MASTER NEGATIVE NO. 91-80197 MICROFILMED 1991 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK ii as part of the Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code — concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia University Library 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. AUTHOR: GUIZOT, FRANCOIS PIERRE GUILLAUME TITLE: ON THE CAUSES OF THE SUCCESS OF THE... 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GUIZOT. / / - I. O N ]:> O N : JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1850. /r u "* 7021 "::> [J n k ^ 7 r t PRINTED BV W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET. Library of David Kin^;. Loavitt & Co. May 21 ENGLISH EEVOLUTIOK The success by which the English Revolution was crowned has not only been permanent, but has borne a double fruit : its authors founded Consti- tutional Monarchy in England ; and in America, their descendants founded the Republic of the United States. These great events are now com- pletely known and understood; time, which has given them its sanction, has also shed over them its light. Sixty years ago France entered on the path opened by England, and Europe lately rushed head- long in the same direction. It is my purpose to show what are the causes which have crowned con- stitutional monarchy in England, and republican government in the United States, with that solid and lasting success which France and the rest of Europe are still vainly pursuing, through those mysterious trials and revolutionary struggles, which, according as they are well or ill passed through, elevate or pervert a nation for a2:es. 2 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF It was in the name of religion and liberty of con- science that the conflict which began in the sixteenth century, and, though occasionally suspended, has been constantly renewed, was undertaken. The tempest which still agitates the world, or hurries it along in an impetuous torrent, gathered in the inmost recesses of men's minds, and burst over the Church before it reached the State. It has been said that Protestantism was a poli- tical rather than a religious revolution ; an insur- rection of worldly interests against the established order of the Church, rather than the outbreak of an ardent conviction concerning the eternal interests of man. This judgment has been super- ficially formed and lightly pronounced ; and the error on which it rests has led the powers, whether spiri- tual or temporal, who have adopted it. into a line of conduct fatal to their own security. Intent on repressing the revolutionary element of Protestant- ism, they have overlooked or misunderstood its religious element. The spirit of revolt is doubtless very powerful, but not powerful enough to accom- plish, alone and unaided, things of such magnitude. It was not merely to shake off a yoke, it was also to secure the free profession and practice of a faith, that the Reformers of the sixteenth century rose up against authority, and persevered in the conflict. This is demonstrated by a decisive and incontestable fact. The two most protestant countries of Europe, i THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 3 % England and Holland, are still the countries in which the Christian faith has the greatest vital energy and power. It betrays a strange ignorance of human nature to believe that religious zeal would have remained at such a pitch of elevation, after the suc- cessful termination of the revolt, if religion had not been the mainspring of the whole movement. The revolution which took place in Germany, in the sixteenth century, was religious and not political ; that in France, in the eighteenth, was political and not religious. [It was the peculiar felicity of Eng- land in the seventeenth century, that the spirit of religious faith and the spirit of political liberty reigned together, and that she entered upon the two revolutions at the same timer] All the great passions of the human soul were thus excited and brought into action, while some of the most power- ful restraints by which they are controlled remained unbroken ; and the hopes and aspirations of eternity remained to console and tranquillize those whose earthly hopes and ambitions had suffered shipwreck. The English Reformers, especially those who aimed only at political reform, did not think a revo- lution necessary. The whole past history of their country, its laws, traditions, and precedents, were dear and sacred in their eyes ; they found in them the justification of their claims, as well as the sanction of their principles. It was in the name of the Great Charter, and of all those statutes by which, through b2 V I w 4 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF the course of four centuries, it had been confirmed, that they demanded their liberties. For four cen- turies not a generation of men liad dwelt upon the soil of England, without uttering the name and beholding the presence of Parliament. The great barons and the people, the country gentlemen and the burgesses, met together in 1640, not to dispute with each other claims to new acquisitions, but to regain, in concert, their common inheritance ; they met to recover their ancient and positive' rights, not to pursue the boundless combinations and hopes suggested by the imagination of man. The claims and projects of the religious reformers who sat in the Long Parliament were not, however, equally legal. The Episcopal Church of England, such as it had been constituted, first by the cruel and capricious despotism of Henry VIII., and after- w^ards by the able and persevering despotism of Elizabeth, did not satisfy them ; it was in their eyes the offspring of an incomplete and incon- sistent reformation, still so nearly approaching Ca- tholicism as to be incessantly exposed to the dan- ger of a relapse. They meditated a complete remo- delling and a new constitution of the national church. In this party the revolutionary spirit was more ardent and open than in the party mainly occupied with political reforms. Nevertheless the religious innovators were not utterly absorbed by the fanta- sies of their own minds. There was an anchor to [y THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 5 which they all held fast ; a compass by which thev ail were guided. The Gospel was their great charter; subject, it is true, to their interpretations and commentaries, but anterior and superior to their Will. They held it in sincere veneration, and, spite of! their pride, humbled themselves before the law which they had not made. Such were the guarantees forlnoderation in the two impending revolutions, afforded by the dispositions of their several partisans. Providence also granted them an especial favour ; they were not doomed, at the outset, to commit the dangerous wrong of attacking spontaneously, and without a clear and urgent ne- cessity, a mild and inoffensive ruler. In England • the royal power was the aggressor. Charles I., full of haughty pretensions, though devoid of elevated ambition, and moved rather by the desire of not derogating, in the eyes of the kings, his peers, than by that of ruling with a strong hand over his people, twice attempted to introduce into the country the maxims and the practice of absolute monarchy: the first time, in presence of Parliament, at the instigation 'of a vain and frivolous favourite, whose presumptuous incapacity shocked the good sense and wounded the self-respect of the humblest citi- zen : the second time, by dispensing with Parlia- ment altogether, and ruling alone by the hand of a minister, able and energetic, ambitious and impe- rious, though not without greatness of mind, de^ \ -JL ; 6 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF voted to his master, by whom he was imperfectly understood and ill supported, and aware too late that kings are not to be saved solely by incurring ruin, however nobly, in tlieir service. To check this aggressive despotism, more enter- prising than energetic, and assailing equally, in Church and State, the ancient rights and recent franchises to which the country laid claim, the mind of the people of England did not go beyond legal re- sistance, and this they entrusted to the hands of their representatives in Parliament. The resistance was as unanimous as it was legitimate. Men the most unlike in origin and character, the great nobles, gentlemen and citizens, those attached to the court and those the most remote from its influence, the friends and the enemies of the established church, all rose with common accord against this accumu- lated mass of grievances and abuses ; and the abuses were overthrown, and the grievances vanished, as the old walls of a deserted citadel crumble at the first stroke of its assailants. In this burst of the indignation and the hopes of the country, some minds of greater foresight, some more scrupulous consciences, already began to feel anxiety. Vengeance not only disfigures, but perverts justice; and passion, exulting in its rights, oversteps not only those rights, but its own inten- tions. Strafford was justly accused, and unjustly condemned. The political party, which did not ^\ / THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 7 desire the ruin of the Episcopal Church, suffered the Bishops to be insulted and humiliated, as if they were utterly and hopelessly overthrown. The ^ blows which struck down the usurpations and the unlawful pretensions of the Crown were so ill aimed that they wounded it in its just prerogatives. • The birth of revolutions is always preceded by vague but intelligible warnings, and gleams of light thrown on the future by passing events; and the revolutionary spirit, lurking under the demand for reforms, was now betrayed by alarm- ing incidents and denounced by courageous voices. But the importance and the splendour of victory blinded people to the perception of faults, and stifled the presentiment of their attendant dangers. When the work of reform was accomplished; when the grievances which had excited the unani- mous reprobation of the country were redressed ; when the powers in which these grievances had ori- ginated, and the men who were the instruments of those powers, were overthrown, the scene changed. People began to ask themselves, How were these con- quests to be maintained ? What security was there that England would henceforward be governed ac- cording to the principles and the laws which she had restored ? . The political reformers began to be perplexed. Above them was the King, who conspired against them while he was making concessions : if he h ( 8 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. ) recovered the power in the government, still com- patible with the reforms that had been effected, he would turn it against reform and the reformers. Around them were their allies, their army, and the religious innovators (Presbyterians or other sectaries), who would not rest satisfied with political reforms, but, in their hatred to the Church, would strive not only to throw off her yoke, but to trample her under foot and impose their own upon her. For the safety of their work and of their persons, the leaders thought fit to remain under arms ; and even if they had not wished it, their soldiers would have compelled them to do so. There was in their eyes only one possible gua- rantee for safety; namely, that Parliament should retain the sovereign power of which it had just taken possession ; that it should be rendered permanently impossible for the King to govern contrary to the will of Parliament generally, and of the Commons' House in particular. This is the result at which Constitutional Mo- narchy has arrived in England. This is the end pursued by its partisans two centuries ago. But in the seventeenth century they possessed neither the political lights nor the political virtues which that system of government requires. The heart of man is at once so arrogant and so weak that he would fain combine the splendour of triumph with the repose of an inviolable peace. To \ surmount obstacles is not enough ; he wants to an- nihilate them for ever, that he may dismiss them entirely from his mind ; victory itself does not sa- tisfy him, unless he enjoy it in all the insolence of complete security. Constitutional monarchy; how- ever, is not formed to gratify these inconsistent desires and bad tendencies of the human heart. To none of the powers which it invests with a joint action, can it grant the pleasure of undivided and secure domination. On all, even on that which has the ascendancy, it imposes the unremitting labour of forced alliances, mutual concessions, frequent com- promises, indirect influences, and a struggle inces- santly renewed, with incessantly recurring chances of success or defeat. It is on these conditions that constitutional monarchy gives predominance to the interests and feelings of the country ; which, in its turn, is bound by its choice of such a govern- ment, to moderation in its desires, to vigilance and patience in its efforts. In the seventeenth century neither the King nor the Parliament of England understood these con- ditions of their common government. The King was obstinately bent on remaining, the House of Commons on becoming, the immediate and infal- lible sovereign of the country. Nothing short of this could satisfy the pride or allay the fears of either party. When things had reached this point, a great |t t 1 10 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF division took place among the reformers. Some, more far-sighted or more timid, undertook the defence of legal order and of the threatened mo- narchy; others, more daring or less scrupulous, embarked on the current of revolution. At this moment arose the two great parties, which, successively assuming different names and aspects, have for two centuries presided over the destinies of England; — the party devoted to the maintenance of the established order of things, and the party favourable to the growth of popular influences ; the Whigs and the Tories ; the Con- servators and the Innovators. To attain its end, — the maintenance and exercise of the supreme power which it had seized, — the Parliament could no longer rest satisfied with the reform of abuses and the restoration of legal rights. The ancient laws must be altered, and all powers concentrated in its own hands. Within the Parliament, the conflict was severe, but short. The monarchical party tried to array itself around the King, and to govern in his name. These first essays at constitutional government failed ere they had well begun ; they failed through the faults of the King, who was inconsistent, frivo- lously obstinate, and as insincere with his counsel- lors as with his enemies; through the inexperience of those counsellors, alternately too exclusive and too yielding, and constantly thwarted or betrayed in i\ f\ ' THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 11 the Palace, as well as in the Parliament ; and finally, through the distrust and the pretensions of the revolutionary party, determined not to yield or rest till the absolute power, which they sought to over- throw, should have passed into their own hands. On the occasion of a new remonstrance, which it was proposed to present to the King against the old grievances (as if they had not already been re- dressed), the strength of the two parties was dis- tinctly put to the trial. The debate became so yiolent that, in the House of Commons itself; the members were on the point of coming to blows. Victory was determined in favour of the revolution- ary party by eleven votes. Fifty days after this vote, the fugitive King quitted his palace of White- hall, which he re-entered only on his way to the scaflfold. The House of Commons immediately ordered that the country should, with all diligence, be put in a state of defence. The Parliamentary struggle was at an end : Civil War had begun. At this solemn moment, patriotic regrets and gloomy forebodings were heard in both parties ; and especially in tliat of the King, which was less con- fident in its strength, and perhaps also in its cause. But these sentiments were not general. In most minds the ardent desire and hope of victory were 12 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF I predominant. The spirit of resistance to illegality and oppression Jias been^one of tlie most noble and salutary dispositions'^ of the English people throughout the whole course of their history. Docile and even favourable to authority, when it acts in virtue of the laws, they are intrepid in resisting any violation of what they regard as the law of the land and their own right. Both parties, even in the midst of their dissensions, were animated by this sentiment. The revolutionary party struggled against the encroachments and oppressions which England had endured from the King, and which she had still to apprehend from him. The mo- narchical party resisted the illegal and oppressive acts which Parliament was actually inflicting on the country. The respect for right and law,°though continually disregarded or violated, was deeply rooted in all minds, and threw a veil over the inju- ries and the evils which civil war was preparing for the country. In neither party were the habits and manners very repugnant to civil war. The Cavaliers were impetuous and violent, and still given to that habit of combat, that taste for an appeal to force, which characterized the feudal times. The Puritans were rigid, harsh, and pertinacious : they had imbibed the passions, together with the traditions, of the He- brew people, who defended and avenged their God by destroying his enemies. To both, the sacrifice of i7< fs THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 13 life was familiar; in neither, did bloodshed-excite any horror. Another less obvious cause hastened and aggra- vated the explosion. The contest was not merely between the political and religious parties; beneath , that, lay a social question— the struggle between the various classes of society for influence and power. Not that the separation between these classes was as profound and as hostile in England as it has been in other countries. The great barons had maintained the liberties of the people together with their own, and the people did -not forget the debt they owed them. The country gentlemen and the burgesses had sat together in Parliament, in the name of the Commons of England, for three centuries. But during the preceding century a great change had taken place in the relative strength of the several classes of society, without any analogous change in the government. Commercial activity and religious zeal had given a prodigious impulse to wealth and thought among the middle classes. It was ob- served with suiprise in one of the first parliaments in the reign of Charles I. that the House of Com- mons was three times as rich as the House of Lords. The higher aristocracy no longer possessed the same preponderance in the nation as heretofore, and, though they still rallied round the King, could no longer affbrd him the same support. On the other hand, the citizens, the country gentlemen Kl V i^ 14 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 15 and the yeomen (then a very numerous class), did not exercise an influence over public affairs pro- portionate to their weight in the country. Their growth in wealth and importance had not been accompanied by a corresponding increase of po- litical power. Hence, among them and the classes immediately below them, there existed a fierce and vehement spirit of ambition, ready to burst forth on the first occasion or pretext. Civil war offered a vast field to their energy and their hopes. At its outbreak, it did not wear the aspect of an ex- clusive and jealous social classification ; for many country gentlemen, and many even of the most considerable of the great nobles, marched at the head of the popular party. Nevertheless, the mass of the nobility on the one hand, and of the citizens and the people on the other, ranged themselves, the former on the side of the Crown, the latter on that of the Parliament. Unerring symptoms already showed that a great social movement was going on in the midst of a great political struggle ; and that the effervescence of an ascendant democracy was forcing its way through the ranks of an enfeebled and divided aristocracy. Each party found in the state of society — it would hardly be too much to say, in the laws of the country — natural and almost regular means of maintaining their rights and enforcing their claims by arms. Ever since the reign of Elizabeth, the / ) \ House of Commons had laboured with ardour to destroy the last tottering institutions of feudalism. But profound traces of it still remained; and the habits, sentiments, and even occasionallv the rules, to which it had given birth, still determined the relations of the possessors of fiefs, both to the King their suzerain, and to the part of the popula- tion grouped around their castles or settled on their lands. These people rose at their bidding, and attended them to festivities or to battle, as they themselves answered the call of the King when he claimed their services. It was one of those epochs of transition in which ancient laws, honoured though antiquated, still determine the actions of men on whom they are no longer binding. Attach- ment had taken the place of servitude ; the fidelity of the vassal had become the loyalty of the subject ; and the Cavaliers, whether rich or poor, thronged around the King, ready to fight and to die for him, and followed by a troop or a handful of servants, equally ready to fight and to die for them. On the other hand, the middle classes, consisting {jenerally of artisans and townspeople, had, under other forms, their means of independent action, and even of waging war. Organized in municipal or trading corporations, they met freely to discuss and settle their affairs ; they levied taxes, called out mi- litia or trained bands, and, in short, deliberated and acted within the circuit of their walls, or the often 16 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF obscure limits of their charters, almost with the independence of petty sovereigns. And the ex- tension of commerce and manufactures, the wealth, connexions and credit of these corporations, in- vested them with a power which they used in the service of their cause with the audacity of new-born and inexperienced pride. Neither in the country nor in the towns did the King possess the authority of a central and exjclu- sive administration. The business of the nation, financial, military, and even judicial, was almost entirely in the hands of local and nearly inde- pendent authorities. In the country, it was in the hands of the landholders ; in the towns, in those of municipal or other corporate bodies; and these respectively appropriated to themselves as much as possible of the administrative functions, for the purpose of serving the cause in which they had engaged. And where these established means were insuffi- cient, where the action extended beyond the sphere of the ancient and recognised local powers, the ancient spirit and usage of association (which was still in full force in the country) promptly esta- blished practical and efficient concert between the counties and cities ; between the different parts of the country, or the different classes of society. By means of this concert, free and extemporaneous, associations levied taxes and troops, formed com- / ■ I THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 17 mittees, and elected leaders charged with the conduct of the part they were to take in the general defence of the cause they had embraced. It was in an association of this kind — that of the Eastern Counties — formed to support the Parlia- ment, that Cromwell gave tlie first proofs of his capacity, and laid the fJrst foundations of hi& power. In a community thus organized and thus dis- posed, civil war was neither impossible nor revolt- ing. It soon overspread the wliole country; in some places under the command of the agents of the King or the Parliament, in others spon- taneously levied by the inhabitants; and main- tained on both sides with an energy sometimes sad, but always unhesitating, as the exercise of a right and the fulfilment of a duty. Each party felt profoundly the justice and tlie greatness of its cause ; each party made those efforts and sacrifices in its behalf which elevate the mind, even when confused and misled, and give to pas- sion the appearance, and sometimes the merit of virtue. Nor was virtue itself wanting to either party. The Cavaliers, though generally violent and licentious, had in their ranks the noblest models of the high-bred and generous manners of men of ancient family, full of unexacting devotedness and dignified submission. The Puritans, arrogant and hard, rendered an inappreciable service to their country; they founded the austerity of private life c 18 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 19 and the sanctity of domestic manners. The two parties fought with the most determined acrimony ; but, in the midst of the mortal struggle, they did not renounce all sentiments of order and peace. There were no sanguinary riots, no judicial mas- sacres. There was civil war, fierce, obstinate, full of violence and of evil, but without cynical or atro- cious excesses, and restrained, by the general man- ners of the people, within certain bounds of justice and humanitv. I hasten to render this justice to the conflicting parties; for the virtues of parties are frail and transient when breathed upon by the hot breath, and shaken by the storms, of revolutions. In pro- portion as civil war w^as prolonged, respect for rights and sentiments of justice and generosity grew more and more feeble. The natural conse- quences of a state of revolution manifested them- selves ; gradually perverting, in both parties, the ideas and habits of law and morals. The King was in want of money; the Cavaliers used this as a reason or a pretext for unlicensed pillage. The taxes levied by the Parliament did not suflBce for the expenses of the war; the Parliament established a system of confiscation more or less disguised', which, by branding its enemies with the name of Malig- nants, rendered it master of their revenues, often even of their lands, and thus became a daily source of wealth to its partisans. In this general and • protracted disorder, amidst the abuses of power and the extremities of distress, *bad passions were incessantly excited, and lawless desires exposed to the temptation of chance and opportunity ; hate and revenge took possession of the more energetic minds; fear and baseness, of the feebler. The Parliament, which pretended to act in the name of the laws, and to serve the King, even while resist- ing him, was compelled to clothe its most violent deeds in false and hypocritical language. Among the Royalists, many, mistrusting the King's dupli- city, called upon to make sacrifices beyond their means, and daily more doubtful of the success of tneir cause, felt the warmth of their devotion decline, and either submitted in despair, or sought compensation in licence. Falsehood, violence, rapa- city, pusillanimity and selfishness under every variety of form, rapidly increased among the men engaged in the conflict ; while the people, who took only a remote or indirect part in it, and were subjected to the detestable influence of the spectacle of a revolution, gradually lost their notions of right, duty, justice and virtue, or preserved only dim and wavering traces of them. At the same time they suflTered severely in their pecuniary interests. War, unrestrained by dis- cipline and spread over the whole face of the land, ravaged town and country, destroying the subsist- ence, or defeating the hopes and the labours of the c2 h 20 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 21 people. The financial measures of Parliament, made subservient to local hostilities and intrigues, threw landed property into confusion and depre- ciated its value. All security for the business of the present or the labours of the future was at an end. Even domestic life was affected by the gene- ral disorder, and families the furthest removed from political strife were sharers in the general calamity. And as alarm always travels further and swifter than suffering, the country, fallen into a state of fearful distress, was a prey to an anxiety more general and more fearful than the distress itself. Its complaints and wishes were not long in bursting forth. War was still raging in all its fierceness, when already the cry of " Peace," " Peace," resounded at the doors of the Parliament. Frequent petitions demanding it were brought up by assemblages of men so numerous and so excited that it was necessary to disperse them by force. In the House of Commons, notwithstanding the ' general secession of the original Royalist party, a second was formed in the name of peace, whose main object was to seize every occasion of pro- claiming its necessity, and of opening negotiations with the King. These were attempted several times, but failed, through the intrigues of those, in both parties, who were averse to the mutual concessions which peace would have required ; and through the incapacity or the weakness of those who, while they K • would willingly have consented to the inevitable conditions of a peace, dared not openly accede to them. Civil war continued to rage ; but the party which had begun it was divided, and the struggle for and against revolution was renewed in the Parliament. Out of doors, especially in the country, the people did not rest satisfied with demanding peace at the hands of the Parliament ; they tried to en- force it themselves, locally at least, on both the con- tbnding parties. Associations were formed and took arms, declaring that they would no longer suffer their fields to be ravaged either by Parliamentarians or Royalists, and giving battle to whichever party fell in their way ; — a sort of armed neutrality in the midst of civil war. The attempt, however vain, suflSced to prove how profoundly the furious and obstinate conflicts of the two parties were at variance with the sentiments and interests of the country. So long: as the war was hot and the issue doubtful, the suflferings and impressions of the people, though they produced a reaction in favour of peace, excited in them but a feeble and hesitating return of loyalty towards the King. They accused him of stubborn- ness and falsehood, and complained bitterly of his secret plots with the Queen and the Catholics, who were the objects of vehement hatred and dread. They reproached him, at least as much as the k t 22 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 23 Parliament, with the evils and the prolongation of the war. When the war was ended, and the King a prisoner in the hands of the Parliament, the reaction in , favour of peace assumed a more general and de- cided royalist character. The King was utterly powerless, and hore his misfortunes with dignity. The Parliament was all powerful, and did not put an end to the calamities of the country. On the Parliament now rested the whole responsibility; on the Parliament were thrown all the discontents, the disappointed hopes, the suspicions and hates, the curses of the present, the terrors of the future! ' Urged by this national sentiment, and enlightened by the imminence of the danger, the political re- formers, (who had been the first leaders of the par- liamentary resistance,) and in their train a portion of the religious innovators (the Presbyterians, who, though enemies to the Episcopal Church, were' friendly to the monarchy), made a last effort to bring about a peace with the King and to put an end at once to war and revolution. They were sincere, and even ardent, in their de- sire, but they Avere still full of the revolutionary prejudices and pretensions which had repeatedly rendered f.eace impossible. By the conditions they sought to impose upon the King, they required him Uo sanction the ruin they had brought on the Monarchy and the Church ; they required him to H 1/ I J complete with his own hands the demolition of the edifice in which alone he could hope for safety, and of that on which his faith was fixed. They had proclaimed as a principle, and reduced to practice, the substantial sovereignty of the House of Commons ; and now, constrained in their turn to resist the popular torrent, they were astonished at finding distrust and hostility, instead of support and strength, from the high aristocracy and the church which they had decried and demolished. Even if they had succeeded in concluding a peace with the King, that peace would have been vain. It was too late to stop the course of the revolution, and too soon to bring it to its permanent and satis- factory conclusion. God had only begun to execute his judgments and to teach his lessons. As soon as the first leaders of the insurrection tried to rebuild the structure which they had overthrown, the real revolutionary party arose ; and treating their newly acquired wisdom with open contempt, drove them from the Parliament, condemned the King to death, and proclaimed the Republic. Two centuries have elapsed since the English Re- public put to death King Charles I., and, in a few short years, crumbled to dust on the soil still wet with the blood it had shed. The French Republic I > 24 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTOKY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 25 has Since exhibited the same spectacle. And we still hear it said that these great crimes were acts of a great policy ; that they were enjoined by the necessity of founding those Republics which hardly survived them a dav ! Thus do men try to clothe their folly and wicked- ness in the garb of greatness; but neither the truth of history nor tlie interest of mankind can tolerate so daring and mischievous a falsehood. The fervour of religious conviction and religious liberty had degenerated in some sects into an arro- gant aggressive fanaticism, intractable to all au- thority, and delighting only in outbursts of intellec- tual licentiousness and spiritual pride. Civil war had converted these sectarians into soldiers, at once disputatious and devoted, enthusiastic and disci- plined. Having risen in general from the humbler classes and professions, they greedily relished the pleasure of commanding and predominating over others; they exulted in the belief that they were the chosen and powerful instruments of God's will and judgments on earth. By alternately appealing to religious and democratic enthusiasm, and enforcing military discipline, Cromwell had gained the confidence of these men, and had be- come their leader. He had spent his youth in the excesses of an ungovernable temperament, which were succeeded by fits of ardent and restless piety, and by active services rendered to the people among iii 11 I whom he lived. As soon as a political and war- like career opened before him, he rushed headlong into it, as the only one in which he could find room for the employment of his powers and the satisfaction of his passions. He was the most vehe- ment of sectaries, the most active of revolutionists, the ablest of soldiers; ready alike to speak, to pray, to conspire, and to fight; atone time pour- ing out his thoughts with a warmth and frank- ness that carried away his hearers ; and, in case of need, playing the hypocrite with a cool and inexhaustible mendacity, and. a fertility of invention, which surprised and perplexed even his enemies; enthusiastic yet worldly, rash yet perspicacious, mystical yet practical, he set no bounds to the soarings of his imagination, and he felt no scruples fin perpetrating any act which the necessity of the case enjoined; determined on success at all costs, discerning and seizing with- matchless promp- titude the means necessary to' obtain it, and im- pressing on all, whether friends or foes, the con- viction that he was gifted above all men with the qualities necessary to the vigorous conduct and complete success of an enterprise. To such a party, led by such a man, a Republic was sure to be welcome. It gratified their passions, opened a vista to their most ambitious hopes, and gave security to the interests which civil war had created in their favour. It delivered the country i \ V 26 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF into the hands of the army by the genius of its commander, and the sovereign power into those of Cromwell by the disciplined aid of his soldiers. Respect for their sincerity, their genius, and tlieir misfortunes, restrains me from fully expressing my opinion concerning some illustrious men. Sidney, Vane, Ludlow, Harrington, Hutchinson and Mil- ton were Republicans, but rather in accordance with the political systems and models of antiquity, than from religious fanaticism. They were men of lofty spirits and proud hearts, full of noble ambition for their country and for mankind ; but so injudicious and so insanely proud, that they learned nothing either from power or from defeat. Credulous as childhood, and obstinate as age ; blinded by hope to their perils and their faults ; they were, while preparing the way by their own anarchical tyranny for a more consistent and a more powerful tyranny, persuaded that they were founding the freest and most glorious of governments. Excepting these sects enrolled into regiments, and these coteries constituting a Parliament, nobody in England wished for a Republic. It offended against the traditions, the manners, the laws, the old attachments, the old reverence, the regular interests, the good order, the good sense, and the moral sentiments of the country. Irritated and alarmed by the manifest aversion ' /I V « / i. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 27 of the public for their designs, Cromwell and the sectaries thought that a form of government so generally and vehemently rejected could only be est"ablished by instantly striking a terrible and irre« vocable blow, which would prove its strength and vindicate its right. They determined to consecrate the Republic on the scafl'old of Charles 1. But even the ablest leaders of revolutions are not long-sighted. Intoxicated by the passion, or hurried away by the necessity, of the moment, they do not see that the very acts which secure their triumph to-day, will bring about their down- fall to-morrow. The execution of Charles I., which struck the country with consternation, de- livered England into the hands of Cromwell and the Kepublicans. But the blow which killed the King rebounded with mortal force on the Republic and the Protector ; from that moment, their rule was nothing more than a violent and ephemeral domination, branded with that mark of consummate iniquity which dooms the strongest and most im- posing power to certain ruin. Charles the First's judges did everything in their power to divest their act of its fatal cha- racter, and to represent it as a judgment of God, which they were commissioned to execute. Charles had aimed at absolute power, and had carried on civil war; many rights had unquestionably been violated, and much blood had been shed, by his '/■ .h-.' N 82 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF most moderate weighed the chances, and approached the verge of fresh revolutions, with a facility utterly repugnant to any stable and legal order of things. The revolutionary poison, deadened but not expelled, still circulated in the veins of a large portion of the English nation, and kept it in a state of poHtical fever which threw innumerable obstacles and perils in the way of power. The reactionary spirit, the disease of conquering parties, incessantly exasperated the spirit of revo- lution. Not that we ought to listen to all the reproaches to this effect which history lavishes upon the Cavaliers and the Church of England. When revolutions which have long reigned unchecked are at length arrested in their course, their partisans demand, with singular arrogance, that the results of their past iniquities should remain untouched, and that nothing should be done or desired beyond the repression of their future attempts at mischief; every endeavour to repair the evil which they have inflicted, they call reaction. Among the measures adopted under the reign of Charles II. to redress the wrongs which the royalists, whether lay or ecclesiastical, had suffered during the revolution, many were only a natural and just restitution of violated rights. But both the rational policy of governments, and the well-understood interests of the injured parties themselves, prescribe limits to such acts of reparation. Injustice is not to be re- THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 83 paired by injustice, nor can revolutions be brought to a close by acts of provocation and vengeance. L Reparation, when it appears vindictive, ceases to be regarded as just, and becomes a source of serious danger to the cause which it pretends to serve. The religious reaction under Charles II. was stained by these deplorable excesses : it was not the mere redress of the grievances and wrongs of the Church of England ; it was a vindictive persecution of dissenters and a breach of faith towards the more moderate among them, to whom the king, at the moment of his return, had solemnly pro- mised liberty of conscience. Charles made seve- ral attempts to keep his word, and to secure some toleration to the dissenters. Persecution was repug- nant to his good sense, to the mildness of his tem- per, to his indifference in matters of religion, and to his secret leaning to the catholics. But his feeble and lukewarm velleities of justice soon gave way before the obstinacy of ecclesiastical hatred and the violence of popular passions ; and the royalist party, in parliament and out of it, joined warmly in the vi^ork of persecution. The lay reaction which fol- lowed on the events of 1660 was brief and limited; but the religious reaction, though restrained for a moment, soon broke out with violence, became fiercer tlie longer it lasted, and was the source of most of the dangers, errors and crimes into which Charles and his government fell. o 2 } 84 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF But these faults, however lamentable, did not in effect involve the monarchy in serious danger or threaten the safety of English society. The body of the nation was no longer possessed by the spirit of revolution, nor was it governed by the spirit of reaction. From the time of the great revolu- tionary crisis which lasted from 1G40 to 1660, the English people had the good fortune to profit by experience, and the good sense not to give them- selves up to extreme parties. In the midst of the most ardent political struggles, and of the violences into which they alternately urged and followed their leaders, they never failed, in critical and decisive circumstances, to remain or to fall back within the bounds of that steady good sense which consists in a clear recognition of the things which it is essential to preserve, and an unshaken adherence to them ; in enduring the inconveniences attached to these essen- tials, and renouncing whatever wishes or projects might endanger them. It is from the reign of Charles II. that this good sense, which is the poli- tical intelligence of a free people, has presided over the destinies of England. The revolution through which the English nation had just passed had ter- minated in three great results. They were as yet confused and incomplete, but they were irrevocable : and they were the only results essential to the wishes and the welfare of the people. / In the first place, the king could never again THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 85 I separate himself from the parliament. The cause of Inonarchy was gained, but that of absolute monarchy was lost for ever. Theologians and philosophers, like Filmer or Hobbes, might preach the dogma or maintain the principle of absolute power, and their ideas might excite the indignation or the favour of speculative thinkers or vehement partisans. In the opinion of the nation, however, the question was practically decided : royalists and revolutionists Regarded the close union and the mutual control of the crown and parliament as the right of the country, and as necessary to its interests. In the second place, the House of Commons was in effect the preponderant branch of the parliament. Its direct or formal sovereignty was a revolution- ary principle which was now generally decried and execrated ; and the Crown and the House of Lords had recovered their rights and their dignity. But their overthrow had been so violent and complete, that, even after the fall of their enemies, they were unable to re-establish themselves in their ancient ascendancy ; and neither the faults nor the reverses of the House of Commons could obliterate the effect of its terrible victories. The royalist party were now masters in that assembly, and, in its relations to the crown and the administration of the country, inhe- rited the conquests of the Long Parliament. The confusion was inevitably long and often violent before the different parties (Tory or Whig, govern- 86 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF ment or opposition) learned to use these conquests with sense and moderation; to understand their import and their limits; and to maintain that elaborate harmony among the great powers of the state which is at once the merit and the difficulty of constitutional government. But through all the experiments of this apprenticeship, and in spite of some appearances of an opposite tendency, the pre- ponderant influence of the House of Commons over the afiairs of the country was, from the reign of Charles II., daily more obvious and decisive. These two political facts were accompanied by one of still higher importance, relating to the re- ligious condition of the country : the complete and definitive ascendancy of Protestantism in England was the other great result of the Revolution. Never, certainly, had a fiercer disunion prevailed among the English Protestants; and Bossuet might well exult in the contemplation of their divisions and quarrels. But a common faith and a common passion pervaded all these divergent sects : in the midst of their own combats, they joined with equal ardour in the common war against Catholicism ; and liberty of conscience, though incessantly vio- lated and oppressed by them and among them, was, as against the Church of Rome, equally dear to each and the inalienable acquisition of all. These were, indeed, the only objects which the great body of the English people had really at THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 87 heart, or earnestly demanded of that ancient mo- narchy whose return they hailed with transport; they were resolved to overlook or to endure the faults of a government which, whilst securing to them these three great and indispensable results of the revolution they had just passed through, pre- served them from fresh convulsions. But this was precisely what neither Charles II. nor James II. was able or willing to accomplish. In regard to politics, Charles II. had too much good sense and too much indifference to use any earnest endeavours to obtain absolute power. He cared for nothing but his pleasure, loved power only as a means of enjoyment, and willingly consented to concessions and compromises in order to ward off the risk of extreme struggles, or spare himself the annoyance of them. But in his inmost heart absolute monarchy was the only form of government which suited his taste or com- manded his respect. He had not only witnessed the defects and excesses incident to the institu- tions of his own country, but had suffered under them. On the other hand, he had been a near spectator of the splendid court and the strong go- vernment of Louis XIV., and these were the objects of his admiration and his confidence. Hence arose the facility with which he fell into a venal depend- ence on the French monarch. He regarded him as the head of the great family of kings, and he did / 88 DISCOUKSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 89 not feel all the shame by which he ought to have been overwhehiied, when he sold him the policy and the liberties of his country. In religion, Charles was at once sceptical and catliolic ; believing in nothing, and as corrupt in mind as in manners. But he thought that if, after all, there were any truth in religion, it was in that form of it taught by the Catholic Church, which afforded the surest refuge for kings against the perils of power, and, for the mass of mankind, against those of eternity. Thus, though his conduct was not that of an absolute and catholic king, Charles was in his heart an absolutist and a catholic ; his sympathies were with the sovereigns of the continent, and not with the faith and the policy of his own nation. James II. was a catholic and an absolutist at heart, and his conduct was consistent with his con- viction. He was also blindly enterprising, and persisted in his enterprises with all the obstinacy of a narrow and sterile mind, and the hardness of a cold and arid heart. Such were the two princes whom the Restora- tion placed successively on the throne of England, in the midst of a nation which, though returning with joy to the ancient form of government and execrating the revolution, instinctively determined to hold fast by the important results it had gained. The history of England, during the whole course 1/ ( of the Restoration, is nothing else than the history of the profound discord which, though slowly revealed, broke forth at length between these two kings and their subjects; and of the persevering efforts of the English people to escape from the second revolution to which that discord naturally tended. For England was during that period essentially conservative. She was agitated by the intrigues, the plots, and the insurrections excited by the vio- lence of faction or the selfishness of ambition, and was more than once hurried away by the efforts of malcontents or the passions of the people into dis- turbances which seemed to threaten revolution. But far from seconding the men who sought to overthrow the monarchy of the Stuarts, she stopped and recoiled as soon as she saw that she was tend- ing to that point. During the reign of Charles II. conspirators and insurgents were small fractions of the nation, and were disowned and deserted by it even when it seemed to favour them. As the faults of the restored monarch became more fre- quent and unpardonable, and his tendencies and designs more evident, the public discontent grew stronger, and the chances of a rupture between the sovereign and the country more imminent. But the country, far from availing itself eagerly of these chances, strove to evade them. To maintain the House of Stuart on the throne without surrendering its laws or its faith, the Eiig- <\ ■ * 90 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 91 Hsh nation made every sacrifice and every effort that the most patient and persevering conservatism could require. All the phases through which the English Go- vernment passed during that period, with the con- duct and destiny of all the parties and ministries who then wielded power, were but different forms and striking proofs of this great truth. It was natural that the ancient royalist party, the faithful adherents and counsellors of Charles I. in misfortune, and of Charles II. in exile, should be the first possessors of power. Their leader was Claren- don, a man of firm, upright, and penetrating mind ; a sincere friend of legal and moral order ; a cou- rageous defender of the constitution of his country, and a devoted adherent of her church; full of respect for her rights, whether written or traditional, popular or monarchical. But he carried his hatred of the revolution to such a pitch, that he regarded everything new with suspicion and antipathy. As prime minister, he was haughty rather than high- minded ; he was deficient in largeness of thought and in warmth and generosity of heart; he was osten- tatious in the display of his greatness, and pedanti- cally rigid in the use of his power. Towards the king, who regarded him with great confidence, and with an esteem mingled with some degree of attach- ment, he was by turns austere and humble ; passing from remonstrance to complaisance, speaking the t, \ truth with the courage and firmness of an honest man, but alarmed at having spoken it, and seeking support against the court, yet not choosing to receive it from the Parliament. He tried to compel the Crown to respect the ancient laws of the country, and to keep the Commons within the humble limits which the older constitution had assigned to them ; and he flattered himself that the royal prerogative might be restrained within the bounds of legality, without rendermg it responsible to Parliament. He failed in this <;;himerical attempt to found a go- vernment neither arbitrary nor limited in a country just emerging from a popular revolution ; and he fell, after seven years of ascendancy, hated by the Commons for his monarchical arrogance, by the dissenters for his high church intolerance, and by the court for his contemptuous austerity. He was pursued by the blind anger of the people, who re- proached him with every public evil, as well as with every abuse of power; and was shamefully abandoned by the king, who now regarded him only as an inconvenient censor, and a minister dangerous to his own popularity. Clarendon's fall has been attributed to the defects of his character, and to some mistakes or failures in his policy abroad and at home. Those who judge thus underrate the magnitude of the causes which determine the fate of eminent statesmen. Pro- vidence, which imposes so rude a task upon them^ 92 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 93 does not regard a few weaknesses, failures, or errors with such inexorable rigour as to visit them with a total overthrow. Other great ministers, such as Richelieu, Mazarin, or Walpole, had as great defects as Clarendon, and committed faults at least as serious as his. But they understood the times in which they lived ; the views and objects of their policy were in harmony with the wants, the condition, and the general tendency of the public mind. Clarendon, on the contrary, mistook the character of his age ; he misconstrued the import of tlie great events which he had witnessed. He con- sidered what had passed from 1640 to 1660 as a revolt, the suppression of which had left the govern- ment nothing to do but to re-establish law and order ; he did not perceive that it was a revolution which had not only hurried the English people into fatal disorders, but had stamped a new political character on the country and imposed new rules of conduct on the restored monarchy. Amongst the great results which this revolution had bequeathed to England, Clarendon accepted with sincerity the indispensable concurrence of Parliament in the government of the country, and with joy, the triumph of Protestantism. But he obstinately re- jected and opposed the growing influence of the House of Commons, and could not employ or even understand the means by which it might be made to ensure the safety, and add to the strength, r of the monarchy. This was one of those radical mistakes for which the rarest talents or even virtues cannot atone, and which render faults or reverses, otherwise unimportant, fatal to public men. The honest counsellors of the late king were succeeded by the profligates of the new court. At their head were Buckingham and Shaftesbury ; the one licentious, witty, light, and presumptuous, the other ambitious, crafty, and bold ; both equallj^ corrupt, and equally versed in the arts of corruption ; both ready to go over from the court to the populace, or from the government to a faction, whenever the apostacy would advance their fortune or gratify their vanity. They undertook to satisfy the Parliament, the dissenters, and all the popular feelings which the rigid and isolated policy of Clarendon had irritated. But the art of governing does not consist solely in anxiety to please or readiness to yield. The rash and immoral successors of Clarendon did not suspect the embarrassments and perils which they were about to bring upon the government and on themselves, by leaning on the House of Commons for their chief support. A popular assembly can only become the habitual instrument of a strong and regular government when it is itself strongly and regularly organized and governed ; and this can only be the case when it is divided into great parties, united by common interests and principles, and proceeding in a consistent and disciplined manner, under acknow- / 94 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 95 ledsred leaders, towards determinate ends. Now, such parties can only be formed and held together among men united by firm and enduring convictions. Faith in principles and fidelity to persons are the indispensable virtues and the vital conditions of great political parties; as great political parties are, in their turn, a condition of free government. Nothing of the kind existed, or was in process of formation, under Charles II., when the ministry, called the Cabal, attempted to govern in concert with the House of Commons and in obedience to its wishes. After so many convulsions and delusions, men (especially those in the regions nearest to power) were a prey to doubt and distrust, to a constant restlessness, and to a selfishness at one time impudently rapacious, at another, prudent even to pusillanimity. The House of Commons' was filled with the wrecks of revolutionary parties, but there were no political parties able or worthy to sustain a government. Men like Buckingham and Shaftesbury were equally unable and unworthy to form such parties : they knew only how to gain over partisans for themselves from every camp and by every means. Their policy was shamelessly inconsistent and con- tradictory. They formed an intimate union be- tween England and Holland, or abandoned Hol- land to Louis XIV., according as they happened to need the favour of the zealous English protestants or of the most powerful of foreign princes. They \' \ I granted toleration to dissenters from an apparent respect for the rights of conscience, but, in reality, from complaisance to the king, who wished to pro- tect the catholics; then, under the pressure of the irritated House of Commons, they solicited the king to sanction the most rigorous measures against both catholics and dissenters. Their policy, whether domestic or foreign, was a series of tentatives and contradictions ; their most equitable measures were only means of corruption and deception, insolently adopted and abandoned by turns, and as devoid of consistency as of truth. The public, whether in or out of parliament, was sometimes the dupe of these stratagems. Nothing can equal the eagerness with which the many believe whatever flatters their passions, and the readiness with which they excuse every vice in the men who subserve them. The profligates of the Cabal sometimes enjoyed a momentary favour; but it was withdrawn almost as soon as given. Their licentious lives, the audacious immorality of their maxims, the versatility of their conduct, and the hollowness of their promises, shocked the conscience of the country, which, in the midst of all its errors, had still a solid groundwork of piety and virtue. It would most assuredly not have stopped short at indignation, had it known that its King, with the connivance of his principal counsellors, had con- cluded secret treaties with Louis XIV., by which he 96 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF i\ THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 97 engaged to declare himself catholic as soon as he could do so with any degree of safety ; and had sold, meanwhile, for a few millions, the political independence and the free institutions of his coun- try. England long remained ignorant of these shameful acts ; but where a profound distrust pre- vails, the people, however ignorant, sometimes catch strange glimpses of truth from their presentiments. Though not aware of the degree to which the King's ministers had betrayed and degraded their country, the House of Commons not only withheld its confi- dence from them, but at length violently attacked them ; and they fell under the blows of a power, which, by using it as their instrument, they had themselves augmented, and without having made the smallest progress in organizing political parties in the parliament, or in regulating its action on the government. Their successor Sir Thomas Osborne, afterwards Earl of Danby, had much more political wisdom, and exercised a greater influence on the develop- ment of the parliamentary system in England. Though he came into public life under the auspices of the Cabal, and early took part in some of their bad practices, he differed from them on one essen- tial point — he belonged to the country and not to the court. As he was himself a Yorkshire gentle- man, the country gentlemen of England constituted his party, and the House of Commons was his political sphere. Being an ardent supporter of the cause and prerogative of the Crown, but en- tirely opposed to its severance from the Parliament, his great object was to form a permanent and compact party in the House of Commons. In furtherance of this he resorted to every variety of means ; gaining over the minds of some by argu- ments, and the votes of others by money. He endeavoured to establish that intimate commu- nity of interests between the administration and its adherents, which, by uniting all the various ele- ments of a party in one set of opinions and one line of policy, gives a strength and efficacy to government which nothing else can confer. Danby understood and shared the national feel- ing of England, both as to religion and foreign policy. He was anxious for the security of Protest- antism and the eood understanding; of the Enojlish government with the states devoted to that cause. He persuaded Charles II. to conclude a peace, and afterwards an alliance, with Holland, and to give his niece Mary in marriage to Prince William of Orange. While thus securing abroad a saviour of the faith and the liberties of his country, he laid at home the foundations of that great party attached to the Crown and the Church which has ever since given such strength to the English monarchy and so powerfully conduced to its sta- bility. H / 98 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 99 Whilst the Tory party owed its organization to Danby's good sense and ability, his faults, by a for- tunate coincidence of opposite results, occasioned the vigorous and salutary development of Whig principles. It is the glory of this party to have owed its origin and the first display of its greatness to its defence of the political liberty and morality of the country. It rose into being under the auspices of generous sentiments and noble principles; and it began to assume its peculiar physiognomy and its imposing character, in its struggles with Danby and his army of Cavaliers, transformed into Tories. These struggles were still confused and disorderly ; but it was easy to distinguish in them two great parliamentary parties, aspiring to govern the country upon political principles which, though not radi- cally opposed, were marked by real and important differences. The conflict, which lasted some years, ended in the fall of Danby and the dissolution of the Long Royalist Parliament, which for eighteen years had upheld the royal cause with a singular mixture of devotedness, servility and indej^endence. It was suc- ceeded by a Whig ministry, composed of the leaders of that party. Temple, Russell, Essex, Hollis, Caven- dish, and Powlet ; and with the aid of a few moderate waverers, such as Halifax and Sunderland, and of Shaftesbury, the daring renegade from the court (but now the favourite of the people), this ministry \ If / undertook the task of reforming and conducting the government. It was a momentous crisis. For the first time, a parliamentary opposition, in spite of the resistance of the crown, was raised to power by public opinion and by the majority in the House of Commons. Would they be able to retain it ? Would they be able to satisfy the real wishes of the country, with- out shaking the foundations of the monarchy, alarmed at their accession to power ? The Whigs did not succeed in solving this pro- blem. From want of experience, or from the influence of the false political theories which they had inherited from the revolutionary Long Parliament, their no- tions of their own organization and the conditions of constitutional government were confused, unprac- tical, wavering, and contradictory. Their prejudices were at once monarchical and republican. They tried to constitute the cabinet on a wide basis, and to render it a sort of intermediate body capable of checking the crown by means of the parliament, and the parliament by means of the crown : — a pro- ject so ill conceived that its immediate failure was inevitable. They carried the spirit of opposition into the exercise of power; and while servants of the throne, they were more anxious to restrain than to support its authority. . They lived amongst the remnants of the anarchi- II 2 ■ "^p^wysfp^ 100 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 101 cal factions which had survived the revolution, and incessantly kept up a covert war against the monarchy. Revolutionary habits and passions had not totally disappeared with the republic. The republican party, though nearly annihilated in the higher classes, and too weak, even in the lower, to have any chance of success, still possessed unwearied agitators and implacable conspirators, ready to put their skill and their lives at the service of any one who would afford them a hope of gratifying their turbulent and vindictive passions. The Whigs, if they did not connive at these men, were in constant contact with them, and hoped to secure their services as partizans; but these professional revo- lutionists flattered themselves, on the other hand, that thev should be able to convert their leaders into instruments. They continually compromised the ministers both with the king and the country, which was loyal in spite of its discontent, and decidedly averse to new revolutions. To set against these faults in their conduct or these difiiculties of their situation, the Whigs had one resource of which they made an ample and deplorable use — concessions to the passions of the multitude. England was at that time possessed by a general and ungovernable terror and hatred of popery. Suspecting on good ground that they were betrayed on this point by their king, the English people were hurried beyond all bounds \ of reason, justice, or humanity. The political and judicial persecution of the Catholics was, during three years, the joint crime of a people furious in their faith, and a king cowardly in his infidelity. The Whigs as well as the Tories shared in this frenzy or yielded to it. It was moreover their ill luck to attain to power just as the first access of national fury against the Catholics began to sub- side, and to give place to some reaction in favour of justice and good sense. This reaction was therefore more injurious to them than to their rivals; and they had to sustain all the weight of the concealed anger of the king, who delighted to revenge him- self on them for the iniquities which he had not had the courage to prevent. Nor was their situation as to the foreign affairs of the country less complicated and insecure. Whilst they protested against the king's servile intimacy with the court of France, several of their leaders received favours or pensions from Louis XIV. Some accepted them from corruption (for there were profli- gates in the popular party as well as in that of the court) ; others, though men of the highest patriotism and honour, from the chimerical hope of employing the means of influence which they received from a foreign sovereign in securing the liberties of their own country. To seek abroad means of secretly act- ing on the internal affairs of a country, is a danger- ous experiment ; the ablest politicians run a great 102 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 103 risk of serving the designs of the foreigner rather than their own. The advantages which Louis XIV. derived from his connexion with certain Whig leaders were much greater than those which accrued to them from the secret support they received from him in effecting the overthrow of Danby and the dissolution of the Cavalier Long Parliament. It was in the midst of these complicated em- barrassments and perils that the Whigs conceived the design of changing the order of succession to the throne, and of setting aside the lawful heir by Act of Parliament. This was to make a revolution as yet uncalled for by any existing and patent necessity ; to anticipate remote contingencies, and to act upon con- jectures, which, however well founded, were uncer- tain. The Whigs doubtless thought that in such a matter it was wiser to prevent than to wait ; and that it was better to accomplish at once by means of lawful deliberation, what must be effected later by force, and perhaps at the cost of a civil war. This was a very superficial view of the subject, and evinced little knowledge of human nature or the great conditions of social order. To deliberate on a revolution is more profoundly mischievous than to take a part in it ; and the political structure of society is more shaken by attacks on its fundamental laws Jn the name of reason, than by violations of them under the pressure of necessity. IM The Whigs required parliament to abolish, at its mere pleasure, and before James II. had begun to reign, the hereditary right of that prince to the crown ; that is to say, they required it to alter the foundations of the monarchy, and to substitute its own will for a principle established by the constitution. The political tact of the nation warned it that this would be to destroy the monarchy ; the mo- narchical spirit rapidly revived, and divisions broke out in the cabinet itself. The Whigs lost all their allies among the moderate Tories, and found them- selves reduced to the mere strength of their own party. They were also met by an obstacle they had little foreseen — the conscience of Charles II. Selfish as he was, he did not think himself justified in disposing of his brother's rights, and he defended them at all risks. To the honour of the English nation, popular passions yielded to the respect for Constituted authorities ; the Bill of Exclusion, after passing the House of Commons, was thrown out by the Lords, and no attempt was made to push the thing further or to accomplish the same end by other means. But the question, though postponed, was far from being set at rest. The House of Commons which had voted the exclusion of James II. being dissolved, the bill was proposed and carried anew in that which succeeded it. Of the two great parties which had gradually arisen in the course of the reign, the Whigs were re- \ 104 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 105 solved to get rid of the future king, and the Tories to maintain the monarchy intact. Charles II. had also formed his determination ; he dissolved the House of Commons, dismissed the Whigs, made up a ministry consisting exclusively of Tories, and go- verned for four years without a Parliament. During these four gloomy years, England constantly heard the approaching tempest muttering around her. The Whigs, once more in opposition, conspired for different objects and in different degrees. Some en- deavoured to recover power by legal means; others, to force the king, even by insurrection and civil war, if needful, to yield to what they regarded as the right and the will of the nation. Some of the lower and more desperate hangers-on of the party were pre- pared to get rid of the King and his brother, whom they looked upon as the sole obstacles to the success of their cause, by assassination. These plots, some- times exaggerated, sometimes misrepresented by an imperfect publicity or by judicial trials con- ducted with subtle wickedness, threw the country into troubles and distractions of opposite kinds. The conservative party was indignant, and was alarmed for the safety of the throne and the established order of ^things; the popular party was more and more exasperated at finding all its efforts vain, and its noblest leaders led to the scaffold. The destruc- tive hostility to the monarchy provoked a monar- chical reaction equally intense. The charters of the principal corporations, the last rampart of the popular party, were attacked and abolished by form of law. The conspirators, discouraged by their failures and alarmed at their peril, left the country, and went over to Holland to conjure the Prince of Orange to save the Protestant faith and the liberties of England. The two great political results of the recent revolution to which England clung with tenacious attachment, namely, the influence of the parliament on the King's government, and the pre- ponderance of the House of Commons in the par- liament, were not only suspended, but endangered. The great religious result, the ascendancy of Pro- testantism, still remained intact ; it was the Church of England herself who invariably supported the crown and anathematized every attempt at resist- ance. The high Tories, with Rochester at their head, daily rallied more closely round James ; over- looking his attachment to the catholic church in their regard for his character of heir lo the monarchy. But there was a third party, composed of moderate Tories and led by Halifax, who opposed violent measures, demanded the convocation of a parliament, and predicted extreme peril in the event of the government persisting in its refusal. Charles hesitated and procrastinated : promising to the high Tories an unshaken perseverance in maintaining his brother's rights ; to the moderate party, respect for the constitution of the country ; and to the 106 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF Church, the firm maintenance of the protestant establishment. Perplexed and fatigued, he em- ployed all the address and prudence of which he was master, in eluding the necessity of choosing to which of these promises to adhere. He died before events compelled him to decide ; but, having reached the term of his worldly career and the verge of eternity, the anxiety of the dying man overcame the precautions of the king; he rejected all the offers and entreaties of the Anglican bishops, sent for a Benedictine monk who was con- cealed in his palace, and died in the bosom of the Catholic Church — thus in his last tnoments con- firming his brother in a faith, without the consola- tions of which Charles found it impossible to die. During a reign of four years zeal for this faith had exclusive possession of James the Second's mind. His efforts to obtain absolute power were not the result of a stroilg character and despotic temper, nor of an ardent ambition ; they were dictated by a dogged and- intractable fanaticism. The infallibility and superiority to all control, which are the fundamental principles of the con- stitution of the Church of Rome, he regarded as maxims of government, no less than articles of faith. In his narrow and rigid mind, spiritual order was blindly confounded with temporal ; and he thought himself entitled to exact from his sub- jects that absolute submission in the State which THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 107 he deemed it his own duty to yield in the Church. From his infancy he had suffered oppression for his faith, and had seen those who shared it subjected to cruel persecutions. On his accessio i to the throne, he regarded the deliverance of the Catholic Church in England as his peculiar duty and mission, and he was incapable of understanding any other way of effecting her deliverance than by restoring her ascendancy. Such is the lamentable concatenation of human errors and crimes! They provoke and produce each other in endless series. Instead of recognizing and respecting their reciprocal rights, protestants and catholics could only alternately persecute and enslave each otlier. Either in the sincere hope of succeeding, or in the desire of guarding himself from all future re- proach, James began by trying to govern accord- ing to the constitution. The day on which he ascended the throne, he promised to maintain the established laws of the Church as well as of the State ; and this promise he solemnly repeated to the parliament which he shortly after convoked. Some important though isolated acts, however, soon belied these professions. He continued to levy taxes which had not been voted by Parliament; and whilst he redoubled his severity against the ilissenters, with a view to conciliate the Church of 108 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF England, he began to suspend the execution of the laws against the catholics, and to make serious inroads on the political and religious constitution of the state. His language was still more alarming than his acts. While professing the legality of his intentions, he continually betrayed a sense of his right to absolute power, and his resolution to enforce it if the country did not gratefully acknowledge his moderation. Kings and their subjects are equally fond of displaying to each other the sword of Damocles suspended over their heads; the former, in the name of divine right ; the latter, in that of the sovereignty of the people. The menace is as in- sane as it is insolent, since it inevitably enfeebles the powers of the government, or endangers the liberties of the country. The true wisdom and policy of both kings and their subjects are the same ; to claim nothing beyond their lawful rights, and to bury in silence the mysteries and the menaces of arbitrary power on the one hand, and of revolution on the other. James's promises and first acts of constitutional government were received by the country with favour and almost with enthusiasm. The more lively are men's fears, the more eager are their hopes. The Tories had a decided majority in the Parliament. The Church of England strove to hold the King to the engagements he had formed / THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 109 with her, by increased demonstrations of loyalty and devotedness to his person. The dissenters thought they had some chances of toleration and liberty. Good dispositions and evil ones, motives honourable and shameful, conspired to secure to the King the patient, • nay almost the servile, sub- inission of the country. At court and in the par- liament, the greater number of the leading men were so sceptical and corrupt, that they were ready to make indefinite sacrifices of their opinions and their honour. In the nation, a feeling of lassitude, which was still profound, concurred with the mo- narchical spirit and religious discipline to repress any explosion of discontent or alarm. James was no longer young ; his two daughters, sole heirs to the throne, were firmly attached to the pro- testant faith ; it was better to endure for a time evils and perils, the term of which was certain, than to incur the risks of new revolutions. The more violent factions, the conspirators by pro- fession, the men of desperate ambition, and the exiles who had taken refuge in Holland, did not show the same patience and resignation. In spite of the advice of the Prince of Orange, who restrained while he protected them, they attempted two simul- taneous insurrections ; the one in England, under the Duke of Monmouth, the other in Scotland, under the Duke of Argyle. These risings produced a great agitation in the nation ; but thougli a 110 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OP Strong sympathy with the insurgents spread rapidly amongst the lower classes, it did not break out in ac- tive demonstrations. While the Tories vigorously aided the King to suppress the rebellion, the Whigs gave it no support. Both these attempts failed, and both their leaders expiated them on the scaffold. Though their fate excited the public commiseration, neither their personal qualities nor their views awakened any strong national sentiment. But an appearance of success is fatal to a weak prince engaged in a struggle with his people. James, triumphant over his enemies and obeyed by his subjects, gave himself up to the vices of his nature. He delighted in the rigid and even cruel exercise of his power, and he found in Jeffreys an undaunted and shameless minister of his vengeance. The in- human proceedings against the partisans of Argyle and Monmouth, though clothed with the forms of justice, evinced an equal contempt for the gua- rantees of law and the feelings of humanity ; and they excited in the public, whether high or low, whether favourable or hostile to the insurrection, the deepest indignation and disgust. James now gave a free course to his designs. He assailed the Church of England in its vital privileges, and the most faithful of his protestant servants in the inmost recesses of their consciences. The uni- versities of Oxford and Cambridge received orders to place Catholics at the head of Protestant esta- THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. Ill blishments. The king declared with his own lips to Rochester, that if he did not turn catholic he would be deprived of all his employments. Mea- sures so evidently illegal and extreme found oppo- nents even among the Catholics. These were divided into two parties, the one prudent, the other violent, who carried on a constant struggle for influence over the king. The former pointed out to him the dangers into which he was rushing, the latter, the great object on which his hopes were fixed; thus restraining or stimulating his fanaticism by turns, ^othing, therefore, was wanting that could en- lighten or guide James ; neither the loyalty and the long patience of the Protestants, nor the moderar tion and the wise counsels of the more moderate Catholics. But his blind and sincere obstinacy was proof against all representations. He officially raised Father Petre, a Jesuit, to a place in his Privy Council; and he ordered the clergy of the Esta- blished Church to read from every pulpit in the kingdom, the declaration by which he abolished, in virtue of his sole power, the acts of Parliament £igainst Dissenters and Catholics. The Archbishop of Canterbury and six bishops having refused to execute this order, and having presented a remon- strance to the king, he caused them to be arrested, taken to the Tower, and tried before the Court of King's Bench as authors of a seditious libel. Just at this time, a son, whose birth, being con- 112 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. .113 trary to the expectations of all England, was re- garded with groundless but natural suspicion, was born to James. The dominant faction loudly pro- claimed their joy at this event ; and betrayed their hope of training tlie son in their own principles, and of governing him as they had governed his father. There was now no apparent end of the despotism which had hitherto been tolerated in consideration of its short duration. Still there was no violent outbreak, and the country remained motionless ; but its leading men changed their resolutions. The Church of England, goaded to extremity, entered on a system of positive resistance ; the political parties, Whigs and Tories, concurred in a more decisive step. The Whigs had been taught by experience that they alone could neither rally the nation nor establish a government. Their conspiracies had been as unsuccessful as their cabinets. They had now the rare wisdom to per- ceive that they were of themselves insufficient to accomplish their own designs, and that an intimate union with their former adversaries was the only means of securing their success. The Tories, on the other hand, saw that every principle has its limits, every engagement and every duty its conditions. For forty years they had upheld the maxims of non-resistance to the Crown, an3 observed a punctilious fidelity to their kings. Placed in new circumstances, and subjected to a new trial, they felt that their country too had a claim on their fidelity; and that they were not bound by consistency to make a servile surrender of their liberties and faith to a prince inaccessible to reason. The most eminent men of both parties, Flussell, Sidney, and Cavendish for the Whigs, Danby, Shrewsbury, and Lumley for the Tories, laid aside their divisions and determined to act in concert Halifax, l;he leader of the intermediate party, when sounded by them, declined all active participation in their design, but did not dissuade them from it. On the 30th June, 1688, at the veiy moment when the solemn acquittal of the Seven Bishops filled London with enthusiastic acclamations. Ad- miral Herbert, disguised as a common sailor, set out for Holland, bearing to the Prince of Orange a formal invitation to come to the succour of the faith and laws of England, and a solemn engagement to support him at all risks and by every means in their power. These documents were signed by the six leaders of the two great political parties, and by Compton, Bishop of London. William only awaited this step. " Now or never," said he to his confidant, Dykevelt, when he heard of the trial of the Seven Bishops, and of their inflexible resistance. As soon as he received the message, he announced his intention with a bold and dexterous mixture of frankness and reserve, and I M t 114 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 115 publicly prepared to execute it. He did not go, he said^ to conquer a kingdom, or to usurp a throne ; he went at the request of the English people themselves, to interpose between their king and his subjects, and to protect the laws of England and the Protestant religion from the dangers that threat- ened them. He discussed the expediency of the undertaking with the States General of Holland, and asked their opinion and assistance. He in- formed not only tlie Protestant princes, who sym- patliized with him as the champion of their common faith, but the Emperor of Germany and the King of Spain, who regarded him as tlie de- fender of the European balance of power. Never was enter|)rise of the kind thus avowed, debated, explained, and justified beforehand. The whole of Europe knew it, and understood what was impend- ing. Personal ambition and treasonable conspiracy disappeared in the political greatness of the cause and the event. Less than four months after the arrival of the joint message from, the Whigs and Tories, William embarked for England at the head of a squadron and an army : bearing with him the secret good wishes of most of the sovereigns of Europe, Protestant or Catholic, and even of Pope Innocent XL, who had conceived a lively resentment at the haughty demeanour of Louis XIV., and a profound contempt for the insane temerity of James 11. James alone neither understood nor believed what was passing. In vain did he receive from Louis XIV. accurate intelligence, and the offer of efficient help; in vain did his own agents at the Hague and at Paris send him accounts of the preparations and the progress of the enterprise. He rejected all proposals, and shut his eyes to all information. He had still so much of English and kingly pride left as to be unwilling to be publicly defended by the soldiers of a foreign king, whose subsidies he had secretly accepted without blush- ing. His seeming temerity was the offspring of secret fear, and the feeling of his own im- potence made him turn away from the aspect or the thought of danger. His presentiments did not deceive him. More than six weeks elapsed be- tween William's landing on the coast of England and his triumphal entry into London. He advanced slowly through the country, awaiting those who would resist, or those who might join him : but no resistance was offered ; not an effort was made, not a drop of blood was shed, in defence of James. No less abject in the presence of danger than he had been obstinate in refusing to foresee it, he tried to regain by weakness what he had lost by temerity ; he retracted all he had done, granted all he had refused ; he restored to the cities their char- ters, to the universities their privileges, and to the bishops his favour. He dismissed Father Petre 1 2 -"^t^^S^WHt- P~ 116 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 117 from his council, and attempted to negotiate with William. His meanness was as unavailing as his temerity had been impotent. Shut up in his palace, he dailv learned some fresh defection of his gene- rals or counsellors. His daughter, the Princess Anne, escaped to the head-quarters of the Prince of Orange. Whitehall had become a solitude, and was likely soon to become a prison. James fled in his turn, but was recognized and brought back to London by the mob. After a few more days passed in useless perplexities, he escaped again, and for ever. On the 18th December, 1688, he had hardly quitted London three hours, when six regi- ments of cavalry, English and Dutch, entered the capital, with colours flying, in the name of the Prince of Orange. William himself, shunning as much by taste as by prudence all appearance of triumph, arrived in the evening of the same day at St. James's Palace ; and five weeks afterwards, on the 22nd of January, 1689, a parliament, extraordi- narily convoked under the name of a Convention, met at Westminster to sanction and settle the new order of things. In this assembly, the differences which had been suppressed during the common danger^ broke forth anew. The monarchical scruples of the Tories, and the innovating notions of the Whigs, once more mani- fested themselves in all their force. It was said by the more timid of the former, that the wisest course would be to recall King James, after compelling him to grant fresh guarantees. The more vehe- ment of the Whigs spoke of founding a republic governed by a council of state, of which the Prince of Orange should be President. Between these extremes floated the moderate opinions, which also were divided and unsettled. Many of the Whigs, who, though they had no intention of over- throwing the monarchy, were still deeply imbued with the maxims of the Long Parliament, wished to depose King James, and to defer offering the crown to William till republican institutions should have been organized under monarchical forms. The Tories, who were warmly attached to the Church of England, demanded that James should be declared incapable of reigning, but that the foundations of the monarchy should be left un- touched, and the government placed in the hands of a regency. Others, more bold, agreed with the Whigs that James, by his conduct and his flight, had abdicated ; but, under the iniluence of scruples suggested by their monarchical principles, they maintained that the throne, which could not be vacant for a single moment, descended, by this mere act, to his eldest daughter, the Princess Mary, and that nothing remained to be done but to pro- claim her Queen. These various schemes, as soon as they were promulgated, were explained, dis- cussed, and criticised with ardour by the people 118 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF as well as in the two Houses ; the public mind became heated, and parties arrayed themselves against each other; the ambitious unfurled the banner under which they hoped to rise to fortune and distinction ; divisions broke out between the Lords and the Commons; and the Revolu- tion, though hardly accomplished, was already in jeopardy. But the same rare political good sense which had united the leaders of parties in a common resistance, o'uided them through the difficulties incident to a new government. They dismissed all absolute theories and all questions of no practical utility ; they reduced the acts and the terms by which the new power was to be settled, to what was strictly necessary to give it a solid foundation ; and they were only anxious to bring affairs as speedily as possible to a conclusion which might satisfy the higher and middling classes of the country. William, at first by his reserve and afterwards by his firmness, efficiently seconded the wisdom of the party leaders. He left a perfect latitude to every system and every project ; betraying neither his wishes nor aversions, and keeping himself aloof from all debates. But when he felt the crisis approaching, he assembled the most considerable men of the two Houses, and declared to them in simple and brief language, which admitted of no reply, that though ho was full of respect for the THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 119 rights and liberties of the Parliament, he, too, had liberties and rights, and would never accept a mutilated power nor a throne on which his wife would be placed above him. This step was de- cisive : the two Houses came to an agreement ; a declaration was adopted, proclaiming the vacancy of the throne, the fundamental rights of the English people, and the elevation of William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, to the throne of England. On the 13th of February, 1689, the official proclamation of the Act of Parliament was hailed with acclamations in all the principal parts of London. Nor was this rare combination of prudence, tmion, and power, more than the exigencies of the case demanded ; for such is the inherent vice of all revolutions, that even the most lawful, the most necessary, and the most generally approved, causes a profound disturbance in the community which it saves from worse evils, and yields results which are long insecure and precarious. Hardly more than two or three years had passed when William, the deliverer of England, was already unpopular. His simple but haughty deportment, his cold taciturnity, his distaste for the man- ners of the English aristocracy (which he took no pains to conceal), the exclusive intimacy and lavish favours which he bestowed on a few old friends who had accompanied him from Holland, 120 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 121 all conspired to make him a stranger, and not an agreeable one, in the midst of his new people. In all that regarded civil and religious liberty he was far more enlightened than the English, and was not at all inclined to be made the instrument of episcopal intolerance or of rival aristocratic parties. He had little respect for the exigencies of constitutional government, and, indeed, did not understand the working of parliamentary parties, which at that time were confused and ill-organized ; he was shocked at their selfishness and jealous of their power, and sometimes defended his own with more vigour than discernment. The general policy of Europe was the great, and almost sole object of his thoughts and government He had aspired to the throne of England mainly that he might have all her strength at his disposal in his struggle against the domination of Louis XIV. ; and the protestant passions of the English people powerfully seconded his designs. But William involved England in the affairs and wars of the continent more than was agreeable to the habits, tastes, or interests of her people. She was weary of being engaged in efforts and dangers for distant objects by the prince whom she had invited to free her from intestine dangers ; and he, in his turn, was indignant at finding in the people and the parties whom he had delivered on their own soil, so little ardour and devotedncss for the great cause to which their safety and their freedom were, in his eyes, so mani- festly attached. From these causes arose those misunderstandings, heart-burnings and conflicts be- tween the King and the country which disturbed and shook the new government. William was con- scious of his strength, and used it haughtily; he even went so far as to say that he would abdicate and return to Holland, if he were not better under- stood and more vigorously supported. When the danger became urgent, the Parliament, the political parties throughout the country, the church, and the people felt how necessary William was to them, and made the liveliest demonstrations of attach- ment to him. But their mutual disgusts soon re- curred ; the parties returned to their rivalries ; the people to their prejudices and their ignorance; the king to his European policy, his war expenditure, and his captious tenacity of power. The hopes of the Jacobites revived : though beaten in Ireland and Scotland, and discovered and condemned in Eng- land, they laid fresh plots and renewed their at- tempts to excite a civil war. Even in William's privy council, James had correspondents who thus endeavoured to secure themselves against possible contingencies. Notwithstanding the easy success of the revolution, the firm character of the king, and the sincere consent of the country, the government esta- blished in 1688 was, during the whole course of this reign, continually assailed and continually tottering. m 122 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 123 Similar evils subsisted in the reign of Queen Anne. The Whigs and Tories, more and more widely severed, carried on a furious contest for power. In the European struggle for the Spanish succession, the two parties were at first united in pursuing King William's policy of intervention and continental war : but the Whigs, led partly by a spirit of routine and partly by the intoxication of success, wished to carry this policy far beyond the limits of moderation orexpediency ; whilst the Tories espoused the cause of peace, which was ardently desired by the people and favoured by the Queen. By the treaty of Utrecht they put an end to the uneasy and precarious situation of Europe. But the Tories being nearly connected with the Jacobites, and the Queen, in spite of her fidelity to protestantism, beginning to feel a revival of attachment to her family, domes- tic intrigues were mingled with foreign complica- tions, and the banished Stuarts had some reason to imagine that they had yet a chance of recovering the throne. The settlement of 1 688 appeared to be once more called in question ; but the death of Queen Anne and the peaceful accession of the House of Hanover established it on a solid basis. Under the reigns of George I. and George II. the public mind took another direction; foreign politics ceased to occupy it; the internal administration' of the country, the maintenance of peace, questions of finance, colonies, and commerce, and the develop- ; ment and the contests of parliamentary government, became the predominant and absorbing interests of the government and the country. The revolu- tionary and dynastic questions were not, however, wholly extinct : the English nation had no affection for German princes, who did not speak their lan- guage and did not like their habits ; who eagerly seized on any pretext to quit the country and to visit their small hereditary state; and who con- tinually involved them in continental squabbles to which the English attached no importance and no interest. The domestic quarrels and the coarse licentiousness of the royal family offended the country. The vacillating rule, the selfish rivalries, the exaggerations and the intrigues of the parliamentary parties shocked its integrity and its good sense. In Scotland, Ireland, and even in England, Jacobite insurrections were pertinaciously renewed ; but though they always found enthusiastic adhei-ents, they were always repressed, and ceased to excite in the country any vehement fear or antipathy. These continual attacks on the established order of things naturally produced a general indifference and inertness, a disaffection to authority, and a dispo- sition to criticise its conduct ; the public seemed to fall away from a power for which it no longer cared. Fifty-seven years after the burst of national enthu- siasm which had placed William III. on the throne, the grandson of James II., at the head of a body of / 124 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 125 Scotch Highlanders, penetrated unresisted into the very heart of England ; and people began to ask whether he would not enter London in a few days, as easily as William had done when he drove out this same Pretender's grandfather. But the fate of England and its government were not left to be determined by a fit of popular ill humour, the defeat of a few regiments of soldiers, or the daring enterprise of a few factious men. The same social force which, in 1688, had accom- plished the Revolution, defended and saved, in 1745, the government which it had founded. As soon as the danger became evident, the enemies of that government were encountered by the strong organi- zation of aristocratic parties, and by the good sense of a people politically disciplined and deeply imbued with the Christian faith. The Whig leaders and many of the Tories considered their honour and their political fortune bound up with this cause. The parties were faithful to their leaders. The middle classes and the public at large forgot their discontents and disgusts, and the small hold of the government on their personal sympathy, and thought only of the welfare of the coun- try and their own true interests. The church and the dissenters were animated by a common loyalty. Opposed by this intelligent union of the aristocracy with the people, and of the political with the religious spirit, the triumph of the Jacobites I was as short-lived as it had been sudden. The greatest peril which the newly-constituted mo- narchy of England ever incurred was also the last. From that time some secret plot, some at- tempt no sooner conceived than frustrated, has occasionally shown that it still had enemies. It was not till after seventy years of laborious and painful trials that the government established in 1688 overcame the vices inherent in every revo- lution and acquired undisputed sway in England. In 1760, when George III. ascended the throne, it was firmly consolidated. By what means and at what cost this great work had been completed, appears from the preceding relation. A people who can understand and act upon the counsels which God has given it in the past events of its history, is safe in the most dangerous crises of its fate. England had learned from her former trials, that a revolution is an immense and incalcu- lable disorder, which entails on society great evils, great perils, and great crimes ; a disorder which a rational people may be compelled to undergo, but which they will dread and repel until it is forced upon them by an imperious necessity. In her new trials, England did not forget this lesson. She endured much, she struggled long, to avoid \ 126 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 127 another revolution ; nor did she resign herself to it till she saw no other way of saving her rights, her honour, and her faith. It is the glory of the Revo- lution of 1688 and the main cause of its success, that it was an act of mere defence and of neces- sary defence. Whilst this revolution was defensive in principle, it aimed at precise and limited objects. In great political and social convulsions, a fever of boundless and impious ambition sometimes seizes upon so- ciety ; men think themselves entitled to lay hands upon everything, and to remodel the world at their will. These vague and presumptuous schemes of human creatures treating the great and complex system in which their place is marked out as if it were a chaos, and striving to exalt themselves into creators, are as impotent as they are insane ; the utmost that they can do is, to throw all that they touch into the confusion of their own delirious dreams. England did not fall into this wild error. Instead of aspiring to alter the foundations of society and the destinies of mankind, she asserted and main- tained her religion and her positive laws and rights ; and did not carry her claims or even her desires beyond the limits which they prescribed. With a sin- gular mixture of magnanimity and discretion, she accomplished a revolution which gave to the country a new head and new guarantees, but which stopped short with the attainment of those objects. This great change was not brought about by popular risings ; but by political parties organized long before the revolution, with a view to the settlement of a regular government, and not in a revolutionary spirit. Neither the Tory party, nor that of the Whigs (spite of the revolutionary ele- ments which mingled in it), had been formed for the purpose of overthrowing established institutions. They were parties occupied with constitutional politics, not with conspiracy and revolt. Although they were led by imperious circumstances to change the government of their country, the design was foreign to their character and principles ; and they returned with little effort to those habits of order and obedience which they had abandoned for a moment, not from taste or levity, but from necessity. Nor was the merit or the burthen of the revolu- tion limited to either of the great parties which had so long been opposed in opinion. They brought it about in concert and by mutual concessions. It was imposed on both by a common necessity, and was not, to either, a victory or a defeat. Though watching its approach with widely different senti- ments, both saw it to be inevitable, and shared in its accomplishment. It has often been said in France, and even in England, that the Revolution of 1688 was exclu- sively aristocratic ; that it was planned and achieved by the higher classes for their own advantage, and ! 128 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 129 was not accomplished by the impulse or for the good of the people. This is a remarkable example, among many others, of the confusion of ideas and the ignorance of facts which so often characterize the j udgments passed on great events. The two political changes effected by the Revo- lution of 1688 are the most popular to be found in history ; it proclaimed and guaranteed, on the one hand, the essential rights common to all citizens, and on the other, the active and effectual participation of the country in its own government. A people so ignorant of its highest interests, as not to know that this is all which it needs, or ought to demand, will never be able to found a government or to maintain its liberties. Considered from a moral point of view, the Revolution of 1688 had a still more popular character ; since it was made in the name and by the force of the religious convictions of the nation, and was designed principally to give them security and ascendancy. In no country, and at no time, were the form and destiny of the government more powerfully influenced by the prevalent faith of the governed. The Revolution of 1688 was popular in its prin- ciples and results, and was aristocratic only in the mode of its execution ; the men of weight and mark in the country by whom it was conceived, pre- r { \ V pared, and carried through, being the faithful repre- sentatives of the general interests and sentiments. It is the rare felicity of England, that powerful and intimate ties were early formed, and have been perpetuated, among the different classes of society. The aristocracy and the people living amicably, and deriving prosperity from their union, have sustained and controlled each other. The natural leaders of the country have not held themselves aloof from the people, and the people have never wanted leaders. It was more especially in 1688 that England experienced tlie benefit of this happy peculiarity in her social order. To save her faith, her laws and her liberties, she was reduced to the fearful necessity of a revolution ; but she accom- plished it by the hands of men disciplined in habits of order and experienced in government, and not by those of revolutionists. The very men who were the authors of the change, contained it within just limits, and established and consoli- dated the institutions to which it gave birth. The cause of the Englisli people triumphed by the hands of the English aristocracy : this indeed was the great characteristic of the Revolution, and the pledge of its enduring success. 130 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF George III. had been seated on the throne six- teen years, when, at fourteen hundred leagues from his capital, more than two millions of his subjects broke the ties which bound them to his throne, de- clared their independence, and undertook the foun- dation of a Kepublic. England was compelled, after a contest of seven years, to recognise the inde- pendence of the United States of America, and to treat with them upon equal terms. Sixty-seven years have since elapsed ; and, without any violent effort or extraordinary event, these United States, by the mere development of their institutions and of the prosperity which is the natural attendant on peace, have taken an honourable place among great nations. Never was an ascent to greatness at once so rapid, so little costly at its origin, or so little troubled in its progress. It is not merely to the absence of any powerful rival, or to the boundless space open to their popu- lation, that the United States of America have owed this singular good fortune. Their rapid and tran- quil rise is not the mere result of such happy accidents as these, but is in a great degree a con- sequence of moral causes. They rose to the position of an independent state under the banner of law and justice. Their revolution, like that of England, was strictly de- fensive. The guarantees which they claimed and the principles which they asserted were inscribed r THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 131 i in their charters. They were the same which the English parliament, with far greater violence and disorder than were now occasioned by the resist- ance of the colonies, had triumphantly claimed and asserted in the mother-country. The great and perilous enterprise in which they engaged was not strictly a revolution. Before they could conquer their independence, they had to go through a war with a formidable enemy, and to con- struct a central government of their own, in the place of the distant power whose yoke they were endeavouring to throw off: but in respect of their local political institutions and their private law, they had no revolution to make. Each of the colonies was already in the enjoyment of free institutions as toits internal affairs; and when it became an in- dependent state, little change was necessary or desirable in the principles and structure of its existing government. Attachment to ancient laws and manners, and affectionate reverence for the past, were the general sentiments of the people. The colonial administration of a distant monarchy, was easily transformed into a republican admin- istration under a federation of states. Of all forms or modes of government, the repub- lican is unquestionably that to which the general and spontaneous assent of the country is the most indispensable. An absolute monarchy founded by violence, is conceivable ; and indeed such have ex- K 2 ' / 132 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 133 isted. But a popular government forced upon a people in despite of its sentiments and wishes, is an absurditv at which common sense and justice revolt. In their transition to the republican form of government the Anglo-American colonies had no such difficulty to surmount; it was the full and free choice of the people ; and in adopting it, they did but accomplish the national wish, and develope, instead of overturning, their existing in- stitutions. Nor was the perturbation in the social order greater than that in the political. There was no conflict between different classes, nor any violent transfer of influence from one order of men to another. Though the crown of England had still partisans in the colonies, their attachment to it had no connexion with their position in the social scale. The wealthy and important families were in general the most firmly resolved on the conquest of their independence and the foundation of a new system ; and it was under their direction that the people acted, and that those objects were accom- plished. The opinions and feelings of men in regard to religion and morals underwent as slight a revolu- tion as their social condition. The philosophical ideas and the moral and religious scepticism pre- valent in the eighteenth century, had obtained some circulation in the United States ; but even the 'I ininds which they had infected were not thoroughlv imbued by them ; their fundamental principles and ultimate consequences were not understood or accepted : the moral gravity and the practical good sense of the old Puritans survived in most of the American admirers of the new French philosophy. The mass of the population remained as warmly attached to its religious creed as to its political liberties. Whilst rebelling against the King and the Parliament of England, they were submissive to the will of God and the precepts of the Gospel ; and whilst struggling for emancipation, they were governed by the faith which inspired their fore- fathers, when they sought the New World and founded the communities which were now rising ifito independent states. The ideas and passions of the modern partisans of democracy, which now convulse and disorganize society, have an extensive and powerful sway in the United States, and there, as elsewhere, are pregnant with contagious errors and destructive l^ces. Hitherto they have been controlled and purified by Christianity, and by the sound political traditions, and strong habits of spontaneous obe- dience to law, which, in the midst of nearly unli- mited freedom, govern the population. In spite of the anarchical principles which are boldly pro- claimed on this vast theatre, principles of order and conservation maintain their ground, and exercise i34 DISCOURSE ON THE HISTORY OF a powerful influence over society and individuals ; their presence and their power are felt, even by the party which emphatically styles itself demo- cratic ; insensibly moderating its actions, and often saving it from its own intemperance. To these tutelary principles which presided over its origin, the American revolution owed its success. May Heaven grant that in the midst of the formidable conflict which they have now to sustain, they may continue to guide this powerful people, and to warn them in time of the precipices which He so near their path ! Three illustrious men, Cromwell, William III., and Washington, are the prominent and character- istic figures in the history of the critical events which determined the fate of two mighty nations. For extent and force of natural talents, Cromwell perhaps is the most remarkable of the three. His mind was wonderfully inventive, supple, prompt, firm, and perspicacious, and he possessed a vigour of character which no obstacle could daunt, and no conflict weary. He pursued his designs with an ardour as exhaustless as his patience, through the slowest and most tortuous, or the most abrupt and daring ways. He excelled equally in winning and in ruling men by personal and familiar inter- course; he displayed equal ability in leading an army or a party. He had the instinct of popularity and the gift of authority, and he let THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 135 loose factions with as much audacity as he subdued them. But, born in the midst of a revolution, and raised to sovereign power by a succession of violent convulsions, his genius, from first to last, was essentially revolutionary ; and even when taught by experience the necessity of order and government, he was incapable of either respecting or practising the immutable moral laws which are the only basis of government. Owing to the faults of his nature, or the instability of his position, he wanted regularity and calmness in the exercise of power ; had instant recourse to extreme measures, like a man pursued by the dread of mortal dangers, and, by the violence of his remedies, perpetuated or even aggravated the evils which he sought to cure. The establishment of a government is a work which requires a more regular course, and one more con- formable to the eternal laws of moral order. Crom- well was able to subjugate the revolution which he had so largely contributed to make, but not to build up a government in the place of that which he had subverted. Though less powerful than Cromwell by nature, William ill. and Washington succeeded in the undertaking in which he had failed ; they fixed the destiny nnd consolidated the institutions of their respective countries. Even in the midst of revolution they never adopted a revolutionary policy. Power gained by anarchical violence 136 DISCOURSE OiN THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. 137 generally entails on its possessor the necessity of using despotic violence in its defence. But these two great men were naturally placed, or placed themselves, in the regular ways and under the permanent conditions of government. William was an ambitious prince. It is puerile to believe that, up to the moment of the appeal sent to him from London in 1688, he had been insensible to the desire of mounting the throne of England, or ignorant of the schemes which had long been laid for raising him to it. William followed the progress of these schemes step by step ; though he took no part in the means, he did not reject the end ; and, without directly encouraging, he protected its authors. His am- bition was ennobled by the greatness and justice of the cause to which it was attached ; the cause of religious liberty and of the balance of power in Europe. Never did man make a vast political design more exclusively the thought and purpose of his life than William did. The work which he accomplished on the field or in the cabinet was his passion ; his own aggrandizement was but the means to that end. Whatever were his views on the crown of England, he never attempted to realize them by violence and disorder. To his well- regulated and lofty mind the inherent vice and de- grading consequences of such means were obvious and revolting. But when the career was opened to him by England herself, he did not suffer himself to be deterred from entering on it by the scruples of a private man ; he wished his cause to prevail, and he wished to reap the honour of the triumpli. Rare and glorious mixture of worldly ability and christian faith, of personal ambition and devotion to public ends ! Washington had no ambition ; his country wanted him to serve her, and he accepted great- ness from a sense of duty rather than from taste ; sometimes even with a painful effort. The trials of his public life were bitter to a man who preferred the independence of a private condition and tran- quillity of mind to the exercise of power. But he undertook, without hesitation, the task which his country imposed on him, and, in fulfilling it, he made no concessions that could lighten its burthen either to the country or to himself. He was born to govern, though he had no delight in governing ; and, with a firmness as unshaken as it was simple, and a sacrifice of popularity the more meritorious as it was not compensated by the pleasures of domi- nation, he told the American people what he be- lieved to be true, and persisted in doing what he thought to be wise. Though the servant of an infant republic, in which the democratic spirit prevailed, he won the confidence of the people by maintaining their interests in opposition to their inclinations. The policy which he pursued while '\ 138 DISCOURSE ON THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION. laying the foundations of a new government, was so moderate yet so rigorous, so prudent yet so inde- pendent, that it seemed to belong to the head of an aristocratic Senate ruling over an ancient State. The success with which it was crowned does equal honour to Washington and to his country. . Whether we consider the general destiny of na- tions, or the lives of the great men whom they have produced ; whether we are treating of a mo- narchy or a republic, an aristocratic or a democratic society, the same light breaks upon us from the facts presented by history : we see that the ultimate success or failure of governments is determined, in the last result, by the same laws ; and that the policy which jDreserves a state from violent revolu- tions, is also the only policy which can bring a revolution to a successful close. I I THE END. TRIMED By W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET. >* COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 101065902 >• r rn ^ I JUflf 29 1933 t^ -!>s.i 3- *.«.0' .f- *• .#%.' ci. Ym. v^. ^: -■-V *.v r^^ 1 "* y. - *-+ 1/ ^^j-; IK