In the sequel we are told on the same authority that, ** as to Defoe, the queen seems to think, as she did upon your first acquainting her with what he said, that his confession amounts to nothing. However, she is willing to leave it to the Lords of the Commit- tee to let the sentence be executed to-morrow, or not till after Sunday, as they think proper." ^ 1 22(1 July 1703, ib. f. 44. The following memorandum takes signi- ficance as having been indorsed by the Duke of Leeds :— " Daniel Defoe, the author of the review, is no Frenchman, but born here in England, bred an hosier, and followed that trade till he broke for a considerable sum. His creditors run him into an execution of bankruptcy, he having fraudulently, as they seem assured, concealed his effects ; so that his reputation among the fair dealers of the city is very foul. He is a professed Dissenter, though reckoned of no morals. He wrote a libel, as soon as her Majesty came to the throne, called < The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.' He personated the Church- man, and under that disguise would, by. the villanous insinuations ot that pamphlet, have frightened the Dissenters into another rebellion. My Lord Nottingham, then Secretary, hunted him out, proved him the author, and had him pilloried for it. That is the ground of his fury and rage against a loyal and Church Ministry. This makes him so zealously engage and so seditiously express himself against the queen's employing honest men. He is certainly paid well for his pains by a party, for he bestows the copy, which hardly bears the expense of the press.' He Uves on Newington Green, at his father-in-law's house, who DEFOE. 99 Before we deal with the events bringing up the great issues between England and Scotland, some casual disturbing elements in the latter may be noted as a portion of the religious diflSculties of Britain. The Episcopal Church party were regaining heart after their defeat. The suffering Episcopal clergy adopted a humble address to the queen, representing the deplorable condition of the National Church "since the suppression of the truly ancient and apostolic government of the Church by bishops," and lament- ing over the disgrace brought on a Christian land, wherein those consecrated to the altar lacked bread and were dispersed as wanderers. They sought mere toleration. Nothing ever written could be more reasonable than their appeal. But in the career of a nation, when swept by a frenzy of rage and terror, reasonable claims may arise of a kind that it is disastrous to proclaim, and perilous even to whisper. The simple word Episcopacy was associated with national memories not only of the odious but of the perilous. The bloody work of what tradition called " the Killing times " had not in the moment of signal triumph been avenged in blood. Unlike the sanguin- is a lay elder of a conventicle there."— Mus. Brit. Addl, MSS., 28094 f. 65. ' Defoe denied that he kept a hosier's shop, and called himself a " hose factor." He had probably established a connection with the wool-producing districts for bringing their knitted produce to the London market. Nottingham writes to Godolphin : "The person who discovered Daniel Foe— for whom a reward of £50 was promised in the * Gazette ' -—sends to me for his money, but does not care to appear himself. If, therefore, your lordship will order that sum to be paid to Mr Arm- strong, I will take care that the person shall have it who discovered the said Foe, and upon whose information he was apprehended." — 25th May 1703. Calendar Treasury Papers, ii. 153. ti s ICK) THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. aiy Huguenots, from whom they drew their inspira- tion the Presbyterians of Scotland had been signally moderate to the enemy at their feet. The " curates " as the Episcopal clergy were called, were no doubt "rabbled;" and this was an unpleasant ordeal to those who had been accustomed to hunt the rabble. At this juncture, indeed, the safety and comfort of the scattered remnant of the hierarchy depended chiefly on the weakness that kept them passive and silent. This lay not entirely in the inferiority of the number of their followers; for in some of the northern counties the friends of Episcopacy predominated so as to be able to resist the intrusion among them of Presbyterian pastors. But whether few or many, they wanted a faculty of cohesion and combination sufficient for collective action. On the other hand, under the fostering care of the Revolution Settlement, the Presbyterian organisation had waxed strong. It was proving itself to be the most powerful of priestly arrangements for an isolated community. Episcopacy did not come into existence to supply the spiritual wants of independent states. It grew, indeed, out of conditions that made each national church a mere brigade, to be, with all others, at the command of the Bishop of Rome. Presbyterianism took its strength from the opposite direction — from its peculiar ele- ment, rooted, as it were, in the solid earth, and feed- mo- the growing structure with healthy life, till it flourished like a green bay tree. Thus Presbyterianism was strong in Scotland, but not strong enough at this critical point to be care- less about the tenor and object of any curative meas- ure likely to give vitality to Episcopacy. In fact, EPISCOPACY IN SCOTLAND. lOI a new element of danger — an element of indefinite force — had just appeared. Episcopacy was the great ruling feature that made England now foreign to Scotland. Casting Episcopacy on the ground again as it had been cast by the Westminster Assembly was the great achievement that Scotland had succeeded and England had failed to accomplish by the Revolution. It was rumoured that there was something in the air more formidable than the mere bleating of the sheep in the wilderness. The queen, known to be an ardent devotee of the Episcopal Church of Eng- land, had written something about the Episcopal remnant in Scotland. It was in the form of a letter to her Secret Council of Scotland, and the Estates were determined to see that letter in open Parlia- ment. It revealed to them a document adjusted to the emergency with great sagacity. The antithesis of the fixed ecclesiastical conditions of the two countries is at once emphasised in the opening sentences. " We do, in the first place, recommend to your care the Church, now established by law, in its superior and inferior judicatures — such as sessions, presby- teries, synods, and general assemblies ; as also in the exercise of their holy functions, and what concerns their persons and benefices." Then follows : '' We are informed that there are many Dissenters within that kingdom who, albeit they differ from the Estab- lished Church in opinion as to church government and form, yet are of the Protestant reformed religion.'' The High Churchmen of England were just then gird- ing for a war of extermination against their own dis- senters by the Bill for suppressing that middle party who sought refuge in Occasional Conformity. The i I 102 THE RELIGIOUS WORLD. letter further announced : '' It is our royal will and pleasure that they should be directed to live suitably to the reformed religion which they profess, submis- sively to our laws, decently and regularly with rela- tion to the Church established by law, as good Chris- tians and subjects, and in so doing that they be protected in the peaceable exercise of their religion, and in their persons and estates, according to the laws of the kingdom." Surely it must have been pain- ful to the crowned champion and devoted adherent of Episcopacy, as represented in the Church of Eng- land, to sue thus humbly for a sister Church. And yet the appeal received the most humiliating of repulses in the shape of silence.^ 1 The letter is not set forth in the minutes of the Estates, where it is snid that, having been demanded, " the said letter being accordingly brought in and read, was immediately returned to the clerk of the Privy Council." — Act. Pari., xi. 47. I find the letter quoted at length in a broadside of the period. il CHAPTER III. ©omestic Affairs. THE GREAT STORM — DEVASTATION AMONG BUILDINGS — EFFECT ON THE NAVY — EVELYN's EXPERIENCE IN FORESTS — THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE LORDS AND COMMONS, KNOWN AS THE AYLESBURY ELECTION CASE — ITS GREAT SIGNIFICANCE AS A CONSTITUTIONAL INQUIRY — THE EMINENCE OF THE MEN BROUGHT INTO THE DISCUSSION — ESCAPE OF THE CONSTITU- TION FROM THE DANGERS APPREHENDED. The duty of the historian takes its pleasantest shape when he finds a continuous evolution of causation accompany events in their chronological succession. But it is sometimes necessary to drop the chain of causes and effects winding into each other ; and so it is when some great event, portentous to mankind, is not the result of man's passions and actions, but a dispensation such as we can neither create nor obviate, and cannot even foreknow. Such was " the storm " of 1703. Its causes are hidden among the undis- covered secrets of the structure and physiology of the universe, and beyond its own immediate disasters, it left no seeds to ripen into like events. It stands alone in history as " The Great Storm." It . made itself felt all over Europe, but it especially swept the British Islands on the night of the 26th of November ii 104 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. 1703. London being the greatest assemblage in the realm of people, edifices, and wealth, gave it the largest surface for attack, and bore the most numerous and emphatic marks of destructiveness. The fragile houses built in the area that had been swept by the fire were tossed about like houses of cards, and caused many cruel tragedies, while there were also some curious and grotesque escapes of people whose peril- ous position seemed absolutely to doom them. There were inundations of the rivers, and the Thames swept through Westminster Hall. On the shores of all the roadsteads lay drowned bodies with fragments of wreck and heaps of drenched cargo. Even the ships, built with superfluous strength to meet the exigencies of war, suffered. We have from a thoroughly competent authority, this account of the rough and almost fantastic hand- ling of a portion of the English navy posted off" the coast of Holland. " ' The storm ' drove the Veigo, Eochester, Swan, and Newport, with about twenty of the transport ships, from their anchors ashore in the country, where some of them will never get off*. It put the Veigo upon the west pier head at Helvoet- sluys, w^hen the men had just time to save their lives and down she sunk. The rest of her Majesty's ships are got off" and safe. The Russel was drove from her anchor, with Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and after beating over the Hynder sand, put ashore about three miles to the westward of Helvoetsluys. We have got out all our guns and stores, and have some hopes of sav- ing her hull. We have yet no news of the rest of the ships with Sir Cloudesley Shovel, nor of Admiral Cullemberg. . . . There are about 150 sail of • -w^- THE GREAT STORM. 105 merchant - ships lost in the Downs and Yarmouth Sands with their men. The poor Prince of Hesse Darmstadt has lost all his servants but five, and all he has in the world, in a ship driven out of the Downs and lost upon the Ely Island, on the north coast of this country." ^ A calamity that seemed to touch the power of the navy was matter of instantaneous and unanimous action in the Commons, who would have to vote the remedy ; and they promised to find the money for the cost of immediate restoration, giving assurance "that they could not see any diminution of her Majesty's navy, without making provision to repair the same ; wherefore they besought her Majesty that she would immediately give directions for repairing this loss, and for building such capital ships as her Majesty should deem fit, and to assure her Majesty that, at their next meeting, the House would effectually make good that expense/' Irreparable and inestimable mischief was dealt to many monuments of national architecture, and among these, conspicuous for its noble beauties and their defacement, was the chapel of King's College at Cam- bridge. The wind seemed to enjoy a furious revelry in pitching down the steeples of churches, and rolling up the leaden roofs, as a skilful draper rolls his web of cloth. Masses of brick and stone were torn from the Palace of St James's ; and it was noted that the queen, with her husband and her maids of honour, rose at midnight, and formed themselves into an anxious group, as if it were becoming that the sove- ^ Admiral Sir George Rooke— The Hague, 23d December 1743.— MS. Mus. Brit. 1 .1 n V- I I '4.. > 1 io6 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. lii ii I reign should be on the watch while powers so awful and mysterious were dealing destruction among her people. Through all these incidents the hurricane showed no respect of persons, but another seemed to point at distinction and selection. The Bishop of Bath and Wells, along with his wife, was killed in the epis- copal palace, crushed under a stack of chimneys. Now this bishop was Kichard Kidder, who had acquired his bishopric when the sainted Bishop Ken had abandoned it as a sacrifice to his resolution to abstain from the Revolution Oath, though he was one of the immortal seven who went to the Tower in protestation against interference with his ecclesiastical conscience from the opposite side. It is creditable to the fundamental good sense of England at the period, that allusions to the possibility that the whole terrible aflFair of the storm was a special organisation for manifesting, with all attributes of sublimity and horror, the divine vengeance for the expulsion of the Nonjuror, are rare, John Evelyn was a sufferer from the storm, and refers to his own losses and those of his friends in his delightful book, 'Sylvia; or, a Discourse of Forest-trees.' After casual allusion to superstitions about the groaning of storm-shattered forests, he comes home and finds,— "But, however this were, methinks I still hear— sure I am that I still feel— the dismal groans of our forests when that dreadful hurricane subverted so many thousands of goodly oaks, prostrating the trees, laying them in ghastly postures, like whole regiments fallen in battle by the sword of the conqueror, and crushing all that grew THE GREAT STORM. 107 beneath them. . . . The public accounts reckon no less than 3000 brave oaks in one part only of the Forest of Dean blown down ; in New Forest, in Hampshire, about 4000 ; and in about 450 parks and groves, from 200 large trees to 1000 of excellent timber, without counting fruit and orchard trees sans number ; — and proportionally the same through all the considerable woods of the nation. Sir Edward Harley had 1300 blown down ; myself about 2000, several of which, torn up by their fall, raised mounds of earth near twenty feet high, with great stones entangled among the roots and rubbish."^ " The great storm " is an incident now more than a hundred and seventy years old. Throughout that long period no elemental riot has occurred sufficiently egregious to invite a comparison with it. Thus, as time passed, it became ever more and more distin- guished in the isolation of its own unrivalled gran- deur. Does this give us a right to expect exemption — to count that the last of such outbursts of ele- mental wrath is past ? Hardly. In the law of storms science has done little more than to warn us of the approach of the enemy, so that we may take such steps for defence as may fall within our power. Yet there have arisen, though feebly and dubiously, some I* * Sylvia, ii. 350. The Irish have their own peculiar way of dealing with excitingoccasions. An absentee landowner receives the following morsel of intelligence : — "Dec. 11, 1703. — Mr Dixon writes me word that the great storm has blown down one of my barns, and that my tenants are run away. The latter I expected long ago, and endeavoured to persuade him to be beforehand with them, but could not prevail, and so have lost above a year's rent and the damage occasioned by the storm will be at least £20 more out of my way." — Ellis Correspondence, MS., B.M., No. 28,932, f. 114. io8 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. comfortable suggestions that the conditions affording material for the brewing of a storm of a character so comprehensive no longer exist, having been absorbed by the widening area of cultivation on the surface of our islands. It has been observed that in all the more recent occasions of elemental destruction the cause has been found to exist in some local speci- alty—mountain torrents, swamps, sudden thaws on the mountains ; and in regions of perpetual snow, the mysterious movements of the glacier. The de- structive floods, for instance, in the rivers flowing from the Grampians in the year 1829 had a special local cause, giving a lesson that might have been better studied than it has been. Why was it that a rainfall,— only a little above the heaviest that had oc- curred in previous years, and passed peacefully to the sea in swollen rivers,— had not only swept away bridges and drowned villages, but had actually torn mountains to pieces ? It was because the cisterns of water quiescent in the hearts of the mountains had burst their stony sides, under the curious law of hydraulic pressure. That is part of the dynamics of the elements now thoughtfully studied, because money can be made by acquaintance with it. The engineer, with a pump, a tube, and a few gallons of water, can take by it the power of fifty horses ; and possibly some ten per cent of rainfall above that of other years might give power sufficient for rendmg mountains. Let us turn to a contemporary storm of a different character. There had passed, almost silently, from the last Parliament elected under King William into the first elected under Queen Anne, a quarrel between the DISPUTE BETWEEN LORDS AND COMMONS. 109 two Houses of the English Parliament, destined to become memorable in the history of the constitution. It is known in history as the Aylesbury Election Contest, and in law-books as the case of Ashby aofainst Zouch. Before it started into life as a contest between the two Houses, the affair seemed to have been buried among the thousands of squabbles raised in a oreneral election. The writ for the Parliament was issued on the 26th of December of the year 1700, and the Parliament assembled on the 6th of February 1701. Whoever has taken the trouble of mastering the debates on this critical question, will feel little inclination to echo the words of those careless narrators who speak of it as an unseemly squabble between the two Houses, or a collection of arid speeches on profitless questions of form. Per- haps nowhere, within the same compass, is there crowded so much instruction and exemplification on the framework of our constitution as in the two great debates that arose out of the election on that oc- casion of a burgess or member of the Commons, repre- senting the pleasant little town of Aylesbury, in the county of Buckingham. The discussion was enriched by contributions from the greatest lawyers of the age — Sir John Hawles, who had been solicitor-general to King William ; Dormer ; Sir Joseph Jekyll ; three men who, each in his turn, sat on the wool- sack — Cowper, King, and Harcourt. There were political eminences, as Loundes, Strickland, Lord Hartington, Sir Edward Seymour, and Sir Chris- topher Musgrave ; and less distinguished than these, at the time, were three names destined to fill the car of fame — Harley, St John, and Walpole. i \ I no DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. The record of the debate has an emiaeiit interest, from its peculiarity as the first significant political discussion or dispute that began and ended in peace. The constitutional discussions of the seventeenth century were all swayed and characterised by bitter enmities, actual war, and imminent danger. In the days of the Long Parliament it was war for very existence between prerogative and privilege ; and the latest dispute of all ended in driving a king from his throne. A writ had been issued to the sheriff of the county for the election of two burgesses to represent Ayles- bury. The sheriff directed his precept to certam constables with whom the execution of the precept lay. The burgesses being assembled, Matthew Ashby, the plaintiff, maintaining that he was duly qualified to vote, tendered his vote for two candidates— Sir Thomas Lee and Mr Mayne ; but the constable refused to receive it. Ashby then brought an action, tried at the assizes, where the end was a verdict m his favour, with damages amounting to £5. The case was carried to the Queen's Bench, where this judgment was reversed ; and the elector, whose vote was rejected by the constable, was found to have no claim for damage on that account. The franchise on which the claimant tendered his vote had been adjusted by the Commons. In the words of Sir Joseph Jekyll, " Before the action was brought there was a resolution of the House of Commons that the right of election for the borough of Aylesbury was in the inhabitants not receiving alms. It is from that resolution the plaintiff hath taken his rise, and hath broutrht his action ; for by his declaration he makes AYLESBURY ELECTION. Ill his case to be, that he was an inhabitant of that borough, not receiving alms, and that the constables falsely and maliciously obstructed and hindered him from giving his vote at the election there." ^ The hero of this parliamentary contest was so close to the condition of penury that would have sunk him below the franchise, that, being a poor ostler struggling for a sordid living, he became chargeable on the parish while his name was yet the keynote of a mighty parliamentary struggle, — a struggle that might never have burst on the world had the poor ostler made his descent into pauperism more rapidly. The case came to its climax when, on a writ of error, the judgment of the Queen's Bench was reversed by the House of Lords. This final finding by the Lords was favourable to freedom of election, since it opened up the question whether the constables could reject the vote of an adult male inhabitant of the borough not m receipt of alms when lie tendered his vote. But this was an act done by the Lords disposing of a question of membership in the Commons. It could not be denied that many incidental powers in the hands of divers persons might influence an election. The courts of law, in keeping the elector in posses- sion of his territorial qualification, the sherifl* taking steps for obedience to the writ, and the constables in receiving and recording the votes. But over all this, when the question settled itself down upon the issue of possessing a seat in the House, the Commons pro- fessed to be a club entitled to reject or accept their companions within the sacred precincts. They could 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 271. I 41 r 112 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. not decide a question of territorial possession. They could not put a witness on oath as that is done by a court of law. They could not find one disputant before them liable to pay damages to another. But when all these preliminary steps were disposed of, and the result came in the decision that some one had or had not a right to sit among them, then their supreme power over their own composition started into activity. This anomaly was a curious fruit of that jealous, separate independence that drove royalty from their door. The sovereign could not stand on the floor of the House of Commons, and consequent- ly, the Commons could not make themselves a court of law and justice, because all such courts are ani- mated by the royal presence and power, and the pres- ence of the sovereign is a presumption of law in all of them, as it has been sometimes a reality in the House of Lords. The sovereign sought counsel in the administration of justice among the judges of his supreme courts, and among the members of the House of Lords. But he sought no counsel in the other House, because he was jealously excluded from it. It was admitted that from the first irregularity or illegality at the hustings, the Commons could do nothing towards a remedy until the case became ripe for the Lords to correct it, and then the Commons could speak and say,— -You shall not; it is our func- tion. But when their jurisdiction did open, it went back over all the stages to justify the vote that had been rejected by the constable, and decide how the elec- tion would be afiected by the admission of that vote, though it could not mulct the constable in damages for rejecting the vote. This position was stated at QUARREL BETWEEN LORDS AND COMMONS. 1 13 an early stage of the dispute, was maintained throuoh- out, and after all adjustment appeared to be buried in helpless complexities, it was uttered in this dis- tinct shape : — " Nor can any elector sufier either injury or damage by the ojBScer's denying his vote ; for when the elector hath named the person he would have to represent him, his vote is effectually given both as to his own right and privilege and as it avails the candidate in his election : and is ever allowed when it comes in question in the House of Commons, whether the offi- cer had any regard to it or no." ^ While eloquence flowed at St Stephen's, there came some practical hints that the elements of aggression and contest referred to by the orators were finding employment. It was maintained that if the affair lay with the House of Commons, that august body would be content to establish purity of election ; but where would be the end if all concerned in an elec- tion had an action at law against some public oflScer ? " Suppose, as at Westminster, where I think there are 10,000 electors; or suppose it be as in some towns near Wales — for one of which I have the hon- our to serve — where the descendants of every burgess claim a right to vote, and by consequence, they will bring it in time almost to all the sons of Adam ; for all the sons and all the daughters' husbands, and all their descendants claim a right to vote. Now, what a mis- erable case must that officer be in when persons shall come from east, west, north, and south, and say their pedigree is so and so — ^for they are good at pedigrees in those countries, — yet, what a condition is he in ? 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 394. VOL. I. H I 114 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. He is bound to determine whether they have a vote or not ; and though he is no lawyer or herald, yet, however, he is bound to give judgment one way or an- other at the peril of an action. And suppose but a hun- dred men shall bring their actions against the officer, what man can stand a hundred actions though he be in the right ? There are not only these difficulties in the case, but there is revenge : and in popular elec- tions, there are those heats and the voters engage with that animosity, that the losing side next day will be ready, perhaps, only for revenge, to send for a multi- tude of writs, and have the pleasure of ruining the officer who was against them, though he was in the right ; for every one has a right to bring his action whose vote was disallowed, though it should be found at last that he had no right." ^ It tended to the realisation of this vision, that on the strength of the reversal by the Lords, not only did Ashby take out execution, but five other men claiming to be electors of Aylesbury brought actions against the constable for rejecting their votes. These five culprits were in their turn committed for breach of privilege, each on a separate order or warrant set- ting forth in detail the offence committed. At this point the Commons thought it necessary to address the Throne against any counter-action through the agency of her Majesty's courts of law, asserting ** the undoubted right and privilege of the Commons of England in Parliament assembled to commit for breach of privilege : and that the commitments of this House are not examinable in any other court what- soever." They could not especially be touched by 1 Speech of Sir Thomas Powis, Pari. Hist., vi. 247, 248. \ I AYLESBURY ELECTION. 115 any " writ of error." At the same time they made inquiry as to the truth of rumours that certain per- sons had been " concerned in soliciting, prosecuting, or pleading " writs of habeas cor2)us or writs of error, on behalf of the persons committed ; and having reason, on the whole aspect of the affair, to be appre- hensive " lest her Majesty should grant the writs of error," they took a step that gave a touch of the ludicrous to their side of the contest, — they ordered the culprits *Ho be removed from Newgate and taken into the custody of the sergeant-at-arms." ^ The next step taken by the Commons was to smite the legal advisers who were aiding and abetting in the acts denounced as breach of privilege. A com- mittee was appointed " to examine what persons have been concerned in soliciting, prosecuting, or pleading upon the writs of habeas corpus or writs of error, on the part of the persons committed " for breach of privilege. This brought into the contest "James Montague, Esquire ; Nicholas Lechmere, Alexander Denton, and Francis Page, counsellors at law ; William Lee and John Harris, attorneys at law." The sergeant-at-arms being required to account for this new group of culprits, "he gave the House an account accordingly ; that he had found Mr Denton at his own chamber and had him in custody; but that ^ Pari. Hist., vi. 385. A contemporary annalist scarcely extracts the transaction from the condition of the ludicrous by noting " which order was executed at midnight with such circumstances of severity and terror as have been seldom exercised towards the greatest offenders." — Annals of Queen Anne, p. 86. The annalist had, however, found this passage in " the humble representation and address of the Right Hon. the Lords spiritual and temporal in Parliament assembled, presented to her Majesty the 14th day of March 1704," being a complaint against the House of Commons.— See Pari. Hist., vi. 430. ii6 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. AYLESBURY ELECTION. 117 III he could not find the other persons." We are left to vague inferences as to their method of disappearance, in the terms of an order " by the Lords spiritual and temporal in Parliament assembled, that the said per- sons shall, and they have hereby, the protection and privilege of this House, in the advising, applying for, and prosecuting the said writs of error ; and that all keepers of prisons and jailors, and all sergeants-at- arms and other persons whatsoever be — and they are hereby, for or in respect of any of the cases aforesaid — strictly prohibited from arresting, imprisoning, or otherwise detaining or molesting or charging the said persons, or any or either of them, as they and every of them will answer the contrary to this House." It did not point towards moderate and tolerant councils, that the high executive officer of the Commons was thus contemptuously noticed among ** all sergeants-at-arms and other persons." ^ This is an occurrence of the 25th of February; and on the 6 th of March the sergeant- at-arms ap- pears to inform the House how " that a person had this morning brought him a writ of habeas corpus under the Great Seal, for Mr Montague — in his cus- tody by order of this House — to be brought, as he was informed, before the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England; and he delivered the writ under the Seal in at the table." ^ 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 386. * This document in its barbarous Latin, contorted by official contrac- tions, is in strange contrast with the expressive English of the debate and the parliamentary documents, reminding one of a rugged shapeless boulder on a glacier : " Anna Dei gratia Ang* Sco' Franc' et Hibem' Regina, Fidei Defensor, &c. Samuel Powel Ar' Servien ad arma at- tenden' Honorab' Dom' Commun' ejus Deputato et Deputatis salutem," &c.— Pari. Hist., vi. 389. The instructions he received were — " That the ser- geant-at-arms attending this House do make no re- turn of, or yield any obedience to, the said writ of habeas corpus ; and for such his refusal, that he have the protection of the House of Commons."^ Before the dispute had reached this point, a message passed to the Commons that " the Lords desire a present conference with the House in the Painted Chamber about some ancient fundamental liberties of the kingdom." They desired it, they said, '' in order to a good understanding between the two Houses, which they will always endeavour to pre- serve. When either House of Parliament have ap- prehended the proceedings of the other to be liable to exception, the ancient parliamentary method has been to ask a conference, it being ever supposed that when the matters are fairly laid open and debated, that which may have been amiss will be rectified, or else the House that made the objections will be satisfied that their complaint was well grounded." ^ But these conciliatory suggestions announced, as fundamental principles and in a very distinct form, those judicial claims of the House of Lords which the Commons resisted. And no one prepared with a full knowledge of the antecedents of the conference could expect it to work out a good understanding. In fact each of the Houses had acquired, and was yet ac- quiring, certain powers whether they were to be called prerogative or privilege, held by each as peculiarly its own, and jealously to be protected from CO - operation with or interference by the other. The appellate jurisdiction was the chief 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 402. 2 Ibid., 387. ;j I I ii8 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. characteristic claim of the Peerage — the exclusive right of voting supplies was the counter-claim of the Commons. The items of the conference are not articulately preserved, but they are sufficiently clear in revealing irreconcilable claims and enmities. The first taunt of the Commons is occasioned by the first of the Lords' resolutions : " That neither House of Parliament hath any power, by any vote or declaration, to create to themselves any new privilege that is not warranted by the known laws and customs of Parliament." The commentary is : " This would effectually put an end to that en- croachment in judicature so lately assumed by your lordships and so often complained of by the Commons — we mean the hearing of appeals from courts of equity in your lordships' House. This would have hindered the bringing of original causes before your lordships ; and your unwarrantable pro- ceedings upon the petition of Thomas Lord Whar- ton," which the Commons characterised as a per- version of the power " heretofore exercised for the relief of the subject oppressed by the power of the great men of the realm " to a contrary purpose — the unjust aggrandisement of one of their own order. And again, on the fifth resolution justifying the writs of error, among other bitter sayings are : " When it is considered how that usurpation in hearing of appeals from courts of equity, so easily traced though often denied and protested against, is still exercised, and almost every session of Par- liament extended, it is not to be wondered that, after the success your lordships have had in those AYLESBURY ELECTION. 119 great advances upon our constitution, you should now at once make an attempt upon the whole frame of it by drawing the choice of the Commons' rep- resentatives to your determination." And further, '' The Commons cannot but see how your lordships are contriving by all methods to bring the determina- tion of liberty and property into the bottomless and insatiable gulf of your lordships' judicature, which would swallow up both the prerogatives of the Crown and the rights and liberties of the people." ^ And it is observable that the wrath of the Com- mons is under good government; for instead of incoherence there is supreme distinctness of utter- ance linking cause with effect when they come to their angriest climax. "The bringing writs of habeas corpus upon the commitments of the Commons, and a writ of error thereupon before the Lords, would bring all the privi- leges of the Commons to be determined by the judges and afterwards by the Lords upon such writs of error. "Nay, such writs of error upon every habeas corpus would bring the liberty of every commoner in England to the arbitrary disposition of the House of Lords. " And if a writ of error cannot be denied in any case [this was repeatedly urged by the Lords apolo- getically — the writ was not of grace but of right], and the Lords alone are to judge whether the case be proper for a writ of error, then all the queen's revenues, all her prerogatives, and all the lives and liberties of the people of England will be in the 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 400. i I 1 I20 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. I 1.1 hands of the Lords ; for every felon, burglar, and traitor will be entitled to a writ of error before the Lords : and they will have even power over life and death. "And by writs of error and appeals, as already exercised, they will have all our properties ; by such newly invented actions they will have all our elec- tions ; and by such writs of habeas corpus and writs of error thereupon they will have all our privi- leges, liberties, and even lives at their determina- tion : who determine by vote with their doors shut, and it is not certainly known who it is that hurts you. The novelty of those things, and the infinite consequences of them, is the greatest argument in law that they are not of right." ^ There seemed to be some inclination in the Lords attending the conference to be courteous and com- plimentary, but it had a tinge of patronising grace that was perhaps slightly ofiensive, and it had little effect in soothing the wrath of the Commons, though they were told '' that the Lords look upon the Com- mons to be a great part of the constitution, which cannot be preserved but by doing right to both Houses. *' That the constitution is the wonder of the world and the glory of the nation ; it is founded upon liberty and property ; and the House of Commons hath been a great fence and bulwark of liberty." ^ The Lords, though they suggested the conference, did not find that it served their purpose. Those who represented them appear to have been somewhat 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 408. 2 Ibid., 402. AYLESBURY ELECTION. 121 haughty and reserved. They endeavoured to check the Commons on the question of the aggrandisement of the judicial powers of their House. On reporting back to their own House, the managers for the Com- mons conclude thus : '* Your managers declared that they had more to offer, and were ready to proceed upon the subject-matter of the last conference in such manner as they thought their duty to the Com- mons of England required, if their lordships thought fit to hear them ; whereupon the Lords did rise and break off the conference." ^ The Lords then took a course not to be easily ac- counted for. With bitter eloquence they registered the items of their quarrel in a '' Kepresentation and Address" to the queen, dated on the 14th of March. It appears that difficulties had arisen in the matter of the writs of error, for it was said that in two instances, though the usual steps had been taken, the writs had not passed. They conclude their address by express- ing a hope " that no importunity of the House of Commons, nor any other consideration whatsoever, may prevail with your Majesty to suffer a stop to be put to the known course of justice, but that you will be pleased to give eff*ectual orders for the immediate issuing of the writs of error." Her Majesty made answer on the day of the recep- tion of the address, and it was an answer so little to the purpose that it must have been suggested by a bold and subtle policy. It was in these few words : "My Lords, I should have granted the writs of error desired in this address. But finding an abso- 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 420. 122 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. ir )'■ kW lute necessity of putting an immediate end to the session, I am sensible there could have been no further proceeding in that matter." ^ If we test the merits of the parties to this great contest by the historical development of the consti- tution in the judicial remedies for correcting imper- fections in elections, the leaning of approval would be towards the policy of the Lords. To bring elections under impartial law, and reserve them from the power of the party prevalent in the House has been a long and difficult process ; and some of us are old enough to remember when, on the calliug of the names on an election committee, there were cheers from the party that by the accident of the ballot was strongly repre- sented in it. But one's sympathy in the discussion is apt to lie with the Commons. The rapid growth of the judicial powers of the Lords justly alarmed them, and it perhaps required more than usual sagacity to divine that, instead of serving the capricious selfish- ness and tyranny of an irresponsible aristocracy, the judicial powers would all pass into the hands of learned and industrious lawyers — that the arrange- ment would be of eminent service by recruiting the aristocratic branch of the Legislature with the power- ful fresh blood of families that have gradually risen from the humbler ranks of society by capacity, integ- rity, and industry. Two morsels of history not connected with each other save by continuity in time have in this chap- ter here been treated apart, with a view of keeping them out of the current of more conspicuous events. 1 Pari. Hist., vi. 435. AYLESBURY ELECTION. 123 We have to enter on the hatreds and attachments that after many oscillations of hopes and anxieties culminated in the union of England and Scotland. While here one event follows another with a close sequence of cause and effect, another long historical drama, acted abroad, has to be brought before the reader in its successive steps of scarcely interrupted victory. UNION INITIATED. 125 CHAPTER IV. International ©ifficultieg* CAUSES OF DISSENSION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND — SCOTLAND INCLUDED IN THE NAVIGATION ACT OF THE PRO- TECTORATE — EXCLUDED IN THAT OF THE RESTORATION — DEMANDS BY SCOTLAND FOR THE OPENING OF FREE TRADE WITH ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH COLONIES REJECTED — THE PRIVILEGES ENJOYED BY IRELAND AS A DEPENDENCY EFFECT OF THE REVOLUTION AND THE INTERCOURSE WITH THE DUTCH —SUPREMACY OF TRADE QUESTIONS — RIVALRY OF ENGLAND AND HOLLAND FOR SUPREMACY AT SEA — THE NAVI- GATION ACT DESIGNED TO CRUSH THE RIVAL — INVENTION OF BANKING — ITS STIMULUS TO SPECULATIVE COMPANIES— SCOT- LAND STARTS THE INDIAN AND AFRICAN COMPANY, OFTEN CALLED THE DARIEN COMPANY — WILLIAM PATERSON — THE COMPANY STARTED IN LONDON AND EDINBURGH — DRIVEN OUT OF LONDON — THE DARIEN COLONY — ITS CALAMITIES AND FAILURE — THE UNION COMMISSION OF 1702 CLAIM OF FREE TRADE REPEATED BY SCOTLAND — THE QUESTION DROPS — TUR- BULENT SCOTS PARLIAMENT OF 1703 — QUARRELS — THE ACT OF SECURITY — THE LIMITATIONS — THE QUEEN ON THE AFFAIRS OF SCOTLAND. Since the union of the crowns, an incorporating union of Scotland with England had become a tradi- tional policy in both countries, and especially became ripened into form and substance by debates and re- solutions of the Parliament of England. It was be- queathed to both countries by King William under conditions conferring on the bequest a mournful solemnity. On the 23d February in the year 1702, in a message to the Commons, he announced himself as " fully satisfied that nothing can more contribute to the present and future security and happiness of England and Scotland than a firm and entire union between them." Further, that he " would esteem it a peculiar felicity if during his reign some happy ex- pedient for making both kingdoms one might take place." The message incidentally noted that he was " hindered by an unhappy accident from coming in person to his Parliament, and so could only signify to the Commons by message what he desired to have spoken to both Houses from the throne."^ The '' unhappy accident " occurring two days earlier was in fact his death-blow. Whatever forces were at work for or against the Union, in the government and constitution of the two kingdoms, and the tempers and national preju- dices of the people, had become familiar to both in a century of discussion. But ere the question came to a final and practical issue, new forces, arising with the growth of each nation during that century, were destined for predominance in the struggle. Before the civil war there had been disputes and difficulties between Englishmen and Scotsmen on questions of trade, especially wherever the Scots endeavoured to deal with the English colonies. These affairs arose rather out of frailties and imperfections in the law than from exclusive privileges and absolute prohibi- tions. Such as they were, all these difficulties were swept away for a time by the Protectorate Govern- 1 Pari. Hist., v. 1341. CHAPTER IV. international ©ifficulties. iii CAUSES OF DISSENSION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND — SCOTLAND INCLUDED IN THE NAVIGATION ACT OF THE PRO- TECTORATE — EXCLUDED IN THAT OF THE RESTORATION — DEMANDS BY SCOTLAND FOR THE OPENING OF FREE TRADE WITH ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH COLONIES REJECTED THE PRIVILEGES ENJOYED BY IRELAND AS A DEPENDENCY — EFFECT OF THE REVOLUTION AND THE INTERCOURSE WITH THE DUTCH— SUPREMACY OF TRADE QUESTIONS — RIVALRY OF ENGLAND AND HOLLAND FOR SUPREMACY AT SEA — THE NAVI- GATION ACT DESIGNED TO CRUSH THE RIVAL— INVENTION OF BANKING — ITS STIMULUS TO SPECULATIVE COMPANIES — SCOT- LAND STARTS THE INDIAN AND AFRICAN COMPANY, OFTEN CALLED THE DARIEN COMPANY WILLIAM PATERSON — THE COMPANY STARTED IN LONDON AND EDINBURGH — DRIVEN OUT OF LONDON — THE DARIEN COLONY — ITS CALAMITIES AND FAILURE — THE UNION COMMISSION OF 1702 CLAIM OF FREE TRADE REPEATED BY SCOTLAND THE QUESTION DROPS — TUR- BULENT SCOTS PARLIAMENT OF I703 — QUARRELS — THE ACT OF SECURITY — THE LIMITATIONS — THE QUEEN ON THE AFFAIRS OF SCOTLAND. Since the union of the crowns, an incorporating union of Scotland with England had become a tradi- tional policy in both countries, and especially became ripened into form and substance by debates and re- solutions of the Parliament of England. It was be- queathed to both countries by King William under I UNION INITIATED. 125 conditions conferring on the bequest a mournful solemnity. On the 23d February in the year 1702, in a message to the Commons, he announced himself as " fully satisfied that nothing can more contribute to the present and future security and happiness of England and Scotland than a firm and entire union between them." Further, that he " w^ould esteem it a peculiar felicity if during his reign some happy ex- pedient for making both kingdoms one might take place." The message incidentally noted that he was "hindered by an unhappy accident from coming in person to his Parliament, and so could only signify to the Commons by message what he desired to have spoken to both Houses from the throne."^ The " unhappy accident " occurring two days earlier was in fact his death-blow. Whatever forces were at work for or against the Union, in the government and constitution of the two kingdoms, and the tempers and national preju- dices of the people, had become familiar to both in a century of discussion. But ere the question came to a final and practical issue, new forces, arising with the growth of each nation during that century, were destined for predominance in the struggle. Before the civil war there had been disputes and difficulties between Englishmen and Scotsmen on questions of trade, especially wherever the Scots endeavoured to deal with the English colonies. These afiairs arose rather out of frailties and imperfections in the law than from exclusive privileges and absolute prohibi- tions. Such as they were, all these difficulties were swept away for a time by the Protectorate Govern- 1 Pari. Hist., v. 1341. 126 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. FIRST NAVIGATION ACT. 127 I i: * I .11 ment. The exercise of many old constitutional and feudal powers were, especially in Scotland, then thwarted by the controlling hand of a military des- potism. But trade was absolutely freed, and in all matters of commerce, navigation, and colonial enter- prise, England, Scotland, and Ireland became one community. The Navigation Acts had an instructive influence on the creation of the political forces that, by set- ting the two nations in antagonism, led to the com- plete union. The first Navigation Act was passed by the Protectorate Government in 1651. It was a blow dealt against Holland, and whatever economic reaction it had on Britain it was successful in its ostensible object of stopping the career of the States towards the dominion of the seas. The Dutch, by the force of their realised capital, acting on their facil- ities for shipbuilding, were engrossing the carrying trade of the sea : wherever there were commodities ready for exportation, and a community ready to purchase them as imports, Dutch vessels were at hand for their conveyance ; and it was vain for other com- munities to compete with them, for none could per- form the service so effectively and cheaply. The policy of the Act was to exclude these carriers from the ports of England — unless the goods brought in cargo came from the place of their produce in Europe, they must be carried in English-built vessels, of which the commander with three-fourths of the crew were English subjects. We may now believe that the natural enterprise of England would have raised it only the more rapidly to the commercial supremacy it was destined to attain without this invidious exclusion. But what we have here to note is, that Scotland was not excluded by the Act of the Protectorate. There was a complete union of the British Islands under one Government, and whatever advantages Englishmen believed themselves to derive from the exclusion, Scotsmen were entitled to arrogate to themselves. It was among the English- man's denunciations of the Protectorate Government that it admitted the impoverished and sordid Scots to a participation in the sources of England's wealth. Interpreted by the commercial creed of the age, the Navigation Act was a brilliant achievement, and though the work of the usurper it was speedily re- enacted by the Restoration Government. In its res- toration it was shaken free of the defect that gave a share in its beneficence to Scotland. England and Scotland again stood separate and apart, and in the protective code of England, Scotland was as thor- oughly a foreign country as France or Russia. In a remonstrance on the part of Scotland in the beginning of the year 1668, a claim of participation was stated in a shape to bring out distinctly the character of the exclusion, by pleading that '' the same freedom may be allowed to such ships and vessels as do truly and without fraud belong only to the people of Scotland — whereof the master and three -fourth parts are Scotsmen or other his Majesty's subjects, and freight- ed only by his Majesty's subjects — as are allowed to his Majesty's subjects of Ireland, dominion of Wales, and town of Berwick-upon-Tweed." And further, "that it be declared that his Majesty's subjects of Scotland are not meant to be debarred by the clause debarring aliens or persons not born within the alle- 128 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. giance of our Sovereign Lord the King from exercis- ino- the trade or occupation of merchants or factors/' ^ But co-operation and harmonious action did not re- spond to the tone of the commercial policy of the age. Ketaliation was the keynote that raised the eneroies of nations. A feeble effort to effect a union followed this remonstrance. The active spirits began to dream of exclusive schemes for Scotland in rivalry with England. The Dutch were an example to them. Exclusion from English trade seemed only to concen- trate their powers in doing for themselves. Even while the Protectorate exclusion pressed upon them they were settling themselves at the Cape of Good Hope, the resting-place for all the European States ambitious of trade and dominion in the Indian seas ; they were creeping with factories into Borneo and other islands of the Eastern Archipelago, and had audaciously planted themselves so far away in the New World as Guiana. Cut off from the English sympathy and communion, they prospered so as to rival if not to excel England as a trading and aggran- dising community. They might be excluded from the Thames, but if the Eno-lish patrician desired to select the decorations of his dwelling from the splendours of the East and the West he must go to muddy Amsterdam for them. Even sullen Japan, shutting its door to the rest of the world, admitted the Dutch trader to its great mart of household finery. Scotland likewise excluded would do in like manner. Even so the restless needy man who sees his aggrandising neighbour heaping 1 Bruce : Report od the events and circumstances which produced the Union, Appx. ccl. • SCOTLAND'S DEMAND OF FREE TRADE. 129 riches upon riches l)y bold enterprises that never fail in his hands, will follow in the wake of his specula- tive enterprises and make himself rich. But he for- gets two absolute conditions of success. The one is, that capital must have accumulated, and either in the hands of the rich possessor or some ancestor, it has come in drop by drop in sordid gains, until' it has become strong enough to rule the market. The other condition is, the capacity to handle so powerful and subtle an engine as capital. The Dutchman had achieved this accomplishment by practice in all the markets of the world. The Scot has shown since then that it is latent in his nature, but as yet he had neither realised capital for himself nor exemplified such capacity for handling it as might induce others to intrust it to his management. Thus it befell that while the prohibitions and penalties of the Navigation Act were levelled against the prosperous Dutch— the rivals of England in trade and navigation — they struck and wounded the poor Scots, who might have expected brotherly treatment. A statement early in the year 1668, made by com- missioners from Scotland meeting commissioners from England, going back to the time when there was no protective and exclusive Navigation Act, and passing on through the Navigation Act of the Protectorate to the Navigation Act of the Restora- tion, states the conditions with great clearness : " Whereas his Majestie's subjects of Scotland have enjoyed a free trade here in England, and in all the dominions and plantations belonging to the kingdom of England, more than fifty and six years without any considerable obstruction all that time ; yet since VOL. I. T V ■crrr ■35».; 130 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES, the twenty-fifth day of March, in the twelfth year of his Majesty's reign, by some Acts of Parliament here in England, the king's subjects of Scotland are thereby debarred from the privileges granted to all his Majesty's other subjects, seeing by those Acts the privileges are granted to such ships or vessels as do truly and without fraud belong only to the people of England or Ireland, dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick-upon-Tweed; and all other ships or vessels —without any exception— with all their goods and merchandises, are declared to be forfeited/' ^ There was an element of practical irony in this result of the effective struggle of the Scots to hold their independence. Ireland, the dominion of Wales, the town of Berwick -on-T weed, were dependencies of the English Crown, subject to the authority of Eno-lish legislation and participators in the privileges secured to the trade of England. Scotland was an independent state, and had to look to its own Legis- lature for sound laws and the redress of grievances.^ It was in vain to plead, as the Scots did, that they and the English were under the allegiance of the 1 Bruce : Report on the Union, App. coxlix. 2 The demand by Scotland of the privileges conferred on Ireland, is met thus • " The answer is most clear and obvious— viz., that Ireland is not only under one king with us, as Scotland, but belongs to, and is, an appendix of the Crown of England ; and laws made in the Tarhament of Encrland do bind them ; and no law can be enacted by the Parlia- ment of Ireland but what passeth the Privy Council of England ; and > orders of the Council of England and the Great Seal of England do take place in Ireland ; yea, the Treasurer and other great officers of State in Encdand, have jurisdiction and superintendency in Ireland : by all whkh it is absolutely in our power when we grant privileges to them, to compel and keep them up to the restrictions and limitations ot them • all which is quite otherwise in relation to Scotland. —English Commissioners' Concessions, &c, 16th March 1678 : Bruce, cclxxiv. Scotland's demand of free trade. 131 same sovereign. In anything that touched their inde- pendence or nationality, the Scots would never admit that their sovereign could, because he was King of England, do what he could not have done had he been king only of Scotland. But they had better reasons to state for being included in the English privileges. A partnership in trade between England and Scotland would increase the wealth of both, and would strengthen the Crown by enlarging the customs duties ; while the increase of shipping and seamen that would come of the united effort of the two nations, would increase the strength and security of the British empire. Of course, in the suggestions from Scotland there was no hint that the restrictions might well be relaxed — it was only just that Scotland should participate in the blessings they imparted. They desired that the privileges of the English colo- nial trade might be extended "to such ships and vessels as do truly and without fraud belong only to the people of Scotland, whereof the master and three- fourth parts are Scotsmen or other his Majesty's sub- jects, and freighted only by his Majesty's subjects ; " and that vessels so navigated and freighted '' may be declared to have Uberty to bring into England the goods and commodities that are of foreign growth, production, or manufacture, under the same restric- tions and limitations as are expressed for the ships of England." 1 The discussion of the Scots claims of 1669 brought the whole question so far to a practical shape that commissioners were appointed on both sides to treat of a union. But the period of discord and gloom 1 Bruce, ccli. 132 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. SCOTS AFRICAN COMPANY. ^33 that settled for twenty years on the two kingdoms, and especially on Scotland, seems to have deadened the cheerful aspirations that seek their issue in trade and co-operative enterprises. The legislation of the period is exceptionally barren, even in the paternal legislation that professes to protect good and whole- some commerce, and to denounce all those efforts at selfish aggrandisement which are supposed to spread the seeds of commercial disease through the com- munity at large. The Revolution, with the influence social rather than political of the Dutch king and his followers, created a new spirit. The banker appeared beside the dealer. All kinds of coins, some of value diffi- cult of adjustment, others debased or clipped, would double or triple the perplexities of the trader. Bills of exchange had been invented, but they depended not so much on their prompt conversion into bullion, as on the multitude of indorsers, all liable to the relief of the holder. Eeal property, such as land and houses, might be pledged for the paper money, and this might make it ultimately secure, but would not give it the flexibility of ready money. But Holland had solved the great problem, and the wondrous Bank of Amsterdam appeared to create out of nothing but the wisdom and cleverness of its creators a sufficiency of ready cash for all the wants of an affluent community.^ 1 The adepts who organised the Scots system of banking, carefully studied the mechanism of the Bank of Amsterdam. It is fortunate that a century ago, while it was still exceptionally effective as a national bank, and the Scots bankers were endeavouring to follow its instructive precedents, Adam Smith should have written an exposition of its peculiarities and merits. — See Wealth of Nations, book iv. chap. iii. From the Revolution to the accession of Queen Anne, England was kept in restless agitation by speculative projects. Among these were the Bank of England, the Million Bank, two Land Banks, plantation projects in the colonies and great public companies for pearl-fishing, the Greenland and New- foundland fisheries, and many others. There were great organisations on the joint-stock system for sup- plying clothing, and the other common necessaries and amenities of life — as the Lustring Company, the various companies for linen and woollen manufac- tures, glass-blowing companies, and japanning com- panies. Many of these were ephemeral, but a few left their mark on history, as the two East India Companies, the old and the new, and the two African Companies. Lastly, the speculating spirit of the age gave existence to a new institution, which has had a vigorous life — the Stock Exchange of London. It was natural that Scotland should be touched by the influences so forcibly prevalent in England, and perhaps equally natural that in the crowd of projects, an Act passed by the Scots Estates on the 25 th of June 1695, called an " Act for a Company trading to Africa and the Indies," should be allowed to pass without much examination or criticism from those not immediately interested in the project. The legis- lation of the Scots Estates was ever more impulsive than that of the Parliament of England. The com- plete division into two Houses, and the many checks interrupting hasty or inconsiderate action, which had grown through the long struggle between prerogative and privilege in England, were scarcely known in Scotland ; and they were hardly missed, for it so hap- 134 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. pened that the Estates and the Crown generally acted with so much harmony, as to leave it an open question whether the Crown could reject a bill passed by the Estates. There was at the same time a local cause deterring those not in the secret of the ultimate pro- jects of the promoters of the measure from criticising its nature, since the Estates were at the time all on fire about **The Report of the Commission for in- quiring into the Slaughter of the Glencoe men." Yet^the Act that passed thus quietly carried the union of the kingdoms and went far in the securing of the Hanover succession. It cannot be said that there never would have been a union of England and Scotland but for this Act ; but had there been a union otherwise stimulated, it must have had a different history from that now to be told. And, indeed, when the terms of the statute are interpreted by events following on it, its importance and significance be- come powerfully visible, since it created in the new company powers of declaring peace and war, upholding navies and armies, founding colonies, and contracting alliances. The first step was to raise the necessary stock. And here it was discovered that there was a fatal weakness in the laws for keeping all the commerce of England to her own people, and especially excluding the participation of the Scots. Englishmen could hold stock in a Scots company, and however patriot- ism could collectively exclude Scots participation in English profits, it was insuflicient to restrain English- men separately from investing in a Scots adventure promising to pay. William Paterson, the soul and inspiration of the PATERSON S PROJECTS. 135 scheme, was a liOndon merchant deep in all the mys- teries of the stock market. He recommended that the afi*air should receive its first impulse in that ardent atmosphere, instead of being first exposed to a lingering appreciation by the Scots, scant of cash, and unaccustomed to the bold adventures of England. He remarked that " when the Parliament gives a long day for money, that fund has hardly any success. The Bank of England had but six weeks' time from the opening of the books and that was finished in nine days. And in all subscriptions here it is always limited to a short day ; for if a thing go not on with the first heat, the raising of a fund seldom or never succeeds, the multitude being commonly led more by example than reason." Under the auspices of ten English directors, the books were opened in London. The opening was in every way skilful both as to the seductive prospect and the limited opportunity for participation, and there was a rush for shares. Then the two demons of the market — the lust of gain and the dread of ruin —were raised and set to work. A later generation beheld wilder orgies in the South Sea and Mississippi schemes, but on this occasion even so barren a stage as poor Scotland aff'orded an exciting rehearsal of such scenes. The capitalists of the English companies whose privileges were to be touched, arose in fury, and were successful in arousing sympathetic wrath in both Houses of Parliament. That solemn conclave, only exorcised into existence by conditions critical and weighty — a conference between the Lords and Com- mons, was dedicated to the emergency. And when 136 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. ENGLISH SUBSCRIBERS WITHDRAW. 137 I the causes of wrath were set forth in detail, nothing could be more just and logical than their tenor. All the English companies possessed exclusive privileges, protected to them by stern and cruel laws ; and here started up a band of free-traders — of licensed smug- glers — who were to outrage them all. Through the privileges granted to the Scots company, "a great part of the stock and shipping of this nation will be carried thither, and by this means Scotland be made a free port for all Indian commodities, and conse- quently those several places in Europe which were supplied from England, will be furnished from thence much cheaper;" *'and when once that nation shall have settled themselves in plantations in America, our commerce in tobacco, sugar, cotton, wool, skins, masts, &c., will be utterly lost, because the privileges of that nation, granted to them by this Act, are such that that kingdom must be the magazine for all those commodities, and the English plantations and the traffic there lost to us/' ^ Then came a demand for the impeachment of some of the statesmen who had counselled the Crown to the perpetration of this outrage, but all who could be charged with the guilty act were secure in Scotland, where nothing but a powerful invading force could touch them. In a short time the fury of the English capitalists burnt itself out. Those who had subscribed for stock took fright and courted obscurity. When the first instalment fell due none came forward to meet it and the shares were consequently forfeited. Thus the English privileged companies were not to 1 Lords' Journals, 13th December 1695. be invaded and ruined by rival capitalists at their own door. The Scots were not in a humour to feel thwarted or disappointed by this result of their attempt on English capital. It is possible even to extract from their demeanour symptoms of exultation in the pros- pect of keeping the newly found treasure exclusively to themselves. But then arose the serious question — Could the nation produce the capital necessary for the mighty undertaking ? Some efforts were made to get aid from abroad, but the national enthusiasm daily grew and strengthened, and it became clear that whatever funds existed would be available in the cause. It was a national cause, aided by an approving self-interest that had no doubt of the absolute certainty of the coming reward. The capital, as originally projected, was to be six hun- dred thousand pounds sterling, to be equally divided between the two kingdoms. Now that England had dropped off, the Scots bravely added a hundred thou- sand to their original allotment. That this slightly overdrew the pecuniary capacity of the country is shown by a small item only revealed to those who have examined the company's books. The last two thousand pounds subscribed to complete the round sum are fictitious. They were subscribed by a citizen of Edinburgh on a guarantee from the company at large. And now came the dangerous delusion that a community are enriched because they are rapidly spending. Everything had a tone of prosperity. The country was, in gamblers' phrase, "flush of 138 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. . DARIEN COLONY. 139 money/' but nothing could less resemble the squan- dering of the gambler than the purpose to which it was applied. All the productive resources of the country were stimulated. Coal-mines, salt-mines, metallic ores, were worked up into saleable commodi- ties. All kinds of linen, woollen, and leather goods were rapidly manufactured. The herring, cod, whale, and salmon fisheries expanded with the rising market. The building trade was even touched in the general stimulus, for the company began to build between Edinburgh and the Meadows stately chambers, bid- ding fair to become a national palace in the French style. Most significant, perhaps, of all this produc- tiveness, was the creation of a fleet of vessels, equipped not only for the exportation of merchandise and emigrants, but for battle. The first colony — the colonisation schemes were indefinite — was to rise in a spot selected by Paterson, who had made close acquaintance with it, and pro- nounced it to be the best adapted spot in all the world for giving eff*ect to the ruling spirit of the new enterprise. That spirit was free trade. All the world was to be invited to buy and sell in the new territory of the Scots ; and to suit the traders of all the world it was to be on the Isthmus of Panama— the neck of rocky land, looking so narrow on a ter- restial globe, that by uniting the great northern and the great southern territories of America, just suffices to make the whole one continent. The spot selected, chiefly with an eye to its capacity of being well forti- fied, is too well known in the annals of national mis- fortune by the name of Darien. Here then was established a real Scots colony, but to what end 1 By taking up its position where it did, it seemed to proclaim to the world at large, — ^Ye that want to buy the produce of European industry, come to us — we have abundance of commodities, useful and ornamental ; ye that want to sell the produce of your own distant lands, come to us — we have capital, and are j)repared to buy. But no one came for either purpose. Then it was found that the hardy Scotsman's constitution was not suited to endure a tropical climate, stimulating poisonous swamps, and dripping forests ; and for months the chief labour of the colonists was in burying their dead. In Scotland the harvest next after their departure was deficient. They seemed to have taken the heart and energy of the country with them, and those remaining at home longed to join their brethren in the happy regions of prosperity ; so that, ere anything was heard of the fate of the first colony, a second and a third had been sent out to increase its wants instead of supplying them. Then they soon found themselves in the midst of enemies. In Spain there was a sick man, sick even unto death ; and when the hour of death came, it was as absolute as political cause and effect could be, that instantly all Europe would be at war for the disposal of his heritage. Was this a time for planting British subjects in the middle of the possessions of the Span- iards in their boasted Indies ? for though the colonists selected uninhabited ground, Darien was in the midst of Spanish communities, and the colonists had to fight for possession. Nor did they in their contests receive the courtesy due to national enemies. The career of the new-comers was identical with that of the several 140 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. I I groups of filibusters and pirates who infested the Spanish main, and built fortified harbours for the storage and defence of their plunder. There was no official diplomatic staff" to contradict this conclusion. The ambassadors of King William to foreign courts and the governors of the colonies were all English- men, with instincts and interests inimical to the new colony. Of old, when the ancient league was in full vigour, France stood by the Scots in difficulties with the other Continental towns ; but now all that France could do for Scotland was to give hospitable refuge to the king she had discarded. Scotsmen had recently been conspicuous and powerful on the European continent. It might be remembered how the Scotsman Lockhart, whose wife was the niece of the mighty Cromwell, was ambassador for the Protectorate, and took Dunkirk out of the hands both of France and Spain. Mackay's Scots Bri- gade lay conspicuous among the slain on the bloody field of Steinkirk, where they were under the com- mand of King William. But who would answer for these Scots of Darien, who conducted themselves after the fashion of the other pirates and bucca- neers on the Spanish main ? Nay, if the Spaniards obtained minute information concerning the strangers, it would lead to the knowledge that they were dis- obedient servants who had offended their sovereign, so far that he placed it on the record of Parliament that, in permitting this expedition, he had been ill- served in the Scots part of his dominions. Starvation, disease, and vice were rapidly wasting the colony, the account of their career that reached their kinsfolk at home becoming sadder and sadder. RUIN OF THE COLONY. 141 Yet before the exhausted remnant surrendered them- selves to a powerful fleet, there was one gleam of brightness to penetrate the gloom that hung over Scotland. A Spanish army was approaching to crush Darien, when a small body of the colonists crossed the isthmus, attacked it with fury, and scat- tered it in wild rout. A medal was struck, repre- senting Campbell of Finab, the glorious leader of the Scots, galloping on his war -steed across the battle- field ; and the victory of Zubaccanti was solemnised by a riotous illumination in Edinburgh. There was no redress for the inhospitality of the English representatives abroad to the suffering Scots adventurers, and the alternative was becoming daily more distinct, that the two nations were drifting into war, unless an incorporating union should save them. King William saw in this the only hope and remedy, and he influenced the House of Lords to take the first step in the direction of union. They passed a bill appointing commissioners for neo:otiation, and sent it to the Commons with a re- commendation to their consideration as "a bill of great consequence." Any such effort by the one House to stimulate the other was, it seems, contrary to the etiquette between the Houses ; and the Com- mons, taking huff", threw out the bill on the second reading. This might bring war with Scotland, but what was that to the humiliation of listening to a suggestion from the Lords ? The king again raised the question ; and thus we have come round to the period of our story where it appeared desirable to take this brief retrospect to assist in rendering the remainder intelligible. * M II fl IIP" 142 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. On the 25th of August 1702, a commission was issued under Queen Anne's sign-manual, appointing, on the part of England, commissioners to treat on the terms of a union, with commissioners to be ap- pointed for Scotland. When the work was begun, the demand of Scotland to be released from the re- straints of the navigation laws and establish freedom of trade between the two kingdoms opened at once the great critical question where the whole issue lay. On the part of England it was early taken up as a plea conclusive on this claim, that participation in English trade was not so much a question of national polity as of personal vested interests and properties, which it would be confiscation to diminish. In the discussions of 1667 it was laid down, "That his Majesty's plantations in the East Indies, and several in the West Indies, belong to particular corporations of Englishmen ; that the rest in America were purchased and settled by the blood and estates of Englishmen — and there is no reason Scotland should reap the benefit thereof." ^ On the 3d of December the Scots briefly put their claim for *' such an union as entitles the subjects of both kingdoms to a mutual communication of trade privileges and advantages." On the part of the English commissioners this was accepted with a significant reservation, '' though they allow the com- munication of trade and other privileges to be the necessary result of a complete union, yet in the method of proceeding they must first settle with your lordships the terms and conditions of this communication of trade and other privileges." 2 1 Bruce, ccclxxxv. ^ ibid., ccclxviii. SCOTS DEMAND UNION V^ITH OPEN TRADE. 143 After some hesitating discussion the Scots put their claims in a shape not admitting doubt : — 1. *'That there be a free trade between the two kingdoms, without any imposition or distinction. 2. *' That both kingdoms be under the same regu- lations, and liable to equal impositions for exporta- tion and importation, and that a book of rates be adjusted for both. 3. " That the subjects of both kingdoms, and their seamen and shipping, have equal freedom of trade and commerce to and from the plantations, and be under the same regulation. 4. "That the Acts of Navigation, and all other Acts in either kingdom, in so far as contrary to or inconsistent with any of the above-mentioned pro- posals, be rescinded." ^ This was uttered on the 9th of December, and on the 16th the English commissioners met it with a specification of reservations and restrictions: "As to the first article, their lordships are of opinion that there be a free trade between the two kingdoms for the native commodities of the growth, product, and manufactures of the respective countries, with an exception to wool, sheep, and sheep-fells, and with- out any distinction or imposition other than equal duties upon the home consumption." This implied an exclusion on importation of foreign merchandise into England in Scots vessels, restricted the impor- tation of Scots produce to the market for home con- sumption, and made important exceptions to the articles of home produce that might be imported.^ Here were clear demands, and refusal as clear. 1 Bruce, ccclxx. 2 Ibid., clxxi. "STTT'fTS' 144 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. il The question of the colonial trade was reserved in terms showing how tenaciously England might be expected to hold her advantages there : " As to the third article, their lordships say that the plantations are the property of Englishmen, and that this trade is of so great a consequence, and so beneficial, as not to be communicated as is proposed, till all other par- ticulars which shall be thought necessary to this union be adjusted/' And then, as if to render the impracticability of Scotsmen enjoying this trade, they are told that, with the exception of " salt fish " and some other commodities, " as the case now stands by law, no European goods can be carried to the English plantations but what have been first landed in Eng- land ; " " nor can the product of the plantations be carried to other parts of Europe till it has been first landed in England." ^ At this point a sudden change appears to come over the spirit of the negotiations. Three days later — on the 19th of December — it is minuted that " The commissioners on both sides had a full con- ference upon the sul)ject of the communication of trade in the foresaid proposals and answers, which was very amicable ; and their lordships for England agreed to all the proposals made by their lordships for Scotland." 2 The results of this harmonious action stand em- bodied in articles adopted at a joint meeting on the 2d of January : — "That there be a free trade between all the sub- jects of the Island of Great Britain, without any distinction, in the same manner as is now practised 1 Bruce, cclxxiii. 2 Defoe's Hist, of the Union, App. 740. SCOTS DEMAND UNION V^ITH OPEN TRADE. 145 from one part of England to another ; and that the masters, mariners, and goods be under the same securities and penalties in the coasting trade. " That both kingdoms be under the same regula- tions and prohibitions, and liable to equal inaposi- tions for exportation and importation; and that a book of rates be adjusted for both. "That the subjects of both kingdoms, and their seamen and shipping, have equal freedom of trade and commerce to and from the plantations, under such and the same regulations and restrictions as are and will be necessary for preserving the said trade to Great Britain." ^ At a point where the negotiations appeared to be closing round so fortunate a conclusion, we have a glimpse into the inner thoughts of Secretary Tarbat, about the most active and able of the Scots statesmen of the day. He had been known as Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, and afterwards became known as Earl of Cromarty. As a man of letters he had written some godly books, and some others far re- moved from this qualification. He had a consider- able share in that unscrupulous waywardness that came to its climax in the assembly of the west called "the Drunken Parliament." He was concerned in the "billeting" affair— an attempt to ostracise cer- tain public men as doomed to perpetual incapacity for office. In applying for a general "remission," or prospective pardon for any sins that might be charged and proved against him, he uttered himself in words that might be a broad audacious jest, but might also be the impulse of a secret consciousness 1 Bruce, ccclxxv. VOL. I. ^ m \m t .'I '^> 146 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. I I \ of extreme danger : " I wish to have a very general remission sent me ; because I see faults fished for in others upon as great grounds. If it comes, let it contain treason, perduellion, and a general of all crimes; though on all that is sacred I know not myself guilty, nor do I hear anything on this side Irish witnesses or evidence." Having passed through the sedate reign of King William, and reached the mature age of seventy-two, he might now be likened to the respectable observer of domestic responsibili- ties looking back to the sowing of his wild oats. So, in the trying oscillations of the Union contest, he steered his way with a firm hand. The letter now cited is addressed to Nottingham, and is dated on the 21st of December 1702 : — "I am so much in love with the Union that if thereby I be pushed to press upon your time, I will hope for your pardon on account of the cause for which I am concerned. My lord, this treaty must either produce a very happy or a very unhappy con- clusion ; and I must be afraid of the latter if an im- possibility be proposed as a condition. This night at our meeting, wherein all did agree as to the terms of what concerned the burdens to be imposed on goods exported to foreign places, or imported from thence, and in what can concern the transport of merchan- dise from one part to another of Britain; yet the very difierent articles, viz., of the taxes to be im- posed upon consumpt at home, doth rise like a little cloud, which threatens a storm. I presume Scotland will go to the utmost reach of possibility for what may render Britain secure and happy ; but when SCOTS DEMAND UNION V^ITH OPEN TRADE. 147 'impossibility' gives a stop on that side, the safety must be from the prudence of England." ^ In the resolutions now reached, the chief desire of Scotland seemed to be achieved at last. There must be a secret history of this revulsion, for it stands forth like the proverbial inconsistencies in human action that precede insanity or sudden death. This resolution extinguished the treaty and the treaters. It was not a violent death. Its shape was, that the English commissioners dropped away from the meet- ings for bringing the affair to a conclusion; and though there was a professed attempt to remedy this desertion, nothing came of the attempt.^ Some conferences were held, where the burdens of English debt and the coexistence of the English and the Scots India Companies were discussed as secondary to the great question of freedom of trade, no longer an open question. On the 3d of February, by a queen's letter, the meetings of both commissions were adjourned to the 4th of October.*^ On the 3d of September, the Scots Estates resolved, on a review of the progress of the treaty, " That the commission of Parliament granted for the said treaty is terminate and extinct, and that there shall be no 1 Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS., 29588, f. 379. 2 "Die veneris, 22d January 1702-3. — There not being a quorum of the English, and the Scots being met in their own chamber in the Cockpit, the Marquis of Normanby and Earls of Pembroke and Notting- ham came unto them from such of the English commissioners as were met in the council-chamber, to signify that they were so much ashamed of the frequent disappointments they had given them, that for prevent- ing the like for the future, they had resolved amongst themselves to apply to her Majesty for a new commission under the Broad Seal, in which seven might be named a quorum." — Defoe, App. 744. 3 Defoe, App. 750. i 148 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. I new commission for treating of an union betwixt the kingdoms of Scotland and England without consent of Parliament." ^ So it appeared that Scotland's participation in the trading privileges of England was a proposal so pre- posterous that it sank under the weight of its own absurdity. Yet England, though rapidly becoming the greatest, was perhaps the least illiberal of the trading communities of the day. Monopoly and re- taliation were the only trading doctrines and prac- tices throughout Europe. Like many other evil qualities, they culminated among the Spaniards, who, as they believed themselves to have been, by the bounty of Providence, invested with the bulk of the sources of all wealth, held that they were all the more beholden by cruel laws and sanguinary deeds to keep it for themselves. It was considered as among the ^ Scots Acts, xi. 101. The following announcement to Secretary Sir Charles Hedges, in the " Additional MSS." in the British Museum, may he counted as the last vestige of the negotiations under the commission of 1702:— ♦• Whitehall, Sept. 30, 1703. " Sir, — The Lords of the Comittee having mett this morning, took notice that on Monday next, the 4th of October, is the day to which the commission for the union of the two kingdoms is adjourned : and though their lordships, upon consideration of what they heare is past in Scotland, think it not necessary that the English commissioners should meet on that day, in regard there are no commissioners from Scotland in town to meet with them ; that the English commis- sioners have no power to act separately ; and that the commission will on that day fall of course, lohich their lordships do not think will be of any inconvenience^ — yet their lordships thought it their duty to submit the matter to her Majesty, what she will please to have done ; and their lordships desire you will receive her Majesty's pleasure herein, and let them know it. " Having read this to my lords, their lordships commanded me to send it away to you, by a messenger, in regard the time for this meet- ing, or not, is so near at hand.— I am, with all respect, Sir, your most obedient humble servant, Rt. Warre." POLICY OF RETALIATION. 149 dangers of the Darien settlers that the Spanish, if strong enough to be victorious over them, would slay them all. Such was their practice towards the rash adventurers who pried into the secret sources of their commerce, and it was the climax of intrusion to be found prowling nigh their gold-fields. When vessels and their crews disappeared in the Spanish main, their fate was thus accounted for. And yet it was noticed at the time, that when the last remnants of the ruined colonists were seeking food and rest, they were more hospitably received by the Spaniards than by their own fellow-islanders. When we reach the cause of this phenomenon, we may also find why the modern mechanic on pay-day contributes one shilling of his wages to a refuge for widows and orphans, and another to a fund for maiming, or, if need be, slaying, the fellow-workman who, to preserve his wife and children from starvation, has consented to work at the market value of his labour.^ 1 To steady men who went with the current opinions of the day, sentiments like the following must have sounded as malignantly as the anarchical announcements of the French revolutionists in the ears of the loyal old country gentlemen of England. In the first place, the newly discovered paradise of trade in Darien is announced : — " The time and expense of navigation to China, Japan, the Spice Islands, and the far greatest part of the East Indies, will be lessened more than half, and the consumption of European commodities and manufactures will soon be more than doubled. Trade will increase trade, and money will beget money, and the trading world shall need no more to want work for their hands, but will rather want hands for their work. Thus the door of the seas, and key of the universe, with anything of a reasonable management, will of course enable its pro- prietors to give laws to both oceans, and to become arbitrators of the commercial world, without being liable to the fatigues, expenses, and dangers, in contracting the guilt and blood of Alexander and Caesar." And who are the chosen people that, to the exclusion of the rest of mankind, are to enjoy the paradise ? " You may easily perceive that the nature of these discoveries are ISO INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. • i r ; I 1 1 t The session of the Scots Estates in the summer of 1703 was stormy. It was tossed by denunciations against England, it was restless with anxieties on the danger of putting all to the issues of war with so great a power, and the whole was tainted by suspi- cions that the Ministers of the Crown for Scotland were truckling to the great enemy. Some of the explosive materials brought together, indeed, burst forth before the battle had begun or the forces had been paraded against each other. When the pre- liminar}" questions about doubtful elections and other matters vital to the constitution of a formal Parlia- ment had been decided, the record tells us how the fiery Belhaven and Sir Alexander Ogilvie of Banff had indulged in an outbreak so violent that they found it prudent to throw themselves on the mercy of the House, and in harmonious humility admit ''unbe- coming expressions and other undutiful behaviour ; for which they are most heartily sorry and grieved. Therefore they did in all humility acknowledge their faults, and did crave pardon of her Majesty's Com- missioner and the Estates of Parliament for the offence committed by them, and did entreat that their most humble submission might be received, and such as not to be engrossed by any one nation or people to the exclu- sion of others ; nor can it be thus attempted without evident hazard and ruin, as we see in the case of Spain and Portugal, who by their prohibiting any other people to trade, or so nmch as to go to dwell in the Indies, have not only lost that trade they were not able to main- tain, but have depopulated and ruined their countries therewith ; so that the Indies have rather conquered Spain and Portugal than they have conquered the Indies."— Report by William Paterson, addressed " To the Right Honourable the Court of Directors of the Indian and African Company of Scotland." — Memoirs of Great Britain and Ire- laud, by Sir John Dalrymple, ii. 1 13. ^1 A DISORDERLY SCOTS PARLIAMENT. iSr they restored to their respective places in Parliament/' With certain verbose formalities, indicative of hesita- tion, the Estates resolved to '' pardon and forgive the culprits, and restore them to their respective places in Parliament." ^ From an account by one who, being present, thought the outbreak of sufficient importance to be told to the English Cabinet, it would appear that the two were rushing from the House to find a more suitable spot for the practical conclusion of their quarrel, when, being interrupted by a closed door, and coming to- gether on the parliamentary side of the impediment, they fell to kicking each other there. '' Immediately after the election was determined, Belhaven and Sir Alexander Ogilvie went out together with design to have fought. But after they had passed the place where we sit, and had come the length of the door, and the same not being so readily opened to them, they did again fall in passion, and Belhaven struck Sir Alexander Ogilvie with his foot, and Sir Alexander struck him again in his own defence. This occasioned a great deal of noise ; and many of the members, particularly the Duke of Ham- ilton, thought Belhaven had been insulted, and so did express himself very passionately, as did several others ; but none of us who were in our seats could see what happened. " After this I went home, and did expect to see no person, it being so late. But his Grace my Lord Duke of Hamilton and his two brothers came to my house, and proposed that, seeing this scuffle had happened betwixt my Lord Belhaven, who is a 1 Act. Pari. Scot., ix. 65. k Iv H i|! 152 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. Hamilton, and Sir Alexander Ogilvie, who is of my name, and my relation — that therefore we might interpose betwixt them and settle any diflference they had." 1 The intervention was immediately successful, so far as the two perpetrators of the scuffle were concerned. But there seemed to arise a competition among others of a more pretentious character. First, " The Earl of Errol, as Lord High Constable, pretends to have the jurisdiction of all riots committed during the sitting of the Parliament, as well within as without the Parliament House — so notwithstanding of the recon- ciliation, he put sentries upon them." Then the Crown was insulted in the person of the Lord High Commissioner, and there was a threat of trial for high treason. This aroused the Estates to claim the privilege of suflfering or repelling the insult, and they determined, by " a great plurality," " that no member could be accused of what was said or done within the House but by order and appointment of Parliament." High treason or not, the affair gravitated into an admission that Parliament was the party injured or insulted, and submission and assurances of penitence were accepted by Parliament. So the culprits ap- peared at the bar, when the judgment, as here cited from the record, was pronounced. It was reported in the following words by Chancellor Seafield to Godol- phin : " His Grace and the Estates were highly dis- pleased because of the misdemeanour they had committed, and that in law they might have been punished; but upon hearing of their petition, in which they do humbly crave his Grace and the 1 Mu8. Brit. Addl. MSS., 2055, f. 364-368. ACT OF SECURITY. 153 Estates' pardon, they were now brought to the bar that they might again have the opportunity of mak- ing their acknowledgments; and accordingly they both did so in the humblest manner." ^ The queen's message at the opening of the session had called attention to the necessity of a parliamen- tary settlement of the Crown ; and the hint was taken, though in a sense significantly opposite to the mean- ing of the invitation. The first actual storm came when the Lord Marchmont, having secured attention by announcing that he had in his hand an overture or bill for the settlement of the succession, came, in the course of his reading, to the words "Princess Sophia." The fury of the meeting seemed to be too intense to let the members understand the sense in which the name was used — the very use of that name in a meeting of the Scots Estates was an indecorum and an insult. We have seen by what process of analysis the English Parliament reached that name ; and had the Scots followed the same process — the exhaustion of the descendants of King James until a Protestant line was reached — it must have been with the same result. But the result of such a logical process had been reached, and had been employed so insultingly against Scotland that, since logical ex- haustion had been set as an example, Scotland was prepared to reach a conclusion of her own more briefly and absolutely ; and this was done by exclud- ing from the succession to the crown of Scotland the person who should succeed to the crown of England. To this end was passed the " Act for the Security of the Kingdom," containing a provision that on the 1 Seafield to Godolphin, Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS., 28055, f. 364. I iti ; ,1 I i I > >ii I I', • h n 8 154 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. death of the queen the Estates should meet to ap- point a successor to the crown — a Protestant — from among the descendants of the old line of Scottish sovereigns, with a special provision that the person chosen to succeed to the crown of England should be excluded from the selection, unless *' there be such conditions of government settled and enacted as may secure the honour and sovereignty of this crown and kingdom, — the freedom, frequency, and power of Parliaments — the religion, freedom, and trade of the nation, — from English or any foreign influence." The Commissioner frankly informed the angry House that he would not give the royal assent to this Act by the touch of the sceptre. Then was debated the question whether that touch was necessary to making an Act of the Estates the law of the land — whether it was more than a courteous acknowledgment of approval and acceptance of a law duly adopted by the Estates. Further perilous matter was struck out in that hot debate, and an opportunity was given to Fletcher of Saltoun to ventilate — to use an expressive neology — his republican proclivities, and embody them in a statute of ''limitations." The object of these was to secure the country against regal power being exercised within it by any one who should become, at any time after the departure of Queen Anne, sovereign of England. To this end the assent of an elected president of the Parliament was to supersede the touch of the sceptre, and the patron- age of office and the command of the army were to be vested in the Estates.^ When the Commissioner 1 We find a collector of intelligence on the Continent, named Cockburn, who appears to have been in the service of Nottingham, PERILOUS CORRESPONDENCE. 155 •I tried to soothe the irritation by persuasions and assurances of healing measures, he was asked if he had secured the approval of my Lord Treasurer of England to what he promised. This touched a point to make Felix tremble, as the letters cited in these pages will amply show. Had certain dingy scraps of paper now sleeping on the shelves of the Manuscript Department of the British Museum been intercepted on their way southward, the quarrel might have drifted to formidable if not tragic results.^ writing to him on the 3d of October thus : " The proceedings of the Scots Parliament are largely set forth in our Dutch courants, and the overtures of Mr Fletcher of Saltoun are written at length. These things are matter of admiration to some, and of laughter to others. If your lordship knew the man — I mean Mr Fletcher — you would not be surprised at his extravagances ; he is enheaded, as the French phrase is, with the notions of a republic, and has an inveterate pique at all sovereignty." — MS. Mus. Brit., 89, f. 79. See ' Lettres historiques contenant ce qui se passe de plus important en Europe ' (attributed to Jean Dumont)— vol. xxiv. — * k la Haye, chez Adrian Moetjens :' 1703. This contemporary history, the precedent of the annual registers and other periodical chronicles of later times, gives ample testimony to the interest created abroad by the Scots Parliament of 1703. To France it seemed to open the question of separation from the interests of England, and a possible restoration of the " Ancient League " between France and Scotland. Some one had supplied a full and tolerably accurate account of this stonny session for the Lettres, as — "Le Parlement d'Ecosse est toujours fort occupe. On y a lu plusieurs differents Projets d'Actes pour regler la succession k la Cou- ronne." " Ce qui en a retard^ jusqu'ici la conclusion c'est que Ton a presente de jour en jour des articles pour y etre inseres, et que cela demande une longue discussion. Le Lord Salton en presenta douze le 18 Juin, tons concernant la limitation du successeur qui devra etre choisi apres la mort de sa Majeste."— Pp. 202, 203. The "Lettres" were rendered by translations in London, and thus the English people received the news of their neighbours in Scotland. 1 The following morsels, addressed by the Earl of Leven, are sugges- tive when interpreted with the letters cited in the text : — " I was obliged to make use of a borrowed hand the last two letters I sent to you, because I understood that some were very busy upon the inquiry if I kept correspondence with any in England, and would have been glad to have got a letter under my hand to any English minister ; * t' I. li i ; t i III ll I. i 156 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. The passages following, from letters by AthoU, Lord Privy Seal, to Godolphin, if they had not interest in themselves, would have it as testimony to the clan- destine communications between the queen's minis- ters in Scotland and the English Cabinet. " HoLYROOD House, July 10, 1703. **We have all concurred — I mean the queen's servants — to keep the limitations out of the Act of Security, which we have done with a great deal of difficulty, and in which I am sure I have done all I could, both by myself and friends that are of the cavalier party, without whose assistance they had certainly been voted before this time, particularly the Act lodging the power of declaring peace or war in the Parliament after her Majesty's decease without heirs. As this appears the most necessary, so it is the first is pressed ; but none can answer but others may be insisted on."^ On the 1st of September (1703), AthoU writes to Godolphin, desiring to be informed of the fate of the Act of Security — is the queen to give it the royal assent, or is she not ? "You may imagine, since there was so much zeal but now that the Parliament is at an end, that danger is over." — Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS., 28055, f. 56. Some things, indeed, were not to be trusted to paper, and must await the opportunity of a private inter- view. " I did wish rather than beg to have seen your lordship ere now. I had reasons for it not so tit ifor paper. But for the little assistance I have given and must give to what I think is intended — or should be intended — here. I shall regret my stay the less. However, I am pre- sumptuous enough to assert that my designs were and are unaltered and unalterable in endeavouring to serve the queen, the monarchy, and Britain faithfully— and with all the endeavours possible for an old man and an old loyalist." — Ibid., f. 2. 1 Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS., 28055, f. 40. ACT OF SECURITY AND LIMITATIONS. 157 and heat in the Parliament to get this Act, it will be a very great disappointment if it should not be passed. It may make the Ministry here have no interest either to carry the supply in this Parliament or in any other. But, on the other hand, if the queen does consent to it, this session I doubt not will conclude immediately by giving supplies for the army. But without the Act be passed, or assur- ances that it will, we find that they will not enter on the supplies, but I am afraid will enter on new Acts that will be more and more uneasy. Therefore I am sure it is the queen's interest to put a conclu- sion as soon as possible, either by allowing the Act to be passed — or if her Majesty is persuaded it may prejudice her affairs more elsewhere than advance them here, then that it is fit her pleasure be known as soon as possible, that we may be adjourned." ^ Revelations of the personal feelings or opinions of royalty as to critical political conditions are rare. Hence the following morsel, addressed by Queen Anne to her faithful friend and servant Godolphin, may have some interest, though it reveals little. It is dated from Windsor on the 14th of June. To those who are acquainted with the gossip of the period, the self-consciousness that in this letter antici- pates an accusation of obstinacy may be curious and interesting. Until the great contest with Duchess Sarah who made the charge of obstinacy, it would be difficult to find any period in history so absolutely free of vestiges of such an interruptive element. We 1 Ibid., 54. A few days later we find Tarbat writing in like tone to Nottingham on the same critical question of the completion of the Act of Security. i :p 4 158 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. ) ■; .it r; ) see the empire passing onward to its mighty destinies with a calm unimpeded flow unexampled in its pre- vious history. If we desire to see what obstinacy in the sovereign is capable of accomplishing, we have but to look back to the reign of Charles I. And when the great contest came with Duchess Sarah on the one side and Abigail Hill on the other, we shall find that it was on a question of ecclesiastical patronage afiecting its highest range — the Bench of Bishops. The existing but endangered Ministry would have it a political, but the queen made it a religious question; and it was an instance of that impulse, whether we call it zeal or fanaticism, that strove to bend everything to its service. " Though you tell me you intend to be here either to-morrow night or Saturday morning, I cannot help venting my thoughts upon the Scotch aflfairs : and in the first place I think these people use me very hardly in opposing Lord Forfar being of the Treasury ; and I should be very glad to know your opinion whether upon this refusal I might not write to the Commis- sioner to let him know, if he does not think it for the service that Lord Forfar should have the post I recom- mended him to, I would let him have some other that may be equivalent to it ; and that I do expect he should comply with this one desire of mine, in return of all the compliances I have made to him. This may dis- please his Grace's touchy temper, but I can't see it can do any prejudice to my service ; and in my poor opinion such usage should be resented. As to the Duke of Queensberry, though he is none of my choice, I own it goes mightily against me — it grates my soul — to take a man into my service »i ? THE QUEEN S VIEWS. 159 4 . that has not only betrayed me, but tricked me several times, — one that has been obnoxious to his own countrymen these many years, and one that I can never be convinced can be of any use. But after all this, since my friends may be censured, and that it may be said if I had not been obstinate everything would have gone well, I will do myself the violence these unreasonable Scotsmen desire ; and indeed it is an inexpressible one. The draft of the letter and instructions, as you propose, will certainly be much better than those that are come out of Scotland ; but I am entirely of your opinion, that no method will succeed. My heart was so full that it was impossible for me to forbear easing it a little, and therefore I hope you will excuse this trouble." ^ In harmony with these expressions of the royal mind, we find Godolphin, in a letter to his colleague Nottingham, saying, "I find the queen is not at all easy at the accounts she has from time to time received of her afiairs in Scotland. She has commanded me this morning to desire that your lordship would, against the next coming hither, consider what direc- tions and instructions may be proper to be sent to * Mu8. Brit., ut supra. The Lord Forfar here referred to is Archibald Douglas, Earl of Forfar. He held none of the high offices or other conspicuous political positions that secure to a man a place in the history of his country, but ** he was made a Privy Councillor of King William, and appointed one of the commissioners for executing the office of Keeper of the Privy Seal. He was also of the Privy Coun- cil to Queen Anne, and was by her Majesty constituted one of the Commissioners of the Treasury, which he held till the dissolution of that Court in consequence of the Treaty of Union, which he supported in Parliament, dividing with Ministers on every question." — Douglas's Peerage of Scotland, i. 597. i( I sl ■' W r h I I! fy'*: .» ^'hN pf 1 60 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. her commissioner there, before she begins her jour- ney to the Bath."^ He has, in the passage that follows, to open his colleague's eyes to an alarming incident in the situa- tion. The queen had sent instructions for the sup- pression or rejection of the Act of Security, and they arrived too late — an accident not to be regretted, since they would have proved futile. " Since I troubled you yesterday I have had letters from Scotland, by which I find the Act of Security was passed the House before the queen's orders came for her servants to endeavour the laying of it aside ; and my letters say that if the order had come sooner, they should not have had strength to do it. They seem now to persuade themselves they shall have the cess they desire, but not without that condition of passing this Act; and I find the Duke of Queens- berry himself, as well as all the others, inclining to wish the queen would pass both together, because he says that without it neither the troops nor the civil Government can be supported, but all must fall to pieces and give way to the power of the opposite party there ; since, without a new one be granted, the prsent cess will not be paid."^ Three days later the matter comes so home to these statesmen, as responsible for the peace and safety of England, that they find it necessary to act, and begin l)y a meeting of the Cabinet. "Bath, 2Sd August 1703. — As to the affairs of Scotland, her Majesty doth also agree with you that the difficulty will be great either to pass the Acts 1 Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS., 29589, f. 82. 2 20th Aug. 1703.— Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS., 29589, f. 96. SCOTS ACT OF SECURITY. I6l desired by that kingdom, or to be without a provi- sion for the support of the civil and military govern- ment there, the want of which must probably bring that country into great confusion, and give oppor- tunity of advantage to the factious and opposite party. But since it is necessary that some resolu- tion of her Majesty should speedily be sent to Scot- land, and that the matter is of so much consequence to England as well as Scotland, as not to be deter- mined without the opinion of the lords of the Cabinet Council, the queen commands me to tell your lord- ship that she desires you would acquaint those lords who are with you at London with the matters of fact which have passed there, and the consequences of them one way and the other, and transmit to her Majesty the result of their thoughts; upon the re- ceipt of which her Majesty intends to call together those lords who are here, in order to guide her in such a resolution as they shall think most proper, to be sent to Scotland upon due consideration of the whole matter; in which for the fuller information of your lordship, and those lords whom you shall summon upon this occasion, the queen has com- manded me to send you the two last letters she has received from the Duke of Queensberry and my Lord Tarbatt; and I beg leave to add one more from my Lord Privy Seal to myself, — desiring the favour of your lordship that you would not for- get to return me these letters again, because they should also be considered by the lords of the Cabinet Council who are here. " It is observable enough that the queen's servants in Scotland, who agree in nothing else, do yet all agree VOL. I. T I f li 162 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. '^ it would be for her Majesty's service in that king- dom to pass these Acts, since they relate only to what may happen after her Majesty's reign ; and in the meantime there may be opportunities of retriev- ing in another session of Parliament the inconveni- ences which would otherwise happen ; but my Lord Privy Seal's letter says very plainly, that in case this should bring a difficulty upon her Majesty's affairs in England, he would use all his endeavours with those he could influence to quiet the minds of the people of Scotland."^ Throughout what appears in historical narrative as the wild work of an excited multitude, a thorough practical spirit governed the legislation of this Par- liament. The disposal of the armed power of the nation must not be left to chance, or be placed absolutely in the hands of any one having power to assume the title of sovereign. Accordingly, through much hot debate, there passed by majority an '' Act anent peace and war," the material provi- sion being, that on the death of the queen, if child- less, '*no person being king or queen of Scotland and England shall have the sole power of making war with any prince, potentate, or state whatsoever without consent of Parliament; and that no de- claration of war without consent foresaid shall be binding on the subjects of this kingdom." ^ If this Act, as supplementary to the Act of Security, carried defiance on its face, another Act, that seemed to carry in its terms an innocent and eminently genial character, was discovered by the Opposition to contain hidden elements of danger. 1 Mus. Brit. Addl. MSS. 29589, f. 107. « Act. Pari. Scot., xi. 107. SCOTS PARLIAMENT. I<^3 •^1 I Its tendency was to make wine abundant and cheap, declaring " That it shall be lawful, from and after the date hereof, to import into this kingdom all sorts of wine and other foreign liquors, any former Act or^ statute on the contrary notwithstand- ing." The Act passed after a vain protestation by a minority, pleading "that this Act allowing the importation of French wine and brandy ought not to pass, as being dishonourable to her Majesty, in- consistent with the grand alliance wherein she is engaged, and prejudicial to the honour, safety, in- terest, and trade of this kingdom.'' ^ A curious little personal affair, communicated to Godolphin by some member of the Estates, who did not sign his letter, is further exemplification of the fiery particles scattered in that assembly. It brings together the names of two men who were then the antithesis of each other as eminent and obscure, but whose position was afterwards signally reversed — Edward Chamerland or Chamberlayne and John Law. Chamberlayne was an " authority " on matters of finance, trade, and currency ; and he was solemnly consulted by the statesmen of the day as an adept in these matters, though, as it often is with those who profess to enrich nations, he seems to have been steeped in poverty; and in the proceedings of the Estates his projects for enriching others alternate with interpositions to protect him from his creditors. ^ * Act. Pari. Scot., xi. 102-112. ^ " Chaiiiberlain, Hugh, M.D., memorial relating to land credit, pre- sented by him remitted to a committee;" "read, and ordered to be printed ; " " an overture by him for the better employment of the poor to be considered ; " " warrant granted to him to cite his creditors with a view to a protection." — Index to Scots Acts. lill''; W Of l!' ' lit' m If I 164 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. Many less defensible projects than his land credit scheme had charms for those smitten by the specu- lative frenzy of the day. Its founder could always preach with truth that its security was absolute. He had not, however, reached the inner truth discovered and revealed by the French at the heavy cost of the ruin of their assignats, that not being convertible at sight it was a security unfit for the protection of a currency. The " one Mr Law," who will be recog- nised as the owner of a name destined to ring over all Europe, was then a young gentleman— pleasaut, gay, and dissipated. But what gives importance to their names here is the testimony to the inflammability of the assembled Estates, in the paltry nature of the dispute about them that set two statesmen to mortal conflict. This was, in the words of Godolphin's cor- respondent, ''occasioned by a proposal of one Mr Law, whom Fletcher was for confronting with Dr Cliamberlain in full Parliament, there to reason and debate the matter, so as that the House might be the better satisfied which of their proposals was the most practicable and advantageous. This the Earl of Eoxburgh thought very unfair— to oblige a gentle- man to come to the bar without he himself was willing to appear in so public a manner, especially since he had not dedicated his book to the Estates of Parliament, nor so much as put his name to it ; and therefore his lordship said that Mr Law, or any other gentleman who had employed his time and thoughts for the good of his country, ought to be treated with good manners." These words roused the fiery soul of Fletcher, who pushed the application until he was told,— that if he took it to himself he SCOTS PARLIAMENT. 165 might. "Upon which Fletcher stood up and said, 'I take it as I ought.'" This justified the commis- sioner in ordering both under arrest. However, they found their way, with seconds, to the sands at Leith — the accustomed spot for the adjustment of such afikirs. Eoxburgh's second objected to swords, on account of an injury or weakness that disqualified him from fair fencing ; but Fletcher produced a pair of pistols, " desiring very cavalierement his lordship to take his choice." At this critical moment the afiair was interrupted by a party of the Horse Guards.^ When the Scots Parliament reassembled in July 1704, the Act of Security was repassed without debate as a thing settled by the Estates. It was followed by provisions for calling out the wapen- shaws or meetings of militia, and for a general arm- ing of the nation. A supply was also passed, and it was significant in not being passed before, but after, the Act of Security : this was a precaution imitated from the tacking devices of the English Commons, of which we have seen examples. It might be conjec- tured from the action of England at this juncture, that the sage Godolphin did not regret the formid- able measures of Scotland, in some hope that the dread of war might frighten the great trading inter- ests of England into compliance with the free trade demands of Scotland. The tone of the alternative presented tended to this efiect : " Doubtless if you let these starving Scots compete with you in a free trade, every pound made by them will be a pound lost to you. But if you do not yield there will be war, and 1 Brit. Mus. Addl. MSS. 28055, f. 248, 249. i :|| 1 i66 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. UNION PROJECT RESUMED. 167 that will damage your trade more than competition. It cannot be helped : the sacrifice of free trade must be made." Meanwhile England took a step that was at once the most dignified and safe for her own national interests, and the least ofiensive to the Scots, how- ever formidable it might be. The policy that seemed to keep out of sight the existence of Scotland as an independent State, capable of making war or peace with any other State, England included, was dropped, and in return for the threat by Scotland, active pre- parations were made for war on the side of England. The whole question was discussed in a solemn sitting of the Lords — the queen present. An address to her desired the fortifying of Newcastle and Tyne- mouth, and the repairing of the works at Carlisle and Hull; further, that an army of regular troops be marched to the Border, and that the militia in the four northern counties be embodied. It was enacted that, with the exception of Scots nat- uralised and permanently resident within the do- minions of the Crown of England, or enrolled in the fleet or army, no native of Scotland "shall be capable to inherit any lands, tenements, and heredit- aments within this kingdom of England, or the do- minions thereunto belonging, or enjoy any benefit or advantage of a natural-born subject of England ; but every such person shall be from thenceforth adjudged and taken as an alien, born out of the allegiance of the Queen of England, until such time as the suc- cession to the crown of Scotland be declared and settled by an Act of Parliament in Scotland in the same manner as the succession to the crown of Eng- land is now settled by Act of Parliament in England, in case of her Majesty's decease without issue of her body.''^ Here were threats — and they were threats that proved eS'ective for their end, — but they were the threats not of a master but of a bargainer, leav- ing to the other party acceptance or rejection. Eng- land said virtually, "We have chosen our line of succession : if you see fit to select the same, we are ready to unite with you as one empire ; if you do otherwise, we remain separate independent sovereign- ties, at peace or war as it may be.'' Then followed restrictions and prohibitions for fully completing the disruption, if so it was to be ; but what sufi*used a healing balm throughout this formidable statute was, that at the commencement, as introductory to its hostile and penal clauses, stood a plenary authority to the queen to appoint commis- sioners to treat with such commissioners as might be appointed on the authority of the Parliament of Scotland to meet them for the adjustment of a treaty of union between the two kingdoms. If in the minds of those chiefly responsible for the adjustment of this Act there arose any vista of doubts or difficulties, fed from religious antagonism, they led to a conclusion in the same spirit. There was no word or hint as to religion in Scotland ; but the final clause secured England, by enacting " That the com- missioners to be named in pursuance of this Act shall not, by virtue of such commission, treat of or concern- ing any alteration of the liturgy, rites, ceremonies, 1 3 & 4 Anne, ch. 7, "An Act for the effectual securing the kingdom of England from the apparent dangers that may arise from several Acts lately passed in the Parliament of Scotland." ',( u 1 68 INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULTIES. UNION PROJECT RESUMED. 169 discipline, or government of the Church, as by law established within this realm." ^ In the Scots Parliament there was much talkinof, and some wild things were said by Fletcher and others, but there was nothing that could be called a debate. The only party who had critical issues to put to debate and division were the Jacobites. But action on their part was a question of life and death, and no opportunity came for their interposing, with the faintest chance of safety. They ventured, indeed, on a critical division, but it was rather because it would bring to their numbers, on that division, the Fletcher party, than because the policy they proposed was congenial to Jacobitism ; and, in fact, Fletcher was the champion of their cause. The question was opened on the appointment of the commissioners to meet those appointed by England — should they be named by the queen or by the Estates ? The majority felt their power, and would give no quarter. The busi- ness was hurried through with the impatience of people who have their opportunity and may lose it. The nomination by the queen was carried by a majority of 40 ; and on the 1st of September, close to midnight, the Act for a treaty with England passed. In response to the concluding clause of the English Act, a condition was carefully prepared and adopted with deliberate consideration : " That the commis- sioners shaU not treat of or concerning any altera- tion of the worship, discipline, or government of the Church of this kingdom, as now by law established." We have now come to the end of the Parliament- ary contest that happily ripened into the conclusion ^ 3 & 4 Anne, ch. 7, s. 1 1. that a union of the two kingdoms was a thing that must be, and created the machinery that was to adjust it. Between this point, however, and the final adjustment, the two kingdoms were perplexed and troubled by incidents, some of them violent and tragical, and all pointing to the sad conclusion that war between the two nations might still break in upon the blessed prospect that had been opened.. Before dealing with these difficulties and their solu- tion, let us turn to a war elsewhere, where Enoflish and Scots fought side by side with such success as to destroy at its source that element of peril to the two countries that was the most imminent of all, an invasion by King Louis in the cause of the house of Stewart.