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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
of the
HENRY HOMES FUND

Green's Short History
of the English People

The World's Great Books

Committee of Selection

Thomas B. Reed
Speaker of the House
of Representatives
Edward Everett Hale
Author of The Man
Without a Country

William R. Harper
President of the
University of Chicago
Ainsworth R. SpofFord
Of the Congressional
Library

Rossiter Johnson
Editor of Little Classics and Editor-in-Chief of this Series

Aldine Edition

D-Apple'lon Ir Company.

VICTORIA.
Photogravure from a photograph.

A Short History
of the EngHsh People
By
John Richard Green

With a Biographical and Critical Introduction
by George Burton Adams

Illustrated
Volume 1 1

New York
D. Appleton and Company
1898

Copyright, 1S98,
By D. appleton AND COMPANY.

FAMOUS AND UNIQUE MANUSCRIPT AND
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS.
A series of fac-similes, showing the development of manuscript and
book illustrating during 4000 years.

CHARIES VII ENTERING PARIS.
Miniature from the chronicles of Monstrelet. The costumes are
ofthe sixteenth century.

PAGE

CONTENTS CHAPTER VII
THE REFORMATION
The Elizabethan Poets. — The Conquest of Ireland, 1588-1610 531
CHAPTER VIII
PURITAN ENGLAND
The Puritans, 1583-1603. — The First of the Stuarts, 1604-1623. —
The King and the Parliament, 1623-1629. — New England. —
The Personal Government, 1629-1640. — The Long Parliament,
1640-1644. — The Civil War, July, 1642-August, 1646. — The
Army and the Parliament, 1646-1649. — The Commonwealth,
1649-1653. — The Fall of Puritanism, 1653-1660 582
CHAPTER IX
THE REVOLUTION
England and the Revolution. — The Restoration, 1660-1667. —
Charles the Second, 1667-1673. — Danby, 1673-1678. — Shaftes
bury, 1679-1682. — The Second Stuart Tyranny, 1682-1688. —
William of Orange. — The Grand Alliance, 1689-1697. — Marl
borough, 1698-1712. — Walpole, 1712- 1742 .... 766
CHAPTER X
MODERN ENGLAND
William Pitt, 1742-1762. — The Independence of America, 1761-
1782. — The Second Pitt, 1783-1793. — The War with France,
1793-1815.— Epilogue, 1815-1873 . . . . 932

FAMOUS AND UNIQUE MANUSCRIPT AND
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS.
A series of fac-similes, showing the development of manuscript and
book illustrating during 4000 years.

TITIE-PAGE OF BACON'S "INSTAURATIO
MAGNA," PRINTED IN 1620.

ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Victoria  Frontispiece
Photogravure from a photograph
Charles VII entering Paris  ii
Illuminated miniature from a mediaeval manuscript
Title-page of Bacon's "Instauratio Magna" . . . iv
Fac-simile from a book printed A. D. 1620
Charles I in the Studio of Van Dyck . . .666
Photogravure from an engraving
Duke of Marlborough  902
Photogravure from an engraving
Modern England  932
Coloured Map
Watt Discovering the Power of Steam . . . 1006
Photogravure from an engraving
Doctor Jenner Vaccinating his First Patient . . 1036
Photogravure from an engraving

A SHORT HISTORY

OF
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
CHAPTER VII
THE REFORMATION
Section VII. — The Elizabethan Poets
WE have already watched the revival of English
letters during the earlier half of Elizabeth's reign.
The general awakening of national life, the in
crease of wealth, of refinement and leisure, which marked
that period, had been accompanied, as we have seen, by a
quickening of English intelligence, which found vent in an
upgrowth of grammar-schools, in the new impulse given
to classical learning at the universities, in a passion for
translations which familiarized all England with the mas
terpieces of Italy and Greece, and above all in the crude
but vigorous efforts of Sackville and Lyly after a nobler
poetry and prose. But to the national and local influences
which were telling on English literature was added that of the
restlessness and curiosity which characterized the age. The
sphere of human interest was widened as it has never been
widened before or since by the revelation of a new heaven
and a new earth. It was only in the later years of the six
teenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus were brought
home to the general intelligence of the world by Kepler and
Galileo, or that the daring of the buccaneers broke through
the veil which the greed of Spain had drawn across the New
World of Columbus. Hardly inferior to these revelations as
a source of intellectual impulse was the sudden and pictur-
35 S3I

532 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1572
esque way in which the various races of the world were
brought face to face with one another through the universal
passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the West
were described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civili
zation of Mexico and Peru disclosed by Cortez and Pizarro,
the voyages of the Portuguese threw open the older splendors
of the East, and the story of India and China was told for
the first time to Christendom by Maffei and Mendoza. Eng
land took her full part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson,
an English traveler, made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby
brought back Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe.
English mariners penetrated among the Esquimaux, or set
tled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the globe. The
" Collection of Voyages," which was published by Hakluyt,
not only disclosed the vastness of the world itself, but the
infinite number of the races of mankind, the variety of their
laws, their customs, their religions, their very instincts. We
see the influence of this new and wider knowledge of the
world, not only in the life and richness which it gave to the
imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which
from this moment attached itself to man. Shakspere's
conception of Caliban, like the questionings of Montaigne,
marks the beginning of a new and a truer, because a more
inductive, philosophy of human nature and human history.
The fascination exercised by the study of human character
showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the
wonderful popularity of the drama. And to these larger
and world-wide sources of poetic powers was added in Eng
land the impulse which sprang from national triumph, from
the victory over the Armada, the deliverance from Spain,
the rolling away of the Catholic terror which had hung like
a cloud over the hopes of the people. With its new sense
of security, of national energy and national power, the whole
aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest of
Elizabeth's reign had been political and material; the stage had
been crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and Wal-
singhams and Drakes. Literature had hardly found a place
in the glories of the time. But from the moment when the
Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol, the figures of warriors
and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of poets

1579] THE REFORMATION 533
and philosophers. Amidst the throng in Elizabeth's ante
chamber the noblest form is that of the singer who lays the
"Faerie Queen" at her feet, or of the young lawyer who
muses amid the splendors of the presence over the problems
of the " Novum Organum." The triumph at Cadiz, the con
quest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building
up his " Ecclesiastical Polity " among the sheepfolds, or the
genius of Shakspere rising year by year into supremer gran
deur in a rude theater beside the Thames.
The full glory of the new literature broke on England with
Edmund Spenser. We know little of his life ; he was born
in East London, of poor parents, but connected with the
Spencers of Althorpe, even then — as he proudly says — "a
house of ancient fame." He studied as a sizar at Cambridge,
and quitted the university while still a boy to live as a tutor
in the north ; but after some years of obscure poverty the
scorn of a fair " Rosalind " drove him again southwards. A
college friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to introduce
him to Lord Leicester, who sent him as his envoy into
France, and in whose service he first became acquainted
with Leicester's nephew. Sir Philip Sidney. From Sidney's
house at Penshurst came his earliest work, the " Shepherd's
Calendar," in form, like Sidney's own "Arcadia," a pastoral,
where love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the
fancied shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse
imagination which the pastoral disclosed at once placed its
author in the forefront of living poets, but a far greater work
was already in hand ; and from some words of Gabriel Har
vey's we see Spenser bent on rivaling Ariosto, and even
hoping " to overgo " the " Orlando Furioso," in his " Elvish
Queen." The ill will or indifference of Burleigh, however,
blasted the expectations he had drawn from the patronage of
Sidney or the Earl of Leicester, and the favor with which he
had been welcomed by the queen. Sidney, himself in dis
grace with Elizabeth, withdrew to Wilton to write the
" Arcadia," by his sister's side ; and " discontent of my long
fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet tells us, " and ex
pectation vain of idle hopes," drove Spenser at last into exile.
He followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and
remained there on the deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an

534 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1580
office and a grant of land from the forfeited estates of the
Earl of Desmond. Spenser had thus enrolled himself among
the colonists to whom England was looking at the time for
the regeneration of Munster, and the practical interest he
took in the " barren soil where cold and want and poverty
do grow" was shown by the later publication of a prose
tractate on the condition and government of the island. It
was at Dublin or in his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from
Doneraile, " under the foote of Mole, that mountain hoar,"
that he spent the ten years in which Sidney died and Mary
fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went ; and it
was in the latter home that Walter Ralegh found him sitting
"alwaies idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, "among
the cooly shades of the green alders by the MuUa's shore,"
in a visit made memorable by the poem of " Colin Clout's
Come Home Again." But in the " idlesse " and solitude of
the poet's exile the great work begun in the two pleasant
years of his stay at Penshurst had at last taken form, and it
was to publish the first three books of the " Faerie Queen "
that Spenser returned in Ralegh's company to London.
The appearance of the " Faerie Queen" is the one critical
event in the annals of English poetry ; it settled, in fact, the
question whether there was to be such a thing as English
poetry or no. The older national verse which had blossomed
and died in Csedmon sprang suddenly into a grander life in
Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete death.
Across the border, indeed, the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
century preserved something of their master's vivacity and
color, and in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renas
cence had of late found echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The
new English drama too was beginning to display its wonder
ful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already prepared
the way for the work of Shakspere. But bright as was the
promise of coming song, no great imaginative poem had
broken the silence of English literature for nearly two hun
dred years when Spenser landed at Bristol with the " Faerie
Queen." From that moment the stream of English poetry
has flowed on without a break. There have been times, as
in the years which immediately followed, when England has
"become a nest of singing birds"; there have been times

1590] THE REFORMATION 535
when song was scant and poor ; but there never has been a
time when England was wholly without a singer. The
new English verse has been true to the source from which it
sprang, and Spenser has always been "the poet's, poet."
But in his own day he was the poet of England at large.
The " Faerie Queen " was received with a burst of general
welcome. It became "the delight of every accomplished gen
tleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier."
The poem expressed, indeed, the very life of the time. It
was with a true poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the
framework of his story on the fairy world of Celtic romance,
whose wonder and mystery had in fact become the truest
picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around him.
In the age of Cortez and of Ralegh dreamland had ceased
to be dreamland, and no marvel or adventure that befell lady
or knight was stranger than the tales which weather-beaten
mariners from the southern seas were telling every day to
grave merchants upon 'Change. The very incongruities of
the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it had
been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur
and priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of
the world of incongruous feeling which we call the Renas
cence. To modern eyes perhaps there is something grotesque
in the strange medley of figures which crowd the canvas of
the " Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward where
knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the sal-
vagemen from the New World with the satyrs of classic
mythology, in the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular
fancy, who jostle with the nymphs of Greek legend and the
damosels of medieval romance. But, strange as the medley
is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley of warring
ideals and irreconcilable impulses which made up the life of
Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the " Faerie Queen "
only, but in the world which it portrayed, that the religious
mysticism of the Middle Ages stood face to face with the
intellectual freedom of the Revival of Letters, that asceticism
and self-denial cast their spell on imaginations glowing with
the sense of varied and inexhaustible existence, that the
dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which expressed
itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry coexisted with

536 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1590
the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening
sense of human power, or the lawless extravagance of an
idealized friendship and love lived side by side with the moral
sternness and elevation which England was drawing from
the Reformation and the Bible. But strangely contrasted as
are the elements of the poem, they are harmonized by the
calmness and serenity which is the note of the " Faerie
Queen." The world of the Renascence is around us, but it
is ordered, refined, and calmed by the poet's touch. The
warmest scenes which he borrows from the Italian verse of
his day are idealized into purity ; the very struggle of the
men around him is lifted out of its pettier accidents, and
raised into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the soul
itself. There are allusions in plenty to contemporary events,
but the contest between Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form
in that of Una and the false Duessa, and the clash of arms
between Spain and the Huguenots comes to us faint and
hushed through the serener air. The verse, like the story,
rolls on as by its own natural power, without haste or effort
or delay. The gorgeous coloring, the profuse and often
complex imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave
no sense of confusion in the reader's mind. Every figure,
strange as it may be, is seen clearly and distinctly as it passes
by. It is in this calmness, this serenity, this spiritual eleva
tion, of the " Faerie Queen," that we feel the new life of the
coming age molding into ordered and harmonious form the
life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in
the way in which this conception is realized in the portion
of his work which Spenser completed, his poem strikes the
note of the coming Puritanism. In his earlier pastoral, the
" Shepherd's Calendar," the poet had boldly taken his part
with the more advanced reformers against the Church policy
of the court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, who was
then in disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as his model of
a Christian pastor, and attacked with sharp invective the
pomp of the higher clergy. His "Faerie Queen," in its
religious theory, is Puritan to the core. The worst foe of its
"Red-cross Knight" is the false and scarlet-clad Duessa of
Rome, who parts him for a while from Truth and leads him
to the house of Pride. Spenser presses strongly and pitilessly

IS90] THE REFORMATION 537
for the execution of Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever
breaks the calm of his verse save when it touches on the
perils with which Catholicism was environing England, perils
before which his knight must fall "were not that Heavenly
Grace doth him uphold and steadfast Truth acquite him out
of all." But it is yet more in the temper and aim of his
work that we catch the nobler and deeper tones of English
Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Penshurst the poet
had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gaiety of Ariosto's
song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of
laughter breaks the calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is
habitually serious, and the seriousness of his poetic tone
reflects the seriousness of his poetic purpose. His aim, he
tells us, was to represent the moral virtues, to assign to
each its knightly patron, so that its excellence might be ex
pressed and its contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds
of arms and chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve
he purposed to paint, he wished to embody some single
virtue of the virtuous man in its struggle with the faults and
errors which specially beset it ; till in Arthur, the sum of the
whole company, man might have been seen perfected, in his
longing and progress towards the " Faerie Queen," the
Divine Glory which is the true end of human effort. The
largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense of beauty,
and above all the very intensity of his moral enthusiasm,
saved Spenser from the narrowness and exaggeration which
often distorted goodness into unloveliness in the Puritan.
Christian as he is to the core, his Christianity is enriched
and fertilized by the larger temper of the Renascence, as
well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which the
older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of
heathendom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of
the new faith; and in one of the greatest songs of the
" Faerie Queen," the conception of love widens, as it widened
in the mind of a Greek, into the mighty thought of the pro
ductive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows in fact the
delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to ex
press his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as
others have loved, all that is noble and pure and of good
report, but he is fired as none before or after him have been

538 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1599
fired with a passionate sense of moral beauty. Justice,
Temperance, Truth, are no mere names to him, but real
existences to which his whole nature clings with a rapturous
affection. Outer beauty he believed to spring, and loved
because it sprang, from the beauty of the soul within. There
was much in such a moral protest as this to rouse dislike in
any age, but it is the glory of the age of Elizabeth that,
"mad world" as in many ways it was, all that was noble
welcomed the " Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says
Spenser, " to mine oaten pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed
a pension on the poet. In 1595 he brought three more books
of his poem to England. He returned to Ireland, to com
memorate his marriage in Sonnets and the most beautiful of
bridal songs, and to complete the " Faerie Queen " amongst
love and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbors. But
these troubles soon took a graver form. In 1 599 Ireland
broke into revolt, and the poet escaped from his burning
house to fly to England, and to die broken-hearted in an inn
at Westminster.
If the " Faerie Queen " expressed the higher elements of
the Elizabethan age, the whole of that age, its lower elements
and its higher alike, was expressed in the English drama.
We have already pointed out the circumstances, which through
out Europe were giving a poetic impulse to the newly aroused
intelligence of men, and this impulse everywhere took a
dramatic shape. The artificial French tragedy which began
about this time with Garnier was not, indeed, destined to
exert any influence over English poetry till a later age ;
but the influence of the Italian comedy, which had begun
half a century earlier with Machiavelli and Ariosto, was felt
directly through the Novelle, or stories, which served as plots
for the dramatists. It left its stamp indeed on some of the
worst characteristics of the English stage. The features of
our drama that startled the moral temper of the time and
won the deadly hatred of the Puritan, its grossness and pro
fanity, its tendency to scenes of horror and crime, its profuse
employment of cruelty and lust as grounds of dramatic action,
its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural whenever
they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting sides
of human passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is

1576] THE REFORMATION 539
doubtful how much the English playwrights may have owed
to the Spanish drama, that under Lope and Cervantes sprang
suddenly into a grandeur which almost rivaled their own.
In the intermixture of tragedy and comedy, in the abandon
ment of the solemn uniformity of poetic diction for the
colloquial language of real life, the use of unexpected inci
dents, the complications of their plots and intrigues, the
dramas of England and Spain are remarkably alike ; but the
likeness seems rather to have sprung from a similarity in the
circumstances to which both owed their rise, than from any
direct connection of the one with the other. The real origin
of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from
without, but in the influence of England itself. The temper of
the nation was dramatic. Ever since the Reformation, thei
palace, the inns of court, and the university had been vying
with one another in the production of plays; and so early
was their popularity, that even under Henry the Eighth it
was found necessary to create a " Master of the Revels " to
supervise them. Every progress of Elizabeth from shire to
shire was a succession of shows and interludes. Diana with
her nymphs met the queen as she returned from hunting ;
Love presented her with his golden arrow as she passed
through the gates of Norwich. From the earlier years of
her reign, the new spirit of the Renascence had been pouring
itself into the rough mold of the Mystery Plays, whose alle
gorical virtues and vices, or Scriptural heroes and heroines,
had handed on the spirit of the drama through the Middle
Ages. Adaptations from classical pieces soon began to
alternate with the purely religious " Moralities " ; and an
attempt at a livelier style of expression and invention appeared
in the popular comedy of " Gammer Gurton's Needle " ;
while Sackville, Lord Dorset, in his tragedy of " Gorboduc "
made a bold effort at sublimity of diction, and introduced
the use of blank verse as the vehicle of dramatic dialogue.
But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and nobles
that the English stage was really indebted for the amazing
outburst of genius which dates from the moment when " the
Earl of Leicester's servants " erected the first public theater
in Blackfriars. It was the people itself that created its stage.
The theater, indeed, was commonly only the courtyard of an

540 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1590
inn, or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country fair ;
the bulk of the audience sat beneath the open sky in the
" pit " or yard, a few covered seats in the galleries which ran
round it formed the boxes of the wealthier spectators, while
patrons and nobles found seats upon the actual boards. All
the appliances were of the roughest sort : a few flowers
served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were repre
sented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers,
heroes rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a
post told whether the scene was at Athens or London.
There were no female actors, and the grossness which startles
us in words which fell from women's lips took a different
color when every woman's part was acted by a boy. But
difficulties such as these were more than compensated by the
popular character of the drama itself. Rude as the theater
might be, all the world was there. The stage was crowded
with nobles and courtiers. Apprentices and citizens thronged
the benches in the yard below. The rough mob of the pit
inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid transitions, the
passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and con
fusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the
sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and
vulgar bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of
society, the intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest
developments of human temper, which characterized the
English stage. The new drama represented " the very age
and body of the time, his form and pressure." The people
itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards.
No stage was ever so human, no poetic life so intense.
Wild, reckless, defiant of all past tradition, of all conven
tional laws, the English dramatists owned no teacher, no
source of poetic inspiration, but the people itself.
Few events in our literary history are so startling as this
sudden rise of the Elizabethan drama. The first public
theater, as we have seen, was erected only in the middle of
the queen's reign. Before the close of it eighteen theaters
existed in London alone. Fifty dramatic poets, many of
the first order, appeared in the fifty years which precede the
closing of the theaters by the Puritans ; and great as is the
number of their works which have perished, we still possess

159°] THE REFORMATION 541
a hundred dramas, all written within this period, and of
¦which at least a half are excellent. A glance at their authors
shows us that the intellectual quickening of the age had now
reached the mass of the people. Almost all of the new play
wrights were fairly educated, and many were university men.
But, instead of courtly singers of the Sidney and Spenser
sort, we see the advent of the " poor scholar." The earlier
dramatists, such as Nash, Peek, Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe,
were for the most part poor and reckless in their poverty ;
wild livers, defiant of law or common fame, in revolt against
the usages and religion of their day, "atheists" in general
repute, " holding Moses for a juggler," haunting the brothel
and the ale-house, and dying starved or in tavern brawls.
But with their appearance began the Elizabethan drama.
The few plays which have reached us of an earlier date are
either cold imitations of the classical and Italian comedy, or
rude farces like " Ralph Roister Doister," or tragedies such
as " Gorboduc," where, poetic as occasional passages may be,
there is little promise of dramatic development. But in the
year which preceded the coming of the Armada the whole
aspect of the stage suddenly changes, and the new drama
tists range themselves around two men of very different
genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. Of Greene,
as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already
spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater impor
tance, for his keen perception of character and the relations
of social life, the playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness
of his style exerted an influence on his contemporaries which
was equaled by that of none but Marlowe and Peele. No
figure better paints the group of young playwrights. He
left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to
bring back the debauchery of the one and the skepticism of
the other. In the words of remorse he wrote before his death
he paints himself as a drunkard and a roisterer, winning
money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays, to waste it on
wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs.
Hell and the after-world were the butts of his ceaseless
mockery. If he had not feared the judges of the queen's
courts more than he feared God, he said in bitter jest, he
should often have turned cutpurse. He married, and loved

542 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1593
his wife, but she was soon deserted ; and the wretched profli
gate found himself again plunged into excesses which he
loathed, though he could not live without them. But wild
as was the life of Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily
on virtue's side in the love pamphlets and novelettes he
poured out in endless succession, and whose plots were
dramatized by the school which gathered round him. The
life of Marlowe was as riotous, his skepticism even more
daring, than the life and skepticism of Greene. His early
death alone saved him, in all probability, from a prosecution
for atheism. He was charged with calling Moses a juggler,
and with boasting that, if he undertook to write a new relig
ion, it should be a better religion than the Christianity he
saw around him. But he stood far ahead of his fellows as
a creator of English tragedy. Born at the opening of Eliza
beth's reign, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but edu
cated at Cambridge, Marlowe burst on the world in the year
which preceded the triumph over the Armada, with a play
which at once wrought a revolution in the English stage.
Bombastic and extravagant as it was, and extravagance
reached its height in the scene where captive kings, the
"pampered jades of Asia," drew their conqueror's car across
the stage, " Tamburlaine " not only indicated the revolt of the
new drama against the timid inanities of Euphuism, but gave
an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of which
Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed
him. He perished at twenty-nine in a shameful brawl, but
in his brief career he had struck the grander notes of the
coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the herald of Shy
lock. He opened in " Edward the Second " the series of
historical plays which gave us " Caesar " and " Richard the
Third." Riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad thirst for
pleasure as it is, his "Faustus " was the first dramatic attempt
to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the un
seen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened
with superstition, the daring of human defiance in a heart
abandoned to despair. Extravagant, unequal, stooping even
to the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffoonery, there
is a force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of
passion, which sets him above all his contemporaries save one.

1564] THE REFORMATION 543
In the higher qualities of imagination, as in the majesty and
sweetness of his " mighty line," he is inferior to Shakspere
alone. A few daring jests, a brawl and a fatal stab, make up the
life of Marlowe ; but even details such as these are wanting
to the life of William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet,
indeed, do we know so little. For the story of his youth we
have only one or two trifling legends, and these almost cer
tainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic saying, not
one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single
anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His
look and figure in later age have been preserved by the bust
over his tomb at Stratford, and a hundred years after his
death he was still remembered in his native town ; but the
minute diligence of the inquirers of the Georgian time was
able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most trivial
order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement
before his death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and
unity of his temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have
left its trace on the memory of his contemporaries ; it is
the very grandeur of his genius which precludes us from
discovering any personal trait in his works. His supposed
self-revelation in the Sonnets is so obscure that only a
few outlines can be traced even by the boldest conjecture.
In his dramas he is all his characters, and his characters
range over all mankind. There is not one, or the act or
word of one, that we can identify personally with the poet
himself. He was born in the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve
years after the birth of Spenser, three years later than the
birth of Bacon. Marlowe was of the same age with Shak
spere, Greene probably a few years older. His father, a
glover and small farmer of Stratford-on-Avon, was forced
by poverty to lay down his office of alderman, as his son
reached boyhood ; and stress of poverty may have been the
cause which drove William Shakspere, who was already mar
ried at eighteen to a wife older than himself, to London and
the stage. His life in the capital can hardly have begun
later than in his twenty-third year, the memorable year which
followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the

544 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1587
Armada, and which witnessed the production of Marlowe's
"Tamburlaine." If we take the language of the Sonnets
as a record of his personal feeling, his new profession as an
actor stirred in him only the bitterness of self-contempt. He
chides with Fortune, " that did not better for my life provide
than public means that public manners breed " ; he writhes
at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the
view of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars.
"Thence comes it," he adds, "that my name receives a brand,
and almost thence my nature is subdued to that it works in."
But the application of the words is a more than doubtful one.
In spite of petty squabbles with some of his dramatic rivals
at the outset of his career, the genial nature of the newcomer
seems to have won him a general love among his fellow
actors. In 1592, while still a mere fitter of old plays for the
stage, a fellow playwright, Chettle, answered Greene's attack
on him in words of honest affection : " Myself have seen his
demeanor no less civil, than he excellent in the quality he
professes : besides, divers of worship have reported his up
rightness of dealing, which argues his honesty ; and his face
tious grace in writing, that approves his art." His partner
Burbage spoke of him after death as a " worthy friend and
fellow " ; and Jonson handed down the general tradition of
his time when he described him as " indeed honest, and of
an open and free nature." His profession as an actor was
of essential service to him in his poetic career. Not only did
it give him the sense of threatrical necessities which makes
his plays so effective on the boards, but it enabled him to
bring his pieces as he wrote them to the test of the stage.
If there is any truth in Jonson's statement that Shakspere
never blotted a line, there is no justice in the censure which
it implies on his carelessness or incorrectness. The condi
tions of poetic publication were in fact wholly different from
those of our own day. A drama remained for years in manu
script as an acting piece, subject to continual revision and
amendment ; and every rehearsal and representation afforded
hints for change which we know the young poet was far from
neglecting. The chance which has preserved an earlier edi
tion of his " Hamlet " shows in what an unsparing way Shak
spere could recast even the finest products of his genius.

1593] THE REFORMATION 545
Five years after the supposed date of his arrival in London,
he was already famous as a dramatist. Greene speaks bit
terly of him, under the name of " Shakescene," as an " up
start crow beautified with our feathers," a sneer which points
either to his celebrity as an actor, or to his preparation for
loftier flights by fitting pieces of his predecessors for the
stage. He was soon partner in the theater, actor, and play
wright; and another nickname, that of "Johannes Factotum,"
or Jack-of-all-Trades, shows his readiness to take all honest
work which came to hand.
With the poem of " Venus and Adonis," " the first heir of
my invention," as Shakspere calls it, the period of independ
ent creation fairly began. The date of its publication was a
very memorable one. The " Faerie Queen " had appeared
only three years before, and had placed Spenser without a
rival at the head of English poetry. On the other hand, the
two leading dramatists of the time passed at this moment
suddenly away. Greene died in poverty and self-reproach
in the house of a poor shoemaker. " Doll," he wrote to the
wife he had abandoned, " I charge thee, by the love of our
youth and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid ;
for if he and his wife had not succored me, I had died in the
streets." " Oh, that a year were granted me to live," cried
the young poet from his bed of death — " but I must die, of
every man abhorred ! Time, loosely spent, will not again be
won! My time is loosely spent — and I undone!" A year
later, the death of Marlowe in a street brawl removed the
only rival whose powers might have equaled Shakspere's
own. He was now about thirty ; and the twenty-three years
which elapsed between the Appearance of the " Adonis " and
his death were filled with a series of masterpieces. Nothing
is more characteristic of his genius than its incessant activity.
Through the five years which followed the publication of his
early poem he seems to have produced on an average two
dramas a year. When we attempt, however, to trace the
growth and progress of the poet's mind in the order of his
plays, we are met, at least in the case of many of them, by
an absence of certain information as to the dates of their
appearance. The facts on which inquiry has to build are
extremely few. " Venus and Adonis," with the " Lucrece,"

546 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i593
must have been written before their publication in 1593-4;
the Sonnets, though not published till 1609, were known in
some form among his private friends as early as 1598- His
earlier plays are defined by a list given in the " Wit's Treas
ury" of Francis Meres in 1598, though the omission of a
play from a casual catalogue of this kind would hardly war
rant us in assuming its necessary non-existence at the time.
The works ascribed to him at his death are fixed, in the same
approximate fashion, through the edition published by his
fellow actors. Beyond these meager facts, and our knowl
edge of the publication of a few of his dramas in his lifetime,
all is uncertain ; and the conclusions which have been drawn
from these, and from the dramas themselves, as well as from
assumed resemblances with, or references to, other plays of
the period, can only be accepted as approximations to the
truth. The bulk of his lighter comedies and historical dramas
can be assigned with fair probability to the period from about
1593, when he was known as nothing more than an adapter,
to 1598, when they are mentioned in the list of Meres. They
bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In " Love's La
bor's Lost " the young playwright, fresh from his own Strat
ford, flings himself into the midst of the brilliant England
which gathered round Elizabeth, busying himself as yet for
the most part with the surface of it, with the humors and
quixotisms, the wit and the whim, the unreality, the fantastic
extravagance, which veiled its inner nobleness. Country lad
as he is, he can exchange quip and repartee with the best ;
he quizzes the verbal wit and high-flown extravagance of
thought and phrase which Euphues had made fashionable
in the court world of the time. He shares the delight in ex
istence which was so marked a feature of the age ; he enjoys
the mistakes, the contrasts, the adventures, of the men about
him ; his fun breaks almost riotously out in the practical jokes
of the " Taming of the Shrew " and the endless blunderings
of the " Comedy of Errors." His work is as yet marked by
little poetic elevation, or by passion ; but the easy grace of
the dialogue, the dexterous management of a complicated
story, the genial gaiety of his tone, and the music of his verse
promised a master of social comedy as soon as Shakspere
turned from the superficial aspects of the world about him to

1593] THE REFORMATION 547
find a new delight in the character and actions of men. In
the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," his painting of manners
was suffused by a tenderness and ideal beauty, which formed
an effective protest against the hard though vigorous charac
ter painting which the first success of Ben Jonson in " Every
Man in his Humor " brought at the time into fashion. But
quick on these lighter comedies followed two, in which his
genius started fully into life. His poetic power, held in re
serve till now, showed itself with a splendid profusion in the
brilliant fancies of the " Midsummer Night's Dream " ; and
passion swept like a tide of resistless delight through " Romeo
and Juliet." Side by side, however, with these passionate
dreams, these delicate imaginings and piquant sketches of
manners, had been appearing during this short interval of
intense activity his historical dramas. No plays seem to
have been more popular, from the earliest hours of the new
stage, than dramatic representations of our history. Marlowe
had shown in his " Edward the Second " what tragic grandeur
could be reached in this favorite field ; and, as we have seen,
Shakspere had been led naturally towards it by his earlier
occupation as an adapter of stock pieces like " Henry the
Sixth " for the new requirements of the stage. He still to
some extent followed in plan the older plays on the subjects
he selected, but in his treatment of their themes he shook
boldly off the yoke of the past. A larger and deeper con
ception of human character than any of the old dramatists
had reached displayed itself in Richard the Third, in Falstaff,
or in Hotspur ; while in Constance and Richard the Second
the pathos of human suffering was painted as even Marlowe
had never dared to paint it. No dramas have done so much
for Shakspere's enduring popularity with his countrymen as
these historical plays. Nowhere is the spirit of our history
so nobly rendered. If the poet's work echoes sometimes our
national prejudice and unfairness of temper, it is instinct
throughout with English humor, with our English love of
hard fighting, our English faith in goodness and in the doom
that waits upon triumphant evil, our English pity for the
fallen. Whether as a tragedian or as a writer of social comedy,
Shakspere had now passed far beyond his fellows. "The
36

548 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1598
Muses," said Meres, "would speak with Shakspere's fine
filed phrase, if they would speak English." His personal
popularity was at its height. His pleasant temper, and the
vivacity of his wit, had drawn him early into contact with the
young Earl of Southampton, to whom his "Adonis" and
" Lucrece " are dedicated ; and the different tone of the two
dedications shows how rapidly acquaintance ripened into
an ardent friendship. Shakspere's wealth and influence too
were growing fast. He had property both in Stratford and
London, and his fellow-townsmen made him their suitor to
Lord Burleigh for favors to be bestowed on Stratford. He
was rich enough to aid his father, and to buy the house at
Stratford which afterwards became his home. The tradition
that Elizabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in " Henry the
Fourth " that she ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in
love, — an order which produced the " Merry Wives of Wind
sor," — whether true or false, proves his repute as a play
wright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they
found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood,
and Chapman, and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of
these could dispute the supremacy of Shakspere. The ver
dict of Meres, that " Shakspere among the English is the
most excellent in both kinds for the stage," represented the
general feeling of his contemporaries. He was at last
fully master of the resources of his art. The " Merchant
of Venice" marks the perfection of his development as a
dramatist in the completeness of its stage effect, the in
genuity of its incidents, the ease of its movement, the poetic
beauty of its higher passages, the reserve and self-control
with which its poetry is used, the conception and unfolding
of character, and above all the mastery with which character
and event are grouped round the figure of Shylock. But the
poet's temper is still young ; the " Merry Wives of Windsor "
is a burst of gay laughter ; and laughter more tempered, yet
full of a sweeter fascination, rings round us in "As You
Like It." But in the melancholy and meditative Jacques of
the last drama we feel the touch of a new and graver mood.
Youth, so full and buoyant in the poet till now, seems to have
passed almost suddenly away. Though Shakspere has hardly
reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which cannot have been

1598] THE REFORMATION 549
written at a much later time than this, there are indications
that he already felt the advance of premature age. The outer
world suddenly darkened around him. The brilliant circle of
young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up
by the political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the
Earl of Essex for power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold ;
his friend and Shakspere's idol, Southampton, passed a pris
oner into the Tower; Herbert, Lord Pembroke, a younger
patron of the poet, was banished from court. While friends
were thus falling and hopes fading without, Shakspere's own
mind seems to have been going through a phase of bitter
suffering and unrest. In spite of the ingenuity of commen
tators, it is difficult and even impossible to derive any knowl
edge of his inner history from the Sonnets; "the strange
imagery of passion whicli passes over the magic mirror," it
has been finely said, "has no tangible evidence before or
behind it." But its mere passing is itself an evidence of the
restlessness and agony within. The change in the character
of his dramas gives a surer indication of his change of mood.
The joyousness which breathes through his early work disap
pears in comedies such as " Troilus " and " Measure for Meas
ure." Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" the
virtue of Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from
mankind; in Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless
for want of the capacity of action ; the poison of lago taints
the love of Desdemona and the grandeur of Othello ; Lear's
mighty passion battles helplessly against the wind and the
rain ; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the cup of her
triumph from th'e hand of Lady Macbeth ; lust and self-
indulgence blast the heroism of Antony ; pride ruins the
nobleness of Coriolanus. But the very struggle and self-
introspection that these dramas betray were to give a depth
and grandeur to Shakspere's work such as it had never
known before. The age was one in which man's temper and
powers took a new range and energy. The daring of the
adventurer, the philosophy of the scholar, the passion of the
lover, the fanaticism of the saint, towered into almost super
human grandeur. Man became conscious of the immense
resources that lay within him, conscious of boundless powers
that seemed to mock the narrow -world in which they moved.

550 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1608
It is this grandeur of humanity that spreads before us as the
poet pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful con
vulsion of a great nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the
soul of Lear which blends with the very storm of the heavens
themselves, the fearful ambition that nerved a woman's hand
to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered king, the reck
less lust that "flung away a world for love." Amid the
terror and awe of these great dramas we learn something of
the vast forces of the age from which they sprang. The
passion of Mary Stuart, the ruthlessness of Alva, the daring
of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney, the range of thought and
action in Ralegh or Elizabeth, come better home to us as we
follow the mighty series of tragedies which began in " Hamlet"
and ended in " Coriolanus."
Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in
which he shows a soul at rest with itself and with the
world, "Cymbeline," "The Tempest," "Winter's Tale," were
written in the midst of ease and competence, in a house at
Stratford, to which he withdrew a few years after the
death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relation with the
world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. It
is in this peaceful and gracious close that the life of Shak
spere contrasts with that of his greatest contemporaries.
Himself Elizabethan to the core, he stood at the meeting-
point of two great epochs of our history. The age of the
Renascence was passing into the age of Puritanism. A
sterner Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by
its morality, its seriousness, its intense conviction of God.
But it was at the same time hardening and narrowing it.
The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The " obstinate ques
tionings " which haunted the finer souls of the Renascence
were being stereotyped into the theological formulas of the
Puritan. The sense of a divine omnipotence was annihilating
man. The daring which turned England into a people of
"adventurers," the sense of inexhaustible resources, the buoy
ant freshness of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty and
joy, which created Sidney and Marlowe and Drake, were
passing away before the consciousness of evil and the crav
ing to order man's life aright before God. A new political
world, healthier, more really national, but less picturesque,

i6o8] THE REFORMATION 551
less wrapped in the mystery and splendor which poets love,
was rising with the new moral world. Rifts which were still
little were widening hour by hour, and threatening ruin to
the great fabric of Church and State which the Tudors had
built up, and to which the men of the Renascence clung pas
sionately. From this new world of thought and feeling
Shakspere stood utterly aloof. Of the popular tendencies
of Puritanism — and great as were its faults, Puritanism may
fairly claim to be the first political system which recognized
the grandeur of the people as a whole — Shakspere knew
nothing. His roll of dramas is the epic of civil war. The Wars
of the Roses fill his mind as they filled the mind of his con
temporaries. It is not till we follow him through the series
of plays from " Richard the Second " to " Henry the Eighth "
that we realize how profoundly the memory of the strug
gle between York and Lancaster had molded the temper
of the people, how deep a dread of civil war, of baronial tur
bulence, of disputes over the succession, it had left behind it.
From such a risk the Crown seemed the one security. With
Shakspere as with his contemporaries the Crown is still the
center and safeguard of the national life. His ideal England
is an England grouped round a king such as his own Henry
v., a born ruler of men, with a loyal people about him, and
his enemies at his feet. Socially too the poet reflects the
aristocratic view of life which was shared by all the nobler
spirits of the Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the embodi
ment of a great noble ; and the taunts which Shakspere hurls
in play after play at the rabble only echo the general temper
of the Renascence. But he shows no sympathy with the
struggle of feudalism against the Crown. He had grown up
under the reign of Elizabeth ; he had known no ruler save one
who had cast a spell over the hearts of Englishmen. The
fear of misrule was dim and distant; his thoughts were
absorbed, as those of the country were absorbed, in the strug
gle for national existence, and the heat of such a struggle left
no time for the thoughts of civil liberty. Nor were the spir
itual sympathies of the poet those of the coming time. Turn
as others might to the speculations of theology, man and
man's nature remained with him an inexhaustible subject of
interest. Caliban was among his latest creations. It is

552 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1608
impossible to discover whether his faith, if faith there were,
was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard, indeed, to say whether
he had any religious belief or no. The religious phrases
which are thinly scattered over his works are little more than
expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. But on
the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is signifi
cant. He is silent, and the doubt of Hamlet deepens his
silence, about the after-world. " To die," it may be, was to
him as to Claudio, "to go we know not whither." Often as
his "questionings" turn to the riddle of life and death, he
leaves it a riddle to the last, without heeding the common
theological solutions around him. "We are such stuff as
dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a
sleep." The contrast between the spirit of the Elizabethan drama
and the new temper of the nation became yet stronger when
the death of Shakspere left the sovereignty of the English
stage to Ben Jonson. Jonson retained it almost to the
moment when the drama itself perished in the storm of
the civil war. Webster and Ford, indeed, surpassed him
in tragic grandeur, Massinger in facility and grace, Beau
mont and Fletcher in poetry and inventiveness ; but in the
breadth of his dramatic quality, his range over every kind
of poetic excellence, Jonson was excelled by Shakspere
alone. His life retained to the last the riotous, defiant
color of the earlier dramatic world, in which he made his
way to fame. The stepson of a bricklayer, he enlisted as
a volunteer in the wars of the Low Countries, killed his man
in single combat in sight of both armies, and returned at
nineteen to London to throw himself on the stage for bread.
At forty-five he was still so vigorous that he made his way to
Scotland on foot. Even in old age his "mountain belly," his
scarred face, and massive frame became famous among the
men of a younger time, as they gathered at the " Mermaid "
to listen to his wit, his poetry, his outbursts of spleen and
generosity, of delicate fancy, of pedantry, of riotous excess.
His entry on the stage was marked by a proud resolve to
reform it. Already a fine scholar in early manhood, and dis
dainful of writers who, like Shakspere, " had small Latin and
less Greek," Jonson aimed at a return to classic severity, to a

1561] THE REFORMATION 553
severer criticism and taste. He blamed the extravagance
which marked the poetry around him, he studied his plots, he
gave symmetry and regularity to his sentences and concise
ness to his phrase. But creativeness disappears : in his social
comedies we are amongst qualities and types rather than men,
amongst abstractions and not characters. His comedy is no
genial reflection of life as it is, but a moral, satirical effort to
reform manners. It is only his wonderful grace and real
poetic feeling that lightens all this pedantry. He shares the
vigor and buoyancy of life which distinguished the school
from which he sprang. His stage is thronged with figures.
In spite of his talk about correctness, his own extravagance is
only saved from becoming ridiculous by his amazing force.
If he could not create characters, his wealth of striking details
gave life to the types which he substituted for them. His
poetry, too, is of the highest order ; his lyrics of the purest,
lightest fancy : his masks rich with gorgeous pictures ; his
pastoral, the "Sad Shepherd," fragment as it is, breathes a
delicate tenderness. But, in spite of the beauty and strength
which lingered on, the life of our drama was fast ebbing
away. The interest of the people was in reality being drawn
to newer and graver themes, as the struggle of the great
rebellion threw its shadow before it, and the efforts of the
playwrights to arrest this tendency of the time by fresh
excitement only brought about the ruin of the stage. The
grossness of the later comedy is incredible. Almost as
incredible is the taste of the later tragedians for horrors of
incest and blood. The hatred of the Puritans to the stage
was not a mere longing to avenge the insults which it had
leveled at Puritanism : it was in the main the honest hatred
of God-fearing men against the foulest depravity presented in
a poetic and attractive form.
If the imaginative resources of the new England were
seen in the creators of " Hamlet " and the " Faerie Queen," its
purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over the stores of
human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with
which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis
Bacon. Bacon was born at the opening of Elizabeth's reign,
three years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the
younger son of a lord keeper, as well as the nephew of

554 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE £1561
Lord Burleigh, and even in boyhood his quickness and sagac
ity won the favor of the queen. Elizabeth " delighted much
to confer with him, and to prove him with questions : unto
which he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity
above his years that her Majesty would often term him 'the
young lord keeper.' " Even as a boy at college he had
expressed his dislike of the Aristotelian philosophy, as "a
philosophy only strong for disputations and contentions, but
barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life
of man." As a law student of twenty-one he sketched in a
tract on the "Greatest Birth of Time" the system of induc
tive inquiry he was already prepared to substitute for it. The
speculations of the young thinker were interrupted by hopes
of court success ; but these were soon dashed to the ground.
He was left poor by his father's death ; the ill will of the
Cecils barred his advancement with the queen; and a few
years before Shakspere's arrival in London he entered as a
barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one of the most
successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three he was a
member of the House of Commons, and his judgment and
eloquence at once brought him to the front. " The fear of
every man that heard him was lest he should make an end,"
Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his reputation
was quickened by the appearance of his " Essays," a work
remarkable not merely for the condensation of its thought
and its felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power
with which it applied to human life that experimental analy
sis which Bacon was at a later time to make the key of
Science. His fame at once became great at home and
abroad, but with this nobler fame Bacon could not content
himself. He was conscious of great powers, as well as great
aims for the public good ; and it was a time when such aims
could hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown.
But political employment seemed further off than ever. At
the outset of his career in Parliament he had irritated Eliza
beth by a firm opposition to her demand of a subsidy ; and
though the offense was atoned for by profuse apologies, and
by the cessation of all further resistance to the policy of the
court, the law offices of the Crown were more than once
refused to him, and it was only after the publication of his

1597] THE REFORMATION 555
" Essays " that he could obtain some slight promotion as a
queen's counsel. The moral weakness which more and more
disclosed itself is the best justification of the queen in her
reluctance — a reluctance so strangely in contrast with her
ordinary course — to bring the wisest head in her realm to
her council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were
for the most part men whose intellect was directed by a strong
sense of public duty. Their reverence for the queen, strangely
exaggerated as it may seem to us, was guided and controlled
by an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of religion ; and
with all their regard for the royal prerogative, they never lost
their regard for the law. The grandeur and originality of
Bacon's intellect parted him from men like these quite as
much as the bluntness of his moral perceptions. In politics,
as in science, he had little reverence for the past. Law, con
stitutional privileges, or religion were to him simply means
of bringing about certain ends of good 'government ; and if
these ends could be brought about in shorter fashion he saw
only pedantry in insisting on more cumbrous means. He had
great social and political ideas to realize, the reform and codi
fication of the law, the civilization of Ireland, the purification
of the Church, the union — at a later time — of Scotland and
England, educational projects, projects of material improve
ment, and the like ; and the direct and shortest way of realiz
ing these ends was in Bacon's eyes the use of the power of
the Crown. But whatever charm such a conception of the
royal power might have for her successor, it had little charm
for Elizabeth ; and to the end of her reign Bacon was foiled
in his efforts to rise in her service.
" For my name and memory," he said at the close of his
life, " I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign
nations, and the next age." Amid political activity and court
intrigue he still found room for the philosophical speculation
which had begun with his earliest years. At forty-four, after
the final disappointment of his political hopes from Elizabeth,
the publication of the "Advancement of Learning " marked the
first decisive appearance of the new philosophy which he had
been silently framing. The close of this work was, in his
own words, "a general and faithful perambulation of learning,
with an inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and

556 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1597
not improved and converted by the industry of man ; to the
end that such a plot, made and recorded to memory, may both
minister light to any public designation and also serve to excite
voluntary endeavors." It was only by such a survey, he held,
that men could be turned from useless studies, or ineffectual
means of pursuing more useful ones, and directed to the true
end of knowledge as "a rich storehouse for the glory of the
Creator and the relief of man's estate." The work was in
fact the preface to a series of treatises which were intended
to be built up into an " Instauratio Magna," which its author
was never destined to complete, and of which the parts that
we possess were published in the following reign. The " Cogi-
tata et Visa" was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum,"
which in its complete form was presented to James in 1621.
A year later Bacon produced his " Natural and Experimental
History." This, with the " Novum Organum " and the " Ad
vancement of Learning," was all of his projected " Instauratio
Magna" which he actually finished; and even of this portion
we have only part of the last two divisions. The " Ladder of
the Understanding," which was to have followed these and
led up from experience to science, the "Anticipations," or
provisional hypotheses for the inquiries of the new philosophy,
and the closing account of " Science in Practise," were left
for posterity to bring to completion. " We may, as we trust,"
said Bacon, " make no despicable beginnings. The destinies
of the human race must complete it, in such a manner per
haps as men looking only at the present world would not
readily conceive. For upon this will depend, not only a
speculative good, but all the fortunes of mankind, and all
their power." When we turn from words like these to the
actual work which Bacon did, it is hard not to feel a certain
disappointment. He did not thoroughly understand the older
philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from the waste of
human intelligence, which he conceived to be owing to the
adoption of a false method of investigation, blinded him to
the real value of deduction as an instrument of discovery ;
and he was encouraged in his contempt for it as much by his
own ignorance of mathematics as by the non-existence in his
day of the great deductive sciences of physics and astronomy.
Nor had he a more accurate prevision of the method of modern

1597] THE REFORMATION 557
science. The inductive process to which he exclusively di
rected jnen's attention bore no fruit in Bacon's hands. The
"art of investigating nature" on which he prided himself has
proved useless for scientific purposes, and would be rejected
by modern investigators. Where he was on a more correct
track he can hardly be regarded as original. "It may be
doubted," says Dugald Stewart, " whether any one important
rule with regard to the true method of investigation be con
tained in his works of which no hint can be traced in those of
his predecessors." Not only indeed did Bacon fail to antici
pate the methods of modern science, but he even rejected
the great scientific discoveries of his own day. He set aside
with the same scorn the astronomical theory of Copernicus
and the magnetic investigations of Gilbert. The contempt
seems to have been fully returned by the scientific workers
of his day. "The lord chancellor wrote on science," said
Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, " like
a lord chancellor."
In spite, however, of his inadequate appreciation either of
the old philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of
later ages has attributed, and justly attributed, to the " Novum
Organum " a decisive influence on the development of modern
science. If he failed in revealing the method of experimental
research. Bacon was the first to proclaim the existence of a
Philosophy of Science, to insist on the unity of knowledge
and inquiry throughout the physical world, to give dignity by
the large and noble temper in which he treated them to the
petty details of experiment in which science had to begin, to
clear a way for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions
of the past, to claim for it its true rank and value, and to
point to the enormous results which its culture would bring
in increasing the power and happiness of mankind. In one
respect his attitude was in the highest degree significant. The
age in which he lived was one in which theology was absorb
ing the intellectual energy of the world. He was the servant,
too, of a king with whom theological studies superseded all
others. But if he bowed in all else to James, Bacon would
not, like Casaubon; bow in this. He would not even, like
Descartes, attempt to transform theology by turning reason
into a mode of theological demonstration. He stood abso-

558 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i597
lutely aloof from it. Though as a politician he did not shrink
from dealing with such subjects as Church Reform, he dealt
with them simply as matters of civil polity. But from his
exhaustive enumeration of the branches of human knowledge
he excluded theology, and theology alone. His method was
of itself inapplicable to a subject where the premises were
assumed to be certain, and the results known. His aim was
to seek for unknown results by simple experiment. It was
against received authority and accepted tradition in matters
of inquiry that his whole system protested; what he urged
was the need of making belief rest strictly on proof, and proof
rest on the conclusions drawn from evidence by reason. But
in theology — all theologians asserted — reason played but a
subordinate part. " If I proceed to treat of it," said Bacon,
" I shall step out of the bark of human reason and enter into
the ship of the Church. Neither will the stars of philosophy,
which have hitherto so nobly shone on us, any longer give us
their light." The certainty indeed of conclusions on such
subjects was out of harmony with the grandest feature of
Bacon's work, his noble confession of the liability of every
inquirer to error. It was his especial task to warn men against
the "vain shows" of knowledge which had so long hindered
any real advance in it, the " idols " of the Tribe, the Den, the
Forum, and the Theater, the errors which spring from the
systematizing spirit which pervades all masses of men, or
from individual idiosyncrasies, or from the strange power of
words and phrases over the mind, or from the traditions of the
past. Nor were the claims of theology easily to be reconciled
with the position which he was resolute to assign to natural
science. "Through all those ages," Bacon says, "wherein
men of genius or learning principally or even moderately
flourished, the smallest part of human industry has been
spent on natural philosophy, though this ought to be esteemed
as the great mother of the sciences : for all the rest, if torn
from this root, may perhaps be polished and formed for use,
but can receive little increase." It was by the adoption of the
method of inductive inquiry which physical science was to
make its own, and by basing inquiry on grounds which phy
sical science could supply, that the moral sciences, ethics and
politics, could alone make any real advance. " Let none ex-

1588] THE REFORMATION 559
pect any great promotion of the sciences, especially in their
effective part, unless natural philosophy be drawn out to par
ticular sciences ; and, again, unless these particular sciences
be brought back again to natural philosophy. From this defect
it is that astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, and
(what seems stranger) even moral and civil philosophy and
logic rise but little above the foundations, and only skim over
the varieties and surfaces of things." It was this lofty con
ception of the position and destiny of natural science which
Bacon was the first to impress upon mankind at large. The
age was one in which knowledge was passing to fields of in
quiry which had till then been unknown, in which Kepler and
Galileo were creating modern astronomy, in which Descartes
was revealing the laws of motion, and Harvey the circulation
of the blood. But to the mass of men this great change was
all but imperceptible ; and it was the energy, the profound
conviction, the eloquence of Bacon which first called the atten
tion of mankind as a whole to the power and importance of
physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in the
results and victories of the new philosophy nerved its fol
lowers to a zeal and confidence equal to his own. It was he
who above all gave dignity to the slow and patient processes
of investigation, of experiment, of comparison, to the sacri
ficing of hypothesis to fact, to the single aim after truth, which
was to be the law of modern science.
Section VIII. — The Conquest of Ireland, 1588-1610
While England became " a nest of singing birds " at home,
the last years of Elizabeth's reign were years of splendor and
triumph abroad. The defeat of the Armada was the first of a
series of defeats which broke the power of Spain and changed
the political aspect of the world. The next year fifty vessels
and fifteen thousand men were sent under Drake and Norris
against Lisbon. The expedition returned baffled to England,
but it had besieged Corunna, pillaged the coast, and repulsed
a Spanish army on Spanish ground. The exhaustion of the
treasury indeed soon forced Elizabeth to content herself with
issuing commissions to volunteers ; but the war was a national
one, and the nation waged it for itself. Merchants, gentle-

56o HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1591
men, nobles, fitted out privateers. The sea-dogs in ever
growing numbers scoured the Spanish Main; Spanish gal
leons, Spanish merchant ships, were brought month after
month to English harbors. Philip meanwhile was held back
from attack on England by the need of action in France.
The Armada had hardly been dispersed when the assassina
tion of Henry the Third, the last of the line of Valois, raised
Henry of Navarre to the throne; and the accession of a Prot
estant sovereign at once ranged the Catholics of France to a
man on the side of the League and its leaders, the Guises.
The League rejected Henry's claims as those of a heretic,
proclaimed the Cardinal of Bourbon king, as Charles the
Tenth, and recognized Philip as protector of France. It
received the support of Spanish soldiery and Spanish treas
ure : and this new effort of Spain, an effort whose triumph
must have ended in her ruin, forced Elizabeth to aid Henry
with men and money in his five years' struggle against the
overwhelming odds which seemed arrayed against him. Torn
by civil strife, it seemed as though France might be turned
into a Spanish dependency ; and it was from its coast that
Philip hoped to reach England. But the day at last went
against the Leaguers. On the death of their puppet king,
their scheme of conferring the crown on Philip's daughter
awoke jealousies in the House of Guise itself, while it gave
strength to the national party who shrank from laying France
at the feet of Spain. Henry's submission to the faith held
by the bulk of his subjects at last destroyed all chance of
Philip's success. " Paris is well worth a mass " was the
famous phrase in which Henry explained his abandonment
of the Protestant cause ; but the step did more than secure
Paris. It dashed to the ground all hopes of further resist
ance, it dissolved the League, and enabled the king at the
head of a reunited people to force Philip to acknowledge his
title and consent to peace in the treaty of Vervins. The
overthrow of Philip's hopes in France had been made more
bitter by the final overthrow of his hopes at sea. In 1596
his threat of a fresh Armada was met by the daring descent
of an English force upon Cadiz. The town was plundered
and burned to the ground ; thirteen vessels of war were fired
in its harbor, and the stores accumulated for the expedition

1588] THE REFORMATION 561
utterly destroyed. In spite of this crushing blow a Spanish
fleet gathered in the following year and set sail for the English
coast; but as in the case of its predecessor storms proved
more fatal than the English guns, and the ships were wrecked
and almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay.
With the ruin of Philip's projects in France and the asser
tion of English supremacy at sea, all danger from Spain
passed quietly away, and Elizabeth was able to direct her
undivided energies to the last work which illustrates her
reign. To understand, however, the final conquest of Ireland, we
must retrace our steps to the reign of Henry the Second.
The civilization of the island had at that time fallen far below
the height which it had reached when its missionaries brought
religion and learning to the shores of Northumbria. Learn
ing had almost disappeared. The Christianity which had been
a vital force in the eighth century had died into asceticism and
superstition by the twelfth, and had ceased to influence the
morality of the people at large. The Church, destitute of
any effective organization, was powerless to do the work
which it had done elsewhere in Western Europe, or to intro
duce order into the anarchy of warring tribes. On the con
trary, it shared the anarchy around it. Its head, the Coarb
or Archbishop of Armagh, sank into the hereditary chieftain
of a clan ; its bishops were without dioceses, and often mere
dependents of the greater monasteries. Hardly a trace of
any central authority remained to knit the tribes into a single
nation, though the king of Ulster claimed supremacy over
his fellow kings of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught; and
even within these minor kingships the regal authority was little
more than a name. The one living thing in the social and
political chaos was the sept, or tribe, or clan, whose institu
tions remained those of the earliest stage of human civiliza
tion. Its chieftainship was hereditary, but, instead of passing
from father to son, it was held by whoever was the eldest
member of the ruling family at the time. The land belonging
to the tribe was shared among its members, but redivided
among them at certain intervals of years. The practise of
"fosterage," or adoption, bound the adopted child more
closely to its foster-parents than to its family by blood.

562 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1155
Every element of improvement or progress which had been
introduced into the island disappeared in the long and des
perate struggle with the Danes. The coast towns, such as
Dublin or Waterford, which the invaders founded, remained
Danish in blood and manners, and at feud with the Celtic
tribes around them, though sometimes forced by the fortunes
of war to pay tribute, and to accept, in name at least, the
overlordship of the Irish kings. It was through these towns
however that the intercourse with England, which had ceased
since the eighth century, was to some extent renewed in the
eleventh. Cut off from the Church of the island by national
antipathy, the Danish coast cities applied to the see of Can
terbury for the ordination of their bishops, and acknowledged
a right of spiritual supervision in Lanfranc and Anselm. The
relations thus formed were drawn closer by the slave-trade,
which the conqueror and Bishop Wulfstan succeeded for a
time in suppressing at Bristol, but which appears to have
quickly revived. In the twelfth century Ireland was full of
Englishmen who had been kidnaped and sold into slavery,
in spite of royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces of the
English Church. The state of the country afforded a legiti
mate pretext for war, had a pretext been needed by the ambi
tion of Henry the Second ; and within a few months of that
king's coronation John of Salisbury was despatched to obtain
the papal sanction for an invasion of the island. The enter
prise, as it was laid before Pope Hadrian the Fourth, took
the color of a crusade. The isolation of Ireland from the
general body of Christendom, the absence of learning and
civilization, the scandalous vices of its people, were alleged
as the grounds of Henry's action. It was the general belief
of the time that all islands fell under the jurisdiction of the
papal see, and it was as a possession of the Roman Church
that Henry sought Hadrian's permission to enter Ireland.
His aim was " to enlarge the bounds of the Church, to restrain
the progress of vices, to correct the manners of its people and
to plant virtue among them, and to increase the Christian
religion." He engaged to "subject the people to laws, to
extirpate vicious customs, to respect the rights of the native
churches, and to enforce the payment of Peter's pence " as a
recognition of the overiordship of the Roman see. Hadrian

1 169] THE REFORMATION 563
by his bull approved the enterprise as one prompted by "the
ardor of faith and love of religion," and declared his will
that the people of Ireland should receive Henry with all
honor and revere him as their lord. The papal bull was pro
duced in a great council of the English baronage, but the
opposition of the Empress Matilda and the difficulties of the
enterprise forced on Henry a temporary abandonment of his
designs, and his energies were diverted for the moment to
plans of Continental aggrandizement.
Twelve years had passed when an Irish chieftain, Dermod,
king of Leinster, presented himself at Henry's court and
did homage to him for the dominions from which he had
been driven in one of the endless civil wars which distracted
the island. Dermod returned to Ireland with promises of
aid from the English knighthood, and was soon followed by
Robert Fitzstephen, a son of the Constable of Cardigan, with
a small band of a hundred and forty knights, sixty men-at-
arms, and three or four hundred Welsh archers. Small as
was the number of the adventurers, their horses and arms
proved irresistible to the Irish kerns ; a sally of the men of
Wexford was avenged by the storm of their town ; the Ossory
clans were defeated with a terrible slaughter, and Dermod,
seizing a head from the heap of trophies which his men piled
at his feet, tore off in savage triumph its nose and lips with
his teeth. The arrival of fresh forces under Maurice Fitz
gerald heralded the coming of Richard of Clare, Earl of Pem
broke and Striguil, a ruined baron later known by the nick
name of Strongbow, who in defiance of Henry's prohibition
landed near Waterford with a force of fifteen hundred men,
as Dermod's mercenary. The city was at once stormed, and
the united forces of the earl and king marched to the siege
of Dublin. In spite of a relief attempted by the king of
Connaught, who was recognized as overking of the island by
the rest of the tribes, Dublin was taken by surprise ; and the
marriage of Richard with Eva, Dermod's daughter, left him
on the death of his father-in-law, which followed quickly on
these successes, master of his kingdom of Leinster. The new
lord had soon, however, to hurry back to England, and ap
pease the jealousy of Henry by the surrender of Dublin to
the Crown, by doing homage for Leinster as an English
37

564 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1171
lordship, and by accompanying the king in his voyage to the
new dominion which the adventurers had won. Had Henry
been allowed by fortune to carry out his purpose, the con
quest of Ireland would now have been accomplished. The
king of Connaught indeed and the chiefs of Northern Ulster
refused him homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes owned his
suzerainty ; the bishops in synod at Cashel recognized him as
their lord ; and he was preparing to penetrate to the north
and west, and to secure his conquest by a systematic erection
of castles throughout the country, when the troubles which
followed on the murder of Archbishop Thomas recalled him
hurriedly to Normandy. The lost opportunity never returned.
Connaught, indeed, bowed to a nominal acknowledgment of
Henry's overlordship ; John de Courcy penetrated into Ulster
and established himself at Downpatrick; and the king planned
for a while the establishment of his youngest son, John, as
Lord of Ireland. But the levity of the young prince, who
mocked the rude dresses of the native chieftains, and plucked
them in insult by the beard, compelled his recall ; and nothing
but the feuds and weakness of the Irish tribes enabled the
adventurers to hold the districts of Drogheda, Dublin, Wex
ford, Waterford, and Cork, which formed what was thence
forth known as the " English Pale."
Had the Irish driven their invaders into the sea, or the
English succeeded in the complete conquest of Ireland, the
misery of its after history might have been avoided. A strug
gle such as that in which Scotland drove out its conquerors
might have produced a spirit of patriotism and national union
which would have formed a people out of the mass of war
ring clans. A conquest such as that of England by the Nor
mans would have spread at any rate the law, the order, the
peace and civilization of the conquering country over the
length and breadth of the conquered. Unhappily Ireland,
while powerless to effect its deliverance, was strong enough
to hold its assailants partially at bay. The country was broken
into two halves, whose conflict has never ceased. The bar
barism of the native tribes was only intensified by their hatred
of the more civilized intruders. The intruders themselves,
penned up in the narrow limits of the Pale, fell rapidly to the
level of the barbarism about them. All the lawlessness, the

1366] THE REFORMATION 565
ferocity, the narrowness, of feudalism broke out unchecked
in the horde of adventurers who held the land by their sword.
It needed the stern vengeance of John, whose army stormed
their strongholds, and drove the leading barons into exile, to
preserve even their fealty to the English Crown. John di
vided the Pale into counties, and ordered the observance of
the English law ; but the departure of his army was the sig
nal for a return of the anarchy which he had trampled under
foot. Every Irishman without the Pale was deemed an enemy
and a robber, nor was his murder cognizable by the law.
Half the subsistence of the barons was drawn from forays
across the border, and these forays were avenged by incur
sions of native marauders, which carried havoc to the walls
of Dublin. The English settlers in the Pale itself were har
ried and oppressed by enemy and protector alike ; while
the feuds of the English lords wasted their strength, and pre
vented any effective combination for conquest or defense.
The landing of a Scotch force after Bannockburn with Edward
Bruce at its head, and a general rising of the Irish which
welcomed this deliverer, drove indeed the barons of the Pale
to a momentary union ; and in the bloody field of Athenree
their valor was proved by the slaughter of eleven thousand
of their foes, and the almost complete extinction of the sept
of the O'Connors. But with victory returned anarchy and
degradation. The barons sank more and more into Irish
chieftains; the Fitzmaurices, who became earls of Desmond,
and whose great territory in the south was erected into a
County Palatine, adopted the dress and manners of the natives
around them ; and the provisions of the Statute of Kilkenny
were fruitless to check the growth of this evil. The statute
forbade the adoption by any man of English blood of the Irish
language or name or dress ; it enforced within the Pale the
use of English law, and made that of the native or Brehon
law, which was gaining ground, an act of treason; it made
treasonable any marriage of the Englishry with persons of
Irish blood, or any adoption of English children by Irish
foster-fathers. But stern as they were, these provisions
proved fruitless to check the fusion of the two races, while
the growing independence of the lords of the Pale threw off
all but the semblance of obedience to the English govern-

566 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i394
ment. It was this which stirred Richard the Second to a
serious effort for the conquest and organization of the island.
He landed with an army at Waterford, and received the gen
eral submission of the native chieftains. But the lords of the
Pale held sullenly aloof ; and Richard had no sooner quitted
the island than the Irish in turn refused to carry out their
promise of quitting Leinster. In 1398 his lieutenant in Ire
land, the Earl of March, was slain in battle, and Richard
resolved to complete his work by a fresh invasion ; but the
troubles in England soon interrupted his efforts, and all traces
of his work vanished with the embarkation of his soldiers.
With the renewal of the French wars, and the outburst of
the Wars of the Roses, Ireland was again left to itself, and
English sovereignty over the island dwindled to a shadow.
But at last Henry the Seventh took the country in hand.
Sir Edward Poynings was despatched as deputy; the lords
of the Pale were scared by the seizure of their leader, the Earl
of Kildare ; the parliament of the Pale was forbidden by the
famous Poynings' Act to treat of any matters save those first
approved of by the English king and his council. For a
while, however, the lords of the Pale must still serve as the
English garrison against the unconquered Irish, and Henry
made his prisoner the Earl of Kildare lord deputy. "All
Ireland cannot rule this man," grumbled his ministers.
"Then shall he rule all Ireland," replied the king. But
though Henry the Seventh had begun the work of bridling
Ireland he had no strength for exacting a real submission;
and the great Norman lords of the Pale, the Butlers and
Geraldines, the De la Poers and the Fitzpatricks, though
subjects in name, were in fact defiant of royal authority. In
manners and outer seeming they had sunk into mere natives ;
their feuds were as incessant as those of the Irish septs ; and
their despotism over the miserable inhabitants of the Pale
combined the horrors of feudal oppression with those of Cel
tic anarchy. Crushed by taxation, by oppression, by misgov-
ernment, plundered alike by Celtic marauders and by the
troops levied to disperse them, the wretched descendants of
the first English settlers preferred even Irish misrule to Eng
lish "order," and the border of the Pale retreated steadily
towards Dublin. The towns of the seaboard, sheltered by

1534] THE REFORMATION 567
their walls and their municipal self-government, formed the
only exceptions to the general chaos ; elsewhere throughout
its dominions the English government, though still strong
enough to break down any open revolt, was a mere phantom
of rule. From the Celtic tribes without the Pale even the
remnant of civilization and of native union which had lin
gered on to the time of Strongbow had vanished away. The
feuds of the Irish septs were as bitter as their hatred of the
stranger; and the government at Dublin found it easy to
maintain a strife, which saved it the necessity of self-defense,
among a people whose " nature is such that for money one
shall have the son to war against his father, and the father
against his child." During the first thirty years of the six
teenth century, the annals of the country which remained
under native rule record more than a hundred raids and
battles between clans of the north alone. But the time was
at last come for a vigorous attempt on the part of England
to introduce order into this chaos of turbulence and misrule.
To Henry the Eighth the policy which had been pursued by
his father, of ruling Ireland through the great Irish lords,
was utterly hateful. His purpose was to rule in Ireland as
thoroughly and effectively as he ruled in England, and dur
ing the latter half of his reign he bent his whole energies to
accomplish this aim. From the first hours of his accession,
indeed, the Irish lords felt the heavier hand of a master.
The Geraldines, who had been suffered under the preceding
reign to govern Ireland in the name of the Crown, were quick
to discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their
tool. Their head, the Earl of Kildare, was called to England
and thrown into the Tower. The great house resolved to
frighten England again into a conviction of its helplessness ;
and a rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald followed the usual
fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the Archbishop of
Dublin, a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle, a
harrying of the Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the
rebels among the bogs and forests of the border on the ad
vance of the English forces. It had been usual to meet such
an onset as this by a raid of the same character, by a corre
sponding failure before the castle of the rebellious noble, and
a retreat like his own, which served as a preliminary to nego-

S68 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1535
tiations and a compromise. Unluckily for the Geraldines,
Henry had resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand, and he
had Cromwell to execute his will. Skeffington, a new lord
deputy, brought with him a train of artillery, which worked
a startling change in the political aspect of the island. The
castles which had hitherto sheltered rebellion were battered
into ruins. Maynooth, a stronghold from which the Geral
dines threatened Dublin and ruled the Pale at their will, was
beaten down in a fortnight. So crushing and unforeseen
was the blow that resistance was at once at an end. Not
only was the power of the great Norman house which had
towered over Ireland utterly broken, but only a single boy
was left to preserve its name.
With the fall of the Fitzgeralds Ireland felt itself in a
master's grasp. " Irishmen," wrote one of the lord justices
to Cromwell, " were never in such fear as now. The king's
sessions are being kept in five shires more than formerly."
Not only were the Englishmen of the Pale at Henry's feet,
but the kerns of Wicklow and Wexford sent in their sub
mission ; and for the first time in men's memory an English
army appeared in Munster and reduced the south to obedience.
A castle of the O'Briens, which guarded the passage of the
Shannon, was carried by assault, and its fall carried with it
the submission of Clare. The capture of Athlone brought
about the reduction of Connaught and assured the loyalty of
the great Norman house of the De Burghs or Bourkes, who
had assumed an almost royal authority in the west. The
resistance of the tribes of the north was broken in the victory
of Bellahoe. In seven years, partly through the vigor of
Skeffington's successor. Lord Leonard Grey, and still more
through the resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, the power
of the Crown, which had been limited to the walls of Dublin,
was acknowledged over the length and breadth of Ireland. But
submission was far from being all that Henry desired. His
aim was to civilize the people whom he had conquered — to
rule not by force but by law. But the only conception of law
which the king or his ministers could frame was that of Eng
lish law. The customary law which prevailed without the
Pale, the native system of clan government and common tenure
of land by the tribe, as well as the poetry and literature which

1535] THE REFORMATION 569
threw their luster over the Irish tongue, were either unknown
to the English statesmen, or despised by them as barbarous.
The one mode of civilizing Ireland and redressing its chaotic
misrule which presented itself to their minds was that of
destroying the whole Celtic tradition of the Irish people —
that of " making Ireland English " in manners, in law, and
in tongue. The deputy, parliament, judges, sheriffs, which
already existed within the Pale, furnished a faint copy of
English institutions ; and these, it was hoped, might be gradu
ally extended over the whole island. The English language
and mode of life would follow, it was believed, the English
law. The one effectual way of bringing about such a change
as this lay in a complete conquest of the island, and in its
colonization by English settlers ; but from this course, pressed
on him as it was by his own lieutenants and by the settlers
of the Pale, even the iron will of Cromwell shrank. It was
at once too bloody and too expensive. To win over the chiefs,
to turn them by policy and a patient generosity into English
nobles, to use the traditional devotion of their tribal depend
ents as a means of diffusing the new civilization of their
chiefs, to trust to time and steady government for the gradual
reformation of the country, was a policy safer, cheaper, more
humane, and more statesmanlike. It was this system which,
even before the fall of the Geraldines, Henry had resolved to
adopt; and it was this which he pressed on Ireland when the
conquest laid it at his feet. The chiefs were to be persuaded
of the advantage of justice and legal rule. Their fear of any
purpose to " expel them from their lands and dominions law
fully possessed" was to be dispelled by a promise "to con
serve them as their own." Even their remonstrances against
the introduction of English law were to be regarded, and the
course of justice to be enforced or mitigated according to the
circumstances of the country. In the resumption of lands or
rights which clearly belonged to the Crown "sober ways,
politic shifts, and amiable persuasions " were to be preferred
to rigorous dealing. It was this system of conciliation which
was in the main carried out by the English Government
under Henry and his two successors. Chieftain after chief
tain was won over to the acceptance of the indenture which
guaranteed him in the possession of his lands, and left his

570 HISTORY- OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1535
authority over his tribesmen untouched, on condition of a
pledge of loyalty, of abstinence from illegal wars and exac
tions on his fellow subjects, and of rendering a fixed tribute
and service in war time to the Crown. The sole test of
loyalty demanded was the acceptance of an English title and
the education of a son at the English court ; though in some
cases, like that of the O'Neills, a promise was exacted to use
the English language and dress, and to encourage tillage and
husbandry. Compliance with conditions such as these was
procured, not merely by the terror of the royal name, but by
heavy bribes. The chieftains in fact profited greatly by the
change. Not only were the lands of the suppressed abbeys
granted to them on their assumption of their new titles, but
the English law courts, ignoring the Irish custom by which
the land belonged to the tribe at large, regarded the chiefs as
sole proprietors of the soil.
The merits of the system were unquestionable ; its faults
were such as a statesman of that day could hardly be expected
to perceive. The Tudor politicians held that the one hope
for the regeneration of Ireland lay in its absorbing the civi
lization of England. The prohibition of the national dress,
customs, laws, and language must have seemed to them
merely the suppression of a barbarism which stood in the
way of all improvement. At this moment, however, a fatal
blunder plunged Ireland into religious strife. The religious
aspect of Ireland was hardly less chaotic than its political
aspect had been. Ever since Strongbow's landing there had
been no one Irish Church, simply because there had been no
one Irish nation. There was not the slightest difference in
doctrine or discipline between the church without the Pale
and the Church within it. But within the Pale the clergy
were exclusively of English blood and speech, and without it
they were exclusively of Irish. Irishmen were shut out by
law from abbeys and churches within the English boundary ;
and the ill will of the natives shut out Englishmen from
churches and abbeys outside it. As to the religious state of
the country, it was much on a level with its political condi
tion. Feuds and misrule had told fatally on ecclesiastical dis
cipline. The bishops were political officers, or hard fighters
like the chiefs around them ; their sees were neglected, their

1535] THE REFORMATION 571
cathedrals abandoned to decay. Through whole dioceses the
churches lay in ruins and without priests. The only preach
ing done in the country was done by the begging friars, and
the results of the friars' preaching were small. " If the king
do not provide a remedy," it was said in 1525, "there will be
no more Christentie than in the middle of Turkey." Unfortu
nately the remedy which Henry provided was worse than the
disease. Politically, Ireland was one with England, and the
great revolution which was severing the one country from
the papacy extended itself naturally to the other. The results
of it indeed at first seemed small enough. The supremacy,
a question which had convulsed England, passed over into
Ireland to meet its only obstacle in a general indifference.
Everybody was ready to accept it without a thought of its
consequences. The bishops and clergy within the Pale bent
to the king's will as easily as their fellows in England, and
their example was followed by at least four prelates of
dioceses without the Pale. The native chieftains made no
more scruple than the lords of the council in renouncing
obedience to the Bishop of Rome, and in acknowledging
Henry as the " supreme head of the Church of England and
Ireland under Christ." There was none of the resistance to
the dissolution of the abbeys which had been witnessed on
the other side of the Channel, and the greedy chieftains
showed themselves perfectly willing to share the plunder of
the Church. But the results of the measure were fatal to
the little culture and religion which even the past centuries
of disorder had spared. Such as they were, the religious
houses were the only schools which Ireland contained. The
system of vicars, so general in England, was rare in Ireland ;
churches in the patronage of the abbeys were for the most
part served by the religious themselves, and the dissolution
of their houses suspended public worship over large districts
of the country. The friars, hitherto the only preachers, and
who continued to labor and teach in spite of the efforts of the
government, were thrown necessarily into a position of an
tagonism to the English rule.
Had the ecclesiastical changes which were forced on the
country ended here, however, little harm would in the end
have been done. But in England the breach with Rome, the

572 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1535
destruction of the monastic orders, and the establishment of
the supremacy had roused in a portion of the people itself a
desire for theological change which Henry shared and was
cautiously satisfying. In Ireland the spirit of the Reforma
tion never existed among the people at all. They accepted
the legislative measures passed in the English Parliament
without any dream of theological consequences, or of any
change in the doctrine or ceremonies of the Church. Not a
single voice demanded the abolition of pilgrimages, or the
destruction of images, or the reform of public worship. The
mission of Archbishop Browne " for the plucking down of
idols and extinguishing of idolatry " was a first step in the
long effort of the English Government to force a new faith
on a people who to a man clung passionately to their old
religion. Browne's attempts at "tuning the pulpits" were
met by a sullen and significant opposition. " Neither by
gentle exhortation," the primate wrote to Cromwell, " nor by
evangelical instruction, neither by oath of them solemnly
taken, nor yet by threats of sharp correction may I persuade
or induce any, whether religious or secular, since my coming
over, once to preach the Word of God nor the just title of our
illustrious prince." Even the acceptance of the supremacy,
which had been so quietly effected, was brought into ques
tion when its results became clear. The bishops abstained
from compliance with the order to erase the pope's name out
of their mass-books. The pulpits remained steadily silent.
When Browne ordered the destruction of the images and relics
in his own cathedral, he had to report that the prior and
canons " find them so sweet for their gain that they heed not
my words." Cromwell, however, was resolute for a religious
uniformity between the two islands, and the primate bor
rowed some of his patron's vigor. Recalcitrant priests were
thrown into prison, images were plucked down from the rood-
loft, and the most venerable of Irish relics, the Staff of St.
Patrick, was burnt in the market-place. But he found no
support in his vigor, save from across the Channel. The
Irish council was cold. The lord deputy knelt to say
prayers before an image at Trim. A sullen, dogged opposi
tion baffled Cromwell's efforts, and his fall was followed by a
long respite in the religious changes which he was forcing on

I5SI] THE REFORMATION 573
the conquered dependency. With the accession of Edward
the Sixth, however, the system of change was renewed with
all the energy of Protestant zeal. The bishops were sum
moned before the deputy, Sir Anthony St. Leger, to receive
the new English Liturgy, which, though written in a tongue
as strange to the native Irish as Latin itself, was now to
supersede the Latin service-book in every diocese. The
order was the signal for an open strife. " Now shall every
illiterate fellow read Mass," burst forth Dowdall, the Arch
bishop of Armagh, as he flung out of the chamber with all
but one of his suffragans at his heels. Archbishop Browne,
of Dublin, on the other hand, was followed in his profession
of obedience by the bishops of Meath, Limerick, and Kildare.
The government, however, was far from quailing before the
division of the episcopate. Dowdall was driven from the
country, and the vacant sees were filled with Protestants, like
Bale, of the most advanced type. But no change could be
wrought by measures such as these on the opinions of the
people themselves. The new episcopal reformers spoke no
Irish, and of their English sermons not a word was under
stood by the rude kerns around the pulpit. The native
priests remained silent. " As for preaching we have none,"
reports a zealous Protestant, "without which the ignorant
can have no knowledge." The prelates who used the new
prayer-book were simply regarded as heretics. The Bishop
of Meath was assured by one of his flock that, " if the country
wist how, they would eat you." Protestantism had failed to
wrest a single Irishman from his older convictions, but it suc
ceeded in uniting all Ireland against the Crown. The old
political distinctions which had been produced by the con
quest of Strongbow faded before the new struggle for a com
mon faith. The population within the Pale and without it
became one, "not as the Irish nation," it has been acutely
said, " but as Catholics." A new sense of national identity
was found in the identity of religion. " Both English and
Irish begin to oppose your lordship's orders," Browne had
written years before to Cromwell, " and to lay aside their
national old quarrels."
With the accession of Mary the shadowy form of this ear
lier Irish Protestantism melted quietly away. There were

574 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1551
no Protestants in Ireland save the new bishops ; and when
Bale had fled over sea, and his fellow prelates had been de
prived, the Church resumed its old appearance. No attempt,
indeed, was made to restore the monasteries ; and Mary exer
cised her supremacy, deposed and appointed bishops, and
repudiated papal interference with her ecclesiastical acts, as
vigorously as her father. But the Mass was restored, the old
modes of religious worship were again held in honor, and
religious dissension between the Government and its Irish
subjects was for the time at an end. With the close, how
ever, of one danger came the rise of another. England was
growing tired of the policy of conciliation which had been
steadily pursued by Henry the Eighth and his successor.
As yet it had been rewarded with precisely the sort of success
which Wolsey and Cromwell anticipated : the chiefs had
come quietly into the plan, and their septs had followed them
in submission to the new order. " The winning of the Earl
of Desmond was the winning of the rest of Munster with
small charges. The making O'Brien an earl made all that
country obedient." The Macwilliam became Lord Clan-
rickard, and the Fitzpatricks barons of Upper Ossory. A
visit of the great northern chief who had accepted the title
of Earl of Tyrone to the English court was regarded as a
marked step in the process of civilization. In the south,
where the system of English law was slowly spreading, the
chieftains sat on the bench side by side with the English jus
tices of the peace ; and something had been done to check
the feuds and disorder of the wild tribes between Limerick
and Tipperary. "Men may pass quietly throughout these
countries without danger of robbery or other displeasure."
In the Clanrickard county, once wasted with war, " plowing
increaseth daily." In Tyrone and the north, indeed, the old
disorder reigned without a check ; and everywhere the proc
ess of improvement tried the temper of the English deputies
by the slowness of its advance. The only hope of any real
progress lay in patience ; and there were signs that the Gov
ernment at Dublin found it hard to wait. The " rough han
dling " of the chiefs by Sir Edward Bellingham, a lord deputy
under the Protector Somerset, roused a spirit of revolt that
only subsided when the poverty of the Exchequer forced him

I55I] THE REFORMATION 575
to withdraw the garrisons he had planted in the heart of the
country. His successor in Mary's reign. Lord Sussex, made
raid after raid to no purpose on the obstinate tribes of the
north, burning in one the cathedral of Armagh and three
other churches. A far more serious breach in the system of
conciliation was made when the project of English coloniza
tion which Henry had steadily rejected was adopted by the
same lord deputy, and when the country of the O'Connors
was assigned to English settlers, and made shire-land under
the names of King's and Queen's Counties, in honor of Philip
and Mary. A savage warfare began at once between the
planters and the dispossessed septs, which only ended in the
following reign in the extermination of the Irishmen. Commis
sioners were appointed to survey waste lands, with the aim of
carrying the work of colonization into other districts ; but the
pressure of the French war put an end to these wider projects.
Elizabeth at her accession recognized the risk of the policy of
confiscation and colonization, and the prudence of Cecil fell
back on the safer though more tedious methods of Henry.
The alarm, however, at English aggression had already
spread among the natives : and its result was seen in a revolt
of the north, and in the rise of a leader far more vigorous
and able than any with whom the Government had had as
yet to contend. An acceptance of the earldom of Tyrone
by the chief of the O'Neills brought about the inevitable
conflict between the system of succession recognized by Eng
lish and that recognized by Irish law. On the death of the
earl, England acknowledged his eldest son as the heir of
his earldom; while the sept maintained their older right of
choosing a chief from among the members of the family, and
preferred Shane O'Neill, a younger son of less doubtful
legitimacy. Sussex marched northward to settle the question
by force of arms ; but ere he could reach Ulster the activity
of Shane had quelled the disaffection of his rivals, the O'Don-
nells of Donegal, and won over the Scots of Antrim. " Never
before," wrote Sussex, " durst Scot or Irishman look English
man in the face in plain or wood since I came here '' ; but
Shane had fired his men with a new courage, and charging
the deputy's army with a force hardly half its number, drove
it back in rout on Armagh. A promise of pardon induced

576 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1567
him to visit London, and make an illusory submission, but
he was no sooner safe home again than its terms were set
aside ; and after a wearisome struggle, in which Shane foiled
the efforts of the lord deputy to entrap or to poison him,
he remained virtually master of the north. His success
stirred larger dreams of ambition; he invaded Connaught,
and pressed Clanrickard hard, while he replied to the remon
strances of the council at Dublin with a bold defiance. " By
the sword I have won these lands," he answered, "and by
the sword will I keep them." But defiance broke idly
against the skill and vigor of Sir Henry Sidney, who suc
ceeded Sussex as lord deputy. The rival septs of the
north were drawn into a rising against O'Neill, while the
English army advanced from the Pale ; and Shane, defeated
by the O'Donnells, took refuge in Antrim, and was hewn to
pieces in a drunken squabble by his Scottish entertainers.
The victory of Sidney won ten years of peace for the wretched
country ; but Ireland had already been fixed on by the pa
pacy as ground on which it could with advantage fight out
its quarrel with Elizabeth. Practically, indeed, the religious
question hardly existed there. The ecclesiastical policy of
the Protestants had indeed been revived in name on the
queen's accession ; Rome was again renounced, the new Act of
Uniformity forced the English prayer-book on the island, and
compelled attendance at the services in which it was used.
There was as before a general air of compliance with the
law ; even in the districts without the Pale the bishops gener
ally conformed, and the only exceptions of which we have
any information were to be found in the extreme south and
in the north, where resistance was distant enough to be safe.
But the real cause of this apparent submission to the Act of
Uniformity lay in the fact that it remained, and necessarily
remained, a dead letter. It was impossible to find any con
siderable number of English ministers, or of Irish priests
acquainted with English. Meath was one of the most civi
lized dioceses, and out of a hundred curates in it hardly ten
knew any tongue save their own. The promise that the
service-book should be translated into Irish was never ful
filled, and the final clause of the act itself authorized the use
of a Latin rendering of it till further order could be taken.

1579] THE REFORMATION 577
But this, like its other provisions, was ignored, and through
out Elizabeth's reign the gentry of the Pale went unquestioned
to Mass. There was in fact no religious persecution, and in
the many complaints of Shane O'Neill we find no mention of
a religious grievance. But this was far from being the view
of Rome or of Spain, of the Catholic missionaries, or of the
Irish exiles abroad. They represented, and perhaps believed,
the Irish people to be writhing under a religious oppression
which they were burning to shake off. They saw in the
Irish loyalty to Catholicism a lever for overthrowing the
heretic queen when in 1579 the papacy planned the greatest
and most comprehensive of its attacks upon Elizabeth.
While missionaries egged on the English Catholics to revolt,
the pope hastened to bring about a Catholic revolution in
Scotland and in Ireland. Stukely, an Irish refugee, had
long pressed on the pope and Spain the policy of a descent
on Ireland ; and his plans were carried out at last by the
landing of a small force on the shores of Kerry. In spite of
the arrival in the following year of two thousand papal sol
diers accompanied by a legate, the attempt ended in a miser
able failure. The fort of Smerwick, in which the invaders
entrenched themselves, was forced by the new deputy. Lord
Grey, to surrender, and its garrison put ruthlessly to the
sword. The Earl of Desmond, who after long indecision
rose to support them, was defeated and hunted over his own
country, which the panic-born cruelty of his pursuers harried
into a wilderness. Pitiless as it was, the work done in Mun
ster spread a terror over the land which served England in
good stead when the struggle with Catholicism culminated
in the fight with the Armada; and not a chieftain stirred
during that memorable year save to massacre the miserable
men who were shipwrecked along the coast of Bantry or
Sligo. The power of the Government was from this moment rec
ognized everywhere throughout the land. But it was a
power founded solely on terror ; and the outrages and ex
actions of. the soldiery, who had been flushed with rapine and
bloodshed in the south, sowed during the years which fol
lowed the reduction of Munster the seeds of a revolt more
formidable than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered.

578 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1598
The tribes of Ulster, divided by the policy of Sidney, were
again united by the common hatred of their oppressors ; and
in Hugh O'Neill they found a leader of even greater ability
than Shane himself. Hugh had been brought up at the
English court, and was in manners and bearing an English
man ; he had been rewarded for his steady loyalty in previous
contests by a grant of the earldom of Tyrone ; and in his
strife with a rival chieftain of his clan he had secured aid
from the Government by an offer to introduce the English
laws and shire system into his new country. But he was no
sooner undisputed master of the north than his tone gradually
changed. Whether from a long-formed plan, or from sus
picion of English designs upon himself, he at last took a
position of open defiance. It was at the moment when the
treaty of Vervins, and the wreck of the second Armada,
freed Elizabeth's hands from the struggle with Spain, that
the revolt under Hugh O'Neill broke the quiet which had
prevailed since the victories of Lord Grey. The Irish ques
tion again became the chief trouble of the queen. The tide
of her recent triumphs seemed at first to have turned. . A
defeat of the English forces in Tyrone caused a general
rising of the northern tribes ; and a great effort made in 1599
for the suppression of the growing revolt failed through the
vanity and disobedience, if not the treacherous complicity, of
the queen's lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex. His suc
cessor. Lord Mountjoy, found himself master on his arrival
of only a few miles round Dublin. But in three years the
revolt was at an end. A Spanish force which landed to sup
port it at Kinsale was driven to surrender; a line of forts
secured the country as the English mastered it; all open
opposition was crushed out by the energy and the ruthlessness
of the new lieutenant ; and a famine which followed on his
ravages completed the devastating work of the sword. Hugh
O'Neill was brought in triumph to Dublin; the Earl of Des
mond, who had again roused Munster into revolt, fled for
refuge to Spain; and the work of conquest was at last
brought to a close. Under the administration of Mountjoy's
successor. Sir Arthur Chichester, an able and determined
effort was made for the settlement of the conquered province
by the general introduction of a purely English system of

i6io] THE REFORMATION 579
government, justice, and property. Every vestige of the old
Celtic constitution of the country was rejected as " barbarous."
The tribal authority of the chiefs was taken from them by
law. They were reduced to the position of great nobles
and landowners, while their tribesmen rose from subjects into
tenants, owing only fixed and customary dues and services to
their lords. The tribal system of property in common was
. set aside, and the communal holdings of the tribesmen turned
into the copyholds of English law. In the same way the chief
tains were stripped of their hereditary jurisdiction, and the
English system of judges and trial by jury substituted for their
proceedings under Brehon or customary law. To all this the
Celts opposed the tenacious obstinacy of their race. Irish
juries, then as now, refused to convict. Glad as the tribes
men were to be freed from the arbitrary exactions of their
chiefs, they held them for chieftains still. The attempt
made by Chichester, under pressure from England, to intro
duce the English uniformity of religion ended in utter failure ;
for the Englishry of the Pale remained as Catholic as the
native Irishry ; and the sole result of the measure was to
build up a new Irish people ovit of both on the common basis
of religion. Much, however, had been done by the firm yet
moderate government of the deputy, and signs were already
appearing of a disposition on the part of the people to con
form gradually to the new usages, when the English council
under Elizabeth's successor suddenly resolved upon and
carried through the great revolutionary measure which is
known as the colonization of Ulster. The pacific and con
servative policy of Chichester was abandoned for a vast policy
of spoliation ; two thirds of the north of Ireland was declared
to have been confiscated to the Crown by the part its possess
ors had taken in a recent effort at revolt; and the lands
which were thus gained were allotted to new settlers of Scotch
and English extraction. In its material results the Plantation
of Ulster was undoubtedly a brilliant success. Farms and
homesteads, churches and mills, rose fast amidst the desolate
wilds of Tyrone. The Corporation of London undertook the
colonization of Derry, and gave to the little town the name
which its heroic defense has made so famous. The founda
tions of the economic prosperity which has raised Ulster high
38

58o HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i6or
above the rest of Ireland in wealth and intelligence were
undoubtedly laid in the confiscation of 1610. Nor did the
measure meet with any opposition at the time save that of
secret discontent. The evicted natives withdrew sullenly to
the lands which had been left them by the spoiler ; but all
faith in English justice had been torn from the minds of the
Irishry, and the seed had been sown of that fatal harvest of
distrust and disaffection, which was to be reaped through
tyranny and massacre in the age to come.
The colonization of Ulster has carried us beyond the limits
of our present story. The triumph of Mountjoy flung its
luster over the last days of Elizabeth, but no outer triumph
could break the gloom which gathered round the dying queen.
Lonely as she had always been, her loneliness deepened as she
drew towards the grave. The statesmen and warriors of her
earlier days had dropped one by one from her council-board;
and their successors were watching her last moments, and
intriguing for favor in the coming reign. Her favorite. Lord
Essex, was led into an insane outbreak of revolt which brought
him to the block. The old splendor of her court waned and
disappeared. Only officials remained about her, " the other
of the council and nobility estrange themselves by all occa
sions." As she passed along in her progresses, the people
whose applause she courted remained cold and silent The
temper of the age, in fact, was changing, and isolating her as
it changed. Her own England, the England which had
grown up around her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly
from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth and
the Renascence. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day
enjoyed it, and now that they were gone she clung to it with
a fierce tenacity. She hunted, she danced, she jested with
her young favorites, she coquetted and scolded and frolicked
at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. " The queen,"
wrote a courtier a few months before her death, " was never
so gallant these many years, nor so set upon jollity." She
persisted, in spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses
from country house to country house. She clung to business
as of old, and rated in her usual fashion " one who minded
not to giving up some matter of account." But death crept
on. Her face became haggard, and her frame shrank almost

i603] THE REFORMATION 581
to a skeleton. At last her taste for finerydisappeared, and
she refused to change her dresses for a week together. A
strange melancholy settled down on her : " she held in her
hand," says one who saw her in her last days, " a golden cup,
which she often put to her lips ; but in truth her heart seemed
too full to need more filling." Gradually her mind gave way.
She lost her memory, the violence of her temper became
unbearable, her very courage seemed to forsake her. She
called for a sword to lie constantly beside her, and thrust it
from time to time through the arras, as ff she heard mur
derers stirring there. Food and rest became alike distaste
ful. She sat day and night propped up with pillows on a
stool, her finger on her lip, her eyes fixed on the floor, with
out a word. If she once broke the silence, it was with a flash
of her old queenliness. When Robert Cecil asserted that
she " must " go to bed, the word roused her like a trumpet.
" Must ! " she exclaimed ; " is must a word to be addressed
to princes ? Little man, little man ! thy father, if he had
been alive, durst not have used that word." Then, as her
anger spent itself, she sank into her old dejection. " Thou
art so presumptuous," she said, "because thou knowest I
shall die." She rallied once more when the ministers beside
her bed named Lord Beauchamp, the heir to the Suffolk
claim, as a possible successor. " I will have no rogue's son,"
she cried hoarsely, " in my seat." But she gave no sign, save
a motion of the head, at the mention of the King of Scots.
She was in fact fast becoming insensible ; and early the next
morning the life of Elizabeth, a life so great, so strange and
lonely in its greatness, passed quietly away.

CHAPTER VIII
PURITAN ENGLAND
Section I. — The Puritans, 1583-1603
NO greater moral change ever passed over a nation
than passed over England during the years which
parted the middle of the reign of Elizabeth from the
meeting of the Long Parliament. England became the peo
ple of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was as yet
the one English book which was familiar to every English
man ; it was read at churches and read at home, and every
where its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not
deadened, kindled a startling enthusiasm. When Bishop
Bonner set up the first six Bibles in St. Paul's " many well-
disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof,
especially when they could get any that had an audible voice
to read to them." ... " One John Porter used sometimes
to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of him
self as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man
and of a big stature ; and great multitudes would resort
thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an
audible voice." But the " goodly exercise " of readers such
as Porter was soon superseded by the continued recitation of
both Old Testament and New in the public services of the
Church ; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scrip
ture into every home. The popularity of the Bible was owing
to other causes besides that of religion. The whole prose
literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif,
has grown up since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyn-
dale and Coverdale. So far as the nation at large was con
cerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry, save the
little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue
when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sun
day after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered
round Bonner's Bibles in the nave of St. Paul's, or the family
582

1583] PURITAN ENGLAND 583
group that hung on the words of the Geneva Bible in the
devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new liter
ature. Legend and annal, war-song and psalm. State roll
and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the parables
of evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the
sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apoca
lyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied
for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure of the
stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of the
Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew lit
erature wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the
one revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the
other. No version could transfer to another tongue the peculiar
charm of language which gave their value to the authors of
Greece and Rome. Classical letters, therefore, remained in
the possession of the learned, that is, of the few ; and among
these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the pedants
who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine
Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But
the tongue of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek,
lent themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of
translation. As a mere literary monument, the English ver
sion of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English
tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of
its appearance the standard of our language. For the mo
ment, however, its literary effect was less than its social. The
power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed it
self in a thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspic
uously than in the influence it exerted on ordinary speech.
It formed, we must repeat, the whole literature which was
practically accessible to ordinary Englishmen ; and when we
recall the number of common phrases which we owe to great
authors, the bits of Shakspere, or Milton, or Dickens, or
Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave themselves in our
ordinary talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic
of Biblical words and phrases which colored English talk
two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion
and illustration which we borrow from a thousand books, our
fathers were forced to borrow from one ; and the borrowing
was the easier and the more natural that the range of the

584 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1583
Hebrew literature fitted it for the expression of every phase
of feeling. When Spenser poured forth his warmest love
notes in the " Epithalamion," he adopted the very words of
the psalmist as he bade the gates open for the entrance of
his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills
of Dunbar, he hailed the sunburst with the cry of David :
" Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as
the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away ! " Even
to common minds this familiarity with grand poetic imagery
in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and ardor of
expression, that with all its tendency to exaggeration and
bombast we may prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of to-day.
But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase
was the effect of the Bible on the character of the people at
large. Elizabeth might silence or tune the pulpits; but it
was impossible for her to silence or tune the great preachers
of justice, and mercy, and truth, who spoke from the book
which she had again opened for her people. The whole
moral effect which is produced nowadays by the religious
newspaper, the tract, the essay, the lecture, the missionary
report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible alone ;
and its effect in this way, however dispassionately we exam
ine it, was simply amazing. One dominant influence told on
human action ; and all the activities that had been called into
life by the age that was passing away were seized, concen
trated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of religion.
The whole temper of the nation felt the change. A new
conception of life and of man superseded the old. A new
moral and religious impulse spread through every class.
Literature reflected the general tendency of the time; and
the dumpy little quartos of controversy and piety, which still
crowd our older libraries, drove before them the classical
translations and Italian novelettes of the age of the Renas
cence. "Theology rules there," said Grotius of England
only two years after Elizabeth's death ; and when Casaubon,
the last of the great scholars of the sixteenth century, was
invited to England by King James, he found both king and
people indifferent to pure letters. " There is a great abun
dance of theologians in England," he says; "all point their
studies in that direction." Even a country gentleman like

1583] PURITAN ENGLAND 585
Colonel Hutchinson felt the theological impulse. " As soon
as he had improved his natural understanding with the acqui
sition of learning, the first studies he exercised himself in
were the principles of religion." The whole nation became, in
fact, a church. The great problems of life and death, whose
questionings found no answer in the higher minds of Shak
spere's day, pressed for an answer not only from noble and
scholar but from farmer and shopkeeper in the age that fol
lowed him. We must not, indeed, picture the early Puritan
as a gloomy fanatic. The religious movement had not as
yet come into conflict with general culture. With the close
of the Elizabethan age, indeed, the intellectual freedom which
had marked it faded insensibly away : the bold philosophical
speculations which Sidney had caught from Bruno, and which
had brought on Marlowe and Ralegh the charge of atheism,
died, like her own religious indifference, with the queen. But
the lighter and more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture
harmonized well enough with the temper of the Puritan gen
tleman. The figure of Colonel Hutchinson, one of the Regi
cides, stands out from his wife's canvas with the grace and
tenderness of a portrait by Vandyck. She dwells on the per
sonal beauty which distinguished his youth, on "his teeth
even and white as the purest ivory," "his hair of brown, very
thick-set in his youth, softer than the finest silk, curling with
loose great rings at the ends." Serious as was his temper in
graver matters, the young squire of Owthorpe was fond of
hawking, and piqued himself on his skill in dancing and
fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical love of
" paintings, sculpture, and all liberal arts," as well as in the
pleasure he took in his gardens, " in the improvement of his
grounds, in planting groves and walks and forest trees." If
he was "diligent in his examination of the Scriptures," "he
had a great love for music, and often diverted himself with a
viol, on which he played masterly." We miss, indeed, the
passion of the Elizabethan time, its caprice, its largeness of
feeling and sympathy, its quick pulse of delight ; but, on the
other hand, Iffe gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the
dignity of manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The
temper of the Puritan gentleman was just, noble, and self-
controlled. The larger geniality of the age that had passed

586 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1583
away was replaced by an intense tenderness within the nar
rower circle of the home. " He was as kind a father," says
Mrs. Hutchinson of her husband, "as dear a brother, as good
a master,' as faithful a friend, as the world had." The wilful
and lawless passion of the Renascence made way for a manly
purity. " Neither in youth nor riper years could the most
fair or enticing woman ever draw him into unnecessary famil
iarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous women he loved, and
delighted in all pure and holy and unblameable conversation
with them, but so as never to excite scandal or temptation.
Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and
though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that
which was mixed with impurity he never could endure." To
the Puritan the wilfulness of life, in which the men of the
Renascence had reveled, seemed unworthy of life's character
and end. His aim was to attain self-command, to be master
of himself, of his thought and speech and acts. A certain
gravity and reflectiveness gave its tone to the lightest details
of his converse with the world about him. His temper, quick
as it might naturally be, was kept under strict control. In his
discourse he was ever on his guard against talkativeness or
frivolity, striving to be deliberate in speech and " ranking the
words beforehand." His life was orderly and methodical,
sparing of diet and of self-indulgence; he rose early, "he
never was at any time idle, and hated to see any one else
so." The new sobriety and self-restraint marked itself even
in his change of dress. The gorgeous colors and jewels of
the Renascence disappeared. Colonel Hutchinson " left off
very early the wearing of anything that was costly, yet in his
plainest negligent habit appeared very much a gentleman."
The loss of color and variety in costume reflected no doubt
a certain loss of color and variety in life itself ; but it was a
loss compensated by solid gains. Greatest among these, per
haps, was the new conception of social equality. Their com
mon calling, their common brotherhood in Christ, annihilated
in the mind of the Puritans that overpowering sense of social
distinctions which characterized the age of Elizabeth. The
meanest peasant felt himself ennobled as a child of God.
The proudest noble recognized a spiritual equality in the
poorest "saint." The great social revolution of the civil

1583] PURITAN ENGLAND 587
wars and the Protectorate was already felt in the demeanor
of gentlemen like Hutchinson. " He had a loving and sweet
courtesy to the poorest, and would often employ many spare
hours with the commonest soldiers and poorest laborers."
" He never disdained the meanest nor flattered the greatest."
But it was felt even more in the new dignity and self-respect
with which the consciousness of their " calling " invested the
classes beneath the rank of the gentry. Take such a portrait
as that which Nehemiah Wallington, a turner in Eastcheap,
has left us of a London housewife, his mother. " She was
very loving," he says, "and obedient to her parents, loving
and kind to her husband, very tender-hearted to her children,
loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and
profane. She was a pattern of sobriety unto many, very
seldom was seen abroad except at church ; when others recre
ated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take
her needlework and say, ' Here is my recreation.' . . . God
had given her a pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She
was very ripe and perfect in all stores of the Bible, likewise
in all the stories of the Martyrs, and could readily turn to
them; she was also perfect and well seen in the English
Chronicles, and in the descents of the kings of England.
She lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years,
wanting but four days."
The strength of the religious movement lay rather among
the middle and professional classes than among the gentry ;
and it is in a Puritan of this class that we find the fullest and
noblest expression of the new influence which was leavening
the temper of the time. John Milton is not only the highest,
but the completest, type of Puritanism. His life is absolutely
contemporaneous with his cause. He was born when it began
to exercise a direct power over English politics and English
religion ; he died when its efforts to mold them into its own
shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of
many influences to which we owe our English character.
His earlier verse, the pamphlets of his riper years, the epics
of his age, mark with a singular precision the three great
stages in its history. His youth shows us how much of the
gaiety, the poetic ease, the intellectual culture, of the Renas
cence lingered in a Puritan home. Scrivener and " precisian"

588 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1608
as his father was, he was a skilled musician; and the boy
inherited his father's skill on lute and organ. One of the
finest outbursts in the scheme of education which he put
forth at a later time is a passage in which he vindicates the
province of music as an agent in moral training. His home,
his tutor, his school, were all rigidly Puritan; but there was
nothing narrow or illiberal in his early training. " My father,"
he says, " destined me while yet a little boy to the study of
humane letters ; which I seized with such eagerness that from
the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my
lessons to bed before midnight." But to the Greek, Latin,
and Hebrew he learnt at school, the scrivener advised him to
add Italian and French. Nor were English letters neglected.
Spenser gave the earliest turn to his poetic genius. In spite
of the war between playwright and precisian, a Puritan youth
could still in Milton's days avow his love of the stage, "ff
Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest Shakspere, Fancy's
child, warble his native woodnotes wild," and gather from the
"masks and antique pageantry" of the court-revel hints for
his own "Comus" and "Arcades." Nor does any shadow
of the coming struggle with the Church disturb the young
scholar's reverie, as he wanders beneath " the high embowed
roof, with antique pillars massy proof, and storied windows
richly dight, casting a dim religious light," or as he hears
"the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below, in
service high and anthem clear." His enjoyment of the gaiety
of life stands in bright contrast with the gloom and sternness
which strife and persecution fostered in the later Puritanism.
In spite of "a certain reservedness of natural disposition,"
which shrank from "festivities and jests, in which I acknowl
edge my faculty to be very slight," the young singer could
still enjoy the "jest and youthful jollity " of the world around
him, its " quips and cranks and wanton wiles " ; he could join
the crew of Mirth, and look pleasantly on at the village fair,
"where the jolly rebecks sound to many a youth and many a
maid, dancing in the checkered shade." But his pleasures
were "unreproved." There was nothing ascetic in his look,
in his slender, vigorous frame, his face full of a delicate yet
serious beauty, the rich brown hair which clustered over his
brow ; and the words we have quoted show his sensitive enjoy-

i6o8] PURITAN ENGLAND 589
ment of all that was beautiful. But from coarse or sensual
self-indulgence the young Puritan turned with disgust : " A
certain reservedness of nature, an honest haughtiness and self-
esteem, kept me still above those low descents of mind." He
drank in an ideal chivalry from Spenser, but his religion and
purity disdained the outer pledge on which chivalry built up
its fabric of honor. " Every free and gentle spirit," said
Milton, " without that oath, ought to be born a knight." It
was with this temper that he passed from his London school,
St. Paul's, to Christ's College at Cambridge, and it was this
temper that he preserved throughout his university career.
He left Cambridge, as he said afterwards, "free from all
reproach, and approved by all honest men," with a purpose
of self -dedication "to that same lot, however mean or high,
towards which time leads me, and the will of Heaven."
Even in the still calm beauty of a life such as this, we catch
the sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of
its aim, the intensity of its moral concentration, brought with
them a loss of the genial delight in all that was human which
distinguished the men of the Renascence. " If ever God
instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the mind of
any man," said Milton, "he has instilled it into mine."
" Love Virtue," closed his " Comus," " she alone is free ! "
But this passionate love of virtue and of inoral beauty, if it
gave strength to human conduct, narrowed human sympathy
and human intelligence. Already in Milton we note a certain
"reservedness of temper," a contempt for "the false esti
mates of the vulgar," a proud retirement from the meaner
and coarser life around him. Great as was his love for
Shakspere, we can hardly fancy him delighting in Falstaff.
In minds of a less cultured order, this moral tension ended, no
doubt, in a hard, unsocial sternness of life. The ordinary Puri
tan "loved all that were godly, much misliking the wicked
and profane." His bond to other men was not the sense of
a common manhood, but the recognition of a brotherhood
among the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world
which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy of their
God. It was this utter isolation from the "ungodly" that
explains the contrast which startles us between the inner
tenderness of the Puritans and the ruthlessness of so many

590 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1608
of their actions. Cromwell, whose son's death (in his own
words) went to his heart " like a dagger, indeed it did ! " and
who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph of Marston
Moor, burst into horse-play as he signed the death-warrant
of the king. A temper which had thus lost sympathy with
the life of half the world around it could hardly sympathize
with the whole of its own life. Humor, the faculty which
above all corrects exaggeration and extravagance, died away
before the new stress and strain of existence. The absolute
devotion of the Puritan to a Supreme Will tended more and
more to rob him of all sense of measure and proportion in
common matters. Little things became great things in the
glare of religious zeal; and the godly man leamt to shrink
from a surplice, or a mince-pie at Christmas, as he shrank
from impurity or a lie. Life became hard, rigid, colorless, as
it became intense. The play, the geniality, the delight, of the
Elizabethan age were exchanged for a measured sobriety,
seriousness, and self-restraint. But the self-restraint and
sobriety which marked the Calvinist limited itself wholly to
his outer life. In his inner soul sense, reason, judgment,
were too often overborne by the terrible reality of invisible
things. Our first glimpse of Oliver Cromwell is as a young
country squire and farmer in the marsh levels around Hunt
ingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to time in a deep
melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. " I
live in Meshac," he writes to a friend, " which they say signi
fies Prolonging ; in Kedar, which signifies Darkness ; yet the
Lord forsaketh me not." The vivid sense of a Divine Purity
close to such men made the life of common men seem sin.
"You know what my manner of life has been," Cromwell
adds. " Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light.
I hated godliness." Yet his worst sin was probably nothing
more than an enjoyment of the natural buoyancy of youth,
and a want of the deeper earnestness which comes with riper
years. In imaginative tempers, like that of Bunyan, the
struggle took a more picturesque form. John Bunyan was
the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even
in childhood his fancy reveled in terrible visions of heaven
and hell. "When I was but a child of nine or ten years
old," he tells us, " these things did so distress my soul, that

i6o8] PURITAN ENGLAND 591
then in the midst of my merry sports and childish vanities,
amidst my vain companions, I was often much cast down and
afflicted in my mind therewith ; yet could I not let go my
sins." The sins he could not let go were a love of hockey
and of dancing on the village green ; for the only real fault
which his bitter self-accusation discloses, that of a habit of
swearing, was put an end to at once and forever by a rebuke
from an old woman. His passion for bell-ringing clung to
him even after he had broken from it as a "vain practise " ;
and he would go to the steeple-house and look on, till the
thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove
him panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against dancing
and games drew him for a time from these indulgences ; but
the temptation again overmastered his resolve. " I shook the
sermon out of my mind, and to my old custom of sports and
gaming I returned witb great delight. But the same day, as
I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it one
blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul,
which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or
have thy sins and go to hell.?' At this I was put in an
exceeding maze ; wherefore, leaving my cat upon the ground,
I looked up to heaven ; and was as if I had with the eyes of
my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon
me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He did
severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for those
and other ungodly practises."
Such was Puritanism, and it is of the highest importance
to realize it thus in itself, in its greatness and its littleness,
apart from the ecclesiastical system of Presbyterianism with
which it is so often confounded. As we shall see in the
course of our story, not one of the leading Puritans of the
Long Parliament was a Presbyterian. Pym and Hampden
had no sort of objection to Episcopacy, and the adoption of
the Presbyterian system was only forced on the Puritan
patriots in their later struggle by political considerations.
But the growth of the movement which thus influenced our
history for a time forms one of the most curious episodes in
Elizabeth's reign. Her Church policy rested on the Acts of
Supremacy and of Uniformity ; the first of which placed all

592 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1571
ecclesiastical jurisdiction and legislative power in the hands
of the State, while the second prescribed a course of doctrine
and discipline, from which no variation was legally permissi
ble. For the nation at large Elizabeth's system was no doubt
a wise and healthy one. Single-handed, unsupported by any
of the statesmen or divines about her, the queen forced on the
warring religions a sort of armed truce. The main principles
of the Reformation were accepted, but the zeal of the ultra-
reformers was held at bay. The Bible was left open, private
discussion was unrestrained, but the warfare of pulpit against
pulpit was silenced by the licensing of preachers. Outer con
formity, attendance at the common prayer, was exacted from
all ; but the changes in ritual, by which the zealots of Geneva
gave prominence to the radical features of the religious change
which was passing over the country, were steadily resisted.
While England was struggling for existence, this balanced
attitude of the Crown reflected faithfully enough the bal
anced attitude of the nation ; but with the declaration of war
by the papacy in the bull of deposition the movement in
favor of a more pronounced Protestantism gathered a new
strength. Unhappily the queen clung obstinately to her sys
tem of compromise, weakened and broken as it was. With
the religious enthusiasm which was growing up around her
she had no sympathy whatever. Her passion was for mod
eration, her aim was simply civil order ; and both order and
moderation were threatened by the knot of clerical bigots
who gathered under the banner of Presbyterianism. Of
these Thomas Cartwright was the chief. He had studied at
Geneva ; he returned with a fanatical faith in Calvinism, and
in the system of Church government which Calvin had devised ;
and as Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge he used
to the full the opportunities which his chair gave him of
propagating his opinions. No leader of a religious party
ever deserved less of after sympathy than Cartwright. He
was unquestionably learned and devout, but his bigotry was
that of a medieval inquisitor. The relics of the old ritual,
the cross in baptism, the surplice, the giving of a ring in
marriage, were to him not merely distasteful, as they were to
the Puritans at large : they were idolatrous and the mark of
the beast. His declamation against ceremonies and supersti-

1594] PURITAN ENGLAND 593
tion, however, had little weight with Elizabeth or her primates ;
what scared them was his reckless advocacy of a scheme of
ecclesiastical government which placed the State beneath the
feet of the Church. The absolute rule of bishops, indeed, he
denounced as begotten of the devil ; but the absolute rule of
Presbyters he held to be established by the word of God.
For the Church modeled after the fashion of Geneva he
claimed an authority which surpassed the wildest dreams of
the masters of the Vatican. All spiritual authority and juris
diction, the decreeing of doctrine, the ordering of ceremonies,
lay wholly in the hands of the ministers of the Church. To
them belonged the supervision of public morals. In an or
dered arrangement of classes and synods these Presbyters
were to govern their flocks, to regulate their own order, to
decide in matters of faith, to administer "discipline." Their
weapon was excommunication, and they were responsible for
its use to none but Christ. The province of the civil ruler
was simply to carry out the decisions of the Presbyters, " to
see their decrees executed and to punish the contemners of
them." The spirit of Calvinistic Presbyterianism excluded all
toleration of practise or belief. Not only was the rule of
ministers to be established as the one legal form of Church
government, but all other forms. Episcopalian and Separatist,
were to be ruthlessly put down. For heresy there was the
punishment of death. Never had the doctrine of persecution
been urged with such a blind and reckless ferocity. " I deny,"
wrote Cartwright, " that upon repentance there ought to fol
low any pardon of death. . . . Heretics ought to be put
to death now. If this be bloody and extreme, I am content
to be so counted with the Holy Ghost."
Opinions such as these might wisely have been left to the
good sense of the people itself. Before many years they
found in fact a crushing answer in the " Ecclesiastical Polity "
of Richard Hooker, a clergyman who had been Master of the
Temple, but whose distaste for the controversies of its pulpit
drove him from London to a Wiltshire vicarage at Boscombe,
which he exchanged at a later time for the parsonage of
Bishopsbourne among the quiet meadows of Kent. The
largeness of temper which characterized all the nobler minds
of his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as clearly in

594 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1594
Shakspere as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur
and stateliness of style, which raised him to the highest rank
among English prose writers. Divine as he was, his spirit
and method were philosophical rather than theological.
Against the ecclesiastical dogmatism of Presbyterian or Catho
lic he set the authority of reason. He abandoned the narrow
ground of Scriptural argument to base his conclusions on the
general principles of moral and political science, on the eter
nal obligations of natural law. The Puritan system rested on
the assumption that an immutable rule for human action in
all matters relating to religion, to worship, and to the disci
pline and constitution of the Church was laid down, and only
laid down, in Scripture. Hooker urged that a divine order
exists, not in written revelation only, but in the moral rela
tions, the historical development, and the social and political
institutions of men. He claimed for human reason the prov
ince of determining the laws of this order ; of distinguishing
between what is changeable and unchangeable in them, be
tween what is eternal and what is temporary in the Bible
itself. It was easy for him to push on to the field of theo
logical controversy, where men like Cartwright were fighting
the battle of Presbyterianism, to show that no form of Church
government had ever been of indispensable obligation, and
that ritual observances had in all ages been left to the discre
tion of churches, and determined by the differences of times.
But the truth on which Hooker based his argument was of
far higher value than his argument itself ; and the acknowl
edgment of a divine order in human history, of a divine law
in human reason, which found expression in his work, har
monized with the noblest instincts of the Elizabethan age.
Against Presbyterianism, indeed, the appeal was hardly
needed. Popular as the Presbyterian system became in Scot
land, it never took any general hold on England; it remained
to the last a clerical rather than a national creed, and even in
the moment of its seeming triumph under the Commonwealth
it was rejected by every part of England save London and
Lancashire, and part of Derbyshire. But the bold challenge
to the Government which was delivered by Cartwright's party
in a daring " Admonition to the Parliament," which demanded
the establishment of government by Presbyters, raised a panic

1583] PURITAN ENGLAND 59S
among English statesmen and prelates which cut off all hopes
of a quiet appeal to reason. It is probable that, but for the
storm which Cartwright raised, the steady growth of general
discontent with the ceremonial usages he denounced would
have brought about their abolition. The Parliament of 1571
had not only refused to bind the clergy to subscription to three
articles on the supremacy, the form of Church government,
and the power of the Church to ordain rites and ceremonies,
but favored the project of reforming the Liturgy by the omis
sion of the superstitious practises. But with the appearance
of the " Admonition " this natural progress of opinion abruptly
ceased. The moderate statesman who had pressed for a
change in ritual withdrew from union with a party which re
vived the worst pretensions of the papacy. As dangers from
without and from within thickened round the queen, the
growing Puritanism of the clergy stirred her wrath above
measure, and she met the growth of " nonconforming " min
isters by a measure which forms the worst blot on her reign.
The new powers which were conferred in 1583 on the
Ecclesiastical Commission converted the religious truce into
a spiritual despotism. From being a temporary board which
represented the royal supremacy in matters ecclesiastical, the
Commission was now turned into a permanent body wielding
the almost unlimited powers of the Crown. All opinions or
acts contrary to the Statutes of Supremacy and Uniformity
fell within its cognizance. A right of deprivation placed the
clergy at its mercy. It had power to alter or amend the
statutes of colleges or schools. Not only heresy, and schism,
and nonconformity, but incest or aggravated adultery were
held to fall within its scope ; its means of inquiry were left
without limit, and it might fine or imprison at its will. By
the mere establishment of such a court half the work of the
Reformation was undone. The large number of civilians on
the board indeed seemed to furnish some security against the
excess of ecclesiastical tyranny. Of its forty-four commis
sioners, however, few actually took any part in its proceed
ings ; and the powers of the Commission were practically left
in the hands of the successive primates. No Archbishop of
Canterbury since the days of Augustine had wielded an
authority so vast, so utterly despotic, as that of Whitgift and
39

596 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1583
Bancroft and Abbot and Laud. The most terrible feature of
their spiritual tyranny was its wholly personal character. The
old symbols of doctrine were gone, and the lawyers had not
yet stepped in to protect the clergy by defining the exact
limits of the new. The result was that at the commission
board at Lambeth the primates created their own tests of
doctrine with an utter indifference to those created by law.
In one instance Parker deprived a vicar of his benefice for a
denial of the verbal inspiration of the Bible. Nor did the
successive archbishops care greatly if the test was a varying
or a conflicting one. Whitgift strove to force on the Church
the Calvinistic supralapsarianism of his Lambeth Articles.
Bancroft, who followed him, was as earnest in enforcing his
anti-Calvinistic dogma of the divine right of the episcopate.
Abbot had no mercy for Arminianism. Laud had none for
its opponents. It is no wonder that the Ecclesiastical Com
mission, which these men represented, soon stank in the nos
trils of the English clergy. Its establishment, however, marked
the adoption of a more resolute policy on the part of the
Crown, and its efforts were backed by stern measures of
repression. All preaching or reading in private houses was
forbidden ; and in spite of the refusal of Parliament to en
force the requirement of them by law, subscription to the
Three Articles was exacted from every member of the clergy.
For the moment these measures were crowned with success.
The movement under Cartwright was checked; Cartwright
himself was driven from his professorship ; and an outer uni
formity of worship was more and more brought about by the
steady pressure of the Commission. The old liberty which
had been allowed in London and the other Protestant parts
of the kingdom was no longer permitted to exist. The lead
ing Puritan clergy, whose nonconformity had hitherto been
winked at, were called upon to submit to the surplice, and to
make the sign of the cross in baptism. The remonstrances
of the country gentry availed as little as the protest of Lord
Burleigh himself to protect two hundred of the best ministers
from being driven from their parsonages on a refusal to sub
scribe to the Three Articles. But the persecution only gave
fresh life and popularity to the doctrines which it aimed at
crushing, by drawing together two currents of opinion which

1593] PURITAN ENGLAND 597
were in themselves perfectly distinct. The Presbyterian plat
form of Church discipline had as yet been embraced by the
clergy only, and by few among the clergy. On the other
hand, the wish of the Puritans for a reform in the Liturgy,
the dislike of "superstitious usages," of the use of the surplice,
the sign of the cross in baptism, the gift of the ring in mar
riage, the posture of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was
shared by a large number of the clergy and laity alike. At
the opening of Elizabeth's reign almost all the higher church
men save Parker were opposed to them, and a motion in Con
vocation for their abolition was lost but by a single vote. The
temper of the country gentlemen on this subject was indicated
by that of Parliament ; and it was well known that the wisest
of the queen's councilors, Burleigh, Walsingham, and Knollys,
were at one in this matter with the gentry. If their common
persecution did not wholly succeed in fusing these two sections
of religious opinion into one, it at any rate gained for the
Presbyterians a general sympathy on the part of the Puritans,
which raised them from a clerical clique into a popular party.
Nor were the consequences of the persecution limited to the
strengthening of the Presbyterians. The " Separatists," who
were beginning to withdraw from attendance at public worship
on the ground that the very existence of a national Church
was contrary to the Word of God, grew quickly from a few
scattered zealots to twenty thousand souls. Presbyterian and
Puritan felt as bitter an abhorrence as Elizabeth herself of
the " Brownists," as they were nicknamed after their founder,
Robert Brown. Parliament, Puritan as it was, passed a statute
against them. Brown himself was forced to fly to the Nether
lands, and of his followers many were djiven into exile. So
great a future awaited one of these congregations that we
may pause to get a glimpse of " a poor people " in Lincoln
shire and the neighborhood, who " being enlightened by the
Word of God," and their members " urged with the yoke of
subscription," had been led "to see further." They rejected
ceremonies as relics of idolatry, the rule of bishops as un-
scriptural, and joined themselves, "as the Lord's free people,"
into "a Church estate on the fellowship of the Gospel." Feel
ing their way forward to the great principle of liberty of con
science, they asserted their Christian right "to walk in all

598 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1609
the ways which God had made known or should make known
to them." Their meetings or "conventicles " soon drew down
the heavy hand of the law, and the little company resolved
to seek a refuge in other lands ; but their first attempt at
flight was prevented, and when they made another, their
wives and children were seized at the very moment of enter
ing the ship. At last, however, the magistrates gave a con
temptuous assent to their project; they were, in fact, "glad to
be rid of them at any price " ; and the fugitives found shelter
at Amsterdam, from whence some of them, choosing John
Robinson as their minister, took refuge in 1609 at Leyden.
" They knew they were pilgrims and looked not much on
these things, but lifted up their eyes to heaven, their dearest
country, and quieted their spirits." Among this little band
of exiles were those who were to become famous at a later
time as the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayjloiver.
It was easy to be " rid " of the Brownists ; but the political
danger of the course on which the Crown had entered was
seen in the rise of a spirit of vigorous opposition, such as had
not made its appearance since the accession of the Tudors.
The growing power of public opinion received a striking
recognition in the struggle which bears the name of the
" Martin Marprelate controversy." The Puritans had from
the first appealed by their pamphlets from the Crown to the
people, and Whitgift bore witness to their influence on opin
ion by his efforts to gag the Press. The regulations of the
Star Chamber for this purpose are memorable as the first step
in the long struggle of government after government to check
the liberty of printing. The irregular censorship which had
long existed was now finally organized. Printing was re
stricted to London and the two universities, the number of
printers reduced, and all candidates for license to print were
placed under the supervision of the company of stationers.
Every publication, too, great or small, had to receive the appro
bation of the primate or the bishop of London. The first
result of this system of repression was the appearance, in the
very year of the Armada, of a series of anonymous pamphlets
bearing the significant name of " Martin Marprelate," and
issued from a secret press which found refuge from the royal
pursuivants in the country houses of the gentry. The press

i6o4] PURITAN ENGLAND 599
was at last seized ; and the suspected authors of these scur
rilous libels, Penry, a young Welshman, and a minister
named Udall, died, the one in prison, the other on the scaffold.
But the virulence and boldness of their language produced a
powerful effect, for it was impossible under the system of
Elizabeth to " mar " the bishops without attacking the Crown ;
and a new age of political liberty was felt to be at hand when
Martin Marprelate forced the political and ecclesiastical
measures of the Government into the arena of public discus
sion. The suppression, indeed, of these pamphlets was far
from damping the courage of the Presbyterians. Cartwright,
who had been appointed by Lord Leicester to the mastership
of a hospital at Warwick, was bold enough to organize his
system of Church discipline among the clergy of that county
and of Northamptonshire. His example was widely followed ;
and the general gatherings of the whole ministerial body of
the clergy, and the smaller assemblies for each diocese or
shire, which in the Presbyterian scheme bore the name of
Synods and Classes, began to be held in many parts of Eng
land for the purposes of debate and consultation. The new
organization was quickly suppressed indeed, but Cartwright
was saved from the banishment which Whitgift demanded
by a promise of submission ; his influence steadily increased ;
and the struggle, transferred to the higher sphere of the Par
liament, widened into the great contest for liberty under
James, and the Civil war under his successor.
Section II. — The First of the Stuarts, 1604-1623
To judge fairly the attitude and policy of the English
Puritans, that is of three fourths of the Protestants of Eng
land, at this moment, we must cursorily review the fortunes
of Protestantism during the reign of Elizabeth. At its open
ing the success of the Reformation seemed almost everywhere
secure. Already triumphant in the north of Germany at the
peace of Augsburg, it was fast advancing to the conquest of
the south. The nobles of Austria as well as the nobles and
the towns of Bavaria were forsaking the older religion. A
Venetian ambassador estimated the German Catholics at
little more than one tenth of the whole population of Ger-

600 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1604
many. The new faith was firmly established in Scandinavia.
Eastward the nobles of Hungary and Poland became Protes
tants in a mass. In the West, France was yielding more and
more to heresy. Scotland flung off Catholicism under Mary,
and England veered round again to Protestantism under
Elizabeth. Only where the dead hand of Spain lay heavy,
in Castile, in Aragon, or in Italy, was the Reformation
thoroughly crushed out ; and even the dead hand of Spain
failed to crush heresy in the Low Countries. But at the
very instant of its seeming triumph, the advance of the new
religion was suddenly arrested. The first twenty years of
Elizabeth's reign were a period of suspense. The progress of
Protestantism gradually ceased. It wasted its strength in
theological controversies and persecutions, and in the bitter
and venomous discussions between the Churches which fol
lowed Luther and the Churches which followed Zwingli or
Calvin. It was degraded and weakened by the prostitution
of the Reformation to political ends, by the greed and worth-
lessness of the German princes who espoused its cause, by
the factious lawlessness of the nobles in Poland, and of the
Huguenots in France. Meanwhile the papacy succeeded in
rallying the Catholic world round the Council of Trent. The
Roman Church, enfeebled and corrupted by the triumph of
ages, felt at last the uses of adversity. Her faith was settled
and defined. The papacy was owned afresh as the center of
Catholic union. The enthusiasm of the Protestants roused a
counter enthusiasm among their opponents ; new religious
orders rose to meet the wants of the day ; the Capuchins
became the preachers of Catholicism, the Jesuits became not
only its preachers, but its directors, its schoolmasters, its mis
sionaries, its diplomatists. Their organization, their blind
obedience, their real ability, their fanatical zeal, galvanized
the pulpit, the school, the confessional, into a new life. If
the Protestants had enjoyed the profitable monopoly of mar
tyrdom at the opening of the century, the Catholics won a
fair share of it as soon as the disciples of Loyola came to the
front. The tracts which pictured the tortures of Campian
and Southwell roused much the same fire at Toledo or Vienna
as the pages of Foxe had roused in England. Even learn
ing came to the aid of the older faith. Bellarmine, the

i6o4] PURITAN ENGLAND 6oi
greatest of controversialists at this time, Baronius, the most
erudite of Church historians, were both Catholics. With a
growing inequality of strength such as this, we can hardly
wonder that the tide was seen at last to turn. A few years
before the fight with the Armada Catholicism began defi
nitely to win ground. Southern Germany, where Bavaria
was restored to Rome and where the Austrian House, so
long lukewarm in the faith, at last became zealots in its
defense, was re-Catholicized. The success of Socinianism in
Poland severed that kingdom from any real communion with
the general body of the Protestant churches ; and these again
were more and more divided into two warring camps by the
controversies about the Sacrament and Free Will. Every
where the Jesuits won converts, and their peaceful victories
were soon backed by the arms of Spain. In the fierce
struggle which followed, Philip was undoubtedly worsted.
England was saved by its defeat of the Armada ; the United
Provinces of the Netherlands rose into a great Protestant
power through their own dogged heroism and the genius of
William the Silent. France was rescued from the grasp of
the Catholic League, at a moment when all hope seemed
gone, by the unconquerable energy of Henry of Navarre.
But even in its defeat Catholicism gained ground. In the
Low Countries, the Reformation was driven from the Wal
loon provinces, from Brabant, and from Flanders. In France
Henry the Fourth found himself obliged to purchase Paris
by a mass ; and the conversion of the king was followed by a
quiet breaking up of the Huguenot party. Nobles and
scholars alike forsook Protestantism ; and though the Refor
mation remained dominant south of the Loire, it lost all hope
of winning France as a whole to its side.
At the death of Elizabeth, therefore, the temper of every
earnest Protestant, whether in England or abroad, was that of
a man who, after cherishing the hope of a crowning victory, is
forced to look on at a crushing and irremediable defeat. The
dream of a Reformation of the universal Church was utterly
at an end. The borders of Protestantism were narrowing
every day, nor was there a sign that the triumph of the
papacy was arrested. As hope after hope died into defeat
and disaster, the mood of the Puritan grew sterner and more

6o2 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1604
intolerant. What intensified the dread was a sense of defec
tion and uncertainty within the pale of the Church of England
itself. As a new Christendom fairly emerged from the
troubled waters, the Renascence again made its influence felt.
Its voice was heard above all in the work of Hooker, and the
appeal to reason and to humanity which there found expression
colored through its results the after history of the English
Church. On the one hand the historical feeling showed itself
in a longing to ally the religion of the present with the relig
ion of the past, to claim part in the great heritage of Catholic
tradition. Men like George Herbert started back from the
bare, intense spiritualism of the Puritan to find nourishment
for devotion in the outer associations which the piety of ages
had grouped around it, in holy places and holy things, in the
stillness of church and altar, in the awful mystery of sacra
ments. Men like Laud, unable to find standing-ground in the
purely personal relation between man and God which formed
the basis of Calvinism, fell back on the consciousness of a
living Christendom which, torn and rent as it seemed, was
soon to resume its ancient unity. On the other hand, the
appeal which Hooker addressed to reason produced a school
of philosophical thinkers whose timid upgrowth was almost
lost in the clash of warring creeds about them, but who were
destined — as the Latitudinarians of later days — to make a
deep impression on religious thought. As yet, however, this
rationalizing movement limited itself to the work of moderating
and reconciling, to recognizing with Calixtus the pettiness of
the points of difference which parted Christendom, and the
greatness of its points of agreement, or to revolting with
Arminius from the more extreme tenets of Calvin and Calvin's
followers. No men could be more opposed in their tenden
cies to one another than the later high churchmen, such as
Laud, and the later Latitudinarians, such as Hales. But to
the ordinary English Protestant both Latitudinarian and high
churchman were equally hateful. To him the struggle with
the papacy was not one for compromise or comprehension.
It was a struggle between light and darkness, between life and
death. No innovation in faith or worship was of small account,
if it tended in the direction of Rome. Ceremonies, which in
an hour of triumph might have been allowed as solaces to

i6o4] PURITAN ENGLAND 603
weak brethren, he looked on as acts of treason in this hour of
defeat. The peril was too great to admit of tolerance or mod
eration. Now that falsehood was gaining ground, the only
security for truth was to draw a hard and fast line between
truth and falsehood. There was as yet indeed no general
demand for any change in the form of Church government, or
of its relation to the State, but for some change in the outer
ritual of worship which should correspond to the advance
which had been made to a more pronounced Protestantism.
We see the Puritan temper in the Millenary Petition (as it was
called), which was presented to James the First on his acces
sion by some eight hundred clergymen, about a tenth of the
whole number in his realm. It asked for no change in the
government or organization of the Church, but for a reform of
its courts, the removal of superstitious usages from the Book
of Common Prayer, the disuse of lessons from the apocryphal
books of Scripture, a more rigorous observance of Sundays,
and the provision and training of preaching ministers. Even
statesmen who had. little sympathy with the religious spirit
about them pleaded for the purchase of religious and national
union by ecclesiastical reforms. " Why," asked Bacon,
" should the civil state be purged and restored by good and
wholesome laws made every three years in Parliament assem
bled, devising remedies as fast as time breedeth mischief, and
contrariwise the ecclesiastical state still continue upon the
dregs of time, and receive no alteration these forty-five years
or more ? " A general expectation, in fact, prevailed that, now
the queen's opposition was removed, something would be
done. But, different as his theological temper was from the
purely secular temper of Elizabeth, her successor was equally
resolute against all changes in Church matters.
No sovereign could have jarred against the conception of
an English ruler which had grown up under Plantagenet or
Tudor more utterly than James the First. His big head, his
slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs, stood
out in as grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of
Henry or Elizabeth as his gabble and rodomontade, his want
of personal dignity, his buffoonery, his coarseness of speech,
his pedantry, his contemptible cowardice. Under this ridicu
lous exterior, however, lay a man of much natural ability, a

604 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1604
ripe scholar, with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of
mother-wit, and ready repartee. His canny humor lights up
the political and theological controversies of the time with
quaint incisive phrases, with puns and epigrams and touches
of irony, which still retain their savor. His reading, espe
cially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was a
voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predesti
nation to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only
left him, in the phrase of Henry the Fourth, "the wisest
fool in Christendom." He had the temper of a pedant, a
pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of theories, and a pedant's
inability to bring his theories into any relation with actual
facts. All might have gone well had he confined himself
to speculations about witchcraft, about predestination, about
the noxiousness of smoking. Unhappily for England and
for his successor, he clung yet more passionately to theories
of government which contained within them the seeds of a
death-struggle between his people and the Crown. Even
before his accession to the English throne, he had formu
lated his theory of rule in a work on "The True Law of
Free Monarchy"; and announced that, "although a good
king will frame his actions to be according to law, yet he
is not bound thereto, but of his own will and for example-
giving to his subjects." With the Tudor statesmen who
used the phrase " an absolute king," or " an absolute mon
archy," meant a sovereign or rule complete in themselves,
and independent of all foreign or papal interference. James
chose to regard the words as implying the monarch's freedom
from all control by law, or from responsibility to anything but
his own royal will. The king's theory, however, was made a
system of government; it was soon, as the divine right of
kings, to become a doctrine which bishops preached from
the pulpit, and for which brave men laid their heads on the
block. The Church was quick to adopt its sovereign's dis
covery. Convocation in its book of Canons denounced as a
fatal error the assertion that "all civil power, jurisdiction,
and authority were first derived from the people and dis
ordered multitude, or either is originally still in them, or else
is deduced by their consent naturally from them, and is not
God's ordinance originally descending from Him and depend-

i604] PURITAN ENGLAND 605
ing upon Him." In strict accordance with James's theory,
these doctors declared sovereignty in its origin to be the
prerogative of birthright, and inculcated passive obedience
to the monarch as a religious obligation. Cowell, a civilian,
followed up the discoveries of Convocation by an announce
ment that "the king is above the law by his absolute power,"
and that " notwithstanding his oath he may alter and suspend
any particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate."
The book was suppressed on the remonstrance of the Hoiise
of Commons, but the party of passive obedience grew fast.
A few years before the. death of James, the University of
Oxford decreed solemnly that " it was in no case lawful for
subjects to make use of force against their princes, or to
appear offensively or defensively in the field against them."
The king's "arrogant speeches," if they roused resentment
in the Parliaments to which they were addressed, created by
sheer force of repetition a certain belief in the arbitrary
power they challenged for the Crown. We may give one
instance of their tone from a speech delivered in the Star
Chamber. " As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what
God can do," said James, " so it is presumption and a high
contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or to
say that a king cannot do this or that." " If the practise
should follow the positions," once commented a thoughtful
observer on words such as these, " we are not likely to leave
to our successors that freedom we received from our fore
fathers." It is necessary to weigh throughout the course of James's
reign this aggressive attitude of the Crown, if we would
rightly judge what seems at first sight to be an aggressive
tone in some of the proceedings of the Parliaments. With
new claims of power such as these before them, to have stood
still would have been ruin. The claim, too, was one which
jarred against all that was noblest in the temper of the time.
Men were everywhere reaching forward to the conception of
law. Bacon sought for law in material nature ; Hooker
asserted the rule of law over the spiritual world. The temper
of the Puritan was eminently a temper of law. The diligence
with which he searched the Scriptures sprang from his earnest
ness to discover a divine will which in all things, great or

6o6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1604
small, he might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedience
was reserved for the divine will alone ; for human ordi
nances derived their strength only from their correspondence
with the revealed law of God. The Puritan was bound by his
very religion to examine every claim made on his civil and
spiritual obedience by the powers that be ; and to own or
reject the claim, as it accorded with the higher duty which he
owed to God. " In matters of faith," Mrs. Hutchinson tells
us of her husband, " his reason always submitted to the Word
of God ; but in all other things the greatest names in the
world would not lead him without reason." It was plain that
an impassable gulf parted such a temper as this from the tem
per of unquestioning devotion to the Crown which James
demanded. It was a temper not only legal, but even pedantic
in its legality, intolerant from its very sense of a moral order
and law of the lawlessness and disorder of a personal tyranny;
a temper of criticism, of judgment, and, if need be, of stubborn
and unconquerable resistance ; of a resistance which sprang,
not from the disdain of authority, but from the Puritan's devo
tion to an authority higher than that of kings. But if the theory
of a divine right of kings was certain to rouse against it all
the nobler energies of Puritanism, there was something which
roused its nobler and its pettier instincts of resistance alike
in the place accorded by James to bishops. Elizabeth's con
ception of her ecclesiastical supremacy had been a sore
stumbling-block to her subjects, but Elizabeth at least re
garded the supremacy simply as a branch of her ordinary
prerogative. The theory of James, however, was as different
from that of Elizabeth as his view of kingship was different
from hers. It was the outcome of the bitter years of humilia
tion which he had endured in Scotland in his struggle with
Presbyterianism. The Scotch Presbyters had insulted and
frightened him in the early days of his reign, and he chose to
confound Puritanism with Presbyterianism. No prejudice,
however, was really required to suggest his course. In itself
it was logical, and consistent with the premises from which
it started. If theologically his opinions were Calvinistic, in
the ecclesiastical fabric of Calvinism, in its organization of
the Church, in its annual assemblies, in its public discussion
and criticism of acts of government through the pulpit, he

i6o4] PURITAN ENGLAND 607
saw an organized democracy which threatened his Crown.
The new force which had overthrown episcopacy in Scotland
was a force which might overthrow the monarchy itself. It
was the people which in its religious or its political guise was
the assailant of both. And as their foe was the same, so
James argued with the shrewd short-sightedness of his race,
their cause was the same. "No bishop," ran his famous
adage, " no king ! " Hopes of ecclesiastical change found no
echo in a king who, among all the charms that England pre
sented him, saw none so attractive as its ordered and obedient
Church, its synods that met at the royal will, its courts that
carried out the royal ordinances, its bishops that held them
selves to be royal officers. If he accepted the Millenary
Petition, and summoned a conference of prelates and Puritan
divines at Hampton Court, he showed no purpose of discuss
ing the grievances alleged. He reveled in the opportunity
for a display of his theological reading ; but he viewed the
Puritan demands in a purely political light. The bishops
declared that the insults he showered on their opponents were
dictated by the Holy Ghost. The Puritans still ventured to
dispute his infallibility. James broke up the conference with
a threat which revealed the policy of the Crown. " I will
make them conform," he said of the remonstrants, " or I will
harry them out of the land."
It is only by thoroughly realizing the temper of the nation
on religious and civil subjects, and the temper of the king,
that we can understand the long parliamentary conflict which
occupied the whole of James's reign. But to make its details
intelligible we must briefly review the relations between the
two Houses and the Crown. The wary prescience of Wolsey
had seen in Parliament, even in its degradation under the
Tudors, the memorial of an older freedom, and a center of
national resistance to the new despotism which Henry was
establishing, should the nation ever rouse itself to resist.
Never perhaps was English liberty in such deadly peril as
when Wolsey resolved on the practical suppression of the two
Houses. But the bolder genius of Cromwell set aside the
traditions of the new Monarchy. His confidence in the
power of the Crown revived the Parliament as an easy and
manageable instrument of tyranny. The old forms of con-

6o8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1604
Stitutional freedom were turned to the profit of the royal des
potism, and a revolution which for the moment left England
absolutely at Henry's feet was wrought out by a series of
parliamentary statutes. Throughout Henry's reign Crom
well's confidence was justified by the spirit of slavish submis
sion which pervaded the Houses. But the effect of the
religious change for which his measures made room began
to be felt during the minority of Edward the Sixth ; and the
debates and divisions on the religious reaction which Mary
pressed on the Parliament were many and violent. A great
step forward was marked by the effort of the Crown to neu
tralize by "management" an opposition which it could no
longer overawe. The Parliaments were packed with nominees
of the Crown. Twenty-two new boroughs were created
under Edward, fourteen under Mary, — some, indeed, places
entitled to representation by their wealth and population, but
the bulk of them small towns or hamlets which lay wholly at
the disposal of the royal council. Elizabeth adopted the sys
tem of her two predecessors, both in the creation of boroughs
and the recommendation of candidates ; but her keen political
instinct soon perceived the uselessness of both expedients.
She fell back as far as she could on Wolsey's policy of prac
tical abolition, and summoned Parliaments at longer and
longer intervals. By rigid economy, by a policy of balance
and peace, she strove, and for a long time successfully strove,
to avoid the necessity of assembling them at all. But Mary of
Scotland and Philip of Spain proved friends to English liberty
in its sorest need. The struggle with Catholicism forced
Elizabeth to have more frequent recourse to her Parliament,
and as she was driven to appeal for increasing supplies the
tone of the Houses rose higher and higher. On the question
of taxation or monopolies her fierce spirit was forced to give
way to their demands. On the question of religion she re
fused all concession, and England was driven to await a
change of system from her successor. But it is clear, from
the earlier acts of his reign, that James was preparing for a
struggle with the Houses rather than for a policy of conces
sion. During the queen's reign, the power of Parliament had
sprung mainly from the continuance of the war, and from the
necessity under which the Crown lay of appealing to it for

l6o4] PURITAN ENGLAND 609
supplies. It is fair to the war party in Elizabeth's council
to remember that they were fighting, not merely for Protes
tantism abroad, but for constitutional liberty at home. When
Essex overrode Burleigh's counsels of peace, the old minister
pointed to the words of the Bible, " a blood-thirsty man shall
not live out half his days." But Essex and his friends had
nobler motives for their policy of war than a thirst for blood,
as James had other motives for his policy of peace than a
hatred of bloodshedding. The peace which he hastened to
conclude with Spain was necessary to establish the security
of his throne by depriving the Catholics, who alone questioned
his title, of foreign aid. With the same object of averting a
Catholic rising, he relaxed the penal laws against Catholics,
and released recusants from payment of fines. But however
justifiable such steps might be, the sterner Protestants heard
angrily of negotiations with Spain and with the papacy which
seemed to show a withdrawal from the struggle with Catholi
cism at home and abroad.
The Parliament of 1604 met in another mood from that of
any Parliament which had met for a hundred years. Short
as had been the time since his accession, the temper of the
king had already disclosed itself ; and men were dwelling
ominously on the claims of absolutism in Church and State
which were constantly on his lips. Above all, the hopes of
religious concessions to which the Puritans had clung had
been dashed to the ground in the Hampton Court Confer
ence; and of the squires and merchants who thronged the
benches at Westminster three fourths were in sympathy Puri
tan. They listened with coldness and suspicion to the pro
posals of the king for the union of England and Scotland
under the name of Great Britain. What the House was
really set on was religious reform. The first step of the
Commons was to name a committee to frame bills for the
redress of the more crying ecclesiastical grievances ; and
the rejection of the measures they proposed was at once
followed by an outspoken address to the king. The Parlia
ment, it said, had come together in a spirit of peace ; " Our
desires were of peace only, and our device of unity." Their
aim had been to put an end to the long-standing dissension
among the ministers, and to preserve uniformity by the aban-

6lO HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1604
donment of " a few ceremonies of small importance," by the
redress of some ecclesiastical abuses, and by the establish
ment of an efficient training for a preaching clergy. If they
had waived their right to deal with these matters during the
old age of Elizabeth, they asserted it now. " Let your Maj
esty be pleased to receive public information from your Com
mons in Parliament, as well of the abuses in the Church, as
in the civil state and government." The claim of absolutism
was met in words which sound like a prelude to the Petition
of Right. "Your Majesty would be misinformed," said the
address, " if any man should deliver that the kings of Eng
land have any absolute power in themselves either to alter
religion, or to make any laws concerning the same, otherwise
than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament." The
address was met by a petulant scolding from James, and the
Houses were adjourned. The support of the Crown embold
ened the bishops to a fresh defiance of the Puritan pressure.
The act of Elizabeth which sanctioned the Thirty-nine Arti
cles compelled ministers to subscribe only to those which
concerned the faith and the sacraments ; but the Convoca
tion of 1604 by its canons required subscription to the arti
cles touching rites and ceremonies. The new archbishop,
Bancroft, added a requirement of rigid conformity with the
rubrics on the part of all beneficed clergymen. In the fol
lowing spring three hundred of the Puritan clergy were
driven from their livings for a refusal to comply with these
demands. The breach with the Puritans was followed by a breach
with the Catholics. The increase in their numbers since the
remission of fines had spread a general panic ; and Parlia
ment had reenacted the penal laws. A rumor of his own
conversion so angered the king that these were now put in
force with even more severity than of old. The despair of
the Catholics gave fresh life to a conspiracy which had long
been ripening. Hopeless of aid from abroad, or of success
in an open rising at home, a small knot of desperate men, with
Robert Catesby, who had taken part in the rising of Essex,
at their head, resolved to destroy at a blow both king and
Parliament. Barrels of powder were placed in a cellar be
neath the Parliament House; and while waiting for the fifth

i6o6] PURITAN ENGLAND 6ll
of November, when the Parliament was summoned to meet,
the plans of the little group widened into a formidable con
spiracy. Catholics of greater fortune, such as Sir Everard
Digby and Francis Tresham, were admitted to their confi
dence, and supplied money for the larger projects they de
signed. Arms were bought in Flanders, horses were held in
readiness, a meeting of Catholic gentlemen was brought about
under show of a hunting party, to serve as the beginning of a
rising. The destruction of the king was to be followed by the
seizure of his children and an open revolt, in which aid might
be called for from the Spaniards in Flanders. Wonderful as
was the secrecy with which the plot was concealed, the family
affection of Tresham at the last moment gave a clue to it by
a letter to Lord Monteagle, his relative, which warned him to
absent himself from the Parliament on the fatal day ; and
further information brought about the discovery of the cellar
and of Guido Fawkes, a soldier of fortune, who was charged
with the custody of it. The hunting party broke up in de
spair, the conspirators were chased from county to county,
and either killed or sent to the block, and Garnet, the Provin
cial of the English Jesuits, was brought to trial and executed.
He had shrunk from all part in the plot, but its existence had
been made known to him by another Jesuit, Greenway, and
horror-stricken as he represented himself to have been he had
kept the secret and left the Parliament to its doom.
Parliament was drawn closer to the king by deliverance
from a common peril, and when the Houses met in 1606 the
Commons were willing to vote a sum large enough to pay the
debt left by Elizabeth after the war. But the prodigality of
James was fast raising his peace expenditure to the level of
the war expenditure of Elizabeth ; and he was driven by the
needs of his treasury, and the desire to free himself from
parliamentary control, to seek new sources of revenue. His
first great innovation was the imposition of customs duties.
It had long been declared illegal for the Crown to levy any
duties ungranted by Parliament save those on wool, leather,
and tin. A duty on imports indeed had been imposed in one
or two instances by Mary, and this impost had been extended
by Elizabeth to currants and wine ; but these instances were
too trivial and exceptional to break in upon the general usage.
40

6l2 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1606
A more dangerous precedent lay in the duties which the
great trading companies, such as those to the Levant and to
the Indies, exacted from merchants, in exchange — as was
held — for the protection they afforded them in far-off seas.
The Levant Company was now dissolved, and James seized
on the duties it had levied as lapsing to the Crown. Parlia
ment protested in vain. James cared quite as much to assert
his absolute authority as to fill his treasury. A case therefore
was brought before the Exchequer Chamber, and the judg
ment of the court asserted the king's right to levy what cus
toms duties he would at his pleasure. "All customs," said
the judges, "are the effects of foreign commerce, but all
affairs of commerce and treaties with foreign nations belong
to the king's absolute power. He therefore, who has power
over the cause, has power over the effect." The importance
of a decision which would go far to free the Crown from the
necessity of resorting to Parliament was seen keenly enough
by James. English commerce was growing fast, and English
merchants were fighting their way to the Spice Islands, and
establishing settlements in the dominions of the Mogul. The
judgment gave James a revenue which was sure to grow
rapidly, and the needs of his treasury forced him to action.
After two years' hesitation a royal proclamation imposed a
system of customs duties on many articles of export and
import. But if the new impositions came in fast, the royal
debt grew faster. Every year the expenditure of James
reached a higher level, and necessity forced on the king a
fresh assembling of Parliament. The " great contract " drawn
up by Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, proposed that James
should waive certain oppressive feudal rights, such as those of
wardship and marriage, and the right of purveyance, on con
dition that the Commons raised the royal revenue by a sum
of two hundred thousand a year. The bargain failed, however,
before the distrust of the Commons : and the king's demand
for a grant to pay off the royal debt was met by a petition of
grievances. They had jealously watched the new character
given by James to royal proclamations, by which he created
new offenses, imposed new penalties, and called offenders
before courts which had no legal jurisdiction over them. The
province of the spiritual courts had been as busily enlarged.

i6i4] PURITAN ENGLAND 613
It was in vain that the judges, spurred no doubt by the old
jealousy between civil and ecclesiastical lawyers, entertained
appeals against the high commission, and strove by a series
of decisions to set bounds to its limitless claims of jurisdiction,
or to restrict its powers of imprisonment to cases of schism
and heresy. The judges were powerless against the Crown ;
and James was vehement in his support of courts which were
closely bound up with his own prerogative. Were the treasury
once full, no means remained of redressing these evils. Nor
were the Commons willing to pass over silently the illegalities
of the past years. James forbade them to enter on the subject
of the new duties, but their remonstrance was none the less
¦vigorous. " Finding that your Majesty without advice or coun
sel of Parliament hath lately in time of peace set both greater
impositions and more in number than any of your noble an
cestors did ever in time of war," they prayed "that all imposi
tions set without the assent of Parliament may be quite
abolished and taken away," and that " a law be made to
declare that all impositions set upon your people, their goods
or merchandise, save only by common consent in Parliament,
are and shall be void." As to Church grievances their de
mands were in the same spirit. They prayed that the deposed
ministers might be suffered to preach, and that the jurisdic
tion of the high commission should be regulated by statute ;
in other words, that ecclesiastical like financial matters should
be taken out of the sphere of the prerogative and be owned
as lying henceforth within the cognizance of Parliament.
Whatever concessions James might offer on other subjects,
he would allow no interference with his ecclesiastical preroga
tive ; the Parliament was dissolved, and three years passed
before the financial straits of the Government forced James to
face the two Houses again. But the spirit of resistance was
now fairly roused. Never had an election stirred so much
popular passion as that of 1614. In every case where rejec
tion was possible, the court candidates were rejected. All the
leading members of the popular party, or as we should now
call it, the Opposition, were again returned. But three hun
dred of the members were wholly new men ; and among these
we note for the first time the names of two leaders in the later
struggle with the Crown. Yorkshire returned Thomas Went-

6l4 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1614
worth ; St. Germans, John Eliot. Signs of an unprecedented
excitement were seen in the vehement cheering and hissing
which for the first time marked the proceedings of the Com
mons. But the policy of the Parliament was precisely the
same as that of its predecessors. It refused to grant supplies
till it had considered public grievances, and it fixed on the
impositions and the abuses of the Church as the first to be
redressed. Unluckily the inexperience of the bulk of the
House of Commons led it into quarreling on a point of privi
lege with the Lords ; and the king, who had been frightened
beyond his wont at the vehemence of their tone and language,
seized on the quarrel as a pretext for their dissolution.
Four of the leading members in the dissolved Parliament
were sent to the Tower ; and the terror and resentment which
it had roused in the king's mind were seen in the obstinacy
with which he long persisted in governing without any Parlia
ment at all. For seven years he carried out with a blind
recklessness his theory of an absolute rule, unfettered by any
scruples as to the past, or any dread of the future. All the
abuses which Parliament after Parliament had denounced
were not only continued, but carried to a greater extent than
before. The spiritual courts were encouraged in fresh en
croachments. Though the Crown lawyers admitted the ille
gality of proclamations, they were issued in greater numbers
than ever. Impositions were strictly levied. But the treasury
was still empty ; and a fatal necessity at last drove James to
a formal breach of law. He fell back on a resource which
even Wolsey in the height of the Tudor power had been
forced to abandon. But the letters from the council demand
ing benevolences or gifts from the richer landowners remained
generally unanswered. In the three years which followed
the dissolution of 16 14 the strenuous efforts of the sheriffs
raised only sixty thousand pounds, a sum less than two thirds
of the value of a single subsidy ; and although the remon
strances of the western counties were roughly silenced by the
threats of the council, two counties, those of Hereford and
Stafford, sent not a penny to the last. In his distress for
money James was driven to expedients which widened the
breach between the gentry and the Crown. He had refused
to part with the feudal rights which came down to him from

i6i6] PURITAN ENGLAND 615
the Middle Ages, such as his right to the wardship of young
heirs and the marriage of heiresses, and these were steadily
used as a means of extortion. He degraded the nobility by a
shameless sale of peerages. Of the forty-five lay peers whom
he added to the Upper House during his reign, many were
created by sheer bargaining. A proclamation which forbade
the increase of houses in London brought heavy fines into the
treasury. By shifts such as these James put off from day to
day the necessity for again encountering the one body which
could permanently arrest his effort after despotic rule. But
there still remained a body whose tradition was strong enough,
not indeed to arrest, but to check it. The lawyers had been
subservient beyond all other classes to the Crown. In the
narrow pedantry with which they bent before isolated prec
edents, without realizing the conditions under which these
precedents had been framed, and to which they owed their
very varying value, the judges had supported James in his
claims. But beyond precedents even the judges refused to
go. They had done their best, in a case that came before
them, to restrict the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts
within legal and definite bounds : and when James asserted an
inherent right in the king to be heard before judgment was
delivered, whenever any case affecting the prerogative came
before his courts, they timidly, but firmly, repudiated such a
right as unknown to the law. James sent for them to the
royal closet, and rated them like schoolboys, till they fell on
their knees and, with a single exception, pledged themselves
to obey his will. The chief justice. Sir Edward Coke, a
narrow-minded and bitter-tempered man, but of the highest
eminence as a lawyer, and with a reverence for the law that
overrode every other instinct, alone remained firm. When
any case came before him, he answered, he would act as it
became a judge to act. Coke was at once dismissed from the
council, and a provision which made the judicial office tenable
at the king's pleasure, but which had long fallen into disuse,
was revived to humble the common law in the person of its
chief officer ; on the continuance of his resistance he was
deprived of his post of chief justice. No act of James seems
to have stirred a deeper resentment among Englishmen than
this announcement of his will to tamper with the course of

6l6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1616
justice. It was an outrage on the growing sense of law, as
the profusion and profligacy of the court were an outrage on
the growing sense of morality. The treasury was drained to
furnish masks and revels on a scale of unexampled splen
dor. Lands and jewels were lavished on young adventurers,
whose fair faces caught the royal fancy. If the court of
Elizabeth was as immoral as that of her successor, its im
morality had been shrouded by a veil of grace and chivalry.
But no veil hid the degrading grossness of the court of James.
The king was held, though unjustly, to be a drunkard. Actors
in a mask performed at court were seen rolling intoxicated
at his feet. A scandalous trial showed great nobles and offi
cers of State in league with cheats and astrologers and poison
ers. James himself had not shrunk from meddling busily in
the divorce of Lady Essex ; and her subsequent bridal with
one of his favorites was celebrated in his presence. Before
scenes such as these, the half-idolatrous reverence with which
the sovereign had been regarded throughout the period of the
Tudors died away into abhorrence and contempt. The players
openly mocked at the king on the stage. Mrs. Hutchinson
denounced the orgies of Whitehall in words as fiery as those
with which Elijah denounced the sensuality of Jezebel. But
the immorality of James's court was hardly more despicable
than the folly of his government. In the silence of Parlia
ment, the royal council, composed as it was not merely of the
ministers, but of the higher nobles and hereditary officers of
State, had served even under a despot like Henry the Eighth
as a check upon the arbitrary will of the sovereign. But after
the death of Lord Burleigh's son, Robert Cecil, the minister
whom Elizabeth had bequeathed to him and whose services
in procuring his accession were rewarded by the earldom of
Salisbury, all real control over affairs was withdrawn by James
from the council and entrusted to worthless favorites whom
the king chose to raise to honor. A Scotch page named Carr
was created Viscount Rochester and Earl of Somerset, and
married after her divorce to Lady Essex. Supreme in State
affairs, domestic and foreign, he was at last hurled from favor
and power on the charge of a horrible crime, the murder of
Sir Thomas Overbury by poison, of which he and his countess
were convicted of being the instigators. Another favorite

i6i7] PURITAN ENGLAND 617
was already prepared to take his place. George Villiers, a
handsome young adventurer, was raised rapidly through every
rank of the peerage, made Marquis and Duke of Buckingham,
and entrusted with the appointment to high offices of State.
The payment of bribes to him, or marriage with his greedy
relatives, became the one road to political preferment. Resist
ance to his will was inevitably followed by dismissal from office.
Even the highest and most powerful of the nobles were made
to tremble at the nod of this young upstart. " Never any
man in any age, nor, I believe, in any country," says the
astonished Clarendon, " rose in so short a time to so much
greatness of honor, power, or fortune, upon no other advan
tage or recommendation than of the beauty or gracefulness of
his person." Buckingham indeed had no inconsiderable abil
ities, but his self-confidence and recklessness were equal to his
beauty ; and the haughty young favorite on whose neck James
loved to loll, and whose cheek he slobbered with kisses, was des
tined to drag down in his fatal career the throne of the Stuarts.
The new system was even more disastrous in its results
abroad than at home. The withdrawal of power from the
council left James in effect his own chief minister and master
of the control of affairs as no English sovereign had been
before him. At his accession he found the direction of foreign
affairs in the hands of Salisbury, and so long as Salisbury
lived the Elizabethan policy was in the main adhered to.
Peace, indeed, was made with Spain ; but a close alliance
with the United Provinces, and a more guarded alliance with
France, held the ambition of Spain in check almost as effec
tually as war. When danger grew threatening in Germany
from the Catholic zeal of the House of Austria, the marriage
of the king's daughter, Elizabeth, with the heir of the Elector
Palatine promised English support to its Protestant powers.
But the death of Salisbury, and the dissolution of the Parlia
ment of 1614, were quickly followed by a disastrous change.
James at once proceeded to undo all that the struggle of
Elizabeth and the triumph of the Armada had done. His
quick, shallow intelligence held that in a joint action with
Spain it had found a way by which the Crown might at once
exert weight abroad and be rendered independent of the
nation at home. A series of negotiations was begun for the

6x8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1617
marriage of his son with a princess of Spain. Each of his
successive favorites supported the Spanish alliance; and after
years of secret intrigue the king's intentions were proclaimed
to the world, at the moment when the policy of the House of
Austria threatened the Protestants of Southern Germany with
utter ruin or civil war. From whatever quarter the first ag
gression should come, it was plain that a second great struggle
in arms between Protestantism and Catholicism was to be
fought out on German soil. It was their prescience of the
coming conflict which, on the very eve of the crisis, spurred
a party among his ministers who still clung to the traditions
of Salisbury to support an enterprise which promised to de
tach the king from his new policy by entangling him in a war
with Spain. Sir Walter Ralegh, the one great warrior of
the Elizabethan time who still lingered on, had been im
prisoned ever since the beginning of the new reign, in the
Tower, on a charge of treason. He now disclosed to James
his knowledge of a gold-mine on the Orinoco, and prayed
that he might sail thither and work its treasures for the king.
The king was tempted by the bait of gold ; but he forbade any
attack on Spanish territory, or the shedding of Spanish blood.
Ralegh, however, had risked his head again and again, he be
lieved in the tale he told, and he knew that if war could be
brought about between England and Spain a new career was
open to him. He found the coast occupied by Spanish troops ;
evading direct orders to attack he sent his men up the coun
try, where they plundered a Spanish town, found no gold
mine, and came broken and defeated back. The daring of
the man saw a fresh resource; he proposed to seize the
Spanish treasure ships as he returned, and, like Drake, to
turn the heads of nation and king by the immense spoil.
But his men would not follow him, and he was brought home
to face his doom. James at once put his old sentence in
force; and the death of the broken-hearted adventurer on
the scaffold atoned for the affront to Spain. The failure of
Ralegh came at a critical moment in German history. The
religious truce which had so long preserved the peace of Ger
many was broken in 161 8 by the revolt of Bohemia against
the rule of the Catholic House of Austria; and when the
death of the Emperor Matthias raised his cousin Ferdinand

i62o] PURITAN ENGLAND 619
in 1619 to the empire and to the throne of Bohemia, its
nobles declared the realm vacant and chose Frederick, the
young Elector Palatine, as their king. The German Protes
tants were divided by the fatal jealousy between their Lu
theran and Calvinist princes ; but it was believed that Fred
erick's election could unite them, and the Bohemians counted
on England's support when they chose James's son-in-law for
their king. A firm policy would at any rate have held Spain
inactive, and limited the contest to Germany itself. But the
" statecraft " on which James prided himself led him to count
not on Spanish fear, but on Spanish friendship. He refused
aid to the Protestant union of the German princes when
they espoused the cause of Bohemia, and threatened war
against Holland, the one power which was earnest in the
Palatine's cause. It was in vain that both court and people
were unanimous in their cry for war. James still pressed his
son-in-law to withdraw from Bohemia, and relied in such a
case on the joint efforts of England and Spain to restore
peace. But Frederick refused consent, and Spain quickly
threw aside the mask. Her famous battalions were soon
moving up the Rhine to the aid of the emperor ; and their
march turned the local struggle in Bohemia into a European
war. While the Spaniards occupied the Palatinate, the army
of the Catholic League under Maximilian of Bavaria marched
down the Danube, reduced Austria to submission, and forced
Frederick to battle before the walls of Prague. Before the
day was over he was galloping off, a fugitive, to North Ger
many, to find the Spaniards encamped as its masters in the
heart of the Palatinate.
James had been duped, and for the moment he bent before
the burst of popular fury which the danger to German Prot
estantism called up. He had already been brought to suffer
Sir Horace Vere to take some English volunteers to the Pa
latinate. But the succor had come too late. The cry for a
Parliament, the necessary prelude to a war, overpowered the
king's secret resistance, and the Houses were again called
together. But the Commons were bitterly chagrined as they
found only demands for supplies, and a persistence in the old
efforts to patch up a peace. James even sought the good
will of the Spaniards by granting license for the export of

620 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1620
arms to Spain. The resentment of the Commons found its
expression in their dealings with home affairs. The most
crying constitutional grievance arose from the revival of mon
opolies, in spite of the pledge of Elizabeth to suppress them.
A parliamentary right which had slept ever since the reign of
Henry VI., the right of the Lower House to impeach great
offenders, at the bar of the Lords, was revived against the
monopolists ; and James was driven by the general indigna
tion to leave them to their fate. But the practise of monopo
lies was only one sign of the corruption of the court. Sales
of peerages and offices of State had raised a general disgust ;
and this disgust showed itself in the impeachment of the
highest among the officers of State, the chancellor, Francis
Bacon, the most distinguished man of his time for learning
and ability. At the accession of James the rays of royal
favor had broken slowly upon Bacon. He became succes
sively solicitor and attorney-general; the year of Shakspere's
death saw him called to the privy council ; he verified Eliza
beth's prediction by becoming lord keeper. At last the
goal of his ambition was reached. He had attached himself
to the rising fortunes of Buckingham, and the favor of Buck
ingham made him lord chancellor. He was raised to the
peerage as Baron Verulam, and created, at a later time, Vis
count St. Albans. But the nobler dreams for which these
meaner honors had been sought escaped his grasp. His proj
ects still remained projects, while to retain his hold on office
he was stooping to a miserable compliance with the worst
excesses of Buckingham and his royal master. The years
during which he held the chancellorship were the most dis
graceful years of a disgraceful reign. They saw the execu
tion of Ralegh, the sacrifice of the Palatinate, the exaction of
benevolences, the multiplication of monopolies, the supremacy
of Buckingham. Against none of the acts of folly and wick
edness which distinguished James's government did Bacon
do more than protest ; in some of the -worst, and above all in
the attempt to coerce the judges into prostrating law at the
king's feet, he took a personal part. But even his remon
strances were too much for the young favorite, who regarded
him as the mere creature of his will. It was in vain that
Bacon flung himself on the duke's mercy, and begged him to

i62i] PURITAN ENGLAND 621
pardon a single instance of opposition to his caprice. A Par
liament was impending, and Buckingham resolved to avert
from himself the storm which was gathering by sacrificing to
it his meaner dependents. To ordinary eyes the chancellor
was at the summit of human success. Jonson had just sung
of him as one " whose even thread the Fates spin round and
full out of their choicest and their whitest wool," when the
storm burst. The Commons charged Bacon with corruption
in the exercise of his office. It had been customary among
chancellors to receive gifts from successful suitors after their
suit was ended. Bacon, it is certain, had taken such gifts
from men whose suits were still unsettled; and though his
judgment may have been unaffected by them, the fact of
their reception left him with no valid defense. He at once
pleaded guilty to the charge. " I do plainly and ingenuously
confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all
defense." "I beseech your Lordships," he added, "to be
merciful to a broken reed." The heavy fine imposed on him
was remitted by the Crown ; but the Great Seal was taken
from him, and he was declared incapable of holding office in
the State or of sitting in Parliament. Bacon's fall restored
him to that position of real greatness from which his ambi
tion had so long torn him away. " My conceit of his person,"
said Ben Jonson, " was never increased towards him by his
place or honors. But I have and do reverence him for his
greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed
to me ever by his work one of the greatest men, and most
worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages. In his
adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength :
for greatness he could not want." His intellectual activity
was never more conspicuous than in the last four years of his
life. He had presented the " Novum Organum " to James in
the year before his fall ; in the year after it he produced his
"Natural and Experimental History." He began a digest
of the laws, and a " History of England under the Tudors,"
revised and expanded his " Essays," dictated a jest-book, and
busied himself with experiments in physics. It was while
studying the effect of cold in preventing animal putrefaction
that he stopped his coach to stuff a fowl with snow and caught
the fever which ended in his death.

622 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1621
James was too shrewd to mistake the importance of Ba
con's impeachment ; but the hostility of Buckingham to the
chancellor, and Bacon's own confession of his guilt, made it
difficult to resist his condemnation. Energetic too as its
measures were against corruption and monopolists, the Par
liament respected scrupulously the king's prejudices in other
matters, and, even when checked by an adjournment, re
solved unanimously to support him in any earnest effort for
the Protestant cause. A warlike speech from a member
before the adjournment roused an enthusiasm which recalled
the days of Elizabeth. The Commons answered the appeal
by a unanimous vote, "lifting their hats as high as they could
hold them," that for the recovery of the Palatinate they
would adventure their fortunes, their estates, and their lives.
" Rather this declaration," Cried a leader of the country party
when it was read by the speaker, " than ten thousand men
already on the march." For the moment the resolve seemed
to give vigor to the royal policy. James had aimed through
out at the restitution of Bohemia to Ferdinand, and at indu
cing the emperor, through the mediation of Spain, to abstain
from any retaliation on the Palatinate. He now freed himself
for a moment from the trammels of diplomacy, and enforced
a cessation of the attack on his son-in-law's dominions by a
threat of war. The suspension of arms lasted through the
summer ; but mere threats could do no more, and on the con
quest of the Upper Palatinate by the forces of the Catholic
League, James fell back on his old policy of mediation through
the aid of Spain. The negotiations for the marriage with the
Infanta were pressed more busily. Gondomar, the Spanish
ambassador, who had become all-powerful at the English
court, was assured that no effectual aid should be sent to the
Palatinate. The English fleet, which was cruising by way
of menace off the Spanish coast, was called home. The
king dismissed those of his ministers who still opposed a
Spanish policy, and threatened on trivial pretexts a war with
the Dutch, the one great Protestant power that remained in
alliance with England and was ready to back the Elector.
But he had still to reckon with his Parliament ; and the first
act of the Parliament on its reassembling was to demand a
declaration of war with Spain. The instinct of the nation

i62i] PURITAN ENGLAND 623
was wiser than the statecraft of the king. Ruined and en
feebled as she really was, Spain to the world at large still
seemed the champion of Catholicism. It was the entry of
her troops into the Palatinate which had first widened the
local war in Bohemia into a great struggle for the suppres
sion of Protestantism along the Rhine; above all it was
Spanish influence, and the hopes held out of a marriage of
his son with a Spanish Infanta, which were luring the king
into his fatal dependence on the great enemy of the Protes
tant cause. In their petition the Houses coupled with their
demands for war the demand of a Protestant marriage for
their future king. Experience proved in later years how
perilous it was for English freedom that the heir to the
Crown should be brought up under a Catholic mother ; but
James was beside himself at their presumption in dealing
with mysteries of state. " Bring stools for the ambassadors,"
he cried in bitter irony as their committee appeared before
him. He refused the petition, forbade any further discussion
of State policy, and threatened the speakers with the Tower.
" Let us resort to our prayers," a member said calmly as the
king's letter was read, " and then consider of this great busi
ness." The temper of the House was seen in the Protestation
which met the royal command to abstain from discussion.
It resolved "that the liberties, franchises, privileges, and
jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted
birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England ; and
that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the king. State,
and defense of the realm, and of the Church of England, and
the making and maintenance of laws, and redress of griev
ances, which daily happen within this realm, are proper sub
jects and matter of council and debate in Parliament. And
that in the handling and proceeding of those businesses every
member of the House hath, and of right ought to have,
freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason, and bring to
conclusion the same."
The king answered the Protestation by a characteristic
outrage. He sent for the Journals of the House, and with
his own hand tore out the pages which contained it. " I will
govern," he said, " according to the common weal, but not
according to the common will." A few days after he dis-

624 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1621
solved the Parliament. " It is the best thing that has hap
pened in the interests of Spain and of the Catholic religion
since Luther began preaching," wrote the Count of Gondomar
to his master, in his joy that all danger of war had passed
away. " I am ready to depart," Sir Henry Savile, on the
other hand, murmured on his death-bed, "the rather that
having lived in good times I foresee worse." Abroad indeed
all was lost; and Germany plunged wildly and blindly for
ward into the chaos of the Thirty Years' war. But for Eng
land the victory of freedom was practically won. James had
himself ruined the main bulwarks of the Monarchy. In his
desire for personal government he had destroyed the author
ity of the council. He had accustomed men to think lightly
of the ministers of the Crown, to see them browbeaten by
favorites, and driven from office for corruption. He had
disenchanted his people of their blind faith in the Monarchy
by a policy at home and abroad which ran counter to every
national instinct. He had quarreled with and insulted the
Houses as no English sovereign had ever done before ; and
all the while the authority he boasted of was passing, without
his being able to hinder it, to the Parliament which he out
raged. There was shrewdness as well as anger in his taunt
at his " ambassadors." A power had at last risen up in the
Commons with which the Monarchy was henceforth to reckon.
In spite of the king's petulant outbreaks. Parliament had
asserted its exclusive right to the control of taxation. It had
attacked monopolies. It had reformed abuses in the courts
of law. It had revived the right of impeaching and removing
from office the highest ministers of the Crown. It had as
serted its privilege of free discussion on all questions connected
with the welfare of the realm. It had claimed to deal with
the question of religion. It had even declared its will on the
sacred " mystery " of foreign policy. James might tear the
Protestation from its Journals, but there were pages in the
record of the Parliament of 162 1 which he never could tear
out.

1623] PURITAN ENGLAND 625
Section III. — The King and the Parliament, 1623-1629
In the obstinacy with which he clung to his Spanish policy
James stood absolutely alone ; for not only the old nobility
and the statesmen who preserved the tradition of the age of
Elizabeth, but even his own ministers, with the exception of
Buckingham and the treasurer, Cranfield, were at one with
the Commons. The king's aim, as we have said, was to en
force peace on the combatants, and to bring about the restitu
tion of the Palatinate to the Elector, through the influence of
Spain. It was to secure this influence that he pressed for a
closer union with the great Catholic power ; and of this union,
and the success of the policy which it embodied, the marriage
of his son Charles with the Infanta, which had been held out
as a lure to his vanity, was to be the sign. But the more
James pressed for this consummation of his projects, the more
Spain held back. At last Buckingham proposed to force the
Spaniard's hand by the arrival of Charles himself at the Spanish
court. The prince quitted England in disguise, and appeared
with Buckingham at Madrid to claim his bride. It was in
vain that Spain rose in its demands ; for every new demand
was met by fresh concessions on the part of England. The
abrogation of the penal laws against the Catholics, a Catholic
education for the prince's children, a Catholic household for
the Infanta, all were no sooner asked than they were granted.
But the marriage was still delayed, while the influence of the
new policy on the war in Germany was hard to see. The
Catholic League and its army, under the command of Count
Tilly, won triumph after triumph over their divided foes.
The reduction of Heidelberg and Mannheim completed the
conquest of the Palatinate, whose Elector fled helplessly to
Holland, while his Electoral dignity was transferred by the
emperor to the Duke of Bavaria. But there was still no sign
of the hoped-for intervention on the part of Spain. At last
the pressure of Charles himself brought about the disclosure
of the secret of its policy. " It is a maxim of state with us,"
Olivares confessed, as the prince demanded an energetic inter
ference in Germany, "that the king of Spain must never
fight against the emperor. We cannot employ our forces
against the emperor." "If you hold to that," replied the
prince, "there is an end of all."

626 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1624
His return was the signal for a burst of national joy. All
London was alight with bonfires in her joy at the failure
of the Spanish match, and of the collapse, humiliating as it
was, of the policy which had so long trailed English honor
at the chariot-wheels of Spain. Charles returned to take
along with Buckingham the direction of affairs out of his
father's hands. The journey to Madrid had revealed to
those around him the strange mixture of obstinacy and weak
ness in the prince's character, the duplicity which lavished
promises because it never purposed to be bound by any, the
petty pride that subordinated every political consideration to
personal vanity or personal pique. He had granted demand
after demand, till the very Spaniards lost faith in his con
cessions. With rage in his heart at the failure of his efforts,
he had renewed his betrothal on the very eve of his departure,
only that he might insult the Infanta by its withdrawal when
he was safe at home. But to England at large the baser
features of his character were still unknown. The stately
reserve, the personal dignity and decency of manners which
distinguished the prince, contrasted favorably with the gabble
and indecorum of his father. The courtiers, indeed, who saw
him in his youth would often pray God that " he might be in
the right way when he was set ; for if he was in the wrong
he would prove the most wilful of any king that ever reigned."
But the nation was willing to take his obstinacy for firmness,
as it took the pique which inspired his course on his return
for patriotism and for the promise of a nobler rule. Under
the pressure of Charles and Buckingham the king was forced
to call a Parliament, and to concede the point on which he
had broken with the last, by laying before it the whole ques
tion of the Spanish negotiations. Buckingham and the
prince gave their personal support to Parliament in its demand
for a rupture of the treaties with Spain and a declaration of
war. A subsidy was eagerly voted ; the persecution of the
Catholics, which had long been suspended out of deference
to Spanish intervention, began with new vigor. The head
of the Spanish party, Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, the lord
treasurer, was impeached on a charge of corruption, and
dismissed from office. James was swept along helplessly by
the tide ; but his shrewdness saw clearly the turn that affairs

1 624] PURITAN ENGLAND 627
were taking; and it was only by hard pressure that the
favorite succeeded in wresting his consent to the disgrace of
Middlesex. "You are making a rod for your own back,"
said the king. But Buckingham and Charles persisted in
their plans of war. A treaty of alliance was concluded
with Holland; negotiations were begun with the Lutheran
princes of North Germany, who had looked coolly on at the
ruin of the Elector Palatine; an alliance with France was
proposed, and the marriage of Charles with Henrietta, a
daughter of Henry the Fourth of France, and sister of its
king. To restore the triple league was to restore the system
of Elizabeth ; but the first whispers of a Catholic queen woke
opposition in the Commons. At this juncture the death of
the king placed Charles upon the throne ; and his first Parlia
ment met in May, 1625. "We can hope everything from
the king who now governs us," cried Sir Benjamin Rudyerd
in the Commons. But there were cooler heads in the Com
mons than Sir Benjamin Rudyerd's ; and enough had taken
place in the few months since its last session to temper its
loyalty with caution.
The war with Spain, it must be remembered, meant to the
mass of Englishmen a war with Catholicism ; and the fervor
against Catholicism without roused a corresponding fervor
against Catholicism within the realm. Every English Catho
lic seemed to Protestant eyes an enemy at home. A Protes
tant who leant towards Catholic usage or dogma was a secret
traitor in the ranks. But it was suspected, and suspicion was
soon to be changed into certainty, that in spite of his pledge
to make no religious concessions to France, Charles had on
his marriage promised to relax the penal laws against Catho
lics, and that a foreign power had again been given the right
of intermeddling in the civil affairs of the realm. And it was
to men with Catholic leanings that Charles seemed disposed
to show favor. Bishop Laud was recognized as the center
of that varied opposition to Puritanism, whose members were
loosely grouped under the name of Arminians ; and Laud
now became the king's adviser in ecclesiastical matters.
With Laud at its head the new party grew in boldness as
well as numbers. It naturally sought for shelter for its
religious opinions by exalting the power of the Crown. A
41

628 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1625
court favorite, Montague, ventured to slight the Reformed
Churches of the Continent in favor of the Church of Rome,
and to advocate as the faith of the Church the very doctrines
rejected by the Calvinists. The temper of the Commons on
religious matters was clear to every observer. "Whatever
mention does break forth of the fears or dangers in religion,
and the increase of popery," wrote a member who was noting
the proceedings of the House, "their affections are much
stirred." Their first act was to summon Montague to the
bar and to commit him to prison. But there were other
grounds for their distrust besides the king's ecclesiastical
tendency. The conditions on which the last subsidy had
been granted for war with Spain had been contemptuously
set aside ; in his request for a fresh grant Charles neither
named a sum nor gave any indication of what war it was to
support. His reserve was met by a corresponding caution.
While voting a small and inadequate subsidy, the Commons
restricted their grant of certain customs duties called tonnage
and poundage, which had commonly been granted to the new
sovereign for life, to a single year, so as to give time for
consideration of the additional impositions laid by James on
these duties. The restriction was taken as an insult ; Charles
refused to accept the grant on such a condition, and adjourned
the Houses. When they met again at Oxford it was in a
sterner temper, for Charles had shown his defiance of Parlia
ment by drawing Montague from prison, by promoting him
to a royal chaplaincy, and by levying the disputed customs
without authority of law. " England," cried Sir Robert
Phelips, " is the last monarchy that yet retains her liberties.
Let them not perish now ! " But the Commons had no
sooner announced their resolve to consider public grievances
before entering on other business than they were met by a
dissolution. Buckingham, to whom the firmness of the
Commons seemed simply the natural discontent which fol
lows on ill success, resolved to lure them from their constitu
tional struggle by a great military triumph. His hands were
no sooner free than he sailed for the Hague to conclude a
general alliance against the House of Austria, while a fleet
of ninety vessels and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth
in October for the coast of Spain. But these vast projects

1625] PURITAN ENGLAND 629
broke down before Buckingham's administrative incapacity.
The plan of alliance proved fruitless. After an idle descent
on Cadiz the Spanish expedition returned broken with mutiny
and disease ; and the enormous debt which had been incurred
in its equipment forced the favorite to advise a new summons
of the Houses. But he was keenly alive to the peril in
which his failure had plunged him, and to a coalition which
had been formed between his rivals at court and the leaders
of the last Parliament. His reckless daring led him to antic
ipate the danger and by a series of blows to strike terror
into his opponents. The councilors were humbled by the
committal of Lord Arundel to the Tower. Sir Robert Phelips,
Coke, and four other leading patriots were made sheriffs of
their counties, and thus prevented from sitting in the coming
Parliament. But their exclusion only left the field free for
a more terrible foe.
If Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody
the later national resistance, the earlier struggle for parlia
mentary liberty centers in the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of
an old family which had settled under Elizabeth near the
fishing hamlet of St. Germans, and raised their stately man
sion of Port Eliot, he had risen to the post of Vice-Admiral
of Devonshire under the patronage of Buckingham, and had
seen his activity in the suppression of piracy in the Channel
rewarded by an unjust imprisonment. He was now in the
first vigor of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated and
familiar with the poetry and learning of his day, a nature
singularly lofty and devout, a fearless and vehement temper.
There was a hot impulsive element in his nature which showed
itself in youth in his drawing sword on a neighbor who de
nounced him to his father, and which in later years gave its
characteristic fire to his eloquence. But his intellect was as
clear and cool as his temper was ardent. In the general
enthusiasm which followed on the failure of the Spanish
marriage, he had stood almost alone in pressing for a recog
nition of the rights of Parliament, as a preliminary to any
real reconciliation with the Crown. He fixed, from the very
outset of his career, on the responsibility of the royal min
isters to Parliament, as the one critical point for English
liberty. It was to enforce the demand of this that he availed

630 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1626
himself of Buckingham's sacrifice of the treasurer, Middle
sex, to the resentment of the Commons. " The greater the
delinquent," he urged, "the greater the delict. They are
a happy thing, great men and officers, if they be good, and
one of the greatest blessings of the land; but power con
verted into evil is the greatest curse that can befall it." But
the new Parliament had hardly met, when he came to the
front to threaten a greater criminal than Middlesex. So men
acing were his words, as he called for an inquiry into the
failure before Cadiz, that Charles himself stooped to answer
threat with threat. " I see," he wrote to the House, " you
especially aim at the Duke of Buckingham. I must let you
know that I will not allow any of my servants to be questioned
among you, much less such as are of eminent place and near
to me." A more direct attack on a right already acknowl
edged in the impeachment of Bacon and Middlesex could
hardly be imagined, but Eliot refused to move from his con
stitutional ground. The king was by law irresponsible, he
" could do no wrong." If the country therefore was to be
saved from a pure despotism, it must be by enforcing the
responsibility of the ministers who counseled and executed
his acts. Eliot persisted in denouncing Buckingham's incom
petence and corruption, and the Commons ordered the sub
sidy which the Crown had demanded to be brought in " when
we shall have presented our grievances, and received his
Majesty's answer thereto." Charles summoned them to White
hall, and commanded them to cancel the condition. He would
grant them " liberty of council, but not of control " ; and he
closed the interview with a significant threat. " Remember,"
he said, " that Parliaments are altogether in my power for
their calling, sitting, and dissolution ; and, therefore, as I find
the fruits of them to be good or evil, they are to continue or
not to be." But the will of the Commons was as resolute
as the will of the king. Buckingham's impeachment was
voted and carried to the Lords. The favorite took his seat
as a peer to listen to the charge with so insolent an air of
contempt that one of the managers appointed by the Com
mons to conduct it turned sharply on him. " Do you jeer,
my lord ! " said Sir Dudley Digges. " I can show you when
a greater man than your lordship — as high as you in place

1 626] PURITAN ENGLAND 631
and power, and as deep in the king's favor — has been hanged
for as small a crime as these articles contain." The "proud
carriage " of the duke provoked an invective from Eliot which
marks a new era in parliamentary speech. From the first
the vehemence and passion of his words had contrasted with
the grave, colorless reasoning of older speakers. His oppo
nents complained that Eliot aimed to "stir up affections."
The quick emphatic sentences he substituted for the cumbrous
periods of the day, his rapid argument, his vivacious and
caustic allusions, his passionate appeals, his fearless invective,
struck a new note in English eloquence. The frivolous
ostentation of Buckingham, his very figure blazing with jewels
and gold, gave point to the fierce attack. " He has broken
those nerves and sinews of our land, the stores and treasures
of the king. There needs no search for it. It is too visible.
His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his magnificent
buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the visible
evidences of an express exhausting of the State, a chronicle
of the immensity of his waste of the revenues of the Crown.' "
With the same terrible directness Eliot reviewed the duke's
greed and corruption, his insatiate ambition, his seizure of all
public authority, his neglect of every public duty, his abuse
for selfish ends of the powers he had accumulated. " The
pleasure of his Majesty, his known directions, his public acts,
his acts of council, the decrees of courts — all must be made
inferior to this man's will. No right, no interest, may with
stand him. Through the power of State and justice he has
dared ever to strike at his own ends." "My lords," he ended,
after a vivid parallel between Buckingham and Sejanus, "you
see the man ! What have been his actions, what he is like, you
know ! I leave him to your judgment. This only is conceived
by us, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Commons
House of Parliament, that by him came all our evils, in him we
find the causes, and on him must be the remedies ! Pereat qui
perdere cuncta festinat. Opprimatur ne omnes opprimat ! "
The reply of Charles was as fierce and sudden as the attack
of Eliot. He hurried to the House of Peers to avow as his
own the deeds with which Buckingham was charged. Eliot
and Digges were called from their seats, and committed pris
oners to the Tower. The Commons, however, refused to pro-

632 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1626
ceed with public business till their members were restored ;
and after a ten days' struggle Eliot was released. But his
release was only a prelude to the close of the Parliament.
"Not one moment," the king replied to the prayer of his
council for delay ; and a final remonstrance in which the
Commons begged him to dismiss Buckingham from his ser
vice forever was met by their instant dissolution. The
remonstrance was burnt by royal order ; Eliot was deprived
of his vice-admiralty ; and an appeal was made to the nation
to pay as a free gift the subsidies which the Parliament had
refused to grant till their grievances were redressed. But
the tide of public resistance was slowly rising. Refusals to
give anything, " save by way of Parliament," came in from
county after county. When the subsidy men of Middlesex
and Westminster were urged to comply, they answered with
a tumultuous shout of " a Parliament ! a Parliament ! else no
subsidies ! " Kent stood out to a man. In Bucks the very
justices neglected to ask for the " free gift." The freeholders
of Cornwall only answered that, " if they had but two kine,
they would sell one of them for supply to his Majesty — in
a parliamentary way." The failure of the voluntary gfft
forced Charles to an open defiance of the law. He met it
by the levy of a forced loan. Commissioners were named
to assess the amount which every landowner was bound to
lend, and to examine on oath all who refused. Every means
of persuasion, as of force, was resorted to. The pulpits of
the Laudian clergy resounded with the cry of " passive obedi
ence." Dr. Mainwaring preached before Charles himself,
that the king needed no parliamentary warrant for taxation,
and that to resist his will was to incur eternal damnation.
Poor men who refused to lend were pressed into the army
or navy. Stubborn tradesmen were flung into prison. Buck
ingham himself undertook the task of overawing the nobles
and the gentry. Charles met the opposition of the judges
by instantly dismissing from his office the chief justice. Crew.
But in the country at large resistance was universal. The
northern counties in a mass set the Crown at defiance. The
Lincolnshire farmers drove the commissioners from the town.
Shropshire, Devon, and Warwickshire " refused utterly."
Eight peers, with Lord Essex and Lord Warwick at their

i627] PURITAN ENGLAND 633
head, declined to comply with the exaction as illegal. Two
hundred country gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not been
subdued by their transfer from prison to prison, were sum
moned before the council ; and John Hampden, as yet only
a young Buckinghamshire squire, appeared at the board to
begin that career of patriotism which has made his name
dear to Englishmen. " I could be content to lend," he said,
"but fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta,
which should be read twice a year against those who infringe
it." So close an imprisonment in the Gate House rewarded
his protest, " that he never afterwards did look like the same
man he was before." With gathering discontent as well as
bankruptcy before him, nothing could save the duke but a
great military success ; and he equipped a force of six thou
sand men for the maddest and most profligate of all his enter
prises. In the great struggle with Catholicism the hopes
of every Protestant rested on the union of England with
France against the House of Austria. But the blustering
and blundering of the favorite had at last succeeded in
plunging him into strife with his own allies, and England
now suddenly found herself at war with France and Spain
together. The French minister. Cardinal Richelieu, anxious
as he was to maintain the English alliance, was convinced
that the first step to any effective interference of France in
a European war must be the restoration of order at home
by the complete reduction of the Protestant town of Rochelle,
which had risen in revolt. In 1625 English aid had been
given to the French forces, however reluctantly. But now
Buckingham saw his way to win an easy popularity at home
by supporting the Huguenots in their resistance. The en
thusiasm for their cause was intense ; and he resolved to
take advantage of this enthusiasm to secure such a triumph
for the royal arms as should silence all opposition at home.
A fleet of a hundred vessels sailed under his command for
the relief of Rochelle. But imposing as was his force, the
expedition was as disastrous as it was impolitic. After an
unsuccessful siege of the castle of St. Martin, the English
troops were forced to fall back along a narrow causeway to
their ships ; and in the retreat two thousand fell, without the
loss of a single man to their enemies.

634 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1628
The first result of Buckingham's folly was to force on
Charles, overwhelmed as he was with debt and shame, the
summoning of a new Parliament ; a Parliament which met in
a mood even more resolute than the last. The court candi
dates were everywhere rejected. The patriot leaders were
triumphantly returned. To have suffered in the recent resist
ance to arbitrary taxation was the sure road to a seat. In
spite of Eliot's counsel, even the question of Buckingham's
removal gave place to the craving for redress of wrongs done
to personal liberty. "We must vindicate our ancient liber
ties," said Sir Thomas Wentworth, in words soon to be re
membered against himself : " we must reenforce the laws
made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon
them as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade
them." Heedless of sharp and menacing messages from the
king, of demands that they should take his " royal word " for
their liberties, the House bent itself to one great work, the
drawing up a Petition of Right. The statutes that protected
the subject against arbitrary taxation, against loans and be
nevolences, against punishment, outlawry, or deprivation of
goods, otherwise than by lawful judgment of his peers,
against arbitrary imprisonment without stated charge, against
billeting of soldiery on the people or enactment of martial
law in time of peace, were formally recited. The breaches
of them under the last two sovereigns, and above all since
the dissolution of the last Parliament, were recited as form
ally. At the close of this significant list, the Commons
prayed "that no man hereafter be compelled to make or
yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge,
without common consent by act of Parliament. And that
none be called to make answer, or to take such oaths, or to
be confined or otherwise molested or disputed concerning the
same, or for refusal thereof. And that no freeman may in
such manner as is before mentioned be imprisoned or de
tained. And that your Majesty would be pleased to remove
the said soldiers and mariners, and that your people may not
be so burdened in time to come. And that the commissions
for proceeding by martial law may be revoked and annulled,
and that hereafter no commissions of like nature may issue
forth to any person or persons whatsoever to be executed as

1628] PURITAN ENGLAND 635
aforesaid, lest by color of them any of your Majesty's sub
jects be destroyed and put to death, contrary to the laws and
franchises of the land. All which they humbly pray of your
most excellent Majesty, as their rights and liberties, accord
ing to the laws and statutes of the realm. And that your
Majesty would also vouchsafe to declare that the awards, do
ings, and proceedings to the prejudice of your people in any
of the premises shall not be drawn hereafter into conse
quence or example. And that your Majesty would be pleased
graciously for the further comfort and safety of your people
to declare your royal will and pleasure, that in the things
aforesaid all your officers and ministers shall serve you ac
cording to the laws and statutes of this realm, as they tender
the honor of your Majesty and the prosperity of the king
dom." It was in vain that the Lords desired to conciliate
Charles by a reservation of his " sovereign power." " Our
petition," Pym quietly replied, " is for the laws of England,
and this power seems to be another power distinct from the
power of the law." The Lords yielded, but Charles gave an
evasive reply ; and the failure of the more moderate counsels
for which his own had been set aside, called Eliot again to the
front. In a speech of unprecedented boldness he moved the
presentation to the king of a Remonstrance on the state of
the realm. But at the moment when he again touched on
Buckingham's removal as the preliminary of any real im
provement the speaker of the House interposed. "There
was a command laid on him," he said, " to interrupt any that
should go about to lay an aspersion on the king's ministers."
The breach of their privilege of free speech produced a scene
in the Commons such as St. Stephen's had never witnessed
before. Eliot sat abruptly down amidst the solemn silence
of the House. "Then appeared such a spectacle of pas
sions," says a letter of the time, " as the like had seldom
been seen in such an assembly; some weeping, some expostu
lating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom,
some playing the divines in confessing their sins and coun
try's sins which drew these judgments upon us, some finding,
as it were, fault with those that wept. There were above an
hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being in
terrupted and silenced by their own passions." Pym himself

636 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1628
rose only to sit down choked with tears. At last Sir Edward
Coke found words to blame himself for the timid counsels
which had checked Eliot at the beginning of the session, and
to protest " that the author and source of all those miseries
was the Duke of Buckingham."
Shouts of assent greeted the resolution to insert the duke's
name in their Remonstrance. But at this moment Charles
gave way. To win supplies for a new expedition to Rochelle,
Buckingham bent the king to consent to the Petition of
Right. As Charles understood it, indeed, the consent meant
little. The point for which he really cared was the power of
keeping men in prison without bringing them to trial or as
signing causes for their imprisonment. On this he had con
sulted his judges; and they had answered that his consent to
the petition left his rights untouched ; like other laws, they
said, the petition would have to be interpreted when it came
before them, and the prerogative remained unaffected. As
to the rest, while waiving all claim to levy taxes not granted
by Parliament, Charles still reserved his right to levy imposi
tions paid customarily to the Crown, and amongst these he
counted tonnage and poundage. Of these reserves, however,
the Commons knew nothing. The king's consent won a
grant of subsidy from the Parliament, and such a ringing of
bells and lighting of bonfires from the people "as were never
seen but upon his Majesty's return from Spain." But, like
all Charles's concessions, it came too late to effect the end
at which he aimed. The Commons persisted in presenting
their Remonstrance. Charles received it coldly and ungra
ciously ; while Buckingham, who had stood defiantly at his
master's side as he was denounced, fell on his knees to speak.
" No, George ! " said the king as he raised him ; and his de
meanor gave emphatic proof that the duke's favor remained
undiminished. " We will perish together, George," he added
at a later time, "if thou dost." No shadow of his doom, in
fact, had fallen over the brilliant favorite when, after the
prorogation of the Parliament, he set out to take command
of a new expedition for the relief of Rochelle. But a lieu
tenant in the army, John Felton, soured by neglect and
wrongs, had found in the Remonstrance some fancied sanc
tion for the revenge he plotted ; and, mixing with the throng

i628] PURITAN ENGLAND 637
which crowded the hall at Portsmouth, he stabbed Bucking
ham to the heart. Charles flung himself on his bed in a pas
sion of tears when the news reached him; but outside the
court it was welcomed with a burst of joy. Young Oxford
bachelors, grave London aldermen, vied with each other in
drinking healths to Felton. " God bless thee, little David,"
cried an old woman, as the murderer passed manacled by ;
" the Lord comfort thee," shouted the crowd, as the Tower
gates closed on him. The very crews of the duke's arma
ment at Portsmouth shouted to the king, as he witnessed their
departure, a prayer that he would " spare John Felton, their
sometime fellow soldier." But whatever national hopes the
fall of Buckingham had aroused were quickly dispelled.
Weston, a creature of the duke, became lord treasurer, and
his system remained unchanged. "Though our Achan is
cut off," said Eliot, "the accursed thing remains."
It seemed as if no act of Charles could widen the breach
which his reckless lawlessness had made between himself
and his subjects. But there was one thing dearer to England
than free speech in Parliament, than security for property,
or even personal liberty; and that one thing was, in the
phrase of the day, "the Gospel." The gloom which at the
outset of this reign we saw settling down on every Puritan
heart had deepened with each succeeding year. The great
struggle abroad had gone more and more against Protestant
ism, and at this moment the end of the cause seemed to have
come. In Germany Lutheran and Calvinist alike lay at last
beneath the heel of the Catholic House of Austria. The fall
of Rochelle after Buckingham's death seemed to leave the
Huguenots of France at the feet of a Roman cardinal.
While England was thrilling with excitement at the thought
that her own hour of deadly peril might come again, as it
had come in the year of the Armada, Charles raised Laud to
the bishopric of London, and entrusted him with the direc
tion of ecclesiastical affairs. To the excited Protestantism of
the country, Laud and the churchmen whom he headed
seemed a danger really more formidable than the popery
which was making such mighty strides abroad. To the Puri
tans they were traitors to God and their country at once.
Their aim was to draw the Church of England farther away

638 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1628
from the Protestant Churches and nearer to the Church
which Protestants regarded as Babylon. They aped Roman
ceremonies. Cautiously and tentatively they were introducing
Roman doctrine. But they had none of the sacerdotal inde
pendence which Rome had at any rate preserved. They
were abject in their dependence on the Crown. Their grati
tude for the royal protection which enabled them to defy the
religious instincts of the realm showed itself in their erection
of the most dangerous pretensions of the monarchy into
religious dogmas. Archbishop Whitgift declared James to
have been inspired by God. They preached passive obedience
to the worst tyranny. They declared the person and goods
of the subject to be at the king's absolute disposal. They
were turning religion into a systematic attack on English
liberty. Up to this time they had been little more than a
knot of courtly ecclesiastics, for the mass of the clergy, like
their flocks, were steady Puritans ; but the energy of Laud,
and the patronage of the court, promised a speedy increase
of their numbers and their power. Sober men looked for
ward to a day when every pulpit would be ringing with
exhortations to passive obedience, with denunciations of Cal
vinism and apologies for Rome. Of all the members of the
House of Commons Eliot was least fanatical in his natural
bent, but the religious crisis swept away for the moment all
other thoughts from his mind. " Danger enlarges itself in
so great a measure," he wrote from the country, "that nothing
but Heaven shrouds us from despair." The House met in
the same temper. The first business called up was that of
religion. " The Gospel," Eliot burst forth, " is that Truth in
which this kingdom has been happy through a long and rare
prosperity. This ground, therefore, let us lay for a founda
tion of our building, that that Truth, not with words but with
actions, we will maintain ! " " There is a ceremony," he went
on, " used in the Eastern Churches, of standing at the repeti
tion of the Creed, to testify their purpose to maintain it, not
only with their bodies upright, but with their swords drawn.
Give me leave to call that a custom very commendable ! "
The Commons answered their leader's challenge by a solemn
avowal. They avowed that they held for truth that sense of
the Articles as established by Parliament, which by the public

1629] PURITAN ENGLAND 639
act of the Church, and the general and current exposition of
the writers of their Church, had been delivered unto them.
But the debates over religion were suddenly interrupted.
The Commons, who had deferred all grant of customs till the
wrong done in the illegal levy of them was redressed, had
summoned the farmers of those dues to the bar ; but though
they appeared, they pleaded the king's command as a ground
for their refusal to answer. The House was proceeding to a
protest, when the speaker signified that he had received an
order to adjourn. Dissolution was clearly at hand, and the
long-suppressed indignation broke out in a scene of strange
disorder. The speaker was held down in the chair, while
Eliot, still clinging to his great principle of ministerial respon
sibility, denounced the new treasurer as the adviser of the
measure. " None have gone about to break Parliaments,"
he added in words to which after events gave a terrible sig
nificance, "but in the end Parliaments have broken them."
The doors were locked, and in spite of the speaker's protests,
of the repeated knocking of the usher at the door, and of the
gathering tumult within the House itself, the loud "Aye,
aye," of the bulk of the members supported Eliot in his last
vindication of English liberty. By successive resolutions the
Commons declared whomsoever should bring in innovations
in religion, or whatever minister indorsed the levy of subsidies
not granted in Parliament, " a capital enemy to the kingdom
and commonwealth," and every subject voluntarily complying
with illegal acts and demands " a betrayer of the liberty of
England and an enemy of the same."
Section IV. — New England
The dissolution of the Parliament of 1629 marked the dark
est hour of Protestantism, whether in England or in the world
at large. But it was in this hour of despair that the Puritans
won their noblest triumph. They " turned," to use Canning's
words in a far truer and grander sense than that which he
gave to them, they " turned to the New World to redress the
balance of the Old." It was during the years of tyranny which
followed the close of the third Parliament of Charles that a
great Puritan emigration founded the States of New England.

640 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1629
The Puritans were far from being the earliest among the
English colonists of North America. There was little in the
circumstances which attended the first discovery of the West
ern world which promised well for freedom; its earliest result,
indeed, was to give an enormous impulse to the most bigoted
and tyrannical among the powers of Europe, and to pour the
wealth of Mexico and Peru into the treasury of Spain. But
while the Spanish galleons traversed the southern seas, and
Spanish settlers claimed the southern part of the great con
tinent for the Catholic crown, a happy instinct drew English
men to the ruder and more barren districts along the shore
of Northern America. England had reached the mainland
even earlier than Spain, for before Columbus touched its
shores Sebastian Cabot, a seaman of Genoese blood born and
bred in England, sailed with an English crew from Bristol in
1497, and pushed along the coast of America to the south as
far as Florida, and northward as high as Hudson's Bay. But
no Englishman followed on the track of this bold adventurer ;
and while Spain built up her empire in the New World, the
English seamen reaped a humbler harvest in the fisheries of
Newfoundland. It was not till the reign of Elizabeth that
the thoughts of Englishmen turned again to the New World.
The dream of finding a passage to Asia by a voyage round
the northern coast of the American continent drew a west-
country seaman, Martin Frobisher, to the coast of Labrador ;
and the news which he brought back of the existence of gold
mines there set adventurers cruising among the icebergs of
Baffin's Bay. Luckily the quest of gold proved a vain one ;
and the nobler spirits among those who had engaged in it
turned to plans of colonization. But the country, vexed by
long winters and thinly peopled by warlike tribes of Indians,
gave a rough welcome to the earlier colonists. After a fruit
less attempt to form a settlement, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, one
of the noblest spirits of his time, turned homewards again, to
find his fate in the stormy seas. "We are as near to heaven
by sea as by land," were the famous words he was heard to
utter, ere the light of his little bark was lost forever in the
darkness of the night. An expedition sent by his half-brother,
Sir Walter Ralegh, explored Pamlico Sound; and the country
they discovered, a country where, in their poetic fancy, " men

1634] PURITAN ENGLAND 641
lived after the manner of the Golden Age," received from
Elizabeth, the Virgin queen, the name of Virginia. The
introduction of tobacco and of the potato into Europe dates
from Ralegh's discovery ; but the energy of his settlers was
distracted by the delusive dream of gold, the hostility of the
native tribes drove them from the coast, and it is through the
gratitude of later times for what he strove to do, rather than
for what he did, that Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina,
preserves his name. The first permanent settlement on the
Chesapeake was effected in the beginning of the reign of
James the First, and its success was due to the conviction
of the settlers that the secret of the New World's conquest
lay simply in labor. Among the hundred and five colonists
who originally landed, forty-eight were gentlemen, and only
twelve were tillers of the soil. Their leader, John Smith,
however, not only explored the vast bay of Chesapeake and
discovered the Potomac and the Susquehanna, but held the
little company together in the face of famine and desertion
till the colonists had learnt the lesson of toil. In his letters
to the colonizers at home he set resolutely aside the dream of
gold. " Nothing is to be expected thence," he wrote of the
new country, " but by labor " ; and supplies of laborers, aided
by a wise allotment of lands to each colonist, secured after
five years of struggle the fortunes of Virginia. " Men fell
to building houses and planting corn " ; the very streets of
Jamestown, as their capital was called from the reigning sov
ereign, were sown with tobacco ; and in fifteen years the
colony numbered five thousand souls.
The laws and representative institutions of England were
first introduced into the New World in the settlement of Vir
ginia; some years later a principle as unknown to England
as it was to the greater part of Europe found its home in
another colony, which received its name of Maryland from
Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles the First. Calvert,
Lord Baltimore, one of the best of the Stuart counselors, was
forced by his conversion to Catholicism to seek a shelter for
himself and colonists of his new faith in the district across
the Potomac and round the head of the Chesapeake. As a
purely Catholic settlement was impossible, he resolved to
open the new colony to men of every faith. " No person

642 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1620
within this province," ran the earliest law of Maryland, "pro
fessing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall be in any ways troub
led, molested, or discountenanced for his or her religion, or
in the free exercise thereof." Long, however, before Lord
Baltimore's settlement in Maryland, only a few years indeed
after the settlement of Smith in Virginia, the church of
Brownist or Independent refugees, whom we saw driven in
the reign of James to Amsterdam, had resolved to quit Hol
land and find a home in the wilds of the New World. They
were little disheartened by the tidings of suffering which
came from the Virginian settlement. " We are well weaned,"
wrote their minister, John Robinson, " from the delicate milk
of the mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a
strange land : the people are industrious and frugal. We
are knit together as a body in a most sacred covenant of the
Lord, of the violation whereof we make great conscience, and
by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care
of each other's good and of the whole. It is not with us as
with men whom small things can discourage." Returning
from Holland to Southampton, they started in two small ves
sels for the new land ; but one of these soon put back, and
only its companion, the Mayflcwer, a bark of a hundred and
eighty tons, with forty-one emigrants and their families on
board, persisted in prosecuting its voyage. The little com
pany of the " Pilgrim Fathers," as after-times loved to call
them, landed on the barren coast of Massachusetts at a spot
to which they gave the name of Plymouth, in memory of the
last English port at which they touched. They had soon
to face the long hard winter of the north, to bear sickness
and famine : even when these years of toil and suffering had
passed there was a time when " they knew not at night where
to have a bit in the morning." Resolute and industrious as
they were, their progress was very slow ; and at the end of
ten years they numbered only three hundred souls. But
small as it was, the colony was now firmly established and the
struggle for mere existence was over. " Let it not be griev
ous unto you," some of their brethren had written from Eng
land to the poor emigrants in the midst of their sufferings,
" that you have been instrumental to break the ice for others.
The honor shall be yours to the world's end."

1630] PURITAN ENGLAND 643
From the moment of their establishment the eyes of the
English Puritans were fixed on the little Puritan settlement
in North America. Through the early years of Charles proj
ects were canvassed for a new settlement beside the little
Plymouth; and the aid which the merchants of Boston in
Lincolnshire gave to the realization of this project was acknowl
edged in the name of its capital. At the moment when he
was dissolving his third Parliament, Charles granted the char
ter which established the colony of Massachusetts ; and by
the Puritans at large the grant was at once regarded as a
Providential call. Out of the failure of their great constitu
tional struggle, and the pressing danger to " godliness " in
England, rose the dream of a land in the West where religion
and liberty could find a safe and lasting home. The Parlia
ment was hardly dissolved, when " conclusions " for the es
tablishment of a great colony on the other side the Atlantic
were circulating among gentry and traders, and descriptions
of the new country of Massachusetts were talked over in
every Puritan household. The proposal was welcomed with
the quiet, stem enthusiasm which marked the temper of the
time ; but the words of a well-known emigrant show how hard
it was even for the sternest enthusiasts to tear themselves from
their native land. " I shall call that my country," said the
younger Winthrop, in answer to feelings of this sort, " where
I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dear
est friends." The answer was accepted, and the Puritan
emigration began on a scale such as England had never
before seen. The two hundred who first sailed for Salem
were soon followed by John Winthrop with eight hundred
men ; and seven hundred more followed ere the first year of
the king's personal rule had run its course. Nor were the
emigrants, like the earlier colonists of the south, "broken
men," adventurers, bankrupts, criminals ; or simply poor men
and artisans, like the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower.
They were in great part men of the professional and middle
classes; some of them men of large landed estate, some
zealous clergymen like Cotton, Hooker, and Roger Williams,
some shrewd London lawyers, or young scholars from Oxford.
The bulk were God-fearing farmers from Lincolnshire and
the eastern counties.. They desired in fact "only the best"
42

644 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1630
as sharers in their enterprise; men driven forth from their
fatherland not by earthly want, or by the greed of gold, or
by the lust of adventure, but by the fear of God, and the
zeal for a godly worship. But strong as was their zeal, it was
not without a wrench that they tore themselves from their
English homes. " Farewell, dear England ! " was the cry
which burst from the first little company of emigrants as its
shores faded from their sight. "Our hearts," wrote Winthrop's
followers to the brethren whom they had left behind, " shall
be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we
shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness."
During the next two years, as the sudden terror which had
found so violent an outlet in Eliot's warnings died for the
moment away, there was a lull in the emigration. But the
measures of Laud soon revived the panic of the Puritans.
The shrewdness of James had read the very heart of the man
when Buckingham pressed for his first advancement to the
see of St. David's. " He hath a restless spirit," said the old
king, " which cannot see when things are well, but loves to
toss and change, and to bring matters to a pitch of reforma
tion floating in his own brain. Take him with you, but by
my soul you will repent it." Cold, pedantic, superstitious as
he was (he notes in his diary the entry of a robin-redbreast
into his study as a matter of grave moment), William Laud
rose out of the mass of court prelates by his industry, his
personal unselfishness, his remarkable capacity for adminis
tration. At a later period, when immersed in State business,
he found time to acquire so complete a knowledge of com
mercial affairs that the London merchants themselves owned
him a master in matters of trade. Of statesmanship indeed
he had none. But Laud's influence was really derived from
the unity of his purpose. He directed all the power of a
clear, narrow mind and a dogged will to the realization of a
single aim. His resolve was to raise the Church of England
to what he conceived to be its real position as a branch,
though a reformed branch, of the great Catholic Church
throughout the world ; protesting alike against the innova
tions of Rome and the innovations of Calvin, and basing its
doctrines and usages on those of the Christian communion in
the centuries which preceded the Council of Nicaea. The

1633] PURITAN ENGLAND 645
first step in the realization of such a theory was the severance
of whatever ties had hitherto united the English Church to
the Reformed Churches of the Continent. In Laud's view
episcopal succession was of the essence of a Church, and by
their rejection of bishops, the Lutheran and Calvinistic
Churches of Germany and Switzerland had ceased to be
Churches at all. The freedom of worship therefore which
had been allowed to the Huguenot refugees from France,
or the Walloons from Flanders, was suddenly withdrawn;
and the requirement of conformity with the Anglican ritual
drove them in crowds from the southern ports to seek tolera
tion in Holland. The same conformity was required from
the English soldiers and merchants abroad, who had hitherto
attended without scruple the services of the Calvinistic
Churches. The English ambassador in Paris was forbidden
to visit the Huguenot conventicle at Charenton. As Laud
drew further from the Protestants of the Continent, he drew,
consciously or unconsciously, nearer to Rome. His theory
owned Rome as a true branch of the Church, though severed
from that of England by errors and innovations against which
Laud -vigorously protested. But with the removal of these
obstacles reunion would naturally follow, and his dream was
that of bridging over the gulf which ever since the Reforma
tion had parted the two Churches. The secret offer of a
cardinal's hat proved Rome's sense that Laud was doing his
work for her; while his rejection of it, and his own reiterated
protestations, prove equally that he was doing it uncon
sciously. Union with the great body of Catholicism, indeed,
he regarded as a work which only time could bring about,
but for which he could prepare the Church of England by
raising it to a higher standard of Catholic feeling and Catholic
practise. The great obstacle in his way was the Puritanism
of nine tenths of the English people, and on Puritanism he
made war without mercy. No sooner had his elevation to
the see of Canterbury placed him at the head of the English
Church, than he turned the High Commission into a standing
attack on the Puritan ministers. Rectors and vicars were
scolded, suspended, deprived for " Gospel preaching." The
use of the surplice, and the ceremonies most offensive to
Puritan feeling, were enforced in every parish. The lectures

646 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1633
founded in towns, which were the favorite posts of Puritan
preachers, were rigorously suppressed. They found a refuge
among the country gentlemen, and the archbishop withdrew
from the country gentlemen the privilege of keeping chap
lains, which they had till then enjoyed. As parishes became
vacant the High Church bishops had long been filling them
with men who denounced Calvinism and declared passive
obedience to the sovereign to be part of the law of God. The
Puritans soon felt the stress of this process, and endeavored
to meet it by buying up the appropriations of livings, and
securing through feoffees a succession of Protestant ministers
in the parishes of which they were patrons ; but Laud cited
the feoffees before the Court of Exchequer, and roughly put
an end to them. Nor was the persecution confined to the
clergy. Under the two last reigns the small pocket Bibles
called the Geneva Bibles had become universally popular
amongst English laymen; but their marginal notes were
found to savor of Calvinism, and their importation was pro
hibited. The habit of receiving the communion in a sitting
posture had become common, but kneeling was now enforced,
and hundreds were excommunicated for refusing to comply
with the injunction. A more galling means of annoyance was
found in the different views of the two religious parties on the
subject of Sunday. The Puritans identified the Lord's day
with the Jewish Sabbath, and transferred to the one the strict
observances which were required for the other. The Laudian
clergy, on the other hand, regarded it simply as one among the
holidays of the Church, and encouraged their flocks in the
pastimes and recreations after service which had been common
before the Reformation. The Crown under James had taken
part with the high churchmen, and had issued a " Book of
Sports" which recommended certain games as lawful and
desirable on the Lord's day. The Parliament, as might be
expected, was stoutly on the other side, and had forbidden
Sunday pastimes by statute. The general religious sense of
the country was undoubtedly tending to a stricter observance
of the day, when Laud brought the contest to a sudden issue.
He summoned the Chief Justice Richardson, who had en
forced the statute in the western shires, to the council-table,
and rated him so violently that the old man came out com-

1633] PURITAN ENGLAND 647
plaining he had been all but choked by a pair of lawn
sleeves. He then ordered every minister to read the declara
tion in favor of Sunday pastimes from the pulpit. One Puri
tan minister had the wit to obey, and to close the reading with
the significant hint, " You have heard read, good people, both
the commandment of God and the commandment of man.
Obey which you please." But the bulk refused to comply with
the archbishop's will. The result followed at which Laud no
doubt had aimed. Puritan ministers were cited before the
High Commission and silenced or deprived. In the diocese
of Norwich alone thirty parochial ministers were expelled
from their cures.
The suppression of Puritanism in the ranks of the clergy
was only a preliminary to the real work on which the arch
bishop's mind was set, the preparation for Catholic reunion
by the elevation of the clergy to a Catholic standard in doc
trine and ritual. Laud publicly avowed his preference of an
unmarried to a married priesthood. Some of the bishops, and
a large part of the new clergy who occupied the posts from
which the Puritan ministers had been driven, advocated doc
trines and customs which the Reformers had denounced as
sheer papistry ; the practise, for instance, of auricular confes
sion, a real Presence in the Sacrament, or prayers for the dead.
One prelate, Montague, was earnest for reconciliation with
Rome. Another, Goodman, died acknowledging himself a
papist. Meanwhile Laud was indefatigable in his efforts to
raise the ci-vil and political status of the clergy to the point
which it had reached ere' the fatal blow of the Reformation
fell on the priesthood. Among the archives of his see lies a
large and costly volume in vellum, containing a copy of such
records in the Tower as concerned the privileges of the clergy.
Its compilation was entered in the archbishop's diary as one
among the "twenty-one things which I have projected to do
if God bless me in them," and as among the fifteen to which
before his fall he had been enabled to add his emphatic
" done." The power of the bishops' courts, which had long
fallen into decay, revived under his patronage. In 1636 he was
able to induce the king to raise a prelate, Juxon, Bishop of
London, to the highest civil post in the realm, that of lord
high treasurer. "No churchman had it since Henry the

648 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1633
Seventh's time," Laud comments proudly. " I pray God
bless him to carry it so that the Church may have honor, and
the State service and content by it. And now, if the Church
will not hold up themselves, under God I can do no more."
As he aimed at a more Catholic standard of doctrine in the
clergy, so he aimed at a nearer approach to the pomp of
Catholicism in public worship. His conduct in his own house
at Lambeth brings out with singular vividness the reckless cour
age with which he threw himself across the religious instincts
of a time when the spiritual aspect of worship was overpow
ering in most men's minds its esthetic and devotional sides.
Men noted as a fatal omen the accident which marked his
first entry into Lambeth ; for the overladen ferry-boat upset
in the passage of the river, and though the horses and servants
were saved, the archbishop's coach remained at the bottom
of the Thames. But no omen, carefully as he might note it,
brought a moment's hesitation to the bold, narrow mind of the
new primate. His first act, he boasted, was the setting about
a restoration of his chapel; and, as Laud managed it, his
restoration was the simple undoing of all that had been done
there by his predecessors since the Reformation. The chapel
of Lambeth House was one of the most conspicuous among
the ecclesiastical buildings of the time ; it had seen the daily
worship of every primate since Cranmer, and was a place
"whither many of the nobility, judges, clergy, and persons of
all sorts, as well strangers as natives, resorted." But all pomp
of worship had gradually passed away from it. Under Cran
mer the stained glass was dashed from its windows. In
Elizabeth's time the communion table was moved into the
middle of the chapel, and the credence table destroyed.
Under James Archbishop Abbot put the finishing stroke on
all attempts at a high ceremonial. The cope was no longer
used as a special vestment in the communion. The primate
and his chaplains forbore to bow at the name of Christ. The
organ and choir were alike abolished, and the service reduced
to a simplicity which would have satisfied Calvin. To Laud
the state of the chapel seemed intolerable. With characteris
tic energy he aided with his own hands in the replacement of
the painted glass in its windows, and racked his wits in piecing
the fragments together. The glazier was scandalized by the

1633] PURITAN ENGLAND 649
primate's express command to repair and set up again the
" broken crucifix " in the east window. The holy table was
removed from the center, and set altar-wise against the east
ern wall, with a cloth of arras behind it, on which was em
broidered the history of the Last Supper. The elaborate
woodwork of the screen, the rich copes of the chaplain, the
silver candlesticks, the credence table, the organ and the choir,
the stately ritual, the bowings at the sacred name, the genu
flections to the altar, made the chapel at last such a model of
worship as Laud desired. If he could not exact an equal pomp
of devotion in other quarters, he exacted as much as he could.
Bowing to the altar was introduced into all cathedral churches.
A royal injunction ordered the removal of the communion
table, which for the last half century or more had in almost
every parish church stood in the middle of the nave, back to
its pre-Reformation position in the chancel, and secured it
from profanation by a rail. The removal implied, and was
understood to imply, are cognition of the real Presence, and a
denial of the doctrine which Englishmen generally held about
the Lord's Supper. But, strenuous as was the resistance
Laud encountered, his pertinacity and severity warred it down.
Parsons who denounced the chalnge from their pulpits were
fined, imprisoned, and deprived of their benefices. Church
wardens who refused or delayed to obey the injunction were
rated at the commission table, and frightened into compliance.
In their last remonstrance to the king the Commons had
denounced Laud as the chief assailant of the Protestant
character of the Church of England ; and every year of his
primacy showed him bent upon justifying the accusation.
His policy was no longer the purely conservative policy of
Parker or Whitgift; it was aggressive and revolutionary.
His "new counsels" threw whatever force there was in the
feeling of conservatism into the hands of the Puritan, for it
was the Puritan who now seemed to be defending the old
character of the Church of England against its primate's
attacks. But backed as Laud was by the power of the
Crown, the struggle became more hopeless every day.
While the Catholics owned that they had never enjoyed
a like tranquillity, while the fines for recusancy were re
duced, and their worship suffered to go on in private houses.

6SO HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1633
the Puritan saw his ministers silenced or deprived, his Sab
bath profaned, the most sacred act of his worship brought
near, as he fancied, to the Roman mass. Roman doctrine
met him from the pulpit, Roman practises met him in the
Church. We can hardly wonder that with such a world
around them " godly people in England began to apprehend
a special hand of Providence in raising this plantation " in
Massachusetts ; " and their hearts were generally stirred to
come over." It was in vain that weaker men returned to
bring news of hardships and dangers, and told how two hun
dred of the newcomers had perished with their first winter.
A letter from Winthrop told how the rest toiled manfully on.
" We now enjoy God and Jesus Christ," he wrote to those
at home, " and is not that enough ? I thank God I like so
well to be here as I do not repent my coming. I would not
have altered my course though I had foreseen all these
afflictions. I never had more content of mind." With the
strength and manliness of Puritanism, its bigotry and nar
rowness had crossed the Atlantic too. Roger Williams, a
young minister who held the doctrine of freedom of con
science, was driven from the new settlement, to become a
preacher among the settlers of Rhode Island. The bitter
resentment stirred in the emigrants by persecution at home
was seen in their rejection of episcopacy and their prohibi
tion of the use of the Book of Common Prayer. The inten
sity of its religious sentiments turned the colony into a
theocracy. " To the end that the body of the Commons
may be preserved of honest and good men, it was ordered
and agreed that for the time to come no man shall be admitted
to the freedom of the body politic but such as are members
of some of the churches within the bounds of the same."
As the contest grew hotter at home the number of Puritan
emigrants rose fast. Three thousand new colonists arrived
from England in a single year. The growing stream of emi
grants marks the terrible pressure of the time. Between the
sailing of Winthrop's expedition and the assembly of the
Long Parliament, in the space, that is, of ten or eleven years,
two hundred emigrant ships had crossed the Atlantic, and
twenty thousand Englishmen had found a refuge in the West.

1629] PURITAN ENGLAND 65 1
Section V. — The Personal Government, 1629-1640
At the opening of his third Parliament Charles had hinted
in ominous words that the continuance of Parliament at all
depended on its compliance with his will. " If you do not
your duty," said the king, " mine would then order me to use
those other means which God has put into my hand." The
threat, however, failed to break the resistance of the Com
mons, and the ominous words passed into a settled policy.
" We have showed," said a proclamation which followed on
the dissolution of the Houses, " by our frequent meeting our
people, our love to the use of Parliament ; yet, the late abuse
having for the present driven us unwillingly out of that
course, we shall account it presumption for any to prescribe
any time unto us for Parliament."
No Parliament in fact met for eleven years. But it would
be unfair to charge the king at the outset of this period with
any definite scheme of establishing a tyranny, or of changing
what he conceived to be the older constitution of the realm.
He " hated the very name of Parliaments," but in spite of
his hate he had as yet no settled purpose of abolishing them.
His belief was that England would in time recover its senses,
and that then Parliament might reassemble without incon
venience to the Crown. In the interval, however long it
might be, he proposed to govern single-handed by the use of
" those means which God had put into his hands." Resist
ance, indeed, he was resolved to put down. The leaders of
the popular party in the last Parliament were thrown into
prison ; and Eliot died, the first martyr of English liberty,
in the Tower. Men were forbidden to speak of the reas
sembling of a Parliament. But here the king stopped. The
opportunity which might have suggested dreams of organized
despotism to a Richelieu, suggested only means of filling his
Exchequer to Charles. He had in truth neither the grander
nor the meaner instincts of a born tyrant. He did not seek
to gain an absolute power over his people, because he be
lieved that his absolute power was already a part of the con
stitution of the country. He set up no standing army to
secure it, partly because he was poor, but yet more because
his faith -in his position was such that he never dreamed of

652 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1629
any effectual resistance. His expedients for freeing the
Crown from that dependence on Parliaments against which
his pride as a sovereign revolted were simply peace and
economy. To secure the first he sacrificed an opportunity
greater than ever his father had trodden under foot. The
fortunes of the great struggle in Germany were suddenly
reversed at this juncture by the appearance of Gustavus
Adolphus, with a Swedish army, in the heart of Germany.
Tilly was defeated and slain ; the Catholic League humbled
in the dust ; Munich, the capital of its Bavarian leader, occu
pied by the Swedish army, and the Lutheran princes of
North Germany freed from the pressure of the imperial
soldiery ; while the emperor himself, trembling within the
walls of Vienna, was driven to call for aid from Wallenstein,
an adventurer whose ambition he dreaded, but whose army
could alone arrest the progress of the Protestant conqueror.
The ruin that James had wrought was suddenly averted ; but
the victories of Protestantism had no more power to draw
Charles out of the petty circle of his politics at home than
its defeats had had power to draw James out of the circle of
his imbecile diplomacy. When Gustavus, on the point of
invading Germany, appealed for aid to England and France,
Charles, left penniless by the dissolution of Parliament,
resolved on a policy of peace, withdrew his ships from the
Baltic, and opened negotiations with Spain which brought
about a treaty on the virtual basis of an abandonment of the
Palatinate. Ill luck clung to him in peace as in war. The
treaty was hardly concluded when Gusta-vus began his won
derful career of victory. Charles strove at once to profit by
his success, and a few Scotch and English regiments followed
Gustavus in his reconquest of the Palatinate. But the con
queror demanded, as the price of its restoration to Frederick,
that Charles should again declare war upon Spain ; and this
was a price that the king would not pay, determined as he
was not to plunge into a combat which would again force him
to summon Parliament. His whole attention was absorbed
by the pressing question of revenue. The debt was a large
one ; and the ordinary income of the Crown, unaided by
parliamentary supplies, was inadequate to meet its ordinary
expenditure. Charles himself was frugal and laborious ; and

1630] PURITAN ENGLAND 653
the economy of Weston, the new lord treasurer, whom he
made Earl of Portland, contrasted advantageously with the
waste and extravagance of the government under Bucking
ham. But economy failed to close the yawning gulf of the
treasury, and the course into which Charles was driven by
the financial pressure showed with how wise a prescience the
Commons had fixed on the point of arbitrary taxation as the
chief danger to constitutional freedom.
It is curious to see to what shifts the royal pride was
driven in its effort at once to fill the Exchequer, and yet to
avoid, as far as it could, any direct breach of constitutional
law in the imposition of taxes by the sole authority of the
Crown. The dormant powers of the prerogative were strained
to their utmost. The right of the Crown to force knighthood
on the landed gentry was revived, in order to squeeze them
into composition for the refusal of it. Fines were levied on
them for the redress of defects in their title-deeds. A Com
mission of the Forests exacted large sums from the neigh
boring landowners for their encroachments on Crown lands.
London, the special object of courtly dislike, on account of
its stubborn Puritanism, was brought within the sweep of
royal extortion by the enforcement of an illegal proclama
tion which James had issued, prohibiting its extension.
Every house throughout the large suburban districts in which
the prohibition had been disregarded was only saved from
demolition by the payment of three years' rental to the
Crown. Though the Catholics were no longer troubled by
any active persecution, and the lord treasurer was in heart
a papist, the penury of the Exchequer forced the Crown to
maintain the old system of fines for "recusancy." Vexatious
measures of extortion such as these were far less hurtful to
the State than the conversion of justice into a means of sup
plying the royal necessities by means of the Star Chamber.
The jurisdiction of the king's council had been revived by
Wolsey as a check on the nobles ; and it had received great
development, especially on the side of criminal law, during
the Tudor reigns. Forgery, perjury, riot, maintenance, fraud,
libel, and conspiracy were the chief offenses cognizable in
this court, but its scope extended to every misdemeanor, and
especially to charges where, from the imperfection of the

6S4 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1630
common law, or the power of offenders, justice was baffled
in the lower courts. Its process resembled that of Chancery :
in State trials it acted on an information laid before it by the
king's attorney. Both witnesses and accused were examined
on oath by special interrogatories, and the court was at lib
erty to adjudge any punishment short of death. However
distinguished the Star Chamber was in ordinary cases for the
learning and fairness of its judgments, in political trials it
was impossible to hope for exact and impartial justice from
a tribunal almost entirely composed of privy councilors. The
possession of such a weapon would have been fatal to liberty
under a great tyrant ; under Charles it was turned freely to
the profit of the Exchequer and the support of arbitrary rule.
Enormous penalties were exacted for opposition to the royal
will, and though the fines imposed were often remitted, they
served as terrible engines of oppression. Fines such as these,
however, affected a smaller range of sufferers than the finan
cial expedient to which Weston had recourse in the renewal
of monopolies. Monopolies, abandoned by Elizabeth, and
extinguished by act of Parliament under James, were again
set on foot, and on a scale far more gigantic than had been
seen before, the companies who undertook them paying a
fixed duty on their profits as well as a large sum for the origi
nal concession of the monopoly. Wine, soap, salt, and almost
every article of domestic consumption fell into the hands of
monopolists, and rose in price out of all proportion to the
profit gained by the Crown. "They sup in our cup," Cole-
pepper said afterwards in the Long Parliament, " they dip in
our dish, they sit by our fire ; we find them in the dye fat,
the wash-bowls, and the powdering tub. They share with
the cutler in his box. They have marked and sealed us from
head to foot." But in spite of these expedients the treasury
would have remained unfilled had not the king persisted in
those financial measures which had called forth the protest
of the Parliament. The exaction of customs duties went on
as of old at the ports. The resistance of the London mer
chants to their payment was roughly put down; and one
of them. Chambers, who complained bitterly that merchants
were worse off in England than in Turkey, was brought
before the Star Chamber and ruined by a fine of two thou-

1630] PURITAN ENGLAND 655
sand pounds. It was by measures such as these that Charles
gained the bitter enmity of the great city whose strength and
resources were fatal to him in the coming war. The free
holders of the counties were equally difficult to deal with.
On one occasion, when those of Cornwall were called together
at Bodmin to contribute to a voluntary loan, half the hun
dreds refused, and the yield of the rest came to little more
than two thousand pounds. One of the Cornish-men has left
an amusing record of the scene which took place before the
commissioners appointed for assessment of the loan. " Some
with great words and threatenings, some with persuasions,"
he says, " were drawn to it. I was like to have been compli
mented out of my money ; but knowing with whom I had to
deal, I held, when I talked with them, my hands fast in my
pockets." By such means as these the debt was reduced, and the
annual revenue of the Crown increased. Nor was there
much sign of active discontent. Vexatious indeed and ille
gal as were the proceedings of the Crown, there seems in
these earlier years of personal rule to have been little appre
hension of any permanent danger to freedom in the country
at large. To those who read the letters of the time there is
something inexpressibly touching in the general faith of their
writers in the ultimate victory of the law. Charles was obsti
nate, but obstinacy was too common a foible amongst Eng
lishmen to rouse any vehement resentment. The people were
as stubborn as their king, and their political sense told them
that the slightest disturbance of affairs must shake down the
financial fabric which Charles was slowly building up, and
force him back on subsidies and a Parliament. Meanwhile
they would wait for better days, and their patience was aided
by the general prosperity of the country. The great Con
tinental wars threw wealth into English hands. The inter
course between Spain and Flanders was carried on solely in
English ships, and the English flag covered the intercourse
between Portuguese ports and the colonies in Africa, India,
and the Pacific. The long peace was producing its inevitable
results in an extension of commerce and a rise of manufac
tures in the towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Fresh
land was being brought into cultivation, and a great scheme

6S6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1629
was set on foot for reclaiming the Fens. The new wealth of
the country gentry, through the increase of rent, was seen in
the splendor of the houses which they were raising. The con
trast of this peace and prosperity with the ruin and bloodshed
of the Continent afforded a ready argument to the friends of
the king's system. So tranquil was the outer appearance of
the country that in court circles all sense of danger had dis
appeared. " Some of the greatest statesmen and privy coun
cilors," says May, "would ordinarily laugh when the word,
'liberty of the subject,' was named." There were courtiers
bold enough to express their hope that "the king would never
need any more Parliaments." But beneath this outer calm
" the country," Clarendon honestly tells us while eulogizing
the peace, "was full of pride and mutiny and discontent."
Thousands were quitting England for America. The gentry
held aloof from the court. " The common people in the gen
erality and the country freeholders would rationally argue of
their own rights and the oppressions which were laid upon
them." If Charles was content to deceive himself, there was
one man among his ministers who saw that the people were
right in their policy of patience, and that unless other meas
ures were taken the fabric of despotism would fall at the first
breath of adverse fortune.
Sir Thomas Wentworth, a great Yorkshire landowner and
one of the representatives of his county, had stood during the
Parliament of 1628 among the more prominent members of
the popular party in the Commons. But from the first mo
ment of his appearance in public his passionate desire had
been to find employment in the service of the Crown. At
the close of the preceding reign he was already connected
with the court, he had secured a seat in Yorkshire for one of
the royal ministers, and was believed to be on the highroad
to a peerage. But the consciousness of political ability which
spurred his ambition roused the jealousy of Buckingham ;
and the haughty pride of Wentworth was flung by repeated
slights into an attitude of opposition, which his eloquence —
grander in its sudden outbursts, though less earnest and sus
tained, than that of Eliot — soon rendered formidable. His
intrigues at court roused Buckingham to crush by a signal
insult the rival whose genius he instinctively dreaded. While

1629] PURITAN ENGLAND 657
sitting in his court as sheriff of Yorkshire, Wentworth re
ceived the announcement of his dismissal from office, and of
the gift of his post to Sir John Savile, his rival in the county.
" Since they will thus weakly breathe on me a seeming dis
grace in the public face of my country," he said with a char
acteristic outburst of contemptuous pride, " I shall crave leave
to wipe it away as openly, as easily! " His whole conception
of a strong and able rule revolted against the miserable gov
ernment of the favorite. Wentworth's aim was to force on
the king, not such a freedom as Eliot longed for, but such a
system as the Tudors had clung to, where a large and noble
policy placed the sovereign naturally at the head of the people,
and where Parliaments sank into mere aids to the Crown.
But before this could be, Buckingham must be cleared away.
It was with this end that Wentworth sprang to the front of
the Commons in urging the Petition of Right. Whether in
that crisis of Wentworth's life some nobler impulse, some true
passion for the freedom he was to trample underfoot, min
gled with his thirst for revenge, it is hard to tell. But his
words were words of fire. "If he did not faithfully insist for
the common liberty of the subject to be preserved whole and
entire," it was thus he closed one of his speeches on the
Petition, " it was his desire that he might be set as a beacon
on a hill for all men else to wonder at."
It is as such a beacon that his name has stood from that
time to this. The death of Buckingham had no sooner
removed the obstacle that stood between his ambition and
the end at which it had aimed throughout, than the cloak of
patriotism was flung by. Wentworth was admitted to the
royal council, and he took his seat at the board determined,
to use his own phrase, to " vindicate the Monarchy forever
from the conditions and restraints of subjects." So great
was the faith in his zeal and power which he knew how to
breathe into his royal master that he was at once raised to
the peerage, and placed with Laud in the first rank of the
king's councilors. Charles had good ground for this rapid
confidence in his new minister. In Wentworth, or as he is
known from the title he assumed at the close of his life, in
the Earl of Strafford, the very genius of tyranny was em
bodied. If he shared his master's belief that the arbitrary

658 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1629
power which Charles was wielding formed part of the old
constitution of the country, and that the Commons had gone
out of their " ancient bounds " in limiting the royal preroga
tive, he was clear-sighted enough to see that the only way of
permanently establishing absolute rule in England was not
by reasoning, or by the force of custom, but by the force of
fear. His system was the expression of his own inner
temper; and the dark gloomy countenance, the full heavy
eye, which meet us in Strafford's portrait, are the best com
mentary on his policy of " Thorough." It was by the sheer
strength of his genius, by the terror his violence inspired
amid the meaner men whom Buckingham had left, by the
general sense of his power, that he had forced himself upon
the court. He had none of the small arts of a courtier. His
air was that of a silent, proud, passionate man ; when he first
appeared at Whitehall his rough uncourtly manners provoked
a smile in the royal circle. But the smile soon died into a
general hate. The queen, frivolous and meddlesome as she
was, detested him ; his fellow ministers intrigued against him,
and seized on his hot speeches against the great lords, his
quarrels with the royal household, his transports of passion
at the very council-table, to ruin him in his master's favor.
The king himself, while steadily supporting him against his
rivals, was utterly unable to understand his drift. Charles
valued him as an administrator, disdainful of private ends,
crushing great and small with the same haughty indifference
to men's love or hate, and devoted to the one aim of building
up the power of the Crown. But in his purpose of preparing
for the great struggle with freedom which he saw before him,
of building up by force such a despotism in England as
Richelieu was building up in France, and of thus making
England as great in Europe as France had been made by
Richelieu, he could look for little sympathy and less help
from the king.
Wentworth's genius turned impatiently to a sphere where
it could act alone, untrammeled by the hindrances it encoun
tered at home. His purpose was to prepare for the coming
contest by the provision of a fixed revenue, arsenals, for
tresses, and a standing army, and it was in Ireland that he
resolved to find them. He saw in the miserable country

1633] PURITAN ENGLAND 659
which had hitherto been a drain upon the resources of the
Crown the lever he needed for the overthrow of English free
dom. The balance of Catholic against Protestant in Ireland
might be used to make both parties dependent on the royal
authority; the rights of conquest, which in Wentworth's
theory vested the whole land in the absolute possession of
the Crown, gave him a large field for his administrative abil
ity; and for the rest he trusted, and trusted justly, to the
force of his genius and of his will. In 1633 he was made
lord deputy, and five years later his aim seemed all but
realized. "The king," he wrote to Laud, "is as absolute
here as any prince in the world can be." Wentworth's gov
ernment, indeed, was a rule of terror. Archbishop Usher,
with almost every name which we can respect in the island,
was the object of his insult and oppression. His tyranny
strode over all legal bounds. A few insolent words, con
strued as mutiny, were enough to bring Lord Mountnorris
before a council of war, and to inflict on him a sentence of
death. But his tyranny aimed at public ends, and in Ireland
the heavy hand of a single despot delivered the mass of the
people at any rate from the local despotism of a hundred
masters. The Irish landowners were for the first time made
to feel themselves amenable to the law. Justice was enforced,
outrage was repressed, the condition of the clergy was to some
extent raised, the sea was cleared of the pirates who infested
it. The foundation of the linen manufacture which was to
bring wealth to Ulster, and the first development of Irish com
merce, date from the lieutenancy of Wentworth. But good
government was only a means with him for further ends.
The noblest work to be done in Ireland was the bringing
about a reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant, and
an obliteration of the anger and thirst for vengeance which
had been raised by the Ulster Plantation. Wentworth, on
the other hand, angered the Protestants by a toleration of
Catholic worship and a suspension of the persecution which
had feebly begun against the priesthood, while he fed the
irritation of the Catholics by schemes for a Plantation of Con
naught. His purpose was to encourage a disunion which left
both parties dependent for support and protection on the
Crown. It was a policy which was to end in bringing about
43

66o HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1634
the horrors of the Irish revolt, the vengeance of Cromwell,
and the long series of atrocities on both sides which make the
story of the country he ruined so terrible to tell. But for
the hour it left Ireland helpless in his hands. He doubled
the revenue. He reorganized the army. To provide for its
support he ventured, in spite of the panic with which Charles
heard his project, to summon an Irish Parliament. His aim
was to read a lesson to England and the king, by showing
how completely that dreaded thing, a Parliament, could be
made the organ of the royal will ; and his success was com
plete. Two thirds, indeed, of an Irish House of Commons
consisted of the representatives of wretched villages, the
pocket boroughs of the Crown ; while absent peers were forced
to entrust their proxies to the council to be used at its pleasure.
But precautions were hardly needed. The two Houses trem
bled at the stern master who bade their members not let the
king " find them muttering, or, to speak it more truly, mutiny
ing in corners," and voted with a perfect docility the means
of maintaining an army of five thousand foot and five hundred
horse. Had the subsidy been refused, the result would have
been the same. " I would undertake," wrote Wentworth,
" upon the peril of my head, to make the king's army able to
subsist and provide for itself among them without their help."
While Wentworth was thus working out his system of
"Thorough" on one side of St. George's Channel, it was
being carried out on the other by a mind inferior, indeed,
to his own in genius, but almost equal to it in courage and
tenacity. On Weston's death, in 1635, Laud became virtually
first minister at the English council-board. We have already
seen with what a reckless and unscrupulous activity he was
crushing Puritanism in the English Church, and driving Puri
tan ministers from English pulpits ; and in this work his new
position enabled him to back the authority of the High Com
mission by the terrors of the Star Chamber. It was a work,
indeed, which to Laud's mind was at once civil and religious :
he had allied the cause of ecclesiastical organization with that
of absolutism in the State ; and, while borrowing the power of
the Crown to crush ecclesiastical liberty, he brought the in
fluence of the Church to bear on the ruin of civil freedom.
But his power stopped at the Scotch frontier. Across the

1572] PURITAN ENGLAND 66l
border stood a Church with bishops, indeed, but without a
ritual, modeled on the doctrine and system of Geneva, Cal
vinist in teaching, and to a great extent in government. The
mere existence of such a Church gave countenance to English
Puritanism, and threatened in any hour of ecclesiastical weak
ness to bring a dangerous influence to bear on the Church of
England. With Scotland, indeed. Laud could only deal in
directly through Charles, for the king was jealous of any
interference of his English ministers or Parliament with his
northern kingdom. But Charles was himself earnest to deal
with it. He had imbibed his father's hatred of all that tended
to Presbyterianism, and from the outset of his reign he had
been making advance after advance towards the more com
plete establishment of episcopacy. To understand, however,
what had been done, and the relations which had by this time
grown up between Scotland and its king, we must take up
again the thread of its history which we broke at the moment
when Mary fled for refuge over the English border.
After a few years of wise and able rule, the triumph of
Protestantism under the Earl of Murray had been interrupted
by his assassination, by the revival of the queen's faction,
and by the renewal of civil war. The next regent, the child
king's grandfather, was slain in a fray ; but under the strong
hand of Morton the land won a short breathing space. Edin
burgh, the last fortress held in Mary's name, surrendered to
an English force sent by Elizabeth; and its captain, Kirk
caldy of Grange, was hanged for treason in the market-place,
while the stem justice of Morton forced peace upon the war
ring lords. The people of the Lowlands, indeed, were now
stanch for the new faith; and the Protestant Church rose
rapidly after the death of Knox into a power which appealed
at every critical juncture to the deeper feelings of the nation
at large. In the battle with Catholicism the bishops had
clung to the old religion; and the ne-w faith, left without
episcopal interference, and influenced by the Genevan train
ing of Knox, borrowed from Calvin its model of Church
government, as it borrowed its theology. The system of
Presbyterianism, as it grew up at the outset without direct
recognition from the law, not only bound Scotland together
as it had never been bound before by its administrative

662 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1577
organization, its Church synods and general assemblies, but
by the power it gave the lay elders in each congregation, and
by the summons of laymen in an overpowering majority to
the earlier assemblies, it called the people at large to a voice,
and, as it proved, a decisive voice, in the administration of
affairs. If its government by ministers gave it the outer
look of an ecclesiastical despotism, no Church constitution
has proved in practise so democratic as that of Scotland.
Its influence in raising the nation at large to a consciousness
of its own power is shown by the change which passes, from
the moment of its final establishment, over the face of Scotch
history. The sphere of action to which it called the people
was in fact not a mere ecclesiastical but a national sphere;
and the power of the Church was felt more and more over
nobles and king. When after five years the union of his
rivals put an end to Morton's regency, the possession of
the young sovereign, James the Sixth, and the exercise of the
royal authority in his name, became the constant aim of the
factions who were tearing Scotland to pieces. As James
grew to manhood, however, he was strong enough to break
the yoke of the lords, and to become master of the great
houses that had so long overawed the Crown. But he was
farther than ever from being absolute master of his realm.
Amidst the turmoil of the Reformation a new force had come
to the front. This was the Scotch people which had risen
into being under the guise of the Scotch Kirk. Melville, the
greatest of the successors of Knox, claimed for the eccle
siastical body an independence of the State which James
hardly dared to resent, while he struggled helplessly beneath
the sway which public opinion, expressed through the general
assembly of the Church, exercised over the civil government.
In the great crisis of the Armada his hands were fettered by
the league with England which it forced upon him. The
democratic boldness of Calvinism allied itself with the spiritual
pride of the Presbyterian ministers in their dealings with the
Crown. Melville in open council took James by the sleeve,
and called him " God's silly vassal." " There are two kings,"
he told him, " and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ
Jesus the King, and His Kingdom the Kirk, whose subject
James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor

i6o6] PURITAN ENGLAND 663
a lord, nor a head, but a member." The words and tone of
the great preacher were bitterly remembered when James
mounted the English throne. "A Scottish presbytery," he
exclaimed years afterwards at the Hampton Court Conference,
" as well fitteth with Monarchy as God and the devil I No
bishop, no king ! " But Scotland was resolved on " no bishop."
Episcopacy had become identified among the more zealous
Scotchmen with the old Catholicism they had shaken off.
When he appeared at a later time before the English council-
table, Melville took the Archbishop of Canterbury by the
sleeves of his rochet, and, shaking them in his manner,
called them Romish rags, and marks of the Beast. Four
years, therefore, after the ruin of the Armada, episcopacy
was formally abolished, and the Presbyterian system estab
lished by law as the mode of government of the Church of
Scotland. The rule of the Church was placed in a general
assembly, with subordinate provincial synods, presbyteries,
and Kirk sessions, by which its discipline was carried down
to every member of a congregation. All that James could
save was the right of being present at the general assembly,
and of fixing a time and place for its annual meeting. But
James had no sooner succeeded to the English throne than
he used his new power in a struggle to undo the work which
had been done. In spite of his assent to an act legalizing its
annual convention, he hindered any meeting of the general
assembly for five successive years by repeated prorogations.
The protests of the clergy were roughly met. When nine
teen ministers constituted themselves an assembly, they were
banished as traitors from the realm. Of the leaders who
remained the boldest were summoned with Andrew Melville
to confer with the king in England on his projects of change.
On their refusal to betray the freedom of the Church they
were committed to prison ; and an epigram which Melville
wrote on the usages of the English communion was seized on
as a ground for bringing him before the English privy council.
He was sent to the Tower, and released after some years of
imprisonment only to go into exile. Deprived of their leaders,
threatened with bonds and exile, deserted by the nobles, ill
supported as yet by the mass of the people, the Scottish min
isters bent before the pressure of the Crown. Bishops were

664 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i6ia
allowed to act as presidents in their synods ; and episcopacy
was at last formally recognized in the Scottish Church. The
pulpits were bridled. The general assembly was brought to
submission. The ministers and elders were deprived of their
right of excommunicating offenders, save with a bishop's
sanction. A Court of High Commission enforced the suprem
acy of the Crown. But with this assertion of his royal au
thority James was content. His aim was political rather than
religious, and in seizing on the control of the Church through
his organized prelacy, he held himself to have won back that
mastery of his realm which the Reformation had reft from
the Scottish kings. The earlier policy of Charles followed
his father's line of action. It effected little save a partial
restoration of Church lands, which the lords were forced to
surrender. But Laud's vigorous action soon made itself felt.
His first acts were directed rather to points of outer ob
servance than to any attack on the actual fabric of Presby
terian organization. The estates were induced to withdraw
the control of ecclesiastical apparel from the assembly, and
to commit it to the Crown ; a step soon followed by a resump
tion of their episcopal costume on the part of the Scotch
bishops. When the Bishop of Moray preached before Charles
in his rochet, on the king's visit to Edinburgh, it was the first
instance of its use since the Reformation. The innovation
was followed by the issue of a royal warrant which directed
all ministers to use the surplice in divine worship. From
costume, however, the busy minister soon passed to weightier
matters. Many years had gone by since he had vainly invited
James to draw his Scotch subjects "to a nearer conjunction
with the Liturgy and Canons of this nation." " I sent him
back again," said the shrewd old king, " with the frivolous
draft he had drawn. For all that, he feared not my anger, but
assaulted me again with another ill-fangled platform to make
that stubborn Kirk stoop more to the English platform ; but
I durst not play fast and loose with my word. He knows not
the stomach of that people." But Laud knew how to wait,
and his time had come at last. He was resolved to put an
end to the Presbyterian character of the Scotch Church
altogether, and to bring it to a uniformity with the Church of
England. A book of canons issued by the sole authority

1633] PURITAN ENGLAND 665
of the king placed the government of the Church absolutely
in the hands of its bishops ; no Church assembly might be
summoned but by the king, no alteration in worship or disci
pline introduced but by his permission. As daring a stretch
of the prerogative superseded what was known as Knox's
Liturgy — the book of common order drawn up on the Genevan
model by that Reformer, and generally used throughout Scot
land — by a new Liturgy based on the English Book of
Common Prayer. The Liturgy and Canons drawn up by four
Scottish bishops were laid before Laud ; in their composition
the general assembly had neither been consulted nor recog
nized ; and taken together they formed the code of a political
and ecclesiastical system which aimed at reducing Scotland
to an utter subjection to the Crown. To enforce them on the
land was to effect a revolution of the most serious kind. The
books, however, were backed by a royal injunction, and Laud
flattered himself that the revolution had been wrought.
Triumphant in Scotland, with the Scotch Church — as he
fancied — at his feet. Laud's hand still fell heavily on the
English Puritans. There were signs of a change of temper
which might have made even a bolder man pause. Thou
sands of "the best," scholars, merchants, lawyers, farmers,
were flying over the Atlantic to seek freedom and purity of
religion in the wilderness. Great landowners and nobles were
preparing to follow. Ministers were quitting their parson
ages rather than abet the royal insult to the sanctity of the
Sabbath. The Puritans who remained among the clergy
were giving up their homes rather than consent to the change
of the sacred table into an altar, or to silence in their protests
against the new popery. The noblest of living Englishmen
refused to become the priest of a Church whose ministry
could only be "bought with servitude and forswearing." We
have seen John Milton leave Cambridge, self-dedicated "to
that same lot, however mean or high, to which time leads me
and the will of Heaven." But the lot to which these called
him was not the ministerial office to which he had been des
tined from his childhood. In later life he told bitterly the
story, how he had been " Church-outed by the prelates."
" Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what
tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take

666 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1633
orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which
unless he took with a conscience that would retch he must
either straight perjure or split his faith, I thought it better to
prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speak
ing, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." In
spite, therefore, of his father's regrets, he retired to a new
home which the scrivener had found at Horton, a village in
the neighborhood of Windsor, and quietly busied himself
with study and verse. The poetic impulse of the Renascence
had been slowly dying away under the Stuarts. The stage
was falling into mere coarseness and horror ; Shakspere had
died quietly at Stratford in Milton's childhood ; the last and
worst play of Ben Jonson appeared in the year of his settle
ment at Horton ; and though Ford and Massinger still lin
gered on there were no successors for them but Shirley and
Davenant. The philosophic and meditative taste of the age
had produced indeed poetic schools of its own : poetic satire
had become fashionable in Hall, better known afterwards as
a bishop, and had been carried on vigorously by George
Wither ; the so-called " metaphysical " poetry, the vigorous
and pithy expression of a cold and prosaic good sense, began
with Sir John Davies, and buried itself in fantastic affectations
in Donne; religious verse had become popular in the gloomy
allegories of Quarles and the tender refinement which strug
gles through a jungle of puns and extravagances in George
Herbert. But what poetic life really remained was to be
found only in the caressing fancy and lively badinage of
lyric singers like Herrick, whose grace is untouched by pas
sion and often disfigured by coarseness and pedantry ; or in
the school of Spenser's more direct successors, where Browne
in his pastorals, and the two Fletchers, Phineas and Giles, in
their unreadable allegories, still preserved something of their
master's sweetness, if they preserved nothing of his power.
Milton was himself a Spenserian ; he owned to Dryden in
later years " that Spenser was his original," and in some of
his earliest lines at Horton he dwells lovingly on " the sage
and solemn tones " of the "Faerie Queen," its "forests and
enchantments drear, where more is meant than meets the
ear." But of the weakness and affectation which character
ized Spenser's successors he had not a trace. In the " Alle-

CHARLES T IN THE STUDIO OF VAN DYCK.
Photogravure from an engraving after a painting by
Robert A. Muller.

1633] PURITAN ENGLAND 667
gro " and " Penseroso," the first results of his retirement at
Horton, we catch again the fancy and melody of the Eliza
bethan verse, the wealth of its imagery, its wide sympathy
with nature and man. There is a loss, perhaps, of the older
freedom and spontaneity of the Renascence, a rhetorical
rather than passionate turn in the young poet, a striking
absence of dramatic power, and a want of subtle precision
even in his picturesque touches. Milton's imagination is not
strong enough to identify him with the world which he imag
ines ; he stands apart from it, and looks at it as from a distance,
ordering it and arranging it at his will. But if in this respect
he falls, both in his earlier and later poems, far below Shak
spere or Spenser, the deficiency is all but compensated by his
nobleness of feeling and expression, the severity of his taste,
his sustained dignity, and the perf ectness and completeness of
his work. The moral grandeur of the Puritan breathes, even
in these lighter pieces of his youth, through every line. The
" Comus," planned as a mask for the festivities which the
Earl of Bridgewater was holding at Ludlow Castle, rises into
an almost impassioned pleading for the love of virtue.
The historic interest of Milton's " Comus " lies in its form
ing part of a protest made by the more cultured Puritans at
this time against the gloomier bigotry which persecution was
fostering in the party at large. The patience of English
men, in fact, was slowly wearing out. There was a sudden
upgrowth of virulent pamphlets of the old Martin Marprelate
type. Men, whose names no one asked, hawked libels,
whose authorship no one knew, from the door of the trades
man to the door of the squire. As the hopes of a Parliament
grew fainter, and men despaired of any legal remedy, violent
and weak-headed fanatics came, as at such times they always
come, to the front. Leighton, the father of the saintly arch
bishop of that name, had given a specimen of their tone at
the outset of this period, by denouncing the prelates as men
of blood, episcopacy as Antichrist, and the popish queen as
a daughter of Heth. The " Histrio-mastix " of Prynne, a law
yer distinguished for his constitutional knowledge, but the
most obstinate and narrow-minded of men, marked the deep
ening of Puritan bigotry under the fostering warmth of Laud's
persecution. The book was an attack on players as the min-

668 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1634
isters of Satan, on theaters as the devil's chapels, on hunting.
May-poles, the decking of houses at Christmas with evergreens,
on cards, music, and false hair. The attack on the stage was
as offensive to the more cultured minds among the Puritan
party as to the court itself; Selden and Whitelock took a
prominent part in preparing a grand mask by which the
Inns of Court resolved to answer its challenge, and in the fol
lowing year Milton wrote his mask of " Comus " for Lud
low Castle. To leave Prynne, however, simply to the censure
of wiser men than himself was too sensible a course for the
angry primate. No man was ever sent to prison before or
since for such a sheer mass of nonsense ; but a passage in the
book was taken as a reflection on the queen, and his sentence
showed the hard cruelty of the primate. Prynne was dis
missed from the bar, deprived of his university degree, and
set in the pillory. His ears were clipped from his head, and
he was taken back to prison. But the storm of popular pas
sion which was gathering was not so pressing a difficulty to
the royal ministers at this time as the old difficulty of the
Exchequer. The ingenious devices of the court lawyers, the
revived prerogatives, the illegal customs, the fines and confis
cations which were alienating one class after another and
sowing in home after home the seeds of a bitter hatred to the
Crown, were insufficient to meet the needs of the treasury ;
and new exactions were necessary at a time when the rising
discontent made every new exaction a challenge to revolt. A
fresh danger had suddenly appeared in an alliance of France
and Holland which threatened , English dominion over the
Channel ; and there were rumors of a proposed partition of
the Spanish Netherlands between the two powers. It was
necessary to put a strong fleet on the seas ; and the money
which had to be found at home was procured by a stretch of
the prerogative which led afterwards to the great contest over
ship-money. The legal research of Noy, one of the law offi
cers of the Crown, found precedents among the records in the
Tower for the provision of ships for the king's use by the port
towns of the kingdom, and for the furnishing of their equip
ment by the maritime counties. The precedents dated from
times when no permanent fleet existed, and when sea warfare
was waged by vessels lent for the moment by the various

1635] PURITAN ENGLAND 669
ports. But they were seized as a means of equipping a per
manent navy without cost to the exchequer ; the first demand
for ships was soon commuted into a demand of money for the
payment of ships ; and the writs which were issued to Lon
don and the chief English ports were enforced by fine and
imprisonment. When Laud took the direction of affairs a
more vigorous and unscrupulous impulse made itself felt. To
Laud as to Wentworth, indeed, the king seemed overcautious,
the Star Chamber feeble, the judges overscrupulous. " I am
for Thorough," the one writes to the other in alternate fits of
impatience at the slow progress they are making. Wentworth
was anxious that his good work might not "be spoiled on
that side." Laud echoed the wish, while he envied the free
course of the lord lieutenant. "You have a good deal of
honor here," he writes, "for your proceeding. Go on a'
God's name. I have done with expecting of Thorough on this
side." The financial pressure was seized by both to force the
king on to a bolder course. " The debt of the Crown being
taken off," Wentworth urged, "you may govern at your will."
All pretense of precedents was thrown aside, and Laud
resolved to find a permanent revenue in the conversion of the
"ship-money," till now levied on ports and the maritime
counties, into a general tax imposed by the royal will upon
the whole country. " I know no reason," Wentworth had
written significantly, "but you may as well rule the com
mon lawyers in England as I, poor beagle, do here"; and
the judges no sooner declared the new impost to be legal than
he drew the logical deduction from their decision. " Since it
is lawful for the king to impose a tax for the equipment of
the navy, it must be equally so for the levy of an army : and
the same reason which authorizes him to levy an army to
resist, will authorize him to carry that army abroad that he
may prevent invasion. Moreover, what is law in England is
law also in Scotland and Ireland. The decision of the
judges will therefore make the king absolute at home and for
midable abroad. Let him only abstain from war for a few
years that he may habituate his subjects to the payment of
that tax, and in the end he will find himself more powerful
and respected than any of his predecessors." But there were
men who saw the danger to freedom in this levy of ship-

670 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH; PEOPLE [1636
money as clearly as Wentworth himself. The bulk of the
country party abandoned all hope of English freedom. There
was a sudden revival of the emigration to New England ; and
men of blood and fortune now prepared to seek a new home
in the West. Lord Warwick secured the proprietorship of
the Connecticut valley. Lord Saye and Sele and Lord
Brooke began negotiations for transporting themselves to the
New World. Oliver Cromwell is said, by a doubtful tradi
tion, to have only been prevented from crossing the seas by
a royal embargo. It is more certain that Hampden pur
chased a tract of land on the Narragansett. John Hampden,
a friend of Eliot's, a man of consummate ability, of unequaled
power of persuasion, of a keen intelligence, ripe learning, and
a character singularly pure and lovable, had already shown
the firmness of his temper in his refusal to contribute to the
forced loan of 1627. He now repeated his refusal, declared
ship-money an illegal impost, and resolved to rouse the spirit
of the country by an appeal for protection to the law.
The news of Hampden's resistance thrilled through Eng
land at a moment when men were roused by the news of
resistance in the north. The patience of Scotland had found
an end at last. While England was waiting for the opening
of the great cause of ship-money, peremptory orders from the
king forced the clergy of Edinburgh to introduce the new
service into their churches. But the prayer-book was no
sooner opened at the Church of St. Giles's than a murmur
ran through the congregation, and the murmur soon grew
into a formidable riot. The church was cleared and the
service read; but the rising discontent frightened the judges
into a decision that the royal writ enjoined the purchase, and
not the use, of the prayer-book. Its use was at once discon
tinued, and the angry orders which came from England for
its restoration were met by a shower of protests from every
part of Scotland. The Duke of Lennox alone took sixty-
eight petitions with him to the court ; while ministers, nobles,
and gentry poured into Edinburgh to organize the national
resistance. The effect of these events in Scotland was at
once seen in the open demonstration of discontent south of
the border. The prison with which Laud had rewarded
Prynne's bulky quarto had tamed his spirit so little that a

1637] PURITAN ENGLAND 671
new tract written within its walls attacked the bishops as
devouring wolves and lords of Lucifer. A fellow prisoner,
John Bastwick, declared in his "Litany" that "hell was
broke loose, and the devils in surplices, hoods, copes, and
rochets were come among us." Burton, a London clergy
man silenced by the High Commission, called on all Chris
tians to resist the bishops as " robbers of souls, limbs of the
Beast, and factors of Antichrist." Raving of this sort might
have been passed by had not the general sympathy shown
how fast the storm of popular passion was rising. Prynne
and his fellow pamphleteers, when Laud dragged them be
fore the Star Chamber as "trumpets of sedition," listened
with defiance to their sentence of exposure in the pillory
and imprisonment for life ; and the crowd who filled Palace
Yard to witness their punishment groaned at the cutting off
of their ears, and " gave a great shout " when Prynne urged
that the sentence on him was contrary to the law. A hun
dred thousand Londoners lined the road as they passed on
the way to prison ; and the journey of these " Martyrs," as
the spectators called them, was like a triumphal progress.
Startled as he was at the sudden burst of popular feeling.
Laud remained dauntless as ever. Prynne's entertainers as
he passed through the country were summoned before the
Star Chamber, while the censorship struck fiercer blows at
the Puritan press. But the real danger lay not in the libels
of silly zealots, but in the attitude of Scotland, and in the
effect which was being produced in England at large by the
trial of Hampden. For twelve days the cause of ship-money
was solemnly argued before the full bench of judges. It
was proved that the tax in past times had been levied only
in cases of sudden emergency, and confined to the coast and
port towns alone, and that even the show of legality had been
taken from it by formal statute : it was declared a breach
of the "fundamental laws" of England. The case was
adjourned, but the discussion told not merely on England
but on the temper of the Scots. Charles had replied to their
petitions by a simple order to all strangers to leave the capi
tal. But the council at Edinburgh was unable to enforce
his order; and the nobles and gentry before dispersing to
their homes named a body of delegates, under the odd title

672 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1638
of "the Tables," who carried on through the winter a series
of negotiations with the Crown. The negotiations were in
terrupted in the following spring by a renewed order for
their dispersion, and for the acceptance of a prayer-book;
while the judges in England delivered at last their long-
delayed decision on Hampden's case. Two judges only
pronounced in his favor, though three followed them on
technical grounds. The majority, seven in number, gave
judgment against him. The broad principle was laid down
that no statute prohibiting arbitrary taxation could be pleaded
against the king's will. " I never read or heard," said Judge
Berkley, " that lex was rex, but it is common and most true
that rex is lex." Finch, the chief justice, summed up the
opinions of his fellow judges. " Acts of Parliament to take
away the king's royal power in the defense of his kingdom
are void," he said : . . . " they are void acts of Parliament
to bind the king not to command the subjects, their persons,
and goods, and I say their money too, for no acts of Parlia
ment make any difference."
" I wish Mr. Hampden and others to his likeness," the lord
deputy wrote bitterly from Ireland, "were well whipt into
their right senses." Amidst the exultation of the court over
the decision of the judges, Wentworth saw clearly that Hamp
den's work had been done. His resistance had roused Eng
land to a sense of the danger to her freedom, and forced into
light the real character of the royal claims. How stern and
bitter the temper even of the noblest Puritans had become at
last we see in the poem which Milton produced at this time,
his elegy of " Lycidas." Its grave and tender lament is
broken by a sudden flash of indignation at the dangers around
the Church, at the " blind mouths that scarce themselves know
how to hold a sheep-hook," and to whom "the hungry sheep
look up, and are not fed," while "the grim wolf" of Rome
"with privy paw daily devours apace, and nothing said ! " The
stern resolve of the people to demand justice on their tyrants
spoke in his threat of the ax. Wentworth and Laud, and
Charles himself, had yet to reckon with "that two-handed
engine at the door" which stood "ready to smite once, and
smite no more." But stern as was the general resolve, there
was no need for immediate action, for the difficulties which were

1638] PURITAN ENGLAND 673
gathering in the north were certain to bring a strain on the
Government which would force it to seek support from the
people. The king's demand for immediate submission, which
reached Edinburgh while England was waiting for the Hamp
den judgment, at once gathered the whole body of remon
strants together round " the Tables " at Edinburgh ; and a
protestation, read at Edinburgh and Stirling, was followed, on
Johnston of Warriston's suggestion, by a renewal of the Cove
nant with God which had been drawn up and sworn to in a
previous hour of peril, when Mary was still plotting against
Protestantism, and Spain was preparing its Armada. " We
promise and swear," ran the solemn engagement at its close,
" by the great name of the Lord our God to continue in the
profession and obedience of the said religion, and that we
shall defend the same, and resist all their contrary errors and
corruptions, according to our vocation and the utmost of that
power which God has put into our hands all the days of our
life." The Covenant was signed in the churchyard of the
Gray Friars at Edinburgh, in a tumult of enthusiasm, " with
such content and joy as those who, having long before been
outlaws and rebels, are admitted again into covenant with
God." Gentlemen and nobles rode with the documents in
their pockets over the country, gathering subscriptions to it,
while the ministers pressed for a general consent to it from
the pulpit. But pressure was needless. " Such was the zeal
of subscribers that for a while many subscribed with tears on
their cheeks " ; some were indeed reputed to have " drawn
their own blood and used it in place of ink to underwrite their
names." The force given to Scottish freedom by this revival
of religious fervor was seen in the new tone adopted by the
Covenanters. The Marquis of Hamilton, who came as royal
commissioner to put an end to the quarrel, was at once met
by demands for an abolition of the Court of High Commis
sion, the withdrawal of the books of Canons and Common
Prayer, a free Parliament, and a free general assembly. It
was in vain that he threatened war ; even the Scotch council
pressed Charles to give fuller satisfaction to the people. " I
will rather die," the king wrote to Hamilton, " than yield to
these impertinent and damnable demands " ; but it was need-
iul to gain time. " The discontents at home," wrote Lord

674 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1639
Northumberland to Wentworth, "do rather increase than
lessen " : and Charles was without money or men. It was in
vain that he begged for a loan from Spain on promise of
declaring war against Holland, or that he tried to procure two
thousand troops from Flanders with which to occupy Edin
burgh. The loan and troops were both refused, and some
contributions offered by the English Catholics did little to
recruit the Exchequer. Charles had directed the marquis to
delay any decisive breach till the royal fleet appeared in the
Forth ; but it was hard to equip a fleet at all. Scotland in
deed was sooner ready for war than the king. The Scotch
volunteers who had been serving in the Thirty Years' war
streamed home at the call of their brethren. General Leslie,
a veteran trained under Gustavus, came from Sweden to take
the command of the new forces. A voluntary war-tax was
levied in every shire. The danger at last forced the king to
yield to the Scotch demands ; but he had no sooner yielded
than the concession was withdrawn, and the assembly hardly
met before it was called upon to disperse. By an almost
unanimous vote, however, it resolved to continue its session.
The innovations in worship and discipline were abolished,
episcopacy was abjured, the bishops deposed, and the system
of Presbyterianism reestablished in its fullest extent. The
news that Charles was gathering an army at York, and
reckoning for support on the scattered loyalists in Scotland
itself, was answered by the seizure of Edinburgh, Dumbarton,
and Stirling; while 10,000 well-equipped troops under Leslie
and the Earl of Montrose entered Aberdeen, and brought the
Catholic Earl of Huntly a prisoner to the south. Instead of
overawing the country, the appearance of the royal fleet in
the Forth was the signal for Leslie's march with 20,000 men
to the border. Charles had hardly pushed across the Tweed,
when the " old little crooked soldier," encamping on the hill
of Dunse Law, fairly offered him battle.
Charles however, without money to carry on war, was
forced to consent to the gathering of a free assembly and of a
Scotch Parliament. But in his eyes the pacification at Ber
wick was a mere suspension of arms ; his summons of Went
worth from Ireland was a proof that violent measures were
in preparation, and the Scots met the challenge by seeking

1640] PURITAN ENGLAND 675
for aid from France. The discovery of a correspondence
between the Scotch leaders and the French court raised
hopes in the king that an appeal to the country for aid
against Scotch treason would still find an answer in English
loyalty. Wentworth, who was now made Earl of Strafford,
had never ceased to urge that the Scots should be whipped
back to their border; he now agreed with Charles that a
Parliament should be called, the correspondence laid before
it, and advantage taken of the burst of indignation on which
the king counted, to procure a heavy subsidy. While Charles
summoned what from its brief duration is known as the Short
Parliament, Strafford hurried to Ireland to levy forces. In
fourteen days he had obtained money and men from his ser
vile Parliament, and he came back flushed with his success,
in time for the meeting of the Houses at Westminster. But
the lesson failed in its effect. Every member of the Com
mons knew that Scotland was fighting the battle of English
liberty. All hope of bringing them to any attack upon the
Scots proved fruitless. The intercepted letters were quietly
set aside, and the Commons declared as of old that redress
of grievances must precede the grant of supplies. No sub
sidy could be granted till security was had for religion, for
property, and for the liberties of Parliament. An offer to
relinquish ship-money failed to draw Parliament from its
resolve, and after three weeks' sitting it was dissolved.
"Things must go worse before they go better" was the cool
comment of St. John, one of the patriot leaders. But the
country was strangely moved. " So great a defection in the
kingdom," wrote Lord Northumberland, "hath not been
known in the memory of man." Strafford alone stood un
daunted. He urged that, by the refusal of the Parliament to
supply the king's wants, Charles was " freed from all rule of
government," and entitled to supply himself at his will. The
earl was bent upon war, and took command of the royal army,
which again advanced to the north. But the Scots were ready
to cross the border ; forcing the passage of the Tyne in the
face of an English detachment, they occupied Newcastle,
and despatched from that town their proposals of peace.
They prayed the king to consider their grievances, and,
" with the advice and consent of the estates of England con-
44

6y6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1640
vened in Parliament, to settle a firm and desirable peace."
The prayer was backed by preparations for a march upon
York, where Charles had abandoned himself to despair.
Strafford's troops were a mere mob ; neither by threats nor
prayers could he recall them to their duty, and he was forced
to own that two months were required before they could be
fit for action. It was in vain that Charles won a truce.
Behind him in fact England was all but in revolt. The
London apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, and broke
up the sittings of the High Commission at St. Paul's. The
war was denounced everywhere as " the Bishops' war," and
the new levies murdered officers whom they suspected of
papistry, broke down altar rails in every church they passed,
and deserted to their homes. Two peers. Lord Wharton and
Lord Howard, ventured to lay before the king himself a peti
tion for peace with the Scots ; and though Strafford arrested
and proposed to shoot them as mutineers, the English coun
cil shrank from desperate courses. The king still strove to
escape from the humiliation of calling a Parliament. He
summoned a great council of the peers at York. But his
project broke down before its general repudiation by the
nobles ; and with wrath and shame at his heart Charles was
driven to summon again the Houses to Westminster.
Section VI. — The Long Parliament, 1640-1644
If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the
leader of the Commons from the first meeting of the new
Houses at Westminster, stands out for all after-time as the
embodiment of law. A Somersetshire gentleman of good
birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life in the
Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at
its close. He had been a leading member in that of 1620,
and one of the "twelve ambassadors" for whom James or
dered chairs to be set at Whitehall. Of the band of patriots
with whom he had stood side by side in the constitutional
struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles he was
almost the sole survivor. Coke had died of old age ; Cotton's
heart was broken by oppression ; Eliot had perished in the
Tower; Wentworth had apostatized. Pym alone remained.

1640] PURITAN ENGLAND 677
resolute, patient as of old ; and as the sense of his greatness
grew silently during the eleven years of deepening misrule,
the hope and faith of better things clung almost passionately
to the man who never doubted of the final triumph of free
dom and the law. At their close. Clarendon tells us, in words
all the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, " he was
the most popular man, and the most able to do hurt, that has
lived at any time." He had shown he knew how to wait,
and when waiting was over he showed he knew how to act.
On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England
to quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come
at last ; and on the assembling of the Commons he took his
place, not merely as member for Tavistock, but as their ac
knowledged head. Few of the country gentlemen, indeed,
who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any previous
House ; and of the few, none represented in so eminent a
way the parliamentary tradition on which the coming strug
gle was to turn. Pym's eloquence, inferior in boldness and
originality to that of Eliot or Wentworth, was better suited
by its massive and logical force to convince and guide a
great party ; and it was backed by a calmness of temper, a
dexterity and order in the management of public business,
and a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which
gave a form and method to parliamentary proceedings such
as they had never had before. Valuable, however, as these
qualities were, it was a yet higher quality which raised Pym
into the greatest, as he was the first, of parliamentary leaders.
Of the five hundred members who sat round him at St.
Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen,
and as clearly resolved ho-w to meet, the difficulties which
lay before them. It was certain that Parliament would be
drawn into a struggle with the Crown. It was probable that
in such a struggle the House of Commons would be ham
pered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of
Lords. The legal antiquaries of the older constitutional
school stood helpless before such a conflict of coordinate
powers, a conflict for which no provision had been made by
the law, and on which precedents threw only a doubtful and
conflicting light. But with a knowledge of precedent as
great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp

678 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1640
of constitutional principles. He was the first English states
man who discovered, and applied to the political circumstances
around him, what may be called the doctrine of constitutional
proportion. He saw that as an element of constitutional life
Parliament was of higher value than the Crown ; he saw, too,
that in Parliament itself the one essential part was the House
of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy
in the contest which followed. When Charles refused to act
with the Parliament, Pym treated the refusal as a temporary
abdication on the part of the sovereign, which vested the
executive power in the two Houses until new arrangements
were made. When the Lords obstructed public business, he
warned them that obstruction would only force the Commons
"to save the kingdom alone." Revolutionary as these prin
ciples seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as
bases of our constitution since the days of Pym. The first
principle was established by the Convention and Parliament
which followed on the departure of James the Second ; the
second by the acknowledgment on all sides since the Reform
Bill of 1832 that the government of the country is really in
the hands of the House of Commons, and can only be carried
on by ministers who represent the majority of that House.
Pym's temper, indeed, was the very opposite of the temper
of a revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in their
range of sympathy or action. Serious as his purpose was,
his manners were genial, and even courtly : he turned easily
from an invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady Car
lisle ; and the grace and gaiety of his social tone, even when
the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him to
his grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the
prurient royalists. It was this striking combination of genial
versatility with a massive force in his nature which marked
him out from the first moment of power as a born ruler of
men. He proved himself at once the subtlest of diplomatists
and the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at home
in tracking the subtle intricacies of royalist intrigues, or in
kindling popular passion with words of fire. Though past
middle life when his work really began, for he was born in
1584, four years before the coming of the Armada, he dis
played from the first meeting of the Long Parliament the

1640] PURITAN ENGLAND 679
qualities of a great administrator, an immense faculty for
labor, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of
inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and
moderation under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage,
an iron will. No English ruler has ever shown greater noble
ness of natural temper or a wider capacity for government
than the Somersetshire squire whom his enemies, made clear
sighted by their hate, greeted truly enough as " King Pym."
His ride over England with Hampden on the eve of the
elections had been hardly needed, for the summons of a Par
liament at once woke the kingdom to a fresh life. The Puri
tan emigration to New England was suddenly and utterly
suspended; "the change," said Winthrop, "made all men to
stay in England in expectation of a new world." The public
discontent spoke from every Puritan pulpit, and expressed
itself in a sudden burst of pamphlets, the first-fruits of the
thirty thousand which were issued in the next twenty years,
and which turned England at large into a school of political
discussion. The resolute looks of the members as they gath
ered at Westminster contrasted with the hesitating words of
the king, and each brought from borough or county a petition
of grievances. Fresh petitions were brought every day by
bands of citizens or farmers. Forty committees were ap
pointed to examine and report on them, and their reports
formed the grounds on which the Commons acted. Prynne
and his fellow " martyrs," recalled from their prisons, entered
London in triumph amidst the shouts of a great multitude
who strewed laurel in their path. The Commons dealt roughly
with the agents of the royal system. In every county a list of
" delinquents," or officers who had carried out the plans of the
Government, was ordered to be prepared and laid before the
House. But their first blow was struck at the leading minis
ters of the king. Even Laud was not the center of so great
and universal a hatred as the Earl of Strafford. Strafford's
guilt was more than the guilt of a servile instrument of
tyranny, it was the guilt of " that grand apostate to the Com
monwealth, who," in the terrible words which closed Lord
Digby's invective, " must not expect to be pardoned in this
world till he be despatched to the other." He was conscious
of his danger, but Charles forced him to attend the court ;

680 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1641
and with characteristic boldness he resolved to anticipate
attack by accusing the parliamentary leaders of a treasonable
correspondence with the Scots. He was just laying his
scheme before Charles when the news reached him that Pym
was at the bar of the Lords with his impeachment for high
treason. "With speed," writes an eye-witness, "he comes
to the House : he calls rudely at the door," and, "with a proud
glooming look, makes towards his place at the board head.
But at once many bid him void the House, so he is forced
in confusion to go to the door till he was called." He was
only recalled to hear his committal to the Tower. He was still
resolute to retort the charge of treason on his foes, and
" offered to speak, but was commanded to be gone without
a word." The keeper of the Black Rod demanded his sword
as he took him in charge. " This done, he makes through
a number of people towards his coach, no man capping to
him, before whom that morning the greatest of all England
would have stood uncovered." The blow was quickly fol
lowed up. Windebank, the secretary of state, was charged
with corrupt favoring of recusants, and escaped to France ;
Finch, the lord keeper, was impeached, and fled in terror
over sea. Laud himself was thrown into prison. The shadow
of what was to come falls across the pages of his diary, and
softens the hard temper of the man into a strange tenderness.
" I stayed at Lambeth till the evening," writes the archbishop,
" to avoid the gaze of the people. I went to evening prayer
in my chapel. The Psalms of the day and chapter fifty of
Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me worthy of it,
and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge, hundreds of my
poor neighbors stood there and prayed for my safety and •
return to my house. For which I bless God and them."
Charles was forced to look helplessly on at the wreck of the
royal system, for the Scotch army was still encamped in the
north; and the Parliament, which saw in the presence of
the Scots a security against its own dissolution, was in no
hurry to vote the money necessary for their withdrawal.
"We cannot do without them," Strode honestly confessed,
" the Philistines are still too strong for us." One by one the
lawless acts of Charles's government were undone. Ship-
money was declared illegal, the judgment in Hampden's

1641] PURITAN ENGLAND 68 1
case annulled, and one of the judges committed to prison.
A statute declaring "the ancient right of the subjects of this
kingdom that no subsidy, custom, impost, or any charge what
soever, ought or may be laid or imposed upon any merchan
dise exported or imported by subjects, denizens, or aliens,
without common consent in Parliament," put an end forever
to all pretensions to a right of arbitrary taxation on the part
of the Crown. A Triennial Bill enforced the assembly of the
Houses every three years, and bound the returning officers
to proceed to election if the royal writ failed to summon them.
A Committee of Religion had been appointed to consider the
question of Church Reform, and on its report the Commons
passed a bill for the removal of bishops from the House of
Lords. The king made no sign of opposition. He was known to
be resolute against the abolition of episcopacy ; but he
announced no purpose of resisting the expulsion of the
bishops from the Peers. Strafford's life he was determined
to save ; but he threw no obstacle in the way of his impeach
ment. The trial of the earl began in Westminster Hall, and
the whole of the House of Commons appeared to support it.
The passion which the cause excited was seen in the loud
cries of sympathy or hatred which burst from the crowded
benches on either side. For fifteen days Strafford struggled
with a remarkable courage and ingenuity against the list of
charges, and melted his audience to tears by the pathos of his
defense. But the trial was suddenly interrupted. Though
tyranny and misgovemment had been conclusively proved
against him, the technical proof of treason was weak. " The
law of England," to use Hallam's words, " is silent as to con
spiracies against itself," and treason by the statute of Edward
the Third was restricted to a levying of war against the king
or a compassing of his death. The Commons endeavored to
strengthen their case by bringing forward the notes of a meet
ing of a committee of the Commons in which Strafford had
urged the use of his Irish troops " to reduce this kingdom";
but the Lords would only admit the evidence on condition of
wholly reopening the case. Pym and Hampden remained
convinced of the sufficiency of the impeachment ; but the
Commons broke loose from their control, and, guided by

682 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1641
St. John and Henry Marten, resolved to abandon these judi
cial proceedings and fall back on the resource of a Bill of
Attainder. Their course has been bitterly censured by some
whose opinion in such a matter is entitled to respect. But
the crime of Strafford was none the less a crime that it did
not fall within the scope of the Statute of Treasons. It is
impossible, indeed, to provide for some of the greatest dangers
which can happen to national freedom by any formal statute.
Even now a minister might avail himself of the temper of a
Parliament elected in some moment of popular panic, and,
though the nation returned to its senses, might simply by
refusing to appeal to the country govern in defiance of its
will. Such a course would be technically legal, but such a
minister would be none the less a criminal. Strafford's
course, whether it fell within the Statute of Treasons or no,
was from beginning to end an attack on the freedom of the
whole nation. In the last resort a nation retains the right of
self-defense, and the Bill of Attainder is the assertion of such
a right for the punishment of a public enemy who falls within
the scope of no written law. To save Strafford and episco
pacy Charles seemed to assent to a proposal for entrusting
the offices of State to the leaders of the Parliament, with the
Earl of Bedford as lord treasurer; the only conditions he
made were that episcopacy should not be abolished nor Straf
ford executed. But the negotiations were interrupted by
Bedford's death, and by the discovery that Charles had been
listening all the while to counselors who proposed to bring
about his end by stirring the army to march on London, seize
the Tower, free Strafford, and deliver the king from his
thraldom to Parliament. The discovery of the Army Plot
sealed Strafford's fate. The Londoners were roused to
frenzy, and as the Peers gathered at Westminster crowds
surrounded the House with cries of "Justice." On May 8
the Lords passed the Bill of Attainder. The earl's one hope
was in the king, but two days later the royal assent was
given, and he passed to his doom. Strafford died as he had
lived. His friends warned him of the vast multitude gathered
before the Tower to witness his fall. " I know how to look
death in the face, and the people too," he answered proudly.
" I thank God I am no more afraid of death, but as cheer-

i64i] PURITAN ENGLAND 683
fully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I
went to bed." As the ax fell, the silence of the great multi
tude was broken by a universal shout of joy. The streets
blazed with bonfires. The bells clashed out from every
steeple. "Many," says an observer, "that came to town to
see the execution rode in triumph back, waving their hats,
and with all expressions of joy through every town they
went, crying, ' His head is off ! His head is off ! ' "
The failure of the attempt to establish a parliamentary
ministry, the discovery of the Army Plot, the execution of
Strafford, were the turning-points in the history of the Long
Parliament. Till May there was still hope for an accommo
dation between the Commons and the Crown by which the
freedom that had been won might have been taken as the
base of a new system of government. But from that hour
little hope of such an agreement remained. On the one
hand, the air, since the army conspiracy, was full of rumors
and panic ; the creak of a few boards revived the memory of
the Gunpowder Plot, and the members rushed out of the
House of Commons in the full belief that it was undermined.
On the other hand, Charles regarded his consent to the new
measures as having been extorted by force, and to be retracted
at the first opportunity. Both Houses, in their terror, swore
to defend the Protestant religion and the public liberties, an
oath which was subsequently exacted from every one engaged
in civil employment, and voluntarily taken by the great mass
of the people. The same terror of a counter revolution
induced Hyde and the "moderate men" in the Commons to
agree to a bill providing that the present Parliament should
not be dissolved but by its own consent. Of all the demands
of the Parliament this was the first that could be called dis
tinctly revolutionary. To consent to it was to establish a
power permanently coordinate with the Crown. Charles
signed the bill without protest, but he was already planning
the means of breaking the Parliament. Hitherto, the Scotch
army had held him down, but its payment and withdrawal
could no longer be delayed, and a pacification was arranged
between the two countries. The Houses hastened to com
plete their task of reform. The irregular jurisdictions of the
council of the north and the court of the Marches of Wales

684 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1641
had been swept away; and the civil and criminal jurisdiction
of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, the
last of the extraordinary courts which had been the support
of the Tudor monarchy, were now summarily abolished.
The work was pushed hastily on, for haste was needed. The
two armies had been disbanded ; and the Scots were no
sooner on their way homeward than the king resolved to
bring them back. In spite of prayers from the Parliament
he left London for Edinburgh, yielded to every demand of
the assembly and the Scotch Estates, attended the Presby
terian worship, lavished titles and favors on the Earl of
Argyle and the patriot leaders, and gained for a few months
a popularity which spread dismay in the English Parliament.
Their dread of his designs was increased when he was found
to have been intriguing all the while with the Earl of Mont
rose, — who had seceded from the patriot party before his
coming, and been rewarded for his secession with imprison
ment in the castle of Edinburgh, — and when Hamilton and
Argyle withdrew suddenly from the capital, and charged the
king with a treacherous plot to seize and carry them out of
the realm. The fright was fanned to frenzy by news which
came suddenly from Ireland, where the fall of Strafford had
put an end to all semblance of rule. ¦ The disbanded soldiers
of the army he had raised spread over the country, and stirred
the smoldering disaffection into a flame. A conspiracy,
organized with wonderful power and secrecy, burst forth in
Ulster, where the confiscation of the settlement had never
been forgiven, and sprea.d like wild-fire over the center and
west of the island. Dublin was saved by a mere chance;
but in the open country the work of murder went on un
checked. Thousands of English people perished in a few
days, and rumor doubled and trebled the number. Tales of
horror and outrage, such as maddened our own England
when they reached us from Cawnpore, came day after day
over the Irish Channel. Sworn depositions told how hus
bands were cut to pieces in presence of their wives, their
children's brains dashed out before their faces, their
daughters brutally violated and driven out naked to perish
frozen in the woods. "Some," says May, "were burned on
set purpose, others drowned for sport or pastime, and if they

l64i] PURITAN ENGLAND 685
swam kept from landing with poles, or shot, or murdered in
the water ; many were buried quick, and some set into the
earth breast-high and there left to famish." Much of all
this was the wild exaggeration of panic. But the revolt was
unlike any earlier rising in its religious character. It was no
longer a struggle, as of old, of Celt against Saxon, but of
Catholic against Protestant. The papists within the Pale
joined hands in it with the wild kerns outside the Pale. The
rebels called themselves " Confederate Catholics," resolved to
defend " the public and free exercise of the true and Catholic
Roman religion." The panic waxed greater when it was
found that they claimed to be acting by the king's commis
sion, and in aid of his authority. They professed to stand by
Charles and his heirs against all that should " directly and
indirectly endeavor to suppress their royal prerogatives."
They showed a commission, purporting to have been issued
by royal command at Edinburgh, and styled themselves
"the king's army." The commission was a forgery, but
belief in it was quickened by the want of all sympathy with
the national honor which Charles displayed. To him the
revolt seemed a useful check on his opponents. " I hope,"
he wrote coolly, when the news reached him, " this ill news
of Ireland may hinder some of these follies in England."
Above all, it would necessitate the raising of an army, and
with an army at his command he would again be the master
of the Parliament. The Parliament, on the other hand, saw
in the Irish revolt the disclosure of a vast scheme for a
counter revolution, of which the withdrawal of the Scotch
army, the reconciliation of Scotland, the intrigues at Edin
burgh, were all parts. Its terror was quickened into panic
by the exultation of the royalists at the king's return, and by
the appearance of a royalist party in the Parliament itself.
The new party had been silently organized by Hyde, the
future Lord Clarendon. With him stood Lord Falkland, a
man learned and accomplished, the center of a circle which
embraced the most liberal thinkers of his day, a keen rea
soner and able speaker, whose intense desire for liberty of
religious thought, which he now saw threatened by the dog
matism of the time, estranged him from Parliament, while his
dread of a conflict with the Crown, his passionate longing for

686 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1641
peace, his sympathy for the fallen, led him to struggle for a
king whom he distrusted, and to die in a cause that was not
his own. Behind Falkland and Hyde soon gathered a strong
force of supporters ; chivalrous soldiers like Sir Edmund
Verney (" I have eaten the king's bread and served him now
thirty years, and I will not do so base a thing as to desert
him "), as well as men frightened by the rapid march of
change or by the dangers which threatened episcopacy and
the Church, the partisans of the court, and the time-servers
who looked forward to a new triumph of the Crown. With
a broken Parliament, and perils gathering without, Pym
resolved to appeal for aid to the nation itself. The Grand
Remonstrance which he laid before the House was a detailed
narrative of the work which the Parliament had done, the
difficulties it had surmounted, and the new dangers which lay
in its path. The Parliament had been charged with a design
to abolish episcopacy : it declared its purpose to be simply
that of reducing the power of bishops. Politically it repudi
ated the taunt of revolutionary aims. It demanded only the
observance of the existing laws against recusancy, securities
for the due administration of justice, and the employment of
ministers who possessed the confidence of Parliament. The
new king's party fought fiercely, debate followed debate, the
sittings were prolonged till lights had to be brought in ; and
it was only at midnight, and by a majority of eleven, that the
remonstrance was finally adopted. On an attempt of the
minority to offer a formal protest against a subsequent vote
for its publication the slumbering passion broke out into a
flame. " Some waved their hats over their heads, and others
took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and
held them by the pommels in their hands, setting the lower
part on the ground." Only Hampden's coolness and tact
averted a conflict. The Remonstrance was felt on both sides
to be a crisis in the struggle. " Had it been rejected," said
Cromwell, as he left the House, " I would have sold to-mor
row all I possess, and left England forever." Listened to
sullenly by the king, it kindled afresh the spirit of the
country. London swore to live and die with the Parliament;
associations were formed in every county for the defense of
the Houses ; and when the guard which the Commons had

i64i] PURITAN ENGLAND 68?
asked for in the panic of the Army Plot was withdrawn by
the king, the populace crowded down to Westminster to take
its place.
The question which had above all broken the unity of the
Parliament had been the question of the Church. All were
agreed on the necessity of reform, and one of the first acts
of the Parliament had been to appoint a Committee of Relig
ion to consider the question. The bulk of the Commons as
of the Lords were at first against any radical changes in the
constitution or doctrines of the Church. But within as with
out the House the general opinion was in favor of a reduc
tion of the power and wealth of the prelates, as well as of the
jurisdiction of the Church courts. Even among the bishops
themselves, the more prominent saw the need for consenting
to the abolition of chapters and bishops' courts, as well as
to the election of a council of ministers in each diocese,
which had been suggested by Archbishop Usher as a check
on episcopal autocracy. A scheme to this effect was drawn
up by Bishop Williams of Lincoln ; but it was far from meet
ing the wishes of the general body of the Commons. Pym
and Lord Falkland demanded, in addition to these changes,
a severance of the clergy from all secular or State offices, and
an expulsion of the bishops from the House of Lords. Such
a measure seemed needed to restore the independence of the
Peers ; for the number and servility of the bishops were com
monly strong enough to prevent any opposition to the Crown.
There was, however, a growing party which pressed for the
abolition of episcopacy altogether. The doctrines of Cart
wright had risen into popularity under the persecution of
Laud, and Presbyterianism was now a formidable force
among the middle classes. Its chief strength lay in the
eastern counties and in London, where a few ministers such
as Calamy and Marshall had formed a committee for its dif
fusion ; while in Parliament it was represented by Lord
Mandeville and some others. In the Commons Sir Harry
Vane represented a more extreme party of reformers, the
Independents of the future, whose sentiments were little less
hostile to Presbyterianism than to episcopacy, but who acted
with the Presbyterians for the present, and formed a part of
what became known as the "root and branch party," from its

688 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1641
demand for the extirpation of prelacy. The attitude of Scot
land in the great struggle against tyranny, and the political
advantages of a religious union between the two kingdoms,
as well as the desire to knit the English Church more closely
to the general body of Protestantism, gave force to the Pres
byterian party. Milton, who after the composition of his
" Lycidas " had spent a year in foreign travel, returned to
throw himself on this ground into the theological strffe. He
held it " an unjust thing that the English should differ from
all Churches as many as be reformed." In spite of this pres
sure, however, and of a Presbyterian petition from London
with fifteen thousand signatures to the same purport, the Com
mittee of Religion reported in favor of the moderate reforms
proposed by Falkland and Pym ; and a bill for the removal
of bishops from the House of Peers passed the Commons
almost unanimously. Rejected by the Lords on the eve of
the king's journey to Scotland, it was again introduced on
his return. Pym and his colleagues, anxious to close the
disunion in their ranks, sought to end the pressure of the
Presbyterian zealots, and the dread of the Church party, by
taking their stand on the compromise suggested by the Com
mittee of Religion in the spring. But in spite of violent
remonstrances from the Commons, the bill still hung fire
among the Peers. The delay roused the excited crowd of
Londoners who gathered round Whitehall ; the bishops' car
riages were stopped, and the prelates themselves rabbled on
their way to the House. The angry pride of Williams in
duced ten of his fellow bishops to declare themselves pre
vented from attendance in Parliament, and to protest against
all acts done in their absence as null and void. The protest
was met at once on the part of the Peers by the committal
of the prelates who had signed it to the Tower. But the
contest gave a powerful aid to the projects of the king.
The courtiers declared openly that the rabbling of the bish
ops proved that there was "no free Parliament," and strove
to bring about fresh outrages by gathering troops of officers
and soldiers of fortune, who were seeking for employment
in the Irish war, and pitting them against the crowds at
Whitehall. The brawls of the two parties, who gave each
other the nicknames of " Roundheads " and " Cavaliers,"

1642] PURITAN ENGLAND 689
created fresh alarm in the Parliament ; but Charles persisted
in refusing it a guard. " On the honor of a king," he engaged
to defend them from violence as completely as his own chil
dren, but the answer had hardly been given when his attor
ney appeared at the bar of the Lords, and accused Hampden,
Pym, Hollis, Strode, and Haselrig of high treason in their
correspondence with the Scots. A herald-at-arms appeared
at the bar of the Commons, and demanded the surrender of
the five members. If Charles believed himself to be within
legal forms, the Commons saw a mere act of arbitrary vio
lence in a charge which proceeded personally from the king,
which set aside the most cherished privileges of Parliament,
and summoned the accused before a tribunal which had no
pretense to a jurisdiction over them. The Commons simply
promised to take the demand into consideration, and again
requested a guard. " I will reply to-morrow," said the king.
On the morrow he summoned the gentlemen who clustered
round Whitehall to follow him, and, embracing the queen,
promised her that in an hour he would return master of his
kingdom. A mob of Cavaliers joined him as he left the
palace, and remained in Westminster Hall as Charles, accom
panied by his nephew, the Elector Palatine, entered the House
of Commons. " Mr. Speaker," he said, " I must for a time
borrow your chair ! " He paused with a sudden confusion as
his eye fell on the vacant spot where Pym commonly sat :
for at the news of his approach the House had ordered the
five members to withdraw. " Gentlemen," he began in slow,
broken sentences, " I am sorry for this occasion of coming
unto you. Yesterday I sent a sergeant-at-arms upon a very
important occasion to apprehend some that by my command
were accused of high treason, whereunto I did expect obedi
ence, and not a message." Treason, he went on, had no privi
lege, "and therefore I am come to know if any of these
persons that were accused are here." There was a dead
silence, only broken by his reiterated " I must have them
wheresoever I find them." He again paused, but the still
ness was unbroken. Then he called out, " Is Mr. Pym here ? "
There was no answer ; and Charles, turning to the speaker,
asked him whether the five members were there. Lenthall
fell on his knees : " I have neither eyes to see," he replied,

690 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1642
"nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is
pleased to direct me." " Well, well," Charles angrily retorted,
" 'tis no matter. I think my eyes are as good as another's ! "
There was another long pause, while he looked carefully over
the ranks of members. " I see," he said at last, " all the birds
are flown. I do expect you will send them to me as soon
as they return hither." If they did not, he added, he would
seek them himself ; and with a closing protest that he never
intended any force, " he went out of the House," says an eye
witness, "in a more discontented and angry passion than he
came in."
Nothing but the absence of the five members, and the calm
dignity of the Commons, had prevented the king's outrage
from ending in bloodshed. " It was believed," says White-
lock, who was present at the scene, "that if the king had
found them there, and called in his guards to have seized
them, the members of the House would have endeavored the
defense of them, which might have proved a very unhappy
and sad business." Five hundred gentlemen of the best
blood in England would hardly have stood tamely by while
the bravos of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in the
midst of the Parliament. But Charles was blind to the danger
of his course. The five members had taken refuge in the city,
and it was there that on the next day the king himself
demanded their surrender from the aldermen at Guildhall.
Cries of " Privilege " rang round him as he returned through
the streets : the writs issued for the arrest of the five were
disregarded by the sheriffs, and a proclamation issued four
days later, declaring them traitors, passed without notice.
Terror drove the Cavaliers from Whitehall, and Charles stood
absolutely alone ; for the outrage had severed him for the
moment from his new friends in the Parliament, and from
the ministers, Falkland and Colepepper, whom he had chosen
among them. But lonely as he was, Charles had resolved
on war. The Earl of Newcastle was despatched to muster a
royal force in the north ; and on the tenth of January news
that the five members were about to return in triumph to
Westminster drove Charles from Whitehall. He retired to
Hampton Court and to Windsor, while the Trained Bands of
London and Soutbwark on foot, and the London watermen

1642] PURITAN ENGLAND 691
on the river, all sworn " to guard the Parliament, the king
dom, and the king," escorted Pym and his fellow members
along the Thames to the House of Commons. Both sides
prepared for the coming struggle. The queen sailed from
Dover with the Crown jewels to buy munitions of war. The
Cavaliers again gathered round the king, and the royalist press
flooded the country with State papers drawn up by Hyde.
On the other hand, the Commons resolved by vote to secure
the great arsenals of the kingdom, Hull, Portsmouth, and the
Tower ; while mounted processions of freeholders from Buck
inghamshire and Kent traversed London on their way to St.
Stephen's, vowing to live and die with the Parliament. The
Lords were scared out of their policy of obstruction by Pym's
bold announcement of the new position taken by the House
of Commons. "The Commons," said their leader, "will be
glad to have your concurrence and help in saving the king
dom ; but ff they fail of it, it should not discourage them in
doing their duty. And whether the kingdom be lost or saved,
they shall be sorry that the story of this present Parliament
should tell posterity that in so great a danger and extremity
the House of Commons should be enforced to save the king
dom alone." The effect of Pym's words was seen in the
passing of the bill for excluding bishops from the House of
Lords. The great point, however, was to secure armed sup
port from the nation at large, and here both sides were in a
difficulty. Previous to the innovations introduced by the
Tudors, and which had been already questioned by the Com
mons in a debate on pressing soldiers, the king in himself had
no power of calling on his subjects generally to bear arms, save
for purposes of restoring order or meeting foreign invasion.
On the other hand, no one contended that such a power had
ever been exercised by the two Houses without the king ; and
Charles steadily refused to consent to a militia bill, in which
the command of the national force was given in every county
to men devoted to the parliamentary cause. Both parties
therefore broke through constitutional precedent, the Parlia
ment in appointing the lord lieutenants who commanded the
militia by ordinance of the two Houses, Charles in levying
forces by royal commissions of array. The king's great diffi
culty lay in procuring arms, and on the twenty-third of April
45

692 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1642
he suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of the north,
and demanded admission. The new governor. Sir John Hot-
ham, fell on his knees, but refused to open the gates; and
the avowal of his act by the Parliament was followed by the
withdrawal of the royalist party among its members from
their seats at Westminster. Falkland, Colepepper and Hyde,
with thirty-two peers and sixty members of the House of
Commons, joined Charles at York ; and Lyttelton, the lord
keeper, followed with the Great Seal. They aimed at putting
a check on the king's projects of war, and their efforts were
backed by the general opposition of the country. A great
meeting of the Yorkshire freeholders, which he convened on
Heyworth Moor, ended in a petition praying him to be recon
ciled to the Parliament, and in spite of gifts of plate from the
universities and nobles of his party, arms and money were
still wanting for his new levies. The two Houses, on the
other hand, gained in unity and vigor by the withdrawal of
the royalists. The militia was rapidly enrolled. Lord War
wick named to the command of the fleet, and a loan opened
in the city, to which the women brought even their wedding
rings. The tone of the two Houses had risen with the threat
of force, and their last proposals demanded the powers of
appointing and dismissing the royal ministers, naming guar
dians for the royal children, and of virtually controlling mili
tary, civil, and religious affairs. " If I granted your demands,"
replied Charles, "I should be no more than the mere phan
tom of a king."
Section VII. — The Civil War, July, 1642-August, 1646
The breaking off of negotiations was followed on both sides
by preparations for immediate war. Hampden, Pym, and
Hollis became the guiding spirits of a Committee of Public
Safety which was created by Parliament as its administrative
organ ; English and Scotch officers were drawn from the Low
Countries, and Lord Essex named commander of an army
which soon rose to twenty thousand foot and four thousand
horse. The confidence on the parliamentary side was great ;
"We all thought one battle would decide," Baxter confessed
after the first encounter ; for the king was almost destitute of

1642] PURITAN ENGLAND 693
money and arms, and in spite of his strenuous efforts to raise
recruits he was embarrassed by the reluctance of his own ad
herents to begin the struggle. Resolved, however, to force
on a contest, he raised the royal standard at Nottingham
" on the evening of a very stormy and tempestuous day," but
the country made no answer to his appeal ; while Essex, who
had quitted London amidst the shouts of a great multitude,
with orders from the Parliament to follow the king, " and by
battle or other way rescue him from his perfidious counselors
and restore him to Parliament," mustered his army at North
ampton. Charles had but a handful of men, and the dash of
a few regiments of horse would have ended the war; but
Essex shrank from a decisive stroke, and trusted to reduce
the king to submission by a show of force. As Charles fell
fell back on Shrewsbury, Essex too moved westward and
occupied Worcester. But the whole face of affairs suddenly
changed. Catholics and royalists rallied fast to the king's
standard, and a bold march on London drew Essex from
Worcester to protect the capital. The two armies fell in
with one another on the field of Edgehill, near Banbury. The
encounter was a surprise, and the battle which followed was
little more than a confused combat of horse. At its outset
the desertion of Sir Faithful Fortescue with a whole regiment
threw the parliamentary forces into disorder, while the royal
ist horse on either wing drove the cavalry of the enemy from
the field ; but the foot-soldiers of Lord Essex broke the
infantry which formed the center of the king's line, and
though his nephew, Prince Rupert, brought back his squad
rons in time to save Charles from capture or flight, the night
fell on a drawn battle. The moral advantage, however, rested
with the king. Essex had learned that his troopers were no
match for the Cavaliers, and his withdrawal to Warwick left
open the road to the capital. Rupert pressed for an instant
march on London, but the proposal found stubborn opponents
among the moderate royalists, who dreaded the complete
triumph of Charles as much as his defeat. The king there
fore paused for the time at Oxford, where he was received
with uproarious welcome ; and when the cowardice of its
garrison delivered Reading to Rupert's horse, and his daring
capture of Brentford drew the royal army in his support

694 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1643
almost to the walls of the capital, the panic of the Londoners
was already over, and the junction of their train-bands with
the army of Essex forced Charles to fall back again on his
old quarters. But though the Parliament rallied quickly from
the blow of Edgehill, the war, as its area widened through
the winter, went steadily for the king. The fortification of
Oxford gave him a firm hold on the midland counties ; while
the balance of the two parties in the north was overthrown
by the march of the Earl of Newcastle, with the force he had
raised in Northumberland, upon York. Lord Fairfax, the
parliamentary leader in that county, was thrown back on the
manufacturing towns of the West Riding, where Puritanism
found its stronghold ; and the arrival of the queen with arms
from Holland encouraged the royal army to push its scouts
across the Trent, and threaten the eastern counties, which
held firmly for the Parliament. The stress of the war was
shown by the vigorous exertions of the two Houses. Some
negotiations which had gone on into the spring were broken
off by the old demand that the king should return to his
Parliament ; London was fortified ; and a tax of two millions
a year was laid on the districts which adhered to the par
liamentary cause. Essex, whose army had been freshly
equipped, was ordered to advance upon Oxford ; but though
the king held himself ready to fall back on the west, the earl
shrank from again risking his raw army in an encounter. He
confined himself to the recapture of Reading, and to a month
of idle encampment round Brill.
But while disease thinned his ranks and the royalists beat
up his quarters, the war went more and more for the king.
The inaction of Essex enabled Charles to send a part of his
small force at Oxford to strengthen a royalist rising in the
west. Nowhere was the royal cause to take so brave or noble
a form as among the Cornishmen. Cornwall stood apart
from the general life of England, — cut off from it not only by
differences of blood and speech, but by the feudal tendencies
of its people, who clung with a Celtic loyalty to their local
chieftains, and suffered their fidelity to the Crown to deter
mine their own. They had as yet done little more than keep
the war out of their own county ; but the march of a small par
liamentary force under Lord Stamford upon Launceston forced

i643] PURITAN ENGLAND 695
them into action. A little band of Cornishmen gathered
round the chivalrous Sir Bevil Greenvil, " so destitute of pro
visions that the best officers had but a biscuit a day," and
with only a handful of powder for the whole force ; but starv
ing and outnumbered as they were, they scaled the steep rise
of Stratton Hill, sword in hand, and drove Stamford back on
Exeter, with a loss of two thousand men, his ordnance, and
baggage train. Sir Ralph Hopton, the best of the royalist
generals, took the command of their army as it advanced into
Somerset, and drew the stress of the war into the west.
Essex despatched a picked force under Sir William Waller
to check their advance ; but Somerset was already lost ere
he reached Bath, and the Cornishmen stormed his strong
position on Lansdowne Hill in the teeth of his guns. But
the stubborn fight robbed the victors of their leaders ; Hop-
ton was wounded, and Greenvil slain ; while soon after, at
the siege of Bristol, fell two other heroes of the little army.
Sir Nicholas Slanning and Sir John Trevanion, " both young,
neither of them above eight and twenty, of entire friendship
to one another, and to Sir Bevil Greenvil." Waller, beaten
as he was, hung on their weakened force as it moved for aid
upon Oxford, and succeeded in cooping up the foot in
Devizes. But the horse broke through, and joining a force
which Charles had sent to their relief, turned back, and
dashed Waller's army to pieces in a fresh victory on Round-
way Down. The Cornish rising seemed to decide the for
tune of the war ; and the succors which his queen was
bringing him from the army of the north determined Charles
to make a fresh advance upon London. He was preparing
for this advance, when Rupert in a daring raid from Oxford
on the parliamentary army, met a party of horse with Hamp
den at its head, on Chalgrove field. The skirmish ended in
the success of the royalists, and Hampden was seen riding
off the field before the action was done, " which he never
used to do," with his head bending down, and resting his
hands upon the neck of his horse. He was mortally wounded,
and his death seemed an omen of the ruin of the cause he
loved. Disaster followed disaster. Essex, more and more
anxious for a peace, fell back on Uxbridge ; while a cowardly
surrender of Bristol to Prince Rupert gave Charles the second

696 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1643
city of the kingdom, and the mastery of the west. The
news fell on the Parliament " like a sentence of death." The
Lords debated nothing but proposals of peace. London itself
was divided ; " a great multitude of the wives of substantial
citizens " clamored at the door of the Commons for peace ;
and a flight of six of the few peers who remained at West
minster to the camp at Oxford proved the general despair of
the Parliament's success.
From this moment, however, the firmness of the parlia
mentary leaders began slowly to reverse the fortunes of the
war. If Hampden was gone, Pym remained. The spirit of
the Commons was worthy of their great leader, and Weller
was received on his return from Roundway Hill "as if he
had brought the king prisoner with him." A new army was
placed under the command of Lord Manchester to check the
progress of Newcastle in the north. But in the west the
danger was greatest. Prince Maurice continued his brother
Rupert's career of success, and his conquest of Barnstaple
and Exeter secured Devon for the king. Gloucester alone
interrupted the communications between his forces in Bristol
and in the north ; and Charles moved against the city, with
hope of a speedy surrender. But the gallant resistance of
the town called Essex to its relief. It was reduced to a single
barrel of powder when the earl's approach forced Charles to
raise the siege ; and the Puritan army fell steadily back again
on London, after an indecisive engagement near Newbury,
in which Lord Falkland fell, " ingeminating ' Peace, peace I ' "
and the London train-bands flung Rupert's horsemen roughly
off their front of pikes. In this posture of his affairs nothing
but a great victory could have saved the king, for the day
which witnessed the triumphant return of Essex witnessed
the solemn taking of the Covenant. Pym had resolved at
last to fling the Scotch sword into the wavering balance ; and
in the darkest hour of the Parliament's cause Sir Harry Vane
had been despatched to Edinburgh to arrange the terms on
which the aid of Scotland would be given. First amongst
them stood the demand of a "unity in Religion"; an adop
tion, in other words, of the Presbyterian system by the
Church of England. Events had moved so rapidly since the
earlier debates on Church government in the Commons that

i643] PURITAN ENGLAND 697
some arrangement of this kind had become a necessity. The
bishops to a man, and the bulk of the clergy whose bent was
purely episcopal, had joined the royal cause, and were being
expelled from their livings as "delinquents." Some new
system of Church government was imperatively called for by
the religious necessities of the country ; and, though Pym
and the leading statesmen were still in opinion moderate
Episcopalians, the growing force of Presbyterianism, and still
more the needs of the war, forced them to seek such a sys
tem in the adoption of the Scotch discipline. Scotland, for
its part, saw that the triumph of the Parliament was nec
essary for its own security ; and whatever difficulties stood in
the way of Vane's wary and rapid negotiations were removed
by the policy of the king. While the Parliament looked for aid
to the north, Charles had been seeking assistance from the
Irish rebels. The massacre had left them the objects of a
vengeful hate such as England had hardly known before, but
with Charles they were simply counters in his game of king
craft. The conclusion of a truce with the Confederate Cath
olics left the army under Lord Ormond, which had hitherto
held their revolt in check, at the king's disposal for service
in England. With the promise of Catholic support Charles
might even think himself strong enough to strike a blow at
the Government in Edinburgh ; and negotiations were soon
opened with the Irish Catholics to support by their landing
in Argyleshire a rising of the Highlanders under Montrose.
None of the king's schemes proved so fatal to his cause as
these. As the rumor of his intentions spread, officer after
officer in his own army flung down his commission, the
peers who had fled to Oxford fled back again to London, and
the royalist reaction in the Parliament itself came utterly to
an end. Scotland, anxious for its own safety, hastened to
sign the Covenant ; and the Commons, " with uplifted
hands," swore in St. Margaret's Church to observe it. They
pledged themselves to " bring the Churches of God in the
three Kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in
religion, confession of faith, form of Church government,
direction for worship and catechizing ; that we, and our pos
terity after us, may as brethren live in faith and love, and
the Lord may delight to live in the midst of us " : to extirpate

698 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1643
popery, prelacy, superstition, schism, and profaneness ; to
" preserve the rights and privileges of the Parliament, and
the liberties of the Kingdom " ; to punish malignants and
opponents of reformation in Church and State ; to " unite the
two Kingdoms in a firm peace and union to all posterity." The
Covenant ended with a solemn acknowledgment of national
sin and a vow of reformation. " Our true, unfeigned pur
pose, desire, and endeavor for ourselves and all others under
our power and charge, both in public and private, in all duties
we owe to God and man, is to amend our lives, and each one
to go before another in the example of a real reformation."
The conclusion of the Covenant had been the last work of
Pym. A " Committee of the Two Kingdoms " which was
entrusted after his death in December with the conduct of
the war and of foreign affairs did their best to carry out the
plans he had formed for the coming year. The vast scope
of these plans bears witness to his amazing ability. Three
strong armies, comprising a force of fifty thousand men, had
been raised for the coming campaign. Essex, with the army
of the center, was charged with the duty of watching the
king at Oxford. Waller, with another army, was to hold
Prince Maurice in check in the west. The force of fourteen
thousand men which had been raised by the zeal of the
eastern counties, and in which Cromwell's name was becom
ing famous as a leader, was raised into a third army under
Lord Manchester, ready to cooperate in Yorkshire with Sir
Thomas Fairfax. With Alexander Leslie, Lord Leven, at
its head, the Scotch army crossed the border in January " in
a great frost and snow," and Newcastle was forced to hurry
northward to arrest its march. His departure freed the
hands of Fairfax, who threw himself on the English troops
from Ireland that had landed at Chester, and after cutting
them to pieces marched as rapidly back to storm Selby.
The danger in his rear called back Newcastle, who returned
from confronting the Scots at Durham to throw himself into
York, where he was besieged by Fairfax and by the Scotch
army. The plans of Pym were now rapidly developed.
While Manchester marched with the army of the Associated
Counties to join the forces of Fairfax and Lord Leven under
the walls of York, Waller and Essex gathered their troops

l644] PURITAN ENGLAND 699
round Oxford. Charles was thrown on the defensive. The
troops from Ireland on which he counted had been cut to
pieces by Fairfax or by Waller, and in north and south he
seemed utterly overmatched. But he was far from despair
ing. He had already answered Newcastle's cry for aid by
despatching Prince Rupert from Oxford to gather forces on
the Welsh border ; and the brilliant partisan, after breaking
the sieges of Newark and Lathom House, burst over the
Lancashire hills into Yorkshire, slipped by the parliamentary
army, and made his way untouched into York. But the
success of this feat of arms tempted him to a fresh act of
daring ; he resolved on a decisive battle, and a discharge of
musketry from the two armies as they faced each other on
Marston Moor brought on, as evening gathered, a disorderly
engagement. On the one flank a charge of the king's horse
broke that of the enemy ; on the other, Cromwell's brigade
won as complete a success over Rupert's troopers. " God
made them as stubble to our swords," wrote the general at
the close of the day ; but in the heat of victory he called
back his men from the chase to back Manchester in his attack
on the royalist foot, and to rout their other wing of horse as
it returned breathless from pursuing the Scots. Nowhere
had the fighting been so fierce. A young Puritan who lay
dying on the field told Cromwell as he bent over him that one
thing lay on his spirit. " I asked him what it was," Crom
well wrote afterwards. " He told me it was that God had
not suffered him to be any more the executioner of His
enemies." At nightfall all was over ; and the royalist cause
in the north had perished at a blow. Newcastle fled over
sea ; York surrendered, and Rupert, with about six thousand
horse at his back, rode southward to Oxford. The blow was
the more terrible that it fell on Charles at a moment when
his danger in the south was being changed into triumph by a
series of brilliant and unexpected successes. After a month's
siege the king had escaped from Oxford, followed by Essex
and Waller, had waited till Essex marched to attack Prince
Maurice at Lyme, and then, turning fiercely on Waller at
Cropredy Bridge, had driven him back broken to London,
two days before the battle of Marston Moor. Charles
followed up his success by hurrying in the track of Essex,

700 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1644
whom he hoped to crush between his own force and that
under Maurice. By a fatal error, Essex plunged into Corn
wall, where the country was hostile, and where the king
hemmed him in among the hills, drew his lines tightly round
his army, and forced the whole body of the foot to surrender
at his mercy, while the horse cut their way through the
besiegers, and Essex himself fled by sea to London. The
day of the surrender was signalized by a royalist triumph in
Scotland which promised to undo what Marston Moor had
done. The Irish Catholics fulfilled their covenant with
Charles by the landing of Irish soldiers in Argyle ; and as
had long since been arranged, Montrose, throwing himself
into the Highlands, called the clans to arms. Flinging his
new force on that of the Covenanters at Tippermuir, he
gained a victory which enabled him to occupy Perth, to sack
Aberdeen, and to spread terror to Edinburgh. The news
fired Charles, as he came up from the west, to venture on a
march upon London ; but though the Scots were detained at
Newcastle, the rest of the victors at Marston Moor lay in his
path at Newbury ; and their force was strengthened by the
soldiers who had surrendered in Cornwall, but who had been
again brought into the field. The charges of the royalists
failed to break the parliamentary squadrons, and the soldiers
of Essex wiped away the shame of their defeat by flinging
themselves on the cannon they had lost, and bringing them
back in triumph to their lines. Cromwell would have seized
the moment of victory, but the darkness hindered his charg
ing with his single brigade. Manchester, meanwhile, in spite
of the prayers of his officers, refused to attack. Like Essex,
he shrank from a crowning victory over the king. Charles
was allowed to withdraw his army to Oxford, and even to
reappear unchecked in the field of his defeat.
The quarrel of Cromwell with Lord Manchester at New
bury was destined to give a new color and direction to the
war. Pym, in fact, had hardly been borne to his grave in
Westminster Abbey before England instinctively recognized
a successor of yet greater genius in the victor of Marston
Moor. Born in the closing years of Elizabeth's reign, the
child of a cadet of the great house of the Cromwells of
Hinchinbrook, and of kin through their mothers with Hamp-

1644] PURITAN ENGLAND 701
den and St. John, Oliver had been recalled by his father's
death from a short stay at Cambridge to the little family
estate at Huntingdon, which he quitted for a farm at St.
Ives. We have already seen his mood during the years of
personal rule, as he dwelt in "prolonging" and "blackness"
amidst fancies of coming death, the melancholy which formed
the ground of his nature feeding itself on the inaction of the
time. But his energy made itself felt the moment the tyranny
was over. His father had sat, with three of his uncles, in the
later Parliaments of Elizabeth. Oliver had himself been re
turned to that of 1628, and the town of Cambridge sent him
as its representative to the Short Parliament as to the Long.
It is in the latter that a courtier. Sir Philip Warwick, gives
us our first glimpse of his actual appearance. " I came into
the House one morning, well clad, and perceived a gentleman
speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily appareled, for it
was a plain cloth suit, which seemed to have been made by
an ill country tailor. His linen was plain, and not very
clean ; and I remember a speck or two of blood upon his
little band, which was not much larger than his collar. His
hat was without a hatband. His stature was of a good size ;
his sword stuck close to his side ; his countenance swoln and
reddish ; his voice sharp and untunable, and his eloquence
full of fervor." He was already " much hearkened unto,"
but his power was to assert itself in deeds rather than in
words. Men of his own time marked him out from all others
by the epithet of Ironside. He appeared at the head of a
troop of his own raising at Edgehill ; but with the eye of a
born soldier he at once saw the blot in the army of Essex.
"A set of poor tapsters and town apprentices," he warned
Hampden, " would never fight against men of honor " ; and
he pointed to religious enthusiasm as the one weapon which
could meet the chivalry of the Cavalier. Even to Hampden
the plan seemed impracticable ; but the regiment of a thou
sand men which Cromwell raised for the Association of the
Eastern Counties was formed strictly of "men of religion."
He spent his fortune freely on the task he set himself.
" The business . . . hath had of me in money between eleven
and twelve hundred pounds, therefore my private estate can
do little to help the public. ... I have little money of my

703 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1644
own (left) to help my soldiers." But they were "a lovely
company," he tells his friends with soldierly pride. No
blasphemy, drinking, disorder, or impiety were suffered in
their ranks. " Not a man swears but he pays his twelve
pence." Nor was his choice of "men of religion" the only
innovation Cromwell introduced into his new regiment. The
social traditions which restricted command to men of birth
were disregarded. " It may be," he wrote, in answer to com
plaints from the committee of the association, " it provokes
your spirit to see such plain men made captains of horse.
It had been well that men of honor and birth had entered
into their employments ; but why do they not appear ? But
seeing it is necessary the work must go on, better plain men
than none ; but best to have men patient of wants, faithful
and conscientious in their employment, and such, I hope,
these will approve themselves." 'The words paint Cromwell's
temper accurately enough : he is far more of the practical
soldier than of the reformer ; though his genius already
breaks in upon his aristocratic and conservative sympathies,
and catches glimpses of the social revolution to which the
war was drifting. " I had rather," he once burst out im
patiently, "have a plain russet-coated captain, that knows
what he fights for and loves what he knows, than what you
call a gentleman, and is nothing else. I honor a gentleman
that is so indeed ! " he ends with a characteristic return to
his more common mood of feeling. The same practical tem
per broke out in a more startling innovation. Bitter as had
been his hatred of the bishops, and strenuously as he had
worked to bring about a change in Church government, Crom
well, like most of the parliamentary leaders, seems to have
been content with the new Presbyterianism, and the Presby
terians were more than content with him. Lord Manchester
"suffered him to guide the army at his pleasure." "The
man Cromwell," writes the Scotchman Baillie, "is a very
wise and active head, universally well beloved as religious
and stout." But against dissidents from the legal worship of
the Church the Presbyterians were as bitter as Laud him
self ; and, as we shall see, nonconformity was rising into pro
portions which made its claim of toleration, of the freedom
of religious worship, one of the problems of the time. Crom-

1644] PURITAN ENGLAND 703
well met the problem in his unspeculative fashion. He
wanted good soldiers and good men ; and, if they were these,
the Independent, the Baptist, the Leveler, found entry
among his troops. "You would respect them, did you see
them," he answered the panic-stricken Presbyterians who
charged them with " Anabaptistry " and revolutionary aims;
" they are no Anabaptists : they are honest, sober Christians ;
they expect to be used as men." He was soon to be driven
— as in the social change we noticed before — to a far larger
and grander point of view. But as yet he was busier with
his new regiment than with theories of Church and State ;
and his horsemen were no sooner in action than they
proved themselves such soldiers as the war had never seen
yet. " Truly they were never beaten at all," their leader
said proudly at its close. At Winceby fight they charged
" singing psalms," cleared Lincolnshire of the Cavaliers, and
freed the eastern counties from all danger from Newcastle's
partisans. At Marston Moor they faced and routed Rupert's
chivalry. At Newbury it was only Manchester's reluctance
that hindered them from completing the ruin of Charles.
Cromwell had shown his capacity for organization in the
creation of his regiment ; his military genius had displayed
itself at Marston Moor. Newbury first raised him into a
political leader. "Without a more speedy, vigorous, and
effective prosecution of the war," he said to the Commons
after his quarrel with Manchester, " casting off all lingering
proceedings, like those of soldiers of fortune beyond sea to
spin out a war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and
hate the name of a Parliament." But under the leaders who
at present conducted it a vigorous conduct of the war was
hopeless. They were, in Cromwell's plain words, " afraid to
conquer." They desired not to crush Charles, but to force
him back, with as much of his old strength remaining as
might be, to the position of a constitutional king. The old
loyalty, too, clogged their enterprise ; they shrank from the
taint of treason. " If the king be beaten," Manchester urged
at Newbury, " he will still be king ; if he beat us he will hang
us all for traitors." To a mood like this Cromwell's attitude
seemed horrible : " If I met the king in battle," he answered,
according to a later story, " I would fire my pistol at the king

704 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1644
as at another." The army, too, as he long ago urged at
Edgehill, was not an army to conquer with. Now, as then,
he urged that till the whole force was new modeled, and
placed under a stricter discipline, " they must not expect any
notable success in anything they went about." But the first
step in such a reorganization must be a change of officers.
The army was led and officered by members of the two
Houses, and the Self-denying Ordinance, as it was intro
duced by Cromwell and Vane, declared the tenure of military
or civil offices incompatible with a seat in either. The long
and bitter resistance which this measure met before it was
finally passed in a modified form was justified at a later time
by the political results which followed the rupture of the tie
which had hitherto bound the army to the Parliament. But
the drift of public opinion was too strong to be withstood.
The passage of the ordinance brought about the retirement
of Essex, Manchester, and Waller ; and the new organization
of the army went rapidly on under a new commander-in-chief.
Sir Thomas Fairfax, the hero of the long contest in York
shire, and who had been raised into fame by his victory at
Nantwich, and his bravery at Marston Moor. But behind
Fairfax stood Cromwell ; and the principles on which Crom
well had formed his brigade were carried out on a larger
scale in the " New Model." The one aim was to get together
twenty thousand "honest" men. "Be careful," Cromwell
had written, "what captains of horse you choose, what men
be mounted. A few honest men are better than numbers.
If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of horse,
honest men will follow them." The result was a curious
medley of men of different ranks among the officers of the
New Model. The bulk of those in high command remained
men of noble or gentle blood, Montagues, Pickerings, For-
tescues, Sheffields, Sidneys, and the like. But side by side
with these, though in far smaller proportion, were seen offi
cers like Ewer, who had been a serving-man, like Okey, who
had been a drayman, or Rainsborough, who had been a
" skipper at sea." A result hardly less notable was the youth
of the officers. Among those in high command there were
few who, like Cromwell, had passed middle age. Fairfax
was but thirty-three, and most of his colonels were even

i645] PURITAN ENGLAND 705
younger. Equally strange was the mixture of religions in its
ranks ; though a large proportion of the infantry was com
posed of pressed recruits, the cavalry was for the most part
strongly Puritan, and in that part of the army especially dis-
sidence of every typerhad gained a firm foothold.
Of the political and religious aspect of the New Model we
shall have to speak at a later time; as yet its energy was
directed solely to " the speedy and vigorous prosecution of
the war." Fairfax was no sooner ready for action than the
policy of Cromwell was aided by the policy of the king.
From the hour when Newbury marked the breach between
the peace and war parties in the Parliament, the Scotch com
missioners and the bulk of the Commons had seen that their
one chance of hindering what they looked on as revolution in
Church and State lay in pressing for fresh negotiations with
Charles. Commissioners met at Uxbridge to draw up a
treaty ; but the hopes of concession which Charles held out
were suddenly withdrawn in the spring. He saw, as he
thought, the parliamentary army dissolved and ruined by
its new modeling, at an instant when news came from Scot
land of fresh successes on the part of Montrose, and of his
overthrow of the Marquis of Argyle's troops in the victory of
Inverlochy. "Before the end of the summer," wrote the con
queror, " I shall be in a position to come to your Majesty's
aid with a brave army." The party, of war gained the as
cendent; and in May the king opened his campaign by a
march to the north. Leicester was stormed, the blockade of
Chester raised, and the eastern counties threatened, until
Fairfax, who had been unwillingly engaged in a siege of
Oxford, hurried at last on his track. Cromwell, who had
been suffered by the House to retain his command for a few
days in spite of the ordinance, joined Fairfax as he drew
near the king, and his arrival was greeted by loud shouts of
welcome from the troops. The two armies met near Naseby,
to the northwest of Northampton. The king was eager to
fight. " Never have my affairs been in as good a state," he
cried ; and Prince Rupert was as impatient as his uncle. On
the other side, even Cromwell doubted as a soldier the suc
cess of the newly drilled troops, though religious enthusiasm
swept away doubt in the assurance of victory. " I can say

706 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1645
this of Naseby," he wrote soon after, " that when I saw the
enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and
we a company of poor ignorant men, to seek to order our
battle, the general having commanded me to order all the
horse, I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile
out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God
would by things that are not bring to naught things that are.
Of which I had great assurance, and God did it." The battle
began with a furious charge of Rupert uphill, which routed
the wing opposed to him under Ireton; while the royalist
foot, after a single discharge, clubbed their muskets and fell
on the center under Fairfax so hotly that it slowly and stub
bornly gave way. But Cromwell's brigade were conquerors
on the left. A single charge broke the northern horse under
Langdale, who had already fled before them at Marston
Moor ; and holding his troops firmly in hand, Cromwell fell
with them on the flank of the royalist foot in the very crisis
of its success. A panic of the king's reserve, and its flight
from the field, aided his efforts : it was in vain that Rupert
returned with forces exhausted by pursuit, that Charles, in a
passion of despair, called on his troopers for "one charge
more." The battle was over : artillery, baggage, even the
royal papers, fell into the conquerors' hands ; five thousand
men surrendered ; only two thousand followed the king in his
headlong flight from the field. The war was ended at a blow.
While Charles wandered helplessly along the Welsh border
in search of fresh forces, Fairfax marched rapidly into Som
ersetshire and routed the royal forces at Langport. A vic
tory at Kilsyth, which gave Scotland for the moment to
Montrose, threw a transient gleam over the darkening for
tunes of his master's cause ; but the surrender of Bristol to
the parliamentary army, and the dispersion of the last force
Charles could collect in an attempt to relieve Chester, was
followed by news of the crushing and irretrievable defeat of
the " Great Marquis " at Philiphaugh. In the wreck of the
royal cause we may pause for a moment over an incident
which brings out in relief the best temper of both sides.
Cromwell " spent much time with God in prayer before the
storm " of Basing House, where the Marquis of Winchester
had held stoutly out through the war for the king. The

1646] PURITAN ENGLAND 707
storm ended its resistance, and the brave old royalist was
brought in a prisoner, with his house flaming around him.
He "broke out," reports a Puritan bystander, "and said
' that if the king had no more ground in England but Basing
House, he would adventure it as he did, and so maintain it to
the uttermost,' comforting himself in this matter ' that Basing
House was called Loyalty.' " Of loyalty such as this Charles
was utterly unworthy. The seizure of his papers at Naseby
had hardly disclosed his earlier intrigues with the Irish Catho
lics when the Parliament was able to reveal to England a
fresh treaty with them, which purchased no longer their
neutrality, but their aid, by the simple concession of every
demand they had made. The shame was without profit, for
whatever aid Ireland might have given came too late to be of
service. The spring of 1646 saw the few troops who still
clung to Charles surrounded and routed at Stow. " You have
done your work now," their leader. Sir Jacob Astley, said
bitterly to his conquerors, " and may go to play, unless you
fall out among yourselves."
Section VIII. — The Army and the Parliament, 1 646-1 649
With the close of the Civil war we enter on a time of
confused struggles, a time tedious and uninteresting in its
outer details, but of higher interest than even the war itself
in its bearing on our after history. Modern England, the
England among whose thoughts and sentiments we actually
live, began however dimly with the triumph of Naseby. Old
things passed silently away. When Astley gave up his sword
the "work" of the generations which had struggled for
Protestantism against Catholicism, for public liberty against
absolute rule, in his own emphatic phrase, was "done." So
far as these contests were concerned, however the later
Stuarts might strive to revive them, England could safely
" go to play." But with the end of this older work a new
work began. The constitutional and ecclesiastical problems
which still in one shape or another beset us started to the
front as subjects of national debate in the years between the
close of the Civil war and the death of the king. The great
parties which have ever since divided the social, the political,
46

708 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1646
and the religious life of England, whether as Independents
and Presbyterians, as Whigs and Tories, as Conservatives and
Liberals, sprang into organized existence in the contest between
the army and the Parliament. Then for the first time began a
struggle which is far from having ended yet, a struggle between
political tradition and political progress, between the principle
of religious conformity and the principle of religious freedom.
It was the religious struggle which drew the political in its
train. We have already witnessed the rise under Elizabeth
of sects who did not aim, like the Presbyterians, at a change
in Church government, but rejected the notion of a national
Church at all, and insisted on the right of each congregation
to perfect independence of faith and worship. At the close
of the queen's reign, however, these " Brownists " had almost
entirely disappeared. Some of the dissidents, as in the nota
ble instance of the congregation that produced the Pilgrim
Fathers, had found a refuge in Holland ; but the bulk had
been driven by persecution to a fresh conformity with the
Established Church. "As for those which we call Brown
ists," says Bacon, "being when they were at the best a very
small number of very silly and base people, here and there
in corners dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the
good remedies that have been used, suppressed and worn
out so that there is scarce any news of them." As soon,
however, as Abbot's primacy promised a milder rule, the
Separatist refugees began to venture timidly back again to
England. During their exile in Holland the main body had
contented themselves with the free development of their sys
tem of independent congregations, each forming in itself a
complete Church, and to them the name of Independents
attached itself at a later time. A small part, however, had
drifted into a more marked severance in doctrine from the
Established Church, especially in their belief of the necessity
of adult baptism, a belief from which their obscure congrega
tion at Leyden became known as that of the Baptists. Both
of these sects gathered a church in London in the middle of
James's reign, but the persecuting zeal of Laud prevented
any spread of their opinions under that of his successor ; and
it was not till their numbers were suddenly increased by the
return of a host of emigrants from New England, with Hugh

1646] PURITAN ENGLAND 709
Peters at their head, on the opening of the Long Parliament,
that the Congregational or Independent body began to attract
attention. Lilburne and Burton soon declared themselves
adherents of what was called " the New England way " ; and
a year later saw in London alone the rise of "fourscore
congregations of several sectaries," as Bishop Hall scornfully
tells us, " instructed by guides fit for them, cobblers, tailors,
felt-makers, and such like trash." But little religious weight,
however, could be attributed as yet to the Congregational
movement. Baxter at this time had not heard of the exist
ence of any Independents. Milton in his earlier pamphlets
shows no sign of their influence. Of the hundred and five
ministers present in the Westminster Assembly, only five were
Congregational in sympathy, and these were all returned refu
gees from Holland. Among the one hundred and twenty
London ministers in 1643, only three were suspected of lean
ings towards the sectaries.
The struggle with Charles in fact at its outset only threw
new difficulties in the way of religious freedom. It was with
strictly conservative aims in ecclesiastical as in political mat
ters that Pym and his colleagues began the strife. Their
avowed purpose was simply to restore the Church of England
to its state under Elizabeth, and to free it from " innovations,"
from the changes introduced by Laud and his fellow prelates.
The great majority of the Parliament were averse to any
alterations in the constitution or doctrine of the Church itself ;
and it was only the refusal of the bishops to accept any dimi
nution of their power and revenues, the growth of a party
hostile to Episcopalian government, the necessity for pur
chasing the aid of the Scots by a union in religion as in poli
tics, and above all the urgent need of constructing some new
ecclesiastical organization in the place of the older organiza
tion which had become impossible from the political attitude
of the bishops, that forced on the two Houses the adoption of
the Covenant. But the change to a Presbyterian system
of Church government seemed at that time of little import to
the bulk of Englishmen. The dogma of the necessity of bish
ops was held by few, and the change was generally regarded
with approval as one which brought the Church of England
nearer to that of Scotland and to the Reformed Churches of

710 HISt6rY of THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1646
the Continent. But whatever might be the change in its
administration, no one imagined that it had ceased to be the
Church of England, or that it had parted with its right to
exact conformity to its worship from the nation at large.
The Tudor theory of its relation to the State, of its right to
embrace all Englishmen within its pale, and to dictate what
should be their faith and form of worship, remained utterly
unquestioned by any man of note. The sentiments on which
such a theory rested indeed for its main support, the power
of historical tradition, the association of " dissidence " with
danger to the State, the strong English instinct of order, the
as strong English dislike of " innovations," with the abhor
rence of " indifferency," as a sign of lukewarmness in mat
ters of religion, had only been intensified by the earlier
incidents of the struggle with the king. The Parliament,
therefore, had steadily pressed on the new system of ecclesi
astical government in the midst of the troubles of the war.
An Assembly of Divines which was called together at West
minster in 1643, and which sat in the Jerusalem Chamber
during the five years which followed, was directed to revise
the Articles, to draw up a Confession of Faith, and a Directory
of Public Worship ; and these with a scheme of Church gov
ernment, a scheme only distinguished from that of Scotland
by the significant addition of a lay court of superior appeal
set by Parliament over the whole system of Church courts
and assemblies, were accepted by the Houses and embodied
in a series of Ordinances.
Had the change been made at the moment when "with
uplifted hands " the Commons swore to the Covenant in St.
Margaret's, it would probably have been accepted by the
country at large. But it met with a very different welcome
when it came at the end of the war. In spite of repeated
votes of Parliament for its establishment, the pure Presby
terian system took root only in London and Lancashire.
While the Divines, indeed, were drawing up their platform
of uniform belief and worship in the Jerusalem Chamber,
dissidence had grown into a religious power. In the terrible
agony of the struggle against Charles, individual conviction
became a stronger force than religious tradition. Theolog
ical speculation took an unprecedented boldness from the

1646] PURITAN ENGLAND 711
temper of the times. Four years after the war had begun a
horror-stricken pamphleteer numbered sixteen religious sects
as existing in defiance of the law ; and, widely as these bodies
differed among themselves, all were at one in repudiating any
right of control in faith or worship by the Church oi" its
clergy. Milton himself had left his Presbyterian standpoint,
and saw that " new Presbyter is but old Priest writ large."
The question of sectarianism soon grew into a practical one
from its bearing on the war : for the class specially infected
with the new spirit of religious freedom was just the class to
whose zeal and vigor the Parliament was forced to look for
success in its struggle. We have seen the prevalence of this
spirit among the farmers from whom Cromwell drew his
horsemen, and his enlistment of these "sectaries" was the
first direct breach in the old system of conformity. The sen
timents of the farmers indeed were not his own. Cromwell
had signed the Covenant, and there is no reason for crediting
him with any aversion to Presbyterianism as a system of
doctrine or of Church organization. His first step was a
purely practical one, a step dictated by military necessities,
and excused in his mind by a sympathy with " honest " men,
as well as by the growing but still vague notion of a com
munion among Christians wider than that of outer conform
ity in worship or belief. But the alarm and remonstrances
of the Presbyterians forced his mind rapidly forward on the
path of toleration. "The State in choosing men to serve
it," Cromwell wrote before Marston Moor, " takes no notice
of these opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it,
that satisfies." Marston Moor spurred him to press on the
Parliament the need of at least " tolerating " dissidents ; and
he succeeded in procuring the appointment of a committee
of the Commons to find some means of effecting this. But
the conservative temper of the bulk of the Puritans was at
last roused by his efforts. "We detest and abhor," wrote
the London clergy in 1645, "the much-endeavored Tolera
tion " ; and the Corporation of London petitioned Parliament
to suppress all sects "without toleration." The Parliament
itself too remained steady on the conservative side. But the
fortunes of the war told for religious freedom. Essex and
his Presbyterians only marched from defeat to defeat. In

712 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1646
remodeling the army the Commons had rejected a demand
made by the Lords that officers and men, besides taking the
Covenant, should submit " to the form of Church government
that was already voted by both Houses." The victory of
Naseby raised a wider question than that of mere toleration.
" Honest men served you faithfully in this action," Cromwell
wrote to the speaker of the House of Commons from the
field. " Sir, they are trusty : I beseech you in the name of
God not to discourage them. He that ventures his life for
the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty
of his conscience." The storm of Bristol encouraged him to
proclaim the new principles yet more distinctly. " Presbyte
rians, Independents, all here have the same spirit of faith
and prayer, the same presence and answer. They agree
here, have no names of difference; pity it is it should be
otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the real unity,
which is the most glorious, being the inward and spiritual, in
the body and in the head. For being united in forms (com
monly called uniformity), every Christian will for peace' sake
study and do as far as conscience will permit. And from
brethren in things of the mind we look for no compulsion but
that of light and reason."
The increasing firmness of Cromwell's language was due
to the growing irritation of his opponents. The two parties
became every day more clearly defined. The Presbyterian
ministers complained bitterly of the increase of the sectaries,
and denounced the toleration which had come into practical
existence without sanction from the law. Scotland, whose
army was still before Newark, pressed for the execution of
the Covenant and the universal enforcement of a religious
uniformity. Sir Harry Vane, on the other hand, was striv
ing to bring the Parliament round to less rigid courses by the
introduction of two hundred and thirty new members, who
filled the seats left vacant by royalist secessions, and the
more eminent of whom, such as Ireton and Algernon Sidney,
were inclined to support the Independents. But it was only
the pressure of the New Model, and the remonstrances of
Cromwell as its mouthpiece, which hindered any effective
movement towards persecution. Amidst the wreck of his
fortunes Charles intrigued busily with both parties, and

1646] PURITAN ENGLAND 713
promised liberty of worship to Vane and the Independents,
at the moment when he was negotiating with the Parliament
and the Scots. His negotiations were quickened by the
march of Fairfax upon Oxford. Driven from his last refuge,
the king after some aimless wanderings made his appearance
in the camp of the Scots. Lord Leven at once fell back
with his royal prize to Newcastle. The new aspect of affairs
threatened the party of religious freedom with ruin. Hated
as they were by the Scots, by the Lords, by the city of Lon
don, the apparent junction of Charles with their enemies
destroyed their growing hopes in the Commons, where the
prospects of a speedy peace on Presbyterian terms at once
swelled the majority of their opponents. The two Houses
laid their conditions of peace before the king without a
dream of resistance from one who seemed to have placed
himself at their mercy. They required for the Parliament
the command of the army and fleet for twenty years; the
exclusion of all " Malignants," or royalists who had taken
part in the war, from civil and military office ; the abolition
of episcopacy; and the establishment of a Presbyterian
Church. Of toleration or liberty of conscience they said not
a word. The Scots pressed these terms on the king " with
tears " ; his friends, and even the queen, urged their accept
ance. But the aim of Charles was simply delay. Time and
the dissensions of his enemies, as he believed, were fighting
for him. " I am not without hope," he wrote coolly, " that I
shall be able to draw either the Presbyterians or the Inde
pendents to side with me for extirpating one another, so that
I shall be really king again." His refusal of the terms
offered by the Houses was a crushing defeat for the Presby
terians. "What will become of us," asked one of them,
"now that the king has rejected our proposals ? " "What
would have become of us," retorted an Independent, "had
he accepted them > " The vigor of Holies and the Conserva
tive leaders in the Parliament rallied, however, to a bolder
effort. The king's game lay in balancing the army against
the Parliament; and while the Scotch army lay at Newcastle
the Houses could not insist on dismissing their own. It was
only a withdrawal of the Scots from England and their trans
fer of the king's person into the hands of the Houses that

714 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1647
would enable them to free themselves from the pressure of
their own soldiers by disbanding the New Model. Hopeless
of success with the king, and unable to bring him into Scot
land in face of the refusal of the general assembly to receive
a sovereign who would not swear to the Covenant, the Scot
tish army accepted ;£400,ooo in discharge of its claims,
handed Charles over to a committee of the Houses, and
marched back over the border. Masters of the king, the
Presbyterian leaders at once moved boldly to their attack on
the New Model and the sectaries. They voted that the
army should be disbanded, and that a new army should be
raised for the suppression of the Irish rebellion, with Presby
terian officers at its head. It was in vain that the men pro
tested against being severed from "officers that we love,"
and that the Council of Officers strove to gain time by press
ing on the Parliament the danger of mutiny. Holies and
his fellow leaders were resolute, and their ecclesiastical
legislation showed the end at which their resolution aimed.
Direct enforcement of conformity was impossible till the
New Model was disbanded; but the Parliament pressed on
in the work of providing the machinery for enforcing it as
soon as the army was gone. Vote after vote ordered the
setting up of presbyteries throughout the country, and the
first-fruits of these efforts were seen in the Presbyterian
organization of London, and in the first meeting of its synod
at St. Paul's. Even the officers on Fairfax's staff were
ordered to take the Covenant.
All hung, however, on the disbanding of the New Model,
and the New Model showed no will to disband itself. Its
attitude can only fairly be judged by remembering what
many of the conquerors of Naseby really were. They were
soldiers of a different class and of a different temper from
the soldiers of any other army that the world has seen.
They were for the most part young farmers and tradesmen
of the lower sort, maintaining themselves, for the pay was
twelve months in arrear, mainly at their own cost. The
horsemen in many regiments had been specially picked as
"honest," or religious, men; and whatever enthusiasm or
fanaticism they may have shown, their very enemies acknowl
edged the order and piety of their camp. They looked on

i647] PURITAN ENGLAND 715
themselves not as swordsmen, to be caught up and flung
away at the will of a paymaster, but as men who had left
farm and merchandise at a direct call from God. A great
work had been given them to do, and the call bound them
till it was done. Kingcraft, as Charles was hoping, might
yet restore tyranny to the throne. A more immediate danger
threatened that liberty of conscience which was to them " the
ground of the quarrel, and for which so many of their friends'
lives had been lost, and so much of their own blood had been
spilt." They would wait before disbanding till these liberties
were secured, and ff need came they would again act to
secure them. But their resolve sprang from no pride in the
brute force of the sword they wielded. On the contrary, as they
pleaded passionately at the bar of the Commons, " on becom
ing soldiers we have not ceased to be citizens." Their aims
and proposals throughout were purely those of citizens, and
of citizens who were ready the moment their aim was won
to return peacefully to their homes. Thought and discussion
had turned the army into a vast Parliament, a Parliament
which regarded itself as representative of " godly " men in as
high a degree as the Parliament at Westminster, and which
must have become every day more conscious of its superior
ity in political capacity to its rival. Ireton, the moving spirit
of the New Model, had no equal as a statesman in St.
Stephen's; nor is it possible to compare the large and far-
sighted proposals of the army with the blind and narrow
policy of the two Houses. Whatever we may think of the
means by which the New Model sought its aims, we must in
justice remember that, so far as those aims went, the New
Model was in the right. For the last two hundred years
England has been doing little more than carrying out in a
slow and tentative way the scheme of political and religious
reform which the army propounded at the close of the Civil
war. It was not till the rejection of the officers' proposals
had left little hope of conciliation that the army acted, but its
action was quick and decisive. It set aside for all political
purposes the Council of Officers, and elected a new Council
of Agitators or Agents, two members being named by each
regiment, which summoned a general meeting of the army at
Triploe Heath, where the proposals of pay and disbanding

7l6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1647
made by the Parliament were rejected with cries of "Jus
tice." While the army was gathering, in fact, the Agitators
had taken a step which put submission out of the question.
A rumor that the king was to be removed to London, a new
army raised, a new civil war begun, roused the soldiers to
madness. Five hundred troopers suddenly appeared be
fore Holmby House, where the king was residing in charge
of parliamentary commissioners, and displaced its guards.
" Where is your commission for this act .'' " Charles asked
the cornet who commanded them. " It is behind me," said
Joyce, pointing to his soldiers. " It is written in very fine
and legible characters," laughed the king. The seizure
had in fact been previously concerted between Charles and
the Agitators. " I will part willingly," he told Joyce, " if the
soldiers confirm all that you have promised me. You will
exact from me nothing that offends my conscience or my
honor." "It is not our maxim," replied the cornet, "to
constrain the conscience of any one, still less that of our
king." After a fresh burst of terror at the news, the Parlia
ment fell furiously on Cromwell, who had relinquished his
command and quitted the army before the close of the war,
and had ever since been employed as a mediator between the
two parties. The charge of having incited the mutiny fell
before his vehement protest, but he was driven to seek
refuge with the army, and on the 25th of June it was in
full march upon London. Its demands were expressed with
perfect clearness in an " Humble Representation " which it
addressed to the Houses. " We desire a settlement of the
peace of the kingdom and of the liberties of the subject
according to the votes and declarations of Parliament. We
desire no alteration in the civil government : as little do we
desire to interrupt or in the least to intermeddle with the set
tling of the Presbyterial government." They demanded tol
eration ; but " not to open a way to licentious living under
pretense of obtaining ease for tender consciences, we profess,
as ever, in these things when the State has made a settlement
we have nothing to say, but to submit or suffer." It was
with a view to such a settlement that they demanded the
expulsion of eleven members from the Commons, with Holies
at their head, whom the soldiers charged with stirring up

I647] PURITAN ENGLAND 717
Strffe between the army and the Parliament, and with a
a design of renewing the Civil war. After fruitless negotia
tions the terror of the Londoners forced the eleven to with
draw ; and the Houses named commissioners to treat on the
questions at issue.
Though Fairfax and Cromwell had been forced from their
position as mediators into a hearty cooperation with the
army, its political direction rested at this moment with Crom
well's son-in-law, Henry Ireton, and Ireton looked for a real
settlement, not to the Parliament, but to the king. " There
must be some difference," he urged bluntly, " between con
querors and conquered " ; but the terms which he laid before
Charles were terms of studied moderation. The vindictive
spirit which the Parliament had shown against the royalists
and the Church disappeared in the terms exacted by the New
Model ; and the army contented itself with the banishment
of seven leading " delinquents," a general Act of Oblivion
for the rest, the withdrawal of all coercive power from the
clergy, the control of Parliament over the military and naval
forces for ten years, and its nomination of the great officers
of State. Behind these demands, however, came a masterly
and comprehensive plan of political reform, which had already
been sketched by the army in the " Humble Representation "
with which it had begun its march on London. Belief and
worship were to be free to all. Acts enforcing the use of the
prayer-book, or attendance at church, or the enforcement of
the Covenant were to be repealed. Even Catholics, whatever
other restraints might be imposed, were to be freed from the
bondage of compulsory worship. Parliaments were to be trien
nial, and the House of Commons to be reformed by a fairer
distribution of seats and of electoral rights ; taxation was to
be readjusted; legal procedure simplified ; a crowd of political,
commercial, and judicial privileges abolished. Ireton believed
that Charles could be " so managed " (says Mrs. Hutchinson)
"as to comply with the public good of his people after he
could no longer uphold his violent will." But Charles was
equally dead to the moderation and to the wisdom of this great
Act of Settlement. He saw in the crisis nothing but an
opportunity of balancing one party against another, and be
lieved that the army had more need of his aid than he of the

71 8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1647
army's. "You cannot do without me — you are lost if I do
not support you," he said to Ireton as he pressed his propo
sals. " You have an intention to be the arbitrator between us
and the Parliament," Ireton quietly replied, "and we mean to
be so between the Parliament and your Majesty." But the
king's tone was soon explained. A mob of Londoners broke
into the House of Commons, and forced its members to recall
the eleven. While some fourteen peers and a hundred com
moners fled to the army, those who remained at Westminster
prepared for an open struggle with it, and invited Charles to
return to London. But the news no sooner reached the camp
than the army was again on the march. " In two days," Crom
well said coolly, " the city will be in our hands." The soldiers
entered London in triumph, and restored the fugitive members ;
the eleven were again expelled, and the army leaders resumed
negotiations with the king. The indignation of the soldiers
at his delays and intrigues made the task hourly more difficult ;
but Cromwell, who now threw his whole weight on Ireton's
side, clung to the hope of accommodation with a passionate
tenacity. His mind, conservative by tradition, and above all
practical in temper, saw the political difficulties which would
follow on the abolition of Monarchy, and in spite of the king's
evasions he persisted in negotiating with him. But Cromwell
stood almost alone ; the Parliament refused to accept Ireton's
proposals as a basis of peace, Charles still evaded, and the
army grew restless and suspicious. There were cries for a
wide reforin, for the abolition of the House of Peers, for a
new House of Commons ; and the Agitators called on the
Council of Officers to discuss the question of abolishing roy
alty itself. Cromwell was never braver than when he faced
the gathering storm, forbade the discussion, adjourned the
council, and sent the officers to their regiments. But the
strain was too great to last long, and Charles was still resolute
to "play his game." He was, in fact, so far from being in
earnest in his negotiation with Cromwell and Ireton, that at
the moment they were risking their lives for him he was con
ducting another and equally delusive negotiation with the
Parliament, fomenting the discontent in London, preparing
for a fresh royalist rising, and for an intervention of the Scots
in his favor. "The two nations," he wrote joyously, "will

1648] PURITAN ENGLAND 719
soon be at war." All that was needed for the success of his
schemes was his own liberty ; and in the midst of their hopes
of an accommodation the army leaders found with astonish
ment that they had been duped throughout, and that the king
had fled.
The flight fanned the excitement of the New Model into
frenzy, and only the courage of Cromwell averted an open
mutiny in its gathering at Ware. But even Cromwell was
powerless to break the spirit which now pervaded the soldiers,
and the king's perfidy left him without resource. " The king
is a man of great parts and great understanding," he said,
" but so great a dissembler and so false a man that he is not
to be tmsted." The danger from his escape indeed soon
passed away. By a strange error Charles had ridden from
Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, perhaps with some hope
from the sympathy of Colonel Hammond, the governor of
Carisbrook Castle, and again found himself a prisoner.
Foiled in his effort to put himself at the head of the new
civil war, he set himself to organize it from his prison ; and
while again opening delusive negotiations with the Par
liament, he signed a secret treaty with the Scots for the inva
sion of the realm. The practical suspension of the Covenant
and the triumph of the party of religious liberty in England
had produced a violent reaction across the Tweed. The
moderate party had gathered round the Duke of Hamilton,
and carried the elections against Argyle and the more zealous
religionists ; and on the king's consenting to a stipulation for
the reestablishment of Presbytery in England, they ordered
an army to be levied for his support. In England the whole
of the conservative party, with many of the most conspicuous
members of the Long Parliament at its head, was drifting, in
its horror of the religious and political changes which seemed
impending, towards the king; and the news from Scotland
gave the signal for fitful insurrections in almost every quarter.
London was only held down by main force, old officers of the
Parliament unfurled the royal flag in South Wales and sur
prised Pembroke. The seizure of Berwick and Carlisle
opened a way for the Scotch invasion. Kent, Essex, and
Hertford broke out in revolt. The fleet in the Downs sent
their captains on shore, hoisted the king's pennon, and block-

720 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1648
aded the Thames. " The hour is come for the Parliament to
save the kingdom and to govern alone," cried Cromwell ; but
the Parliament only showed itself eager to take advantage of
the crisis to profess its adherence to monarchy, to reopen the
negotiations it had broken off with the king, and to deal the
fiercest blow at religious freedom which it had ever received.
The Presbyterians flocked back to their seats ; and an " Ordi
nance for the suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies,"
which Vane and Cromwell had long held at bay, was passed
by triumphant majorities. Any man — ran this terrible stat
ute — denying the doctrine of the Trinity or of the Divinity
of Christ, or that the books of Scripture are "the Word of
God," or the resurrection of the body, or a future day of
judgment, and refusing on trial to abjure his heresy, "shall
suffer the pain of death." Any man declaring (amidst a long
list of other errors) "that man by nature hath free will to turn
to God," that there is a Purgatory, that images are lawful,
that infant baptism is unlawful ; any one denying the obliga
tion of observing the Lord's day, or asserting " that the
Church government by Presbytery is antichristian or unlaw
ful," shall on a refusal to renounce his errors "be commanded
to prison." It was plain that the Presbyterians counted on
the king's success to resume their policy of conformity, and
had Charles been free, or the New Model disbanded, their
hopes would probably have been realized. But Charles was
still safe at Carisbrook; and the New Model was facing
fiercely the danger which surrounded it. The wanton re
newal of the war at a moment when all tended to peace swept
from the mind of Fairfax and Cromwell, as from that of the
army at large, every thought of reconciliation with the king.
Soldiers and generals were at last bound together again in a
stern resolve. On the eve of their march against the revolt,
all gathered in a solemn prayer-meeting, and came "to a very
clear and joint resolution, 'that it was our duty, if ever the
Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart,
that man of blood, to account for the blood he has shed and
mischief he has done to his utmost against the Lord's cause
and people in this poor nation.' " In a few days Fairfax had
trampled down the Kentish insurgents, and had prisoned
those of the eastern countries within the walls of Colchester,

1648] PURITAN ENGLAND 721
while Cromwell drove the Welsh insurgents within those of
Pembroke. Both towns, however, held stubbornly out ; and
though a rising under Lord Holland in the neighborhood of
London was easily put down, there was no force left to stem
the inroad of the Scots, who poured over the border some
twenty thousand strong. Luckily the surrender of Pembroke
at this critical moment set Cromwell free. Pushing rapidly
northward with five thousand men, he called in the force
under Lambert which had been gallantly hanging on the Scot
tish flank, and pushed over the Yorkshire hills into the valley of
the Ribble, where the Duke of Hamilton, reenforced by three
thousand royalists of the north, had advanced as far as Pres
ton. With an army which now numbered ten thousand men,
Cromwell poured down on the flank of the duke's straggling
line of march, attacked the Scots as they retired behind the
Ribble, passed the river with them, cut their rear-guard to
pieces at Wigan, forced the defile at Warrington, where the
flying enemy made a last and desperate stand, and drove their
foot to surrender, while Lambert hunted down Hamilton and
the horse. Fresh from its victory, the New Model pushed
over the border, while the peasants of Ayrshire and the west
rose in the " Whiggamore raid " (notable as the first event in
which we find the name " Whig," which is possibly the same
as our "Whey" and conveys a taunt against the "sour-milk"
faces of the fanatical Ayrshiremen), and, marching upon Edin
burgh, dispersed the royalist party and again installed Argyle
in power.
Argyle welcomed Cromwell as a deliverer, but the victorious
general had hardly entered Edinburgh when he was recalled
by pressing news from the south. The temper with which the
Parliament had met the royalist revolt was, as we have seen,
widely different from that of the army. It had recalled the
eleven members, and had passed the ordinance against heresy.
At the moment of the victory at Preston the Lords were dis
cussing charges of treason against Cromwell, while commis
sioners were again sent to the Isle of Wight, in spite of the
resistance of the Independents, to conclude peace with the
king. Royalists and Presbyterians alike pressed Charles to
grasp the easy terms which were now offered him. But his
hopes from Scotland had only broken down to give place to

722 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1648
hopes of a new war with the aid of an army from Ireland ;
and the negotiators saw forty days wasted in useless chicanery.
" Nothing," Charles wrote to his friends, " is changed in my
designs." But the surrender of Colchester to Fairfax in August,
and Cromwell's convention with Argyle, had now set free the
army, and petitions from its regiments at once demanded "jus
tice on the king." A fresh " Remonstrance " from the Council
of Officers called for the election of a new Parliament; for
electoral reform ; for the recognition of the supremacy of the
Houses " in all things " ; for the change of kingship, should it
be retained, into a magistracy elected by the Parliament, and
without veto on its proceedings. Above all, they demanded
" that the capital and grand author of our troubles, by whose
commissions, commands, and procurements, and in whose
behalf and for whose interest only, of will and power, all our
wars and troubles have been, with all the miseries attending
them, may be specially brought to justice for the treason, blood,
and mischief he is therein guilty of." The demand drove the
Houses to despair. Their reply was to accept the king's con
cessions, unimportant as they were, as a basis of peace. The
step was accepted by the soldiers as a defiance : Charles was
again seized by a troop of horse, and carried off to Hurst
Castle, while a letter from Fairfax announced the march of
his army upon London. " We shall know now," said Vane,
as the troops took their post round the Houses of Parliament,
" who is on the side of the king, and who on the side of the
people." But the terror of the army proved weaker among
the members than the agonized loyalty which strove to save
the Monarchy and the Church, and a large majority in both
Houses still voted for the acceptance of the terms which
Charles had offered. The next morning saw Colonel Pride
at the door of the House of Commons with a list of forty
members of the majority in his hands. The Council of
Officers had resolved to exclude them, and as each member
made his appearance he was arrested, and put in confine
ment. " By what right do you act?" a member asked. "By
the right of the sword," Hugh Peters is said to have replied.
The House was still resolute, but on the following morning
forty more members were excluded, and the rest gave way.
The sword had fallen ; and the two great powers which had

i649] PURITAN ENGLAND 723
waged this bitter conflict, the Parliament and the Monarchy,
suddenly disappeared. The expulsion of one hundred and
forty members, — in a word, of the majority of the existing
House, — reduced the Commons to a name. The remnant
who remained to cooperate with the army were no longer repre
sentative of the will of the country ; in the coarse imagery of
popular speech they were but the " rump " of a Parliament.
While the House of Commons dwindled to a sham, the
House of Lords passed away altogether. The effect of
" Pride's Purge " was seen in a resolution of the Rump for
the trial of Charles and the nomination of a court of one
hundred and fifty commissioners to conduct it, with John
Bradshaw, a lawyer of eminence, at their head. The rejec
tion of this ordinance by the few peers who remained brought
about a fresh resolution from members who remained in the
Lower House, " that the People are, under God, the original
of all just power; that the Commons of England in Parlia
ment assembled — being chosen by and representing the
People — have the supreme power in this nation ; and that
whatsoever is enacted and declared for law by the Commons
in Parliament assembled hath the force of a law, and all the
people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the
consent and concurrence of the king or House of Peers be
not had thereunto."
Charles appeared before Bradshaw's court only to deny its
competence and to refuse to plead ; but thirty-two witnesses
were examined to satisfy the consciences of his judges, and
it was not till the fifth day of the trial that he was condemned
to death as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and enemy of his
country. The popular excitement vented itself in cries of
"Justice," or " God save your Majesty," as the trial went on,
but all save the loud outcries of the soldiers was hushed as
Charles passed to receive his doom. The dignity which he
had failed to preserve in his long jangling with Bradshaw
and the judges returned at the call of death. Whatever had
been the faults and follies of his life, " he nothing common
did nor mean, upon that memorable scene." Two masked
executioners awaited the king as he mounted the scaffold,
which had been erected outside one of the windows of the
Banqueting House at Whitehall ; the streets and roofs were
47

724 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1649
thronged with spectators, and a strong body of soldiers stood
drawn up beneath. His head fell at the first blow, and as
the executioner lifted it to the sight of all a groan of pity and
horror burst from the silent crowd.

Section IX. — The Commonwealth, 1 649-1653
The news of the king's death was received throughout
Europe with a thrill of horror. The Czar of Russia chased
the English envoy from his court. The ambassador of France
was withdrawn on the proclamation of the Republic. The
Protestant powers of the Continent seemed more anxious
than any to disavow all connection with the Protestant people
who had brought their king to the block. Holland took the
lead in acts of open hostility to the new power as soon as the
news of the execution reached the Hague ; the States-General
waited solemnly on the Prince of Wales, who took the title
of Charles the Second, and recognized him as " Majesty,"
while they refused an audience to the English envoys. Their
Stadtholder, his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, was
supported by popular sympathy in the aid and encourage
ment he afforded to Charles ; and eleven ships of the English
fleet, which had found a refuge at the Hague ever since their
revolt from the Parliament, were suffered to sail under Ru
pert's command, and to render the seas unsafe for English
traders. The danger was far greater nearer home. In Scot
land Argyle and his party proclaimed Charles the Second
king, and despatched an embassy to the Hague to invite him
to ascend the throne. In Ireland, Ormond had at last brought
to some sort of union the factions who ever since the rebellion
had turned the land into a chaos — the old Irish Catholics or
native party under Owen Roe O'Neil, the Catholics of the
English Pale, the Episcopalian Royalists, the Presbyterian
Royalists of the north; and Ormond called on Charles to
land at once in a country where he would find three fourths of
its people devoted to his cause. Nor was the danger from
without met by resolution and energy on the part of the
diminished Parliament which remained the sole depository of
legal powers. The Commons entered on their new task with
hesitation and delay. Six weeks passed after the king's ex-

1649] PURITAN ENGLAND 725
ecution before the Monarchy was formally abolished and the
government of the nation provided for by the creation of a
Council of State consisting of forty-one members selected
from the Commons, who were entrusted with full executive
power at home or abroad. Two months more elapsed before
the passing of the memorable act which declared " that the
People of England and of all the dominions and territories
thereunto belonging are, and shall be, and are hereby Con
stituted, made, established, and confirmed to be a Common
wealth and Free State, and shall henceforward be governed
as a Commonwealth and Free State by the supreme authority
of this nation, the representatives of the People in Parliament,
and by such as they shall appoint and constitute officers and
ministers for the good of the people, and that without any
king or House of Lords."
Of the dangers which threatened the new Commonwealth
some were more apparent than real. The rivalry of France
and Spain, both anxious for its friendship, secured it from
the hostility of the greater powers of the Continent ; and the
ill will of Holland could be delayed, if not averted, by negoti
ations. The acceptance of the Covenant was insisted on by
Scotland before it would formally receive Charles as its ruler,
and nothing but necessity would induce him to comply with
such a demand. On the side of Ireland the danger was more
pressing, and an army of twelve thousand men was set apart
for a vigorous prosecution of the Irish war. But the real
difficulties were the difficulties at home. The death of Charles
gave fresh vigor to the royalist cause, and the new loyalty
was stirred to enthusiasm by the publication of the " Eikon
Basilike," a work really due to the ingenuity of Dr. Gauden,
a Presbyterian minister, but which was believed to have been
composed by the king himself in his later hours of captivity,
and which reflected with admirable skill the hopes, the suffer
ing, and the piety of the royal " martyr." The dreams of a
rising were roughly checked by the execution of the Duke of
Hamilton and Lords Holland and Capell, who had till now
been confined in the Tower. But the popular disaffection told
even on the Council of State. A majority of its members
declined the oath offered to them at their earliest meeting,
pledging them to an approval of the king's death and the

726 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1649
establishment of the Commonwealth. Half the judges retired
from the bench. Thousands of refusals met the demand of
an engagement to be faithful to the Republic which was made
to all beneficed clergymen and public functionaries. It was
not till May, and even then in spite of the ill will of the
citizens, that the council ventured to proclaim the Common
wealth in London. The army, indeed, had no thought of set
ting up a mere military rule. Still less did it contemplate
leaving the conduct of affairs to the small body of members
which still called itself the House of Commons, a body which
numbered hardly a hundred, and whose average attendance
was little more than fifty. In reducing it by " Pride's Purge"
to the mere shadow of a House the army had never dreamed
of its continuance as a permanent assembly : it had, in fact,
insisted as a condition of even its temporary continuance that
it should prepare a bill for the summoning of a fresh Parlia
ment. The plan put forward by the Council of Officers is
still interesting as the basis of many later efforts towards
parliamentary reform. It advised a dissolution in the spring,
the assembling every two years of a new Parliament consist
ing of four hundred members elected by all householders
ratable to the poor, and a redistribution of seats which would
have given the privilege of representation to every place of
importance. Paid military officers and civil officials were ex
cluded from election. The plan was apparently accepted by
the Commons, and a bill based on it was again and again dis
cussed; but there was a suspicion that no serious purpose
of its own dissolution was entertained by the House. The
popular discontent found a mouthpiece in John Lilburne, a
brave, hot-headed soldier, and the excitement of the army
appeared suddenly in a formidable mutiny in May. "You
must cut these people in pieces," Cromwell broke out in the
Council of State, " or they will cut you in pieces " ; and a
forced march of fifty miles to Burford enabled him to burst
on the mutinous regiments at midnight, and to stamp out the
revolt. But resolute as he was against disorder, Cromwell
went honestly with the army in its demand of a new Parlia
ment ; he believed, and in his harangue to the mutineers he
pledged himself to the assertion, that the House proposed to
dissolve itself. Within the House, however, a vigorous knot

1649] PURITAN ENGLAND 727
of politicians was resolved to prolong its existence ; in a witty
paraphrase of the story of Moses, Henry Martyn was soon to
picture the Commonwealth as a new-born and delicate babe,
and hint that " no one is so proper to bring it up as the mother
who has brought it into the world." As yet, however, their
intentions were kept secret, and in spite of the delays thrown
in the way of the bill for a new representative body Crom
well entertained no serious suspicion of the Parliament's
design, when he was summoned to Ireland by a series of
royalist successes which left only Dublin in the hands of the
parliamentary forces.
With Scotland threatening war, and a naval struggle impend
ing with Holland, it was necessary that the work of the army
in Ireland should be done quickly. The temper, too, of
Cromwell and his soldiers was one of vengeance, for the
horror of the Irish massacre remained living in every English
breast, and the revolt was looked upon as a continuance of
the massacre. "We are come," he said on his landing, "to
ask an account of the innocent blood that hath been shed, and
to endeavor to bring to an account all who by appearing in
arms shall justffy the same." A sortie from Dublin had
already broken up Ormond's siege of the capital ; and, feeling
himself powerless to keep the field before the new army, the
marquis had thrown his best troops, three thousand English
men under Sir Arthur Aston, as a garrison into Drogheda.
The storm of Drogheda by Cromwell was the first of a series
of awful massacres. The garrison fought bravely, and re
pulsed the first attack ; but a second drove Aston and his
force back to the Mill-Mount. "Our men getting up to them,"
ran Cromwell's terrible despatch, " were ordered by me to put
them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of action,
I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town,
and I think that night they put to death about two thousand
men." A few fled to St. Peter's Church, "whereupon I ordered
the steeple to be fired, where one of them was heard to say in
the midst of the flames: 'God damn me, I burn, I burn.'"
" In the church itself nearly one thousand were put to the
sword. I believe all their friars were knocked on the head
promiscuously but two," but these were the sole exceptions to
the rule of killing the soldiers only. At a later time Cromwell

728 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1649
challenged his enemies to give " an instance of one man since
my coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or
banished." But for soldiers who refused to surrender on
summons there was no mercy. Of the remnant who were
driven to yield at last through hunger, " when they submitted,
their officers were knocked on the head, every tenth man of
the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for the Barbados."
" I am persuaded," the despatch ends, " that this is a righteous
judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have
imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it
will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future." A
detachment sufficed to relieve Derry, and to quiet Ulster; and
Cromwell turned to the south, where as stout a defense was
followed by as terrible a massacre at Wexford. A fresh suc
cess at Ross brought him to Waterford; but the city held
stubbornly out, disease thinned his army, where there was
scarce an officer who had not been sick, and the general him
self was arrested by illness. At last the tempestuous weather
drove him into winter quarters at Cork with his work half
done. The winter was one of terrible anxiety. The Parlia
ment was showing less and less inclination to dissolve itself,
and was meeting the growing discontent by a stricter censor
ship of the press, and a fruitless prosecution of John Lilburne.
English commerce was being ruined by the piracies of Rupert's
fleet, which now anchored at Kinsale to support the royalist
cause in Ireland. The energy of Vane indeed had already
recreated a navy, squadrons of which were being despatched
into the British seas, the Mediterranean, and the Levant ; and
Colonel Blake, who had distinguished himself by his heroic
defense of Taunton during the war, was placed at the head
of a fleet which drove Rupert from the Irish coast, and finally
blockaded him in the Tagus. But even the energy of Vane
quailed before the danger from the Scots. " One must go
and die there," the young king cried at the news of Ormond's
defeat before Dublin, " for it is shameful for me to live else
where." But his ardor for an Irish campaign cooled as
Cromwell marched from victory to victory ; and from the isle
of Jersey, which alone remained faithful to him of all his
southern dominions, Charles renewed the negotiations with
Scotland which his hopes from Ireland had broken. They

1650] PURITAN ENGLAND 729
were again delayed by a proposal on the part of Montrose to
attack the very government with whom his master was negoti
ating ; but the failure and death of the marquis in the spring
forced Charles to accept the Presbyterian conditions. The
news of the negotiations filled the English leaders with dis
may, for Scotland was raising an army, and Fairfax, while
willing to defend England against a Scotch invasion, scrupled
to take the lead in an invasion of Scotland. The council
recalled Cromwell from Ireland, but his cooler head saw that
there was yet time to finish his work in the west. During the
winter he had been busily preparing for a new campaign, and
it was only after the storm of Clonmell, and the overthrow of
the Irish under Hugh O'Neil, that he embarked again for
England. Cromwell entered London amidst the shouts of a great mul
titude ; and a month after Charles had landed on the shores
of Scotland the English army started for the north. It
crossed the Tweed, fifteen thousand men strong ; but the ter
ror of his massacres in Ireland hung round its leader, the
country was deserted as he advanced, and he was forced to
cling for provisions to a fleet which sailed along the coast.
David Leslie, with a larger force, refused battle and lay obsti
nately in his lines between Edinburgh and Leith. A march
of the English army round his position to the slopes of the
Pentlands only brought about a change of the Scottish front ;
and as Cromwell fell back baffled upon Dunbar, Leslie
encamped upon the heights above the town, and cut off the
English retreat along the coast by the seizure of Cockburns-
path. His post was almost unassailable, while the soldiers of
Cromwell were sick and starving; and their general had
resolved on an embarkation of his forces, when he saw in the
dusk of evening signs of movement in the Scottish camp.
Leslie's caution had at last been overpowered by the zeal of
the preachers, and his army moved down to the lower ground
between the hillside on which it was encamped and a little
brook which covered the English front. His horse was far in
advance of the main body, and it had hardly reached the
level ground when Cromwell in the dim dawn flung his whole
force upon it. " They run ; I profess they run ! " he cried as
the Scotch horse broke after a desperate resistance and

730 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1650
threw into confusion the foot who were hurrying to its aid.
Then, as the sun rose over the mist of the morning, he added
in nobler words : " Let God arise, and let His enemies be
scattered ! Like as the mist vanisheth, so shalt Thou drive
them away ! " In less than an hour the victory was complete.
The defeat at once became a rout ; ten thousand prisoners
were taken, with all the baggage and guns ; three thousand
were slain, with scarce any loss on the part of the conquerors.
Leslie reached Edinburgh, a general without an army. The
effect of Dunbar was at once seen in the attitude of the Con
tinental powers. Spain hastened to recognize the Republic,
and Holland offered its alliance. But Cromwell was watch
ing with anxiety the growing discontent at home. The
general amnesty claimed by Ireton, and the bill for the Par
liament's dissolution, still hung on hand ; the reform of the
courts of justice, which had been pressed by the army, failed
before the obstacles thrown in its way by the lawyers in the
Commons. "Relieve the oppressed," Cromwell wrote from
Dunbar, " hear the groans of poor prisoners. Be pleased to
reform the abuses of all professions. If there be any one that
makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Com
monwealth." But the House was seeking to turn the current
of public opinion in favor of its own continuance by a great
diplomatic triumph. It resolved secretly on the wild project
of bringing about a union between England and Holland, and
it took advantage of Cromwell's victory to despatch Oliver St.
John with a stately embassy to the Hague. His rejection of
an alliance and Treaty of Commerce which the Dutch offered
was followed by the disclosure of the English proposal of
union, but the proposal was at once refused. The envoys,
who returned angrily to the Parliament, attributed their fail
ure to the posture of affairs in Scotland, where Charles was
preparing for a new campaign. Humiliation after humilia
tion had been heaped on Charles since he landed in his north
ern realm. He had subscribed to the Covenant; he had
listened to sermons and scoldings from the ministers ; he had
been called on to sign a declaration that acknowledged the
tyranny of his father and the idolatry of his mother. Hard
ened and shameless as he was, the young king for a moment
recoiled. " I could never look my mother in the face again,"

1651] PURITAN ENGLAND 73 1
he cried, " after signing such a paper " ; but he signed. He
was still, however, a king only in name, shut out from the coun
cil and the army, with his friends excluded from all part in
government or the war. But he was at once freed by the
victory of Dunbar. " I believe the king will set up on his
own score now," Cromwell wrote after his victory. With the
overthrow of Leslie fell the power of Argyle and the narrow
Presbyterians whom he led. Hamilton, the brother and suc
cessor of the duke who had been captured at Preston, brought
back the royalists to the camp, and Charles insisted on tak
ing part in the council and on being crowned at Scone. Mas
ter of Edinburgh, but foiled in an attack on Stirling, Cromwell
waited through the winter and the long spring, while intestine
feuds broke up the nation opposed to him, and while the
stricter covenanters retired sulkily from the rOyal army on the
return of the " Malignants," the royalists of the earlier war,
to its ranks. With summer the campaign recommenced, but
Leslie again fell back on his system of positions, and Crom
well, finding the Scotch camp at Stirling unassailable, crossed
into Fife and left the road open to the south. The bait was
taken. In spite of Leslie's counsels Charles resolved to
invade England, and was soon in full march through Lanca
shire upon the Severn, with the English horse under Lambert
hanging on his rear, and the English foot hastening by York
and Coventry to close the road to London. " We have done
to the best of our judgment," Cromwell replied to the angry
alarm of the Parliament, " knowing that if some issue were
not put to this business it would occasion another winter's
war." At Coventry he learned Charles's position, and swept
round by Evesham upon Worcester, where the Scotch king
was encamped. Throwing half his force across the river,
Cromwell attacked the town on both sides on the anniversary
of his victory at Dunbar. He led the van in person, and was
" the first to set foot on the enemy's ground." When Charles
descended from the cathedral tower to fling himself on the
eastern division, Cromwell hurried back across the Severn,
and was soon " riding in the midst of the fire." For four or
five hours, he told the Parliament, " it was as stiff a contest as
ever I have seen " ; the Scots, outnumbered and beaten into
the city, gave no answer but shot to offers of quarter, and it

732 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1652
was not till nightfall that all was over. The loss of the vic
tors was as usual inconsiderable. The conquered lost six
thousand men, and all their baggage and artillery. Leslie
was among the prisoners, Hamilton among the dead. Charles
himself fled from the field, and after months of wanderings
made his escape to France.
" Now that the king is dead and his son defeated," Crom
well said gravely to the Parliament, " I think it necessary to
come to a settlement." But the settlement which had been
promised after Naseby was still as distant as ever after
Worcester. The bill for dissolving the present Parliament,
though Cromwell pressed it in person, was only passed, after
bitter opposition, by a majority of two ; and even this success
had been purchased by a compromise which permitted the
House to sit for three years more. Internal affairs were
almost at a deadlock. The Parliament appointed committees
to prepare plans for legal reforms, or for ecclesiastical re
forms, but it did nothing to carry them into effect. It was
overpowered by the crowd of affairs which the confusion of
the war had thrown into its hands, by confiscations, seques
trations, appointments to civil and military offices, in fact,
the whole administration of the State ; and there were times
when it was driven to a resolve not to take any private affairs
for weeks together in order that it might make some progress
with public business. To add to this confusion and muddle
there were the inevitable scandals which arose from it;
charges of malversation and corruption were hurled at the
members of the House ; and some, like Haselrig, were accused
with justice of using their power to further their own inter
ests. The one remedy for all this was, as the army saw, the
assembly of a new and complete Parliament in place of the
mere " rump " of the old ; but this was the one measure which
the House was resolute to avert. Vane spurred it to a new
activity. The Amnesty Bill was forced through after fifteen
divisions. A grand committee, with Sir Matthew Hale at its
head, was appointed to consider the reform of the law. A
union with Scotland was pushed resolutely forward ; eight
English commissioners convoked a convention of delegates
from its counties and boroughs at Edinburgh, and in spite of
dogged opposition procured a vote in favor of the proposal.

1652] PURITAN ENGLAND 733
A bill was introduced which gave legal form to the union,
and admitted representatives from Scotland into the next
Parliament. A similar plan was proposed for a union with
Ireland. But it was necessary for Vane's purposes not only
to show the energy of the Parliament, but to free it from the
control of the army. His aim was to raise in the navy a
force devoted to the House, and to eclipse the glories of
Dunbar and Worcester by yet greater triumphs at sea. With
this view the quarrel with Holland had been carefully nursed ;
a " Navigation Act " prohibiting the importation in foreign
vessels of any but the products of the countries to which they
belonged struck a fatal blow at the carrying trade from which
the Dutch drew their wealth ; and fresh debates arose from
the English claim to salutes from all vessels in the Channel.
The two fleets met before Dover, and a summons from Blake
to lower the Dutch flag was met by the Dutch admiral. Van
Tromp, with a broadside. The States-General attributed the
collision to accident, and offered to recall Van Tromp ; but
the English demands rose at each step in the negotiations, till
war became inevitable. The army hardly needed the warning
conveyed by the introduction of a bill for its disbanding to
understand the new policy of the Parliament. It was sig
nificant that while accepting the bill for its own dissolution
the House had as yet prepared no plan for the assembly
which was to follow it ; and the Dutch war had hardly been
declared when, abandoning the attitude of inaction which it
had observed since the beginning of the Commonwealth, the
army petitioned, not only for reform in Church and State, but
for an explicit declaration that the House would bring its
proceedings to a close. The Petition forced the House to
discuss a bill for "a New Representative," but the discussion
soon brought out the resolve of the sitting members to con
tinue as a part of the coming Parliament without reelection.
The officers, irritated by such a claim, demanded in confer
ence after conference an immediate dissolution, and the House
as resolutely refused. In ominous words Cromwell supported
the demand of the army. " As for the members of this Par
liament, the army begins to take them in disgust. I would it
did so with less reason." There was just ground, he urged,
for discontent in their selfish greed of houses and lands, the

734 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1653
scandalous lives of many, their partiality as judges, their
interference with the ordinary course of law in matters of
private interest, their delay of law reform, above all in their
manifest design of perpetuating their own power. " There
is little to hope for from such men," he ended with a return
to his predominant thought, "for a settlement of the nation."
For the moment the crisis was averted by the events of
the war. A terrible storm had separated the two fleets when
on the point of engaging in the Orkneys, but Ruyter and
Blake met again in the Channel, and after a fierce struggle
the Dutch were forced to retire under cover of night. Since
the downfall of Spain Holland had been the first naval power
in the world, and the spirit of the nation rose gallantly with
its earliest defeat. Immense efforts were made to strengthen
the fleet, and the veteran Van Tromp, who was replaced at its
head, appeared in the Channel with seventy-three ships of
war. Blake had but half the number, but he at once accepted
the challenge, and the unequal fight went on doggedly till
nightfall, when the English fleet withdrew shattered into the
Thames. Tromp swept the Channel in triumph, with a broom
at his masthead ; and the tone of the Commons lowered with
the defeat of their favorite force. A compromise seems to
have been arranged between the two parties, for the bill pro
viding a new Representative was again pushed on, and the
Parliament agreed to retire in the coming November, while
Cromwell offered no opposition to a reduction of the army.
But the courage of the House rose afresh with a turn of
fortune. The strenuous efforts of Blake enabled him again
to put to sea in a few months after his defeat, and a running
fight through four days ended at last in an English victory,
though Tromp's fine seamanship enabled him to save the
convoy he was guarding. The House at once insisted on
the retention of its power. Not only were the existing
members to continue as members of the new Parliament,
depriving the places they represented of their right of
choosing representatives, but they were to constitute a
committee of revision to determine the validity of each
election and the fitness of the members returned. A con
ference took place between the leaders of the Commons and
the officers of the array, who resolutely demanded not only

1653] PURITAN ENGLAND 735
the omission of these clauses, but that the Parliament should
at once dissolve itself, and commit the new elections to the
Council of State. " Our charge," retorted Haselrig, " cannot
be transferred to any one." The conference was adjourned
till the next morning, on an understanding that no decisive
step should be taken ; but it had no sooner reassembled than
the absence of the leading members confirmed the news that
Vane was fast pressing the bill for a new representative
through the House. " It is contrary to common honesty,"
Cromwell angrfly broke out ; and, quitting Whitehall, he sum
moned a company of musketeers to follow him as far as the
door of the Commons. He sat down quietly in his place,
" clad in plain gray clothes and gray worsted stockings," and
listened to Vane's passionate arguments. "I am come to do
what grieves me to the heart," he said to his neighbor, St.
John ; but he still remained quiet, till Vane pressed the House
to waive its usual forms and pass the bill at once. " The time
has come," he said to Harrison. " Think well," replied Har
rison, "it is a dangerous work!" and Cromwell listened for
another quarter of an hour. At the question " that this bill
do pass," he at length rose, and his tone grew higher as he
repeated his former charges of injustice, self-interest, and
delay. " Your hour is come," he ended, " the Lord hath done
with you I " A crowd of members started to their feet in
angry protest. "Come, come," replied Cromwell, "we have
had enough of this " ; and striding into the midst of the
chamber, he clapt his hat on his head, and exclaimed, " I
will put an end to your prating ! " In the din that followed
his voice was heard in broken sentences — " It is not fit that
you should sit here any longer! You should give place to
better men! You are no Parliament." Thirty musketeers
entered at a sign from their general, and the fifty members
present crowded to the door. " Drunkard ! " Cromwell
broke out as Wentworth passed him ; and Martin was
taunted with a yet coarser name. Vane, fearless to the last,
told him his act was " against all right and all honor." " Ah,
Sir Harry Vane, Sir Harry Vane," Cromwell retorted in
bitter indignation at the trick he had been played, "you
might have prevented all this, but you are a juggler, and have
no common honesty! The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry

736 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1653
Vane ! " The speaker refused to quit his seat tfll Harrison
offered to " lend him a hand to come down." Cromwell lifted
the mace from the table. " What shall we do with this bau
ble.?" he said. "Take it away!" The door of the House
was locked at last, and the dispersion of the Parliament was
followed a few hours after by that of its executive committee,
the Council of State. Cromwell himself summoned them to
withdraw. "We have heard," replied the president, John
Bradshaw, " what you have done this morning at the House,
and in some hours all England wfll hear it. But you mistake,
sir, if you think the Parliament dissolved. No power on
earth can dissolve the Parliament but itself, be sure of that ! "
Section X. — The Fall of Puritanism, 1653-1660
The dispersion of the Parliament and of the Councfl of
State left England without a government, for the authority
of every official ended with that of the body from which his
power was derived. Cromwell, in fact, as captain-general
of the forces, was forced to recognize his responsibflity for
the maintenance of public order. But no thought of military
despotism can be fairly traced in the acts of the general or
the army. They were in fact far from regarding their posi
tion as a revolutionary one. Though incapable of justifi
cation on any formal ground, their proceedings since the
establishment of the Commonwealth had as yet been sub
stantially in vindication of the rights of the country to rep
resentation and self-government ; and public opinion had
gone fairly with the army in its demand for a full and effi
cient body of representatives, as well as in its resistance to
the project by which the Rump would have deprived half
England of its right of election. It was only when no other
means existed of preventing such a wrong that the soldiers
had driven out the wrong-doers. " It is you that have forced
me to this," Cromwell exclaimed, as he drove the members
from the House ; " I have sought the Lord night and day
that He would rather slay me than put me upon the doing
of this work." The act was one of violence to the members
of the House, but the act which it aimed at preventing was
one of violence on their part to the constitutional rights of

1653] PURITAN ENGLAND 737
the whole nation. The people had in fact been " dissatisfied
in every corner of the realm " at the state of public affairs,
and the expulsion of the members was ratified by a general
assent. "We did not hear a dog bark at their going," the
protector said years afterwards. Whatever anxiety may have
been felt at the use which was like to be made of " the power
of the sword," was in great part dispelled by a proclamation
of the officers. Their one anxiety was "not to grasp the
power ourselves nor to keep it in mflitary hands, — no, not for
a day," and their promise to " call to the government men of
approved fidelity and honesty " was to some extent redeemed
by the nomination of a provisional Council of State, consist
ing of eight officers of high rank and four civilians, with
Cromwell as their head, and a seat in which was offered,
though fruitlessly, to Vane. The first business of such a
body was clearly to summon a new Parliament and to resign
its trust into its hands ; but the bill for parliamentary reform
had dropped with the expulsion, and reluctant as the council
was to summon a new Parliament on the old basis of election,
it shrank from the responsibility of effecting so fundamental
a, change as the creation of a new basis by its own authority.
It was this difficulty which led to the expedient of a Constit
uent Convention. Cromwell told the story of this unlucky
assembly some years after with an amusing frankness. " I
will come and tell you a story of my own weakness and
folly. And yet it was done in my simplicity — I dare avow
it was. ... It was thought then that men of our own judg
ment, who had fought in the wars, and were all of a piece on
that account — why, surely, these men will hit it, and these
men will do it to the purpose, whatever can be desired !
And surely we did think, and I did think so — the more
blame to me ! " Of the hundred and fifty-six men, " faithful,
fearing God, and hating covetousness," whose names were
selected for this purpose by the Council of State, from lists
furnished by the congregational churches, the bulk were
men, like Ashley Cooper, of good blood and " free estates " ;
and the proportion of burgesses, such as the leather merchant,
Praise-God Barebones, whose name was eagerly seized on as
a nickname for the body to which he belonged, seems to have
been much the same as in earlier Parliaments. But the cir-

73? HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1653
cumstances of their choice told fatally on the temper of its
members. Cromwell himself, in the burst of rugged elo
quence with which he welcomed their assembling, was carried
away by a strange enthusiasm. " Convince the nation," he
said, "that as men fearing God have fought them out of
their bondage under the regal power, so men fearing God
do now rule them in the fear of God. . . . Own your call,
for it is of God : indeed, it is marvelous, and it hath been
unprojected. . . . Never was a supreme power under such
a way of owning God, and being owned by Him." A spirit
yet more enthusiastic appeared in the proceedings of the
convention itself. The resignation of their powers by Crom
well and the council into its hands left it the one supreme
authority ; but by the instrument which convoked it provision
had been made that this authority should be transferred in
fifteen months to another assembly elected according to its
directions. Its work was, in fact, to be that of a constituent
assembly, paving the way for a Parliament on a really national
basis. But the convention put the largest construction on
its commission, and boldly undertook the whole task of con
stitutional reform. Committees were appointed to consider
the needs of the Church and the nation. The spirit of econ
omy and honesty which pervaded the assembly appeared in
its redress of the extravagance which prevailed in the civil
service, and of the inequality of taxation. With a remark
able energy it undertook a host of reforms, for whose execu
tion England has had to wait to our own day. The Long
Parliament had shrunk from any reform of the Court of
Chancery, where twenty-three thousand cases were waiting
unheard. The convention proposed its abolition. The work
of compiling a single code of laws, begun under the Long
Parliament by a committee with Sir Matthew Hale at its
head, was again pushed forward. The frenzied alarm which
these bold measures aroused among the lawyer class was soon
backed by that of the clergy, who saw their wealth menaced
by the establishment of civil marriage, and by proposals to
substitute the free contributions of congregations for the
payment of tithes. The landed proprietors too rose against
the scheme for the abolition of lay patronage, which was
favored by the convention, and predicted an age of confis-

1653] PURITAN ENGLAND 739
cation. The " Barebones Parliament," as the assembly was
styled in derision, was charged with a design to ruin property,
the Church, and the law, with enmity to knowledge, and a
blind and ignorant fanaticism. Cromwell himself shared the
general uneasiness at its proceedings. His mind was that
of an administrator, rather than that of a statesman, unspec
ulative, deficient in foresight, conservative, and eminently
practical. He saw the need of administrative reform in
Church and State ; but he had no sympathy whatever with
the revolutionary theories which were filling the air around
him. His desire was for "a settlement" which should be
accompanied with as little disturbance of the old state of
things as possible. If monarchy had vanished in the tur-
mofl of war, his experience of the Long Parliament only
confirmed him in his belief of the need of establishing an
executive power of a similar kind, apart from the power of
the legislature, as a condition of civil liberty. His sword
had won " liberty of conscience " ; but passionately as he
clung to it, he was still for an established Church, for a
parochial system, and a ministry maintained by tithes. His
social tendencies were simply those of the class to which he
belonged. "I was by birth a gentleman," he told a later
Parliament, and in the old social arrangement of " a noble
man, a gentleman, a yeoman," he saw "a good interest of
the nation and a great one." He hated "that leveling prin
ciple " which tended to the reducing of all to one equality.
"What was the purport of it," he asks with an amusing
simplicity, "but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as
the landlord .' Which, I think, if obtained, would not have
lasted long. The men of that principle, after they had
served their own turns, would then have cried up property
and interest fast enough."
To a practical temper such as this the speculative reforms
of the convention were as distasteful as to the lawyers and
clergy whom they attacked. " Nothing," said Cromwell,
"was in the hearts of these men but "overturn, overturn.'"
But he was delivered from his embarrassment by the internal
dissensions of the assembly itself. The day after the decision
against tithes the more conservative members snatched a
vote by surprise "that the sitting of this Parliament any
48

740 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1653
longer, as now constituted, will not be for the good of the Com
monwealth, and that it is requisite to deliver up unto the lord
general the powers we received from him." The speaker placed
their abdication in Cromwell's hands, and the act was confirmed
by the subsequent adhesion of a majority of the members.
The dissolution of the convention replaced matters in the state
in which its assembly had found them ; but there was still
the same general anxiety to substitute some sort of legal rule
for the power of the sword. The convention had named
during its session a fresh Council of State, and this body at
once drew up, under the name of the Instrument of Govern
ment, a remarkable constitution, which was adopted by the
Council of Officers. They were driven by necessity to the
step from which they had shrunk before, that of convening a
Parliament on the reformed basis of representation, though
such a basis had no legal sanction. The House was to con
sist of four hundred members from England, thirty from
Scotland, and thirty from Ireland. The seats hitherto as
signed to small and rotten boroughs were transferred to
larger constituencies, and for the most part to counties. All
special rights of voting in the election of members were
abolished, and replaced by a general right of suffrage, based
on the possession of real or personal property to the value of
two hundred pounds. Catholics and " Malignants," as those
who had fought for the king were called, were excluded for
the while from the franchise. Constitutionally, all further
organization of the form of government should have been
left to this assembly ; but the dread of disorder during the
interval of its election, as well as a longing for " settlement,"
drove the council to complete their work by pressing the
office of " protector " upon Cromwell. " They told me that
except I would undertake the government they thought
things would hardly come to a composure or settlement, but
blood and confusion would break in as before." If we follow,
however, his own statement, it was when they urged that the
acceptance of such a protectorate actually limited his power
as lord general, and " bound his hands to act nothing without
the consent of a councfl until the Parliament," that the post
was accepted. The powers of the new protector indeed
were strictly limited. Though the members of the councfl

1654] PURITAN ENGLAND 741
were originally named by him, each member was irremovable
save by consent of the rest : their advice was necessary in all
foreign affairs, their consent in matters of peace and war,
their approval in nominations to the great offices of state, or
the disposal of the military or civil power. With this body,
too, lay the choice of all future protectors. To the adminis
trative check of the council was added the political check of
the Parliament. Three years at the most were to elapse
between the assembling of one Parliament and another.
Laws could not be made, nor taxes imposed but by its au
thority, and after the lapse of twenty days the statutes it
passed became laws even if the protector's assent was refused
to them. The new constitution was undoubtedly popular;
and the promise of a real Parliament in a few months covered
the want of any legal character in the new rule. The Gov
ernment was generally accepted as a provisional one, which
could only acquire legal authority from the ratification of its
acts in the coming session ; and the desire to settle it on such
a parliamentary basis was universal among the members of
the new assembly which met in the autumn at Westminster.
Few Parliaments have ever been more memorable, or more
truly representative of the English people, than the Parlia
ment of 1654. It was the first Parliament in our history
where members from Scotland and Ireland sat side by side
with those from England, as they sit in the Parliament of
to-day. The members for rotten boroughs and pocket bor
oughs had disappeared. In spite of the exclusion of royalists
and Catholics from the polling-booths, and the arbitrary
erasure of the names of a few ultrarepublican members by
the council, the House had a better title to the name of a
"free Parliament" than any which had sat before. The
freedom with which the electors had exercised their right of
voting was seen indeed in the large number of Presbyterian
members who were returned, and in the reappearance of Has
elrig and Bradshaw, with many members of the Long Parlia
ment, side by side with Lord Herbert and the older Sir Harry
Vane. The first business of the House was clearly to consider
the question of government ; and Haselrig, with the fiercer
republicans, at once denied the legal existence of either
council or protector, on the ground that the Long Parliament

742 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1654
had never been dissolved. Such an argument, however, told
as much against the Parliament in which they sat as against
the administration itself, and the bulk of the assembly con
tented themselves with declining to recognize the constitution
or protectorate as of more than provisional validity. They
proceeded at once to settle the Government on a parliamen
tary basis. The " Instrument " was taken as the groundwork
of the new constitution, and carried clause by clause. That
Cromwell should retain his rule as protector was unanimously
agreed ; that he should possess the right of veto or a coordi
nate legislative power with the Parliament was hotly debated,
though the violent language of Haselrig did little to disturb
the general tone of moderation. Suddenly, however, Crom
well interposed. If he had undertaken the duties of protector
with reluctance, he looked on all legal defects in his title as
more than supplied by the consent of the nation. " I called
not myself to this place," he urged, " God and the people of
these kingdoms have borne testimony to it." His rule had
been accepted by London, by the army, by the solemn deci
sion of the judges, by addresses from every shire, by the
very appearance of the members of the Parliament in answer
to his writ. " Why may I not balance this Providence," he
asked, "with any hereditary interest?" In this national
approval he saw a call from God, a divine right of a higher
order than that of the kings who had gone before.
But there was another ground for the anxiety with which
he watched the proceedings of the Commons. His passion
for administration had far overstepped the bounds of a merely
provisional rule in the interval before the assembling of the
Parliament. His desire for " settlement " had been strength
ened not only by the drift of public opinion, but by the urgent
need of every day ; and the power reserved by the " Instru
ment " to issue temporary ordinances " untfl further order in
such matters, to be taken by the Parliament," gave a scope
to his marvelous activity of which he at once took advan
tage. Sixty-four ordinances had been issued in the nine
months before the meeting of the Parliament. Peace had
been concluded with Holland. The Church had been set in
order. The law itself had been minutely regulated. The
union with Scotland had been brought to completion. So

1655] PURITAN ENGLAND 743
far was Cromwell from dreaming that these measures, or the
authority which enacted them, would be questioned, that he
looked to Parliament simply to complete his work. "The
great end of your meeting," he said at the first assembly of
its members, "is healing and settling." Though he had him
self done much, he added, " there was still much to be done."
Peace had to be made with Portugal and alliance with Spain.
Bills were laid before the House for the codification of the
law. The plantation and settlement of Ireland had still to
be completed. He resented the setting these projects aside
for constitutional questions which, as he held, a divine call
had decided, but he resented yet more the renewed claim
advanced by Parliament to the sole power of legislation. As
we have seen, his experience of the evils which had arisen
from the concentration of legislative and executive power in
the Long Parliament had convinced Cromwell of the danger
to public liberty which lay in such a union. He saw in the
joint government of " a single person and a Parliament " the
only assurance "that Parliaments should not make themselves
perpetual," or that their power should not be perverted to
public wrong. But whatever strength there may have been
in the protector's arguments, the act by which he proceeded
to enforce them was fatal to liberty, and in the end to Puri
tanism. " If my calling be from God," he ended, " and my tes
timony from the People, God and the People shall take it from
me, else I will not part from it." And he announced that no
member would be suffered to enter the House without sign
ing an engagement " not to alter the Government as it is set
tled in a single person and a Parliament." No act of the
Stuarts had been a bolder defiance of constitutional law ; and
the act was as needless as it was illegal. One hundred mem
bers alone refused to take the engagement, and the signatures
of three fourths of the House proved that the security Crom
well desired might have been easily procured by a vote of
Parliament. But those who remained resumed their consti
tutional task with unbroken firmness. They quietly asserted
their sole title to government by referring the protector's
ordinances to committees for revision and for conversion
into laws. The " Instrument of Government " was turned
into a bfll, debated, and after some modifications read a third

744 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1654
time. Money votes, as in previous Parliaments, were deferred
till "grievances" had been settled. But Cromwell once more
intervened. The royalists were astir again; and he attributed
their renewed hopes to the hostile attitude which he ascribed
to the Parliament. The army, which remained unpaid whfle
the supplies were delayed, was seething with discontent. " It
looks," said the protector, "as if the laying grounds for a
quarrel had rather been designed than to give the people set
tlement. Judge yourselves whether the contesting of things
that were provided for by this Government hath been profit
able expense of time for the good of this nation." In words
of angry reproach he declared the Parliament dissolved.
With the dissolution of the Parliament of 1654 ended all
show of constitutional rule. The protectorate, deprived by
its own act of all chance of legal sanction, became a simple
tyranny. Cromwell professed, indeed, to be restrained by
the " Instrument '' ; but the one great restraint on his power
which the Instrument provided, the inability to levy taxes
save by consent of Parliament, was set aside on the plea of
necessity. " The People," said the protector in words which
Strafford might have uttered, " wfll prefer their real security
to forms." That a danger of royalist revolt existed was un
deniable, but the danger was at once doubled by the general
discontent. From this moment, Whitelock tells us, "many
sober and noble patriots," in despair of public liberty, " did
begin to incline to the king's restoration." In the mass of
the population the reaction was far more rapid. " Charles
Stuart," writes a Cheshire correspondent to the secretary of
state, " hath five hundred friends in these adjacent counties
for every one friend to you among them." But before the
overpowering strength of the army even this general discon
tent was powerless. Yorkshire, where the royalist insurrec
tion was expected to be most formidable, never ventured to
rise at all. There were risings in Devon, Dorset, and the
Welsh Marches, but they were quickly put down, and their
leaders brought to the scaffold. Easfly, however, as the revolt
was suppressed, the terror of the Government was seen in the
energetic measures to which Cromwell resorted in the hope
of securing order. The country was divided into ten mflitary
governments, each with a major-general at its head, who was

1654] PURITAN ENGLAND 745
empowered to disarm all papists and royalists, and to arrest
suspected persons. Funds for the supports of this mflitary
despotism were provided by an ordinance of the Council of
State, which enacted that all who had at any time borne arms
for the king should pay every year a tenth part of their income,
in spite of the Act of Oblivion, as a fine for their royalist ten
dencies. The despotism of the major-generals was seconded
by the older expedients of tyranny. "The ejected clergy had
been zealous in promoting the insurrection, and they were
forbidden in revenge to act as chaplains or as tutors. The
press was placed under a strict censorship. The payment of
taxes levied by the sole authority of the protector was enforced
by distraint ; and when a collector was sued in the courts for
redress, the counsel for the prosecution were sent to the
Tower. If pardon, indeed, could ever be won for a tyranny, the
wisdom and grandeur with which he used the power he had
usurped would win pardon for the protector. The greatest
among the many great enterprises undertaken by the Lord
Parliament had been the union of the three kingdoms; and
that of Scotland with England had been brought about, at
the very end of its career, by the tact and vigor of Sir Harry
Vane. But its practical realization was left to Cromwell. In
four months of hard fighting General Monk brought the
Highlands to a new tranquillity ; and the presence of an army
of eight thousand men, backed by a line of forts, kept the
most restless of the clans in good order. The settlement of
the country was brought about by the temperance and sagac
ity of Monk's successor. General Deane. No further inter
ference with the Presbyterian system was attempted beyond
the suppression of the general assembly. But religious
liberty was resolutely protected, and Deane ventured even to
interfere on behalf of the miserable victims whom Scotch
bigotry was torturing and burning on the charge of witch
craft. Even steady royalists acknowledged the justice of the
Government and the wonderful discipline of its troops. " We
always reckon those eight years of the usurpation," said
Burnet afterwards, "a time of great peace and prosperity."
Sterner work had to be done before Ireland could be brought
into real union with its sister kingdoms. The work of con-

746 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1654
quest had been continued by Ireton, and completed after his
death by General Ludlow, as mercilessly as it had begun.
Thousands perished by famine or the sword. Shipload after
shipload of those who surrendered were sent over sea for sale
into forced labor in Jamaica and the West Indies. More
than forty thousand of the beaten Catholics were permitted
to enlist for foreign service, and found a refuge in exile under
the banners of France and Spain. The work of settlement,
which was undertaken by Henry Cromwell, the younger and
abler of the protector's sons, turned out to be even more ter
rible than the work of the sword. It took as its model the
colonization of Ulster, the fatal measure which had destroyed
all hope of a united Ireland and had brought inevitably in its
train the revolt and the war. The people were divided into
classes in the order of their assumed guilt. All who after
fair trial were proved to have personally taken part in the
massacre were sentenced to banishment or death. The gen
eral amnesty which freed "those of the meaner sort" from
all question on other scores was far from extending to the
landowners. Catholic proprietors who had shown no good
will to the Parliament, even though they had taken no part
in the war, were punished by the forfeiture of a third of their
estates. All who had borne arms were held to have forfeited
the whole, and driven into Connaught, where fresh estates
were carved out for them from the lands of the native clans.
No such doom had ever fallen on a nation in modern times as
fell upon Ireland in its new settlement. Among the bitter
memories which part Ireland from England the memory of
the bloodshed and confiscation which the Puritans wrought
remains the bitterest ; and the worst curse an Irish peasant
can hurl at his enemy is "the curse of Cromwell." But piti
less as the protector's policy was, it was successful in the
ends at which it aimed. The whole native population lay
helpless and crushed. Peace and order were restored, and a
large incoming of Protestant settlers from England and Scot
land brought a new prosperity to the wasted country. Above
all, the legislative union which had been brought about with
Scotland was now carried out with Ireland, and thirty seats
were allotted to its representatives in the general Parliament.
In England Cromwefl dealt with the royalists as irreconcil-

1 654] PURITAN ENGLAND 747
able enemies ; but in every other respect he carried fairly out
his pledge of " healing and settling." The series of adminis
trative reforms planned by the convention had been partially
carried into effect before the meeting of Parliament in 1654 ;
but the work was pushed on after the dissolution of the House
with yet greater energy. Nearly a hundred ordinances showed
the industry of the Government. Police, public amusements,
roads, finances, the condition of prisons, the imprisonment of
debtors, were a few among the subjects which claimed Crom
well's attention. An ordinance of more than fifty clauses
reformed the Court of Chancery. The anarchy which had
reigned in the Church since the breakdown of episcopacy
and the failure of the Presbyterian system to supply its place,
was put an end to by a series of wise and temperate meas
ures for its reorganization. Rights of patronage were left
untouched; but a Board of Triers, a fourth of whom were
laymen, was appointed to examine the fitness of ministers pre
sented to livings ; and a Church board of gentry and clergy
was set up in every county to exercise a supervision over
ecclesiastical affairs, and to detect and remove scandalous
and ineffectual ministers. Even by the confession of Crom
well's opponents, the plan worked well. It furnished the
country with " able, serious preachers," Baxter tells us, " who
lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion soever they were " ;
and, as both Presbyterian and Independent ministers were
presented to livings at the will of their patrons, it solved so
far as practical working was concerned the problem of a relig
ious union among the Puritans on the base of a wide variety
of Christian opinion. From the Church which was thus re
organized all power of interference with faiths differing
from its own was resolutely withheld. Save in his dealings
with the Episcopalians, whom he looked on as a political dan
ger, Cromwell remained true throughout to the cause of relig
ious liberty. Even the Quaker, rejected by all other Christian
bodies as an anarchist and blasphemer, found sympathy and
protection in the protector. The Jews had been excluded
from England since the reign of Edward the First; and a
prayer which they now presented for leave to return was re
fused by the commission of merchants and divines to whom
the protector referred it for consideration. But the refusal

'743 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1654
was quietly passed over, and the connivance of Cromwell in
the settlement of a few Hebrews in London and Oxford was
so clearly understood that no one ventured to interfere with
them. No part of his policy is more characteristic of Cromwell's
mind, whether in its strength or in its weakness, than his man
agement of foreign affairs. While England had been absorbed
in her long and obstinate struggle for freedom the whole face
of the world around her had changed. The Thirty Years'
war was over. The victories of Gustavus, and of the Swedish
generals who followed him, had been seconded by the policy
of Richelieu and the intervention of France. Protestantism
in Germany was no longer in peril from the bigotry or ambi
tion of the House of Austria, and the treaty of Westphalia
had drawn a permanent line between the territories belonging
to the adherents of the old religion and the new. There was
little danger, indeed, now to Europe from the great Catholic
house which had threatened its freedom ever since Charles
the Fifth. Its Austrian branch was called away from dreams
of aggression in the West to a desperate struggle with the
Turk for the possession of Hungary and the security of Aus
tria itself. Spain was falling into a state of strange decrepi
tude. So far from aiming to be mistress of Europe, she was
rapidly sinking into the almost helpless prey of France. It
was France which had now become the dominant power in
Christendom, though her position was far from being as com
manding as it was to become under Louis the Fourteenth.
The peace and order which prevailed after the cessation of
the religious troubles throughout her compact and fertile ter
ritory gave scope at last to the quick and industrious temper
of the French people ; whfle her wealth and energy were
placed by the centralizing administration of Henry the Fourth,
of Richelieu, and of Mazarin, almost absolutely in the hands
of the Crown. Under the three great rulers who have just
been named her ambition was steadily directed to the same
purpose of territorial aggrandizement, and though limited as
yet to the annexation of the Spanish and imperial territories
which stfll parted her frontier from the Pyrenees, the Alps,
and the Rhine, a statesman of wise political genius would have
discerned the beginning of that great struggle for supremacy

i654] PURITAN ENGLAND 749
over Europe at large which was only foiled by the genius of
Marlborough and the victories of the Grand Alliance. But
in his view of European politics Cromwell was misled by
the conservative and unspeculative temper of his mind as
well as by the strength of his religious enthusiasm. Of the
change in the world around him he seems to have discerned
nothing. He brought to the Europe of Mazarin the hopes
and ideas with which all England was thrilling in his youth
at the outbreak of the Thirty Years' war. Spain was still to
him "the head of the papal interest," whether at home or
abroad. " The papists in England," he said to the Parliament
of 1656, " have been accounted, ever since I was born, Spanio-
lized ; they never regarded France, or any other papist state,
but Spain only." The old English hatred of Spain, the old
English resentment at the shameful part which the nation
had been forced to play in the great German struggle by the
policy of James and of Charles, lived on in Cromwell, and was
only strengthened by the religious enthusiasm which the suc
cess of Puritanism had kindled within him. " The Lord Him
self," he wrote to his admirals as they sailed to the West
Indies, " hath a controversy with your enemies ; even with
that Romish Babylon of which the Spaniard is the great
underpropper. In that respect we fight the Lord's battles."
What Sweden had been under Gustavus, England, CromweU
dreamed, might be now — the head of a great Protestant
League in the struggle against Catholic aggression. "You have
on your shoulders," he said to the Parliament of 1654, " the in
terest of all the Christian people of the world. I wish it may
be written on our hearts to be zealous for that interest."
The first step in such a struggle was necessarfly to league
the Protestant powers together, and Cromwell's earliest efforts
were directed to bring the ruinous and indecisive quarrel with
HoUand to an end. The fierceness of the strife had grown
with each engagement; but the hopes of HoUand fell with
her admiral, Tromp, who received a mortal wound at the
moment when he had succeeded in forcing the English line ;
and the skfll and energy of his successor, De Ruyter, strug
gled in vain to restore her waning fortunes. She was saved
by the expulsion of the Long Parliament, which had persisted
in its demand of a political union of the two countries ; and

750 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1654
the new policy of Cromwell was seen in the conclusion of
peace. The United Provinces recognized the supremacy of
the English flag in the British seas, and submitted to the
Navigation Act, whfle Holland pledged itself to shut out the
House of Orange from power, and thus relieved England from
the risk of seeing a Stuart restoration supported by Dutch
forces. The peace with the Dutch was followed by the con
clusion of like treaties with Sweden and with Denmark ; and
on the arrival of a Swedish envoy with offers of a league of
friendship, Cromwell endeavored to bring the Dutch, the
Brandenburgers, and the Danes into a confederation of the
Protestant powers. His efforts in this direction however,
though they never wholly ceased, remained fruitless ; but the
protector was resolute to carry out his plans single-handed.
The defeat of the Dutch had left England the chief sea power
of the world ; and before the dissolution of the Parliament,
two fleets put to sea with secret instructions. The first, under
Blake, appeared in the Mediterranean, exacted reparation from
Tuscany for wrongs done to English commerce, bombarded
Algiers, and destroyed the fleet with which its pirates had ven
tured through the reign of Charles to insult the English coast.
The thunder of Blake's guns, every Puritan believed, would
be heard in the castle of St. Angelo, and Rome itself would
have to bow to the greatness of Cromwell. But though no
declaration of war had been issued against Spain, the true
aim of both expeditions was an attack on that power ; and
the attack proved singularly unsuccessful. Though Blake
sailed to the Spanish coast, he failed to intercept the treasure
fleet from America ; and the second expedition, which made
its way to the West Indies, was foiled in a descent on St. Do
mingo. Its conquest of Jamaica, important as it really was
in breaking through the monopoly of the New World in the
South which Spain had till now enjoyed, seemed at the time
but a poor result for a vast expenditure of blood and money.
Its leaders were sent to the Tower on their return ; but Crom
well found himself at war with Spain, and thrown whether he
would or no into the hands of the French minister Mazarin.
He was forced to sign a treaty of alliance with France;
while the cost of his abortive expeditions drove him again to
face a Parliament. But Cromwell no longer trusted, as in his

i655] PURITAN ENGLAND 751
earlier Parliament, to freedom of elections. The sixty mem
bers sent from Ireland and Scotland under the ordinances
of union were simply nominees of the Government. Its
whole influence was exerted to secure the return of the more
conspicuous members of the Council of State. It was calcu
lated that of the members returned one half were bound to
the Government by ties of profit or place. But Cromwell
was stfll unsatisfied. A certificate of the council was required
from each member before admission to the House ; and a
fourth of the whole number returned — one hundred in all,
with Haselrig at their head — were by this means excluded
on grounds of disaffection or want of religion. To these
arbitrary acts of violence the House replied only by a course
of singular moderation and wisdom. From the first it dis
claimed any purpose of opposing the Government. One of
its earliest acts provided securities for Cromwell's person,
which was threatened by constant plots of assassination. It
supported him in his war policy, and voted supplies of unprec
edented . extent for the maintenance of the struggle. It was
this attitude of loyalty which gave force to its steady refusal
to sanction the system of tyranny which had practically
placed England under martial law. In his opening address
Cromwell boldly took his stand in support of the military
despotism wielded by the major-generals. "It hath been
more effectual towards the discountenancing of vice and set
tling religion than anything done these fifty years. I will
abide by it," he said, with singular vehemence, "notwith
standing the envy and slander of foolish men. I could as
soon venture my life with it as with anything I ever under
took. If it were to be done again, I would do it." But no
sooner had a biU been introduced into Parliament to confirm
the proceedings of the major-generals than a long debate
showed the temper of the Commons. They had resolved to
acquiesce in the protectorate, but they were equally resolved
to bring it again to a legal mode of government. This, indeed,
was the aim of even CromweU's wiser adherents. "What
makes me fear the passing of this act," one of them wrote
to his son Henry, "is that thereby his Highness's govern
ment will be more founded in force, and more removed from
that natural foundation which the people in Parliament are

752 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1657
desirous to give him, supposing that he wfll become more
theirs than now he is." The bfll was rejected, and Cromwell
bowed to the feeling of the nation by withdrawing the powers
of the major-generals.
But the defeat of the tyranny of the sword was only a step
towards a far bolder effort for the restoration of the power of
the law. It was no mere pedantry, still less was it vulgar
flattery, which influenced the Parliament in their offer to
Cromwell of the title of king. The experience of the last
few years had taught the nation the value of the traditional
forms under which its liberties had grown up. A king was
limited by constitutional precedents. " The king's preroga
tive," it was well urged, " is under the courts of justice, and
is bounded as well as any acre of land, or anything a man
hath." A protector, on the other hand, was new in our his-
tory, and there were no traditional means of limiting his
power. "The one office being lawful in its nature," said
Glynne, " known to the nation, certain in itself, and confined
and regulated by the law, and the other not so — that was
the great ground why the Parliament did so much insist on
this office and title." Under the name of Monarchy, indeed,
the question really at issue between the party headed by the
officers and the party led by the lawyers in the Commons
was that of the restoration of constitutional and legal rule.
The proposal was carried by an overwhelming majority, but a
month passed in endless consultations between the Parlia
ment and the protector. His good sense, his knowledge of
the general feeling of the nation, his real desire to obtain a
settlement which should secure the ends for which Puritanism
fought, political and religious liberty, broke in conference
after conference through a mist of words. But his real con
cern throughout was with the temper of the army. CromweU
knew well that his government was a sheer government of
the sword, and that the discontent of his soldiery would shake
the fabric of his power. He vibrated to and fro between his
sense of the political advantages of such a settlement, and
his sense of its impossibility in face of the mood of the army.
His soldiers, he said, were no common swordsmen. They
were " godly men, men that will not be beaten down by a
worldly and carnal spirit whfle they keep their integrity " ;

i6s7] PURITAN ENGLAND 753
men in whose general voice he recognized the voice of God.
" They are honest and faithful men," he urged, " true to the
great things of the Government. And though it really is no
part of their goodness to be unwilling to submit to what a
Parliament shall settle over them, yet it is my duty and con
science to beg of you that there may be no hard things put
upon them which they cannot swallow. I cannot think God
would bless an undertaking of anything which would justly and
with cause grieve them." The temper of the army was soon
shown. Its leaders, with Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough
at their head, placed their commands in Cromwell's hands. A
petition from the officers to Parliament demanded the with
drawal of the proposal to restore the Monarchy, " in the
name of the old cause for which they had bled." Cromwell
at once anticipated the coming debate on this petition, a
debate which might have led to an open breach between the
army and the Commons, by a refusal of the Crown. " I can
not undertake this government," he said, " with that title of
king ; and that is my answer to this great and weighty business."
Disappointed as it was, the Parliament with singular self-
restraint turned to other modes of bringing about its purpose.
The offer of the Crown had been coupled with the condition
of accepting a constitution which was a modification of the
Instrument of Government adopted by the Parliament of
1654, and this constitution Cromwell emphatically approved.
" The things provided by this Act of Government," he owned,
" do secure the liberties of the people of God as they never
before have had them." With a change of the title of king
into that of protector, the Act of Government now became
law; and the solemn inauguration of the protector by the
Parliament was a practical acknowledgment on the part of
Cromwell of the illegality of his former rule. In the name
of the Commons the speaker invested him with a mantle of
state, placed the scepter in his hand, and girt the sword of
justice by his side. By the new Act of Government Crom
well was allowed to name his own successor, but in all after
cases the office was to be an elective one. In every other
respect the forms of the older constitution were carefully re
stored. Parliament was again to consist of two Houses, the
seventy members of " the other House " being named by the

754 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1657
protector. The Commons regained their old right of exclu
sively deciding on the qualification of their members. Parlia
mentary restrictions were imposed on the choice of members
of the council, and officers of state or of the army. A fixed
revenue was voted to the protector, and it was provided that
no moneys should be raised but by assent of Parliament.
Liberty of worship was secured for all but papists, prelatists,
Socinians, or those who denied the inspiration of the Scrip
tures ; and liberty of conscience was secured for all.
The adjournment of the House after his inauguration left
Cromwell at the height of his power. He seemed at last to
have placed his government on a legal and national basis.
The ill success of his earlier operations abroad was forgotten
in a blaze of glory. On the eve of the Parliament's assembly
one of Blake's captains had managed to intercept a part of
the Spanish treasure fleet. At the close of 1656 the protector
seemed to have found the means of realizing his schemes
for rekindling the religious war throughout Europe in a
quarrel between the Duke of Savoy and his Protestant sub
jects in the valleys of Piedmont. A ruthless massacre of
these Vaudois by the Duke's troops roused deep resentment
throughout England, a resentment which still breathes in the
noblest of Milton's sonnets. While the poet called on God to
avenge his " slaughtered saints, whose bones lie scattered on
the Alpine mountains cold," Cromwell was already busy with
the work of earthly vengeance. An English envoy appeared
at the duke's court with haughty demands of redress. Their
refusal would have been followed by instant war, for the
Protestant Cantons of Switzerland were bribed into promising
a force of ten thousand men for an attack on Savoy. The
plan was foiled by the cool diplomacy of Mazarin, who forced
the duke to grant Cromwell's demands ; but the apparent
success of the protector raised his reputation at home and
abroad. The spring of 1657 saw the greatest, as it was the
last, of the triumphs of Blake. He found the Spanish Plate
fleet guarded by galleons in the strongly armed harbor of
Santa Cruz ; he forced an entrance into the harbor and burnt
or sank every ship within it. Triumphs at sea were followed
by a triumph on land. Cromwell's demand of Dunkirk,
which had long stood in the way of any acceptance of his

i6s8] PURITAN ENGLAND 755
offers of aid, was at last conceded ; and a detachment of the
Puritan army joined the French troops who were attacking
Flanders under the command of Turenne. Their valor and
discipline were shown by the part they took in the capture
of Mardyke, and still more by the victory of the Dunes, a
¦victory which forced the Flemish towns to open their gates
to the French, and gave Dunkirk to Cromwell.
Never had the fame of an English ruler stood higher ; but
in the midst of his glory the hand of death was falling on
the protector. He had long been weary of his task. " God
knows," he had burst out to the Parliament a year before, " I
would have been glad to have lived under my woodside, and
to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken
this government." And now to the weariness of power was
added the weakness and feverish impatience of disease.
Vigorous and energetic as his life had seemed, his health
was by no means as strong as his will ; he had been struck
down by intermittent fever in the midst of his triumphs both
in Scotland and in Ireland, and during the past year he had
suffered from repeated attacks of it. " I have some infirmi
ties upon me," he owned twice over in his speech at the re
opening of the Parliament after an adjournment of six months ;
and his feverish irritability was quickened by the public danger.
No supplies had been voted, and the pay of the army was
heavfly in arrear, while its temper grew more and more sullen
at the appearance of the new constitution and the reawak
ening of the royalist intrigues. Under the terms of the new
constitution the members excluded in the preceding year
took their places again in the House. The mood of the
nation was reflected in the captious and quarrelsome tone of
the Commons. They still delayed the grant of supplies.
Meanwhile a hasty act of the protector in giving to his
nominees in " the other House," as the new second chamber
he had devised was called, the title of " Lords," kindled a
strife between the two Houses which was busily fanned by
Haselrig and other opponents of the Government. It was
contended that the " other House " had under the new con
stitution simply judicial and not legislative powers. Such a
contention struck at Cromwell's work of restoring the old
political forms of English life ; and the reappearance of par-
49

756 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1658
Uamentary strife threw him at last, says an observer at his court,
"into a rage and passion like unto madness." What gave
weight to it was the growing strength of the royalist party,
and its preparations for a coming rising. Charles himself
with a large body of Spanish troops drew to the coast of
Flanders to take advantage of it. His hopes were above all
encouraged by the strife in the Commons, and their manifest
dislike of the system of the protectorate. It was this that
drove Cromwell to action. Summoning his coach, by a sudden
impulse, the protector drove with a few guards to West
minster; and setting aside the remonstrances of Fleetwood,
summoned the two Houses to his presence. " I do dissolve
this Parliament " he ended a speech of angry rebuke, " and
let God be judge between you and me." Fatal as was the
error, for the moment all went well. The army was recon
ciled by the blow leveled at its opponents, and the few
murmurers were weeded from its ranks by a careful remodel
ing. The triumphant officers vowed to stand or fall with his
Highness. The danger of a royalist rising vanished before
a host of addresses from the counties. Great news too came
from abroad, where victory in Flanders, and the cession of
Dunkirk, set the seal on Cromwell's glory. But the fever
crept steadily on, and his looks told the tale of death to the
Quaker, Fox, who met him riding in Hampton Court Park.
" Before I came to him," he says, " as he rode at the head
of his Life Guards, I saw and felt a waft of death go
forth against him ; and when I came to him he looked like
a dead man." In the midst of his triumph Cromwell's heart
was in fact heavy with the sense of failure. He had no
desire to play the tyrant; nor had he any belief in the
permanence of a mere tyranny. He clung desperately to
the hope of bringing the country to his side. He had
hardly dissolved the Parliament before he was planning the
summons of another, and angry at the opposition which
his council offered to the project. " I will take my own
resolutions," he said gloomily to his household; "I can no
longer satisfy myself to sit still, and make myself guilty of
the loss of all the honest party and of the nation itself."
But before his plans could be realized the overtaxed strength
of the protector suddenly gave way. He saw too clearly the

1659] PURITAN ENGLAND 757
chaos into which his death would plunge England to be will
ing to die. " Do not think I shall die," be burst out with
feverish energy to the physicians who gathered round him ;
" say not I have lost my reason ! I tell you the truth. I
know it from better authority than any you can have from
Galen or Hippocrates. It is the answer of God Himself to
our prayers ! " Prayer, indeed, rose from every side for his
recovery, but death drew steadily nearer, tfll even Cromwell
felt that his hour was come. " I would be willing to live,"
the dying man murmured, " to be further serviceable to God
and His people, but my work is done ! Yet God wfll be with
His people ! " A storm which tore roofs from houses, and lev
eled huge trees in every forest, seemed a fitting prelude to the
passing away of his mighty spirit. Three days later, on the
third of September, the day which had witnessed his victories
of Worcester and Dunbar, Cromwell quietly breathed his last.
So absolute even in death was his sway over the minds of
men, that, to the wonder of the excited royalists, even a
doubtful nomination on his death-bed was enough to secure
the peaceful succession of his son, Richard Cromwell. Many,
in fact, who had rejected the authority of his father sub
mitted peaceably to the new protector. Their motives were
explained by Baxter, the most eminent among the Presby
terian ministers, in the address to Richard which announced
his adhesion. "I observe," he says, "that the nation gener
ally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon the Government.
Many are persuaded that you have been strangely kept from
participating in any of our late bloody contentions, that God
might make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you
in that Temple work which David himself might not be
honored with, though it was in his mind, because he shed
blood abundantly and made great wars." The new protector
was a weak and worthless man, but the bulk of the nation
were content to be ruled by one who was at any rate no
soldier, no Puritan, and no innovator. Richard was known to
be lax and worldly in his conduct, and he was believed to be
conservative and even royalist in heart. The tide of reaction
was felt even in his council. Their first act was to throw
aside one of the greatest of Cromwell's reforms, and to fall
back in the summons which they issued for the new Parlia-

758 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1659
ment on the old system of election. It was felt far more
keenly in the tone of the new House of Commons. The
republicans under Vane, backed adroitly by the secret royal
ists, fell hotly on Cromwell's system. The fiercest attack of
all came from Sir Ashley Cooper, a Dorsetshire gentleman
who had changed sides in the civfl war, had fought for the
king and then for the Parliament, had been a member of
Cromwell's council, and had of late ceased to be a member
of it. His virulent invective on " his Highness of deplorable
memory, who with fraud and force deprived you of your
liberty when living, and entailed slavery on you at his death,"
was followed by an equally virulent invective against the
army. "They have not only subdued their enemies," said
Cooper, " but the masters who raised and maintained them !
They have not only conquered Scotland and Ireland, but
rebellious England too, and there suppressed a Malignant
party of magistrates and laws." The army was quick with
its reply. It had already demanded the appointment of a
soldier as its general in the place of the new protector, who
had assumed the command. The tone of the Council of Offi
cers now became so menacing that the Commons ordered
the dismissal of all officers who refused to engage " not to dis
turb or interrupt the free meetings of Parliament." Richard
ordered the Council of Officers to dissolve. Their reply was
a demand for the dissolution of the Parliament, a demand
with which Richard was forced to comply. The purpose of
the army, however, was still to secure a settled government ;
and setting aside the new protector, whose weakness was
now evident, they resolved to come to a reconciliation with
the republican party, and to recall the fragment of the Com
mons whom they had expelled from St. Stephen's in 1653.
Of the one hundred and sixty members who had continued
to sit after the king's death, about ninety returned to their
seats and resumed the administration of affairs. But the
continued exclusion of the members who had been "purged"
from the House in 1648 proved that no real intention existed
of restoring a legal rule. The House was soon at strife with
the soldiers. In spite of Vane's counsels, it proposed a reform
of the officers, and though a royalist rising in Cheshire dur
ing August threw the disputants for a moment together, the

i66o] PURITAN ENGLAND 759
Struggle revived as the danger passed away. A new hope
indeed filled men's minds. Not only was the nation sick of
military rule, but the army, unconquerable so long as it held
together, at last showed signs of division. In Ireland and
Scotland the troops protested against the attitude of their
English comrades; and Monk, the commander of the Scottish
army, threatened to march on London and free the Parlia
ment from their pressure. Their divisions encouraged Hasel
rig and his coadjutors to demand the dismissal of Fleetwood
and Lambert from their commands. They answered by driv
ing the Parliament again from Westminster, and by marching
under Lambert to the north to meet Monk's army. Negotia
tion gave Monk time to gather a convention at Edinburgh,
and strengthen himself with money and recruits. His atti
tude roused England to action. So rapidly did the tide of
feeling rise throughout the country that the army was driven
to undo its work by recalling the Rump. Monk, however,
advanced rapidly to Coldstream, and crossed the border. The
cry of "a free Parliament" ran like fire through the country.
Not only Fairfax, who appeared in arms in Yorkshire, but
the ships on the Thames and the mob which thronged the
streets of London caught up the cry; Monk, who lavished
protestations of loyalty to the Rump, while he accepted peti
tions for a "free Parliament," entered London unopposed.
From the moment of his entry the restoration of the Stuarts
became inevitable. The army, resolute as it still remained
for the maintenance of " the cause," was deceived by Monk's
declarations of loyalty to it, and rendered powerless by his
adroit dispersion of the troops over the country. At the
instigation of Ashley Cooper, those who remained of the
members who had been excluded from the House of Com
mons by Pride's Purge in 1648 again forced their way into
Parliament, and at once resolved on a dissolution and the
election of a new House of Commons. The new House,
which bears the name of the convention, had hardly taken
the solemn League and Covenant which showed its Presby
terian temper, and its leaders had only begun to draw up
terms on which the king's restoration might be assented to,
when they found that Monk was in negotiation with the
exfled court. All exaction of terms was now impossible ; a

76o HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1660
Declaration from Breda, in which Charles promised a gen
eral pardon, religious toleration, and satisfaction to the army,
was received with a burst of national enthusiasm; and the
old constitution was restored by a solemn vote of the con
vention, " that according to the ancient and fundamental
laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be,
by king. Lords, and Commons." The king was at once in
vited to hasten to his realm ; he landed at Dover, and made
his way amidst the shouts of a great multitude to Whitehall.
" It is my own fault," laughed the new king, with character
istic irony, "that I had not come back sooner; for I find
nobody who does not tell me he has always longed for my
return." Puritanism, so men believed, had faUen never to rise again.
As a political experiment it had ended in utter faflure and
disgust. As a religious system of national life it brought
about the wildest outbreak of moral revolt that England has
ever witnessed. And yet Puritanism was far from being
dead ; it drew indeed a nobler life from suffering and defeat.
Nothing aids us better to trace the real course of Puritan
influence since the fall of Puritanism than the thought of the
two great works which have handed down from one genera
tion to another its highest and noblest spirit. From that
time to this the most popular of all religious books has been
the Puritan allegory of the " Pilgrim's Progress." The most
popular of all EngUsh poems has been the Puritan epic of
the "Paradise Lost." Milton had been engaged during the
civil war in strife with Presbyterians and with royalists,
pleading for civil and religious freedom, for freedom of social
life, and freedom of the press. At a later time he became
Latin secretary to the protector, in spite of a blindness which
had been brought on by the intensity of his study. The Res
toration found him of all living men the most hateful to the
royalists ; for it was his " Defense of the English People "
which had justified throughout Europe the execution of the
king. Parliament ordered his book to be burnt by the com
mon hangman ; he was for a time imprisoned, and even when
released he had to live amidst threats of assassination from
fanatical Cavaliers. To the ruin of his cause were added
personal misfortunes in the bankruptcy of the scrivener who

i66o] PURITAN ENGLAND 76 1
held the bulk of his property, and in the fire of London,
which deprived him of much of what was left. As age drew
on, he found himself reduced to comparative poverty, and
driven to sell his library for subsistence. Even among the
sectaries who shared his political opinions Milton stood in
religious opinion alone, for he had gradually severed himself
from every accepted form of faith, had embraced Arianism,
and had ceased to attend at any place of worship. Nor was
his home a happy one. The grace and geniality of his youth
disappeared in the drudgery of a schoolmaster's life and
amongst the invectives of controversy. In age his temper
became stern and exacting. His daughters, who were forced
to read to their blind father in languages which they could
not understand, revolted utterly against their bondage. But
solitude and misfortune only brought out into bolder relief
Milton's inner greatness. There was a grand simplicity in
the life of his later years. He listened every morning to a
chapter of the Hebrew Bible, and after musing in silence for
a while pursued his studies till midday. Then he took exer
cise for an hour, played for another hour on the organ or
-viol, and renewed his studies. The evening was spent in
converse with visitors and friends. For, lonely and unpopu
lar as Milton was, there was one thing about him which made
his house in Bunhill Fields a place of pilgrimage to the wits
of the Restoration. He was the last of the Elizabethans. He
had possibly seen Shakspere, as on his visits to London after
his retirement to Stratford the playwright passed along Bread
Street to his wit combats at the Mermaid. He had been the
contemporary of Webster and Massinger, of Herrick and Cra-
shaw. His "Comus" and "Arcades" had rivaled the masks
of Ben Jonson. It was with a reverence drawn from thoughts
like these that men looked on the blind poet as he sat, clad
in black, in his chamber hung with rusty green tapestry, his
fair brown hair falling as of old over a calm, serene face that
still retained much of its youthful beauty, his cheeks delicately
colored, his clear gray eyes showing no trace of their blind
ness. But famous, whether for good or fll, as his prose writ
ings had made him, during fifteen years only a few sonnets
had broken his sflence as a singer. It was now, in his blind
ness and old age, with the cause he loved trodden underfoot

762 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1667
by men as vile as the rabble in " Comus," that the genius of
Milton took refuge in the great poem on which through years
of sflence his imagination had still been brooding.
On his return from his travels in Italy, Milton had spoken
of himself as musing on " a work not to be raised from the
heat of youth or the vapors of wine, like that which flows at
waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist or the trencher
fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invoca
tion of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters; but by
devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out His Seraphim, with
the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of
whom He pleases." His lips were touched at last. In his
quiet retreat he mused during these years of persecution and
loneliness on his great work. Seven years after the Restora
tion appeared the " Paradise Lost," and four years later the
"Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes," in the severe
grandeur of whose verse we see the poet himself "fallen,"
like Samson, on " evil days and evil tongues, with darkness
and with danger compassed round." But great as the two
last works were, their greatness was eclipsed by that of their
predecessor. The whole genius of Milton expressed itself in
the " Paradise Lost." The romance, the gorgeous fancy, the
daring imagination which he shared with the Elizabethan
poets, the large but ordered beauty of form which he had
drunk in from the literature of Greece and Rome, the sub
limity of conception, the loftiness of phrase, which he owed
to the Bible, blended in this story "of man's first disobedi
ence, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
brought death into the world and all our woe." It is only
when we review the strangely mingled elements which make
up the poem that we realize the genius which fused them
into such a perfect whole. The meager outline of the He
brew legend is lost in the splendor and music of Milton's
verse. The stern idealism of Geneva is clothed in the gor
geous robes of the Renascence. If we miss something of the
free play of Spenser's fancy, and yet more of the imaginative
delight in their own creations which gives so exquisite a life
to the poetry of the early dramatists, we find in place of these
the noblest example which our literature affords of the or-

i667] PURITAN ENGLAND 763
dered majesty of classic form. But it is not with the literary
value of the "Paradise Lost" that we are here concerned.
Its historic importance lies in this, that it is the Epic of
Puritanism. Its scheme is the problem with which the Puri
tan wrestled in hours of gloom and darkness, the problem of
sin and redemption, of the world-wide struggle of evil against
good. The intense moral concentration of the Puritan had
given an almost bodily shape to spiritual abstractions before
Milton gave life and being to the forms of Sin and Death.
It was the Puritan tendency to mass into one vast " body of
sin " the various forms of human evil, and by the very force
of a passionate hatred to exaggerate their magnitude and
their power, to which we owe the conception of Milton's
Satan. The greatness of the Puritan aim in the long and
wavering struggle for justice and law and a higher good;
the grandeur of character which the contest developed ; the
colossal forms of good and evil which moved over its stage ;
the debates and conspiracies and battles which had been
men's life for twenty years; the mighty eloquence and
mightier ambition which the war had roused into being — all
left their mark on the "Paradise Lost." Whatever was high
est and best in the Puritan temper spoke in the nobleness
and elevation of the poem, in its purity of tone, in its gran
deur of conception, in its ordered and equable realization of a
great purpose. Even in his boldest flights, Milton is calm
and master of himself. His touch is always sure. Whether
he passes from heaven to hell, or from the council hall of
Satan to the sweet conference of Adam and Eve, his tread is
steady and unfaltering. But if the poem expresses the
higher qualities of the Puritan temper, it expresses no less
exactly its defects. Throughout it we feel almost painfully a
want of the finer and subtler sympathies, of a large and
genial humanity, of a sense of spiritual mystery. Dealing as
Milton does with subjects the most awful and mysterious that
poet ever chose, he is never troubled by the obstinate ques
tionings of invisible things which haunted the imagination of
Shakspere. We look in vain for any ^schylean background
of the vast unknown. "Man's disobedience" and the scheme
for man's redemption are laid down as clearly and with just
as little mystery as in a Puritan discourse. On topics such

764 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1667
as these, even God the Father (to borrow Pope's sneer)
"turns a school divine." As in his earlier poems he had
ordered and arranged nature, so in the " Paradise Lost "
Milton orders and arranges heaven and hell. His mightiest
figures, angel or archangel, Satan or Belial, stand out colos
sal but distinct. There is just as little of the wide sympathy
with all that is human which is so lovable in Chaucer and
Shakspere. On the contrary the Puritan individuality is no
where so overpowering as in Milton. He leaves the stamp
of himself deeply graven on all he creates. We hear his
voice in every line of his poem. The cold, severe conception
of moral virtue which reigns throughout it, the inteUectual
way in which he paints and regards beauty (for the beauty of
Eve is a beauty which no mortal man may love) are Milton's
own. We feel his inmost temper in the stoical self-repression
which gives its dignity to his figures. Adam utters no cry
of agony when he is driven from Paradise. Satan suffers in
a defiant silence. It is to this intense self-concentration that
we must attribute the strange deficiency of humor which
Milton shared with the Puritans generally, and which here
and there breaks the sublimity of his poem with strange slips
into the grotesque. But it is above all to this Puritan defi
ciency in human sympathy that we must attribute his wonder
ful want of dramatic genius. Of the power which creates a
thousand different characters, which endows each with its
appropriate act and word, which loses itself in its own crea
tions, no great poet ever had less.
The poem of Milton was the epic of a fallen cause. The
broken hope, which had seen the Kingdom of the Saints pass
like a dream away, spoke in its very name. Paradise was lost
once more, when the New Model, which embodied the courage
and the hope of Puritanism, laid down its arms. In his prog
ress to the capital Charles passed in review the soldiers
assembled on Blackheath. Betrayed by their general, aban
doned by their leaders, surrounded as they were by a nation
in arms, the gloomy silence of their ranks awed even the
careless king with a sense of danger. But none of the victo
ries of the New Model were so glorious as the victory which
it won over itself. Quietly, and without a struggle, as men
who bowed to the inscrutable will of God, the farmers and

i66o] PURITAN ENGLAND 765
traders who had dashed Rupert's chivalry to pieces on Naseby
field, who had scattered at Worcester the " army of the aliens,"
and driven into helpless flight the sovereign that now came
"to enjoy his own again," who had renewed beyond sea the
glories of Cr6cy and Agincourt, had mastered the Parliament,
had brought a king to justice and the block, had given laws
to England, and held even Cromwell in awe, became farmers
and traders again, and were known among their fellow men
by no other sign than their greater soberness and industry.
And, with them, Puritanism laid down the sword. It ceased
from the long attempt to build up a kingdom of God by force
and violence, and fell back on- its truer work of buflding up a
kingdom of righteousness in the hearts and consciences of
men. It was from the moment of its seeming fall that its
real victory began. As soon as the wild orgy of the Restora
tion was over, men began to see that nothing that was really
worthy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. The
revels of Whitehall, the skepticism and debauchery of courti
ers, the corruption of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen
what Puritanism had made them, serious, earnest, sober in
life and conduct, firm in their love of Protestantism and of
freedom. In the Revolution of 1688 Puritanism did the
work of civil liberty which it had failed to do in that of 1642.
It wrought out through Wesley and the revival of the eigh
teenth century the work of religious reform which its earlier
efforts had only thrown back for a hundred years. Slowly
but steadily it introduced its own seriousness and purity into
English society, English literature, English politics. The
whole history of English progress since the Restoration, on
its moral and spiritual sides, has been the history of Puri
tanism.

CHAPTER IX
THE REVOLUTION
Section I. — England and the Revolution
THE entry of Charles the Second into WhitehaU marked
a deep and lasting change in the temper of the Eng
lish people. With it modern England began. The
influences which had up to this time molded our history, the
theological influence of the Reformation, the monarchical
influence of the new kingship, the feudal influence of the
Middle Ages, the yet earlier influence of tradition and
custom, suddenly lost power over the minds of men. From
the moment of the Restoration we find ourselves all at once
among the great currents of thought and activity which have
gone on widening and deepening from that time to this. The
England around us becomes our own England, an England
whose chief forces are industry and science, the love of
popular freedom and of law, an England which presses
steadily forward to a larger social justice and equality, and
which tends more and more to bring every custom and tradi
tion, religious, intellectual, and political, to the test of pure
reason. Between modern thought, on some at least of its
more important sides, and the thought of men before the
Restoration, there is a great gulf fixed. A political thinker
in the present day would find it equaUy hard to discuss any
point of statesmanship with Lord Burleigh or with Oliver
Cromwell. He would find no point of contact between their
ideas of national life or national welfare, their conception of
government or the ends of government, their mode of regard
ing economical and social questions, and his own. But no
gulf of this sort parts us from the men who followed the
Restoration. From that time to this, whatever differences
there may have been as to practical conclusions drawn from
them, there has been a substantial agreement as to the
766

i66o] THE REVOLUTION y6j
grounds of our political, our social, our intellectual, and
religious life. Paley would have found no difficulty in under
standing Tillotson : Newton and Sir Humphry Davy could
have talked without a sense of severance. "There would have
been nothing to hinder a perfectly clear discussion on govern
ment or law between John Locke and Jeremy Bentham.
The change from the old England to the new is so start
ling that we are apt to look on it as a more sudden change
than it really was, and the outer aspect of the Restoration
does much to strengthen this impression of suddenness. The
aim of the Puritan had been to set up a visible kingdom of
God upon earth. He had wrought out his aim by reversing
the policy of the Stuarts and the Tudors. From the time of
Henry the Eighth to the time of Charles the First, the
Church had been looked upon primarily as an instrument for
securing, by moral and religious influences, the social and
political ends of the State. Under the Commonwealth, the
State, in its turn, was regarded primarily as an instrument
for securing through its political and social influences the
moral and religious ends of the Church. In the Puritan
theory. Englishmen were " the Lord's people," — a people
dedicated to Him by a solemn Covenant, and whose end as
a nation was to carry out His will. For such an end it was
needful that rulers, as well as people, should be " godly men."
Godliness became necessarily the chief qualification for public
employment. The new modeling of the army filled its ranks
with "saints." Parliament resolved to employ no man "but
such as the House shall be satisfied of his real godliness."
The Covenant which bound the nation to God bound it to
enforce God's laws even more earnestly than its own. The
Bible lay on the table of the House of Commons ; and its
prohibition of swearing, of drunkenness, of fornication, be
came part of the law of the land. Adultery was made felony
without the benefit of clergy. Pictures whose subjects jarred
with the new decorum were ordered to be burnt, and statues
were chipped ruthlessly into decency. It was in the same
temper that Puritanism turned from public life to private.
The Covenant bound not the whole nation only, but every
individual member of the nation, to "a jealous God," a God
jealous of any superstition that robbed him of the worship

768 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1663
which was exclusively his due, jealous of the distraction and
frivolity which robbed him of the entire devotion of man to
his service. The want of poetry, of fancy, in the common
Puritan temper, condemned half the popular observances of
England as superstitions. It was superstitious to keep
Christmas, or to deck the house with holly and ivy. It was
superstitious to dance round the village May-pole. It was
flat popery to eat a mince pie. The rough sport, the mirth
and fun of " merry England," were out of place in an Eng
land called with so great a calling. Bull-baiting, bear-baiting,
horse-racing, cock-fighting, the village revel, the dance under
the May-pole, were put down with the same indiscriminating
severity. The long struggle between the Puritans and the
playwrights ended in the closing of every theater.
The Restoration brought Charles to Whitehall ; and in an
instant the whole face of England was changed. All that was
noblest and best in Puritanism was whirled away with its pet
tiness and its tyranny in the current of the nation's hate.
Religion had been turned into a system of political and social
oppression, and it fell with their fall. Godliness became a by
word of scorn ; sobriety in dress, in speech, in manners, was
flouted as a mark of the detested Puritanism. Butler in his
" Hudibras " poured insult on the past with a pedantic buffoon
ery for which, the general hatred, far more than its humor,
secured a hearing. Archbishop Sheldon listened to the mock
sermon of a Cavalier who held up the Puritan phrase and the
Puritan twang to ridicule in his hall at Lambeth. Dueling and
raking became the marks of a fine gentlemen; and grave divines
winked at the follies of " honest fellows " who fought, gambled,
swore, drank, and ended a day of debauchery by a night in the
gutter. Life among men of fashion vibrated between frivolity
and excess. One of the comedies of the time tells the courtier
that " he must dress well, dance well, fence well, have a talent
for love-letters, an agreeable voice, be amorous and discreet —
but not too constant." To graces such as these the rakes of the
Restoration added a shamelessness and a brutality which passes
belief. Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the titles
of some of his poems are such as no pen of our day could copy.
Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness of
his words made even the porters of Covent Garden pelt him

1663] THE REVOLUTION 769
from the balcony when he ventured to address them. The
Duke of Buckingham is a fair type of the time, and the most
characteristic event in the duke's life was a duel in which he
consummated his seduction of Lady Shrewsbury by killing her
husband, while the countess in disguise as a page held his
horse for him and looked on at the murder. Vicious as the stage
was, it only reflected the general vice of the time. The com
edy of the Restoration borrowed everything from the comedy of
France save the poetry, the delicacy, and good taste which
veiled its grossness. Seduction, intrigue, brutality, cynicism,
debauchery, found fitting expression in dialogue of a studied
and deliberate foulness, which even its wit fails to redeem
from disgust. Wycherly, the popular playwright of the time,
remains the most brutal among all writers of the stage ; and
nothing gives so damning an impression of his day as the fact
that he found actors to repeat his words and audiences to
applaud them. Men such as Wycherly gave Milton models
for the Belial of his great poem, " than whom a spirit more
lewd fell not from heaven, or more gross to love vice for
itself." The dramatist piques himself on the frankness and
" plain dealing " which painted the world as he saw it, a world
of brawls and assignations, of orgies at Vauxhall, and fights
with the watch, of lies and double-entendres, of knaves and
dupes, of men who sold their daughters, and women who
cheated their husbands. But the cynicism of Wycherly was
no greater than that of the men about him ; and in mere love
of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief in purity
or honesty, the king himself stood ahead of any of his subjects.
It is, however, easy to exaggerate the extent of this reaction.
So far as we can judge from the memoirs of the time, its more
violent forms were practically confined to the capital and the
court. The mass of Englishmen were satisfied with getting
back their May-poles and mince pies ; and a large part of the
people remained Puritan in life and belief, though they threw
aside many of the outer characteristics of Puritanism. Nor
was the revolution in feeling as sudden as it seemed. Even
if the political strength of Puritanism had remained unbroken,
its social influence must soon have ceased. The young Eng
lishmen who grew up in the midst of the Civil war knew
nothing of the bitter tyranny which gave its zeal and fire to

770 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1663
the religion of their fathers. From the social and religious
anarchy around them, from the endless controversies and dis
cussions of the time, they drank in the spirit of skepticism, of
doubt, of free inquiry. If religious enthusiasm had broken the
spell of ecclesiastical tradition, its own extravagance broke
the spell of religious enthusiasm; and the new generation
turned in disgust to try forms of political government and
spiritual belief by the cooler and less fallible test of rea
son. The children even of the leading Puritans stood aloof
from Puritanism. The eldest of Cromwell's sons made small
pretensions to religion. Cromwell himself in his later years
felt bitterly that Puritanism had missed its aim. He saw the
country gentleman, alienated from it by the despotism it had
brought in its train, alienated perhaps even more by the
appearance of a religious freedom for which he was unpre
pared, drifting into a love of the older Church that he had
once opposed. He saw the growth of a dogged resistance in
the people at large. The attempt to secure spiritual results
by material force had failed, as it always fails. It broke
down before the indifference and resentment of the great mass
of the people, of men who were neither lawless nor enthusiasts,
but who clung to the older traditions of social order, and
whose humor and good sense revolted alike from the artificial
conception of human life which Puritanism had formed and
from its effort to force such a conception on a people by law.
It broke down, too, before the corruption of the Puritans
themselves. It was impossible to distinguish between the
saint and the hypocrite as soon as godliness became profitable.
Even amongst the really earnest Puritans prosperity disclosed
a pride, a worldliness, a selfish hardness, which had been hid
den in the hour of persecution. The tone of Cromwell's later
speeches shows his consciousness that the ground was slipping
from under his feet. He no longer dwells on the dream of a
Puritan England, of a nation rising as a whole into a people of
God. He falls back on the phrases of his youth, and the
saints become again a " peculiar people," a remnant, a frag
ment among the nation at large. But the influences which
were really foUing Cromwell's aim, and forming beneath his
eyes the new England from which he turned in despair, were
influences whose power he can hardly have recognized. Even

i645] THE REVOLUTION 77 1
before the outburst of the Civil war a small group of theologi
cal Latitudinarians had gathered round Lord Falkland at
Great Tew. In the very year when the king's standard was
set up at Nottingham, Hobbes published the first of his works
on Government. The last royalist had only just laid down his
arms when the little company who were at a later time to be
known as the Royal Society gathered round Wilkins at
Oxford. It is in this group of scientific observers that we
catch the secret of the coming generation. From the vexed
problems, political and religious, with which it had so long
wrestled in vain, England turned at last to the physical world
around it, to the observation of its phenomena, to the discov
ery of the laws which govern them. The pursuit of physical
science became a passion ; and its method of research, by
observation, comparison, and experiment, transformed the
older methods of inquiry in matters without its pale. In
religion, in politics, in the study of man and of nature, not
faith but reason, not tradition but inquiry, were to be the
watchwords of the coming time. The dead-weight of the past
was suddenly rolled away, and the new England heard at last
and understood the call of Francis Bacon.
Bacon had already called men with a trumpet voice to such
studies ; but in England at least Bacon stood before his age.
The beginnings of physical science were more slow and timid
there than in any country of Europe. Only two discoveries
of any real value came from English research before the
Restoration : the first, Gflbert's discovery of terrestrial mag
netism in the close of Elizabeth's reign ; the next, the great
discovery of the circulation of the blood, which was taught by
Harvey in the reign of James. Apart from these illustrious
names England took little share in the scientific movement of
the Continent ; and her whole energies seemed to be whirled
into the vortex of theology and politics by the Civil war.
But the war had not reached its end when a little group of
students were to be seen in London, men " inquisitive," says
one of them, "into natural phUosophy and other parts of
human learning, and particularly of what hath been caUed
the New Philosophy, . . . which from the times of Galileo at
Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England,
hath been much cultivated in Italy, France, Germany, and
50

772 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1648
other parts abroad, as well as with us in England." The
strife of the time indeed aided in directing the minds of men
to natural inquiries. "To have been always tossing about
some theological question," says the first historian of the
Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, " would have been to have made
that their private diversion, the excess of which they disliked
in the public. To have been eternally musing on civil busi
ness and the distresses of the country was too melancholy a
reflection. It was nature alone which could pleasantly enter
tain them in that estate." Foremost in the group stood Doc
tors Wallis and Wilkins, whose removal to Oxford, which had
just been reorganized by the Puritan Visitors, divided the
little company into two societies. The Oxford society, which
was the more important of the two, held its meetings at the
lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, who had become warden of Wad-
ham College, and added to the names of its members that of
the eminent mathematician, Dr. Ward, and that of the first of
English economists. Sir William Petty. " Our business,"
Wallis tells us, "was (precluding matters of theology and
State affairs) to discourse and consider of philosophical in
quiries and such as related thereunto, as Physic, Anatomy,
Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Statics, Magnetics, Chem-
ics. Mechanics, and Natural Experiments : with the state
of these studies, as then cultivated at home and abroad. We
then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in
the vencB lacte(2, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican hy
pothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of
Jupiter, the oval shape of Saturn, the spots in the sun and its
turning on its own axis, the inequalities and selenography of
the moon, the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the im
provement of telescopes, the grinding of glasses for that pur
pose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of
vacuities, and Nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian
experiment in quicksilver, the descent of heavy bodies and
the degree of acceleration therein, and divers other things of
like nature."
The other little company of inquirers, who remained in
London, was at last broken up by the troubles of the second
protectorate; but it was revived at the Restoration by the
return to London of the more eminent members of the Ox-

1662] THE REVOLUTION 773
ford group. Science suddenly became the fashion of the
day. Charles was himself a fair chemist, and took a keen
interest in the problems of navigation. The Duke of Buck
ingham varied his freaks of rhyming, drinking, and fiddling by
fits of devotion to his laboratory. Poets like Dryden and Cow
ley, courtiers like Sir Robert Murray and Sir Kenelm Digby,
joined the scientific company to which in token of his sympa
thy with it the king gave the title of "The Royal Society."
The curious glass toys caUed Prince Rupert's drops recall the
scientific inquiries which, with the study of etching, amused
the old age of the great cavalry leader of the Civil war.
Wits and fops crowded to the meetings of the new society.
Statesmen like Lord Somers felt honored at being chosen its
presidents. Its definite establishment marks the opening of
a great age of scientific discovery in England. Almost every
year of the half century which followed saw some step made
to a wider and truer knowledge. Our first national observa
tory rose at Greenwich, and modern astronomy began with
the long series of astronomical observations which immortal
ized the name of Flamsteed. His successor, Halley, under
took the investigation of the tides, of comets, and of terres
trial magnetism. Hooke improved the microscope, and gave
a fresh impulse to microscopical research. Boyle made the
air-pump a means of advancing the science of pneumatics,
and became the founder of experimental chemistry. Wilkins
pointed forward to the science of philology in his scheme of
a universal language. Sydenham introduced a careful obser
vation of nature and facts which changed the whole face of
medicine. The physiological researches of Willis first threw
light upon the structure of the brain. Woodward was the
founder of mineralogy. In his edition of Wflloughby's " Orni
thology," and in his own " History of Fishes," John Ray was
the first to raise zoology to the rank of a science ; and the first
scientific classification of animals was attempted in his " Syn
opsis of Quadrupeds." Modern botany began with his " His
tory of Plants," and the researches of an Oxford professor,
Robert Morrison ; while Grew divided with Malpighi the
credit of founding the study of vegetable physiology. But
great as some of these names undoubtedly are, they are lost
in the luster of Isaac Newton. Newton was born at Wools-

774 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1666
thorpe in Lincolnshire, on Christmas day, in the memorable
year which saw the outbreak of the Civil war. In the year
of the Restoration he entered Cambridge, where the teaching
of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius for mathematics, and
where the method of Descartes had superseded the older
modes of study. From the close of his Cambridge career his
life became a series of great physical discoveries. At twenty-
three he facilitated the calculation of planetary movements by
his theory of Fluxions. The optical discoveries to which he
was led by his experiments with the prism, and which he
partly disclosed in the lectures which he delivered as Mathe
matical Professor at Cambridge, were embodied in the theory
of light which he laid before the Royal Society on becoming
a fellow of it. His discovery of the law of gravitation had
been made as early as 1666 ; but the erroneous estimate which
was then generally received of the earth's diameter prevented
him from disclosing it for sixteen years ; and it was not till
the eve of the Revolution that the " Principia " revealed to
the world his new theory of the universe.
It is impossible to do more than indicate, in such a summary
as we have given, the wonderful activity of directly scientific
thought which distinguished the age of the Restoration. But
the skeptical and experimental temper of mind which this activ
ity disclosed was telling at the same time on every phase of the
world around it. We see the attempt to bring religious spec
ulation into harmony with the conclusions of reason and
experience in the school of Latitudinarian theologians which
sprang from the group of thinkers that gathered on the eve of
the Civil war round Lord Falkland at Great Tew. Whatever
verdict history may pronounce on Falkland's political career,
his name must ever remain memorable in the history of
religious thought. A new era in English theology began
with the speculations of the men he gathered round him.
Their work was above all to deny the authority of tradition
in matters of faith, as Bacon had denied it in matters of
physical research, and to assert in the one field as in the
other the supremacy of reason as a test of truth. Of the
authority of the Church, its Fathers, and its CouncUs, John
Hales, a canon of Windsor, and a friend of Laud, said briefly
" it is none." He dismissed with contempt the accepted test

1663] THE REVOLUTION 775
of universality. " Universality is such a proof of truth as truth
itself is ashamed of. The most singular and strongest part
of human authority is properly in the wisest and the most
virtuous, and these, I trow, are not the most umversal."
WUUam Chfllingworth, a man of larger ff not keener mind,
had been taught by an early conversion to Catholicism, and
by a speedy return, the insecurity of any basis for belief but
that of pri\^te judgment. In his " ReUgion of Protestants "
he set aside ecclesiastical tradition or Church authority as
grounds of faith in favor of the Bible, but only of the Bible
as interpreted by the common reason of men. Jeremy Taylor,
the most brUliant of EngUsh preachers, a sufferer like Chfl
lingworth on the royalist side during the troubles, and -ft'^ho
was rewarded at the Restoration with the bishopric of Down,
limited even the authority of the Scriptures themselves.
Reason -was the one means which Taylor approved of in in
terpreting the Bible ; but the certainty of the conclusions
which reason drew from the Bible varied, as he held, with
the conditions of reason itself. In all but the simplest truths
of natural reUgion " we are not sure not to be deceived." The
deduction of points of belief from the words of the Scriptures
was attended with aU the uncertaint}' and liabiUty to error
which sprang from the infinite %-ariety of human understand
ings, the difficulties which hinder the discovery of truth, and
the influences which divert the mind from accepting or rightly
estimating it. It was plain to a mind Uke Chillingworth's
that this denial of authority, this perception of the imperfec
tion of reason in the discovery of absolute truth, struck as
directly at the root of Protestant dogmatism as at the root of
Catholic infaUibiUty. " If Protestants are fault}- in this matter
[of claiming authority] it is for doing it too much and not
too Uttle. This presumptuous imposing of the senses of man
upon the words of God, of the special senses of man upon the
general words of God, and laying them upon men's con
sciences together under the equal penalt}- of death and dam
nation, this -vain conceit that we can speak of the things of
God better than in the words of God, this deffying our o-wn
interpretations and t}-rannous enforcing them upon others,
this restraining of the word of God from that latitude and
generaUt}', and the understandings of men from that Uberty

^^6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1647
wherein Christ and His apostles left them, is and hath been
the only foundation of all the schisms of the Church, and that
which makes them immortal." In his " Liberty of Prophesy
ing " Jeremy Taylor pleaded the cause of toleration with a
weight of argument which hardly required the triumph of the
Independents and the shock of Naseby to drive it home. But
the freedom of conscience which the Independent founded on
the personal communion of each soul with God, the Latitudi
narian founded on the weakness of authority and the imper
fection of human reason. Taylor pleads even for the Ana
baptist and the Romanist. He only gives place to the action
of the civil magistrate in "those religions whose principles
destroy government," and " those religions — if there be any
such — which teach ill life." Hales openly professed that he
would quit the Church to-morrow if it required him to believe
that all that dissented from it must be damned. Chfllingworth
denounced persecution in words of fire. "Take away this
persecution, burning, cursing, damning, of men for not sub
scribing the words of men as the words of God : require of
Christians only to believe Christ and to call no man master
but Him ; let them leave claiming infallibility that have no
title to it, and let them that in their own words disclaim it,
disclaim it also in their actions. . . . Protestants are inex
cusable if they do offer violence to other men's consciences."
From the denunciation of intolerance the Latitudinarians
passed easily to the dream of comprehension which had
haunted every nobler soul since the " Utopia " of More.
Hales based his loyalty to the Church of England on the
fact that it was the largest and the most tolerant Church in
Christendom. Chillingworth pointed out how many obstacles
to comprehension were removed by such a simplification of
belief as flowed from a rational theology. Like More, he
asked for " such an ordering of the public service of God
as that all who believe the Scripture and live according to it
might without scruple or hypocrisy or protestation in any
part join in it." Taylor, like Chillingworth, rested his hope
of union on the simplification of belief. He saw a probability
of error in all the creeds and confessions adopted by Christian
Churches. " Such bodies of confessions and articles," he
said, "must do much hurt." "He is rather the schismatic

1651] THE REVOLUTION TJ7
who makes unnecessary and inconvenient impositions, than
he who disobeys them because he cannot do otherwise with
out violating his conscience." The Apostles' Creed in its
literal meaning seemed to him the one term of Christian union
which the Church had any right to impose. With the Res
toration the Latitudinarians came at once to the front. They
were soon distinguished from both Puritans and high church
men by their opposition to dogma, by their preference of
reason to tradition whether of the Bible or the Church, by
their basing religion on a natural theology, by their aiming at
rightness of Iffe rather than at correctness of opinion, by
their advocacy of toleration and comprehension as the grounds
of Christian unity. Chillingworth and Taylor found suc
cessors in the restless good sense of Burnet, the enlightened
piety of TUlotson, and the calm philosophy of Bishop Butler.
Meanwhile the impulse which such men were giving to
religious speculation was being given to political and social
inquiry by a mind of far greater keenness and power.
Bacon's favorite secretary was Thomas Hobbes. "He was
beloved by his lordship," Aubrey tells us, " who was wont
to have him walk in his delicate groves, where he did medi
tate; and when a notion darted into his mind, Mr. Hobbes
was presently to write it down. And his lordship was wont
to say that he did it better than any one else about him ; for
that many times when he read their notes he scarce under
stood what they writ, because they understood it not clearly
themselves." The long Iffe of Hobbes covers a memorable
space in our history. He was born in the year of the victory
over the Armada ; he died, at the age of ninety-two, only nine
years before the Revolution. His abflity soon made itself felt,
and in his earlier days he was the secretary of Bacon, and
the friend of Ben Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
But it was not tfll the age of fifty-four, when he withdrew to
France on the eve of the Great Rebellion, that his specula
tions 'were made known to the world in his treatise " De
Give." He joined the exiled court at Paris, and became
mathematical tutor to Charles the Second, whose love and
regard for him seem to have been real to the end. But his
post was soon forfeited by the appearance of his "Levia
than " ; he was forbidden to approach the court, and returned

778 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1660
to England, where he seems to have acquiesced in the rule
of Cromwell. The Restoration brought him a pension ; but
both his works were condemned by Parliament, and " Hobb-
ism " became, ere he died, the popular synonym for irrelig-
ion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded oddly
in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things
necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the
law. But the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the
effect which the Hobbist philosophy must necessarily have
on the current religion and the current notions of political
and social morality. Hobbes was the first great English
writer who dealt with the science of government from the
ground, not of tradition, but of reason. It was in his treat
ment of man in the stage of human development which he
supposed to precede that of society that he came most roughly
into conflict with the accepted beliefs. Men, in his theory,
were by nature equal, and their only natural relation was a
state of war. It was no innate virtue of man himself which
created human society out of this chaos of warring strengths.
Hobbes, in fact, denied the existence of the more spiritual
sides of man's nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected
every human custom and desire, and reduced even the most
sacred to demonstrations of a prudent selfishness. Friend
ship was simply a sense of social utility to one another. The
so-called laws of nature, such as gratitude or the love of our
neighbor, were in fact contrary to the natural passions of
man, and powerless to restrain them. Nor had religion res
cued man by the interposition of a divine will. Nothing
better illustrates the daring with which the new skepticism
was to break through the theological traditions of the older
world than the pitiless logic with which Hobbes assailed the
very theory of revelation. "To say God hath spoken to
man in a dream, is no more than to say man dreamed that
God hath spoken to him." " To say one hath seen a vision,
or heard a voice, is to say he hath dreamed between sleeping
and waking." Religion, in fact, was nothing more than
" the fear of invisible powers " ; and here, as in all other
branches of human science, knowledge dealt with words and
not with things. It was man himself who for his own profit
created society, by laying down certain of his natural rights

i66o] THE REVOLUTION 779
and retaining only those of self-preservation. A Covenant
between man and man originally created " that great Levia
than called the Commonwealth or State, which is but an arti
ficial man, though of greater stature and strength than the
natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended."
The fiction of such an " original contract " has long been dis
missed from political speculation, but its effect at the time of
its first appearance was immense. Its almost universal ac
ceptance put an end to the religious and patriarchal theories
of society, on which kingship had till now founded its claim
of a divine right to authority which no subject might ques
tion. But if Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal des
potism, he laid a new and a firmer one. To create a society
at all, he held that the whole body of the governed must have
resigned all rights save that of self-preservation into the hands
of a single ruler, who was the representative of all. Such a
ruler was absolute, for to make terms with him implied a
man making terms with himself. The transfer of rights was
inalienable, and after generations were as much bound by it
as the generation which made the transfer. As the head of
the whole body, the ruler judged every question, settled the
laws of civU justice or injustice, or decided between religion
and superstition. His was a divine right, and the only di
vine right, because in him were absorbed all the rights of
each of his subjects. It was not in any constitutional check
that Hobbes looked for the prevention of tyranny, but in the
common education and enlightenment as to their real end
and the best mode of reaching it on the part of both subjects
and prince. And the real end of both was the weal of the
Commonwealth at large. It was in laying boldly down this
end of government, as well as in the basis of contract on
which he made government repose, that Hobbes really influ
enced all later politics. Locke, the foremost political thinker
of the Restoration, derived political authority, like Hobbes,
from the consent of the governed, and adopted the common
weal as the end of government. But the practical temper of
the time molded the new theory into a form which con
trasted strangely with that given to it by its first inventor.
The political phUosophy of Locke indeed was little more
than a formal statement of the conclusions which the bulk of

780 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1660
Englishmen had drawn from the great struggle 'of the Civil
war. In his theory the people remain passively in posses
sion of the power which they have delegated to the prince,
and have the right to withdraw it if it be used for purposes
inconsistent with the end which society was formed to pro
mote. To the origin of all power in the people, and the end
of all power for the people's good, — the two great doctrines
of Hobbes, — Locke added the right of resistance, the re
sponsibility of princes to their subjects for a due execution
of their trust, and the supremacy of legislative assemblies as
the voice of the people itself. It was in this modified and
enlarged form that the new political philosophy found gen
eral acceptance after the Revolution of 1688.
Section II. — The Restoration, 1660-1667
When Charles the Second entered Whitehall, the work of
the Long Parliament seemed undone. Not only was the
Monarchy restored, but it was restored, in spite of the efforts
of Sir Matthew Hale, without written restriction or condition
on the part of the people, though with implied conditions on
the part of Charles himself ; and of the two great influences
which had hitherto served as checks on its power, the first,
that of Puritanism, had become hateful to the nation at large,
while the second, the tradition of constitutional liberty, was
discredited by the issue of the Civfl war. But amidst all
the tumult of demonstrative loyalty the great " revolution of
the seventeenth century," as it has justly been styled, went
steadily on. The supreme power was gradually transferred
from the Crown to the House of Commons. Step by step.
Parliament drew nearer to a solution of the political problem
which had so long foiled its efforts, the problem how to make
its will the law of administrative action without itself under
taking the task of administration. It is only by carefully
fixing our eyes on this transfer of power, and by noting the
successive steps towards its realization, that we can understand
the complex history of the Restoration and the Revolution.
The first acts of the new Government showed a sense that,
loyal as was the temper of the nation, its loyalty was by no
means the blind devotion of the Cavalier. "The chief part in

i66o] THE REVOLUTION 78 1
the Restoration had in fact been played by the Presbyterians ;
and the Presbyterians were still powerful from their almost
exclusive possession of the magistracy and all local authority.
The first ministry which Charles ventured to form bore on it
the marks of a compromise between this powerful party and
their old opponents. Its most influential member indeed was
Sir Edward Hyde, the adviser of the king during his exile,
who soon became Earl of Clarendon and lord chancellor.
Lord Southampton, a steady royalist, accepted the post of
lord treasurer^ and the devotion of Ormond was rewarded
with a dukedom and the dignity of lord steward. But the
purely parliamentary interest was represented by Monk, who
remained lord general of the army with the title of Duke of
Albemarle ; and though the king's brother, James, Duke of
York, was made lord admiral, the administration of the fleet
was virtually in the hands of one of Cromwell's foUowers,
Montagu, the new Earl of Sandwich. An old Puritan, Lord
Saye and Sele, was made lord privy seal. Sir Ashley Cooper,
a leading member of the same party, was rewarded for his
activity in bringing about the Restoration, first by a privy
councilorship, and soon after by a barony and the office of
chancellor of the Exchequer. Of the two secretaries of
state, the one, Nicholas, was a devoted royalist ; the other,
Morice, was a steady Presbyterian. Of the thirty members
of the Privy Council, twelve had borne arms against the
king. It was clear that such a ministry was hardly likely to lend
itself to a mere policy of reaction, and the temper of the new
Government therefore fell fairly in with the temper of the
convention when that body, after declaring itself a Parlia
ment, proceeded to consider the measures which were requi
site for a settlement of the nation. The convention had been
chosen under the ordinances which excluded royalist " Malig
nants " from the right of voting ; and the bulk of its mem
bers were men of Presbyterian sympathies, loyalist to the
core, but as averse to despotism as the Long Parliament
itself. In its earlier days a member who asserted that those
who had fought against the king were as guilty as those who
cut off his head was sternly rebuked from the chair. The
first measure which was undertaken by the House, the Bfll

782 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1660
of Indemnity and Oblivion for all offenses committed during
the recent troubles, showed at once the moderate character of
the Commons. In the punishment of the Regicides, indeed, a
Presbyterian might well be as zealous as a Cavalier. In spite
of a proclamation he had issued in the first days of his re
turn, in which mercy was virtually promised to all the judges
of the late king who surrendered themselves to justice,
Charles pressed for revenge on those whom he regarded as
his father's murderers, and the Lords went hotly with the
king. It is to the credit of the Commons that they steadily
resisted the cry for blood. By the original provisions of the Bill
of Oblivion and Indemnity only seven of the living regicides
were excluded from pardon ; and though the rise of royalist
fervor during the three months in which the bill was under
discussion forced the House in the end to leave almost all to
the course of justice, the requirement of a special Act of
Parliament for the execution of those who had surrendered
under the Proclamation protected the lives of most of them.
Twenty-eight of the king's judges were in the end arraigned
at the bar of a court speciaUy convened for their trial, but
only thirteen were executed, and only one of these. General
Harrison, had played any conspicuous part in the rebellion.
Twenty others, who had been prominent in what were now
called " the troubles " of the past twenty years, were declared
incapable of holding office under the State ; and by an
unjustifiable clause which was introduced into the act before
its final adoption. Sir Harry Vane and General Lambert,
though they had taken no part in the king's death, were
specially exempted from the general pardon. In dealing
with the questions of property which arose from the confisca
tions and transfers of estates during the civil wars the con
vention met with greater difficulties. No opposition was made
to the resumption of all Crown lands by the State, but the
convention desired to protect the rights of those who had
purchased Church property, and of those who were in actual
possession of private estates which had been confiscated by
the Long Parliament, or by the Government which succeeded
it. The bills, however, which they prepared for this purpose
were delayed by the artifices of Hyde ; and at the close of
the session the ' bishops and the evicted royalists quietly

i66o] THE REVOLUTION 783
reentered into the occupation of their old possessions. The
royalists indeed were far from being satisfied with this sum
mary confiscation. Fines and sequestrations had impoverished
all the steady adherents of the royal cause, and had driven
many of them to forced sales of their estates ; and a demand
was made for compensation for their losses and the cancel
ing of these sales. Without such provisions, said the fren
zied Cavaliers, the biU would be " a Bill of Indemnity for the
king's enemies, and of Oblivion for his friends." But here
the convention stood firm. All transfers of property by sale
were recognized as valid, and all claims of compensation for
losses by sequestration were barred by the act. From the
settlement of the nation the convention passed to the settle
ment of the relations between the nation and the Crown.
So far was the constitutional work of the Long Parliament
from being undone, that its more important measures were
silently accepted as the base of future government. Not a
voice demanded the restoration of the Star Chamber, or of
monopolies, or of the Court of High Commission ; no one
disputed the justice of the condemnation of ship-money, or
the assertion of the sole right of Parliament to grant supplies
to the Crown. The militia, indeed, was placed in the king's
hands ; but the army was disbanded, though Charles was
permitted to keep a few regiments for his guard. The reve
nue was fixed at ;£ 1,200,000; and this sum was granted to
the king for Iffe, a grant which might have been perilous for
freedom had not the taxes provided to supply the sum fallen
constantly below this estimate, while the current expenses of
the Crown, even in time of peace, greatly exceeded it. But
even for this grant a heavy price was exacted. Though the
rights of the Crown over lands held, as the bulk of English
estates were held, in military tenure, had ceased to be of any
great pecuniary value, they were indirectly a source of con
siderable power. The right of wardship and of marriage,
above all, enabled the sovereign to exercise a galling pressure
on every landed proprietor in his social and domestic con
cerns. Under Elizabeth, the right of wardship had been
used to secure the education of all Catholic minors in the
Protestant faith ; and under James and his successor the
charge of minors had been granted to court favorites or sold

784 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1660
in open market to the highest bidder. But the real value of
these rights to the Crown lay in the political pressure which
it was able to exert through them on the country gentry. A
squire was naturally eager to buy the good-will of a sover
eign who might soon be the guardian of his daughter and
the administrator of his estate. But the same motives which
made the Crown cling to this prerogative made the Parlia
ment anxious to do away with it. Its efforts to bring this
about under James the First had been foiled by the king's
stubborn resistance ; but the long interruption of these rights
during the wars made their revival almost impossible at the
Restoration. One of the first acts therefore of the conven
tion was to free the country gentry by abolishing the claims
of the Crown to reliefs and wardship, purveyance, and pre
emption, and by the conversion of lands held till then in chiv
alry into lands held in common socage. In lieu of his rights,
Charles accepted a grant of ;£ 100, 000 a year; a sum which
it was originally purposed to raise by a tax on the lands thus
exempted from feudal exactions, but which was provided for
in the end, with less justice, by a general excise.
Successful as the convention had been in effecting the
settlement of political matters, it failed in bringing about a
settlement of the Church. In his proclamation from Breda
Charles had promised to respect liberty of conscience, and to
assent to any acts of Parliament which should be presented
to him for its security. The convention was in the main
Presbyterian ; but it soon became plain that the continuance
of a purely Presbyterian system was impossible. "The
generality of the people," wrote Sharpe, a shrewd Scotch
observer, from London, "are doting after prelacy and the
service-book." The convention, however, still hoped for
some modified form of Episcopalian government which would
enable the bulk of the Puritan party to remain within the
Church. A large part of the existing clergy, indeed, were
Independents, and for these no compromise with episcopacy
was possible ; but the greater number were moderate Presby
terians, who were ready "for fear of worse" to submit to such
a plan of Church government as Archbishop Usher had pro
posed, a plan in which the bishop was only the president of
a diocesan board of Presbyters, and to accept the Liturgy

i66i] THE REVOLUTION 785
with a few amendments and the omission of the " superstitious
practises." It was to a compromise of this kind that the king
himself leant at the beginning ; and a royal declaration which
announced his approval of the Puritan demands was read at a
conference of the two parties, and with it a petition from the
Independents praying for religious liberty. The king pro
posed to grant the prayer of the petition, not for the Independ
ents only but for all Christians ; but on the point of tolerating
the CathoUcs, churchmen and Puritans were at one, and a bfll
which was introduced into the House of Commons by Sir
Matthew Hale to turn the declaration into a law was thrown
out. A fresh conference was promised, but in the absence of
any parliamentary action the Episcopal party boldly avafled
themselves of their legal rights. The ejected clergy who still
remained alive entered again into their parsonages, the bishops
returned to their sees, and the dissolution of the Convention-
Parliament destroyed the last hope of an ecclesiastical com
promise. The tide of loyalty had in fact been rising fast
during its session, and its influence was already seen in a
shameful outrage wrought under the very orders of the con
vention itself. The bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ire
ton were torn from their graves and hung on gibbets at
Tyburn, while those of Pym and Blake were cast out of
Westminster Abbey into St. Margaret's churchyard. But in
the elections for the new Parliament the zeal for Church and
king swept all hope of moderation and compromise before it.
" Malignity " had now ceased to be a crime, and voters long
deprived of the suffrage, vicars, country gentlemen, farmers,
with the whole body of the Catholics, rushed again to the
poll. The Presbyterians sank in the Cavalier Parliament to
a handful of fifty members. The new House of Commons
was made up for the most part of young men, of men, that is,
who had but a faint memory of the Stuart tyranny of their
childhood, but who had a keen memory of living from man
hood beneath the tyranny of the Commonwealth. Their
very bearing was that of wUd revolt against the Puritan past.
To a staid observer, Roger Pepys, they seemed a following of
" the most profane, swearing fellows that ever I heard in my
life." The zeal of the Parliament at its outset, indeed, far
outran that of Charles or his ministers. Though it confirmed

786 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1661
the other acts of the convention, it could with difficulty be
brought to confirm the Act of Indemnity. The Commons
pressed for the prosecution of Vane. Vane was protected
alike by the spirit of the law and by the king's pledge to the
convention that, even if convicted of treason, he would not
suffer him to be brought to the block. But he was now
brought to trial on the charge of treason against a king " kept
out of his royal authority by traitors and rebels," and his
spirited defense served as an excuse for his execution. " He
is too dangerous a man to let live," Charles wrote with char
acteristic coolness, "if we can safely put him out of the way."
But the new members were yet better churchmen than loyal
ists. A common suffering had thrown the squires and the
Episcopalian clergy together, and for the first time since the
Reformation the English gentry were ardent not for king
only, but for Church and king. At the opening of their ses
sion the Commons ordered every member to receive the com
munion, and the League and Covenant to be solemnly burnt
by the common hangman in Westminster Hall. The bill ex
cluding bishops from the House of Lords was repealed. The
conference at the Savoy between the Episcopalians and Pres
byterians broke up in anger, and the few alterations made in
the Liturgy were made with a view to disgust rather than to
conciliate the Puritan party.
The temper of the new Parliament, however, was not a mere
temper of revenge. Its wish was to restore the constitutional
system which the Civil war had violently interrupted, and the
royalists were led by the most active of the constitutional
loyalists who had foUowed Falkland in 1642, Hyde, now Earl
of Clarendon and lord chancellor. The Parliament and the
Church were in his conception essential parts of the system
of English government, through which the power of the Crown
was to be exercised ; and under his guidance Parliament
turned to the carrying out of the principle of uniformity in
Church as well as in State on which the minister was resolved.
The chief obstacle to such a policy lay in the Presbyterians,
and the strongholds of this party were in the corporations
of the boroughs, which practically returned the borough mem
bers. An attempt was made to drive the Presbyterians from
municipal posts by a severe Corporation Act, which required

1662] THE REVOLUTION 787
a reception of the Communion according to the rites of the
Anglican Church, a renunciation of the League and Covenant,
and a declaration that it was unlawful on any grounds to take
up arms against the king, before admission to municipal
offices. A more deadly blow was dealt at the Puritans in the
renewal of the Act of Uniformity. Not only was the use of
the prayer-book,, and the prayer-book only, enforced in all
public worship, but an unfeigned consent and assent was
demanded from every minister of the Church to all which
was contained in it ; while, for the first time since the Refor
mation, all orders save those conferred by the hands of bishops
were legally disallowed. The declaration exacted from cor
porations was exacted from the clergy, and a pledge was
required that they would seek to make no change in Church
or State. It was in vain that Ashley opposed the bill fiercely
in the Lords, that the peers pleaded for pensions to the ejected
ministers and for the exemption of schoolmasters from the
necessity of subscription, and that even Clarendon, who felt
that the king's word was at stake, pressed for the insertion
of clauses enabling the Crown to grant dispensations from
its provisions. Every suggestion of compromise was rejected
by the Commons; and Charles at last assented to the bill,
while he promised to suspend its execution by the exercise
of his prerogative.
The Anglican Parliament, however, was resolute to enforce
the law ; and on St. Bartholomew's day, the last day allowed
for compliance with its requirements, nearly two thousand
rectors and vicars, or about a fifth of the English clergy, were
driven from their parishes as Nonconformists. No such
sweeping alteration in the religious aspect of the Church had
ever been seen before. The changes of the Reformation had
been brought about with little change in the clergy itself.
Even the severities of the High Commission under Elizabeth
ended in the expulsion of a few hundreds. If Laud had gone
zealously to work in emptying Puritan pulpits, his zeal had
been to a great extent foiled by the restrictions of the law and
by the growth of Puritan sentiment in the clergy as a whole.
A far wider change had been brought about by the Civil war ;
but the change had been gradual, and had ostensibly been
wrought for the most part on political or moral rather than
51

788 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1662
on religious grounds. The parsons expelled were expelled
as " malignants " or as unfitted for their office by idleness
or vice or inability to preach. But the change wrought by
St. Bartholomew's day was a distinctly religious change,
and it was a change which in its suddenness and complete
ness stood utterly alone. The rectors and vicars who were
driven out were the most learned and the most active of their
order. The bulk of the great livings throughout the country
were in their hands. They stood at the head of the London
clergy, as the London clergy stood in general repute at the
head of their class throughout England. They occupied the
higher posts at the two universities. No English divine,
save Jeremy Taylor, rivaled Howe as a preacher. No parson
was so renowned a controversialist, or so indefatigable a parish
priest, as Baxter. And behind these men stood a fifth of the
whole body of the clergy, men whose zeal and labor had dif
fused throughout the country a greater appearance of piety
and religion than it had ever displayed before. But the
expulsion of these men was far more to the Church of Eng
land than the loss of their individual services. It was the
definite expulsion of a great party which from the time of the
Reformation had played the most active and popular part in
the life of the Church. It was the close of an effort which
had been going on ever since Elizabeth's accession to bring
the English communion into closer relations with the Re
formed communions of the Continent, and into greater har
mony with the religious instincts of the nation at large. The
Church of England stood from that moment isolated and
alone among all the Churches of the Christian world. The
Reformation had severed it irretrievably from those which
still clung to the obedience of the papacy. By its rejection
of all but Episcopal orders, the Act of Uniformity severed it
as irretrievably from the general body of the Protestant
Churches, whether Lutheran or Reformed. And while thus
cut off from all healthy religious communion with the world
without, it sank into immobility within. With the expulsion
of the Puritan clergy, all change, all efforts after reform, all
national development, suddenly stopped. From that time to
this the Episcopal Church has been unable to meet the vary
ing spiritual needs of its adherents by any modification of its

i662] THE REVOLUTION 789
government or its worship. It stands alone among all the
religious bodies of Western Christendom in its failure through
two hundred years to devise a single new service of prayer
or of praise. But if the issues of St. Bartholomew's day have
been harmful to the spiritual Ufe of the English Church, they
have been in the highest degree advantageous to the cause
of religious liberty. At the Restoration religious freedom
seemed again to have been lost. Only the Independents and
a few despised sects, such as the Quakers, upheld the right
of every man to worship God according to the bidding of his
own conscience. The bulk of the Puritan party, with the
Presbyterians at its head, was at one with its opponents in
desiring a uniformity of worship, if not of belief, throughout
the land ; and, had the two great parties within the Church
held together, their weight would have been almost irresist
ible. Fortunately the great severance of St. Bartholomew's
day drove out the Presbyterians from the Church to which
they clung, and forced them into a general union with sects
which they had hated till then almost as bitterly as the bishops
themselves. A common suffering soon blended the Noncon
formists into one. Persecution broke down before the num
bers, the wealth, and the political weight of the new sectarians ;
and the Church, for the first time in its history, found itself
confronted with an organized body of Dissenters without its
pale. The impossibility of crushing such a body as this
wrested from English statesmen the first legal recognition
of freedom of worship in the Toleration Act; their rapid
growth in later times has by degrees stripped the Church of
almost all the exclusive privileges which it enjoyed as a relig
ious body, and now threatens what remains of its official con
nection with the State. With these remoter consequences,
however, we are not as yet concerned. It is enough to note
here that with the Act of Uniformity and the expulsion of the
Puritan clergy a new element in our religious and political
history, the element of Dissent, the influence of the Noncon
formist churches, comes first into play.
The sudden outbreak and violence of the persecution
turned the disappointment of the Presbyterians into despair.
Many were for retiring to Holland, others proposed flight to
New England and the American colonies. Charles, however,

790 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1664
was anxious to use the strife between the two great bodies of
Protestants so as to secure toleration for the Catholics, and
revive at the same time his prerogative of dispensing with the
execution of laws ; and fresh hopes of protection were raised
by a royal proclamation which expressed the king's resolve
to exempt from the penalties of the act " those who, living
peaceably, do not conform themselves thereunto, through
scruple and tenderness of misguided conscience, but modestly
and without scandal perform their devotions in their own
way." A bill introduced in 1663, in redemption of a pledge
in the declaration itself, gave Charles the power to dispense,
not only with the provisions of the Act of Uniformity, but
with the penalties provided by all laws which enforced relig
ious conformity, or which imposed religious tests. But if the
Presbyterian leaders in the council had stooped to accept the
aid of the declaration, the bulk of the Dissidents had no mind
to have their grievances used as a means of procuring by a
side-wind toleration for Roman Catholics, or of building up
again that dispensing power which the civfl wars had thrown
down. The churchmen, too, whose hatred for the Dissidents
had been embittered by suspicions of a secret league between
the Dissidents and the Catholics in which the king was taking
part, were resolute in opposition. The Houses therefore
struck simultaneously at both their opponents. They forced
Charles by an address to withdraw his pledge of toleration.
They then extorted from him a proclamation for the banish
ment of all Catholic priests, and followed this up by a Con
venticle Act, which punished with fine, imprisonment, and
transportation on a third offense all persons who met in
greater number than five for any religious worship save that
of the Common Prayer ; while return or escape from banish
ment was punished by death. The Five Mile Act, a year
later, completed the code of persecution. By its provisions,
every clergyman who had been driven out by the Act of Uni
formity was called on to swear that he held it unlawful under
any pretext to take up arms against the king, and that he
would at no time " endeavor any alteration of government in
Church and State." In case of refusal, he was forbidden to
go within five mUes of any borough, or of any place where he
had been wont to minister. As the main body of the Non-

1665] THE REVOLUTION 791
conformists belonged to the city and trading classes, the
effect of this measure was to rob them of any religious teach
ing at all. A motion to impose the oath of the Five Mfle
Act on every person in the nation was rejected in the same
session by a majority of only six. The sufferings of the Non
conformists indeed could hardly faff to tell on the sympathies
of the people. The thirst for revenge, which had been
roused by the ¦violence of the Presbyterians in their hour of
triumph, was satisfied by their humiUation in the hour of
defeat. The sight of pious and learned clergymen driven
from their homes and their flocks, of reUgious meetings
broken up by the constables, of preachers set side by side
¦with thieves and outcasts in the dock, of jafls crammed with
honest enthusiasts whose piety was their only crime, pleaded
more eloquently for toleration than all the reasoning in the
world. We have a clue to the extent of the persecution from
what we know to have been its effect on a single sect. The
Quakers had excited alarm by their extravagances of manner,
their, refusal to bear arms or to take oaths ; and a special act
was passed for their repression. They were one of the small
est of the Nonconformist bodies, but more than four thousand
were soon in prison, and of these five hundred were impris
oned in London alone. The king's Declaration of Indulgence,
twelve years later, set free twelve hundred Quakers who had
found their way to the jails. Of the sufferings of the expelled
clergy, one of their number, Richard Baxter, has given us an
account. " Many hundreds of them, with their wives and
chUdren, had neither house nor bread. . . . Their congrega
tions had enough to do, besides a small maintenance, to help
them out of prisons, or to maintain them there. Though they
were as frugal as possible they could hardly live ; some
lived on little more than bro^wn bread and water, many
had but eight or ten pounds a year to maintain a family, so
that a piece of flesh has not come to one of their tables in six
weeks' time ; their allowance could scarce afford them bread
and cheese. One went to plow six days and preached on the
Lord's day. Another was forced to cut tobacco for a UveU-
hood." But poverty was the least of their sufferings. They
were jeered at by the players. They were hooted through
the streets by the mob. " Many of the ministers, being afraid

792 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1645
to lay down their ministry after they had been ordained to it,
preached to such as would hear them in fields and private
houses, till they were apprehended and cast into jails, where
many of them perished." They were excommunicated in the
bishops' court, or fined for nonattendance at church ; and a
crowd of informers grew up who made a trade of detecting
the meetings they held at midnight. AUeyn, the author of the
well-known " Alarm to the Unconverted," died at thirty-six
from the sufferings he endured in Taunton jail. Vavasour
Powell, the apostle of Wales, spent the eleven years which
followed the Restoration in prisons at Shrewsbury, Southsea,
and Cardiff, till he perished in the Fleet. John Bunyan was
for twelve years a prisoner at Bedford.
We have already seen the atmosphere of excited feeling in
which the youth of Bunyan had been spent. From his child
hood he heard heavenly voices, and saw visions of heaven ;
from his childhood, too, he had been wrestling with an over
powering sense of sin, which sickness and repeated escapes
from death did much as he grew up to deepen. But in spite
of his self-reproaches his life was a religious one ; and the
purity and sobriety of his youth was shown by his admis
sion at seventeen into the ranks of the New Model. Two
years later the war was over, and Bunyan, though hardly
twenty, found himself married to a " godly " wife, as young
and penniless as himself. So poor were the young couple that
they could scarce muster a spoon and a plate between them ;
and the poverty of their home deepened, perhaps, the gloom
of the young tinker's restlessness and religious depression.
His wife did what she could to comfort him, teaching him
again to read and write, for he had forgotten his school
learning, and reading with him in two little " godly " books
which formed his library. But the darkness only gathered
the thicker round his imaginative soul. " I walked," he tells
us of this time, " to a neighboring town ; and sat down upon
a settle in the street, and fell into a very deep pause about
the most fearful state my sin had brought me to ; and after
long musing I lifted up my head ; but methought I saw as if
the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me
light ; and as if the very stones in the street and tfles upon
the houses did band themselves against me. Methought that

1653] THE REVOLUTION 793
they all combined together to banish me out of the world. I
was abhorred of them, and wept to dweU among them, because
I had sinned against the Savior. Oh, how happy now was
every creature over I ! for they stood fast and kept their
station. But I was gone and lost." At last, after more than
two years of this struggle, the darkness broke. Bunyan felt
himself "converted," and freed from the burden of his sin.
He joined a Baptist church at Bedford, and a few years later
he became famous as a preacher. As he held no formal post
of minister in the congregation, his preaching even under the
protectorate was illegal and "gave great offense," he tells
us, " to the doctors and priests of that county," but he per
sisted with little real molestation until the Restoration. Six
months, however, after the king's return he was committed to
Bedford jail on a charge of preaching in unlicensed con
venticles ; and his refusal to promise to abstain from preach
ing kept him there twelve years. The jail was crowded
with prisoners like himself, and amongst them he continued
his ministry, supporting himself by making tagged thread
laces, and finding some comfort in the Bible, the " Book of
Martyrs," and the writing materials which he was suffered to
have with him in his prison. But he was in the prime of life,
his age was thirty-two when he was imprisoned ; and the in
activity and severance from his wife and little children was
hard to bear. " The parting with my wife and poor children,"
he says in words of simple pathos, " hath often been to me in
this place as the pulling of the flesh from the bones, and that
not only . because I am somewhat too fond of those great
mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my
mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor
family was like to meet with should I be taken from them,
especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart
than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I thought
my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to
pieces. ' Poor child,' thought I, ' what sorrow art thou like to
have for thy portion in this world ! Thou must be beaten,
must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand
calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow
upon thee.' " But suffering could not break his purpose, and
Bunyan found compensation for the narrow bounds of his

794 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1672
prison in the wonderful activity of his pen. Tracts, contro
versial treatises, poems, meditations, his " Grace Abounding,"
and his "Holy City" followed each other in quick succession.
It was in his jafl that he wrote the first and greatest part of his
" Pilgrim's Progress." Its publication was the earliest result of
his deliverance at the Declaration of Indulgence, and the popu
larity which it enjoyed from the first proves that the reUgious
sympathies of the English people were stUl mainly Puritan.
Before Bunyan's death in 1688 ten editions of the " Pilgrim's
Progress " had already been sold ; and though even Cowper
hardly dared to quote it a century later for fear of moving a
smile in the polite world about him, its favor among the
middle classes and the poor has grown steadily from its
author's day to our own. It is now the most popular and
the most widely known of all English books. In none do we
see more clearly the new imaginative force which had been
given to the common Iffe of Englishmen by their study of the
Bible. Its English is the simplest and the homeliest English
which has ever been used by any great English ¦writer ; but it
is the English of the Bible. "The images of the " Pilgrim's
Progress" are the images of prophet and evangelist; it bor
rows for its tenderer outbursts the very verse of the Song of
Songs, and pictures the Heavenly City in the words of the
Apocalypse. But so completely has the Bible become Bun
yan's life that one feels its phrases as the natural expression
of his thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its words have
become his own. He has lived among its ¦visions and voices
of heaven till all sense of possible unreality has died away.
He tells his tale with such a perfect naturalness that alle
gories become living things, that the Slough of Despond and
Doubting Castle are as real to us as places we see every day,
that we know Mr. Legality and Mr. Worldly Wiseman as ff
we had met them in the street. It is in this amazing reality
of impersonation that Bunyan's imaginative genius speciaUy
displays itself. But this is far from being his only excel
lence. In its range, in its directness, in its simple grace,
in the ease with which it changes from lively dialogue to
dramatic action, from simple pathos to passionate earnest
ness, in the subtle and delicate fancy which often suffuses
its childlike words, in its playful humor, its bold character-

1665] THE REVOLUTION 795
painting, in the even and balanced power which passes
without effort from the Valley of the Shadow of Death
to the land "where the Shining Ones commonly walked,
because it was on the borders of heaven," in its sunny kind
liness unbroken by one bitter word, the " Pilgrim's Progress "
is among the noblest of English poems. For if Puritanism
had first discovered the poetry which contact with the spir
itual world awakes in the meanest soul, Bunyan was the
first of the Puritans who revealed this poetry to the outer
world. The journey of Christian from the City of Destruction
to the Heavenly City is simply a record of the life of such a
Puritan as Bunyan himself, seen through an imaginative haze
of spiritual idealism in which its commonest incidents are
heightened and glorified. He is himself the pilgrim who flies
from the City of Destruction, who climbs the hill Difficulty,
who faces ApoUyon, who sees his loved ones cross the river
of Death towards the Heavenly City, and how, because " the
hill on which the City was framed was higher than the clouds,
they therefore went up through the region of the air, sweetly
talking as they went."
The success, however, of the system of reUgious repression
rested mainly on the maintenance of peace ; and while Bun
yan was lying in Bedford jail, and the Church was carrying
on its bitter persecution of the Nonconformists, England was
plunging into a series of bitter humiliations and losses abroad.
The old commercial jealousy between the Dutch and English,
which had been lulled by a formal treaty in 1662, but which
still lived on in petty squabbles at sea, was embittered by the
cession of Bombay — a port which gave England an entry into
the profitable trade with India — and by the establishment of
a West Indian Company in London which opened a traffic
with the Gold Coast of Africa. The quarrel was fanned into
a war. Parliament voted a large supply unanimously ; and
the king was won by hopes of the ruin of the Dutch Presby
terian and republican government, and by his resentment at
the insults he had suffered from Holland in his exile. The
war at sea which followed was a war of giants. An obsti
nate battle off Lowestoft ended in a victory for the English
fleet ; but in an encounter the next year with De Ruyter off
the North Foreland, Monk and his fleet after two days' fight-

796 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1666
ing were only saved from destruction by the arrival of Prince
Rupert. The dogged admiral renewed the fight, but the com
bat again ended in De Ruyter's favor, and the English took
refuge in the Thames. Their fleet was indeed ruined, but
the losses of the enemy had been hardly less. " English
sailors may be kflled," said De Witt, " but they cannot be con
quered " ; and the saying was as true of one side as the other.
A third battle, as hard-fought as its predecessors, ended in
the triumph of the English, and their fleet sailed along the
coast of HoUand, burning ships and towns. But Holland was
as unconquerable as England herself, and the Dutch fleet was
soon again refitted and was joined in the Channel by the
French. Meanwhile, calamity at home was added to the suf
ferings of the war. In the preceding year a hundred thou
sand Londoners had died in six months of the Plague which
broke out in the crowded streets of the capital ; and the Plague
was followed now by a fire, which, beginning in the heart of
London, reduced the whole city to ashes from the Tower to
the Temple. Thirteen hundred houses and ninety churches
were destroyed. The loss of merchandise and property was
beyond count. The treasury was empty, and neither ships
nor forts were manned when the Dutch fleet appeared at the
Nore, advanced unopposed up the Thames to Gravesend,
forced the boom which protected the Medway, burned three
men-of-war which lay anchored in the river, and withdrew
only to sail proudly along the coast, the masters of the
Channel. Section III. — Charles the Second, 1667-1673
The thunder of the Dutch guns in the Medway and the
Thames woke England to a bitter sense of its degradation.
The dream of loyalty was over. " Everybody nowadays,"
Pepys tells us, " reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what
brave things he did, and made all the neighbor princes fear
him." But Oliver's successor was coolly watching this shame
and discontent of his people with the one aim of turning it to
his own advantage. To Charles the Second the degradation
of England was only a move in the political game which he
was playing, a game played with so consummate a secrecy
and skill that it deceived not only the closest observers of his

1667] THE REVOLUTION 797
©¦wn day but still misleads historians of ours. What his sub
jects saw in their king was a pleasant, brown-faced gentle
man playing with his spaniels, or drawing caricatures of his
ministers, or flinging cakes to the water-fowl in the park.
To aU outer seeming Charles was the most consummate of
idlers. " He deUghted," says one of his courtiers, " in a be
witching kind of pleasure called sauntering." The business-
Uke Pepys soon discovered that "the king do mind nothing
but pleasures, and hates the very sight or thoughts of busi
ness." He only laughed when Tom KUUgrew frankly told
him that badly as things were going there was one man
whose industry could soon set them right, " and this is one
Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in using his lips
about the court, and hath no other employment." That
Charles had great natural parts no one doubted. In his
earUer days of defeat and danger he showed a cool courage
and presence of mind which never fafled him in the many
perilous moments of his reign. His temper was pleasant
and social, his manners perfect, and there was a careless free
dom and courtesy in his address which won over everybody
who came into his presence. His education indeed had been
so grossly neglected that he could hardly read a plain Latin
book ; but his natural quickness and intelUgence showed itself
in his pursuit of chemistr)- and anatomy, and in the interest
he showed in the scientific inquiries of the Royal Society.
Like Peter the Great his favorite study was that of naval
architecture, and he piqued himself on being a clever ship-
buUder. He had some Uttle love too for art and poetry, and
a taste for music. But his shrewdness and vivacity showed
itself most in his endless talk. He was fond of telling stories,
and he told them ¦with a good deal of grace and humor. His
humor indeed never forsook him : even on his death-bed he
turned to the weeping courtiers around and whispered an
apology for ha^ving been so unconscionable a time in dying.
He held his o^wn fairly ¦with the wits of his court, and bandied
repartees on equal terms with Sedley or Buckingham. Even
Rochester in his mercfless epigram was forced to own that
Charles "never said a foolish thing." He had inherited in
fact his grandfather's gfft of pithy sayings, and his habit
ual irony often gave an amusing turn to them. When his

798 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1667
brother, the most unpopular man in England, solemnly
warned him of plots against his life, Charles laughingly bade
him set all fear aside. " They will never kill me, James," he
said, " to make you king." But courage and wit and ability
seemed to have been bestowed on him in vain. Charles
hated business. He gave to outer observers no sign of
ambition. The one thing he seemed in earnest about was
sensual pleasure, and he took his pleasure with a cynical
shamelessness which roused the disgust even of his shame
less courtiers. Mistress followed mistress, and the guilt of a
troop of profligate women was blazoned to the world by the
gift of titles and estates. The royal bastards were set
amongst English nobles. The ducal house of Grafton springs
from the king's adultery with Barbara Palmer, whom he
created Duchess of Cleveland. The Dukes of St. Albans
owe their origin to his intrigue with Nell Gwynn, a player
and a courtezan. Louise de Qu6rouaille, a mistress sent by
France to win him to its interests, became Duchess of Ports
mouth and ancestress of the House of Richmond. An earUer
mistress, Lucy Walters, was mother of a boy whom he raised
to the dukedom of Monmouth, and to whom the Dukes of
Buccleuch trace their line ; but there is good reason for
doubting whether the king was actually his father. But
Charles was far from being content with these recognized
mistresses, or with a single form of self-indulgence. Gam
bling and drinking helped to fill up the vacant moments
when he could no longer toy with his favorites or bet at
Newmarket. No thought of remorse or of shame seems
ever to have crossed his mind. " He could not think God
would make a man miserable," he said once, "only for taking
a little pleasure out of the way." From shame indeed he was
shielded by his cynical disbelief in human virtue. Virtue he
regarded simply as a trick by which clever hypocrites im
posed upon fools. Honor among men seemed to him as
mere a pretense as chastity among women. Gratitude he
had none, for he looked upon self-interest as the only motive
of men's actions, and though soldiers had died and women
had risked their lives for him, he " loved others as little as he
thought they loved him." But ff he felt no gratitude for
benefits he felt no resentment for wrongs. He was incapa-

1667] THE REVOLUTION 799
bie either of love or of hate. The only feeling he retained
for his fellow men was that of an amused contempt.
It was difficult for Englishmen to believe that any real dan
ger to liberty could come from an idler and a voluptuary such
as Charles the Second. But in the very difficulty of believ
ing this lay half the king's strength. He had in fact no taste
whatever for the despotism of the Stuarts who had gone be
fore him. His shrewdness laughed his grandfather's theory
of divine right down the wind, while his indolence made such
a personal administration as that which his father deUghted
in burdensome to him. He was too humorous a man to care
for the pomp and show of power, and too good-natured a man
to play the tyrant. But he believed as firmly as his father or
his grandfather had believed in the older prerogatives of the
Crown ; and, like them, he looked on Parliaments with suspi
cion and jealousy. " He told Lord Essex," Burnet says, "that
he did not wish to be like a Grand Signor, with some mutes
about him, and bags of bowstrings to strangle men ; but he
did not think he was a king so long as a company of fellows
were looking into his actions, and examining his ministers as
well as his accounts." "A king," he thought, "who might
be checked, and have his ministers called to an account, was
but a king in name." In other words, he had no settled plan
of tyranny, but he meant to rule as independently as he could,
and from the beginning to the end of his reign there never
was a moment when he was not doing something to carry out
his aim. But he carried it out in a tentative, irregular fashion
which it was as hard to detect as to meet. Whenever there
was any strong opposition he gave way. If popular feeling
demanded the dismissal of his ministers, he dismissed them.
If it protested against his declaration of indulgence, he re
called it. If it cried for victims in the frenzy of the popish
plot, he gave it victims till the frenzy was at an end. It was
easy for Charles to yield and to wait, and just as easy for him
to take up the thread of his purpose again the moment the
pressure was over. The one fixed resolve which overrode
every other thought in the king's mind was a resolve " not to
set out on his travels again." His father had fallen through
a quarrel with the two Houses, and Charles was determined
to remain on good terms with the Parliament till he was

Sob HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1660
strong enough to pick a quarrel to his profit. He treated the
Lords with an easy familiarity which robbed opposition of its
seriousness. "Their debates amused him," he said in his
indolent way; and he stood chatting before the fire while
peer after peer poured invectives on his ministers, and laughed
louder than the rest when Shaftesbury directed his coarsest
taunts at the barrenness of the queen. Courtiers were en
trusted with the secret "management" of the Commons:
obstinate country gentlemen were brought to the royal closet
to kiss the king's hand and listen to the king's pleasant stories
of his escape after Worcester ; and still more obstinate coun
try gentlemen were bribed. Where bribes, flattery, and man
agement failed, Charles was content to yield and to wait till
his time came again. Meanwhile he went on patiently gather
ing up what fragments of the old royal power stfll survived,
and availing himself of whatever new resources offered them
selves. If he could not undo what Puritanism had done in
England, he could undo its work in Scotland and in Ireland.
Before the Civil war these kingdoms had served as useful
checks on English liberty, and by simply regarding the Union
which the Long Parliament and the protector had brought
about as a nullity in law it was possible they might become
checks again. In his refusal to recognize the Union Charles
was supported by public opinion among his English subjects,
partly from sheer abhorrence of changes wrought during "the
troubles," and partly from a dread that the Scotch and Irish
members would form a party in the English Parliament which
would always be at the service of the Crown. In both the
lesser kingdoms too a measure which seemed to restore some
what of their independence was for the moment popular.
But the results of this step were quick in developing them
selves. In Scotland the Covenant was at once abolished.
The new Scotch Parliament at Edinburgh, the Drunken Par
liament, as it was called, outdid the wildest loyalty of the Eng
lish Cavaliers by annulling in a single act all the proceedings
of its predecessors during the last eight and twenty years.
By this measure the whole existing Church system of Scot
land was deprived of legal sanction. The general assembly
had already been prohibited from meeting by Cromwell ; the
Kirk sessions and ministers' synods were now suspended.

1667] THE REVOLUTION 8oi
The Scotch bishops were again restored to their spiritual
preeminence and to their seats in Parliament. An iniqui
tous trial sent the Marquis of Argyle, the only noble strong
enough to oppose the royal will, to the block, and the govern
ment was entrusted to a knot of profligate statesmen tUl it
fell into the hands of Lauderdale, one of the ablest and most
unscrupulous of the king's ministers. Their policy was stead
ily directed to the two purposes of humbling Presbyterianism
— as the force which could alone restore Scotland to freedom,
and enable her to lend aid as before to English liberty in any
struggle with the Crown — and that of raising a royal army
which might be ready in case of need to march over the bor
der to the king's support. In Ireland the dissolution of the
Union brought back the bishops to their sees ; but whatever
wish Charles may have had to restore the balance of Catho
lic and Protestant as a source of power to the Crown was
baffled by the obstinate resistance of the Protestant settlers
to any plans for redressing the confiscations of Cromwell.
Five years of bitter struggle between the dispossessed loyal
ists and the new occupants left the Protestant ascendency
unimpaired ; and in spite of a nominal surrender of one third
of the confiscated estates to their old possessors, hardly a
sixth of the profitable land in the island remained in Catholic
holding. The claims of the Duke of Ormond too made it nec
essary to leave the government in his hands, and Ormond's
loyalty was too moderate and constitutional to lend itself to
any of the schemes of absolute rule which under Tyrconnell
played so great a part in the next reign. But the severance
of the two kingdoms from England was in itself a gain to the
royal authority : and Charles turned quietly to the buUding up
of a ro)'al arm)- at home. A standing arm)- had become so
hateful a thing to the body of the nation, and above all to the
royalists whom the New Model had trodden under foot, that
it was impossible to propose its establishment. But in the
mind of Charles and his brother James, their father's down
fall had been owing to the want of a disciplined force which
would have trampled out the first efforts of national resist
ance ; and whUe disbanding the New Model, Charles availed
himself of the alarm created by a mad rising of some Fifth-
Monarch}- men in London under an old soldier called \'^enner

802 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1667
to retain five thousand horse and foot in his service under the
name of his guards. A body of " gentlemen of quality and
veteran soldiers, excellently clad, mounted, and ordered," was
thus kept ready for service near the royal person ; and in spite
of the scandal which it aroused the king persisted, steadily but
cautiously, in gradually increasing its numbers. Twenty years
later it had grown to a force of seven thousand foot and one
thousand seven hundred horse and dragoons at home, with
a reserve of six fine regiments abroad in the service of the
United Provinces.
But Charles was too quick-witted a man to believe, as his
brother James believed, that it was possible to break down
English freedom by the royal power or by a few thousand
men in arms. It was still less possible by such means to break
down, as he wished to break down, English Protestantism. In
heart, whether the story of his renunciation of Protestantism
during his exile be true or no, he had long ceased to be a
Protestant. Whatever religious feeling he had was on the
side of Catholicism ; he encouraged conversions among his
courtiers, and the last act of his Iffe was to seek formal admis
sion into the Roman Church. But his feelings were rather
political than religious. The English Roman Catholics formed
a far larger part of the population then than now ; their wealth
and local influence gave them a political importance which
they have long since lost, and every motive of gratitude as
well as self-interest led him to redeem his pledge to procure
toleration for their worship. But he was already looking,
however vaguely, to something more than Catholic toleration.
He saw that despotism in the State could hardly coexist with
free inquiry and free action in matters of the conscience, and
that government, in his own words, " was a safer and easier
thing where the authority was believed infallible and the faith
and submission of the people were implicit." The difficulties
in the way of such a religious change probably seemed the
less to him from his long residence in Roman Catholic coun
tries, and from his own religious skepticism. Two years, indeed,
after his restoration he had already despatched an agent to
Rome to arrange the terms of a reconciliation between the
Anglican Church and the papacy. But though he counted
much for the success of his project of toleration on taking

1 667] THE REVOLUTION 803
advantage of the dissensions between Protestant Churchmen
and Protestant Dissenters he soon discovered that for any real
success in his political or religious aims he must seek resources
elsewhere than at home. At this moment France was the
dominant power in Europe. Its young king, Louis the Four
teenth, was the champion of Catholicism and despotism against
civU and religious liberty throughout the world. France was
the wealthiest of European powers, and her subsidies could
free Charles from dependence on his Parliament. Her army
was the finest in the world, and French soldiers could put
do^wn, it was thought, any resistance from English patriots.
The aid of Louis could alone realize the aims of Charles, and
Charles was willing to pay the price which Louis demanded
for his aid, the price of concurrence in his designs on Spain.
Spain at this moment had not only ceased to threaten Europe
but herself trembled at the threats of France; and the aim of
Louis was to complete her ruin, to win the Spanish pro^vinces
in the Netherlands, and ultimately to secure the succession to
the Spanish throne for a French prince. But the presence of
the French in Flanders was equally distasteful to England and
to Holland, and in such a contest Spain might hope for the
aid of these states and of the empire. For some years Louis
contented himself with perfecting his army and preparing by
skflful negotiations to make such a league of the great powers
against him impossible. His first success in England was in
the marriage of the king. Portugal, which had only just
shaken off the rule of Spain, was really dependent upon
France ; and in accepting the hand of Catherine of Braganza
in spite of the protests of Spain, Charles announced his adhe
sion to the alliance of Louis. Already English opinion saw
the danger of such a course, and veered round to the Spanish
side. As early as 1661 the London mob backed the Spanish
ambassador in a street squabble for precedence with the ambas
sador of France. "We do all naturally love the Spanish," says
Pepys, " and hate the French." The marriage of Catherine,
the sale of Dunkirk, the one result of Cromwell's victories, to
France, aroused the national jealousy and suspicion of French
influence ; and the war with HoUand seemed at one time likely
to end in a war with Louis. The Dutch war was in itself a
serious stumbling-block in the way of French projects. To
52

804 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1667
aid either side was to throw the other on the aid of the House
of Austria, and to build up a league which would check France
in its aim. Only peace could keep the European states dis
united, and enable Louis by their disunion to carry out his
design of seizing Flanders. His attempt at mediation was
fruitless ; the defeat of Lowestoft forced him to give aid to
Holland, and the news of his purpose at once roused England
to a hope of war. When Charles announced it to the Houses,
" there was a great noise," says Louvois, " in the Parliament
to show the joy of the two Houses at the prospect of a fight
with us." Louis, however, cautiously limited his efforts to nar
rowing the contest to a struggle at sea, while England, vexed
with disasters at home and abroad, could scarcely maintain
the war. The appearance of the Dutch fleet in the Thames
was followed by the sudden conclusion of peace which again
left the ground clear for the diplomatic intrigues of Louis.
In England the irritation was great and universal, but the
public resentment fell on Clarendon alone. Charles had been
bitterly angered when in 1663 his bill to vest a dispensing
power in the Crown had been met by Clarendon's open oppo
sition. The Presbyterian party, represented by Ashley, and
the CathoUcs, led by the Earl of Bristol, alike sought his over
throw; in the court he was opposed by Bennet, afterwards
Earl of Arlington, a creature of the king's. But Clarendon
was StUl strong in his intimate connection with the king's
affairs, in the marriage of his daughter, Anne Hyde, to the
Duke of York, in his capacity for business, above all in the
support of the Church, and the confidence of the royalist and
orthodox House of Commons. Fofled in their efforts to dis
place him, his rivals had availed themselves of the jealousy
of the merchant class to drive him against his will into the
war with Holland; and though the chancellor succeeded in
forcing the Five MUe Act through the Houses in the teeth of
Ashley's protests, the calculations of his enemies were soon
verified. The union between Clarendon and the Parliament
was broken by the war. The Parliament was enraged by his
counsel for its dissolution, and by his proposal to raise troops
without a parliamentary grant, and his opposition to the
inspection of accounts, in which they saw an attempt to
reestablish the one thing they hated most, a standing army.

1668] THE REVOLUTION 805
Charles could at last free himself from the minister who
had held him in check so long ; the chanceUor was dis
missed from office, and driven to take refuge in France.
By the exfle of Clarendon, the death of Southampton, and
the retirement of Ormond and Nicholas, the party of consti
tutional loyalists in the council ceased to exist ; and the section
which had originally represented the Presbyterians, and which
under the guidance of Ashley had bent to purchase toleration
even at the cost of increasing the prerogatives of the Crown,
came to the front of affairs. The religious policy of Charles
had as yet been defeated by the sturdy churchmanship of the
Parliament, the influence of Clarendon, and the reluctance of
the Presbyterians as a body to accept the royal "indulgence"
at the price of a toleration of Catholicism and a recognition
of the king's power to dispense with parliamentary statutes.
The first steps of the new ministry in releasing Nonconform
ists from prison, in suffering conventicles to reopen, and sus
pending the operation of the Act of Uniformity, were in open
defiance of the known will of the two Houses. But when
Charles again proposed to his counselors a general toleration,
he no longer found himself supported by them as in 1663.
Even Ashley's mood was changed. Instead of toleration they
pressed for a union of Protestants which would have utterly
foiled the king's projects ; and a scheme of Protestant com
prehension which had been approved by the moderate divines
on both sides, by TUlotson and Stfllingfleet on the part of the
Church as well as by Manton and Baxter on the part of the
Nonconformists, was laid before the House of Commons.
Even its rejection failed to bring Ashley and his party back
to their old position. They were still for toleration, but only
for a toleration the benefit of which did not extend to Catho
lics, " in respect the laws have determined the principles of
the Romish religion to be inconsistent with the safety of your
Majesty's person and government." The policy of the coun
cil in fact was determined by the look of public affairs abroad.
Louis had quickly shown the real cause of the eagerness with
which he had pressed on the peace of Breda between England
and the Dutch. He had secured the neutrality of the emperor
by a secret treaty which shared the Spanish dominions be
tween the two monarchs in case the king of Spain died with-

8o6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1668
out an heir. England, as he believed, was held in check by
Charles, and like HoUand was too exhausted by the late war
to meddle with a new one. On the very day therefore on
which the treaty was signed he sent in his formal claims on
the Low Countries, and his army at once took the field. The
greater part of Flanders was occupied and six great fortresses
secured in two months. Franche Comt6 was overrun in seven
teen days. HoUand protested and appealed to England for
aid; but her appeals remained at first unanswered. Eng
land sought in fact to tempt Holland, Spain, and France
in turn by secret offers of alliance. From France she de
manded, as the price of her aid against HoUand and perhaps
Spain, a share in the eventual partition of the Spanish domin
ions, and an assignment to her in such a case of the Spanish
empire in the New World. But all her offers were alike
refused. The need of action became clearer every hour to
the English ministers, and wider views gradually set aside the
narrow dreams of merely national aggrandizement. The vic
tories of Louis, the sudden revelation of the strength of
France, roused even in the most tolerant minds a dread of
Catholicism. Men felt instinctively that the very existence
of Protestantism, and with it of civil freedom, was again to be
at stake. Arlington himself had a Dutch wife and had re
sided in Spain; and Catholic as in heart he was, thought
more of the political interests of England, and of the invari
able resolve of its statesmen since Elizabeth's day to keep the
French out of Flanders, than of the interests of Catholicism.
Louis, warned of his danger, strove to lull the general excite
ment by offers of peace to Spain, while he was writing to
Turenne, " I am turning over in my head things that are far
from impossible, and go to carry them into execution what
ever they may cost." Three armies were, in fact, ready to
march on Spain, Germany, and Flanders, when Arlington
despatched Sir WiUiam Temple to the Hague, and the signa
ture of a Triple AUiance between England, HoUand, and
Sweden bound Louis to the terms he had offered as a blind,
and forced on him the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.
Few measures have won a greater popularity than the
Triple Alliance. " It is the only good public thing," says
Pepys, "that hath been done since the king came to Eng-

i668] THE REVOLUTION 807
land." Even Dryden, writing at the time as a Tory, counted
among the worst of Shaftesbury's crimes that "the Triple
Bond he broke." In form indeed the alliance simply bound
Louis to adhere to terms of peace proposed by himself, and
those advantageous terms. But in fact it utterly ruined his
plans. It brought about too that union of the powers of
Europe against which, as Louis felt instinctively, his ambi
tion would dash itself in vain. It was Arlington's aim to
make the alliance the nucleus of a greater confederation ;
and he tried not only to perpetuate it, but to include within
it the Swiss cantons, the empire, and the House of Austria.
His efforts were foiled ; but the " Triple Bond " bore within
it the germs of the Grand Alliance which at last saved
Europe. To England it at once brought back the reputation
which she had lost since the death of Cromwell. It was a
sign of her reentry on the general stage of European politics,
and of the formal adoption of the balance of power as a policy
essential to the welfare of Europe at large. But it was not
so much the action of England which had galled the pride of
Louis, as the action of Holland. That " a nation of shop
keepers " (for Louis applied the phrase to Holland long
before Napoleon applied it to England) should have foiled
his plans at the very moment of their realization, "stung
him," he owned, "to the quick." If he refrained from an
instant attack it was to nurse a surer revenge. His steady
aim during the four years which followed the peace of Aix-
la-Chapelle was to isolate the United Provinces, to bring
about the neutrality of the empire in any attack on them, to
break the Triple Alliance by detaching Sweden from it and
securing Charles, and to leave the Dutch without help, save
from the idle good-will of Brandenburg and Spain. His
diplomacy was everywhere successful, but it was nowhere so
successful as with England. Charles had been stirred to a
momentary pride by the success of the Triple Alliance, but
he had never seriously abandoned his policy, and he was
resolute at last to play an active part in realizing it. It was
clear that little was to be hoped for from his old plans of
winning toleration for the Catholics from his new ministers,
and that in fact they were resolute to bring about such a
union of Protestants as would have been fatal to his designs.

8o8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1669
From this moment he resolved to seek for his advantage
from France. The Triple Alliance was hardly concluded
when he declared to Louis his purpose of entering into an
aUiance with him, offensive and defensive. He owned to
being the only man in his kingdom who desired such a
league, but he was determined to realize his desire, whatever
might be the sentiments of his ministers. His ministers,
indeed, he meant either to bring over to his schemes or to
outwit. Two of them, Arlington and Sir Thomas Clifford,
were Catholics in heart like the king; and they were sum
moned, with the Duke of York, who had already secretly
embraced Catholicism, and two Catholic nobles, to a confer
ence in which Charles, after pledging them to secrecy, de
clared himself a Catholic, and asked their counsel as to the
means of establishing the Catholic religion in his realm. It
was resolved to apply to Louis for aid in this purpose ; and
Charles proceeded to seek from the king a "protection," to
use the words of the French ambassador, " of which he
always hoped to feel the powerful effects in the execution of
his design of changing the present state of religion in Eng
land for a better, and of establishing his authority so as to be
able to retain his subjects in the obedience they owe him."
The fall of Holland was as needful for the success of the
plans of Charles as of Louis ; and with the ink of the Triple
Alliance hardly dry, Charles promised help in Louis's
schemes for the ruin of Holland and the annexation of
Flanders. He offered therefore to declare his religion and
to join France in an attack on Holland, if Louis would grant
him a subsidy equal to a million a year. In the event of the
king of Spain's death without a son Charles pledged himself
to support France in her claims upon Flanders, while Louis
promised to assent to the designs of England on the Spanish
dominions in America. On this basis, after a year's negotia
tions, a secret treaty was concluded at Dover in an interview
between Charles and his sister Henrietta, the Duchess of
Orleans. It provided that Charles should announce his
conversion, and that in case of any disturbance arising from
such a step he should be supported by a French army and
a French subsidy. War was to be declared by both powers
against Holland, England furnishing a small land force, but

1671] THE REVOLUTION 809
bearing the chief burden of the contest at sea, on condition
of an annual subsidy of three hundred thousand pounds.
Nothing marks better the political profligacy of the age
than that Arlington, the author of the Triple Alliance, should
have been chosen as the confidant of Charles in his treaty of
Dover. But to all save Arlington and Clifford the king's
change of religion or his political aims remained utterly
unknown. It would have been impossible to obtain the con
sent of the party in the royal council which represented the
old Presbyterians, of Ashley or Lauderdale or the Duke of
Buckingham, to the treaty of Dover. But it was possible
to trick them into approval of a war with HoUand by playing
on their desire for a toleration of the Nonconformists. The
announcement of the king's Catholicism was therefore de
ferred ; and a series of mock negotiations, carried on through
Buckingham, ended in the conclusion of a sham treaty which
was communicated to Lauderdale and to Ashley, a treaty
which suppressed all mention of the religious changes or
of the promise of French aid in bringing them about, and
simply stipulated for a joint war against the Dutch. In such
a war there was no formal breach of the Triple Alliance, for
the Triple Alliance only guarded against an attack on the
dominions of Spain, and Ashley and his colleagues were
lured into assent to it in 1671 by the promise of a toleration
on their own terms. Charles, in fact, yielded the point to
which he had hitherto clung, and, as Ashley demanded,
promised that no Catholic should be benefited by the Indul
gence. The bargain once struck, and his ministers out
witted, it only remained for Charles to outwit his Parliament.
A large subsidy had been demanded in 1670 for the fleet,
under the pretext of upholding the Triple Alliance ; and the
subsidy was granted. In the spring the two Houses were
adjourned. So great was the national opposition to his
schemes that Charles was driven to plunge hastily into
hostilities. An attack on a Dutch convoy was at once fol
lowed by a declaration of war, and fresh supplies were
obtained for the coming struggle by closing the Exchequer,
and suspending under Clifford's advice the payment of either
principal or interest on loans advanced to the public treasury.
The suspension spread bankruptcy among half the goldsmiths

8 10 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1672
of London ; but with the opening of the war Ashley and his
colleagues gained the toleration they had bought so dear.
By virtue of his ecclesiastical powers the king ordered " that
all manner of penal laws on matters ecclesiastical against
whatever sort of Nonconformists or recusants should be
from that day suspended," and gave liberty of public wor
ship to all dissidents save Catholics, who were allowed to
say mass only in private houses. The effect of the declara
tion went far to justify Ashley and his colleagues (if any
thing could justify their course) in the bargain by which they
purchased toleration. Ministers returned, after years of ban
ishment, to their homes and their flocks. Chapels were
reopened. The jails were emptied. Bunyan left his prison
at Bedford; and hundreds of Quakers, who had been the
special objects of persecution, were set free to worship God
after their own fashion.
The Declaration of Indulgence, however, failed to win any
expression of gratitude from the bulk of the Nonconformists.
Dear as toleration was to them, the general interests of relig
ion were dearer, and not only these but national freedom was
now at stake. The success of the allies seemed at first com
plete. The French army passed the Rhine, overran three
of the states without opposition, and pushed its outposts to
within sight of Amsterdam. It was only by skill and desper
ate courage that the Dutch ships under De Ruyter held the
English fleet under the Duke of York at bay in an obstinate
battle off the coast of Suffolk. The triumph of the English
cabinet was shown in the elevation of the leaders of both its
parties. Ashley was made chancellor and Earl of Shaftes
bury, and Clifford became lord treasurer. But the Dutch
were saved by the stubborn courage which awoke before
the arrogant demands of the conqueror. The plot of the
two courts hung for success on the chances of a rapid sur
prise; and with the approach of winter, which suspended
military operations, all chance of a surprise was over. The
death of De Witt, the leader of the great merchant class,
called William the Prince of Orange to the head of the
Republic. Young as he was, he at once displayed the cool
courage and tenacity of his race. " Do you not see your
country is lost ? " asked the Duke of Buckingham, who had

1 673] THE REVOLUTION 8ll
been sent to negotiate at the Hague. " There is a sure way
never to see it lost," replied William, " and that is, to die in
the last ditch." With the spring the tide began to turn.
Holland was saved and province after province won back
from France by Wflliam's dauntless resolve. In England
the delay of winter had exhausted the supplies which had
been so unscrupulously procured, whUe the closing of the
treasury had shaken credit and rendered it impossible to
raise a loan. It was necessary in 1673 to appeal to the
Commons, but the Commons met in a mood of angry dis
trust. The war, unpopular as it was, they left alone. What
overpowered all other feelings was a vague sense, which we
know now to have been justified by the facts, that liberty
and religion were being unscrupulously betrayed. There
was a suspicion that the whole armed force of the nation
was in Catholic hands. The Duke of York was suspected
of being in heart a papist, and he was in command of the
fleet. Catholics had been placed as officers in the force
which was being raised for the war in HoUand. Lady
Castlemaine, the king's mistress, paraded her conversion ;
and doubts were fast gathering over the Protestantism of
the king. There was a general suspicion that a plot was
on foot for the establishment of Catholicism and despotism,
and that the war and the Indulgence were parts of the plot.
The change of temper in the Commons was marked by the
appearance of what was from that time called the Country
party, with Lord Russell, Lord Cavendish, and Sir WUliam
Coventry at its head, a party which sympathized with the
desire of the Nonconformists for religious toleration, but
looked on it as its first duty to guard against the designs
of the court. As to the Declaration of Indulgence, however,
all parties in the House were at one. The Commons resolved
" that penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be sus
pended but by consent of Parliament," and refused supplies
till the Declaration was recalled. The king yielded ; but the
Declaration was no sooner recalled than a Test Act was
passed through both Houses without opposition, which re
quired from every one in the civil and military employment
of the State the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, a decla
ration against Transubstantiation, and a reception of the sac-

8 12 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1673
rament according to the rites of the Church of England.
It was known that the Protestant dissidents were prepared
to waive all objection to oath or sacrament, while the bUl
would wholly exclude Catholics from share in the govern
ment. Clifford at once counseled resistance, and Bucking
ham talked flightily about bringing the army to London.
But the grant of a subsidy was still held in suspense ; and
Arlington, who saw that all hope of carrying the "great
plan " through was at an end, pressed Charles to yield. A
dissolution was the king's only resource, but in the temper
of the nation a new Parliament would have been yet more
violent than the present one ; and Charles sullenly gave way.
Few measures have ever brought about more startling re
sults. The Duke of York owned himself a Catholic, and
resigned his office as lord high admiral. Throngs of excited
people gathered round the lord treasurer's house at the news
that Clifford, too, had owned to being a Catholic and had
laid down his staff of office. Their resignation was followed
by that of hundreds of others in the army and the civil ser
vice of the Crown. On public opinion the effect was won
derful. " I dare not write all the strange talk of the town,"
says Evelyn. The resignations were held to have proved
the existence of the dangers which the Test Act had been
framed to meet. From this moment all trust in Charles was
at an end. " The king," Shaftesbury said bitterly, " who if
he had been so happy as to have been born a private gentle
man had certainly passed for a man of good parts, excellent
breeding, and well natured, hath now, being a prince, brought
his affairs to that pass that there is not a person in the world,
man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confidence
in his word or friendship." Section IV.— Danby, 1673-1678
The one man in England on whom the discovery of the
king's perfidy fell with the most crushing effect was the
chancellor. Lord Shaftesbury. Ashley Cooper had piqued
himself on a penetration which read the characters of men
around him, and on a political instinct which discerned every
coming change. His self-reliance was wonderful. In mere

1673] THE REVOLUTION 813
boyhood he saved his estate from the greed of his guardians
by boldly appeaUng in person to Noy, who was then attorney-
general As an undergraduate at Oxford he organized a
rebeUion of the freshmen against the oppressive customs
which were enforced by the senior men of his college, and
succeeded in aboUshing them. At eighteen he was a member
of the Short ParUament. On the outbreak of the Ci^vU war
he took part with the king; but in the midst of the royal
successes he foresaw the ruin of the royal cause, passed to
the Parliament, attached himseff to the fortunes of Cromwell,
and became member of the Councfl of State. Before all
things a strict parUamentarian, however, he was alienated
by Cromwell's setting up of absolute rule without ParUament ;
and a temporary disgrace during the last years of the pro
tectorate only quickened him to an active opposition which
did much to bring about its faU. His bitter invectives against
the dead protector, his intrigues with Monk, and the active
part which he took, as member of the CouncU of State, in the
king's recall, were rewarded at the Restoration with a peer
age, and with promotion to a foremost share in the royal
coimcUs. Ashley was then a man of forty, and under the
Commonwealth he had been, in the contemptuous phrase of
Dryden when writing as a Tory, " the loudest bagpipe of the
squeaking train " ; but he was no sooner a minister of Charles
than he flimg himseff into the debauchery of the court with
an ardor which surprised even his master. "You are the
•wickedest dog in England ! " laughed Charles at some un
scrupulous jest of his counselor's. " Of a subject, sir, I
beUeve I am ! " was the unabashed reply. But the debauch
ery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was in fact temperate
by nature and habit, and his fll health rendered any great
excess impossible. Men soon found that the courtier who
lounged in Lady Castlemaine's boudoir, or drank and jested
•with Sedley and Buckingham, was a diligent and able man
of business. " He is a man," says the puzzled Pepys, three
years after the Restoration, " of great business, and yet of
pleasure and dissipation too." His rivals ¦were as en^vious
of the ease and mastery with which he dealt with questions
of finance, as of the " nimble wit " which won the favor of
the king. Even in later years his industr}' earned the grudg-

8l4 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1673
ing praise of his enemies. Dryden owned that as chancellor
he was "swift to despatch and easy of access," and wondered
at the restless activity which "refused his age the needful
hours of rest." His activity indeed was the more wonderful
that his health was utterly broken. An accident in early
days left behind it an abiding weakness, whose traces were
seen in the furrows which seared his long pale face, in the
feebleness of his health, and the nervous tremor which shook
his puny frame. The " pygmy body " was " fretted to decay "
by the "fiery soul" within it. But pain and weakness
brought with them no sourness of spirit. Ashley was attacked
more unscrupulously than any statesman save Walpole ; but
Burnet, who did not love him, owns that he was never
bitter or angry in speaking of his assailants. Even the wit
with which he crushed them was commonly good-humored.
"When wfll you have done preaching? " a bishop murmured
testily, as Shaftesbury was speaking in the House of Peers.
" When I am a bishop, my lord ! " was the laughing reply.
As a statesman Ashley not only stood high among his con
temporaries from his wonderful readiness and industry, but
he stood far above them in his scorn of personal profit.
Even Dryden, while raking together every fault in his char
acter, owns that his hands were clean. As a political leader
his position was to modern eyes odd enough. In religion he
was at best a Deist, with some fanciful notions " that after
death our souls lived in stars." But Deist as he was, he
remained the representative of the Presbyterian and Noncon
formist party in the royal council. He was the steady and
vehement advocate of toleration, but his advocacy was based
on purely political grounds. He saw that persecution would
fail to bring back the Dissenters to the Church, and that the
effort to recall them only left the country disunited, and thus
exposed English liberty to invasion from the Crown, and
robbed England of all influence in Europe. The one means
of uniting Churchmen and Dissidents was by a policy of
toleration, but in the temper of England after the Restoration
he saw no hope of obtaining toleration save from the king.
Wit, debauchery, rapidity in the despatch of business, were
all therefore used as a means to gain influence over the king,
and to secure him as a friend in the struggle which Ashley

i673] THE REVOLUTION 815
carried on against the intolerance of Clarendon. Charles,
as we have seen, had his own game to play and his own
reasons for protecting Ashley during his vehement but fruit
less struggle against the Test and Corporation Act, the Act
of Uniformity, and the persecution of the Dissidents. For
tune at last smiled on the unscrupulous ability with which he
entangled Clarendon in the embarrassments of the Dutch
war of 1664, and took advantage of the alienation of the
Parliament to insure his fall. By a yet more unscrupulous
bargain Ashley had bought, as he believed, the Declaration
of Indulgence, the release of the imprisoned Nonconformists,
and freedom of worship for all dissidents, at the price of a
consent to the second attack on Holland ; and he was looked
on by the public at large as the minister most responsible
both for the measures he advised and the measures he had
nothing to do with. But while facing the gathering storm
of unpopularity Ashley learnt in a moment of drunken con
fidence the secret of the king's religion. He owned to a
friend " his trouble at the black cloud which was gathering
over England " ; but, troubled as he was, he still believed
himself strong enough to use Charles for his own purposes.
His acceptance of the chancellorship and of the earldom of
Shaftesbury, as well as his violent defense of the war on
opening the Parliament, identified him yet more with the
royal policy. It was after the opening of the Parliament, if
we credit the statement of the French ambassador, that he
learnt from Arlington the secret of the treaty of Dover.
Whether this were so, or whether suspicion, as in the people
at large, deepened into certainty, Shaftesbury saw he had
been duped. To the bitterness of such a discovery was
added the bitterness of having aided in schemes which he
abhorred. His change of policy was rapid and complete.
He pressed in the royal councfl for the withdrawal of the
Declaration of Indulgence. In Parliament he supported the
Test Act with extraordinary vehemence. The displacement
of James and Clifford by the Test left him, as he thought,
dominant in the royal councfl, and gave him hopes of reveng
ing the deceit which had been practised on him by forcing
his policy on the king. He was resolved to end the war.
He had dreams of meeting the danger of a Catholic successor

8l6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1673
by a dissolution of the king's marriage and by a fresh match
with a Protestant princess. For the moment indeed Charles
was helpless. He found himself, as he had told Louis long
before, alone in his realm. The Test Act had been passed
unanimously by both Houses. Even the Nonconformists
deserted him, and preferred persecution to the support of his
plans. The dismissal of the Catholic officers made the em
ployment of force, if he ever contemplated it, impossible,
while the ill success of the Dutch war robbed him of all hope
of aid from France. The firmness of the Prince of Orange
had roused the stubborn energy of his countrymen. The
French conquests on land were slowly won back, and at sea
the fleet of the allies was still held in check by the fine sea
manship of De Ruyter. Nor was William less successful in
diplomacy than in war. The House of Austria was at last
roused to action by the danger which threatened Europe, and
its union with the United Provinces laid the foundation of
the Grand Alliance. If Charles was firm to continue the
war, Shaftesbury, like the Parliament itself, was resolved on
peace ; and for this purpose he threw himself into hearty
alliance with the country party in the Commons, and
welcomed the Duke of Ormond and Prince Rupert, who were
looked upon as " great Parliament men," back to the royal
council. It was to Shaftesbury's influence that Charles attrib
uted the dislike which the Commons displayed to the war, and
their refusal of a grant of supplies until fresh religious securi
ties were devised. It was at his instigation that an address
was presented by both Houses against the plan of marry
ing James to a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. But the
projects of Shaftesbury were suddenly interrupted by an unex
pected act of vigor on the part of the king. The Houses
were no sooner prorogued in November than the chancellor
was ordered to deliver up the seals.
" It is only laying down my gown and buckling on my
sword," Shaftesbury is said to have replied to the royal bid
ding; and, though the words were innocent enough, for the
sword was part of the usual dress of a gentleman which he
must necessarily resume when he laid aside the gown of the
chancellor, they were taken as conveying a covert threat.
He was still determined to force on the king a peace with

i674] THE REVOLUTION 817
the states. ' But he looked forward to the dangers of the
future with even greater anxiety than to those of the pres
ent. The Duke of York, the successor to the throne, had
owned himself a Catholic, and almost every one agreed that
securities for the national religion would be necessary in the
case of his accession. But Shaftesbury saw, and it is his
especial merit that he did see, that with a king like James,
convinced of his divine right and bigoted in his religious
fervor, securities were valueless. From the first he deter
mined to force on Charles his brother's exclusion from the
throne, and his resolve was justified by the Revolution which
finally did the work he proposed to do. Unhappily he was
equally determined to fight Charles with weapons as vile as
his own. The result of Clifford's resignation, of James's
acknowledgment of his conversion, had been to destroy all
belief in the honesty of public men. A panic of distrust
had begun. The fatal truth was whispered that Charles him
self was a Catholic. In spite of the Test Act, it was sus
pected that men Catholics in heart still held high office in
the State, and we know that in Arlington's case the suspi
cion was just. Shaftesbury seized on this public alarm,
stirred above all by a sense of inability to meet the secret
dangers which day after day was disclosing, as the means of
carrying out his plans. He began fanning the panic by tales
of a papist rising in London, and of a coming Irish revolt
with a French army to back it. He retired to his house in
the city to find security against a conspiracy which had been
formed, he said, to cut his throat. Meanwhile he rapidly
organized the Country party in the Parliament, and placed
himself openly at its head. An address for the removal of
ministers " popishly affected or otherwise obnoxious or dan
gerous " was presented on the reassembling of the Houses.
The Commons called on the king to dismiss Lauderdale,
Buckingham, and Arlington, and to disband the troops raised
since 1664. A bill was brought in to prevent all Catholics
from approaching the court, in other words for removing
James from the king's councfls. A far more important bill
was that of the Protestant Securities, which was pressed by
Shaftesbury, Halifax, and Carlisle, the leaders of the new
Opposition in the House of Lords, a bill which enacted that

8l8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1674
any prince of the blood should forfeit his right to the Crown
on his marriage with a Catholic. The biU, which was the
first sketch of the later Exclusion Bill, faUed to pass, but its
faUure left the Houses excited and alarmed. Shaftesbury
intrigued busily in the city, corresponded with WiUiam of
Orange, and pressed for a war with France which Charles
could only avert by an appeal to Louis, a subsidy from whom
enabled him to prorogue the Parliament. But Charles saw
that the time had come to give way. " Things have turned
out fll," he said to Temple with a burst of unusual petulance,
" but had I been well served I might have made a good busi
ness of it." His concessions, however, were as usual com
plete. He dismissed Buckingham and Arlington. He made
peace with the Dutch. But Charles was never more formida
ble than in the moment of defeat, and he had already resolved
on a new poUcy by which the efforts of Shaftesbury might be
held at bay. Ever since the opening of his reign he had
clung to a system of balance, had pitted Churchman against
Nonconformist, and Ashley against Clarendon, partly to pre
serve his own independence, and partly with a ¦view of win
ning some advantage to the Catholics from the poUtical strffe.
The temper of the Commons had enabled Clarendon to baffle
the king's efforts ; and on his fall Charles felt strong enough
to abandon the attempt to preserve a political balance, and
had sought to carry out his designs with the single support
of the Nonconformists. But the new policy had broken do^wn
like the old. The Nonconformists refused to betray the cause
of Protestantism, and Shaftesbury, their leader, was pressing
on measures which would rob Catholicism of the hopes it had
gained from the conversion of James. In straits like these
Charles resolved to ¦win back the Commons by boldly adopt
ing the poUcy on which the House was set. The majority
of its members were CavaUer Churchmen, who regarded Sir
Thomas Osborne, a dependent of Arlington's, as their repre
sentative in the royal councils. The king had already created
Osborne Earl of Danby, and made him lord treasurer in Clff-
f ord's room. In 1674 he frankly adopted the policy of Danby
and his party in the Parliament.
The policy of Danby was in the main that of Clarendon.
He had all Clarendon's love of the Church, his equal hatred

1674] THE REVOLUTION 819
of popery and dissent, his high notions of the prerogative
tempered by a faith in Parliament and the law. His first
measures were directed to allay the popular panic and
strengthen the position of James. Mary, the duke's eldest
child and after him the presumptive heir to the Crown, was
confirmed by the royal order as a Protestant. Secret nego
tiations were opened for her marriage with William of Orange,
the son of the king's sister Mary, who if James and his house
were excluded stood next in succession to the Crown. Such
a marriage secured James against the one formidable rival to
his claims, while it opened to William a far safer chance of
mounting the throne at his father-in-law's death. The union
between the Church and the Crown was ratified in confer
ences between Danby and the bishops; and its first-fruits
were seen in the rigorous enforcement of the law against
conventicles, and the exclusion of all Catholics from court ;
while the Parliament which was assembled in 1675 was as
sured that the Test Act should be rigorously enforced. The
change in the royal policy came not a moment too soon. As
it was, the aid of the Cavalier party which rallied round
Danby hardly saved the king from the humiliation of being
forced to recall the troops he still maintained in the French
service. To gain a majority on this point Danby was forced
to avail himself of a resource which from this time played for
nearly a hundred years an important part in English politics.
He bribed lavishly. He was more successful in winning back
the majority of the Commons from their alliance with the
Country party by reviving the old spirit of religious persecu
tion. He proposed that the test which had been imposed
by Clarendon on municipal officers should be extended to
all functionaries of the State; that every member of either
House, every magistrate and public officer, should swear
never to take arms against the king or to " endeavor any
alteration of the Protestant religion now established by law
in the Church of England, or any alteration in the govern
ment in Church and State as it is by law established." The
bill was forced through the Lords by the bishops and the
Cavalier party, and its passage through the Commons was
only averted by a quarrel on privilege between the two
Houses which Shaftesbury dexterously fanned into flame.
S3

820 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1675
On the other hand the Country party remained strong enough
to hamper their grant of supplies with conditions unaccepta
ble to the king. Eager as they were for the war with France
which Danby promised, the Commons could not trust the
king ; and Danby was soon to discover how wise their dis
trust had been. For the Houses were no sooner prorogued
than Charles revealed to him the negotiations he had been
all the while carrying on with Louis, and required him to
sign a treaty by which, on consideration of a yearly pension
guaranteed on the part of France, the two sovereigns bound
themselves to enter into no engagements with other powers,
and to lend each other aid in case of rebellion in their domin
ions. Such a treaty not only bound England to dependence
on France, but freed the king from all parliamentary control.
But his minister pleaded in vain for delay and for the advice
of the council. Charles answered his entreaties by signing
the treaty with his own hand. Danby found himself duped
by the king as Shaftesbury had found himself duped; but
his bold temper was only spurred to fresh plans for rescuing
Charles from his bondage to Louis. To do this the first step
was to reconcile the king and the Parliament, which met after
a prorogation of fifteen months. The Country party stood in
the way of such a reconciliation, but Danby resolved to break
its strength by measures of unscrupulous vigor, for which a
blunder of Shaftesbury's gave an opportunity. Shaftesbury
despaired of bringing the House of Commons, elected as it
had been fifteen years before in a moment of religious and
political reaction, to any steady opposition to the Crown. He
had already moved an address for a dissolution ; and he now
urged that as a statute of Edward the Third ordained that
Parliaments should be held " once a year or oftener if need
be," the Parliament by the recent prorogation of a year and
a half had ceased legally to exist. The Triennial Act deprived
such an argument of any force. But Danby represented it
as a contempt of the House, and the Lords at his bidding
committed its supporters, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Salis
bury, and Wharton, to the Tower. Whfle the Opposition
cowered under the blow, Danby pushed on a measure which
was designed to win back alarmed churchmen to confidence
in the Crown. By the bfll for the security of the Church it

1678] THE REVOLUTION 82 1
was provided that on the succession of a king not a member
of the Established Church the appointment of bishops should
be vested in the existing prelates, and that the king's chfldren
should be placed in the guardianship of the Archbishop of
Canterbury. The bill, however, faUed in the Commons ; and a grant of
supply was only obtained by Danby's profuse bribery. The
progress of the war abroad, indeed, was rousing panic in
England faster than Danby could allay it. New successes
of the French arms in Flanders, and a defeat of the Prince
of Orange at Cassel, stirred the whole country to a cry for
war. The two Houses echoed the cry in an address to the
Crown ; but Charles parried the blow by demanding a supply
before the war was declared, and on the refusal of the still
suspicious House prorogued the Parliament. Fresh and
larger subsidies from France enabled him to continue this
prorogation for seven months. But the silence of the Parlia
ment did little to silence the country; and Danby took
advantage of the popular cry for war to press an energetic
course of action on the king. In its will to check French
aggression the Cavalier party was as earnest as the Puritan,
and Danby aimed at redeeming his failure at home by uniting
the Parliament through a vigorous policy abroad. As usual,
Charles appeared to give way. He was himself for the
moment uneasy at the appearance of the French on the
Flemish coast, and he owned that " he could never live at
ease with his subjects " if Flanders were abandoned. He
allowed Danby, therefore, to press on both parties the neces
sity for mutual concessions, and to define the new attitude of
England by a step which ¦was to produce momentous results.
The Prince of Orange was invited to England, and wedded to
Mary, the presumptive heiress of the Crown. The marriage
promised a close political union in the future with Holland,
and a corresponding opposition to the ambition of France.
With the country it was popular as a Protestant match, and
as insuring a Protestant successor to James. But Louis was
bitterly angered; he rejected the English propositions of
peace, and again set his army in the field. Danby was ready
to accept the challenge, and the withdrawal of the English
ambassador from Paris was followed by an assembly of the

822 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1678
ParUament. A warlike speech from the throne was answered
by a warlike address from the House, supplies were voted,
and an army raised. But the actual declaration of war still
fafled to appear. While Danby threatened France, Charles
was busy turning the threat to his own profit, and gaining
time by prorogations for a series of base negotiations. At
one stage he demanded from Louis a fresh pension for the
next three years as the price of his good offices with the allies.
Danby stooped to write the demand, and Charles added, "This
letter is written by my order, C. R." A force of three thou
sand English soldiers were landed at Ostend ; but the allies
were already broken by their suspicions of the king's real
policy, and Charles soon agreed for a fresh pension to recall
the brigade. The bargain was hardly struck when Louis
withdrew the terms of peace he had himself offered, and on
the faith of which England had ostensibly retired from the
scene. Once more Danby offered aid to the allies, but all
faith in England was lost. One power after another gave
v>ray to the new French demands, and though HoUand, the
original cause of the war, was saved, the peace of Nimeguen
made Louis the arbiter of Europe.
Disgraceful as the peace was to England, it left Charles the
master of a force of twenty thousand men levied for the war
he refused to declare, and with nearly a million of French
money in his pocket. His course had roused into fresh life
the old suspicions of his perfidy, and of a secret plot with
Louis for the ruin of English freedom and of English relig
ion. That there was such a plot we know; and from the
moment of the treaty of Dover the hopes of the Catholic
party mounted even faster than the panic of the Protestants.
But they had been bitterly disappointed by the king's with
drawal from his schemes after his four years' ineffectual strug
gle, and by his seeming return to the policy of Clarendon.
Their anger and despair were revealed in letters from Eng
lish Jesuits and the correspondence of Coleman. Coleman,
the secretary of the Duchess of York, and a busy intriguer,
had gained sufficient knowledge of the real plans of the king
and of his brother to warrant him in begging for money from
Louis for the work of saving Catholic interests from Danby's
hostflity by intrigues in the Parliament. A passage from one

1678] THE REVOLUTION 823
of his letters gives us a glimpse of the wfld dreams which were
stirring among the hotter Catholics of the time. " They had
a mighty work on their hands," he wrote, " no less than the
conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the
utter subduing of a pestflent heresy which had so long domi
neered over a great part of the northern world. Success
would give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that
it had received since its birth." The suspicions which had
been stirred in the public mind mounted into alarm when the
peace of Nimeguen suddenly left Charles master — as it
seemed — of the position ; and it was of this general panic
that one of the vile impostors who are always thrown to the
surface at times of great public agitation was ready to take
advantage by the invention of a popish plot. Titus Oates, a
Baptist minister before the Restoration, a curate and navy
chaplain after it, but left pennfless by his infamous character,
had sought bread in a conversion to Catholicism, and had been
received into Jesuit houses at Valladolid and St. Omer. While
he remained there, he learnt the fact of a secret meeting of
the Jesuits in London, which was probably nothing but the
usual congregation of the order. On his expulsion for mis
conduct this single fact widened in his fertile brain into a
plot for the subversion of Protestantism and the death of the
king. His story was laid before Charles, and received with
cool incredulity ; but Oates made affidavit of its truth before
a London magistrate. Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, and at last
managed to appear before the council. He declared that he
had been trusted with letters which disclosed the Jesuit plans.
They were stirring rebellion in Ireland ; in Scotland they dis
guised themselves as Cameronians ; in England their aim was
to assassinate the king, and to leave the throne open to the
papist Duke of York. The extracts from Jesuit letters, how
ever, which he produced, though they showed the disappoint
ment and anger of the writers, threw no light on the monstrous
charges of a plot for assassination. Oates would have been
dismissed indeed with contempt but for the seizure of Cole
man's correspondence. His letters gave a new color to the
plot. Danby himself, conscious of the truth that there were
designs which Charles dared not avow, was shaken in his
rejection of the disclosures, and inclined to use them as

824 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1678
weapons to check the king in his Catholic policy. But a
more dexterous hand had already seized on the growing
panic. Shaftesbury, released after a long imprisonment and
hopeless of foiling the king's policy in any other way, threw
himself into the plot. " Let the treasurer cry as loud as he
pleases against popery," he laughed, " I wUl cry a note
louder." But no cry was needed to heighten the popular
frenzy from the moment when Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey,
the magistrate before whom Oates had laid his information,
was found in a field near London with his sword run through
his heart. His death was assumed to be murder, and the
murder to be an attempt of the Jesuits to " stifle the plot."
A solemn funeral added to public agitation ; and the two
Houses named committees to investigate the charges made
by Oates.
In this investigation Shaftesbury took the lead. Whatever
his personal ambition may have been, his public aims in all
that followed were wise and far-sighted. He aimed at forcing
Charles to dissolve Parliament and appeal to the nation. He
aimed at driving Danby out of office and at forcing on
Charles a ministry which should break his dependence on
France and give a constitutional turn to his policy. He
saw that no security would really avail to meet the danger
of a Catholic sovereign, and he aimed at excluding James
from the throne. But in pursuing these aims he rested
wholly on the plot. He fanned the popular panic by accept
ing without question some fresh depositions in which Oates
charged five Catholic peers with part in the Jesuit conspiracy.
The peers were sent to the Tower, and two thousand sus
pected persons were hurried to prison. A proclamation
ordered every Catholic to leave London. The train-bands
were called to arms, and patrols paraded through the streets,
to guard against the Catholic rising which Oates declared to be
at hand. Meanwhfle Shaftesbury turned the panic to political
account by forcing through Parliament a bill which excluded
Catholics from a seat in either House. The exclusion re
mained in force for a century and a half ; but it had really
been aimed against the Duke of York, and Shaftesbury was
defeated by a proviso which exempted James from the opera
tion of the bill. The plot, which had been supported for

1679] THE REVOLUTION 825
four months by the sole evidence of Oates, began to hang
fire; but a promise of reward brought forward a vUlain,
named Bedloe, with tales beside which those of Oates seemed
tame. The two informers were now pressed forward by an
infamous rivalry to stranger and stranger revelations. Bedloe
swore to the existence of a plot for the landing of a Catholic
army and a general massacre of the Protestants. Oates
capped the revelations of Bedloe by charging the queen her
self, at the bar of the Lords, with knowledge of the plot to
murder her husband. Monstrous as such charges were, they
revived the waning frenzy of the people and of the two
Houses. The peers under arrest were ordered to be impeached.
A new proclamation enjoined the arrest of every Catholic in
the realm. A series of judicial murders began with the trial
and execution of Coleman, which even now can only be
remembered with horror. But the alarm must soon have
worn out had it only been supported by perjury. What gave
force to the false plot was the existence of a true one. Cole^
man's letters had won credit for the perjuries of Oates, and
a fresh discovery now won credit for the perjuries of Bedloe.
From the moment when the pressure of the Commons and
of Danby had forced Charles into a position of seeming
antagonism to France, Louis had resolved to bring about the
dissolution of the Parliament, the fall of the minister, and
the disbanding of the army which Danby still looked on as a
weapon against him. For this purpose the French ambas
sador had entered into negotiations with the leaders of the
Country party. The English ambassador at Paris, Ralph
Montagu, now returned home on a quarrel with Danby,
obtained a seat in the House of Commons, and, in spite of
the seizure of his papers, laid on the table of the House the
despatch which had been forwarded to Louis, demanding
payment for the king's services to France during the late
negotiations. The House was thunderstruck ; for strong as
had been the general suspicion, the fact of the dependence
of England on a foreign power had never before been proved.
Danby's name was signed to the despatch, and he was at
once impeached on a charge of high treason. But Shaftes
bury was more eager to secure the election of a new Parlia
ment than to punish his rival, and Charles was resolved to

826 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1679
prevent at any price a trial which could not fail to reveal
the disgraceful secret of his foreign policy. Charles was in
fact at Shaftesbury's mercy, and the end for which Shaftes
bury had been playing was at last secured. In January,
1679, the Parliament of 1661, after the longest unbroken
Iffe in our parliamentary annals, was at last dissolved.
Section V. — Shaftesbury, 1679-1682
The new Parliament was elected in a tumult of national
excitement. The members were for the most part church
men and country gentlemen, but they shared the alarm of
the country, and even before their assembly in March their
temper had told on the king's policy. James was sent to
Brussels. Charles began to disband the army and prom
ised that Danby should soon withdraw from office. In his
speech from the throne he asked for supplies to maintain
the Protestant attitude of his government in foreign affairs.
But it was impossible to avert Danby's fall. The Commons
insisted on carrying his impeachment to the bar of the Lords.
It was necessary to dismiss him from his post of treasurer,
and to construct a new ministry. Shaftesbury became presi
dent of the council. The chiefs of the Country party, Lord
Russell and Lord Cavendish, took their seats at the board
with Lords Holies and Roberts, the older representatives of
the Presbyterian party, which had merged in the general
opposition. Savile, Lord Halifax, as yet known only as a
keen and ingenious speaker, entered the ministry in the
train of Shaftesbury, with whom he was connected; Lord
Sunderland was admitted to the council ; whfle Lord Essex
and Lord Capel, two of the most popular among the Country
leaders, went to the treasury. The recall of Sir WUliam
Temple, the negotiator of the Triple Alliance, from his em
bassy at the Hague to fill the post of secretary of state,
promised a foreign policy which would again place England
high among the European powers. Temple returned with a
plan of administration which, fruitless as it directly proved,
is of great importance as marking the silent change which
was passing over the constitution. Like many men of his
time, he was equaUy alarmed at the power both of the Crown

1679] THE REVOLUTION 827
and of the Parliament. In moments of national excitement
the power of the Houses seemed irresistible. They had
overthrown Clarendon. They had overthrown Clifford and
the Cabal. They had just overthrown Danby. But though
they were strong enough in the end to punish ill government,
they showed no power of securing good government or of
permanently influencing the policy of the Crown. For nine
teen years, with a Parliament always sitting, Charles as far
as foreign policy went had it pretty much his own way. He
had made war against the will of the nation and he had
refused to make war when the nation demanded it. Whfle
every Englishman hated France, he had made England a
mere dependency of the French king. The remedy for this
state of things, as it was afterwards found, was a very simple
one. By a change which we shall have to trace, the ministry
has now become a committee of state officers, named by the
majority of the House of Commons from amongst the more
prominent of its representatives in either House, whose object
in accepting office is to do the will of that majority. So long
as the majority of the House of Commons itself represents
the more powerful current of public opinion it is clear that
such an arrangement makes government an accurate reflec
tion of the national wfll. But obvious as such a plan may
seem to us, it had as yet occurred to no English statesman.
Even to Temple the one remedy seemed to lie in the restora
tion of the royal council to its older powers. This body,
composed as it was of the great officers of the court, the
royal treasurer and secretaries, and a few nobles specially
summoned to it by the sovereign, formed up to the close of
Elizabeth's reign a sort of deliberative assembly to which the
graver matters of public administration were commonly sub
mitted by the Crown. A practise, however, of previously
submitting such measures to a smaller body of the more
important councilors must always have existed ; and under
James this secret committee, which was then known as the
Cabala or Cabal, began almost wholly to supersede the
councfl itself. In the large and balanced council which was
formed after the Restoration all real power rested with the
" Cabala " of Clarendon, Southampton, Ormond, Monk, and
the two secretaries ; and on Clarendon's fall these were sue-

828 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1679
ceeded by Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and
Lauderdale. By a mere coincidence the initials of the latter
names formed the word "cabal," which has ever since re
tained the sinister meaning their unpopularity gave to it. The
effect of these smaller committees had undoubtedly been to
remove the check which the larger numbers and the more
popular composition cf the royal councU laid upon the
Crown. The unscrupulous projects which made the Cabal
of CUfford and his fellows a byword among Englishmen
could never have been laid before a councU of great peers
and hereditary officers of state. To Temple, therefore, the
organization of the councU seemed to furnish a check on
mere personal government which Parliament was unable to
supply. For this purpose the Cabala, or Cabinet, as it was
now becoming the fashion to term the confidential committee
of the council, was abolished. The councfl itseff was restricted
to thirty members, and their joint income was not to fall
below ;^300,ooo, a sum little less than what was estimated
as the income of the whole House of Commons. A body of
great nobles and proprietors, not too numerous for secret
deliberation, and wealthy enough to counterbalance either
the Commons or the Crown, would form. Temple hoped, a
barrier against the ¦violence and aggression of the one power,
and a check on the mere despotism of the other.
The new councfl and the new ministry gave fair hope of a
wise and patriotic government. But the difficulties were stfll
great. The nation was frenzied with suspicion and panic.
The elections to the Parliament had taken place amidst a
whirl of excitement which left no place for candidates of the
court. The appointment of the new ministry, indeed, was
welcomed with a general burst of joy. But the question of
the succession threw all others into the shade. At the bottom
of the national panic lay the dread of a Catholic king, a dread
which the after history of James fully justified. Shaftesbury
was earnest for the exclusion of James, but as yet the major
ity of the councfl shrank from the step, and supported a plan
which Charles brought forward for presen-ing the rights of
the Duke of York whfle restraining his powers as sovereign.
By this project the presentation to Church livings was to be
taken out of his hands on his accession. The last Parliament

1679] THE REVOLUTION 829
of the preceding reign was to continue to sit; and the
appointment of all councflors, judges, lord lieutenants, and
officers in the fleet was vested in the two Houses so long as
a Catholic sovereign was on the throne. The extent of these
provisions showed the pressure which Charles felt, but Shaftes
bury was undoubtedly right in setting the plan aside as at
once insufficient and impracticable. He continued to advo
cate the Exclusion in the royal council ; and a bill for depriv
ing James of his right to the Crown, and for devolving it on
the next Protestant in the line of succession, was introduced
into the Commons by his adherents, and passed the House
by a large majority. It was known that Charles would use
his influence with the peers for its rejection, and the earl
therefore fell back on the tactics of Pym. A bold remon
strance was prepared in the Commons. The city of London
was ready with an address to the two Houses in favor of the
bfll. All Charles could do was to gain time by the proroga
tion of the Parliament, and by its dissolution in May.
But delay would have been useless had the Country party
remained at one. The temper of the nation and of the House
of Commons was so hotly pronounced in favor of the exclu
sion of the duke, that union among the ministers must in the
end have secured it and spared England the necessity for the
Revolution of 1688. The wiser leaders of the Country party,
indeed, were already leaning to the very change which that
Revolution brought about. If James were passed over, his
daughter Mary, the wife of the Prince of Orange, stood next
in the order of succession ; and the plan of Temple, Essex,
and Halifax, after the failure of their bUl of Securities, was to
bring the prince over to England during the prorogation, to
introduce him into the council, and to pave his way to the
throne. Unhappily Shaftesbury was contemplating a very
different course. He distrusted the Prince of Orange as a
mere adherent of the royal house, and as opposed to any
weakening of the royal power or invasion of the royal pre
rogative. His motive for setting aside William's claims is
probably to be found in the maxim ascribed to him, that " a
bad title makes a good king." Whatever were his motives,
however, he had resolved to set aside the claims of James
and his children, as weU as William's own claim, and to place

830 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1679
the Duke of Monmouth on the throne. Monmouth was re
puted to be the eldest of the king's bastards, a weak and
worthless profligate in temper, but popular through his per
sonal beauty and his reputation for bravery. The tale was
set about of a secret marriage between the king and his
mother ; Shaftesbury induced Charles to put the duke at the
head of the troops sent to repress a rising of the Covenanters
in the west of Scotland, and on his return pressed the king
to give him the command of the Guards, which would have
put the only military force possessed by the Crown in Mon
mouth's hands.
Sunderland, Halifax, and Essex, however, were not only
steadily opposed to Shaftesbury's project, but saw themselves
marked out for ruin in the event of Shaftesbury's success.
They had advised the dissolution of the last Parliament ; and
the earl's anger had vented itself in threats that the advisers
of the dissolution should pay for it with their heads. The
danger came home to them when a sudden illness of the
king and the absence of James made Monmouth's accession
a possible contingency. The three ministers at once induced
Charles to recall the Duke of York; and though he with
drew to Scotland on the king's recovery, Charles deprived
Monmouth of his charge as captain-general of the forces
and ordered him like James to leave the realm. Left alone
in his cause by the opposition of his colleagues, Shaftesbury
threw himself more and more on the support of the plot.
The prosecution of its victims was pushed recklessly on.
Three Catholics were hanged in London. Eight priests were
put to death in the country. Pursuivants and informers
spread terror through every Catholic household. He counted
on the reassembling of the Parliament to bring all this terror
to bear upon the king. But Charles had already marked the
breach which the earl's policy had made in the ranks of the
Country party. He saw that Shaftesbury was unsupported
by any of his colleagues save Russell. To Temple, Essex,
or Halifax it seemed possible to bring about the succession
of Mary without any violent revolution ; but to set aside not
only the right of James but the right of his Protestant chil
dren, and even of the Prince of Orange, was to insure a civil
war. It was with their fuU support, therefore, that Charles

i68o] THE REVOLUTION 83 1
deprived Shaftesbury of his post of lord president of the
council. The dismissal was the signal for a struggle to whose
danger Charles was far from blinding himself. What had
saved him till now was his cynical courage. In the midst
of the terror and panic of the plot men " wondered to see
him quite cheerful amidst such an intricacy of troubles," says
the courtly Reresby, " but it was not in his nature to think
or perplex himself much about anything." Even in the heat
of the tumult which followed on Shaftesbury's dismissal,
Charles was seen fishing and sauntering as usual in Windsor
Park. But closer observers than Reresby saw beneath this
veil of indolent unconcern a consciousness of new danger.
" From this time," says Burnet, " his temper was observed
to change very visibly." He became in fact "sullen and
thoughtful ; he saw that he had to do with a strange sort of
people, that could neither be managed nor frightened." But
he faced the danger with his old unscrupulous coolness. He
reopened secret negotiations with France. Louis was as
alarmed as Charles himself at the warlike temper of the
nation, and as anxious to prevent the assembly of a Parlia
ment; but the terms on which he offered a subsidy were
too humfliating even for the king's acceptance. The failure
forced him to summon a new Parliament ; and the panic,
which Shaftesbury was busfly feeding with new tales of
massacre and invasion, returned members even more violent
than the members of the House he had just dismissed. A
host of petitions called on the king to suffer Parliament to
meet at the opening of 1680. Even the councfl shrank from
the king's proposal to prorogue its assembly to November,
1680, but Charles persisted. Alone as he stood, he was firm
in his resolve to gain time, for time, as he saw, was working
in his favor. The tide of public sympathy was beginning to
turn. The perjury of Oates proved too much at last for the
credulity of juries ; and the acquittal of four of his victims
was a sign that the panic was beginning to ebb. A far
stronger proof of this was seen in the immense efforts which
Shaftesbury made to maintain it. Fresh informers were
brought forward to swear to a plot for the assassination of
the earl himself, and to the share of the Duke of York in the
conspiracies of his fellow reUgionists. A paper found in a

832 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i68o'
meal-tub was produced as evidence of the new danger. Gi
gantic torchlight processions paraded the streets of London,
and the effigy of the pope was burnt amidst the wild outcry
of a vast multitude.
Acts of yet greater daring showed the lengths to which
Shaftesbury was ready to go. He had grown up amidst the
tumults of Civil war, and, grayheaded as he was, the fire and
vehemence of his early days seemed to wake again in the
singular recklessness with which he drove on the nation to a
struggle in arms. Early in 1680 he formed a committee for
promoting agitation throughout the country ; and the peti
tions which it drew up for the assembly of the ParUament
were sent to every town and grand jury, and sent back again
with thousands of signatures. Monmouth, in spite of the
king's orders, returned at Shaftesbury's call to London ; and
a daring pamphlet pointed him out as the nation's leader in the
coming struggle " against popery and tyranny." So great
was the alarm of the council that the garrison in every for
tress was held in readiness for instant war. But the danger
was really less than it seemed. The tide of opinion had
fairly turned. Acquittal followed acquittal. A reaction of
horror and remorse at the cruelty which had hurried victim
after victim to the gallows succeeded to the pitUess frenzy
which Shaftesbury had fanned into a flame. Anxious as the
nation was for a Protestant sovereign, its sense of justice
revolted against the wrong threatened to James's Protestant
children ; and every gentleman in the realm felt insulted at
the project of setting Mary aside to put the crown of Eng
land on the head of a bastard. The memory too of the Civil
war was still fresh and keen, and the rumor of an outbreak
of revolt rallied men more and more round the king. The
host of petitions which Shaftesbury procured from the coun
ties was answered by a counter host of addresses from thou
sands who declared their " abhorrence " of the plans against
the Crown. The country was divided into two great factions
of " petitioners " and " abhorrers," the germs of the two
great parties of "Whigs" and "Tories" which have played
so prominent a part in our political history from the time of
the Exclusion Bfll. Charles at once took advantage of this
turn of affairs. He recalled the Duke of York to the court.

i68o] THE REVOLUTION 833
He received the resignations of Russell and Cavendish, as
well as of the Earl of Essex, who had at last gone over to
Shaftesbury's projects "with all his heart." Shaftesbury
met defiance with defiance. Followed by a crowd of his ad
herents he attended before the Grand Jury of Middlesex to
indict the Duke of York as a Catholic recusant, and the
king's mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, as a national
nuisance, while Monmouth made a progress through the
country, and gained favor everywhere by his winning de
meanor. Above all, Shaftesbury relied on the temper of the
Commons, elected as they had been in the very heat of the
panic and irritated by the long delay in calling them together.
The first act of the House on meeting in October was to vote
that their care should be " to suppress popery and prevent a
popish successor." Rumors of a Catholic plot in Ireland
were hardly needed to push the Exclusion Bill through the
Commons without a division. So resolute was the temper of
the Lower House that even Temple and Essex now gave
their adhesion to it as a necessity, and Sunderland himself
wavered towards accepting it. Halifax, whose ability and
eloquence had now brought him fairly to the front, opposed
it resolutely and successfully in the Lords; but Halifax was
only the mouthpiece of William. " My Lord Halifax is en
tirely in the interest of the Prince of Orange," the French
ambassador, Barillon, wrote to his master, "and what he
seems to be doing for the Duke of York is really in order to
make an opening for a compromise by which the Prince of
Orange may benefit." The Exclusion Bill once rejected,
Halifax followed up the blow by bringing forward a plan of
Protestant securities, which would have taken from James on
his accession the right of veto on any bill passed by the two
Houses, the right of negotiating with foreign states, or of
appointing either civil or military officers save with the con
sent of Parliament. This plan also was no doubt prompted
by the Prince of Orange ; and the states of Holland sup
ported it by pressing Charles to come to an accommodation
with his subjects which would enable them to check the
perpetual aggressions which France was making on her
neighbors. But if the Lords would have no Exclusion BUl the Com-

834 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1680
mons with as good reason would have no Securities Bill.
They felt — as one of the members for London fairly put it
— that such securities would break down at the very moment
they were needed. A Catholic king, should he ever come to
the throne, would have other forces besides those in England
to back him. " The duke rules over Scotland ; the Irish and
the English papists will follow him ; he wfll be obeyed by
the officials of high and of low rank whom the king has
appointed ; he will be just such a king as he thinks good."
Shaftesbury, however, was far from resting in a merely nega
tive position. He made a despairing effort to do the work
of exclusion by a Bill of Divorce, which would have enabled
Charles to put away his queen on the ground of barrenness,
and by a fresh marriage to give a Protestant heir to the
throne. The earl was perhaps already sensible of a change
in public feeling, and this he resolved to check and turn by
a great public impeachment which would revive and establish
the general belief in the plot. Lord Stafford, who from his
age and rank was looked on as the leader of the Catholic
party, had lain a prisoner in the Tower since the first out
burst of popular frenzy. He was now solemnly impeached ;
and his trial in December, 1680, mustered the whole force of
informers to prove the truth of a Catholic conspiracy against
the king and the realm. The evidence was worthless ; but
the trial revived, as Shaftesbury had hoped, much of the old
panic, and the condemnation of the prisoner by a majority
of his peers was followed by his death on the scaffold. The
blow produced its effect on all but Charles. Sunderland
again pressed the king to give way. But deserted as he was
by his ministers, and even by his mistress, for the Duchess
of Portsmouth had been cowed into supporting the Exclusion
by the threats of Shaftesbury, Charles was determined to re
sist. On the coupling of a grant of supplies with demands
for a voice in the appointment of officers of the royal garri
sons he prorogued the Parliament. The truth was that he
was again planning an alliance with France. With charac
teristic subtlety, however, he dissolved the existing Parlia
ment, and called a new one to meet in March. The act was
a mere blind. The king's aim was to frighten the country
into reaction by the dread of civfl strife ; and his summons

i68i] THE REVOLUTION 835
of the Parliament to Oxford was an appeal to the country
against the disloyalty of the capital, and an adroit means of
reviving the memories of the Civfl war. With the same end
he ordered his guards to accompany him, on the pretext of
anticipated disorder; and Shaftesbury, himself terrified at
the projects of the court, aided the king's designs by appear
ing with his followers in arms on the plea of self-protection.
Monmouth renewed his progresses through the country.
Riots broke out in London. Revolt seemed at hand, and
Charles hastened to conclude his secret negotiations with
France. He verbally pledged himself to a policy of peace,
in other words to withdrawal from any share in the Grand
Alliance which William was building up, while Louis prom
ised a small subsidy which with the natural growth of the
royal revenue sufficed to render Charles, if he remained at
peace, independent of parliamentary aids. The violence of
the new Parliament played yet more effectually into the
king's hands. The members of the House of Commons
were the same as those who had been returned to the Parlia
ments he had just dissolved, and their temper was naturally
embittered by the two dissolutions. Their rejection of a new
Lunitation BUl brought forward by Halffax, which whUe
granting James the title of king would have vested the actual
functions of government in the Prince and Princess of
Orange, alienated the more moderate and sensible of the
Country party. The attempt of the Lower House to revive
the panic by impeaching an informer named Fitzharris before
the House of Lords, in defiance of the constitutional rule
which entitled him as a commoner to a trial by his peers in
the course of common law, did stfll more to throw public
opinion on the side of the Crown. Shaftesbury's course, in
fact, went wholly on a beUef that the penury of the treasury
left Charles at his mercy, and that a refusal of supplies must
wring from the king his assent to the Exclusion. But the
gold of France had freed the king from his thraldom. He
had used the Parliament simply to exhibit himself as a sover
eign whose patience and conciliatory temper were rewarded
with insult and violence ; and now that his end was accom
plished, he no sooner saw the Exclusion Bill reintroduced,
than he suddenly dissolved the Houses after a month's sit-
54

836 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1681
ting, and appealed in a royal declaration to the justice of the
nation at large.
The appeal was met by an almost universal burst of loy
alty. The Church rallied to the king ; his declaration was read
from every pulpit ; and the universities solemnly decided that
" no religion, no law, no fault, no forfeiture," could avafl to
bar the sacred right of hereditary succession. The arrest of
Shaftesbury on a charge of suborning false witnesses to the
plot marked the new strength of the Crown. London indeed
was still true to him ; the Middlesex Grand Jury ignored the
bill of his indictment ; and his discharge from the Tower was
welcomed in every street with bonfires and ringing of bells.
But a fresh impulse was given to the loyal enthusiasm of the
country at large by the publication of a plan said to have
been found among his papers, the plan of a secret association
for the furtherance of the Exclusion, whose members bound
themselves to obey the orders of Parliament even after its
prorogation or dissolution by the Crown. So general was
the reaction that Halffax advised the calling of a new Parlia
ment in the belief that it would be a loyal one. William of
Orange too visited England to take advantage of the turn of
affairs to pin Charles to the policy of the Alliance ; but the
king met both counsels with evasion. He pushed boldly on
in his new course. He confirmed the loyalty of the Church
by a renewed persecution of the Nonconformists, which drove
Penn from England and thus brought about the settlement of
Pennsylvania as a refuge for his fellow Quakers. He was
soon strong enough to call back James to court. Monmouth,
who had resumed his progresses through the country as a
means of checking the tide of reaction, was arrested. The
friendship of a Tory mayor secured the nomination of Tory
sheriffs in London, and the juries they packed left the Iffe of
every Exclusionist at the mercy of the Crown. Shaftesbury,
alive to the new danger, plunged madly into conspiracies with
a handful of adventurers as desperate as himself, hid himself
in the city, where he boasted that ten thousand " brisk boys "
were ready to appear at his call, and urged his friends to rise
in arms. But their delays drove him to flight; and two
months after his arrival in Holland, the soul of the great
leader, great from his immense energy and the wonderful

i682] THE REVOLUTION 837
versatflity of his genius, but whose genius and energy had
ended in wrecking for the time the fortunes of English free
dom, and in associating the noblest of causes with the vflest
of crimes, found its first quiet in death.
Section VI. — The Second Stuart Tyranny, 1682-1688
The flight of Shaftesbury proclaimed the triumph of the
king. His marvelous sagacity had told him when the strug
gle was over and further resistance useless. But the coun
try leaders, who had delayed to answer the earl's call, stfll
believed opposition possible; and Monmouth, with Lord
Essex, Lord Howard of Ettrick, Lord Russell, Hampden,
and Algernon Sidney held meetings with the view of found
ing an association whose agitation should force on the king
the assembly of a Parliament. The more desperate spirits
who had clustered round him as he lay hidden in the city
took refuge in plots of assassination and in a plan for mur
dering Charles and his brother as they passed the Rye House
on their road from London to Newmarket. Both projects
were betrayed, and though they were whoUy distinct from
one another the cruel ingenuity of the Crown lawyers
blended them into one. Lord Essex saved himself from
a traitor's death by suicide in the Tower. Lord Russell,
convicted on a charge of sharing in the Rye House Plot, was
beheaded in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The same fate awaited
Algernon Sidney. Monmouth fled in terror over sea, and
his flight was followed by a series of prosecutions for sedi
tion directed against his followers. In 1683 the constitu
tional opposition which had held Charles so long in check
lay crushed at his feet. A weaker man might easily have
been led into a wild tyranny by the mad outburst of loyalty
which greeted his triumph. On the very day when the crowd
around Russell's scaffold were dipping their handkerchiefs
in his blood, as in the blood of a martyr, the University of
Oxford solemnly declared that the doctrine of passive obedi
ence, even to the worst of rulers, was a part of religion.
But Charles saw that immense obstacles stUl lay in the road
of a mere tyranny. The great Tory party which had rallied
to his succor against the Exclusionists were still steady for

838 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1683
parliamentary and legal government. The Church was as
powerful as ever, and the mention of a renewal of the Indul
gence to Nonconformists had to be withdrawn before the
opposition of the bishops. He was careful therefore during
the few years which remained to him to avoid the appear
ance of any open violation of public law. He suspended
no statute. He imposed no tax by royal authority. Noth
ing indeed shows more completely how great a work the
Long Parliament had done than a survey of the reign of
Charles the Second. " The king," Hallam says very truly,
"was restored to nothing but what the law had preserved
to him." No attempt was made to restore the abuses which
the patriots pf 1641 had swept away. Parliament was con
tinually summoned. In spite of its frequent refusal of
supplies, no attempt was ever made to raise money by un
constitutional means. The few illegal proclamations issued
under Clarendon ceased with his fall. No effort was made
to revive the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commis
sion ; and if judges were servile and juries sometimes packed,
there was no open interference with the course of justice.
In two remarkable points freedom had made an advance
even on 164 1. From the moment when printing began to
tell on public opinion, it had been gagged by a system of
licenses. The regulations framed under Henry the Eighth
subjected the press to the control of the Star Chamber, and
the Martin Marprelate libels brought about a yet more strin
gent control under Elizabeth. Even the Long Parliament
laid a heavy hand on the press, and the great remonstrance
of MUton in his " Areopagitica " fell dead on the ears of his
Puritan associates. But the statute for the regulation of
printing which was passed immediately after the Restora
tion expired finally in 1679, and the temper of the Parliament
at once put an end to any attempt at reestablishing the
censorship. To the new freedom of the press the Habeas
Corpus Act added a new security for the personal freedom
of every Englishman. Against arbitrary imprisonment pro
vision had been made in the earliest ages by a famous clause
in the Great Charter. No free man could be held in prison
save on charge or conviction of crime or for debt, and every
prisoner on a criminal charge could demand as a right from

1683] THE REVOLUTION 839
the Court of King's Bench the issue of a writ of " habeas
corpus," which bound his jailer to produce both the pris
oner and the warrant on which he was imprisoned, that the
court might judge whether he was imprisoned according to
law. In cases, however, of imprisonment on a warrant of
the royal council it had been sometimes held by judges that
the writ could not be issued, and under Clarendon's adminis
tration instances had in this way occurred of imprisonment
without legal remedy. But his fall was quickly followed by
the introduction of a bill to secure this right of the subject,
and after a long struggle the act which is known as the
Habeas Corpus Act passed finally in 1679. By this great
statute the old practise of the law was freed from all diffi
culties and exceptions. Every prisoner committed for any
crime save treason or felony was declared entitled to his writ
even in the vacations of the courts, and heavy penalties were
enforced on judges or jailers who refused him this right.
Every person committed for felony or treason was entitled
to be released on bail, unless indicted at the next session of
jail delivery after his commitment, and to be discharged if
not indicted at the sessions which foUowed. It was for
bidden under the heaviest penalties to send a prisoner into
any places or fortresses beyond the seas.
Galling to the Crown as the freedom of the press and the
Habeas Corpus Act were soon found to be, Charles made no
attempt to curtail the one or to infringe the other. But
while cautious to avoid rousing popular resistance, he moved
coolly and resolutely forward on the path of despotism. It
was in vain that Halifax pressed for energetic resistance to
the aggressions of France, for the recall of Monmouth, or for
the calling of a fresh Parliament. Like every other English
statesman he found he had been duped, and that now his
work was done he was suffered to remain in office, but left
without any influence in the government. Hyde, who was
created Earl of Rochester, still remained at the head of the
treasury; but Charles soon gave more of his confidence to
the supple and acute Sunderland. Parliament, in defiance
of the 'Triennial Act, which after having been repealed had
been reenacted but without the safeguards of the original
act, remained unassembled during the remainder of the

840 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1685
king's reign. His secret alliance with France furnished
Charles with the funds he immediately required, and the
rapid growth of the customs through the increase of Eng
lish commerce promised to give him a revenue which, if
peace were preserved, would save him from the need of a
fresh appeal to the Commons. All opposition was at an
end. The strength of the Country party had been broken
by its own dissensions over the Exclusion Bill, and by the
flight or death of its more prominent leaders. Whatever
strength it retained lay chiefly in the towns, and these were
now attacked by writs of " quo warranto," which called on
them to show cause why their charters should not be declared
forfeited on the ground of abuse of their privfleges. A few
verdicts on the side of the Crown brought about a general
surrender of municipal liberties ; and the grant of fresh
charters, in which all but ultraloyalists were carefully ex
cluded from their corporations, placed the representation of
the boroughs in the hands of the Crown. Against active
discontent Charles had long been quietly providing by the
gradual increase of his guards. The withdrawal of its garri
son from Tangier enabled him to raise their force to nine
thousand well-equipped soldiers, and to supplement this
force, the nucleus of our present standing army, by a reserve
of six regiments, which were maintained till they should be
needed at home in the service of the United Provinces.
But great as the danger really was, it lay not so much in
isolated acts of tyranny as in the character and purpose of
Charles himself. His death at the very moment of his tri
umph saved English freedom. He had regained his old
popularity, and at the news of his sickness crowds thronged
the churches, praying that God would raise him up again
to be a father to his people. But the one anxiety of the
king was to die reconciled to the Catholic Church. His
chamber was cleared and a priest named Huddleston, who
had saved his life after the battle of Worcester, received his
confession and administered the last sacraments. Not a
word of this ceremony was whispered when the nobles and
bishops were recalled into the royal presence. AU the chil
dren of his mistresses save Monmouth were gathered round
the bed. Charles " blessed all his chfldren one by one, pull-

1685] THE REVOLUTION 84 1
ing them on to his bed ; and then the bishops moved him, as
he was the Lord's anointed and the father of his country, to
bless them also and all that were there present, and in them
the general body of his subjects. Whereupon, the room
being full, all fell down upon their knees, and he raised himself
in his bed and very solemnly blessed them all." The strange
comedy was at last over. Charles died as he had lived :
brave, witty, cynical, even in the presence of death. Tor
tured as he was with pain, he begged the bystanders to for
give him for being so unconscionable a time in dying. One
mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, hung weeping over his
bed. His last thought was of another mistress, Nell Gwynn.
" Do not," he whispered to his successor ere he sank into a
fatal stupor, " do not let poor Nelly starve ! "
The first words of James on his accession in February, 1685,
his promise " to preserve the government both in Church and
State as it is now by law established," were welcomed by the
whole country with enthusiasm. All the suspicions of a
Catholic sovereign seemed to have disappeared. " We have
the word of a king ! " ran the general cry, " and of a king
who was never worse than his word." The conviction of his
brother's faithlessness stood James in good stead. He was
looked upon as narrow, impetuous, stubhorn, and despotic in
heart, but even his enemies did not accuse him of being false.
Above all he was believed to be keenly alive to the honor of
his country, and resolute to free it from foreign dependence.
It was necessary to summon a Parliament, forthe royal rev
enue ceased with the death of Charles ; but the elections,
swayed at once by the tide of loyalty and by the command of
the boroughs which the surrender of their charters had given
to the Crown, sent up a House of Commons in which James
found few members who were not to his mind. The question
of religious security was waived at a hint of the royal dis
pleasure. A revenue of nearly two millions was granted to
the king for life. All that was wanted to rouse the loyalty
of the country into fanaticism was supplied by a rebellion in
the north, and by another under Monmouth in the west.
The hopes of Scotch freedom had clung ever since the
Restoration to the House of Argyll. The great marquis,
indeed, had been brought to the block at the king's return.

842 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1685
His son, the Earl of Argyll, had been unable to save himself
even by a life of singular caution and obedience from the ill
will of the vile politicians who governed Scotland. He was
at last convicted of treason in 1682 on grounds at which
every English statesman stood aghast. " We should not
hang a dog here," Halifax protested, " on the grounds on
which my lord Argyll has been sentenced to death." The
earl escaped, however, to Holland, and lived peacefully there
during the last years of the reign of Charles. Monmouth
had found the same refuge at the Hague, where a belief in
the king's purpose to recall him secured him a kindly recep
tion from William of Orange. But the accession of James
was a death-blow to the hopes of the duke, whUe it stirred
the fanaticism of Argyll to a resolve of wresting Scotland
from the rule of a Catholic king. The two leaders determined
to appear in arms in England and the north, and the two
expeditions sailed within a few days of each other. Argyll's
attempt was soon over. His clan of the Campbells rose on
his landing in Cantyre, but the country had been occupied
for the king, and quarrels among the exiles who accompanied
him robbed his effort of every chance of success. His force
scattered without a fight ; and Argyll, arrested in an attempt
to escape, was hurried to a traitor's death. Monmouth for a
time found brighter fortune. His popularity in the west
was great, and though the gentry held aloof when he landed
at Lyme, and demanded effective parliamentary government
and freedom of worship for Protestant Nonconformists, the
farmers and traders of Devonshire and Dorset flocked to his
standard. The clothier towns of Somerset were true to the
Whig cause, and on the entrance of the duke into Taun
ton the popular enthusiasm showed itself in flowers which
wreathed every door, as well as in a train of young girls who
presented Monmouth with a Bible and a flag. His forces
now amounted to six thousand men, but whatever chance of
success he might have had was lost by his assumption of the
title of king. The Houses supported James, and passed a
bill of attainder against the duke. The gentry, still true to
the cause of Mary and of William, held stubbornly aloof ;
while the guards hurried to the scene of the revolt, and the
militia gathered to the royal standard. Foiled in an attempt

i685] THE REVOLUTION 843
on Bristol and Bath, Monmouth fell back on Bridgewater,
and flung himself in the night of the sixth of July, 1685, on
the king's forces, which lay encamped on Sedgemoor. The
surprise fafled ; and the brave peasants and miners who fol
lowed the duke, checked in their advance by a deep drain
which crossed the moor, were broken after a short resistance
by the royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and
after a vain effort to escape from the realm, was captured
and sent pitilessly to the block.
Never had England shown a firmer loyalty ; but its loyalty
was changed into horror by the terrible measures of repres
sion which followed on the victory of Sedgemoor. Even
North, the lord keeper, a servile tool of the Crown, pro
tested against the license and bloodshed in which the troops
were suffered to indulge after the battle. His protest, how
ever, was disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from
the court to die. James was, in fact, resolved on a far more
terrible vengeance ; and the Chief Justice Jeffreys, a man of
great natural powers but of violent temper, was sent to earn
the seals by a series of judicial murders which have left his
name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels
were hanged in the " Bloody Circuit," as Jeffreys made his
way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight hun
dred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number
were whipped and imprisoned. The queen, the maids of
honor, the courtiers, even the judge himself, made shameless
profit from the sale of pardons. What roused pity above all
were the cruelties wreaked upon women. Some were scourged
from market-town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of
one of the Regicides, was sent to the block at Winchester for
harboring a rebel. Elizabeth Gaunt, for the same act of
womanly charity, was burned at Tyburn. Pity turned into
horror when it was found that cruelty such as this was avowed
and sanctioned by the king. Even the cold heart of General
Churchfll, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had
mainly been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which
James turned away from all appeals for mercy. " This mar
ble," he cried as he struck the chimneypiece on which he leant,
" is not harder than the king's heart." But it was soon plain
that the terror which the butchery was meant to strike into

844 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1685
the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made
a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. Charles,
as we have seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to
nearly ten thousand men ; James raised it at one swoop to
twenty thousand. The employment of this force was to be
at home, not abroad, for the hope of an English policy in
foreign affairs had already faded away. In the designs
which James had at heart he could look for no consent from
Parliament ; and however his pride revolted against a depend
ence on France, it was only by French gold and French
soldiers that he could hope to hold the Parliament perma
nently at bay. A week therefore after his accession he as
sured Louis that his gratitude and devotion to him equaled
that of Charles himself. " Tell your master," he said to the
French ambassador, "that without his protection I can do
nothing. He has a right to be consulted, and it is my wish to
consult him, about everything." The pledge of subserviency
was rewarded with the promise of a subsidy, and the promise
was received with the strongest expressions of delight and
servility. Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of
danger to English religion. Europe had long been trembling
at the ambition of Louis ; it was trembling now at his bigotry.
He had proclaimed warfare against civil liberty in his attack
upon Holland ; he declared war at this moment upon religious
freedom by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the measure by
which Henry the Fourth after his abandonment of Protes
tantism secured toleration and the free exercise of their wor
ship for his Protestant subjects. It had been respected by
Richelieu even in his victory over the Huguenots, and only
lightly tampered with by Mazarin. But from the beginning
of his reign Louis had resolved to set aside its provisions,
and his revocation of it in 1685 was only the natural close of
a progressive system of persecution. The revocation was
foUowed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of
Alva. Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families,
women were flung from their sick-beds into the streets, chil
dren were torn from their mothers' arms to be brought up in
Catholicism, ministers were sent to the galleys. In spite of
the royal edicts, which forbade even flight to the •victims of

1 686] THE REVOLUTION 845
these horrible atrocities, a hundred thousand Protestants fled
over the borders, and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate,
were fiUed with French exUes. Thousands found refuge in
England, and their industry founded in the fields east of
London the sUk trade of Spitalfields. But while Englishmen
were looking with horror on these events in France, James
drew from them new hopes. In defiance of the law he was
filling his fresh regiments with Catholic officers. He dis
missed Halifax from the Privy Council on his refusal to
consent to a plan for repeaUng the Test Act. He met the
Parliament with a haughty declaration that whether legal or
no his grant of commissions to Catholics must not be ques
tioned, and with a demand of supplies for his new troops.
Loyal as was the temper of the Houses, their alarm for the
Church, their dread of a standing army, was yet stronger than
their loyalty. The Commons by the majority of a single vote
deferred the grant of supplies till grievances were redressed,
and demanded in their address the recall of the illegal com
missions. The Lords took a bolder tone ; and the protest of the
bishops against any infringement of the Test Act was backed
by the eloquence of Halifax. But both Houses were at once
prorogued. The king resolved to obtain from the judges
what he could not obtain from Parliament. He remodeled
the bench by dismissing four judges who refused to lend
themselves to his plans ; and their successors decided in the
case of Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic officer in the army, that
a royal dispensation could be pleaded in bar of the Test Act.
The principle laid down by the judges asserted the right of
the king to dispense with penal laws according to his own
judgment, and it was applied by James with a reckless impa
tience of all decency and self-restraint. Catholics were ad
mitted into civil and military offices without stint, and four
Catholic peers were sworn as members of the Privy Council.
The laws which forbade the presence of Catholic priests in
the realm, or the open exercise of Catholic worship, were set
at naught. A gorgeous chapel was opened in the palace of
St. James for the worship of the king. Carmelites, Benedic
tines, Franciscans, appeared in their religious garb in the
streets of London, and the Jesuits set up a crowded school in
the Savoy.

846 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1686
The quick growth of discontent at these acts would have
startled a wiser man into prudence, but James prided himself
on an obstinacy which never gave way ; and a riot which took
place on the opening of a fresh Catholic chapel in the city
was followed by the establishment of a camp of thirteen thou
sand men at Hounslow to overawe the capital. The course
which James intended to follow in England was shown by the
course he was following in the sister kingdoms. In Scotland
he acted as a pure despot. He placed its government in the
hands of two lords, Melfort and Perth, who had embraced his
own religion, and put a Catholic in command of the Castle of
Edinburgh. The Scotch Parliament had as yet been the mere
creature of the Crown, but servile as were its members there
was a point at which their servility stopped, When James
boldly required them to legalize the toleration of Catholics,
they refused to pass such an act. It was in vain that the
king tempted them to consent by the offer of a free trade
with England. " Shall we sell our God ? " was the indignant
reply. James at once ordered the Scotch judges to treat all
laws against Catholics as null and void, and his orders were
obeyed. In Ireland his policy threw off even the disguise of
law. Catholics were admitted by the king's command to the
council and to civil offices. A Catholic, Lord Tyrconnell, was
put at the head of the army, and set instantly about its re
organization by cashiering Protestant officers and by admitting
two thousand Catholic natives into its ranks. Meanwhile
James had begun in England a bold and systematic attack
upon the Church. He regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy
as a weapon providentially left to him for undoing the work
which it had enabled his predecessors to do. Under Henry
and Elizabeth it had been used to turn the Church of England
from Catholic to Protestant. Under James it should be used
to turn it back again from Protestant to Catholic. The High
Commission indeed had been declared illegal by an Act of the
Long Parliament, and this act had been confirmed by the
ParUament of the Restoration. But it was thought possi
ble to evade this act by omitting from the instructions
on which the commission acted the extraordinary powers
and jurisdictions by which its predecessor had given offense.
With this reserve, seven commissioners were appointed for

1687] THE REVOLUTION 847
the government of the Church, with Jeffreys at their head ;
and the first blow of the commission was at the Bishop
of London. James had forbidden the clergy to preach
against "the king's religion," and ordered Bishop Compton
to suspend a London vicar who set this order at defiance.
The bishop's refusal was punished by his own suspension.
But the pressure of the commission only drove the clergy
to a bolder defiance of the royal will. Sermons against
superstition were preached from every pulpit ; and the two
most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stfllingfleet,
put themselves at the head of a host of controversialists
who scattered pamphlets and tracts from every printing-
press. It was in vain that the bulk of the Catholic gentry stood
aloof and predicted the inevitable reaction his course must
bring about, or that Rome itself counseled greater modera
tion. James was infatuated with what seemed to be the suc
cess of his enterprises. He looked on the opposition he
experienced as due to the influence of the High Church
Tories who had remained in power since the reaction of
1681, and these he determined to "chastise." The Duke of
Queensberry, the leader of this party in Scotland, was driven
from office. Tyrconnell, as we have seen, was placed as a
check on Ormond in Ireland. In England James resolved
to show the world that even the closest ties of blood were as
nothing to him if they conflicted with the demands of his
faith. His earlier marriage with Anne Hyde, the daughter
of Clarendon, bound both the chancellor's sons to his for
tunes ; and on his accession he had sent his elder brother-in-
law, Henry, Earl of Clarendon, as lord lieutenant to Ireland,
and raised the younger, Laurence, Earl of Rochester, to the
post of lord treasurer. But Rochester was now told that
the king could not safely entrust so great a charge to any
one who did not share his sentiments on religion, and on his
refusal to abandon his faith he was deprived of the White
Staff. His brother. Clarendon, shared his fall. A Catho
lic, Lord Bellasys, became first lord of the treasury, which
was put into commission after Rochester's removal ; and an
other Catholic, Lord Arundel, became lord privy seal, while
Father Petre, a Jesuit, was called to the Privy Council. One

848 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1687
official after another who refused to aid in the repeal of the
Test Act was dismissed. In defiance of the law the nuncio
of the pope was received in state at Windsor. But even
James could hardly fail to perceive the growth of public dis
content. If the great Tory nobles were stanch for the Crown,
they were as resolute Englishmen in their hatred of mere
tyranny as the Whigs themselves. James gave the Duke of
Norfolk the sword of state to carry before him as he went
to Mass. The duke stopped at the chapel door. "Your
father would have gone further," said the king. "Your
Majesty's father was the better man," replied the duke, "and
he would not have gone so far." The young Duke of Somer
set was ordered to introduce the nuncio into the Presence
Chamber. "I am advised," he answered, "that I cannot
obey your Majesty without breaking the law." " Do you
not know that I am above the law ? " James asked angrily.
"Your Majesty may be, but I am not," retorted the duke.
He was dismissed from his post ; but the spirit of resistance
spread fast. In spite of the king's letters the governors of
the Charter House, who numbered among them some of the
greatest English nobles, refused to admit a Catholic to the
benefits of the foundation. The most devoted loyalists began
to murmur when James demanded apostasy as a proof of
their loyalty. He had soon, in fact, to abandon all hope of
bringing the Church or the Tories over to his will. He turned,
as Charles had turned, to the Nonconformists, and published
in 1687 a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended the
operation of the penal laws against Nonconformists and
Catholics alike, and of every act which imposed a test as a
qualification for office in Church or State. The temptation
to accept the indulgence was great, for since the fall of
Shaftesbury persecution had fallen heavily on the Protestant
dissidents, and we can hardly wonder that the Nonconform
ists wavered for a time, or that numerous addresses of thanks
were presented to James. But the great body of them, and
all the more venerable names among them, remained true to
the cause of freedom. Baxter, Howe, and Bunyan all refused
an indulgence which could only be purchased by the violent
overthrow of the law. It was plain that the attempt to divide
the forces of Protestantism had utterly fafled, and that the

i687] THE REVOLUTION 849
only mode of securing his end was to procure a repeal of the
Test Act from Parliament itself.
The temper of the existing Houses, however, remained
absolutely opposed to the king's project. He therefore dis
solved the Parliament, and summoned a new one. But no
free Parliament could be brought, as he knew, to consent to
the repeal. The Lords indeed could be swamped by lavish
creations of new peers. " Your troop of horse," his minister,
Lord Sunderland, told Churchfll, " shall be called up into the
House of Lords." But it was a harder matter to secure a
compliant House of Commons. The lord lieutenants were
directed to bring about such a " regulation " of the governing
body in boroughs as would insure the return of candidates
pledged to the repeal of the Test, and to question every mag
istrate in their county as to his vote. Half of them at once
refused, and a long list of great nobles — the earls of Oxford,
Shrewsbury, Dorset, Derby, Pembroke, Rutland, Abergav
enny, Thanet, Northampton, and Abingdon — were dismissed
from their lord-lieutenancies. The justices when questioned
simply replied that they would vote according to their
consciences, and send members to Parliament who would
protect the Protestant religion. After repeated "regulations "
it was found impossible to form a corporate body which would
return representatives willing to comply with the royal will.
All thought of a Parliament had to be abandoned ; and even
the most bigoted courtiers counseled moderation at this proof
of the stubborn opposition which James must prepare to en
counter from the peers, the gentry, and the trading classes.
The clergy alone stfll hesitated in any open act of resistance.
Even the tyranny of the commission failed to rouse into open
disaffection men who had been preaching Sunday after Sun
day the doctrine of passive obedience to the worst of kings.
But James cared little for passive obedience. He looked on
the refusal of the clergy to support his plans as freeing him
from his pledge to maintain the Church as established by
law; and he resolved to attack it in the great institutions
which had till now been its strongholds. To secure the uni
versities for Catholicism was to seize the only training-schools
which the clergy possessed. Cambridge indeed escaped eas
ily. A Benedictine monk who presented himself with royal

850 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1687
letters recommending him for the degree of a Master of Arts
was rejected on his refusal to sign the Articles : and the vice-
chancellor paid for the rejection by dismissal from his office.
But a violent and obstinate attack was directed against Ox
ford. The master of University College, who declared him
self a convert, was authorized to retain his post in defiance
of the law. Massey, a Roman Catholic, was presented by
the Crown to the deanery of Christ Church. Magdalen was
the wealthiest Oxford College, and James in 1687 recom
mended one Farmer, a Catholic of infamous life and not even
qualified by statute for the office, to its vacant headship.
The Fellows remonstrated, and on the rejection of their re
monstrance chose Hough, one of their own number, as their
president. The Ecclesiastical Commission declared the elec
tion void ; and James, shamed out of his first candidate, rec
ommended a second, Parker, Bishop of Oxford, a Catholic in
heart and the meanest of his courtiers. But the fellows held
stubbornly to their legal head. It was in vain that the king
visited Oxford, summoned them to his presence, and rated
them as they knelt before him like schoolboys. " I am king,"
he said, " I will be obeyed ! Go to your chapel this instant,
and elect the bishop ! Let those who refuse look to it, for
they shall feel the whole weight of my hand ! " It was seen
that to give Magdalen as well as Christ Church into Catholic
hands was to turn Oxford into a Catholic seminary, and the
king's threats were disregarded. But they were soon carried
out. A special commission visited the university, pronounced
Hough an intruder, set aside his appeal to the law, burst open
the door of his president's house to install Parker in his place,
and on their refusal to submit deprived the Fellows of their
fellowships. The expulsion of the Fellows was followed on a
like refusal by that of the Demies. Parker, who died im
mediately after his installation, was succeeded by a Roman
Catholic bishop in partibus, Bonaventure Giffard, and twelve
Catholics were admitted to fellowships in a single day.
Meanwhile James clung to the hope of finding a compliant
Parliament, from which he might win a repeal of the Test
Act. In face of the dogged opposition of the country the
elections had been adjourned ; and a renewed Declaration
of Indulgence was intended as an appeal to the nation at

1688] THE REVOLUTION 851
large. At its close he promised to summon a Parliament in
November, and he called on the electors to choose such mem
bers as would bring to a successful end the policy he had
begun. His resolve, he said, was to establish universal lib
erty of conscience for all future time. It was in this charac
ter of a royal appeal that he ordered every clergyman to read
the declaration during divine service on two successive Sun
days. Little time was given for deliberation, but little time
was needed. The clergy refused almost to a man to be the
instruments of their own humfliation. The declaration was
read in only four of the London churches, and in these the
congregation flocked out of church at the first words of it.
Nearly all of the country clergy refused to obey the royal
orders. The bishops went with the rest of the clergy. A few
days before the appointed Sunday Archbishop Sancroft called
his suffragans together, and the six who were able to appear
at Lambeth signed a temperate protest to the king, in which
they declined to publish an illegal declaration. " It is a
standard of rebellion," James exclaimed as the primate pre
sented the paper; and the resistance of the clergy was no
sooner announced to him than he determined to wreak his
vengeance on the prelates who had signed the protest. He
ordered the ecclesiastical commissioners to deprive them of
their sees, but in this matter even the commissioners shrank
from obeying him. The chancellor. Lord Jeffreys, advised a
prosecution for libel as an easier mode of punishment ; and
the bishops, who refused to give bail, were committed on this
charge to the Tower. They passed to their prison amidst the
shouts of a great multitude, the sentinels knelt for their bless
ing as they entered its gates, and the soldiers of the garri
son drank their healths. So threatening was the temper of
the nation that his ministers pressed James to give way. But
his obstinacy grew with the danger. " Indulgence," he said,
"ruined my father"; and on the 29th of June the bishops
appeared as criminals at the bar of the King's Bench.
The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of
the Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the
indignation of the people at large. No sooner had the fore
man of the jury uttered the words " Not guilty " than a roar
of applause burst from the crowd, and horsemen spurred
55

852 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1688
along every road to carry over the country the news of the
acquittal. Section VII. — William of Orange
Amidst the tumult of the plot and the Exclusion Bill the
wiser among English statesmen had fixed their hopes steadily
on the succession of Mary, the elder daughter and heiress of
James. The tyranny of her father's reign made this succes
sion the hope of the people at large. But to Europe the
importance of the change, whenever it should come about, lay
not so much in the succession of Mary, as in the new power
which such an event would give to her husband, William,
Prince of Orange. We have come in fact to a moment when
the struggle of England against the aggression of its king
blends with the larger struggle of Europe against the aggres
sion of Louis the Fourteenth, and it is only by a rapid glance
at the political state of the Continent that we can understand
the real nature and results of the revolution which drove James
from the throne.
At this moment France was the dominant power in Chris
tendom. The religious wars which began with the Reforma
tion had broken the strength of the nations around her. Spain
was no longer able to fight the battle of Catholicism. The
peace of Westphalia, by the independence it gave to the Ger
man princes and the jealousy it kept alive between the Prot
estant and Catholic powers of Germany, destroyed the strength
of the empire. The German branch of the House of Aus
tria, spent with the long struggle of the Thirty Years' war,
had enough to do in battling hard against the advance of the
Turks from Hungary on Vienna. The victories of Gustavus
and of the generals whom he formed had been dearly pur
chased by the exhaustion of Sweden. The United Provinces
were as yet hardly regarded as a great power, and were tram
meled by their contest with England for the empire of the
seas. France alone profited by the general wreck. The
wise policy of Henry the Fourth in securing religious peace
by a grant of toleration to the Protestants had undone the ill
effects of its religious wars. The Huguenots were still nu
merous south of the Loire, but the loss of their fortresses had
turned their energies into the peaceful channels of industry

•I688] THE REVOLUTION 853
and trade. Feudal disorder was roughly put down by Riche
lieu, and the policy which gathered all local power into the
hands of the Crown, though fatal in the end to the real wel
fare of France, gave it for the moment an air of good govern
ment, and a command over its internal resources which no
other country could boast. Its compact and fertfle territory,
the natural activity and enterprise of its people, and the rapid
growth of its commerce and manufactures were sources of
natural wealth which even its heavy taxation failed to check.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century France was
looked upon as the wealthiest power in Europe. The yearly
income of the French crown was double that of England,
and even Louis the Fourteenth trusted as much to the credit
of his treasury as to the glory of his arms. " After all," he
said, when the fortunes of war began to turn against him, " it
is the last louis d'or which must win ! " It was in fact this
superiority in wealth which enabled France to set on foot
forces such as had never been seen in Europe since the
downfall of Rome. At the opening of the reign of Louis
the Fourteenth its army mustered a hundred thousand men.
With the war against Holland it rose to nearly two hundred
thousand. In the last struggle against the Grand Alliance
there was a time when it counted nearly half a million of
men in arms. Nor was France content with these enormous
land forces. Since the ruin of Spain the fleets of Holland
and of England had alone disputed the empire of the seas.
Under Richelieu and Mazarin France could hardly be looked
upon as a naval power. But the early years of Louis saw
the creation of a navy of 100 men-of-war, and the fleets of
France soon held their own against England or the Dutch.
Such a power would have been formidable at any time ;
but it was doubly formidable when directed by statesmen who
in knowledge and ability were without rivals in Europe. No
diplomatist could compare with Lionne, no war minister with
Louvois, no financier with Colbert. Their young master,
Louis the Fourteenth, bigoted, narrow-minded, commonplace
as he was, without personal honor or personal courage, with
out gratitude and without pity, insane in his pride, insatiable
in his vanity, brutal in his selfishness, had still many of the
qualities of a great ruler : industry, patience, quickness of

854 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1661
resolve, firmness of purpose, a capacity for discerning great
ness and using it, an immense self-belief and self-confidence,
and a temper utterly destitute indeed of real greatness, but
with a dramatic turn for seeming to be great. As a politician
Louis had simply to reap the harvest which the two great
cardinals who went before him had sown. Both had used to
the profit of France the exhaustion and dissension which the
wars of religion had brought upon Europe. Richelieu turned
the scale against the House of Austria by his alliance with
Sweden, with the United Provinces, and with the Protestant
princes of Germany; and the two great treaties by which
Mazarin ended the Thirty Years' war, the treaty of Westpha
lia and the treaty of the Pyrenees, left the empire disorgan
ized and Spain powerless. From that moment indeed Spain
sank into a strange decrepitude. Robbed of the chief source
of her wealth by the independence of Holland, weakened at
home by the revolt of Portugal, her infantry annihilated by
Cond^ in his victory of Rocroi, her fleet ruined by the Dutch,
her best blood drained away to the Indies, the energies of her
people destroyed by the suppression of all liberty, civil or
religious, her intellectual life crushed by the Inquisition, her
industry crippled by the expulsion of the Moors, by financial
oppression, and by the folly of her colonial system, the king
dom which under Philip the Second had aimed at the empire
of the world lay helpless and exhausted under Philip the
Fourth. The aim of Louis from 1661, the year when he
really became master of France, was to carry on the policy
of his predecessors, and above all to complete the ruin of
Spain. The conquest of the Spanish provinces in the Neth
erlands would carry his border to the Scheldt. A more dis
tant hope lay in the probable extinction of the Austrian line
which now sat on the throne of Spain. By securing the suc
cession to that throne for a French prince, not only Castile
and Aragon, with the Spanish dependencies in Italy and the
Netherlands, but the Spanish empire in the New World
would be added to the dominions of France. Nothing could
save Spain but a union of the European powers, and to pre
vent this union by his negotiations was a work at which Louis
toiled for years. The intervention of the empire was guarded
against by a renewal of the old alliances between France and

1672] THE REVOLUTION 855
the lesser German princes. A league with the Turks gave
Austria enough to do on her eastern border. The old league
with Sweden, the old friendship with Holland, were skilfully
maintained. The policy of Charles the Second bound Eng
land to the side of Louis. At last it seemed that the moment
for which he had waited had come, and the signing of the
treaty of Breda gave an opportunity for war of which Louis
availed himself in 1667. But the suddenness and complete
ness of the French success awoke a general terror, before
which the skflful diplomacy of Charles gave way. Holland
was roused to a sense of danger at home by the appearance
of French arms on the Rhine. England woke from her leth
argy on the French seizure of the coast towns of Flanders.
Sweden joined the two Protestant powers in the Triple Alliance;
and the dread of a wider league forced Louis to content him
self with the southern half of Flanders and the possession of
a string of fortresses which practically left him the master of
the Netherlands.
Louis was maddened by the check. He had always dis
liked the Dutch as Protestants and Republicans ; he hated
them now as an obstacle which must be taken out of the way
ere he could resume his projects upon Spain. Four years
were spent in preparations for a decisive blow. The French
army was gradually raised to a hundred and eighty thousand
men. Colbert created a fleet which rivaled that of Holland
in number and equipment. Sweden was again won over.
England was again secured by the treaty of Dover. Mean
while Holland lay wrapped in a false security. The French
aUiance had been its traditional policy since the days of
Henry the Fourth, and it was especially dear to the party of
the great merchant class which had mounted to power on the
fall of the House of Orange. John de Witt, the leader of
this party, though he had been forced to conclude- the Triple
Alliance by the advance of Louis to the Rhine, still clung
blindly to the friendship of France. His trust only broke
down when the French army crossed the Dutch border in
1672, and the glare of its watch-fires was seen from the walls
of Amsterdam. For the moment Holland lay crushed at the
feet of Louis, but the arrogance of the conqueror roused
again the stubborn courage which had wrung victory from

856. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1672
Alva and worn out the pride of Philip the Second. De
Witt was murdered in a popular tumult, and his fall called
William, the Prince of Orange, to the head of the Republic.
Though the new Stadtholder had hardly reached manhood,
his great qualities at once made themselves felt. His earlier
life had schooled him in a wonderful self-control. He had
been left fatherless and all but friendless in childhood, he
had been bred among men who looked on his very existence
as a danger to the State, his words had been watched, his
looks noted, his friends jealously withdrawn. In such an
atmosphere the boy grew up silent, wary, self-contained,
grave in temper, cold in demeanor, blunt and even repulsive
in address. He was weak and sickly from his cradle, and
manhood brought with it an asthma and consumption which
shook his frame with a constant cough ; his face was sullen
and bloodless and scored with deep lines which told of cease
less pain. But beneath this cold and sickly presence lay a
fiery and commanding temper, an immovable courage, and
a political ability of the highest order. William was a born
statesman. Neglected as his education had been in other
ways, for he knew nothing of letters or of art, he had been
carefully trained in politics by John de Witt : and the wide
knowledge with which in his first address to the States-General
the young Stadtholder reviewed the general state of Europe,
the cool courage with which he calculated the chances of the
struggle, at once won him the trust of his countrymen. Their
trust was soon rewarded. Holland was saved, and province
after province won back from the arms of France, by Will
iam's dauntless resolve. Like his great ancestor, William the
Silent, he was a luckless commander, and no general had to
bear more frequent defeats. But he profited by defeat as
other men profit by victory. His bravery indeed was of that
nobler cast which rises to its height in moments of ruin and
dismay. The coolness with which, boy general as he was, he
rallied his broken squadrons amidst the rout of Seneff, and
wrested from Cond^ at the last the fruits of his victory, moved
his veteran opponent to a generous admiration. It was in
such moments indeed that the real temper of the man broke
through the veil of his usual reserve. A strange light flashed
from his eyes as soon as he was under fire, and in the terror

i677] THE REVOLUTION 857
and confusion of defeat his manners took an ease and gaiety
that charmed every soldier around him.
The political abflity of William was seen in the skill with
which he drew Spain and the House of Austria into a coali
tion against France, a union which laid the foundation of the
Grand AUiance. But France was still matchless in arms, and
the effect of her victories was seconded by the selfishness of
the allies, and above all by the treacherous diplomacy of
Charles the Second. William was forced to consent in 1678
to the treaty of Nimeguen, which left France dominant over
Europe as she had never been before. Holland indeed was
saved from the revenge of Louis, but fresh spoils had been
wrested from Spain, and Franche-Comt6, which had been
restored at the close of the former war, was retained at the end
of this. Above all France overawed Europe by the daring
and success with which she had faced single-handed the wide
coalition against her. Her king's arrogance became unbounded.
Lorraine was turned into a subject state. Genoa was bom
barded, and its Doge forced to seek pardon in the antecham
bers of Versailles. The pope was humiliated by the march
of an army upon Rome to avenge a slight offered to the
French ambassador. The empire was outraged by a shame
less seizure of imperial fiefs in Elsass and elsewhere. The
whole Protestant world was defied by the . persecution of the
Huguenots which was to culminate in the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes. In the mind of Louis peace meant
a series of outrages on the powers around him ; but every
outrage helped the cool and silent adversary who was looking
on from the Hague to build up that Great Alliance of all
Europe from which alone he looked for any effectual check to
the ambition of France. The experience of the last war had
taught William that of such an alliance England must form
a part, and the efforts of the prince ever since the peace had
been directed to secure her cooperation. A reconcfliation of
the king with his Parliament was an indispensable step
towards freeing Charles from his dependence on France, and
it was such a reconciliation that William at first strove to
bring about ; but he was for a long time foiled by the steadi
ness with which Charles clung to the power whose aid was
needful to carry out the schemes which he was contempla-

8S8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1686
ting. The change of policy, however, which followed on the
fall of the Cabal and the entry of Danby into power raised
new hopes in William's mind ; and his marriage with Mary
dealt Louis what proved to be a fatal blow. James was
without a son, and the marriage with Mary would at any rate
insure William the aid of England in his great enterprise on
his father-in-law's death. But it was impossible to wait for
that event, and though the prince used his new position to
bring Charles round to a decided policy, his efforts remained
fruitless. The storm of the popish plot complicated his posi
tion. In the earlier stages of the Exclusion Bill, when the
Parliament seemed resolved simply to pass over James and
to seat Mary at once on the throne after her uncle's death,
WiUiam stood apart from the struggle, doubtful of its issue,
though prepared to accept the good luck if it came to him.
But the fatal error of Shaftesbury in advancing the claims of
Monmouth forced him into action. To preserve his wife's
right of succession, with all the great issues which were to
come of it, no other course was left than to adopt the cause
of the Duke of York. In the crisis of the struggle, therefore,
William threw his whole weight on the side of James. The
eloquence of Halifax secured the rejection of the Exclusion
Bill, and Halifax was but the mouthpiece of William.
But while England was seething with the madness of the
popish plot and of the royalist reaction, the great European
struggle was drawing nearer and nearer. The patience of
Germany was worn out by the ceaseless aggressions of Louis,
and in 1686 its princes had bound themselves at Augsburg
to resist all further encroachments on the part of France.
From that moment war became inevitable, and WiUiam
watched the course of his father-in-law with redoubled
anxiety. His efforts to insure English aid had utterly failed.
James had renewed his brother's secret treaty with France,
and plunged into a quarrel with his people which of itself
would have prevented him from giving any aid in a struggle
abroad. The prince could only silently look on, with a des
perate hope that James might yet be brought to a nobler
policy. He refused all encouragement to the leading mal
contents, who were already calling on him to interfere in
arms. On the other hand he declined to support the king in

i687] THE REVOLUTION 859
his schemes for the abolition of the Test. If he still cherished
hopes of bringing about a peace between the king and people,
which might enable him to enlist England in the Grand Alli
ance, they vanished in 1687 before the Declaration of Indul
gence. It was at this moment that James called on him to
declare himself in favor of the abolition of the penal laws
and of the Test. But simultaneously with the king's appeal
came letters of warning and promises of support from the
leading English nobles. Some, like the Hydes, simply
assured him of their friendship. The Bishop of London
added promises of support. Others, like Devonshire, Notting
ham, and Shrewsbury, cautiously or openly warned the prince
against compliance with the king's demand. Lord Churchill
announced the resolve of Mary's sister Anne to stand by the
cause of Protestantism. Danby, the leading representative
of the great Tory party, sent urgent warnings. The letters
dictated William's answer. No one, he truly protested,
loathed religious persecution more than he himself did, but
in relaxing political disabilities James called on him to counte
nance an attack on his own religion. " I cannot," he ended,
" concur in what your Majesty desires of me." But William
still shrank from the plan of an intervention in arms. Gen
eral as the disaffection undoubtedly was, the position of
James seemed fairly secure. He counted on the aid of
France. He had an army of twenty thousand men. Scot
land, disheartened by the faflure of Argyll's rising, could
give no such aid as it gave to the Long ParUament. Ireland
was ready to throw a Catholic army on the western coast. It
was doubtful if in England itself disaffection would turn into
actual rebellion. The " Bloody Circuit " had left its terror on
the Whigs. The Tories and the Churchmen, angered as
they were, were hampered by their doctrine of nonresistance.
William's aim therefore was to discourage all violent counsels,
and to confine himself to organizing such a general opposi
tion as would force James by legal means to reconcile himself
to the country, to abandon his policy at home and abroad,
and to join the alliance against France.
But at this moment the whole course of William's policy
was changed by an unforeseen event. His own patience and
that of the nation rested on the certainty of Mary's succes-

866 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1688
sion. But in the midst of the king's struggle with the Church
it was announced that the queen was again with child. The
news was received with general unbelief, for five years had
passed since the last pregnancy of Mary of Modena. But it
at once forced on a crisis. If, as the Catholics joyously fore
told, the child turned out a boy, and, as was certain, was
brought up a Catholic, the highest Tory had to resolve at last
whether the tyranny under which England lay should go on
forever. The hesitation of the country was at an end.
Danby, loyal above all to the Church and firm in his hatred
of subservience to France, answered for the Tories ; Comp
ton for the High Churchmen, goaded at last into rebellion by
the Declaration of Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire, the
Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion struggle, answered for the
Nonconformists, who were satisfied with William's promise
to procure them toleration, as well as for the general body of
the Whigs. The announcement of the birth of a Prince of
Wales was followed ten days after by a formal invitation to
William to intervene in arms for the restoration of English
liberty and the protection of the Protestant religion ; it was
signed by the representatives of the great parties now united
against a common danger, and by some others, and was car
ried to the Hague by Herbert, the most popular of English
seamen, who had been deprived of his command for a refusal
to vote against the Test. The invitation called on William to
land with an army strong enough to justify those who signed
it in rising in arms. It was sent from London on the day
after the acquittal of the bishops. The general excitement,
the shouts of the boats which covered the river, the bonfires
in every street, showed indeed that the country was on the
eve of revolt. The army itself, on which James had implicitly
relied, suddenly showed its sympathy with the people. James
was at Hounslow when the news of the verdict reached him,
and as he rode from the camp he heard a great shout behind
him. " What is that ? " he asked. " It is nothing," was the
reply, " only the soldiers are glad that the bishops are acquit
ted!" "Do you call that nothing?" grumbled the king. The
shout told him that he stood utterly alone in his realm. The
peerage, the gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the universities,
every lawyer, every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from

i688] THE REVOLUTION 86 1
him. And now his very soldiers forsook him. The most
devoted Catholics pressed him to give way. But to give way
was to change the whole nature of his government. All
show of legal rule had disappeared. Sheriffs, mayors,
magistrates, appointed by the Crown in defiance of a parlia
mentary statute, were no real officers in the eye of the law.
Even ff the Houses were summoned, members returned by
officers such as these could form no legal Parliament.
Hardly a minister of the Crown or a privy councilor exer
cised any lawful authority. James had brought things to
such a pass that the restoration of legal government meant
the absolute reversal of every act he had done. But he was
in no mood to reverse his acts. His temper was only spurred
to a more dogged obstinacy by danger and remonstrance.
He broke up the camp at Hounslow and dispersed its troops
in distant cantonments. He dismissed the two judges who
had favored the acquittal of the bishops. He ordered the
chancellor of each diocese to report the names of the clergy
who had not read the Declaration of Indulgence. But his
will broke fruitlessly against the sullen resistance which met
him on every side. Not a chancellor made a return to the
commissioners, and the commissioners were cowed into inac
tion by the temper of the nation. When the judges who had
displayed their servility to the Crown went on circuit the
gentry refused to meet them. A yet fiercer irritation was
kindled by the king's resolve to supply the place of the Eng
lish troops, whose temper proved unserviceable for his pur
poses, by drafts from the Catholic army which Tyrconnell
had raised in Ireland. Even the Roman Catholic peers at the
council-table protested against this measure ; and six officers
in a single regiment laid down their commissions rather than
enroll the Irish recruits among their men. The ballad of
" LillibuUero," a scurrflous attack on the Irish recruits, was
sung from one end of England to the other.
An outbreak of revolt was in fact inevitable. William was
straining all his resources to gather a fleet and sufficient
forces, while noble after noble made their way to the
Hague. The Earl of Shrewsbury brought ;£2000 towards
the expenses of the expedition. Edward Russell, the repre
sentative of the Whig Earl of Bedford, was followed by the

862 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1688
representatives of great Tory houses, by the sons of the Mar
quis of Winchester, of Lord Danby, of Lord Peterborough,
and by the High Church Lord Macclesfield. At home the
earls of Danby and Devonshire prepared silently with Lord
Lumley for a rising in the north. In spite of the profound
secrecy with which all was conducted, the keen instinct of
Sunderland, who had stooped to purchase continuance in
office at the price of a secret apostasy to Catholicism,
detected the preparations of William ; and the sense that
his master's ruin was at hand encouraged him to tell every
secret of James on the promise of a pardon for the crimes to
which he had lent himself. James alone remained stubborn
and insensate as of old. He had no fear of a revolt unaided
by the Prince of Orange, and he believed that the threat of a
French attack on Holland would render William's departure
impossible. But in September the long-delayed war began,
and by the greatest political error of his reign Louis threw
his forces not on Holland, but on Germany. The Dutch at
once felt themselves secure ; the States-General gave their
sanction to William's project, and the armament he had pre
pared gathered rapidly in the Scheldt. The news no sooner
reached England than the king passed from obstinacy to
panic. By drafts from Scotland and Ireland he had mus
tered forty thousand men, but the temper of the troops
robbed him of all trust in them. Help from France was
now out of the question. He could only fall back on the
older policy of a union with the Tory party and the party
of the Church. He personaUy appealed for support to the
bishops. He dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. He
replaced the magistrates he had driven from office. He
restored their franchises to the towns. The chancellor car
ried back the Charter of London in state into the city. The
Bishop of Winchester was sent to replace the expelled Fel
lows of Magdalen. Catholic chapels and Jesuit schools were
ordered to be closed. Sunderland pressed for the instant
calling of a Parliament, but to James the counsel seemed
treachery, and he dismissed Sunderland from office. In
answer to a declaration from the Prince of Orange, which
left the question of the legitimacy of the Prince of Wales
tp ParUament, he produced before the peers who were in

i688] THE REVOLUTION 863
London proofs of the birth of his chfld. But concessions
and proofs came too late. Detained by iU winds, beaten back
on its first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of six
hundred transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored
on the fifth of November in Torbay ; and his army, thirteen
thousand men strong, entered Exeter amidst the shouts of its
citizens. His coming had not been looked for in the west,
and for a week no great landowner joined him. But nobles
and squires soon flocked to his camp, and the adhesion of
Plymouth secured his rear. Insurrection broke out in Scot
land. Danby, dashing at the head of a hundred horsemen
into York, gave the signal for a rising. The militia met his
appeal with shouts of " A free Parliament and the Protestant
religion ! " Peers and gentry flocked to his standard ; and a
march on Nottingham united his forces to those under Devon
shire, who had mustered at Derby the great lords of the
midland and eastern counties. Everywhere the revolt was
triumphant. The garrison of Hull declared for a free Par
liament. The Duke of Norfolk appeared at the head of
three hundred gentlemen in the market-place at Norwich.
At Oxford townsmen and gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace
with uproarious welcome. Bristol threw open its gates to
the Prince of Orange, who advanced steadily on Salisbury,
where James had mustered his forces. But the king's army,
broken by dissensions and mutual suspicions among its lead
ers, fell back in disorder ; and the desertion of Lord Churchill
was followed by that of so many other officers that James
abandoned the struggle in despair. He fled to London to
hear that his daughter Anne had left St. James's to join
Danby at Nottingham. " God help me," cried the wretched
king, "for my own children have forsaken me! " His spirit
was utterly broken; and though he promised to call the
Houses together, and despatched commissioners to Hunger-
ford to treat with William on the terms of a free Parliament,
in his heart he had resolved on flight. Parliament, he said
to the few who still clung to him, would force on him con
cessions he could not endure ; and he only waited for news
of the escape of his wife and child to make his way to the
Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy lay ready to carry him to
France. Some rough fishermen, who took him for a Jesuit,

864 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1689
pre-vented his escape, and a troop of Life Guards brought
him back in safety to London; but it was the policy of
William and his advisers to further a flight which removed
their chief difficulty out of the way. It would have been
hard to depose James had he remained, and perilous to keep
him prisoner ; but the entry of the Dutch troops into London,
the silence of the prince, and an order to leave St. James's
filled the king with fresh terrors, and taking advantage of
the means of escape which were almost openly placed at his
disposal, James a second time quitted London and embarked
on the 23d of December unhindered for France.
Before flying James had burnt most of the writs convok
ing the new Parliament, had disbanded his army, and de
stroyed so far as he could all means of government. For
a few days there was a wild burst of panic and outrage in
London, but the orderly instinct of the people soon reasserted
itself. The Lords who were at the moment in London pro
vided on their own authority as privy councilors for the more
pressing needs of administration, and resigned their authority
into William's hands on his arrival. The difficulty which
arose from the absence of any person legally authorized to
call Parliament together was got over by convoking the
House of Peers, and forming a second body of all members
who had sat in the Commons in the reign of Charles the
Second, with the aldermen and common councilors of Lon
don. Both bodies requested William to take on himself the
provisional government of the kingdom, and to issue circular
letters inviting the electors of every town and county to send
up representatives to a convention which met in January,
1689. In the new convention both Houses were found
equally resolved against any recall of or negotiation with
the fallen king. They were united in entrusting a provi
sional authority to the Prince of Orange. But with this step
their unanimity ended. The Whigs, who formed a majority
in the Commons, voted a resolution which, iUogical and incon
sistent as it seemed, was well adapted to unite in its favor
every element of the opposition to James : the Churchman
who was simply scared by his bigotry, the Tory who doubted
the right of a nation to depose its king, the Whig who held
the theory of a contract between king and people, They

1689] THE REVOLUTION 865
voted that King James, " ha^ving endeavored to subvert the
constitution of this kingdom by breaking the original con
tract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits
and other ¦wicked persons ha^ving violated the fundamental
laws, and ha^ving ¦withdrawn himseff out of the kingdom, has
abdicated the Government, and that the throne is thereby
vacant." But in the Lords, where the Tories were stfll in the
ascendent, the resolution was fiercely debated. Archbishop
Sancroft with the high Tories held that no crime could bring
about a forfeiture of the Crown, and that James stfll re
mained king, but that his tyranny had given the nation a
right to ¦withdraw from him the actual exercise of govern
ment and to entrust his functions to a regency. The moder
ate Tories under Danby's guidance admitted that James had
ceased to be king, but denied that the throne could be vacant,
and contended that from the moment of his abdication the
sovereignty vested in his daughter Mary. It was in vain
that the eloquence of Halffax backed the Whig peers in
struggling for the resolution of the Commons as it stood.
The plan of a regency was lost by a single vote, and Dan
by's scheme was adopted by a large majority. But both the
Tory courses foimd a sudden obstacle in WUliam. He de
cUned to be regent. He had no mind, he said to Danby, to
be his wffe's gentleman usher. Mary, on the other hand, re
fused to accept the Crown save in conjunction with her hus
band. The two declarations put an end to the question. It
was agreed that WUUam and Mary should be acknowledged
as joint sovereigns, but that the actual administration should
rest ¦with WUliam alone. A parliamentary committee in
which the most active member was John Somers, a young
la^wyer who had distinguished himself in the trial of the
bishops and who was destined to play a great part in later
history, drew up a Declaration of Rights which was presented
on February 13th to WUUam and Mary by the two Houses in
the banqueting room at Whitehall. It recited the misgovem
ment of James, his abdication, and the resolve of the Lords
and Commons to assert the ancient rights and liberties of
EngUsh subjects. It condemned as fllegal his establishment
of an ecclesiastical commission, and his raising an army with
out parUamentary sanction. It denied the right of any king

866 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1689
to suspend or dispense with laws, or to exact money, save by
consent of Parliament. It asserted for the subject a right to
petition, to a free choice of representatives in Parliament, and
to a pure and merciful administration of justice. It declared
the right of both Houses to liberty of debate. It demanded
securities for the free exercise of their religion by all Protes
tants, and bound the new sovereign to maintain the Protestant
religion and the law and liberties of the realm. In full faith
that these principles would be accepted and maintained by
WiUiam and Mary, it ended with declaring the Prince and Prin
cess of Orange king and queen of England. At the close
of the declaration, Halifax, in the name of the estates of the
realm, prayed them to receive the Crown. William accepted
the offer in his own name and his wife's, and declared in a
few words the resolve of both to maintain the laws and to
govern by advice of Parliament.
Section VIII. — The Grand Alliance, 1689-1697
The blunder of Louis in choosing Germany instead of
Holland for his point of attack was all but atoned for by the
brilliant successes with which he opened the war. The whole
country west of the Rhine was soon in his hands ; his armies
were masters of the Palatinate, and penetrated even to Wiir
temberg. His hopes had never been higher than at the mo
ment when the arrival of James at St. Germain dashed all
hope to the ground. Louis was at once thrown back on a
war of defense, and the brutal ravages which marked the
retreat of his armies from the Rhine revealed the bitterness
with which his pride stooped to the necessity. The Palati
nate was turned into a desert. The same ruin fell on the
stately palace of the elector at Heidelberg, on the venerable
tombs of the emperors at Speyer, on the town of the trader,
on the hut of the vine-dresser. In accepting the English
throne WUliam had been moved not so much by personal
ambition as by the prospect of firmly knitting together Eng
land and Holland, the two great Protestant powers whose
fleets held the mastery of the sea, as his diplomacy had knit
all Germany together a year before in the treaty of Augs
burg. But the advance from such a union to the formation

1689] THE REVOLUTION 867
of the European alliance against France was stfll delayed by
the reluctance of the two branches of the House of Austria
in Germany and Spain to league with Protestant states
against a Catholic king, whfle England cared little to join in
an attack on France with the view of saving the liberties of
Europe. All hesitation, however, passed away when the re
ception of James as stiU king of England at St. Germain
gave England just ground for a declaration of war, a step in
which it was soon followed by Holland, and the two coun
tries at once agreed to stand by one another in their struggle
against France. The adhesion of Spain and the court of
Vienna in 1689 to this agreement completed the Grand Alli
ance which William had designed ; and when Savoy joined
the allies France found herself girt in on every side save that
of Switzerland with a ring of foes. The Scandinavian king
doms alone stood aloof from the confederacy of Europe, and
their neutrality was unfriendly to France. Louis was left
without a single ally save the Turk ; but the energy and
quickness of movement which sprang from the concentration
of the power of France in a single hand still left the contest
an equal one. The empire was slow to move ; the court of
Vienna was distracted by a war with the Turks ; Spain was
all but powerless ; Holland and England were alone earnest
in the struggle, and England could as yet give little aid in
the war. One English brigade, indeed, formed from the regi
ments raised by James, joined the Dutch army on the Sam-
bre, and distinguished itself under Churchill, who had been
rewarded for his treason by the title of Earl of Marlborough,
in a brisk skirmish with the enemy at Walcourt. But Will
iam had as yet grave work to do at home.
In England not a sword had been drawn for James. In
Scotland his tyranny had been yet greater than in England,
and so far as the Lowlands went the fall of his tyranny was
as rapid and complete. No sooner had he called his troops
southward to meet William's invasion than Edinburgh rose in
revolt. The western peasants were at once up in arms, and
the Episcopalian clergy, who had been the instruments of
the Stuart misgovemment ever since the Restoration, were
rabbled and driven from their parsonages in every parish.
The news of these disorders forced William to act, though he
56

868 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1689
was without a show of legal authority over Scotland. On the
advice of the Scotch Lords present in London, he ventured to
summon a convention similar to that which had been sum
moned in England, and on his own responsibility to set aside
the laws which excluded Presbyterians from the Scotch Par
liament. This convention resolved that James had forfeited
the Crown by misgovemment, and offered it to William and
Mary. The offer was accompanied by a Claim of Right
framed on the model of the Declaration of Rights to which
they had consented in England, but closing with a demand
for the abolition of prelacy. Both Crown and claim were
accepted, and the arrival of the Scotch regiments which Will
iam had brought from Holland gave strength to the new
Government. Its strength was to be roughly tested. John
Graham of Claverhouse, whose cruelties in the persecution of
the western Covenanters had been rewarded by high com
mand in the Scotch army and the title of Viscount Dundee,
withdrew with a few troopers from Edinburgh to the High
lands, and appealed to the clans. In the Highlands nothing
was known of English government or misgovemment : all
that the revolution meant to a Highlander was the restora
tion of the House of Argyll. To many of the clans it meant
the restoration of lands which had been granted them on the
earl's attainder ; and the Macdonalds, the Macleans, the Cam-
erons, were as ready to join Dundee in fighting the Campbells
and the Government which upheld them as they had been
ready to join Montrose in the same cause forty years before.
They were soon in arms. As WiUiam's Scotch regiments
under General Mackay climbed the pass of Killiecrankie,
Dundee charged them at the head of three thousand clans
men, and swept them in headlong rout down the glen. But
his death in the moment of victory broke the only bond which
held the Highlanders together, and in a few weeks the host
which had spread terror through the Lowlands melted help
lessly away. In the next summer Mackay was able to build
the strong post of Fort WiUiam in the very heart of the dis
affected country, and his offers of money and pardon brought
about the submission of the clans. Sir John Dalrymple, the
Master of Stair, in whose hands the government of Scotland
at this time mainly rested, had hoped that a refusal of the

1692] THE REVOLUTION 869
oath of allegiance would give grounds for a war of extermina
tion, and free Scotland forever from its terror of the High
landers. He had provided for the expected refusal by orders
of a ruthless severity. " Your troops," he wrote to the officer
in command, " will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber,
Lochiel's lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. Your
powers shall be large enough. I hope the soldiers will not
trouble the Government with prisoners." But his hopes were
disappointed by the readiness with which the clans accepted
the offers of the Government. All submitted in good time
save Macdonald of Glencoe, whose pride delayed his taking
of the oath till six days after the latest date fixed by the
proclamation. Fofled in his larger hopes of destruction,
Dalrymple seized eagerly on the pretext given by Mac
donald, and an order "for the extirpation of that sect of
robbers" was laid before WiUiam and received the royal
signature. "The work," wrote the Master of Stair to Colonel
Hamilton, who undertook it, "must be secret and sudden."
The troops were chosen from among the Campbells, the
deadly foes of the clansmen of Glencoe, and quartered peace
fully among the Macdonalds for twelve days, till all suspicion
of their errand disappeared. At daybreak they fell on their
hosts, and in a few moments thirty of the clansfolk lay dead
on the snow. The rest, sheltered by a storm, escaped to the
mountains, to perish for the most part of cold and hunger.
" The only thing I regret," said the Master of Stair when the
news reached him, " is that any got away." Whatever horror
the Massacre of Glencoe has roused in later days, few save
Dalrymple knew of it at the time. The peace of the High
lands enabled the work of reorganization to go on quietly at
Edinburgh. In accepting the Claim of Right with its re
pudiation of prelacy, William had in effect restored the Pres
byterian Church, and its restoration was accompanied by the
revival of the Westminster Confession as a standard of faith,
and by the passing of an act which abolished lay patronage.
Against the Toleration Act which the king proposed, the
Scotch Parliament stood firm. But the king was as firm in
his purpose as the Parliament. So long as he reigned, Will
iam declared in memorable words, there should be no perse
cution for conscience' sake. "We never could be of that

870 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1689
mind that violence was suited to the advancing of true re
ligion, nor do we intend that our authority shall ever be a tool
to the irregular passions of any party."
It was not in Scotland, however, but in Ireland that James
and Louis hoped to arrest William's progress. In the middle
of his reign, when his chief aim was to provide against the
renewed depression of his fellow religionists at his death by
any Protestant successor, James had resolved (if we may trust
the statement of the French ambassador) to place Ireland in
such a position of independence that she might serve as a
refuge for his Catholic subjects. Lord Clarendon was dis
missed from the lord-lieutenancy and succeeded in the
charge of the island by the Catholic Earl of Tyrconnell.
The new governor, who was raised to a dukedom, went
roughly to work. Every Englishman was turned out of
office. Every judge, every privy councilor, every mayor
and alderman of a borough was required to be a Catholic and
an Irishman. The Irish army, raised to the number of fifty
thousand men and purged of its Protestant soldiers, was
entrusted to Catholic officers. In a few months the English
ascendency was overthrown, and the life and fortune of the
English settlers were at the mercy of the natives, on whom
they had trampled since CromweU's day. The king's flight
and the agitation among the native Irish at the news spread
panic therefore through the island. Another massacre was
believed to be at hand; and fifteen hundred Protestant fami
lies, chiefly from the south, fled in terror over sea. The Prot
estants of the north, on the other hand, drew together at
Enniskillen and Londonderry, and prepared for self-defense.
The outbreak, however, was still delayed, and for two months
Tyrconnell intrigued with William's Government. But his
aim was simply to gain time. He was, in fact, inviting James
to return to Ireland, and at the news of his coming with
officers, ammunition, and a supply of money provided by the
French king Tyrconnell threw off the mask. A flag was
hoisted over Dublin Castle, with the words embroidered on
its folds, " Now or Never." The signal called every Catholic
to arms. The maddened natives flung themselves on the
plunder which their masters had left, and in a few weeks
havoc was done, the French envoy told Louis, which it would

1689] THE REVOLUTION 87 1
take years to repair. Meanwhfle James saUed from France
to Kinsale. His aim was to carry out an invasion of England
with the fifty thousand men that Tyrconnell was said to have
at his disposal. But his hopes were ruined by the war of
races which had broken out. To Tyrconnell and the Irish
leaders the king's plans were utterly distasteful. Their policy
was that of Ireland for the Irish, and the first step was to
drive out the Englishmen who still stood at bay in Ulster.
Half of Tyrconnell's army, therefore, had been sent against
Londonderry, where the bulk of the fugitives found shelter
behind a weak wall, manned by a few old guns, and destitute
even of a ditch. But the seven thousand desperate English
men behind the wall made up for its weakness. So fierce
were their sallies, so crushing the repulse of his attack, that
the king's general, Hamilton, at last turned the siege into a
blockade. The Protestants died of hunger in the streets, and
of the fever which comes of hunger, but the cry of the town
was still, " No Surrender." The siege had lasted a hundred
and five days, and only two days' food remained in London
derry, when on the 28th of July an English ship broke the
boom across the river, and the besiegers sullenly withdrew.
Their defeat was turned into a rout by the men of Enniskillen,
who struggled through a bog to charge an Irish force of
double their number at Newtown Butler, and drove horse
^nd foot before them in a panic which soon spread through
Hamilton's whole army. The routed soldiers fell back on
Dublin, where James lay helpless in the hands of the frenzied
Parliament which he had summoned. Every member returned
was an Irishman and a Catholic, and their one aim was to
undo the successive confiscations which had given the soil to
English settlers and to get back Ireland for the Irish. The
Act of Settlement on which all title to property rested was at
once repealed, in spite of the king's reluctance. Three thou
sand Protestants of name and fortune were massed together
in the hugest BiU of Attainder which the world has seen. In
spite of James's promise of religious freedom, the Protestant
clergy were driven from their parsonages. Fellows and
scholars were turned out of Trinity College, and the French
envoy, the Count of Avaux, dared even to propose that if any
Protestant rising took place on the English descent, as was

872 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1689
expected, it should be met by a general massacre of the Prot
estants who stfll lingered in the districts which had submitted
to James. To his credit the king shrank horror-struck from
the proposal. " I cannot be so cruel," he said, " as to cut
their throats while they live peaceably under my government."
" Mercy to Protestants," was the cold reply, " is cruelty to
Catholics." Through the long agony of Londonderry, through the pro
scription and bloodshed of the new Irish rule, William was
forced to look helplessly on. The best troops in the army
which had been mustered at Hounslow had been sent with
Marlborough to the Sambre ; and the political embarrass
ments which grew up around the Government made it impos
sible to spare a man of those who remained. The great
ends of the Revolution were indeed secured, even amidst
the confusion and intrigue which we shall have to describe,
by the common consent of all. On the great questions of
civil liberty Whig and Tory were now at one. The Declara
tion of Rights was turned into the Bill of Rights by the con
vention which had now become a Parliament, and the passing
of this measure in 1689 restored to the monarchy the char
acter which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts.
The right of the people through its representatives to depose
the king, to change the order of succession, and to set on the
throne whom they would was now established. All claim of
divine right, or hereditary right independent of the law, was
formally put an end to by the election of William and Mary.
Since their day no English sovereign has been able to advance
any claim to the Crown save a claim which rested on a par
ticular clause in a particular act of Parliament. WiUiam,
Mary, and Anne were sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill
of Rights. George the First and his successors have been
sovereigns solely by virtue of the Act of Settlement. An
English monarch is now as much the creature of an Act of
Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm. Nor
was the older character of the kingship alone restored. The
older constitution returned with it. Bitter experience had
taught England the need of restoring to the ParUament its
absolute power over taxation. The grant of revenue for life
to the last two kings had been the secret of their antinational

1689] THE REVOLUTION 873
policy, and the first act of the new legislature was to restrict
the grant of the royal revenue to a term of four years. Will
iam was bitterly galled by the provision. " The gentlemen
of England trusted King James," he said, " who was an en
emy of their religion and their laws, and they will not trust
me, by whom their religion and their laws have been pre
served." But the only change brought about in the Parlia
ment by this burst of royal anger was a resolve henceforth
to make the vote of supplies an annual one, a resolve which,
in spite of the slight changes introduced by the next Tory
Parliament, soon became an invariable rule. A change of
almost as great importance established the control of Parlia
ment over the army. The hatred to a standing army which
had begun under Cromwell had only deepened under James ;
but with the Continental war the existence of an army was a
necessity. As yet, however, it was a force which had no legal
existence. The soldier was simply an ordinary subject; there
were no legal means of punishing strictly military offenses or
of providing for military discipline : and the assumed power
of bflleting soldiers in private houses had been taken away
by the law. The difficulty both of Parliament and the army
was met by the Mutiny Act. The powers requisite for disci
pline in the army were conferred by Parliament on its officers,
and provision was made for the pay of the force, but both
pay and disciplinary powers were granted only for a single
year. The Mutiny Act, like the grant of supplies, has re
mained annual ever since the Revolution ; and as it is impos
sible for the State to exist without supplies, or for the army to
exist without discipline and pay, the annual assembly of Par
liament has become a matter of absolute necessity. The great
est constitutional change which our history has witnessed was
thus brought about in an indirect but perfectly efficient way.
The dangers which experience had lately shown lay in the
Parliament itself were met with far less skill. Under Charles,
England had seen a Parliament, which had been returned in
a moment of reaction, maintained without fresh election for
eighteen years. A Triennial Bill, which limited the duration
of a Parliament to three, was passed with little opposition,
but fell before the dislike and veto of William. To counter
act the influence which a king might obtain by crowding the

874 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1689
Commons with officials proved a yet harder task. A Place
Bfll, which excluded all persons in the employment of the
State from a seat in Parliament, was defeated, and wisely
defeated, in the Lords. The modern course of providing
against a pressure from the court or the administration by
excluding all minor officials, but of preserving the hold of
Parliament over the great officers of state by admitting them
into its body, seems as yet to have occurred to nobody. It
is equally strange that whfle vindicating its right of parlia
mentary control over the public revenue and the army, the
BUl of Rights should have left by its silence the control of
trade to the Crown. It was only a few years later, in the
discussions on the charter granted to the East India Com
pany, that the Houses sUently claimed and obtained the right
of regulating English commerce.
The religious results of the revolution were hardly less
weighty than the political. In the common struggle against
Catholicism Churchman and Nonconformist had found them
selves, as we have seen, strangely at one; and schemes of
comprehension became suddenly popular. But with the fall
of James the union of the two bodies abruptly ceased ; and
the establishment of a Presbyterian Church in Scotland, to
gether with the " rabbling " of the Episcopalian clergy in its
western shires, revived the old bitterness of the clergy towards
the dissidents. The Convocation rejected the scheme of the
Latitudinarians for such modifications of the prayer-book as
would render possible a return of the Nonconformists, and a
Comprehension Bill which was introduced into Parliament
failed to pass in spite of the king's strenuous support. Will
iam's attempt to partially admit Dissenters to civU equality
by a repeal of the Corporation Act proved equally fruitless ;
but the passing of a Toleration Act in 1689 practically estab
lished freedom of worship. Whatever the religious effect of
the failure of the Latitudinarian schemes may have been, its
political effect has been of the highest value. At no time
had the Church been so strong or so popular as at the Rev
olution, and the reconciliation of the Nonconformists would
have doubled its strength. It is doubtful whether the disin
clination to all political change which has characterized it
during the last two hundred, years would have been affected

i689] THE REVOLUTION 875
by such a change ; but it is certain that the power of opposi
tion which it has wielded would have been enormously in
creased. As it was, the Toleration Act established a group
of religious bodies whose religious opposition to the Church
forced them to support the measures of progress which the
Church opposed. With religious forces on the one side and
on the other England has escaped the great stumbling-block
in the way of nations where the cause of religion has become
identified with that of political reaction. A secession from
within its own ranks weakened the Church still more. The
doctrine of divine right had a strong hold on the body of the
clergy, though they had been driven from their other favorite
doctrine of passive obedience, and the requirement of the
oath of allegiance to the new sovereigns from all persons in
public functions was resented as an intolerable wrong by
almost every parson. Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canter
bury, with a few prelates and a large number of the higher
clergy, absolutely refused the oath, treated all who took it as
schismatics, and on their deprivation by Act of Parliament
regarded themselves and their adherents, who were known as
Nonjurors, as the only members of the true Church of Eng
land. The bulk of the clergy bowed to necessity, but their
bitterness against the new Government was fanned into a
flame by the religious policy announced in this assertion of
the supremacy of Parliament over the Church, and the deposi
tion of bishops by an act of the legislature. The new prelates,
such as Tillotson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Burnet,
Bishop of Salisbury, were men of learning and piety ; but it
was only among Whigs and Latitudinarians that WiUiam and
his successors could find friends among the clergy, and it was
mainly to these that they were driven to entrust the higher
offices of the Church. The result was a severance between
the higher dignitaries and the mass of the clergy, which broke
the strength of the Church ; and till the time of George the
Third its fiercest strife was waged within its own ranks. But
the resentment at the measure which brought this strife about
already added to the difficulties which WUliam had to en
counter. Yet greater difficulties arose from the temper of his Parlia
ment. In the Commons the bulk of the members were Whigs,

876 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1689
and their first aim was to redress the wrongs which the Whig
party had suffered during the last two reigns. The attainder
of Lord Russell was reversed. The judgments against Sid
ney, Cornish, and Alice Lisle were annulled. In spite of the
opinion of the judges that the sentence on Titus Oates had
been against law, the Lords refused to reverse it, but even
Oates received a pardon and a pension. The Whigs, however,
wanted not merely the redress of wrongs but the punishment
of the wrong-doers. Whig and Tory had been united, indeed,
by the tyranny of James ; both parties had shared in the Revo
lution, and William had striven to prolong their union by join
ing the leaders of both in his first Ministry. He named the
Tory Earl of Danby lord president, made the Whig Earl of
Shrewsbury secretary of state, and gave the privy seal to
Lord Halifax, a trimmer between the one party and the other.
But save in a moment of common oppression or common
danger union was impossible. The Whigs clamored for the
punishment of Tories who had joined in the illegal acts of
Charles and of James, and refused to pass the Bill of General
Indemnity which William laid before them. William on the
other hand was resolved that no bloodshed or proscription
should follow the revolution which had placed him on the
throne. His temper was averse from persecution ; he had no
great love for either of the battling parties ; and above all he
saw that internal strife would be fatal to the effective prose
cution of the war. While the cares of his new throne were
chaining him to England, the confederacy of which he was
the guiding spirit was proving too slow and too loosely com
pacted to cope with the swift and resolute movements of
France. The armies of Louis had fallen back within their
own borders, but only to turn fiercely at bay. Even the
junction of the English and Dutch fleets failed to assure
them the mastery of the seas. The English navy was para
lyzed by the corruption which prevailed in the public service,
as well as by the sloth and incapacity of its commander. The
services of Admiral Herbert at the Revolution had been re
warded by the earldom of Torrington and the command of
the fleet ; but his indolence suffered the seas to be swept by
French privateers, and his want of seamanship was shown in
an indecisive engagement with a French squadron in Bantry

1689] THE REVOLUTION, 877
Bay. Meanwhile Louis was straining every nerve to win the
command of the Channel ; the French dockyards were turn
ing out ship after ship, and the galleys of the Mediterranean
fleet were brought round to reenforce the fleet at Brest. A
French victory off the English coast would have brought
serious political danger, for the reaction of popular feeling
which had begun in favor of James had been increased by the
pressure of the war, by the taxation, by the expulsion of the
Nonjurors and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of
the Tories at the spirit of vengeance which broke out among
the triumphant Whigs, and above all by the presence of James
in Ireland. A new party, that of the Jacobites or adherents
of King James, was just forming; and it was feared that a
Jacobite rising would follow the appearance of a French fleet
on the coast. In such a state of affairs William judged rightly
that to yield to the Whig thirst for vengeance would have been
to ruin his cause. He dissolved the Parliament, which had
refused to pass a BUl of Indemnity for all political offenses,
and called a new one to meet in March. The result of the
election proved that he had only expressed the general temper
of the nation. The boroughs had been alienated from the
Whigs by their refusal to pass the Indemnity, and their at
tempts to secure the Corporations for their own party ; while
in the counties parson after parson led his flock to the poll
against the Whigs. In the new Parliament the bulk of the
members proved Tories. William accepted the resignation of
the more violent Whigs among his councilors, and placed
Danby at the head of affairs. In May the Houses gave their
assent to the Act of Grace. The king's aim in this sudden
change of front was not only to meet the change in the
national spirit, but to secure a momentary lull in English
faction which would suffer him to strike at the rebeUion in
Ireland. While James was king in Dublin it was hopeless to
crush treason at home; and so urgent was the danger, so
precious every moment in the present juncture of affairs, that
William could trust no one to bring the work as sharply to an
end as was needful save himself.
In the autumn of the year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg,
an exiled Huguenot who had followed WUliam to England,
had been sent with a small force to Ulster, but his landing

878 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1690
had only roused Ireland to a fresh enthusiasm. The ranks
of the Irish army were filled up at once, and James was able
to face the Duke at Drogheda with a force double that of his
opponent. Schomberg, whose men were all raw recruits
whom it was hardly possible to trust at such odds in the field,
entrenched himself at Dundalk, in a camp where pestilence
soon swept off half his men, till winter parted the two armies.
During the next six months James, whose treasury was utterly
exhausted, strove to fill it by a coinage of brass money, while
his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder. WUliam meanwhile
was toiling hard on the other side of the Channel to bring the
Irish war to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during
the winter with men and stores, and when the spring came
his force reached thirty thousand men. Louis, too, felt the
importance of the coming struggle; and seven thousand
picked Frenchmen, under the Count of Lauzun, were de
spatched to reenforce the army of James. They had hardly
arrived when William himself landed at Carrickfergus, and
pushed rapidly to the south. His columns soon caught sight
of the Irish forces, posted strongly behind the Boyne. " I
am glad to see you, gentlemen," William cried with a burst
of delight; "and if you escape me now the fault will be
mine." Early next morning the whole English army plunged
into the river. The Irish foot broke in a sudden panic, but
the horse made so gallant a stand that Schomberg fell in re
pulsing its charge, and for a time the English center was held
in check. With the arrival of William, however, at the head
of the left wing all was over. James, who had throughout
been striving to secure the withdrawal of his troops rather
than frankly to meet William's onset, forsook his troops as
they fell back in retreat upon Dublin, and took ship at Kin
sale for France.
But though the beaten army was forced by William's pur
suit to abandon the capital, it was still resolute to fight. The
incapacity of the Stuart sovereign moved the scorn even of his
followers. " Change kings with us," an Irish officer replied
to an Englishman who taunted him with the panic of the
Boyne, " change kings with us and we will fight you again."
They did better in fighting without a king. The French,
indeed, withdrew scornfully from the routed army as it stood

1691] THE REVOLUTION 879
at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. " Do you call these
ramparts ? " sneered Lauzun ; " the English will need no can
non ; they may batter them down with roasted apples." But
twenty thousand men remained with Sarsfield, a brave and
skflful officer who had seen service in England and abroad ;
and his daring surprise of the English ammunition train, his
repulse of a desperate attempt to storm the town, and the
approach of the winter, forced WUliam to raise the siege.
The course of the war abroad recalled him to England, and
he left his work to one who was quietly proving himself a
master in the art of war. Churchfll, now Earl of Marlbor
ough, had been recalled from Flanders to command a divi
sion which landed in the south of Ireland. Only a few days
remained before the operations were interrupted by the
coming of winter, but the few days were turned to good
account. Cork, with five thousand men behind its walls, was
taken in forty-eight hours. Kinsale a few days later shared
the fate of Cork. Winter indeed left Connaught and the
greater part of Munster in Irish hands ; the French force re
mained untouched, and the coming of a new French general,
St. Ruth, with arms and supplies encouraged the insurgents.
But the summer of 1691 had hardly opened when Ginkell,
the new English general, by his seizure of Athlone forced on
a battle with the combined French and Irish forces at Augh-
rim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his army was
utterly broken. The defeat left Limerick alone in its revolt,
and even Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of a surrender.
Two treaties were drawn up between the Irish and English
generals. By the first it was stipulated that the Catholics of
Ireland should enjoy such privfleges in the exercise of their
reUgion as were consistent with law, or as they had enjoyed
in the reign of Charles the Second. The Crown pledged
itself also to summon a Parliament as soon as possible, and to
endeavor to procure to the good Roman Catholics security
"from any disturbance upon the account of the said religion."
By the military treaty those of Sarsfield's soldiers who would
were suffered to follow him to France ; and ten thousand
men, the whole of his force, chose exfle rather than Ufe in a
land where all hope of national freedom was lost. When the
wild cry of the women who stood watching their departure

880 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1690
was hushed, the sflence of death settled down upon Ireland.
For a hundred years the country remained at peace, but the
peace was a peace of despair. The most terrible legal
tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned avenged the
rising under Tyrconnell. The conquered people, in Swift's
bitter words of contempt, became " hewers of wood and
drawers of water " to their conquerors. Though local risings
of these serfs perpetually spread terror among the English
settlers, all dream of a national revolt passed away ; and till
the eve of the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a
source of political danger to England.
Short as the struggle of Ireland had been, it had served
Louis well, for while William was busy at the Boyne a series
of brilliant successes was restoring the fortunes of France.
In Flanders the Duke of Luxembourg won the victory of
Fleurus. In Italy Marshal Catinat defeated the Duke of
Savoy. A success of even greater moment, the last victory
which France was fated to win at sea, placed for an instant
the very throne of Wflliam in peril. William never showed a
cooler courage than in quitting England to fight James in Ire
land at a moment when the Jacobites were only looking for
the appearance of a French fleet on the coast to rise in revolt.
He was hardly on his way in fact when Tourvflle, the French
admiral, put to sea with strict orders to fight. He was met
by the English and Dutch fleet at Beachy Head, and the
Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly outnum
bered, it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid ; but Her
bert, whether from cowardice or treason, looked idly on whfle
his allies were crushed, and withdrew at nightfall to seek
shelter in the Thames. The danger was as great as the
shame, for Tourville's victory left him master of the Channel,
and his presence off the coast of Devon invited the Jacobites
to revolt. But whatever the discontent of Tories and Non
jurors against William might be, all signs of it vanished with
the landing of the French. The burning of Teignmouth by
Tourville's sailors called the whole coast to arms ; and the
news of the Boyne put an end to all dreams of a rising in favor
of James. The natural reaction against a cause which looked
for foreign aid gave a new strength for the moment to WUl
iam in England ; but UI luck stfll hung around the Grand AUi-

1692] THE REVOLUTION 88 1
ance. So urgent was the need for his presence abroad that
WiUiam left, as we have seen, his work in Ireland undone,
and crossed in the spring of 1691 to Flanders. It was the
first time since the days of Henry the Eighth that an English
king had appeared on the Continent at the head of an English
army. But the slowness of the allies again baffled William's
hopes. He was forced to look on with a small army while a
hundred thousand Frenchmen closed suddenly around Mons,
the strongest fortress of the Netherlands, and made them
selves masters of it in the presence of Louis. The humilia
tion was great, and for the moment all trust in William's
fortune faded away. In England the blow was felt more
heavily than elsewhere. The Jacobite hopes which had been
crushed by the indignation at TourvUle's descent woke up to
a fresh life. Leading Tories, such as Lord Clarendon and
Lord Dartmouth, opened communications with James ; and
some of the leading Whigs, with the Earl of Shrewsbury at
their head, angered at what they regarded as William's ingrat
itude, followed them in their course. In Lord Marlborough's
mind the state of affairs raised hopes of a double treason.
His design was to bring about a revolt which would drive
Wflliam from the throne without replacing James, and give
the Crown to his daughter Anne, whose affection for Marlbor
ough's wife would place the real government of England in
his hands. A yet greater danger lay in the treason of Admiral
Russell, who had succeeded Torrington in command of the
fleet. Russell's defection would have removed the one obsta
cle to a ne^w attempt which James was resolved to make for
the recovery of his throne, and which Louis had been brought
to support. In the beginning of 1 692 an army of thirty thousand
troops was quartered in Normandy in readiness for a descent
on the English coast. Transports were provided for their
passage, and Tourvflle was ordered to cover it with the French
fleet at Brest. Though RusseU had twice as many ships as
his opponent, the beUef in his purpose of betraying WiUiam's
cause was so strong that Louis ordered Tourvflle to engage
the allied fleets at any disadvantage. But whatever Russell's
intrigues may have meant, he was no Herbert. " Do not
think I wUl let the French triumph over us in our own seas,"
he warned his Jacobite correspondents. " If I meet them I

882 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1692
will fight them, even though King James were on board."
When the allied fieets met the French off the heights
of Barfleur his fierce attack proved Russell true to his
word. Tourville's fifty vessels were no match for the ninety
ships of the allies, and after five hours of a brave strug
gle the French were forced to fly along the rocky coast
of the Cotentin. Twenty-two of their vessels reached St.
Malo ; thirteen anchored with Tourville in the bays of Cher
bourg and La Hogue; but their pursuers were soon upon
them, and in a bold attack the English boats burnt ship after
ship under the eyes of the French army. All dread of the
invasion was at once at an end ; and the throne of Wflliam
was secured by the detection and suppression of the Jacobite
conspiracy at home which the invasion was intended to sup
port. But the overthrow of the Jacobite hopes was the least
result of the victory of La Hogue. France ceased from that
moment to exist as a great naval power ; for though her fleet
was soon recruited to its former strength, the confidence of
her sailors was lost, and not even Tourville ventured again to
tempt in battle the fortune of the seas. A new hope, too,
dawned on the Grand Alliance. The spell of French triumph
was broken. Namur indeed surrendered to Louis, and the
Duke of Luxembourg maintained the glory of the French
arms by a victory over William at Steinkirk. But the battle
was a useless butchery in which the conquerors lost as many
men as the conquered. France felt herself disheartened and
exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public misery
was extreme. "The country," Fenelon wrote frankly to
Louis, "is a vast hospital." In 1693 the campaign of Louis
in the Netherlands proved a fruitless one, and Luxembourg
was hardly able to beat off the fierce attack of William at
Neerwinden. For the first time in his long career of pros
perity Louis bent his pride to seek peace at the sacrifice of
his conquests, and though the effort was vain it told that the
daring hopes of French ambition were at an end, and that the
work of the Grand Alliance was practically done.
In outer seeming, the Revolution of 1688 had only trans
ferred the sovereignty over England from James to William
and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful and deci
sive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was

1692] THE REVOLUTION 883
transferring the sovereignty from the king to the House of
Commons. From the moment when its sole right to tax the
nation was established by the Bill of Rights, and when its
own resolve settled the practise of granting none but annual
supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons became the
supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently
to suspend its sittings, or in the long run to oppose its will,
when either course must end in leaving the Government
penniless, in breaking up the army and navy, and in suspend
ing the public service. But though the constitutional change
was complete, the machinery of government was far from
having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life
which such a change brought about. However powerful the
will of the House of Commons might be, it had no means of
bringing its will directly to bear upon the conduct of public
affairs. The ministers who had charge of them were not its
servants, but the servants of the Crown ; it was from the
king that they looked for direction, and to the king that they
held themselves responsible. By impeachment or more in
direct means the Commons could force a king to remove a
minister who contradicted their will ; but they had no con
stitutional power to replace the fallen statesman by a minister
who would carry out their will. The result was the growth
of a temper in the Lower House which drove William and
his ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous of
power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit, as bodies
always become whose consciousness of the possession of
power is untempered by a corresponding consciousness of
the practical difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the
power which they possess. It grumbled at the ill success of
the war, at the suffering of the merchants, at the discontent
of the Churchmen ; and it blamed the Crown and its ministers
for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to find
out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its
mood changed, as William bitterly complained, with every
hour. It was, in fact, without the guidance of recognized
leaders, without adequate information, and destitute of that
organization out of which alone a definite policy can come.
Nothing better proves the inborn political capacity of the
English mind than that it should at once have found a simple
57

884 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1693
and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit
of the solution belongs to a man whose political character
was of the lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had
been a minister in the later days of Charles the Second ; and
he had remained minister through almost all the reign of
James. He had held office at last only by compliance with
the worst tyranny of his master, and by a feigned conversion
to the Roman Catholic faith ; but the ruin of James was no
sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection
from William by the betrayal of the master to whom he had
sacrificed his conscience and his honor. Since the Revolu
tion Sunderland had striven only to escape public observation
in a country retirement, but at this crisis he came secretly
forward to bring his unequaled sagacity to the aid of the
king. His counsel was to recognize practically the new
power of the Commons by choosing the ministers of the
Crown exclusively from among the members of the party
which was strongest in the Lower House. As yet no minis
try in the modern sense of the term had existed. Each great
officer of state, treasurer or secretary or lord privy seal,
had in theory been independent of his fellow officers ; each
was the "king's servant" and responsible for the discharge
of his special duties to the king alone. From time to time
one minister, like Clarendon, might tower above the rest and
give a general direction to the whole course of government,
but the predominance was merely personal and never per
manent; and even in such a case there were colleagues who
were ready to oppose or even impeach the statesman who
overshadowed them. It was common for a king to choose or
dismiss a single minister without any communication with the
rest ; and so far was even WiUiam from aiming at ministerial
unity, that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself
the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunder
land's plan aimed at replacing these independent ministers
by a homogeneous ministry, chosen from the same party,
representing the same sentiments, and bound together for
common action by a sense of responsibility and loyalty to the
party to which it belonged. Not only would such a plan
secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till
then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons

1693] THE REVOLUTION 885
which it had never had before. The ministers who were
representatives of the majority of its members became the
natural leaders 6f the House. Small factions were drawn
together into the two great parties which supported or opposed
the ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the
simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had
so long vexed both king and Commons. The new ministers
ceased in all but name to be the king's servants. They be
came simply an executive committee representing the will of
the majority of the House of Commons, and capable of being
easfly set aside by it and replaced by a similar committee
whenever the balance of power shifted from one side of the
House to the other.
Such was the origin of that system of representative gov
ernment which has gone on from Sunderland's day to our
own. But though William showed his own political genius
in understanding and adopting Sunderland's plan, it was only
slowly and tentatively that he ventured to carry it out in
practise. In spite of the temporary reaction Sunderland
believed that the balance of political power was really on the
side of the Whigs. Not only were they the natural repre
sentatives of the principles of the Revolution, and the sup
porters of the war, but they stood far above their opponents
in parliamentary and administrative talent. At their head
stood a group of statesmen, whose close union in thought
and action gained them the name of the Junto. Russell, as yet
the most prominent of these, was the victor of La Hogue ;
John Somers was an advocate who had sprung into fame by
his defense of the Seven Bishops ; Lord Wharton was known
as the most dexterous and unscrupulous of party managers ;
and Montague was fast making a reputation as the ablest
of English financiers. In spite of such considerations, how
ever, it is doubtful whether William would have thrown him
self into the hands of a purely Whig ministry but for the
attitude which the Tories took towards the war. Exhausted
as France was the war still languished, and the allies failed
to win a single victory. Meanwhile English trade was all
but ruined by the French privateers, and the nation stood
aghast at the growth of taxation. The Tories, always cold
in their support of the Grand Alliance, now became eager for

886 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1694
peace. The Whigs, on the other hand, remained resolute in
their support of the war. WUliam, in whose mind the con
test with France was the first object, was thus driven slowly
to follow Sunderland's advice. Montague had already met
the strain of the war by bringing forward a plan which had
been previously suggested by a Scotchman, William Paterson,
for the creation of a National Bank. WhUe serving as an
ordinary bank for the supply of capital, the Bank of Eng
land, as the new institution was called, was in reality an in
strument for procuring loans from the people at large by the
formal pledge of the State to repay the money advanced on
the demand of the lender. A loan of ;^i, 200,000 was thrown
open to public subscription ; and the subscribers to it were
formed into a chartered company in whose hands the nego
tiation of all after loans was placed. In ten days the list
of subscribers was full. The discovery of the resources
afforded by the national wealth revealed a fresh source of
power; and the rapid growth of the national debt, as the
mass of these loans to the State came to be called, gave a
new security against the return of the Stuarts, whose first
work would have been the repudiation of the claims of the
lenders or "fundholders." The evidence of the public credit
gave strength to William abroad, while at home a new unity
of action followed the change which Sunderland counseled
and which was quietly carried out. One by one the Tory
ministers, already weakened by Montague's success, were
replaced by members of the Junto. Russell went to the
Admiralty; Somers was named lord keeper; Shrewsbury,
secretary of state ; Montague, chancellor of the Exchequer.
Even before this change was completed its effect was felt.
The House of Commons took a new tone. The Whig ma
jority of its members, united and disciplined, moved quietly
under the direction of their natural leaders, the Whig minis
ters of the Crown. It was this which enabled WUliam to
face the shock which was given to his position by the death
of Queen Mary. The renewed attacks of the Tories showed
what fresh hopes had been raised by William's lonely posi
tion. The Parliament, however, whom the king had just con-
cfliated by assenting at last to the Triennial Bill, went steadily
with the ministry ; and its fidelity was rewarded by triumph

1697] THE REVOLUTION 887
abroad. In 1695 the alliance succeeded for the first time in
winning a great triumph over France in the capture of Namur.
The king skilfully took advantage of his victory to call a new
Parliament, and its members at once showed their temper by
a vigorous support of the war. The Houses, indeed, were no
mere tools in William's hands. They forced him to resume
prodigal grants of lands made to his Dutch favorites, and to
remove his ministers in Scotland who had aided in a wild
project for a Scotch colony on the Isthmus of Darien. They
claimed a right to name members of the new Board of Trade,
established for the regulation of commercial matters. They
rejected a proposal, never henceforth to be revived, for a
censorship of the press. But there was no factious opposi
tion. So strong was the ministry that Montague was ena
bled to face the general distress that was caused for the
moment by a reform of the currency, which had been re
duced by clipping to far less than its nominal value ; and in
spite of the financial embarrassments created by the reform,
William was able to hold the French at bay.
But the war was fast drawing to a close. Louis was sim
ply fighting to secure more favorable terms, and William,
though he held that " the only way of treating with France
is with our swords in our hands," was almost as eager as
Louis for a peace. The defection of Savoy made it impos
sible to carry out the original aim of the Alliance, that of
forcing France back to its position at the treaty of West
phalia, and the question of the Spanish succession was draw
ing closer every day. The obstacles which were thrown in
the way of an accommodation by Spain and the empire were
set aside in a private negotiation between William and Louis,
and the year 1697 saw the conclusion of the peace of Rys
wick. In spite of failure and defeat in the field WUliam's
policy had won. The victories of France remained barren
in the face of a united Europe ; and her exhaustion forced
her, for the first time since Richelieu's day, to consent to a
disadvantageous peace. On the side of the empire France
withdrew from every annexation save that of Strasburg
which she had made since the treaty of Nimeguen, and
Strasburg would have been restored but for the unhappy
delays of the German negotiators. To Spain Louis restored

888 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1698
Luxembourg and all the conquests he had made during the
war in the Netherlands. The Duke of Lorraine was replaced
in his dominions. A far more important provision of the
peace pledged Louis to an abandonment of the Stuart cause
and a recognition of William as king of England. For
Europe in general the peace of Ryswick was little more
than a truce. But for England it was the close of a long
and obstinate struggle and the opening of a new era of
political history. It was the final and decisive defeat of the
conspiracy which had gone on between Louis and the Stuarts
ever since the treaty of Dover, the conspiracy to turn Eng
land into a Roman Catholic country and into a dependency
of France. But it was even more than this. It was the
definite establishment of England as the center of European
resistance against all attempts to overthrow the balance of
power. Section IX. — Marlborough, 1698-1712
What had bowed the pride of Louis to the humiliating
terms of the peace of Ryswick was not so much the exhaus
tion of France as the need of preparing for a new and
greater struggle. The death of the king of Spain, Charles
the Second, was known to be at hand ; and with him ended
the male line of the Austrian princes, who for two hundred
years had occupied the Spanish throne. How strangely
Spain had fallen from its high estate in Europe the wars of
Louis had abundantly shown, but so vast was the extent of
its empire, so enormous the resources which stfll remained
to it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old power
would at once return. Its sovereign was still master of some
of the noblest provinces of the Old World and the New, of
Spain itself, of the MUanese, of Naples and Sicily, of the
Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble islands of
the Spanish Main. To add such a dominion as this to the
dominion either of Louis or of the emperor would be to undo
at a blow the work of European independence which WUliam
had wrought; and it was with a view to prevent either of
these results that Wflliam freed his hands by the peace of
Ryswick. At this moment the claimants of the Spanish suc
cession were three : the French Dauphin, a son of the Span-

1698] THE REVOLUTION 889
ish king's elder sister ; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a
grandson of his younger sister ; and the emperor, who was
a son of Charles's aunt. In strict law — if there had been
any law really applicable to the matter — the claim of the last
was the strongest of the three ; for the claim of the Dauphin
was barred by an express renunciation of all right to the suc
cession at his mother's marriage with Louis the Fourteenth,
a renunciation which had been ratified at the treaty of the
Pyrenees ; and a simUar renunciation barred the claim of the
Bavarian candidate. The claim of the emperor was more
remote in blood, but it was barred by no renunciation at all.
William, however, was as resolute in the interests of Europe
to repulse the claim of the emperor as to repulse that of
Louis ; and it was the consciousness that the Austrian suc
cession was inevitable if the war continued and Spain re
mained a member of the Grand Alliance, in arms against
France and leagued with the emperor, which made him sud
denly conclude the peace of Ryswick. Had England and
Holland shared William's temper he would have insisted on
the succession of the Electoral Prince to the whole Spanish
dominions. But both were weary of war. In England the
peace was at once foUowed by the reduction of the army at
the demand of the House of Commons to fourteen thousand
men; and a clamor had already begun for the disbanding
even of these. It was necessary to bribe the two rival claim
ants to a waiver of their claims ; and by the First Partition
Treaty, concluded in 1698, between England, Holland, and
France, the succession of the Electoral Prince was recognized
on condition of the cession by Spain of its Italian possessions
to his two rivals. The Milanese was to pass to the emperor ;
the Two Sicilies, with the border province of Guipuzcoa, to
France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when
the death of the Bavarian prince made the treaty waste paper.
Austria and France were left face to face, and a terrible
struggle, in which the success of either would be equally
fatal to the independence of Europe, seemed unavoidable.
The peril was greater that the temper of England left Will
iam without the means of backing his policy by arms. The
suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class,
and the pressure of the debt and taxation it entafled, were

890 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1698
waking every day a more bitter resentment in the people, and
the general discontent avenged itself on William and the
party who had backed his policy. The king's natural par
tiality to his Dutch favorites, the confidence he gave to
Sunderland, his cold and sullen demeanor, his endeavors to
maintain the standing army, robbed him of popularity. In
the elections held at the close of 1698 a Tory majority
pledged to peace was returned to the House of Commons.
The Junto lost all hold on the new Parliament. The resigna
tion of Montague and RusseU was followed by the dismissal
of the Whig ministry, and Somers and his friends were re
placed by an administration composed of moderate Tories,
with Lords Rochester and Godolphin as its leading members.
The fourteen thousand men who still remained in the army
were cut down to seven. William's earnest entreaty could not
turn the Parliament from its resolve to send his Dutch guards
out of the country. The navy, which had numbered forty
thousand sailors during the war, was cut down to eight. How
much William's hands were weakened by this peace temper
of England was shown by the Second Partition Treaty which
was concluded between the two maritime powers and France.
The demand of Louis that the Netherlands should be given
to the Elector of Bavaria, whose political position left him a
puppet in the French king's hands, was resisted. Spain, the
Netherlands, and the Indies were assigned to the second son
of the emperor, the Archduke Charles of Austria. But the
whole of the Spanish territories in Italy were now granted to
France ; and it was provided that Milan should be exchanged
for Lorraine, whose duke was to be summarily transferred to
the new duchy. If the emperor persisted in his refusal to
come into the treaty, the share of his son was to pass to an
other, unnamed prince, who was probably the Duke of Savoy.
The emperor still protested, but his protest was of little
moment so long as Louis and the two maritime powers held
firmly together. Nor was the bitter resentment of Spain of
more avafl. The Spaniards cared little whether a French
or an Austrian prince sat on the throne of Charles the Sec
ond, but their pride revolted against the dismemberment of
the monarchy by the loss of its Italian dependencies. Even
the dying king shared the anger of his subjects, and a wiU

I70I] THE REVOLUTION 89 1
wrested from him by the factions which wrangled over his
death-bed bequeathed the whole monarchy of Spain to a
grandson of Louis, the Duke of Anjou, the second son of
the Dauphin. The Treaty of Partition was so recent, and
the risk of accepting this bequest so great, that Louis would
hardly have resolved on it but for his belief that the temper
of England must necessarily render William's opposition
a fruitless one. Never in fact had England been so averse
from war. So strong was the antipathy to William's foreign
policy that men openly approved the French king's course.
Hardly any one in England dreaded the succession of a boy
who, French as he was, would as they believed soon be turned
into a Spaniard by the natural course of events. The succes
sion of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked upon as far
better than the increase of power which France would have de
rived from the cessions of the last Treaty of Partition, cessions
which would have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into
a French lake, imperiled the English trade with the Levant
and America, and raised France into a formidable power at
sea. " It grieves me to the heart," William wrote bitterly,
"that almost every one rejoices that France has preferred
the Will to the Treaty." Astonished and angered as he was
at his rival's breach of faith, he had no means of punishing
it. The Duke of Anjou entered Madrid, and Louis proudly
boasted that henceforth there were no Pyrenees. The life-
work of William seemed undone. He knew himself to be
dying. His cough was incessant, his eyes sunk and dead,
his frame so weak that he could hardly get into his coach.
But never had he shown himself so great. His courage rose
with every difficulty. His temper, which had been heated by
the personal affronts lavished on him through English fac
tion, was hushed by a supreme effort of his will. His large
and clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary
embarrassments of French diplomacy and EngUsh party strife
to the great interests which he knew must in the end deter
mine the course of European politics. Abroad and at home
all seemed to go against him. For the moment he had no
ally save Holland, for Spain was now united with Louis,
while the attitude of Bavaria divided Germany and held the
House of Austria in check. The Bavarian Elector indeed.

892 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1701
who had charge of the Spanish Netherlands and on whom
William had counted, openly joined the French side from
the first and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as king, in Brus
sels. In England the new Parliament was crowded with
Tories who were resolute against war. The Tory Ministry
pressed him to acknowledge the new king of Spain ; and as
even Holland did this, William was forced to submit. He
could only count on the greed of Louis to help him, and he
did not count in vain. The approval of the French king's
action had sprung from the belief that he intended to leave
Spain to the Spaniards under their new king. Bitter too as
the strife of Whig and Tory might be in England, there were
two things on which Whig and Tory were agreed. Neither
would suffer France to occupy the Netherlands. Neither
would endure a French attack on the Protestant succession
which the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the
arrogance of Louis blinded him to the need of moderation
in his hour of good luck. In the name of his grandson he
introduced French troops into the seven fortresses known
as the Dutch barrier, and into Ostend and the coast towns
of Flanders. Even the Peace Parliament at once acquiesced
in William's demand for their withdrawal, and authorized him
to conclude a defensive alliance with HoUand. The king's
policy indeed was bitterly blamed, whfle the late ministers,
Somers, Russell, and Montague (now become peers), were
impeached for their share in the treaties. But outside the
House of Commons the tide of national feeling rose as the
designs of Louis grew clearer. He refused to allow the Dutch
barrier to be reestablished ; and a great French fleet gathered
in the Channel to support, it was believed, a fresh Jacobite
descent, which was proposed by the ministers of James in
a letter intercepted and laid before Parliament. Even the
House of Commons took fire at this, and the fleet was raised
to thirty thousand men, the army to ten thousand. Kent
sent up a remonstrance against the factious measures by
which the Tories stfll struggled against the king's policy,
with a prayer that addresses might be turned into Bills of
Supply ; and Wflliam was encouraged by these signs of a
change of temper to despatch an English force to Holland,
and to conclude a secret treaty with the United Provinces for

I70I] THE REVOLUTION 893
the recovery of the Netherlands from Louis, and for their
transfer with the MUanese to the House of Austria as a means
of counterbalancing the new power added to France. But
England was still clinging desperately to a hope of peace,
when Louis by a sudden act forced it into war. He had
acknowledged William as king in the peace of Ryswick, and
pledged himself to oppose aU attacks on his throne. He now
entered the bedchamber at St. Germain where James was
breathing his last, and promised to acknowledge his son at
his death as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The
promise was in fact a declaration of war, and in a moment
all England was at one in accepting the chaUenge. The issue
Louis had raised was no longer a matter of European politics,
but the question whether the work of the Revolution should
be undone, and whether Catholicism and despotism should
be replaced on the throne of England by the arms of France.
On such a question as this there was no difference between
Tory and Whig. When the death, in 1 700, of the last child
of the Princess Anne had been followed by a new Act of
Succession, not a voice had been raised for James or his son ;
and the descendants of the daughter of Charles the First,
Henrietta of Orleans, whose only child had married the
Catholic Duke of Savoy, were passed over in the same silence.
The Parliament fell back on the line of James the First.
His daughter Elizabeth had married the Elector Palatine,
and her only surviving child, Sophia, was the wife of the late
and the mother of the present Elector of Hanover. It was in
Sophia and her heirs, being Protestants, that the Act of
Settlement vested the Crown. It was enacted that every
English sovereign must be in communion with the Church
of England as by law established. All future kings were
forbidden to leave England without consent of Parliament,
and foreigners were excluded from all public posts. The
independence of justice was established by a clause which
provided that no judge should be removed from office save
on an address from Parliament to the Crown. The two prin
ciples, that the king acts only through his ministers, and that
these ministers are responsible to Parliament, were asserted
by a requirement that all public business should be formally
done in the Privy CouncU, and all its decisions signed by its

894 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1702
members — provisions which went far to complete the parlia
mentary constitution which had been drawn up by the Bill
of Rights. The national union which had already been shown
in this action of the Tory Parliament now showed itself in
the king's welcome on his return from the Hague, where the
conclusion of a new Grand Alliance between the empire,
Holland, and the United Provinces had rewarded Wflliam's
patience and skill. The Alliance was soon joined by Den
mark, Sweden, the Palatinate, and the bulk of the German
states. The Parliament of 1702, though still Tory in the
main, replied to William's stirring appeal by voting forty
thousand soldiers and as many sailors for the coming struggle.
A Bill of Attainder was passed against the new pretender ;
and all members of either House and all public officials were
sworn to uphold the succession of the House of Hanover.
But the king's weakness was already too great to allow of
his taking the field ; and he was forced to entrust the war in
the Netherlands to the one Englishman who had shown him
self capable of a great command. John Churchfll, Earl of
Marlborough, was born in 1650, the son of a Devonshire
Cavalier, whose daughter became at the Restoration mistress
of the Duke of York. The shame of Arabella did more per
haps than her father's loyalty to win for her brother a com
mission in the Royal Guards ; and, after five years' service
abroad under Turenne, the young captain became colonel of
an EngUsh regiment which was retained in the service of
France. He had already shown some of the qualities of a
great soldier, an unruffled courage, a bold and venturous
temper held in check by a cool and serene judgment, a
vigilance and capacity for enduring fatigue which never for
sook him. In later years he was known to spend a whole
day in reconnoitering, and at Blenheim he remained on horse
back for fifteen hours. But courage and skill in arms did
less for ChurchUl on his return to the English court than his
personal beauty. In the French camp he had been known
as " the handsome Englishman " ; and his manners were as
winning as his person. Even in age his address was almost
irresistible : " He engrossed the graces," says Chesterfield ;
and his air never lost the careless sweetness which won the
favor of Lady Castlemaine. A present of ;£sooo from the

1702] THE REVOLUTION 895
king's mistress laid the foundation of a fortune which grew
rapidly to greatness, as the prudent forethought of the hand
some young soldier hardened into the avarice of age. But it
was to the Duke of York that Churchill looked mainly for
advancement, and he earned it by the fidelity with which as
a member of his household he clung to the duke's fortunes
during the dark days of the popish plot. He foUowed James
to the Hague and to Edinburgh, and on his master's return he
was rewarded with a peerage and the colonelcy of the Life
Guards. The service he rendered James after his accession
by saving the royal army from a surprise at Sedgemoor would
have been yet more splendidly acknowledged but for the
king's bigotry. In spite of his master's personal solicitations
Churchill remained true to Protestantism ; but he knew James
too well to count on further favor. Luckily he had now
found a new groundwork for his fortunes in the growing
influence of his wife over the king's second daughter, Anne ;
and at the crisis of the Revolution the adhesion of Anne to
the cause of Protestantism was of the highest value. No
sentiment of gratitude to his older patron hindered Marl
borough from corresponding with the Prince of Orange, from
promising Anne's sympathy to William's effort, or from
deserting the ranks of the king's army when it faced William
in the field. His desertion proved fatal to the royal cause ;
but great as this service was it was eclipsed by a second. It
was by his wife's persuasion that Anne was induced to for
sake her father and take refuge in Danby's camp. Unscrupu
lous as his conduct had been, the services which he rendered
to William were too great to miss their reward. He became
Earl of Marlborough ; he was put at the head of a force dur
ing the Irish war, where his rapid successes won William's
regard ; and he was given high command in the army of
Flanders. But the sense of his power over Anne soon turned
Marlborough from plotting treason against James to plot
treason against WilUam. Great as was his greed of gold, he
had married Sarah Jennings, a penniless beauty of Charles's
court, in whom a violent and malignant temper was strangely
combined with a power of winning and retaining love.
ChurchUl's affection for her ran like a thread of gold through
the dark web of his career. In the midst of his marches and

896 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1702
from the very battle-field he writes to his wife with the same
passionate tenderness. The composure which no danger or
hatred could ruffle broke down into almost womanish depres
sion at the thought of her coldness or at any burst of her vio
lent humor. He never left her without a pang. "I did for
a great while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs,"
he once wrote to her after setting out on a campaign, "in
hopes that I might have had one sight of you." It was no
wonder that the woman who inspired Marlborough with a
love like this bound to her the weak and feeble nature of the
Princess Anne. The two friends threw off the restraints of
state, and addressed each other as " Mrs. Freeman " and
" Mrs. Morley." It was on his wife's influence over her
friend that the earl's ambition counted in its designs against
William. His plan was to drive the king from the throne by
backing the Tories in their opposition to the war as well as
by stirring to frenzy the EngUsh hatred of foreigners, and to
seat Anne in his place. The discovery of his designs roused
the king to a burst of unusual resentment. " Were I and
my Lord Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed,
"the sword would have to settle between us." As it was, he
could only strip the earl of his offices and command, and
drive his wife from St. James's. Anne followed her favor
ite, and the court of the princess became the center of the
Tory opposition, while Marlborough opened a correspondence
with James. So notorious was his treason that on the eve
of the French invasion of 1692 he was one of the first of the
suspected persons sent to the Tower.
The death of Mary forced William to recall Anne, who
became by this event his successor ; and with Anne the
Marlboroughs returned to court. The king could not bend
himself to trust the earl again ; but as death drew near he
saw in him the one man whose splendid talents fitted him,
in spite of the baseness and treason of his life, to rule Eng
land and direct the Grand AUiance in his stead. He employed
Marlborough, therefore, to negotiate the treaty of aUiance
with the emperor, and put him at the head of the army in
Flanders. But the earl had only just taken the command
when a fall from his horse proved fatal to the broken frame
of the king. " There was a time when I should have been

1702] THE REVOLUTION 897
glad to have been delivered out of my troubles," the dying
man whispered to Portland, " but I own I see another scene,
and could wish to live a little longer." He knew, however,
that the wish was vain, and commended Marlborough to
Anne as the fittest person to lead her armies and guide her
counsels. Anne's zeal needed no quickening. Three days
after her accession the earl was named captain-general of the
English forces at home and abroad, and entrusted with the
entire direction of the war. His supremacy over home affairs
was secured by the construction of a purely Tory administra
tion, with Lord Godolphin, a close friend of Marlborough's,
as lord treasurer at its head. The queen's affection for his
wife insured him the support of the Crown at a moment
when Anne's personal popularity gave the Crown a new
weight with the nation. In England, indeed, party feeling
for the moment died away. AU save the extreme Tories were
won over to the war now that it was waged on behalf of a
Tory queen by a Tory general, while the most extreme of the
Whigs were ready to back even a Tory general in waging a
Whig war. Abroad, however, William's death shook the Alli
ance to its base; and even Holland wavered in dread of being
deserted by England in the coming struggle. But the deci
sion of Marlborough soon did away with this distrust. Anne
was made to declare from the throne her resolve to pursue
with energy the policy of her predecessor. The Parliament
was brought to sanction vigorous measures for the prosecu
tion of the war. The new general hastened to the Hague,
received the command of the Dutch as well as of the English
forces, and drew the German powers into the confederacy
with a skill and adroitness which even William might have
envied. Never was greatness more quickly recognized than
in the case of Marlborough. In a few months he was re
garded by all as the guiding spirit of the Alliance, and princes
whose jealousy had worn out the patience of the king yielded
without a struggle to the counsels of his successor. His tem
per fitted him in an especial way to be the head of a great
confederacy. Like William, he owed little of his power to
any early training. The trace of his neglected education was
seen to the last in his reluctance to write. " Of all things,"
he said to his wife, " I do not love writing." To pen a

898 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1702
despatch, indeed, was a far greater trouble to him than to
plan a campaign. But nature had given him qualities which
in other men spring speciaUy from culture. His capacity
for business was immense. During the next ten years he
assumed the general direction of the war in Flanders and in
Spain. He managed every negotiation with the courts of the
allies. He watched over the shifting phases of English poli
tics. He crossed the Channel to win over Anne to a change
in the cabinet, or hurried to Berlin to secure the due con
tingent of Electoral troops from Brandenburg. At one and
the same moment men saw him reconciling the emperor with
the Protestants of Hungary, stirring the Calvinists of the
Cevennes into revolt, arranging the affairs of Portugal, and
providing for the protection of the Duke of Savoy. But his
air showed no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He
retained to the last the indolent grace of his youth. His
natural dignity was never ruffled by an outbreak of temper.
Amidst the storm of battle his soldiers saw their leader
" without fear of danger or in the least hurry, giving his
orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he
was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same
equable serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the
phlegm of the Dutch, the ignorant opposition of his officers,
the libels of his political opponents. There was a touch of
irony in the simple expedients by which he sometimes solved
problems which had baffled cabinets. The touchy pride of
the king of Prussia made him one of the most vexatious
among the allies, but all difficulty with him ceased when
Marlborough rose at a state banquet and handed him a
napkin. Churchill's composure rested partly, indeed, on a
pride which could not stoop to bare the real self within to
the eyes of meaner men. In the bitter moments before his
fall he bade Godolphin burn some querulous letters which
the persecution of his opponents had wrung from him. " My
desire is that the world may continue in their error of think
ing me a happy man, for I think it better to be envied than
pitied." But in great measure it sprang from the purely
intellectual temper of his mind. His passion for his wife was
the one sentiment which tinged the colorless light in which
his understanding moved. In all else he was without love or

1702] THE REVOLUTION 899
hate, he knew neither doubt nor regret. In private life he
was a humane and compassionate man ; but if his position
required it he could betray Englishmen to death, or lead his
army to a butchery such as that of Malplaquet. Of honor
or the finer sentiments of mankind he knew nothing ; and he
turned without a shock from guiding Europe and winning
great victories to heap up a matchless fortune by peculation
and greed. He is perhaps the only instance of a man of
real greatness who loved money for money's sake. The
passions which stirred the men around him, whether noble
or ignoble, were to him simply elements in an intellectual
problem which had to be solved by patience. " Patience will
overcome all things," he writes again and again. "As I
think most things are governed by destiny, having done all
things we should submit with patience."
As a statesman the high qualities of Marlborough were
owned by his bitterest foes. " Over the confederacy," says
Bolingbroke, " he, a new, a private man, acquired hy merit
and management a more decided influence than high birth,
confirmed authority, and even the Crown of Great Britain
had given to King WiUiam." But great as he was in the
council, he was even greater in the field. He stands alone
amongst the masters of the art of war as a captain whose vic
tories began at an age when the work of most men is done.
Though he served as a young officer under Turenne, and for
a few months in Ireland and the Netherlands, he had held no
great command till he took the field in Flanders at the age
of fifty-two. He stands alone, too, in his unbroken good for
tune. Voltaire notes that he never besieged a fortress which
he did not take, or fought a battle which he did not win.
His difficulties came not so much from the enemy, as from
the ignorance and timidity of his own allies. He was never
defeated in the field, but victory after victory was snatched
from him by the incapacity of his officers or the stubbornness
of the Dutch. What startled the cautious strategists of his
day was the vigor and audacity of his plans. Old as he was,
Marlborough's designs had from the first all the dash and
boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at once
resolved to force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan
was foiled by the timidity of the Dutch deputies. But his
58

90.O HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1703
resolute advance across the Meuse drew the French forces
from that river, and enabled him to reduce fortress after for
tress in a series of sieges, till the surrender of Li^ge closed a
campaign which cut off the French from the Lower Rhine,
and freed Holland from all danger of an invasion. The suc
cesses of Marlborough had been brought into bolder relief
by the fortunes of the war in other quarters. Though the
imperialist general. Prince Eugene of Savoy, showed his
powers by a surprise of the French army at Cremona, no real
successes had been won in Italy. An EngUsh descent on the
Spanish coast ended in faUure. In Germany the Bavarians
joined the French, and the united armies defeated the forces
of the empire. It was in this quarter that Louis resolved to
push his fortunes. In the spring of 1703 a fresh army under
Marshal Villars again relieved the Bavarian Elector from the
pressure of the imperial forces, and only a strife which arose
between the two commanders hindered the joint armies from
marching on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the Dutch
deputies served Louis well in the Low Countries. The hopes
of Marlborough, who had been raised to a dukedom for his
services in the previous year, were again foiled by the
deputies of the States-General. Serene as his temper was,
it broke down before their refusal to cooperate in an attack on
Antwerp and French Flanders ; and the prayers of Godol
phin and of the pensionary Heinsius alone induced him to
withdraw his offer of resignation. But in spite of his vic
tories on the Danube, of the blunders of his adversaries on
the Rhine, and the sudden aid of an insurrection which broke
out in Hungary, the difficulties of Louis were hourly increas
ing. The accession of Savoy to the Grand Alliance threatened
his armies in Italy with destruction. That of Portugal gave
the allies a base of operations against Spain. The French
king's energy, however, rose with the pressure ; and while
the Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second,
was despatched against Portugal, and three small armies
closed round Savoy, the flower of the French troops joined
the army of Bavaria on the Danube ; for the bold plan of
Louis was to decide the fortunes of the war by a victory
which would wrest peace from the empire under the walls of
Vienna.

1704] THE REVOLUTION 901
. The master-stroke of Louis roused Marlborough at the
opening of 1704 to a master-stroke in return; but the secrecy
and boldness of the duke's plans deceived both his enemies
and his allies. The French army in Flanders saw in his
march upon Maintz only a design to transfer the war into
Elsass. The Dutch were lured into suffering their troops to
be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz by proposals for
an imaginary campaign on the Moselle. It was only when
Marlborough crossed the Neckar and struck through the
center of Germany for the Danube that the true aim of his
operations was revealed. After struggling through the hill
country of Wurtemberg, he joined the imperial army under
the Prince of Baden, stormed the heights of Donauwerth,
crossed the Danube and the Lech, and penetrated into the
heart of Bavaria. The crisis drew the two armies which
were facing one another on the Upper Rhine to the scene.
The arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thousand French
troops saved the Elector of Bavaria for the moment from
the need of submission ; but the junction of his opponent.
Prince Eugene, with Marlborough raised the contending
forces again to an equality. After a few marches the armies
met on the north bank of the Danube, near the Uttle town
of Hochstadt and the village of Blindheim or Blenheim,
which have given their names to one of the most memorable
battles in the history of the world. In one respect the struggle
which foUowed stands almost unrivaled, for the whole of the
Teutonic race was represented in the strange medley of Eng
lishmen, Dutchmen, Hanoverians, Danes, Wiirtembergers, and
Austrians who foUowed Marlborough and Eugene. The
French and Bavarians, who numbered like their opponents
some fifty thousand men, lay behind a little stream which ran
through swampy ground to the Danube. Their position was
a strong one, for its front was covered by the swamp, its
right by the Danube, its left by the hill country in which the
stream rose ; and Tallard had not only entrenched himself
but was far superior to his rival in artillery. But for once
Marlborough's hands were free. "I have great reason," he
wrote calmly home, " to hope that everything will go well,
for I have the pleasure to find all the officers willing to obey
witho.ut knowing any other reason than that it is my desire.

902 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1704
which is very different from what it was in Flanders, where
I was obliged to have the consent of a council of war for
everything I undertook." So formidable were the obstacles,
however, that though the allies were in motion at sunrise,
it was not till midday that Eugene, who commanded on the
right, succeeded in crossing the stream. The English foot
at once forded it on the left and attacked the vUlage of
Blindheim in which the bulk of the French infantry were
entrenched ; but after a furious struggle the attack was
repulsed, while as gallant a resistance at the other end of
the line held Eugene in check. The center, however, which
the French believed to be unassailable, had been chosen by
Marlborough for the chief point of attack ; and by making an
artificial road across the morass he was at last enabled to
throw his eight thousand horsemen on the French cavalry
which occupied this position. Two desperate charges which
the duke headed in person decided the day. The French
center was flung back on the Danube and forced to sur
render. Their left fell back in confusion on Hochstadt,
while their right, cooped up in Blindheim and cut off from
retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army only
twenty thousand escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, four
teen thousand were captured. Germany was finally freed
from the French ; and Marlborough, who followed the wreck
of the French host in its flight to Elsass, soon made himself
master of the Lower Moselle. But the loss of France could
not be measured by men or fortresses. A hundred victories
since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the French army
as invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the flower
of the French soldiery broke the spell. From that moment
the terror of victory passed to the side of the allies, and
" Malbrook " became a name of fear to every child in France.
In England itself the victory of Blenheim aided to bring
about a great change in the political aspect of affairs. The
Tories were resolved to create a permanent Tory majority in
the Commons by excluding Nonconformists from the munici
pal corporations, which returned the bulk of the borough
members. The Protestant Dissenters, whUe adhering to
their separate congregations, in which they were now pro
tected by the Toleration Act, " qualified for office " by the

DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH.
Photogravure from an engraving after a painting by Kneller.

1704] THE REVOLUTION 903
" occasional conformity " of receiving the sacrament at church
once in the year. It was against this " occasional con
formity" that the Tories introduced a test to exclude the
Nonconformists ; and this test at first received Marlborough's
support. But it was steadily rejected by the Lords as often
as it was sent up to them, and it was soon guessed that their
resistance was secretly backed by both Marlborough and
Godolphin. Tory as he was, in fact Marlborough had no
mind for an unchecked Tory rule, or for a revival of religious
strffe which would be fatal to the war. But he strove in
vain to propitiate his party by inducing the queen to set aside
the tenths and first-fruits hitherto paid by the clergy to the
Crown as a fund for the augmentation of small benefices, a
fund which still bears the name of Queen Anne's Bounty.
The Commons showed their resentment by refusing to add
a grant of money to the grant of a dukedom after his first
campaign ; and the higher Tories, with Lord Nottingham at
their head, began to throw every obstacle they could in the
way of the continuance of the war. At last they quitted
office in 1704, and Marlborough replaced them by Tories
of a more moderate stamp who were still in favor of the war :
by Robert Harley, who became secretary of state, and
Henry St. John, a man of splendid talents, who was named
secretary at war. The duke's march into Germany, which
pledged England to a struggle in the heart of the Continent,
embittered the political strife. The high Tories and Jacobites
threatened, if Marlborough failed, to bring his head to the
block, and only the victory of Blenheim saved him from
political ruin. Slowly and against his will the duke drffted
from his own party to the party which really backed his
policy. He availed himself of the national triumph over
Blenheim to dissolve Parliament ; and when the election of
1705, as he hoped, returned a majority in favor of the war,
his efforts brought about a coalition between the moderate
Tories who still clung to him and the Whig Junto, whose
support was purchased by making a Whig, WUliam Cowper,
lord keeper, and by sending Lord Sunderland as envoy to
Vienna. The bitter attacks of the peace party were entirely
foUed by this union, and Marlborough at last felt secure at
home. But he had to bear disappointment abroad. His

904 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1705
plan of attack along the line of the MoseUe was defeated by
the refusal of the imperial army to join him. When he
entered the French lines across the Dyle, the Dutch generals
withdrew their troops ; and his proposal to attack the Duke
of Vflleroy in the field of Waterloo was rejected in full coun
cil of war by the deputies of the states with cries of " mur
der " and " massacre." Even Marlborough's composure broke
into bitterness at the blow. " Had I had the same power I
had last year," he wrote home, " I could have won a greater
victory than that of Blenheim." On his complaint the states
recalled their commissaries, but the year was lost; nor had
greater results been brought about in Italy or on the Rhine.
The spirits of the allies were only sustained by the romantic
exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. Profligate, unprinci
pled, flighty, as he was, Peterborough had a genius for war,
and his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, his
recognition of the old liberties of Aragon, roused that province
to support the cause of the second son of the emperor, who
had been acknowledged as king of Spain by the allies under
the title of Charles the Third. Catalonia and Valencia soon
joined Aragon in declaring for Charles ; while Marlborough
spent the winter of 1705 in negotiations at Vienna, Berlin,
Hanover, and the Hague, and in preparations for the coming
campaign. Eager for freedom of action, and sick of the
imperial generals as of the Dutch, he planned a march over
the Alps and a campaign in Italy ; and though his designs
were defeated by the opposition of the allies, he found him
self unfettered when he again appeared in Flanders in 1706.
The French marshal Villeroy was as eager as Marlborough
for an engagement; and the two armies met on the 23d of
May at the vfllage of Ramillies on the undulating plain which
forms the highest ground in Brabant. The French were
drawn up in a wide curve with morasses covering their front.
After a feint on their left, Marlborough flung himself on their
right wing at Ramillies, crushed it in a brilliant charge that
he led in person, and swept along their whole line till it
broke in a rout which only ended beneath the walls of Louvain.
In an hour and a half the French had lost fifteen thousand
men, their baggage, and their guns ; and the line of the
Scheldt, Brussels, Antwerp, and Bruges became the prize of

i7o6] THE REVOLUTION 905
the victors. It only needed four successful sieges which
followed the battle of Ramillies to complete the deliverance
of Flanders.
The year which witnessed the victory of RamUlies remains
yet more memorable as the year which witnessed the final
union of England with Scotland. As the undoing of the
earlier union had been the first work of the Government of
the Restoration, its revival was one of the first aims of the
Government which followed the Revolution. But the project
was long held in check by reUgious and commercial jealous
ies. Scotland refused to bear any part of the English debt.
England would not yield any share in her monopoly of trade
with the colonies. The English Churchmen longed for a res
toration of Episcopacy north of the border, while the Scotch
Presbyterians would not hear even of the legal toleration of
Episcopalians. In 1703, however, an Act of Settlement
which passed through the Scotch Parliament at last brought
home to English statesmen the dangers of further delay. In
dealing with this measure the Scotch Whigs, who cared only
for the independence of their country, joined hand in hand
with the Scotch Jacobites, who looked only to the interests
of the pretender. The Jacobites excluded from the act the
name of the Princess Sophia ; the Whigs introduced a provi
sion that no sovereign of England should be recognized as
sovereign of Scotland save upon security given to the religion,
freedom, and trade of the Scottish people. Great as the dan
ger arising from such a measure undoubtedly was, for it
pointed to a recognition of the pretender in Scotland on the
queen's ¦ death, and such a recognition meant war between
Scotland and England, it was only after three years' delay
that the wisdom and resolution of Lord Somers brought the
question to an issue. The Scotch proposals of a federative
rather than a legislative union were set aside by his firmness ;
the commercial jealousies of the English trader were put by ;
and the Act of Union provided that the two kingdoms should
be united into one under the name of Great Britain, and that
the succession to the Crown of this United Kingdom should
be ruled by the provisions of the English Act of Settlement.
The Scotch Church and the Scotch Law were left untouched ;
but all rights of trade were thrown open, and a uniform sys-

906 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1707
tem of coinage adopted. A single Parliament was henceforth
to represent the United Kingdom, and for this purpose forty-
five Scotch members were added to the five hundred and
thirteen EngUsh members of the House of Commons, and
sixteen representative peers to the one hundred and eight
who formed the English House of Lords. In Scotland the
opposition was bitter and almost universal. The terror of
the Presbyterians indeed was met by an Act of Security
which became part of the Treaty of Union, and which re
quired an oath to support the Presbyterian Church from
every sovereign on his accession. But no securities could
satisfy the enthusiastic patriots or the fanatical Cameronians.
The Jacobites sought troops from France, and plotted a Stuart
restoration. The nationalists talked of seceding from the
Houses which voted for the Union, and of establishing a
rival Parliament. In the end, however, good sense and the
loyalty of the trading classes to the cause of the Protestant
succession won their way. The measure was adopted by
the Scotch Parliament, and the Treaty of Union became in
1707 a legislative act to which Anne gave her assent in noble
words. "I desire," said the queen, "and expect from my
subjects of both nations that from henceforth they act with
all possible- respect and kindness to one another, that so it
may appear to all the world they have hearts disposed to
become one people." Time has more than answered these
hopes. The two nations whom the Union brought together
have ever since remained one. England gained in the re
moval of a constant danger of treason and war. To Scot
land the Union opened up new avenues of wealth which the
energy of its people turned to wonderful account. The
farms of Lothian have become models of agricultural skill.
A fishing town on the Clyde has grown into the rich and
populous Glasgow. Peace and culture have changed the
wild clansmen of the Highlands into herdsmen and farmers.
Nor was the change followed by any loss of national spirit.
The world has hardly seen a mightier and more rapid devel
opment of national energy than that of Scotland after the
Union. All that passed away was the jealousy which had
parted since the days of Edward the First two peoples whom
a common blood and common speech proclaimed to be one.

1707] THE REVOLUTION 907
The Union between Scotland and England has been real and
stable simply because it was the legislative acknowledgment
and enforcement of a national fact.
With the defeat of Ramillies the fortunes of France
reached their lowest ebb. The loss of Flanders was followed
by the loss of Italy after a victory by which Eugene relieved
Turin ; and not only did Peterborough hold his ground in
Spain, but Charles the Third with an army of English and
Portuguese entered Madrid. Marlborough was at the height
of his renown. Ramillies gave him strength enough to force
Anne, in spite of her hatred of the Whigs, to fulfil his com
pact with them by admitting Lord Sunderland, the bitterest
leader of their party, to office. But the system of political
balance which he had maintained till now began at once to
break down. Constitutionally, Marlborough's was the last
attempt to govern England on other terms than those of
party government, and the union of parties to which he had
clung ever since his severance from the extreme Tories soon
became impossible. The growing opposition of the Tories
to the war threw the duke more and more on the support of
the Whigs, and the Whigs sold their support dearly. Sun
derland, who had inherited his father's conceptions of party
government, ¦was resolved to restore a strict party adminis
tration on a purely Whig basis, and to drive the moderate
Tories from office in spite of Marlborough's desire to retain
them. The duke wrote hotly home at the news of the pres
sure which the Whigs were putting on him. " England," he
said, " will not be ruined because a few men are not pleased."
Nor was Marlborough alone in his resentment. Harley fore
saw the danger of his expulsion from office, and began to
intrigue at court, through Mrs. Masham, a bedchamber
woman of the queen, who was supplanting the duchess in
Anne's favor, against the Whigs and against Marlborough.
St. John, who owed his early promotion to office to the duke's
favor, was driven by the same fear to share Harley's schemes.
Marlborough strove to win both of them back, but he was
helpless in the hands of the only party that steadily sup
ported the war. A factious union of the Whigs with their
opponents, though it roused the duke to a burst of unusual
passion in Parliament, effected its end by convincing him of

908 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1708
the impossibility of further resistance. The opposition of the
queen indeed was stubborn and bitter. Anne was at heart a
Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough died with his submis
sion to the Whig demands. It was only by the threat of
resignation that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to
office ; and the violent outbreak of temper with which the
duchess enforced her husband's will changed the queen's
friendship for her into a bitter resentment. Marlborough
was driven to increase this resentment by fresh compliances
with the conditions which the Whigs imposed on him, by re
moving Peterborough from his command as a Tory general,
and by wresting from Anne her consent to the dismissal from
office of Harley and St. John with the moderate Tories whom
they headed. Their removal was followed by the complete
triumph of the Whigs. Somers became president of the
council, Wharton lord lieutenant of Ireland, while lower
posts were occupied by men destined to play a great part in
our later history, such as the young Duke of Newcastle and
Robert Walpole. Meanwhfle, the great struggle abroad
went on, with striking alternations of success. France rose
with singular rapidity from the crushing blow of Ramillies.
Spain was recovered for Philip by a victory of Marshal Ber
wick at Almanza. Villars won fresh triumphs on the Rhine,
while Eugene, who had penetrated into Provence, was driven
back into Italy. In Flanders, Marlborough's designs for
taking advantage of his great victory were foiled by the
strategy of the Duke of Vendome and by the reluctance of
the Dutch, who were now wavering towards peace. In the
campaign of 1708, however, Vend6me, in spite of his superi
ority in force, was attacked and defeated at Oudenarde ; and
though Marlborough was hindered from striking at the heart
of France by the timidity of the English and Dutch states
men, he reduced Lille, the strongest of its frontier fortresses,
in the face of an army of relief which numbered a hundred
thousand men. The pride of Louis was at last broken by
defeat and by the terrible suffering of France. He offered
terms of peace which yielded all that the allies had fought
for. He consented to withdraw his aid from Philip of Spain,
to give up ten Flemish fortresses to the Dutch, and to sur
render to the empire all that France had gained since the

1709] THE REVOLUTION 909
treaty of Westphalia. He offered to acknowledge Anne, to
banish the pretender from his dominions, and to demoUsh the
fortifications of Dunkirk, a port hateful to England as the
home of the French privateers.
To Marlborough peace now seemed secure ; but in spite
of his counsels, the allies and the Whig ministers in England
demanded that Louis should with his own troops compel his
grandson to give up the crown of Spain. " If I must wage
war," replied the king, " I had rather wage it against my
enemies than against my chfldren." In a bitter despair he
appealed to France ; and exhausted as it was, the campaign
of 1709 proved how nobly France answered his appeal. The
terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of
Malplaquet showed a new temper in the French soldiers.
Starving as they were, they flung away their rations in their
eagerness for the fight, and fell back at its close in serried
masses that no efforts of Marlborough could break. They
had lost twelve thousand men, but the forcing their Unes of
entrenchment had cost the allies a loss of double that num
ber. Horror at such a " deluge of blood " increased the
growing weariness of the war; and the rejection of the
French offers was unjustly attributed to a desire on the part
of Marlborough of lengthening out a contest which brought
him profit and power. A storm of popular passion burst
suddenly on the Whigs. Its occasion was a dull and silly
sermon in which -a High Church divine. Dr. Sacheverell,
maintained the doctrine of nonresistance, at St. Paul's. His
boldness challenged prosecution ; but in spite of the warning
of Marlborough and of Somers the Whig ministers resolved
on his impeachment before the Lords, and the trial at once
widened into a great party struggle. An outburst of popular
enthusiasm in Sacheverell's favor showed what a storm of
hatred had gathered against the Whigs and the war. The
most eminent of the Tory Churchmen stood by his side at
the bar, crowds escorted him to the court and back again,
while the streets rang with cries of "The Church and Dr.
Sacheverell." A small majority of the peers found the
preacher guilty, but the Ught sentence they inflicted was in
effect an acquittal, and bonfires and illuminations over the
whole country welcomed it as a Tory triumph.

910 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1710
The party whom the Whigs had striven to crush were
roused to new life. The expulsion of Harley and St. John
from the ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more
subtle and vigorous stamp than the High Churchmen who
had quitted office in the first years of the war, and St. John
brought into play a new engine of political attack whose
powers soon made themselves felt. In the Exatniner and in
a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which foUowed in its
train, the humor of Prior, the bitter irony of Swift, and St.
John's own brilliant sophistry spent themselves on the abuse
of the war and of its general. " Six millions of supplies and
almost fifty millions of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the
high allies have been the ruin of us ! " Marlborough was
ridiculed and reviled, he was accused of insolence, cruelty
and ambition, of corruption and greed. Even his courage
was called in question. The turn of popular feeling freed
Anne at once from the pressure beneath which she had bent;
and the subtle intrigue of Harley was busy in undermining
the ministry. The Whigs, who knew the duke's alliance
with them had simply been forced on him by the war, were
easily persuaded that the queen had no aim but to humble
him, and looked coolly on at the dismissal of his son-in-law,
Sunderland, and his friend, Godolphin. Marlborough on his
part was lured by hopes of reconciliation with his old party,
and looked on as coolly while Anne dismissed the Whig
ministers and appointed a Tory ministry in their place, with
Harley and St. John at its head. But the intrigues of Harley
paled before the subtle treason of St. John. Resolute to
drive Marlborough from his command, he fed the duke's
hopes of reconcUiation with the Tories, tUl he led him to ac
quiesce in his wife's dismissal, and to pledge himself to a
cooperation with the Tory policy. It was the duke's belief
that a reconciliation with the Tories was effected that led
him to sanction the despatch of troops which should have
strengthened his army in Flanders on a fruitless expedition
against Canada, though this left him too weak to carry out
a masterly plan which he had formed for a march into the
heart of France in the opening of 171 1. He was unable
even to risk a battle or to do more than to pick up a few sea
board towns, and St. John at once turned the smaU results

1713] THE REVOLUTION 911
of the campaign into an argument for the conclusion of peace.
In defiance of an article of the Grand Alliance which pledged
its members not to carry on separate negotiations with France,
St. John, who now became Lord Bolingbroke, pushed for
ward a secret accommodation between England and France.
It was for this negotiation that he had crippled Marlborough's
campaign ; and it was the discovery of his perfidy which re
vealed to the duke how utterly he had been betrayed, and
forced him at last to break with the Tory ministry. He
returned to England ; and his efforts induced the House of
Lords to denounce the contemplated peace ; but the support
of the Commons and the queen, and the general hatred of
the war among the people, enabled Harley to ride down all
resistance. At the opening of 171 2 the Whig majority in
the House of Lords was swamped by the creation of twelve
Tory peers. Marlborough was dismissed from his command,
charged with peculation, and condemned as guilty by a vote
of the House of Commons. The duke at once withdrew
from England, and with his withdrawal all opposition to the
peace was at an end.
Marlborough's flight was foUowed by the conclusion of a
treaty at Utrecht between France, England, and the Dutch ;
and the desertion of his allies forced the emperor at last to
make peace at Rastadt. By these treaties the original aim of
the war, that of preventing the possession of France and Spain
by the House of Bourbon, was abandoned. No precaution
was taken against the dangers it involved to the " balance of
power," save by a provision that the two crowns should never
be united on a single head, and by PhUip's renunciation of all
right of succession to the throne of France. The principle
on which the treaties were based was in fact that of the earUer
treaties of partition. Phflip retained Spain and the Indies :
but he ceded his possessions in Italy and the Netherlands
with the island of Sardinia to Charles of Austria, who had
now become emperor, in satisfaction of his claims ; whfle he
handed over Sicily to the Duke of Savoy. To England he
gave up not only Minorca but Gibraltar, two positions which
secured her the command of the Mediterranean. France had
to consent to the reestabUshment of the Dutch barrier on a
greater scale than before ; to pacffy the English resentment

912 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1713
against the French privateers by the dismantling of Dunkirk ;
and not only to recognize the right of Anne to the Crown,
and the Protestant succession in the House of Hanover, but
to consent to the expulsion of the pretender from her soil.
The failure of the queen's health made the succession the
real question of the day, and it was a question which turned
all politics into faction and intrigue. The Whigs, who were
still formidable in the Commons, and who showed the strength
of their party in the Lords by defeating a Treaty of Commerce,
in which Bolingbroke anticipated the greatest financial tri
umph of Wflliam Pitt and secured freedom of trade between
England and France, were zealous for the succession of the
elector; nor did the Tories really contemplate any other
plan. But on the means of providing for his succession Har
ley and Bolingbroke differed widely. Harley inclined to an
alliance between the moderate Tories and the Whigs. The
policy of Bolingbroke, on the other hand, was so to strengthen
the Tories by the utter overthrow of their opponents, that
whatever might be the elector's sympathies they could force
their policy on him as king. To ruin his rival's influence he
introduced a Schism Bfll, which hindered any Nonconformist
from acting as a schoolmaster or a tutor ; and which broke
Harley's plans by creating a more bitter division than ever
between Tory and Whig. But its success went beyond his
intentions. The Whigs regarded the bill as the first step in
a Jacobite restoration. The Electress Sophia was herself
alarmed, and the Hanoverian ambassador demanded for the
son of the elector, the future George the Second, who had
been created Duke of Cambridge, a summons as peer to the
coming Parliament, with the aim of securing the presence in
England of a Hanoverian prince in case of the queen's death.
The queen's anger, fanned by Bolingbroke, broke out in a
letter to the electress which warned her that " such conduct
may imperU the succession itself " ; and in July Anne was
brought to dismiss Harley, now Earl of Oxford, and to con
struct a strong and united Tory ministry which would back
her in her resistance to the elector's demand. As the crisis
grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the be
ginning of 1 714 the Whigs had made ready for a rising on
the queen's death, and invited Marlborough from Flanders to

I7I2] THE REVOLUTION 913
head them, in the hope that his name would rally the army
to their cause. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, intent on
buUding up a strong Tory party, made the Duke of Ormond,
whose sympathies were known to be in favor of the pre
tender's succession, warden of the Cinque Ports, the district
in which either claimant of the Crown must land, whfle he
gave Scotland in charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. But
events moved faster than his plans. Anne was suddenly
struck with apoplexy. The Privy Council at once assembled,
and at the news the Whig dukes of Argyll and Somerset
entered the Council Chamber without summons and took
their places at the board. The step had been taken in secret
concert with the Duke of Shrewsbury, who was president of
the councfl in the Tory ministry, but a rival of Bolingbroke
and an adherent of the Hanoverian succession. The act was
a decisive one. The right of the House of Hanover was
at once acknowledged, Shrewsbury was nominated as lord
treasurer by the council, and the nomination was accepted by
the dying queen. Bolingbroke, though he remained secretary
of state, suddenly found himself powerless and neglected, while
the councU took steps to provide for the emergency. Four
regiments were summoned to the capital in the expectation
of a civU war. But the Jacobites were hopeless and unpre
pared ; and on the death of Anne the Elector George of Han
over, who had become heir to the throne by his mother's death,
was proclaimed king of England without a show of opposition.
Section X. —Walpole, 1712-1742
The accession of George the First marked a change in the
position of England in the European commonwealth. From
the age of the Plantagenets the country had stood apart from
more than passing contact with the fortunes of the Continent.
But the Revolution had forced her to join the Great AUiance
of the European peoples ; and shameful as were some of its
incidents, the peace of Utrecht left her the main barrier
against the ambition of the House of Bourbon. And not
only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the
powers of Europe, but it assigned her a special place among
them. The result of the aUiance and the war had been to
establish what was then called a " balance of power " between

914 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1712
the great European states ; a balance which rested indeed not
so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a com
promise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a
great struggle ; but which, once recognized and established,
could be adapted and readjusted, it was hoped, to the varying
political conditions of the time. Of this balance of power, as
recognized and defined in the treaty of Utrecht and its suc
cessors, England became the special guardian. The stubborn
policy of the Georgian statesmen has left its mark on our
policy ever since. In struggling for peace and for the sanctity
of treaties, even though the struggle was one of selfish interest,
England took a ply which she has never wholly lost. Warlike
and imperious as is her national temper, she has never been
able to free herself from a sense that her business in the world
is to seek peace alike for herself and for the nations about her,
and that the best security for peace lies in her recognition,
amidst whatever difficulties and seductions, of the force of
international engagements and the sanctity of treaties.
At home the new king's accession was followed by striking
political results. Under Anne the throne had regained much
of the older influence which it lost through William's unpop
ularity ; but under the two sovereigns who followed Anne
the power of the Crown lay absolutely dormant. They were
strangers, to whom loyalty in its personal sense was impossible ;
and their character as nearly approached insignificance as it
is possible for human character to approach it. Both were
honest and straightforward men, who frankly accepted the
irksome position of constitutional kings. But neither had
any qualities which could make their honesty attractive to the
people at large. The temper of George the First was that of
a gentleman usher ; and his one care was to get money for
his favorites and himself. The temper of George the Second
was that of a drfll-sergeant, who believed himself master of
his realm while he repeated the lessons he had learnt from
his wife, and which his wife had learnt from the minister.
Their court is familiar enough in the witty memoirs of the
time ; but as political figures the two Georges are almost
absent from our history. William of Orange had not only
used the power of rejecting bills passed by the two Houses,
but had kept in his own hands the control of foreign affairs.

I7I2] THE REVOLUTION 915
Anne had never yielded even to Marlborough her exclusive
right of dealing with Church preferment, and had presided to
the last at the cabinet councils of her ministers. But with
the accession of the Georges these reserves passed away. No
sovereign since Anne's death has appeared at a cabinet
councU, or has ventured to refuse his assent to an Act of
Parliament. As Elector of Hanover, indeed, the king still
dealt with Continental affairs ; but his personal interference
roused an increasing jealousy, while it affected in a very
slight degree the foreign policy of his English counselors.
England, in short, was governed not by the king, but by the
Whig ministers of the Crown. Nor had the Whigs to fear
any effective pressure from their political opponents. " The
Tory party," Bolingbroke wrote after Anne's death, "is
gone." In the first House of Commons indeed which was
called by the new king, the Tories hardly numbered fifty
members ; while a fatal division broke their strength in the
country at large. In their despair the more vehement among
them turned to the pretender. Lord Oxford was impeached
and sent to the Tower ; Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond
fled from England to take office under the son of King James.
At home Sir William Wyndham seconded their efforts by build
ing up a Jacobite faction out of the wreck of the Tory party.
The Jacobite secession gave little help to the pretender, while
it dealt a fatal blow to the Tory cause. England was still
averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of
Jacobite designs not only alienated the trading classes, who
shrank from the blow to public credit which a Jacobite repudi
ation of the debt would hring about, but deadened the zeal
even of the parsons and squires ; while it was known to have
sown a deep distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of
the new sovereign. The Crown, indeed, now turned to the
Whigs ; while the Church, which up to this time had been the
main stumbling-block of their party, was sinking into political
insignificance, and was no longer a formidable enemy. For
more than thirty years the Whigs ruled England. But the
length of their rule was not wholly due to the support of the
Crown or the secession of the Tories. It was in some measure
due to the excellent organization of their party. While their
adversaries were divided by differences of principle and without
59

9l6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1712
leaders of real eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the
principles of the Revolution and produced great leaders who
carried them into effect. They submitted with admirable disci
pline to the guidance of a knot of great nobles, to the houses of
Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the Fitzroys
and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose re
sistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose
energy in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave
them a claim to power. It was due yet more largely to the
activity with which the Whigs devoted themselves to the
gaining and preserving an ascendency in -the House of Com
mons. The support of the commercial classes and of the
great towns was secured not only by a resolute maintenance
of public credit, but by the special attention which each minis
try paid to questions of trade and finance. Peace and the
reduction of the land tax conciliated the farmers and the land
owners, while the Jacobite sympathies of the bulk of the
squires, and their consequent withdrawal from all share in
politics, threw even the representation of the shires for a time
into Whig hands. Of the county members, who formed the
less numerous but the weightier part of the Lower House,
nine tenths were for some years relatives and dependents of
the great Whig families. Nor were coarser means of con
trolling Parliament neglected. The wealth of the Whig
houses was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small
and corrupt constituencies which made up a large part of the
borough representation. It was spent yet more unscrupu
lously in parliamentary bribery. Corruption was older than
Walpole or the Whig ministry, for it sprang out of the very
transfer of power to the House of Commons which had begun
with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the
House was supreme in the State; but while freeing itself
from the control of the Crown, it was as yet imperfectly
responsible to the people. It was only at election time that a
member felt the pressure of public opinion. The secrecy of
parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful as a safe
guard against royal interference with debate, served as a safe
guard against interference on the part of constituencies. This
strange union of immense power with absolute freedom from
responsibUity brought about its natural results in the bulk of

I7I2] THE REVOLUTION 917
members. A vote was too valuable to be given without recom
pense ; and parliamentary support had to be bought by places,
pensions, and bribes in hard cash. But dexterous as was their
management, and compact as was their organization, it was to
nobler qualities than these that the Whigs owed their long
rule over England. They were true throughout to the princi
ples on which they had risen into power, and their unbroken
administration converted those principles into national habits.
Before their long rule was over. Englishmen had forgotten
that it was possible to persecute for difference of opinion, or
to put down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the
administration of justice, or to rule without a Parliament.
That this policy was so firmly grasped and so steadily carried
out was due above all to the genius of Robert Walpole. Born
in 1676, he entered Parliament two years before Wflliam's
death as a young Norfolk landowner of fair fortune, with the
tastes and air of the class from which he sprang. His big
square figure, his vulgar good-humored face, were those of a
common country squire. And in Walpole the squire under
lay the statesman to the last. He was ignorant of books, he
" loved neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste for
art, his real love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase.
He rode as hard as he drank. Even in moments of political
peril, the first despatch he would open was the letter from
his gamekeeper. There was the temper of the Norfolk fox-
hunter in the " doggedness " which Marlborough noted as his
characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared, " If
I had not been prime minister, I should have been Archbishop
of Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the
awkwardness of his earlier efforts to speak, or met single-
handed at the last the bitter attacks of a host of enemies.
There was the same temper in the genial good humor which
became with him a new force in politics. No man was ever
more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought
in no " gagging act " for the press ; and though the lives of
most of his assailants were in his hands through their in
trigues with the pretender, he made little use of his power
over them. Where his country breeding showed itself most,
however, was in the shrewd, narrow, honest character of his
mind. Though he saw very clearly, he could not see far, and

9l8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1712
he would not believe what he could not see. He was thor
oughly straightforward and true to his own convictions, so
far as they went. " Robin and I are two honest men," the
Jacobite Shippen owned in later years, when contrasting him
with his factious opponents ; " he is for King George and I
am for King James, but those men with long cravats only
desire place either under King George or King James." He
saw the value of the political results which the Revolution
had won, and he carried out his " Revolution principles" with
a rare fidelity through years of unquestioned power. But his
prosaic good sense turned skeptically away from the poetic
and passionate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier
or purer motives of action he laughed at as " schoolboy
flights." For young members who talked of public virtue or
patriotism, he had one good-natured answer : " You will soon
come off that and grow wiser."
How great a part Walpole was to play no one could as yet
foresee. Though his vigor in the cause of his party had
earned him the bitter hostility of the Tories in the later
years of Anne, and a trumped-up charge of peculation had
served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him from the House
and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of George
the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding posi
tion he was soon to assume. The first Hanoverian ministry
was drawn wholly from the Whig party, but its leaders and
Marlborough found themselves alike set aside. The direction
of affairs was entrusted to the new secretary of state. Lord
Townshend ; his fellow secretary was General Stanhope, who
was raised to the peerage. It was as Townshend's brother-in-
law, rather than from a sense of his actual ability, that Wal
pole successively occupied the posts of paymaster of the
forces, chancellor of the Exchequer, and first lord of the treas
ury in the new administration. The first work of the min
istry was to meet a desperate attempt of the pretender to
gain the throne. There was no real prospect of success, for
the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories
were broken and dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The
death of Louis ruined all hope of aid from France ; the hope
of Swedish aid proved as fruitless ; but in spite of Boling
broke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. With-

I7i6] THE REVOLUTION 919
out informing his new minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar
to give the signal for revolt in the north. In Scotland the
triumph of the Whigs meant the continuance of the House of
Argyll in power, and the rival Highland clans were as ready
to fight the Campbells under Mar as they had been ready to
fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a
leader of different stamp from these. Six thousand High
landers joined him at Perth, but his cowardice or want of con
duct kept his army idle, tUl Argyll had gathered forces to
meet it in an indecisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The
pretender, who arrived too late for the action, proved a yet
more sluggish and incapable leader than Mar; and at the
close of 1 71 5 the advance of fresh forces drove James over
sea again and dispersed the clans to their hills. In England
the danger passed away like a dream. The accession of the
new king had been followed by some outbreaks of riotous
discontent ; but at the talk of Highland risings and French
invasions Tories and Whigs alike rallied round the throne,
while the army went hotly for King George. The suspension
of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the arrest of their leader. Sir
William Wyndham, cowed the Jacobites; and not a man
stirred in the west when Ormond appeared off the coast of
Devon, and called on his party to rise. Oxford alone, where
the university was a hotbed of Jacobitism, showed itself rest
less ; and a few of the Catholic gentry rose in Northumber
land, under Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster. The arrival
of two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them
by Mar spurred them to a march into Lancashire, where the
Catholic party was strongest ; but they were soon cooped up
in Preston, and driven to a surrender. The ministry availed
itself of its triumph to gratify the Nonconformists by a repeal
of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts, and to venture
on a great constitutional change. Under the Triennial Bill
in William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to
three years. Now that the House of Commons, however,
was become the ruling power in the State, a change was
absolutely required to secure steadiness and fixity of political
action; and in 17 16 this necessity coincided with the desire
of the Whigs to maintain in power a thoroughly Whig Parlia
ment. The duration of Parliament was therefore extended

920 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [171 7
to seven years by the Septennial BUl. But the Jacobite ris
ing brought about a yet more momentous change in English
policy abroad. At the moment when the landing of James
in Scotland had quickened the anxiety of King George that
France should be wholly detached from his cause, the actual
state of European politics aided to bring about a new Triple
Alliance between France, England and Holland.
Since the death of Louis the Fourteenth in 171 5 France
had been ruled by the Duke of Orleans as regent for the
young king, Louis the Fifteenth. The duke stood next in
the succession to the crown, if PhUip of Spain observed the
renunciation of his rights which he had made in the treaty
of Utrecht. It was well known, however, that Philip had
no notion of observing this renunciation, and the constant
dream of every Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had
given up. To attempt this was to defy Europe : for Savoy
had gained Sicily ; the emperor held the Netherlands,
Naples, and the MUanese ; Holland looked on the barrier
fortresses as vital to its own security ; while England clung
tenaciously to the American trade. But the boldness of
Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the Spanish minister,
accepted the risk; and while his master was intriguing
against the regent in France, Alberoni promised aid to the
Jacobite cause as a means of preventing the interference of
England with his designs. His first attempt was to recover
the Italian provinces which Philip had lost, and armaments
greater than Spain had seen for a century reduced Sardinia
in 1 71 7. England and France at once drew together and
entered into a compact by which France guaranteed the
succession of the House of Hanover in England, and Eng
land the succession of the House of Orleans, should Louis
the Fifteenth die without heirs ; and the two powers were
joined, though unwfllingly, by Holland. When in the sum
mer of 17 1 8 a strong Spanish force landed in Sicily, and
made itself master of the island, the appearance of an Eng
lish squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an
engagement in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed.
Alberoni strove to avenge the blow by fitting out an arma
ment which the Duke of Ormond was to command for a
revival of the Jacobite rising in Scotland. But the ships

I7i8] THE REVOLUTION 921
were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the accession of
Austria with Savoy to the Triple Alliance left Spain alone in
the face of Europe. The progress of the French armies
in the north of Spain forced PhUip at last to give way.
Alberoni was dismissed ; and the Spanish forces were with
drawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands
now passed to the emperor. Savoy being compensated for
its loss by the acquisition of Sardinia, from which its duke
took the title of king; while the work of the treaty of
Utrecht was completed by the emperor's renunciation of
his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation
of his claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies.
The struggle, however, had shown the difficulties which the
double position of its sovereign was to bring on England.
In his own mind George cared more for the interests of his
electorate of Hanover than of his kingdom ; and these were
now threatened by Charles XII. of Sweden, whose anger had
been roused at the cession to Hanover of the Swedish pos
sessions of Bremen and Verden by the king of Denmark,
who had seized them while Charles was absent in Turkey.
The despatch of a British fleet into the Baltic to overawe
Sweden identified England with the policy of Hanover, and
Charles retorted by joining with Alberoni, and by concluding
an alliance with the czar, Peter the Great, for a restoration
of the Stuarts. Luckily for the new dynasty his plans were
brought to an end by his death at the siege of Frederickshall ;
but the policy which provoked them had already brought about
the dissolution of the ministry. In assenting to a treaty of
alliance with Hanover against Sweden, they had yielded to
the fact that Bremen and Verden were not only of the high
est importance to Hanover, which was thus brought into
contact with the sea, but of hardly less value to England, as
they secured the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, the
chief inlets for British commerce into Germany, in the hands
of a friendly state. But they refused to go further in carry
ing out a Hanoverian policy ; the anger of the king was
seconded by intrigues among the ministers; and in 171 7
Townshend and Walpole had been forced to resign their
posts. In the reconstituted cabinet Lords Sunderland and
Stanhope remained supreme ; and their first aim was to

922 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1720
secure the maintenance of the Whig power by a constitutional
change. Harley's creation of twelve peers to insure the
sanction of the lords to the treaty of Utrecht showed that
the Crown possessed a power of swamping the majority in
the House of Peers. In 1720, therefore, the ministry intro
duced a bill, suggested as was believed by Sunderland, which
professed to secure the liberty of the Upper House by limit
ing the power of the Crown in the creation of fresh peers.
The number of peers was permanently fixed at the number
then sitting in the House ; and creations could only be made
when vacancies occurred. Twenty-five hereditary Scotch
peers were substituted for the sixteen elected peers for
Scotland. The bfll, however, was strenuously opposed by
Walpole. It would in fact have rendered representative
government impossible. For representative government was
now coming day by day more completely to mean govern
ment by the will of the House of Commons, carried out by a
ministry which served as the mouthpiece of that will. But
it was only through the prerogative of the Crown, as exer
cised under the advice of such a ministry, that the peers
could be forced to bow to the will of the Lower House in
matters where their opinion was adverse to it ; and the pro
posal of Sunderland would have brought legislation and gov
ernment to a deadlock. The Peerage Bill owed its defeat
to Walpole's opposition ; and his rivals were forced to admit
him, with Townshend, into the ministry, though they held
subordinate places. But this soon gave way to a more
natural arrangement. The sudden increase of English com
merce begot at this moment the mania of speculation. Ever
since the age of Elizabeth the unknown wealth of Spanish
America had acted like a spell upon the imagination of Eng
lishmen ; and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Com
pany, which promised a reduction of the public debt as the
price of a monopoly of the Spanish trade. Spain, however,
clung jealously to her old prohibitions of all foreign com
merce ; and the treaty of Utrecht only won for England the
right of engaging in the negro slave trade, and of despatching
a single ship to the coast of Spanish America. But in spite
of all this, the company again came forward, offering in
exchange for new privileges to pay off national burdens

1722] THE REVOLUTION 923
which amounted to nearly a million a year. It was in vain
that Walpole warned the ministry and the country against
this " dream." Both went mad ; and in 1720 bubble company
followed bubble company, till the inevitable reaction brought
a general ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to
the grave. Of his colleagues, many were found to have
received bribes from the South Sea Company to back its
frauds. Craggs, the secretary of state, died of terror at the
investigation ; Aislabie, the chancellor of the Exchequer,
was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck of his
rivals Walpole mounted again into power. In 1721 he be
came first lord of the treasury, while Townshend returned
to his post of secretary of state. But their relative position
was now reversed. Townshend had been the head in their
earlier administration : in this Walpole was resolved, to use
his own characteristic phrase, that " the firm should be Wal
pole and Townshend and not Townshend and Walpole." y
If no minister has fared worse at the hands of poets and
historians, there are few whose greatness has been more
impartially recognized by practical statesmen. The years of
his power indeed are years without parallel in our history for
political stagnation. His long administration of more than
twenty years is almost without a history. All legislative and
poUtical activity seemed to cease with his entry into office.
Year after year passed by without a change. In the third
year of his ministry there was but one division in the House
of Commons. The Tory members were so few that for a
time they hardly cared to attend its sittings ; and in 1 722 the
loss of Bishop Atterbury of Rochester, who was convicted of
correspondence with the pretender, deprived of his bishopric,
and banished by Act of Parliament, deprived the Jacobites
of their only remaining leader. Walpole's one care was to
maintain the quiet which was reconciling the country to the
system of the Revolution. But this inaction fell in with the
temper of the nation at large. It was popular with the class
which commonly presses for political activity. The energy
of the trading class was absorbed in the rapid extension of
commerce and accumulation of wealth. So long as the
country was justly and temperately governed the merchant
and shopkeeper were content to leave government in the

924 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1725
hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone to
enjoy their new freedom, and develop their new industries.
And Walpole let them alone. Progress became material
rather than political, but the material progress of the country
was such as England had never seen before. The work of
keeping England quiet and of giving quiet to Europe, was in
itself a noble one ; and it is the temper with which he carried
on this work which gives Walpole his place among English
statesmen. He was the first and he was the most success
ful of our peace ministers. "The most pernicious circum
stances," he said, "in which this country can be are those of
war, as we must be losers while it lasts, and cannot be great
gainers when it ends." It was not that the honor or influence
of England suffered in his hands, for he won victories by the
firmness of his policy and the skill of his negotiations as
effectual as any which are won by arms. But in spite of the
complications of foreign affairs, and the pressure from the
court and the Opposition, it is the glory of Walpole that he
resolutely kept England at peace. Peace indeed was hard
to maintain. The Emperor Charles the Sixth had issued a
Pragmatic Sanction, by which he provided that his hereditary
dominions should descend unbroken, to his daughter, Maria
Theresa ; but no European state had yet consented to guar
antee her succession. Spain, still resolute to regain her lost
possessions, and her old monopoly of trade with her American
colonies, seized the opportunity of detaching the emperor
from the alliance of the four powers, which left her isolated
in Europe. She promised to support the Pragmatic Sanction
in return for a pledge from Charles to aid in wresting Gibral
tar and Minorca from England, and in securing to a Spanish
prince the succession to Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany. A
grant of the highest trading privUeges in her American
dominions to a commercial company which the emperor had
established at Ostend, in defiance of the treaty of WestphaUa
and the remonstrances of England and Holland, revealed this
secret alliance ; and there were fears of the adhesion of
Russia. The danger was met for a while by an aUiance of
England, France, and Prussia; but the withdrawal of the last
power again gave courage to the confederates, and in 1727
the Spaniards besieged Gibraltar, whUe Charles threatened

1730] THE REVOLUTION 925
an invasion of Holland. The moderation of Walpole alone
averted a European war. Whfle sending British squadrons
to the Baltic, the Spanish coast, and America, he succeeded
by diplomatic pressure in again forcing the emperor to inac
tion ; Spain was at last brought to sign the treaty of Seville,
and to content herself with a promise of the succession of a
Spanish prince to the duchies of Parma and Tuscany ; and
the discontent of Charles at this concession was allayed in
1 73 1 by giving the guarantee of England to the Pragmatic
Sanction. As Walpole was the first ¦ of our peace ministers, so he
was the first of our financiers. He was far indeed from dis
cerning the powers which later statesmen have shown to
exist in a sound finance, but he had the sense to see,
what no minister had till then seen, that the wisest course
a statesman can take in presence of a great increase in
national industry and national wealth is to look quietly on
and let it alone. At the outset of his rule he declared in
a speech from the throne that nothing would more conduce
to the extension of commerce " than to make the exportation
of our own manufactures, and the importation of the com
modities used in the manufacturing of them, as practicable
and easy as may be." The first act of his financial admin
istration was to take off the duties from more than a hun
dred British exports, and nearly forty articles of importation.
In 1730 he broke in the same enhghtened spirit through the
prejudice which restricted the commerce of the colonies to.
the mother country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Car
olinas to export their rice directly to any part of Europe.
The result was that the rice of America soon drove that of
Italy and Egypt from the market. His Excise Bill, defective
as it was, was the first measure in which an English minister
showed any real grasp . of the principles of taxation. The
wisdom of Walpole was rewarded by a quick upgrowth of
prosperity. Our exports, which were six mfllions in value.
at the beginning of the century, had doubled by the middle
of it. The rapid development of the colonial trade gave
England a new wealth. In Manchester and Birmingham,
whose manufactures were now becoming of importance, pop
ulation doubled in thirty years. Bristol, the chief seat of the

926 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1727
West Indian trade, rose into new prosperity. Liverpool,
which owes its creation to the new trade with the West,
sprang up from a little country town into the third port in
the kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that
they brought with them, the value of land, and with it the
rental of every country gentleman, rose fast. But this up
growth of wealth around him never made Walpole swerve
from a rigid economy, from the steady reduction of the
debt, or the diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the
death of George the First the public burdens were reduced
by twenty millions.
The accession of George the Second in 1727 seemed to
give a fatal shock to Walpole's power; for the new king
was known to have hated his father's minister hardly less
than he had hated his father. But hate Walpole as he
might, the king was absolutely guided by the adroitness of
his wife, Caroline of Anspach ; and Caroline had resolved
that there should be no change in the ministry. The years
which followed were, in fact, those in which Walpole's power
reached its height. He gained as great an influence over
George the Second as he had gained over his father. His
hold over the House of Commons remained unshaken. The
country was tranquil and prosperous. The prejudices of the
landed gentry were met by a steady effort to reduce the land
tax. The Church was quiet. The Jacobites were too hope
less to stir. A few trade measures and social reforms crept
quietly through the Houses. An inquiry into the state of the
jails showed that social thought was not utterly dead. A bill
of great value enacted that all proceedings in courts of justice
should henceforth be in the English language. Only once
did Walpole break this tranquillity by an attempt at a great
measure of statesmanship. No tax had from the first moment
of its introduction been more unpopular than the Excise. Its
origin was due to Pym and the Long Parliament, who imposed
duties on beer, cider, and perry, which at the Restoration pro
duced an annual income of more than six hundred thousand
pounds. The war with France brought with it the malt tax,
and additional duties on spirits, wine, tobacco, and other arti
cles. So great had been the increase in the public wealth
that the return from the Excise amounted at the death of

1733] THE REVOLUTION 927
George the First to nearly two mUlions and a half a year.
But its unpopularity remained unabated, and even philoso
phers like Locke contended that the whole public revenue
should be drawn from direct taxes upon the land. Walpole,
on the other hand, saw in the growth of indirect taxation a
means of winning over the country gentry to the new dynasty
of the Revolution by freeing the land from all burdens what
ever. Smuggling and fraud diminished the revenue by
immense sums. The loss on tobacco alone amounted to a
third of the whole duty. The Excise Bill of 1733 met this
evil by the establishment of bonded warehouses, and by the
collection of the duties from the inland dealers in the form of
Excise and not of Customs. The first measure would have
made London a free port and doubled English trade. The
second would have so largely increased the revenue, without
any loss to the consumer, as to enable Walpole to repeal the
land tax. In the case of tea and coffee alone, the change in
the mode of levying the duty was estimated to bring in an
additional hundred thousand pounds a year. The necessaries
of life and the raw materials of manufacture were in Wal
pole's plan to remain absolutely untaxed. The scheme was
an anticipation of the principles which have guided English
finance since the triumph of free trade; but in 1733 Walpole
stood ahead of his time. A violent agitation broke out ; riots
almost grew into revolt ; and in spite of the queen's wish to put
down resistance by force, Walpole withdrew the bill. " I will
not be the minister," he said with noble self-command, " to
enforce taxes at the expense of blood." What had fanned
popular prejudice into a flame during the uproar was the vio
lence of the so-called " Patriots." In the absence of a strong
opposition and of great impulses to enthusiasm a party breaks
readily into factions ; and the weakness of the Tories joined
with the stagnation of public affairs to breed faction among
the Whigs. Walpole too was jealous of power; and as his
jealousy drove colleague after colleague out of office, they
became leaders of a party whose sole aim was to thrust him
from his post. Greed of power indeed was the one passion
which mastered his robust common sense. Townshend was
turned out of office in 1730, Lord Chesterfield in 1733;
and though he started with the ablest administration the

928 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1733
country had known, Walpole was left after twenty years of
supremacy with but one man of ability in his cabinet, the
chancellor. Lord Hardwicke. With the single exception of
Townshend, the colleagues whom his jealousy dismissed
plunged into an opposition more factious and unprincipled
than has ever disgraced English politics. The " Patriots," as
they called themselves, owned Pulteney as their head ; they
were reenforced by a band of younger Whigs- — -the "Boys,"
as Walpole named them — whose temper revolted alike
against the inaction and cynicism of his policy, and whose
spokesman was a young cornet of horse, William Pitt ; and
they rallied to these the fragment of the Tory party which
still took part in politics, and which was guided for a while by
the virulent ability of Bolingbroke, whom Walpole had suf
fered to return from exile, but to whom he had refused the
restoration of his seat in the House of Lords. But Walpole's
defeat on the Excise Bill had done little to shake his power,
and Bolingbroke withdrew to France in despair at the failure
of his efforts.
Abroad the first signs of a new danger showed themselves
in 1733, when the peace of Europe was broken afresh by dis
putes which rose out of a contested election to the throne of
Poland. Austria and France were alike drawn into the strffe ;
and in England the awakening jealousy of French designs
roused a new pressure for war. The new king too was eager
to fight, and her German sympathies inclined even Caroline to
join in the fray. But Walpole stood firm for the observance
of neutrality. " There are fifty thousand men slain this year
in Europe," he boasted as the strife went on, " and not one
Englishman." The intervention of England and Holland
succeeded in 1736 in restoring peace; but the country noted
bitterly that peace was bought by the triumph of both
branches of the House of Bourbon. A new Bourbon mon
archy was established at the cost of the House of Austria
by the cession of the Two Sicilies to a Spanish prince, in
exchange for his right of succession to Parma and Tuscany.
On the other hand, Lorraine passed finally into the hands of
France. The birth of chUdren to Louis the Fifteenth had
settled all questions of succession in France, and no obstacle
remained to hinder their family sympathies from uniting the

1738] THE REVOLUTION 929
Bourbon courts in a common action. As early as 1733 a
Family Compact had been secretly concluded between France
and Spain, the main object of which was the ruin of the
maritime supremacy of Britain. Spain bound herself to
deprive England gradually of its commercial privileges in
her American dominions, and to transfer them to France.
France in return engaged to support Spain at sea, and to aid
her in the recovery of Gibraltar. The caution with which
Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered this com
pact inoperative for the time ; but neither of the Bourbon
courts ceased to look forward to its future execution. No
sooner was the war ended than France strained every nerve
to increase her fleet ; while Spain steadily tightened the
restrictions on British commerce with her American colonies.
The trade with Spanish America, which, illegal as it was, had
grown largely through the connivance of Spanish port officers
during the long alliance of England and Spain in the wars
against France, had at last received a legal recognition in the
peace of Utrecht. It was indeed left under narrow restric
tions ; but these were evaded by a vast system of smuggling
which rendered what remained of the Spanish monopoly all
but valueless. The efforts of Philip, however, to bring down
English intercourse with his colonies to the importation of
negroes and the despatch of a single ship, as stipulated by
the treaty of Utrecht, brought about collisions which made
it hard to keep the peace. The ill humor of the trading
classes rose to madness in 1738, when a merchant captain
named Jenkins told at the bar of the House of Commons the
tale of his torture by the Spaniards, and produced an ear
which, he said, they had cut off with taunts at the English
king. It was in vain that Walpole strove to do justice to
both parties, and that he battled stubbornly against the 'cry
for an unjust and impolitic war. The emperor's death was
now close at hand ; and at such a juncture it was of the high
est importance that England should be free to avail herself
of every means to guard the European settlement. But his
efforts were in vain. His negotiations were foiled by the
frenzy of the one country and the pride of the other. At
home his enemies assailed him with a storm of abuse. Bal
lad singers trolled out their rhymes to the crowd on " the cur-

930 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i739
dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain." His position had
been weakened by the death of the queen ; and it was now
weakened yet more by the open hostility of the Prince of
Wales. His mastery of the House of Commons too was no
longer unquestioned. The Tories were slowly returning to
Parliament. The numbers and the violence of the " Patriots "
had grown with the open patronage of Prince Frederick. The
country was slowly turning against him. With the cry for a
commercial war the support of the trading class failed him.
But it was not till he stood utterly alone that Walpole gave
way, and that he consented in 1739 to a war against Spain.
"They may ring their beUs now," the great minister said
bitterly, as peals and bonfires welcomed his surrender ; " but
they will soon be wringing their hands." His foresight was
at once justified. No sooner had Admiral Vernon appeared
off the coast of South America with an English fleet, and
captured Porto Bello, than France formally declared that she
would not consent to any English settlement on the mainland
of South America, and despatched two squadrons to the West
Indies. At this crisis the death of Charles the Sixth forced
on the European struggle which Walpole had dreaded. France
saw her opportunity for finishing the work which Henry the
Second had begun of breaking up the empire into a group of
powers too weak to resist French aggression. While the
new king of Prussia, Frederick the Second, claimed Sflesia,
Bavaria claimed the Austrian duchies, which passed with
the other hereditary dominions, according to the Pragmatic
Sanction, to the queen of Hungary, Maria Theresa. In
union, therefore, with Spain, which aimed at the annexation of
the Milanese, France promised her aid to Prussia and Bava
ria ; while Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France.
In the summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany,
and the Elector of Bavaria appeared unopposed before
Vienna. Never had the House of Austria stood in such
peril. Its opponents counted on a division of its dominions.
France claimed the Netherlands, Spain the Milanese, Bavaria
the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second SUesia.
Hungary and the duchy of Austria alone were left to Maria
Theresa. Walpole, though still true to her cause, advised her
to purchase Frederick's aid against France and her allies by

1742] THE REVOLUTION 931
the cession of part of SUesia; but the "Patriots" spurred
her to refusal by promising her the aid of England. Wal
pole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken, and Fred
erick was driven to conclude an aUiance with France. But
the queen refused to despair. She won the support of Hun
gary by restoring its constitutional rights; and British sub
sidies enabled her to march at the head of a Hungarian army
to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria, and repulse an
attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. On
England's part, however, the war was waged feebly and inef
fectively. Admiral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena;
and Walpole was charged with thwarting and starving the
war. He stUl repeUed the attacks of the "Patriots" with
wonderful spirit; but in a new Parliament his majority
dropped to sixteen, and in his own cabinet he became almost
powerless. The buoyant temper which had carried him
through so many storms broke down at last. " He who was
asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes his son,
"now never sleeps above an hour without waking; and he
who at dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more
gay and thoughtless than all the company, now sits without
speaking and with his eyes fixed for an hour together." The
end was in fact near ; and in the opening of 1742 the dwin
dling of his majority to three forced Walpole to resign.

60

CHAPTER X
MODERN ENGLAND
Section I. — William Pitt, 1742 -1762
THE fall of Walpole revealed a change in the temper of
England which was to influence from that time to this
its social and political history. New forces, new crav
ings, new aims, which had been silently gathering beneath
the crust of inaction, began at last to tell on the national life.
The stir showed itself markedly in a religious revival which
dates from the later years of Walpole's ministry. Never had
religion seemed at a lower ebb. The progress of free inquiry,
the aversion from theological strife which had been left by
the civil wars, the new political and material channels opened
to human energy, had produced a general indifference to all
questions of religious speculation or religious life. The
Church, predominant as its influence seemed at the close of
the Revolution, had sunk into political insignificance. The
bishops, who were now chosen exclusively from among the
small number of Whig ecclesiastics, were left politically
powerless by the estrangement and hatred of their clergy ;
while the clergy themselves, drawn by their secret tendencies
to Jacobitism, stood sulkily apart from any active interference
with public affairs. The prudence of the Whig statesmen
aided to maintain this ecclesiastical immobility. They were
careful to avoid all that could rouse into Ufe the slumbering
forces of bigotry and fanaticism. When the Dissenters
pressed for a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Wal
pole openly avowed his dread of awaking the passions of relig
ious hate by such a measure, and satisfied them by an annual
act of indemnity for any breach of these penal statutes ;
while a suspension of the meetings of Convocation deprived
the clergy of their natural center of agitation and opposition.
Nor was this political inaction compensated by any religious
932

MODERN ENGLAND.

ENGLAND

NORTH
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1742] MODERN ENGLAND 933
activity. A large number of prelates were mere Whig parti
sans with no higher aim than that of promotion. The levees
of the ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh
bishop avowed that he had seen his diocese but once, and
habituaUy resided at the lakes of Westmoreland. The sys
tem of pluralities turned the wealthier and more learned of
the priesthood into absentees, whUe the bulk of them were
indolent, poor, and without social consideration. A shrewd,
if prejudiced, observer brands the English clergy of the day
as the most Iffeless in Europe, " the most remiss of their labors
in private, and the least severe in their lives." There was
a revolt against religion and against churches in both the
extremes of English society. In the higher circles of society
" every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to Eng
land, " if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen
of the time the greater part were unbelievers in any form of
Christianity, and distinguished for the grossness and immo
rality of their lives. Drunkenness and foul talk were thought
no discredit to Walpole. A later prime minister, the Duke
of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with his mistress
at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were
sneered out of fashion ; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters
to his son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a
polite education. At the other end of the social scale lay the
masses of the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a
degree which it is hard to conceive, for the increase of popu
lation which foUowed on the growth of towns and the devel
opment of commerce had been met by no efforts for their
religious or educational improvement. Not a new parish had
been created. Schools there were none, save the grammar-
schools of Edward and Elizabeth, and some newly established
" circulating schools " in Wales, for religious education. The
rural peasantry, who were fast being reduced to pauperism
by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left without much moral
or reUgious training of any sort. " We saw but one Bible in
the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later
time, " and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within the
towns things were worse. There was no effective police ; and
in great outbreaks the mob of London or Birmingham burnt
houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and pfllaged at their

934 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1742
will. The criminal class gathered boldness and numbers in
the face of ruthless laws which only testified to the terror of
society, laws which made it a capital crime to cut down a
cherry-tree, and which strung up twenty young thieves of a
morning in front of Newgate ; while the introduction of gin
gave a new impetus to drunkenness. In the streets of Lon
don at one time ginshops invited every passer-by to get drunk
for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.
In spite, however, of scenes such as this, England remained
at heart religious. In the middle class the old Puritan spirit
lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious
revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration,
which changed after a time the whole tone of English society.
The Church was restored to life and activity. Religion car
ried to the hearts of the people a fresh spirit of moral zeal,
while it purified our literature and our manners. A new
philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and
wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and
gave the first impulse to popular education. The revival
began in a small knot of Oxford students, whose revolt against
the religious deadness of their times showed itself in ascetic
observances, an enthusiastic devotion, and a methodical regu
larity of life which gained them the nickname of " Metho
dists." Three figures detached themselves from the group
as soon as, on its transfer to London in 1738, it attracted
public attention by the fervor and even extravagance of its
piety ; and each found his special work in the task to which
the instinct of the new movement led it from the first, that of
carrying religion and morality to the vast masses of popula
tion which lay concentrated in the towns, or around the mines
and collieries of Cornwall and the north. Whitefield, a ser
vitor of Pembroke College, was above all the preacher of the
revival. Speech was governing English politics ; and the
religious power of speech was shown when a dread of " enthu
siasm " closed against the new apostles the pulpits of the
Established Church, and forced them to preach in the fields.
Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous
corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumber
land, or in the dens of London, or in the long galleries where
in the pauses of his labor the Cornish miner listens to the

1742] MODERN ENGLAND 935
sobbing of the sea. Whitefield's preaching was such as Eng
land had never heard before, theatrical, extravagant, often
commonplace, but hushing all criticism by its intense reality,
its earnestness of belief, its deep tremulous sympathy with
the sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthu
siast who could wring gold from the close-fisted Franklin and
admiration from the fastidious Horace Walpole, or who could
look down from the top of a green knoll at Kingswood on
twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits, and
see as he preached the tears " making white channels down
their blackened cheeks." On the rough and ignorant masses
to whom they spoke the effect of Whitefield and his fellow
Methodists was mighty both for good and ill. Their preach
ing stirred a passionate hatred in their opponents. Their
lives were often in danger, they were mobbed, they were
ducked, they were stoned, they were smothered with filth.
But the enthusiasm they aroused was equally passionate.
Women fell down in convulsions ; strong men were smitten
suddenly to the earth ; the preacher was interrupted by bursts
of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenom
ena of strong spiritual excitement, so f amiliar now, but at that
time strange and unknown, followed on their sermons ; and
the terrible sense of a conviction of sin, a new dread of hell,
a new hope of heaven, took forms at once grotesque and
sublime. Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student, came to
add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was
the " sweet singer " of the movement. His hymns expressed
the fiery conviction of its converts in lines so chaste and beau
tiful that its more extravagant features disappeared. The
wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm passed into a passion for
hymn singing, and a new musical impulse was aroused in the
people which gradually changed the face of public devotion
throughout England.
But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied
in himself not this or that side of the new movement, but the
movement itself. Even at Oxford, where he resided as a fellow
of Lincoln, he had been looked upon as head of the group of
Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic mission to the
Indians of Georgia he again took the lead of the little society,
which had removed in the interval to London. In power as a

936 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1742
preacher he stood next to Whitefield ; as a hymn writer he
stood second to his brother Charles. But while combining in
some degree the excellences of either, he possessed qualities
in which both were utterly deficient : an indefatigable indus
try, a cool judgment, a command over others, a faculty of
organization, a singular union of patience and moderation
with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of
men. He had besides a learning and skill in writing which
no other of the Methodists possessed ; he was older than any
of his coUeagues at the start of the movement, and he out
lived them all. His life indeed almost covers the century,
and the Methodist body had passed through every phase of
its history before he sank into the grave at the age of eighty-
eight. It would have been impossible for Wesley to have
wielded the power he did had he not shared the follies and
extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples.
Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At
times he lived on bread only, and he often slept on the bare
boards. He lived in a world of wonders and divine inter
positions. It was a miracle if the rain stopped and allowed
him to set forward on a journey. It was a judgment of
Heaven if a haflstorm burst over a town which had been deaf
to his preaching. One day, he tells us, when he was tired
and his horse fell lame, " I thought — cannot God heal either
man or beast by any means or without any ? — immediately
my headache ceased and my horse's lameness in the same
instant." With a stfll more childish fanaticism he guided
his conduct, whether in ordinary events or in the great crises
of his life, by drawing lots or watching the particular texts at
which his Bible opened. But with all this extravagance and
superstition, Wesley's mind was essentially practical, orderly,
and conservative. No man ever stood at the head of a great
revolution whose temper was so antirevolutionary. In his
earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for
the narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When
Whitefield began his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could
not at first reconcUe himself to that strange way." He con
demned and fought against the admission of laymen as
preachers tfll he found himself left with none but laymen to
preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of

1742] MODERN ENGLAND 937
England, and looked on the body he had formed as but a lay
society in full communion with it. He broke with the Mora
vians, who had been the earliest friends of the new movement,
when they endangered its safe conduct by their contempt of
religious forms. He broke with Whitefield when the great
preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvinism. But the
same practical temper of mind which led him to reject what
was unmeasured, and to be the last to adopt what was new,
enabled him at once to grasp and organize the novelties he
adopted. He became himself the most unwearied of field
preachers, and his journal for half a century is little more
than a record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When
once driven to employ lay helpers in his ministry he made
their work a new and attractive feature in his system. His
earlier asceticism only lingered in a dread of social enjoy
ments and an aversion from the gayer and sunnier side of
life which links the Methodist movement with that of the
Puritans. As the fervor of his superstition died down into
the calm of age, his cool common sense discouraged in his
followers the enthusiastic outbursts which marked the open
ing of the revival. His powers were bent to the building up
of a great religious society, which might give to the new
enthusiasm a lasting and practical form. The Methodists
were grouped into classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by
the expulsion of unworthy members, and furnished with an
alternation of settled ministers and wandering preachers;
whfle the whole body was placed under the absolute gov
ernment of a Conference of Ministers. But so long as he
lived, the direction of the new religious society remained with
Wesley alone. " If by arbitrary power," he replied with
charming simplicity to objectors, "you mean a power which
I exercise simply without any colleagues therein, this is cer
tainly true, but I see no hurt in it."
The great body which he thus founded numbered a hundred
thousand members at his death, and now counts its members
in England and America by miUions. But the Methodists
themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its
action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy ; and
the " Evangelical " movement, which found representatives
like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Establishment,

938 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1742
made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at last
impossible. In Walpole's day the English clergy were the
idlest and most lifeless in the world. In our own time no
body of religious ministers surpasses them in piety, in phil
anthropic energy, or in popular regard. In the nation at
large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and
pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social
tone, and whose power was seen in the disappearance of the
profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes, and the
foulness which had infested literature, ever since the Restora
tion. A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the
steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this,
to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the
social degradation, of the profligate and the poor. It was not
till the Wesleyan impulse had done its work that this philan
thropic impulse began. The Sunday-schools established by
Mr. Raikes of Gloucester at the close of the century were
the beginnings of popular education. By writings and by
her own personal example Hannah More drew the sympathy
of England to the poverty and crime of the agricultural
laborer. A passionate impulse of human sympathy with the
wronged and aiflicted raised hospitals, endowed charities,
built churches, sent missionaries to the heathen, supported
Burke in his plea for the Hindu, and Clarkson and Wilber-
force in their crusade against the iniquity of the slave-trade.
It is only the moral chivalry of his labors that amongst a
crowd of philanthropists draws us most, perhaps, to the work
and character of John Howard. The sympathy which all
were feeling for the sufferings of mankind he felt for the
sufferings of the worst and most hapless of men. With
wonderful ardor and perseverance he devoted himself to the
cause of the debtor, the felon, and the murderer. An appoint
ment to the oflfice of high sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1774
drew his attention to the state of the prisons which were
placed under his care ; and from that time the quiet country
gentleman, whose only occupation had been reading his
Bible and studying his thermometer, became the most ener
getic and zealous of reformers. Before a year was over he
had personally visited almost every English jail, and he
found in nearly all of them frightful abuses which had been

1742] MODERN ENGLAND 939
noticed half a century before, but left unredressed by Parlia
ment. Jailers who bought their places were paid by fees,
and suffered to extort what they could. Even when acquitted,
men were dragged back to their cells for want of funds to dis
charge the sums they owed to their keepers. Debtors and
felons were huddled together in the prisons which Howard
found crowded by the cruel legislation of the day. No sepa
ration was preserved between different sexes, no criminal
discipline enforced. Every jail was a chaos of cruelty and
the foulest immorality, from which the prisoner could only
escape by sheer starvation, or through the jaU-fever that
festered without ceasing in these haunts of wretchedness.
Howard saw everything with his own eyes, he tested every
suffering by his own experience. In one jail he found a cell
so narrow and noisome that the poor wretch who inhabited
it begged as a mercy for hanging. Howard shut himself up
in the cell and bore its darkness and foulness till nature
could bear no more. It was by work of this sort, and by
the faithful pictures of such scenes which it enabled him to
give, that he brought about their reform. The book in which
he recorded his terrible experience, and the plans which he
submitted for the reformation of criminals, made him the
father, so far as England is concerned, of prison discipline.
But his labors were far from being confined to England. In
journey after journey he visited the jails of Holland and Ger
many, till his longing to discover some means of checking
the fatal progress of the plague led him to examine the
lazarettos of Europe and the East. He was stUl engaged
in this work of charity when he was seized by a malignant
fever at Cherson in Southern Russia, and " laid quietly in the
earth," as he desired.
While the revival of the Wesleys was stirring the very
heart of England, its political stagnation was unbroken. The
fall of Walpole made no change in English policy, at home
or abroad. The bulk of his ministry, who had opposed him
in his later years of office, resumed their posts, simply admit
ting some of the more prominent members of opposition,
and giving the control of foreign affairs to Lord Carteret,
a man of great power, and skilled in Continental affairs.
Carteret mainly followed the system of his predecessor. It

940 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1742
was in the union of Austria and Prussia that he looked for
the means of destroying the hold France had now established
in Germany by the election of her puppet, Charles of Ba
varia, as emperor ; and the pressure of England, aided by a
victory of Frederick at Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa to
consent to Walpole's plan of a peace with Prussia at Breslau
on the terms of the cession of SUesia. The peace enabled
the Austrian army to drive the French from Bohemia at the
close of 1742 ; an EngUsh fleet blockaded Cadiz, and another
anchored in the Bay of Naples and forced Don Carlos by a
threat of bombarding his capital to conclude a treaty of neu
trality, while English subsidies detached Sardinia from the
French aUiance. Unfortunately Carteret and the Court of
Vienna now determined not only to set up the Pragmatic
Sanction, but to undo the French encroachments of 1736.
Naples and Sicily were to be taken back from their Spanish
king, Elsass and Lorraine from France ; and the imperial
dignity was to be restored to the Austrian House. To carry
out these schemes an Austrian army drove the emperor from
Bavaria in the spring of 1743 ; while George the Second, who
warmly supported Carteret's policy, put himself at the head
of a force of 40,000 men, the bulk of whom were English and
Hanoverians, and marched from the Netherlands to the Main.
His advance was checked and finally turned into a retreat by
the Due de Noailles, who appeared with a superior army on
the south bank of the river, and finally throwing 31,000 men
across it threatened to compel the king to surrender. In the
battle of Dettingen which followed, however, not only was
the allied army saved from destruction by the impetuosity of
the French horse and the dogged obstinacy with which the
English held their ground, but their opponents were forced to
recross the Main. Small as was the victory, it produced amaz
ing results. The French evacuated Germany. The English
and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine ; and a league be
tween England, Prussia, and the queen of Hungary seemed
all that was needed to secure the results already gained.
But the prospect of peace was overthrown by the ambition
of the House of Austria. In the spring of 1744 an Austrian
army marched upon Naples, with the purpose of transfer
ring it after its conquest to the Bavarian emperor, whose

174S] MODERN ENGLAND 941
hereditary dominions in Bavaria were to pass in return to
Maria Theresa. If, however, Frederick had withdrawn from
the war on the cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up
arms again rather than suffer so great an aggrandizement of
the House of Austria in Germany. His sudden alliance with
France failed at first to change the course of the war; for
though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the
Austrian army from the Rhine, Frederick was driven from
Bohemia, while the death of the emperor forced Bavaria to
lay down its arms and to ally itself with Maria Theresa. So
high were the queen's hopes at this moment that she formed
a secret alliance with Russia for the division of the Prussian
monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned, and the fatal results
of Carteret's weakness in assenting to the change from a war
of defense into one of attack became manifest. The French
king, Louis the Fifteenth, led an army into the Netherlands ;
and the refusal of Holland to act against him left their de
fense wholly in the hands of England. The general anger
at this widening of the war proved fatal to Carteret, or, as
he now became. Earl GranviUe. His imperious temper had
rendered him odious to his colleagues, and he was driven from
office by the Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry
Pelham. Of the reconstituted ministry which followed
Henry Pelham became the head. His temper, as well as a
consciousness of his own mediocrity, disposed him to a policy
of concUiation which reunited the Whigs. Chesterfield and
the Whigs in opposition, with Pitt and the " Boys," all found
room in the new administration; and even a few Tories
found admittance. The bulk of the Whigs were true to
Walpole's policy ; and it was to pave the way to an accommo
dation with Frederick and a close of the war that the Pelhams
forced Carteret to resign. But their attention had first to be
given to the war in Flanders, where Marshal Saxe had estab
lished the superiority of the French army by his defeat of the
Duke of Cumberland. Advancing to the relief of Tournay
with a force of English, Hanoverians, and Dutch, — for
HoUand had at last been dragged into the war, — the duke
on the 31st of May, 1745, found the French covered by a line
of fortified viUages and redoubts with but a single narrow gap
near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into this gap, however, the

942 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i745
English troops, formed in a dense column, doggedly thrust
themselves in spite of a terrible fire ; but at the moment when
the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated
in their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in
a slow and orderly retreat. The blow was quickly followed
up in June by a victory of Frederick at Hohenfriedburg
which drove the Austrians from Sflesia, and by a landing of
a Stuart on the coast of Scotland at the close of July.
The war with France had at once revived the hopes of the
Jacobites ; and as early as 1744 Charles Edward, the grand
son of James the Second, was placed by the French govern
ment at the head of a formidable armament. But his plan of
a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which wrecked
his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had
sailed in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745, however, the
young adventurer again embarked, with but seven friends, in
a small vessel and landed on a little island of the Hebrides.
For three weeks he stood almost alone ; but on the 29th of
August the clans rallied to his standard in Glenfinnan, and
Charles found himself at the head of fifteen hundred men.
His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair
Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and pro
claimed "James the Eighth" at the Town Cross; and two
thousand English troops who marched against him under Sir
John Cope were broken and cut to pieces on the 21st of Sep
tember by a single charge of the clansmen at Preston Pans.
Victory at once doubled the forces of the conqueror. The
prince was now at the head of six thousand men ; but all
were still Highlanders, for the people of the Lowlands held
aloof from his standard, and it was with the utmost difficulty
that he could induce them to follow him to the south. His
tact and energy, however, at last conquered every obstacle,
and after skilfully evading an army gathered at Newcastle he
marched through Lancashire, and pushed on the 4th of
December as far as Derby. But here all hope of success
came to an end. Hardly a man had risen in his support as
he passed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of
its strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to
see a show. Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancashire,
but only a single squire took up arms. Manchester was

1746] MODERN ENGLAND 943
looked on as the most Jacobite of English towns, but aU the
aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand pounds.
From CarUsle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two
hundred men. The policy of Walpole had in fact secured
England for the House of Hanover. The long peace, the
prosperity of the country, and the clemency of the Govern
ment had done their work. The recent admission of Tories
into the administration had severed the Tory party finally
from the mere Jacobites. Jacobitism as a fighting force was
dead, and even Charles Edward saw that it was hopeless to
conquer England with five thousand Highlanders. He soon
learned, too, that forces of double his own strength were clos
ing on either side of him, while a third army under the king
and Lord Stair covered London. Scotland itself, now that
the Highlanders were away, quietly renewed in all the dis
tricts of the Lowlands its allegiance to the House of Han
over. Even in the Highlands the Macleods rose in arms for
King George, while the Gordons refused to stir, though
roused by a small French force which landed at Montrose.
To advance further south was impossible, and Charles fell
rapidly back on Glasgow ; but the reenforcements which he
found there raised his army to nine thousand men, and on the
23d of January, 1746, he boldly attacked an English army
under General Hawley which had followed his retreat and
had encamped near Falkirk. Again the wild charge of his
Highlanders won victory for the prince, but victory was as
fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces dispersed with their
booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly back to the
north before the Duke of Cumberland. On the i6th of April
the armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles
eastward of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six
thousand men, but they were starving and dispirited, while
Cumberland's force was nearly double that of the prince.
Torn by the duke's guns, the clansmen flung themselves in
their old fashion on the English front ; but they were re
ceived with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke
through the first line found themselves fronted by a second.
In a few moments all was over, and the Stuart force was a
mass of hunted fugitives. Charles himself after strange
adventures escaped to France. In England fifty of his fol-

944 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1746
lowers were hanged ; three Scotch lords, Lovat, Balmerino,
and Kilmarnock, brought to the block ; and forty persons of
rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive meas
ures of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feu
dal tenures were abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of
the chiefs were bought up and transferred to the Crown.
The tartan, or garb of the Highlanders, was forbidden by
law. These measures, followed by a general Act of Indem
nity, proved effective for their purpose. The dread of the
clansmen passed away, and the sheriff's writ soon ran
through the Highlands with as little resistance as in the
streets of Edinburgh.
Defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened the
resolve of the Pelhams to bring the war with Prussia to an
end. When England was threatened by a Catholic pretender,
it was no time for weakening the chief Protestant power in
Germany. On the refusal of Maria Theresa to join in a
general peace, England concluded the Convention of Han
over with Prussia, and withdrew so far as Germany was con
cerned from the war. Elsewhere, however, the contest
lingered on. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were
balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where
Marshal Saxe inflicted new defeats on the English and Dutch
at Roucoux and Lauffeld. The danger of HoUand and the
financial exhaustion of France at last brought about the con
clusion of a peace at Aix-la-Chapelle, by which England sur
rendered its gains at sea, and France its conquests on land.
But the peace was a mere pause in the struggle, during
which both parties hoped to gain strength for a mightier
contest which they saw impending. The war was in fact
widening far beyond the bounds of Germany or of Europe.
It was becoming a world-wide duel which was to settle the
destinies of mankind. Already France was claiming the
valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and mooting the great
question whether the fortunes of the New World were to be
molded by Frenchmen or Englishmen. Already, too, French
adventurers were driving English merchants from Madras,
and building up, as they trusted, a power which was to add
India to the dominions of France.
The early intercourse of England with India gave little

1746] MODERN ENGLAND 945
promise of the great fortunes which awaited it. It was not
till the close of Elizabeth's reign, a century after Vasco da
Gama had crept round the Cape of Good Hope and founded
the Portuguese settlement on the Goa coast, that an East
India Company was established in London. The trade, prof
itable as it was, remained small in extent; and the three
early factories of the company were only gradually acquired
during the century which followed. The first, that of Madras,
consisted of but six fishermen's houses beneath Fort St.
George ; that of Bombay was ceded by the Portuguese as
part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza; while Fort
William, with the mean village which has since grown into
Calcutta, owes its origin to the reign of William the Third.
Each of these forts was built simply for the protection of
the company's warehouses, and guarded by a few " sepahis,"
sepoys, or paid native soldiers ; while the clerks and traders
of each establishment were under the direction of a president
and a council. One of these clerks in the middle of the
eighteenth century was Robert Clive, the son of a small
proprietor near Market Drayton in Shropshire, an idle dare
devil of a boy whom his friends had been glad to get rid
of by packing him off in the company's service as a writer
to Madras. His early days there were days of wretchedness
and despair. He was poor and cut off from his fellows by
the haughty shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work, and
haunted by homesickness. Twice he attempted suicide;
and it was only on the failure of his second attempt that he
flung down the pistol which baffled him with a conviction that
he was reserved for higher things.
A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity.
As soon as the war pf the Austrian Succession broke out, the
superiority of the French in power and influence tempted
them to expel the English from India. Labourdonnais, the
governor of the French colony of the Mauritius, besieged
Madras, razed it to the ground, and carried its clerks and
merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. Clive was among these
captives, but he escaped in disguise, and returning to the
settlement threw aside his clerkship for an ensign's commis
sion in the force which the company was busily raising. For
the capture of Madras had not only established the repute of

946 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1751
the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of
Pondicherry, to conceive plans for the creation of a French
empire in India. When the EngUsh merchants of Elizabeth's
day brought their goods to Surat, all India, save the south,
had just been brought for the first time under the rule of a
single great power by the Mogul emperors of the line of
Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign
of Anne, the Mogul empire fell fast into decay. A line of
feudal princes raised themselves to independence in Rajpoo-
tana. The lieutenants of the Emperor founded separate
sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the Carnatic, and
in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied by
a race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and
Afghan invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in
sacking Delhi, the capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic
plunderers, who were known under the name of Mahrattas,
and who were in fact the natives whom conquest had long
held in subjection, poured down from the highlands along
the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore,
and finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior.
Dupleix skflfuUy availed himself of the disorder around him.
He offered his aid to the emperor against the rebels and
invaders who had reduced his power to a shadow ; and it was
in the emperor's name that he meddled with the quarrels of
the states of Central and Southern India, made himself virtu
ally master of the court of Hyderabad, and seated a creature
of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the
one town which held out against this nabob of the Carnatic,
was all but brought to surrender when Clive, in 1751, came
forward with a daring scheme for its relief. With a few hun
dred English and sepoys he pushed through a thunderstorm
to the surprise of Arcot, the nabob's capital, entrenched
himself in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days against
thousands of assaUants. Moved by his gallantry, the Mah
rattas, who had never believed that Englishmen would fight
before, advanced and broke up the siege ; but Clive was no
sooner freed than he showed equal vigor in the field. At the
head of raw recruits who ran away at the first sound of a gun,
and sepoys who hid themselves as soon as the cannon opened
fire, he twice attacked and defeated the French and their

1748] MODERN ENGLAND 947
Indian allies, foiled every effort of Dupleix, and razed to the
ground a pompous pillar which the French governor had set
up in honor of his earlier victories.
Clive was recalled by broken health to England, and the
fortunes of the struggle in India were left for decision to a
later day. But while France was struggling for the empire
of the East, she was striving with even more apparent success
for the command of the New World of the West. Populous
as they had become, the English settlements in America still
lay mainly along the seaboard of the Atlantic ; for only a few
exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before
the Seven Years' war ; and Indian tribes wandered unques
tioned along the lakes. It was not till the peace of Aix-la-
Chapelle that the pretensions of France drew the eyes of the
colonists and of English statesmen to the interior of the
Western Continent. Planted firmly in Louisiana and Canada,
France openly claimed the whole country west of the Alle
ghanies as its own, and its governors now ordered ?.ll English
settlers or merchants to be driven from the valleys of Ohio or
Mississippi which were still in the hands of Indian tribes.
Even the inactive Pelham revolted from pretensions such as
these. The original French settlers were driven from Acadia,
or Nova Scotia, and an English colony founded the settlement
of Halifax. An Ohio Company was formed, and its agents
made their way to the vaUeys of that river and the Kentucky ;
while envoys from Virginia and Pennsylvania drew closer the
alliance between their colonies and the Indian tribes across
the mountains. Nor were the French slow to accept the
challenge. Fighting began in Acadia. A vessel of war ap
peared in Ontario, and Niagara was turned into a fort. A
force of 1 200 men despatched to Erie drove the few English
settlers from their little colony on the fork of the Ohio, and
founded there a fort called Duquesne, on the site of the
later Pittsburg. The fort at once gave this force command
of the river valley. After a fruitless attack on it under George
Washington, a young Virginian, the colonists were forced
to withdraw over the mountains, and the whole of the west
was left in the hands of France. The bulk of the Indian
tribes from Canada as far as the Mississippi attached them
selves to the French cause, and the value of their aid was
61

948 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i7SS
shown in 1755, when General Braddock led a force of English
soldiers and American mUitia to an attack upon Fort Duquesne.
The force was utterly routed and Braddock slain. The Mar
quis of Montcalm, who in 1756 commanded the French forces
in Canada, was gifted with singular powers of administration.
He carried out with even more zeal than his predecessor the
plans of annexation ; and the three forts of Duquesne on the
Ohio, of Niagara on the St. Lawrence, and of Ticonderoga
on Lake Champlain were linked together by a chain of lesser
forts, which cut off the English colonists from all access to
the west. The defeat of Braddock had already roused Eng
land to its danger, for it was certain that war in America
would be foUowed by war in Europe. The ministers looked
on a league with Prussia as the only means of checking
France ; but Frederick held cautiously aloof, while the ad
vances of England to Prussia only served to alienate Maria
Theresa, whose one desire was to regain Silesia. The two
powers of the House of Bourbon were still bound by the
Family Compact; and as early as 1752 Maria Theresa by a
startling change of policy drew to their alliance. The jealousy
which Russia entertained of the growth of a strong power in
North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth to promise aid
to the schemes of the queen of Hungary; and in 1755 the
league of the four powers and of Saxony was practicaUy com
pleted. So secret were these negotiations that they remained
unknown to Henry Pelham and to his brother the Duke of
Newcastle, who succeeded him on his death in 1754 as the
head of the ministry. But they were detected from the first
by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who saw himself
fronted by a line of foes that stretched from Paris to St.
Petersburg. The danger to England was hardly less ; for France
appeared again on the stage with a vigor and audacity
which recalled the days of Louis the Fourteenth. The weak
ness and corruption of the French government was screened
for a time by the daring and scope of its plans, as by the
ability of the agents it found to carry them out. In England,
on the contrary, all was vagueness and indecision. It was
not tUl the close of the year that a treaty was at last con
cluded with the Prussian king. With this treaty between

I7S6] MODERN ENGLAND 949
England and Frederick began the Seven Years' war. No
war has had greater results on the history of the world or
brought greater triumphs to England; but few have had
more disastrous beginnings. Newcastle was too weak and
ignorant to rule without aid, and yet too greedy of power to
purchase aid by sharing it with more capable men. His
preparations for the gigantic struggle before him may be
guessed from the fact that there were but three regiments
fit for service in England at the opening of 1756. France,
on the other hand, was quick in her attack. Port Mahon in
Minorca, the key of the Mediterranean, was besieged by the
Duke of Richelieu and forced to capitulate. To complete
the shame of England, a fleet sent to its relief under Admiral
Byng retreated before the French. In Germany Frederick
seized Dresden at the outset of the war and forced the Saxon
army to surrender; and in 1757 a victory at Prague made
him master for a while of Bohemia ; but his success was
transient, and a defeat at Kolin drove him to retreat again
into Saxony. In the same year the Duke of Cumberland,
who had taken post on the Weser with an army of fifty
thousand men for the defense of Hanover, fell back before
a French army to the mouth of the Elbe, and engaged by
the Convention of Closter-Seven to disband his forces. In
America things went even worse than in Germany. The
inactivity of the English generals was contrasted with the
genius and activity of Montcalm. Already masters of the
Ohio by the defeat of Braddock, the French drove the English
garrison from the forts which commanded Lake Ontario and
Lake Champlain, and their empire stretched without a break
over the vast territory from Louisiana to the St. Lawrence.
A despondency without parallel in our history took possession
of our coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield
cried in despair, " We are no longer a nation."
But the nation of which Chesterfield despaired was really
on the eve of its greatest triumphs, and the miserable inca
pacity of the Duke of Newcastle only called to the front the
genius of William Pitt. Pitt was the grandson of a wealthy
governor of Madras, who had entered Parliament in 1735 as
member for one of his father's pocket boroughs, and had
headed the younger " Patriots " in their attack on Walpole.

950 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1756
The dismissal from the army by which Walpole met his
attacks turned his energy wholly to politics. His fiery spirit
was hushed in office during the "broad-bottom administra
tion " which followed Walpole's faU, but after the death of
Henry Pelham, Newcastle's jealousy of power threw him into
an attitude of opposition and he was deprived of his place.
When the disasters of the war, however, drove Newcastle from
office in November, 1756, Pitt became secretary of state; but
in four months the enmity of the king and of Newcastle's
party drove him to resign. In July, 1757, however, it was
necessary to recall him. The failure of Newcastle to con
struct an administration forced the duke to a junction with
his rival ; and fortunately for their country the character of
the two statesmen made the compromise an easy one. For
all that Pitt coveted, for the general direction of public affairs,
the control of foreign policy, the administration of the war,
Newcastle had neither capacity nor inclination. On the
other hand, his skfll in parliamentary management was un
rivaled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any
living man the price of every member and the intrigues of
every borough. What he cared for was not the control of
affairs, but the distribution of patronage and the work of cor
ruption, and from this Pitt turned disdainfully away. " Mr.
Pitt does everything," wrote Horace Walpole, " and the duke
gives everything. So long as they agree in this partition,
they may do what they please." Out of the union of these
two strangely contrasted leaders, in fact, rose the greatest, as
it was the last, of the purely Whig administrations. But its
real power lay from beginning to end in Pitt himself. Poor
as he was, for his income was little more than two hundred a
year, and springing as he did from a family of no political
importance, it was by sheer dint of genius that the young
cornet of horse, at whose youth and inexperience Walpole
had sneered, seized a power which the Whig Houses had ever
since the Revolution kept jealously in their grasp. His ambi
tion had no petty aim. " I want to call England," he said as
he took office, " out of that enervate state in which twenty
thousand men from France can shake her." His call was
soon answered. He at once breathed his own lofty spirit
into the country he served, as he communicated something

I7S7] MODERN ENGLAND 951
of his own grandeur to the men who served him. " No man,"
said a soldier of the time, "ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet
who did not feel himself braver when he came out than when
he went in." Ill-combined as were his earlier expeditions,
many as were his faflures, he roused a temper in the nation
at large which made ultimate defeat impossible. " England
has been a long time in labor," exclaimed Frederick of
Prussia as he recognized a greatness like his own, " but she
has at last brought forth a man."
It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us
most as we look back to WUliam Pitt. The tone of his speech
and action stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his
time. In the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent,
simple even to the affectation of simplicity, witty and amus
ing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and of head, skepti
cal of virtue and enthusiasm, skeptical above all of itself,
Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his
passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery
energy, his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and
rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and
extravagance, were not more puzzling to his contemporaries
than the confidence with which he appealed to the higher
sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he turned from
a corruption which had till then been the great engine of
politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the
grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. " I
know that I can save the country," he said to the Duke of
Devonshire on his entry into the ministry, " and I know no
other man can." The groundwork of Pitt's character was an
intense and passionate pride ; but it was a pride which kept
him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long
held England in their hands. He was the first statesman
since the Restoration who set the example of a purely public
spirit. Keen as was his love of power, no man ever refused
office so often, or accepted it with so strict a regard to the
principles he professed. " I will not go to court," he replied
to an offer which was made him, " if I may not bring the
constitution with me." For the corruption about him he had
nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of
seats and the purchase of members. At the outset of his

952 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1757
career Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office in
his administration, that of paymaster of the forces; but its
profits were of an fllicit kind, and poor as he was Pitt refused
to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never
appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude to
wards the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popu
larity than "the great commoner," as Pitt was styled, but his
air was always that of a man who commands popularity, not
that of one who seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular
prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for
" Wilkes and liberty," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless
profligate ; and when all England went mad in its hatred of
the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his esteem for a people
whose courage he had been the first to enlist on the side of
loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which flashed
from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and
grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House
of Commons far greater than any other minister has pos
sessed. He could silence an opponent with a look of scorn,
or hush the whole House with a single word. But he never
stooped to the arts by which men form a political party, and
at the height of his power his personal following hardly num
bered half a dozen members.
His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament but in the
people at large. His significant title of "the great com
moner " marks a political revolution. " It is the people who
have sent me here," Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when
the nobles of the cabinet opposed his will. He was the first
to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind had
ceased, and that the progress of commerce and industry had
produced a great middle class, which no longer found its
representatives in the legislature. " You have taught me,"
said George the Second when Pitt sought to save Byng by
appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, " to look for the
voice of my people in other places than within the House of
Commons." It was this unrepresented class which had forced
him into power. During his struggle with Newcastle the
greater towns backed him with the gift of their freedom and
addresses of confidence. " For weeks," laughs Horace Wal
pole, "it rained gold boxes." London stood by him through

I7S7] MODERN ENGLAND 953
good report and evfl report, and the wealthiest of English
merchants. Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his
poUtical lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized
admirably with the temper of the commercial England which
rallied round him, with its energy, its self-confidence, its pride,
its patriotism, its honesty, its moral earnestness. The mer
chant and the trader were drawn by a natural attraction to the
one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish, whose
hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender
affection for wife and child. But there was a far deeper
ground for their enthusiastic reverence and for the reverence
which his country has borne Pitt ever since. He loved Eng
land with an intense and personal love. He believed in her
power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned to be
lieve in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs, her defeats
his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought of
self or party spirit. " Be one people," he cried to the factions
who rose to bring about his fall; " forget everything but the
public ! I set you the example ! " His glowing patriotism
was the real spell by which he held England. But even the
faults which checkered his character told for him with the
middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had
been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity
and absence of pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor,
dramatic in the cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He
transacted business with his clerks in full dress. His letters
to his family, genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and
unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest
at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance
which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in
flannel and his crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole
sneered at him for bringing into the House of Commons " the
gestures and emotions of the stage." But the classes to whom
Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by faults of
taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was
borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of the gout, or car
ried into the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest
against national dishonor.
Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence.
The power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy

954 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1757
debates of the Long Parliament, but it was cramped in its
utterance by the legal and theological pedantry of the time.
Pedantry was flung off by the age of the Revolution, but in
the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see ability rather
than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression, precision of
thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of business,
rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of
statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater
like Walpole, no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield.
His set speeches were always his worst, for in these his want
of taste, his love of effect, his trite quotations and extravagant
metaphors came at once to the front. That with defects like
these he stood far above every orator of his time was due
above all to his profound conviction, to the earnestness and
sincerity with which he spoke. " I must sit still," he whis
pered once to a friend, " for when once I am up everything
that is in my mind comes out." But the reality of his elo
quence was transfigured by a large and poetic imagination,
and by a glow of passion which not only raised him high above
the men of his own day but set him in the front rank among
the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the
common sense, of his age, made way for a splendid audacity, a
sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty
vehemence, a command over the whole range of human feel
ing. He passed without an effort from the most solemn
appeal to the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the
tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by the grand
self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one
having authority. He was in fact the first English orator
whose words were a power, a power not over Parliament only
but over the nation at large. ParUamentary reporting was as
yet unknown, and it was only in detached phrases and half-
remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt reached beyond
the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was especially in these
sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate
appeals, that the power of his eloquence lay. The few broken
words we have of him stir the same thrfll in men of our day
which they stirred in the men of his own. But passionate as
was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of a statesman, not
of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost aU his greater

1757] MODERN ENGLAND 955
Struggles, his defense of the liberty of the subject against
arbitrary imprisonment under " general warrants," of the lib
erty of the press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of con
stituencies against the House of Commons, of the constitutional
rights of America against England itself. His foreign policy
was directed to the preservation of Prussia, and Prussia has
vindicated his foresight by the creation of Germany. We have
adopted his plans for the direct government of India by the
Crown, which when he proposed them were regarded as insane.
Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church
of England. He was the first to sound the note of parliamen
tary reform. One of his earliest measures shows the gener
osity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by
employing its Jacobites in the service of their country, and by
raising Highland regiments among its clans. The selection
of Wolfe and Amherst as generals showed his contempt for
precedent and his inborn knowledge of men.
But it was fortune rather than his genius which showered
on Pitt the triumphs which signalized the opening of his
ministry. In the East the daring of a merchant's clerk made
a company of English traders the sovereigns of Bengal, and
opened that wondrous career of conquest which has added the
Indian peninsula, from Ceylon to the Himalayas, to the do
minion of the British Crown. Recalled by broken health to
England, Clive returned at the outbreak of the Seven Years'
war to win for England a greater prize than that which his
victories had won for it in the supremacy of the Carnatic. He
had been only a few months at Madras when a crime whose
horror still lingers in English memories called him to Bengal.
Bengal, the delta of the Ganges, was the richest and most
fertile of all the provinces of India. Its rice, its sugar, its
silk, and the produce of its looms were famous in European
markets. Its viceroys, like their fellow lieutenants, had become
practically independent of the emperor, and had added to Ben
gal the provinces of Orissa and Behar. Surajah Dowlah, the
master of this vast domain, had long been jealous of the enter
prise and wealth of the English traders ; and, roused at this
moment by the instigation of the French, he appeared before
Fort William, seized its settlers, and thrust a hundred and
fifty of them into a small prison called the Black Hole of Cal-

9S6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1757
cutta. The heat of an Indian summer did its work of death.
The wretched prisoners trampled each other underfoot in
the madness of thirst, and in the morning only twenty-three
remained alive. Clive saUed at the news with a thousand
Englishmen and two thousand sepoys to wreak vengeance
for the crime. He was no longer the boy soldier of Arcot ;
and the tact and skill with which he met Surajah Dowlah in
the negotiations by which the viceroy strove to avert a con
flict were sullied hy the Oriental falsehood and treachery to
which he stooped. But his courage remained unbroken.
When the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plas
sey the odds were so great that on the very eve of the battle
a council of war counseled retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove
hard by, and after an hour's lonely musing gave the word to
fight. Courage, in fact, was all that was needed. The fifty
thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse who were seen
covering the plain at daybreak on the 23d of June, 1757,
were soon thrown into confusion by the English guns, and
broke in headlong rout before the English charge. The death
of Surajah Dowlah enabled the company to place a creature
of its own on the throne of Bengal ; but his rule soon became
a nominal one. With the victory of Plassey began in fact
the empire of England in the East.
The year of Plassey was the year of a victory hardly less
important in the West There was little indeed in the mUi
tary expeditions which marked the opening of Pitt's ministry
to justify the trust of his country ; for money and blood were
lavished on buccaneering descents upon the French coasts
which did small damage to the enemy. But incidents such
as these had little weight in the minister's general policy.
His greatness lies in the fact that he recognized the genius
of Frederick the Great, and resolved to give him an energetic
support. On his entry into office he refused to ratify the
Convention of Closter-Seven, which had reduced Frederick
to despair by throwing open his realm to a French advance ;
protected his flank by gathering an EngUsh and Hanoverian
force on the Elbe, and on the counsel of the Prussian king
placed the best of his generals, the Prince of Brunswick, at
its head ; whfle subsidy after subsidy were poured into Fred
erick's exhausted treasury. Pitt's trust was met by the most

1759] MODERN ENGLAND 957
brilliant display of mUitary genius which the modern world
had as yet witnessed. Two months after his repulse at Kolin,
Frederick flung himself on a French army which had advanced
into the heart of Germany, and annihflated it in the victory
of Rossbach. Before another month had passed he hurried
from the Saale to the Oder, and by a yet more signal victory
at Leuthen cleared Silesia of the Austrians. The victory of
Rossbach was destined to change the fortunes of the world
by bringing about the unity of Germany ; its immediate effect
was to force the French army on the Elbe to fall back on the
Rhine. Here Ferdinand of Brunswick, reenforced with twenty
thousand English soldiers, held them at bay during the sum
mer, while Frederick, foiled in an attack on Moravia, drove
the Russians back on Poland in the battle of Zorndorf. His
defeat, however, by the Austrian General Daun at Hochkirch
proved the first of a series of terrible misfortunes ; and the
year 1759 marks the lowest point of his fortunes. A fresh
advance of the Russian army forced the king to attack it at
Kunersdorf in August, and Frederick's repulse ended in the
utter rout of his army. For the moment all seemed lost, for
even Berlin lay open to the conqueror. A few days later the
surrender of Dresden gave Saxony to the Austrians ; and at
the close of the year an attempt upon them at Plauen was
foiled with terrible loss. But every disaster was retrieved by
the indomitable courage and tenacity of the king, and winter
found him as before master of Silesia and of all Saxony save
the ground which Daun's camp covered. The year which
marked the lowest point of Frederick's fortunes was the year
of Pitt's greatest triumphs, the year of Minden and Quiberon
and Quebec. France aimed both at a descent upon England
and at the conquest of Hanover, and gathered a naval arma
ment at Brest, while fifty thousand men under Contades and
Broglie united on the Weser. Ferdinand with less than forty
thousand met them on the field of Minden. The French
marched along the Weser to the attack, with their flanks pro
tected by that river and a brook which ran into it, and with
their cavalry, ten thousand strong, massed in the center. The
six English regiments in Ferdinand's army fronted the French
horse, and, mistaking their general's order, marched at once
upon them in line, regardless of the batteries on their flank.

958 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1759
and rolled back charge after charge with, volleys of musketry.
In an hour the French center was utterly broken. " I have
seen," said Contades, "what I never thought to be possible
— a single line of infantry break through three lines of cav
alry, ranked in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin ! "
Nothing but the refusal of Lord George Sackville to complete
the victory by a charge of the horse which he headed saved
the French from utter rout. As it was, their army again fell
back broken on Frankfort and the Rhine. The project of an
invasion of England met with like success. Eighteen thou
sand men lay ready to embark on board the French fleet,
when Admiral Hawke came in sight of it at the mouth of
Quiberon Bay. The sea was rolling high, and the coast
where the French ships lay was so dangerous from its shoals
and granite reefs that the pilot remonstrated with the English
admiral against his project of attack. "You have done your
duty in this remonstrance," Hawke coolly replied; "now lay
me alongside the French admiral." Two English ships were
lost on the shoals, but the French fleet was ruined and the
disgrace of Byng's retreat wiped away.
It was not in the Old World only that the year of Minden
and Quiberon brought glory to the arms of England. In
Europe, Pitt had wisely limited his efforts to the support of
Prussia ; but across the Atlantic the field was wholly his own,
and he had no sooner entered office than the desultory raids
which had hitherto been the only resistance to French aggres
sion were superseded by a large and comprehensive plan of
attack. The sympathies of the colonies were won by an
order which gave their provincial officers equal rank with the
royal officers in the field. They raised at Pitt's call twenty
thousand men, and taxed themselves heavily for their support.
Three expeditions were simultaneously directed against the
French line — one to the Ohio valley, one against Ticonder
oga on Lake Champlain, while a third under General Amherst
and Admiral Boscawen sailed to the mouth of the St. Law
rence. The last was brilliantly successful. Louisburg, though
defended by a garrison of five thousand men, was taken with
the fleet in its harbor, and the whole province of Cape Breton
reduced. The American militia supported the British troops
in a vigorous campaign against the forts ; and though Mont-

1759] MODERN ENGLAND 959
calm, with a far inferior force, was able to repulse General
Abercromby from Ticonderoga, a force from Phfladelphia and
Virginia, guided and inspired by the courage of George Wash
ington, made itself master of Duquesne. The name of Pitts
burg which was given to their new conquest still commemorates
the enthusiasm of the colonists for the great minister who
first opened to them the west. The next year saw the evac
uation of Ticonderoga before the advance of Amherst, and the
capture of Fort Niagara after the defeat of an Indian force
which marched to its relief. The capture of the three forts
was the close of the French effort to bar the advance of the
colonists to the valley of the Mississippi, and to place in other
than English hands the destinies of North America. But
Pitt had resolved, not merely to foil the ambition of Mont
calm, but to destroy the French rule in America altogether ;
and whUe Amherst was breaking through the line of forts, an
expedition under General Wolfe entered the St. Lawrence
and anchored below Quebec. Wolfe had already fought at
Dettingen, Fontenoy, and Laffeldt, and had played the first
part in the capture of Louisburg. Pitt had discerned the
genius and heroism which lay hidden beneath the awkward
manner and the occasional gasconade of the young soldier of
thirty-three whom he chose for the crowning exploit of the
war, but for a while his sagacity seemed to have failed. No
efforts could draw Montcalm from the long line of inaccessi
ble cliffs which at this point borders the river, and for six
weeks Wolfe saw his men wasting away in inactivity while he
himself lay prostrate with sickness and despair. At last his
resolution was fixed, and in a long line of boats the army
dropped down the St. Lawrence to a point at the base of the
Heights of Abraham, where a narrow path had been discov
ered to the summit Not a voice broke the sflence of the
night save the voice of Wolfe himself, as he quietly repeated
the stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard,"
remarking as he closed, " I had rather be the author of that
poem than take Quebec." But his nature was as brave as it
was tender ; he was the first to leap on shore and to scale the
narrow path where no two men could go abreast. His men
followed, pulling themselves to the top by the help of bushes
and the crags, and at daybreak on the I2th of September the

96o HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1761
whole army stood in orderly formation before Quebec. Mont
calm hastened to attack, though his force, composed chiefly
of raw mflitia, was far inferior in discipUne to the English ;
his onset, however, was met by a steady fire, and at the first
English advance his men gave way. Wolfe headed a charge
which broke the French line, but a ball pierced his breast in
the moment of victory. "They run," cried an officer who
held the dying man in his arms — "I protest they run."
Wolfe rallied to ask who they were that ran, and was told
"The French." "Then," he murmured, "I die happy!"
The fall of Montcalm in the moment of his defeat completed
the victory ; and the submission of Canada, on the capture of
Montreal by Amherst in 1760, put an end to the dream of a
French empire in America.
Section II. — The Independence of America, 1761-1782
Never had England played so great a part in the history
of mankind as in the year 1759. It was a year of triumphs
in every quarter of the world. In September came the news
of Minden, and of a victory off Lagos. In October came
tidings of the capture of Quebec. November brought word
of the French defeat at Quiberon. "We are forced to ask
every morning what victory there is," laughed Horace Wal
pole, " for fear of missing one." But it was not so much in
the number as in the importance of its triumphs that the
Seven Years' war stood and remains stUl without a rival. It
is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories
determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With
that of Rossbach began the recreation of Germany, the
revival of its political and intellectual life, the long process
of its union under the leadership of Prussia and Prussia's
kings. With that of Plassey the influence of Europe told
for the first time since the days of Alexander on the nations
of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, " saw
one of the races of the northwest cast into the heart of Asia
new manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the
triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the his
tory of the United States. By removing an enemy whose
dread had knit the colonists to the mother country, and by

1761] MODERN ENGLAND 961
breaking through the line with which France had barred
them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the founda
tion of the great republic of the West. Nor were these tri
umphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' war
is a turning-point in our national history, as it is a turning-
point in the history of the world. Tfll now the relative
weight of the European states had been drawn from their
possessions within Europe itself. But from the close of the
war it mattered little whether England counted for less or
more with the nations around her. She was no longer a
mere European power, no longer a mere rival of Germany
or Russia or France. Mistress of Northern America, the
future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of
the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above the nations
whose position in a single continent doomed them to com
parative insignificance in the after history of the world. The
war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of the
destinies that lay before the English people showed itself in
the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into far-off
seas. The Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within
the British empire ; but beyond it to the westward lay a
reach of waters where the British flag was almost unknown.
In the year which followed the peace of Paris two English
ships were sent on a cruise of discovery to the Straits of
Magellan ; three years later Captain Wallis reached the coral
reefs of Tahiti; and in 1768 Captain Cook traversed the
Pacific from end to end, and wherever he touched, in New
Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English
Crown, and opened a new world for the expansion of the
English race. Statesmen and people alike felt the change
in their country's attitude. In the words of Burke, the Par
liament of Britain claimed "an imperial character in which
as from the throne of heaven she superintends all the several
inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all, with
out annihflating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial
ideas of the time, saw in the growth of their vast possessions,
the monopoly of whose trade was reserved to the mother
country, a source of boundless wealth. The trade with
America alone was in 1772 nearly equal to what England
carried on with the whole world at the beginning of the

962 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1761
century. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative a
dominion became from this moment not only the aim of
British statesmen but the resolve of the British people.
From the time when the Puritan emigration added the
four New England States, Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island, to those of Maryland and
Virginia the progress of the English colonies in North Amer
ica had been slow, but it had never ceased. Settlers still
came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colonies south
of Virginia received from Charles the Second their name of
the Carolinas. The war with HoUand transferred to British
rule a district claimed by the Dutch from the Hudson to the
inner lakes ; and this country, which was granted by Charles
to his brother, received from him the name of New York.
Portions were soon broken off from its vast territory to form
the colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of
Quakers followed WUliam Penn across the Delaware into the
heart of the primeval forest and became a colony which re
called its founder and the woodlands among which he planted
it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed
before a new settlement which received its title of Georgia
from the reigning sovereign, George the Second, was estab
lished by General Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a refuge
for English debtors and for the persecuted Protestants of
Germany. Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were
really growing fast in numbers and in wealth. Their whole
population amounted in the middle of the eighteenth century
to about 1,200,000 whites and a quarter of a million of
negroes, — nearly a fourth of that of the mother country.
The wealth of the colonists was growing even faster than
their numbers. As yet the southern colonies were the
more productive. Virginia boasted of its tobacco plantations,
Georgia and the Carolinas of their maize and rice and indigo
crops, whUe New York and Pennsylvania, with the colonies
of New England, were restricted to their whale and cod fish
eries, their corn harvests, and their timber trade. The dis
tinction indeed between the northern and southern colonies
was more than an industrial one. In the southern States
the prevalence of slavery produced an aristocratic spirit and
favored the creation of large estates ; even the system of

1761] MODERN ENGLAND 963
entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of
Virginia, where many of the older English famUies found
representatives in houses such as those of Fairfax and Wash
ington. Throughout New England, on the other hand, the
characteristics of the Puritans, their piety, their intolerance,
their simplicity of life, their love of equality and tendency
to democratic institutions, remained unchanged. In educa
tion and political activity New England stood far ahead of
its fellow colonies, for the settlement of the Puritans had
been followed at once by the establishment of a system of
local schools which is still the glory of America. " Every
township," it was enacted, "after the Lord hath increased
them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one
to teach all children to write and read ; and when any town
shall increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall
set up a grammar-school."
Great, however, as these differences were, and great as was
to be their influence on American history, they were little
felt as yet. In the main features of their outer organization
the whole of the colonies stood fairly at one. In religious
and in civil matters alike all of them contrasted sharply with
the England at home. Religious tolerance had been brought
about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had
never seen before. New England was still a Puritan strong
hold. In all the southern colonies the Episcopal Church was
established by law, and the bulk of the settlers clung to it ;
but Roman Catholics formed a large part of thp population of
Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers. Presby
terians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to
colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Ger
many abounded among the settlers of Carolina and Georgia.
In such a chaos of creeds religious persecution became impos
sible. There was the same outer diversity and the same real
unity in the political tendency and organization of the States.
Whether the spirit of the colony was democratic, moderate,
or oligarchical, its form of government was pretty much the
same. The original rights of the proprietor, the projector
and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save
in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist
or fallen into desuetude. The government of each colony lay
62

964 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1761
in a House of Assembly elected by the people at large, with
a council sometimes elected, sometimes nominated by the
governor, and a governor either elected, or appointed by the
Crown. With the appointment of these governors all admin
istrative interference on the part of the Government at home
practically ended. The colonies were left by a happy neg
lect to themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that
" Mr. Grenville lost America because he read the American
despatches, which none of his predecessors ever did." There
was little room, indeed, for any interference within the limits
of the colonies. Their privUeges were secured by royal char
ters. Their assemblies alone exercised the right of internal
taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt
afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American
excise. " I have Old England set against me," he said, " by
this measure, and do you think I wfll have New England
too? " Even in matters of trade the supremacy of the mother
country was far from being a galling one. There were some
small import duties, but they were evaded by a well-under
stood system of smuggling. The restriction of trade with the
colonies to Great Britain was more than compensated by the
commercial privileges which the Americans enjoyed as Brit
ish subjects. As yet, therefore, there was nothing to break
the good-wUl which the colonists felt towards the mother
country, while the danger of French aggression drew them
closely to it. But strong as the attachment of the Americans
to Britain seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on saw
in the very completeness of Pitt's triumph a danger to their
future union. The presence of the French in Canada, their
designs in the west had thrown America for protection on
the mother country. But with the conquest of Canada all
need of this protection was removed. The attitude of Eng
land towards its distant dependency became one of mere pos
session ; and differences of temper, which had tUl now been
thrown into the background by the higher need for union,
started into a new prominence. If questions of trade and
taxation awoke murmurings and disputes, behind these griev
ances lay an uneasy dread at the democratic form which the
government and society of the colonies had taken, and at the
" leveling principles " which prevailed.

1761] MODERN ENGLAND 965
To check this republican spirit to crush all dreams of
severance, and to strengthen the unity of the British empire
was one of the chief aims of the young sovereign who
mounted the throne on the death of his grandfather in 1760.
For the first and last time since the accession of the House
of Hanover England saw a king who was resolved to play
a part in English politics ; and the part which George the
Third succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable
one. In ten years he reduced government to a shadow, and
turned the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection.
In twenty he had forced the American colonies into revolt
and independence, and brought England to what then
seemed the brink of ruin. Work such as this has sometimes
been done by very great men, and often by very wicked and
profligate men ; but George was neither profligate nor great.
He had a smaller mind than any English king before him
save James the Second. He was wretchedly educated, and
his natural powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he
the capacity of using greater minds than his own by which
some sovereigns have concealed their natural littleness. On
the contrary, his only feeling towards great men was one of
jealousy and hate. He longed for the time when "decrepi
tude or death" might put an end to Pitt; and even when
death had freed him from " this trumpet of sedition," he
denounced the proposal for a public monument to the great
statesman as " an offensive measure to me personally." But
dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to his pur
pose and obstinate in the pursuit of it. And his purpose
was to rule. " George," his mother, the Princess of Wales,
had continually repeated to him in youth, " George, be king."
He called himself always " a Whig of the Revolution," and
he had no wish to undo the work which he believed the
Revolution to have done. But he looked on the subjection
of his two predecessors to the will of their ministers as no
real part of the work of the Revolution, but as a usurpation
of that authority which the Revolution had left to the Crown.
And to this usurpation he was determined not to submit.
His resolve was to govern, — not to govern against law, but
simply to govern, — to be freed from the dictation of parties
and ministers, and to be in effect the first minister of the

966 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1761
State. How utterly incompatible such a dream was with the
parliamentary constitution of the country as it had received
its final form from Sunderland it is easy to see ; but George
was resolved to carry out his dream. And in carrying it out
he was aided by the circumstances of the time. The spell of
Jacobitism was broken by the defeat of Charles Edward, and
the later degradation of his life wore finally away the thin
coating of disloyalty which clung to the clergy and the
squires. They were ready again to take part in politics, and
in the accession of a king who, unlike his two predecessors,
was no stranger but an Englishman, who had been born in
England and spoke English, they found the opportunity they
desired. From the opening of the reign Tories gradually
appeared again at court. It was only slowly indeed that the
party as a whole swung round to a steady support of the
Government ; but their action told at once on the complexion
of English politics. Their withdrawal from public affairs
had left them untouched by the progress of political ideas
since the Revolution of 1688, and when they returned to
political life it was to invest the new sovereign with all the
reverence which they had bestowed on the Stuarts. A
" king's party " was thus ready made to his hand ; but
George was able to strengthen it by a vigorous exertion of
the power and influence which was still left to the Crown.
All promotion in the Church, all advancement in the army, a
great number of places in the civil administration and about
the court, were stfll at the king's disposal. If this vast mass
of patronage had been practically usurped by the ministers
of his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by George
the Third ; and the character of the House of Commons made
patronage, as we have seen, a powerful engine in its manage
ment. George had one of Walpole's weapons in his hands,
and he used it with unscrupulous energy to break up the
party which Walpole had held so long together. He saw
that the Whigs were divided among themselves by the
factious spirit which springs from a long hold of office, and
that they were weakened by the rising contempt with which
the country at large regarded the selfishness and corruption
of its representatives. More than thirty years before. Gay
had set the leading statesmen of the day on the public stage

1761] MODERN ENGLAND 967
under the guise of highwaymen and pickpockets. " It is
difficult to determine," said the witty playwright, "whether
the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the
gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen." And now that
the " fine gentlemen " were represented by hoary jobbers
such as Newcastle, the public contempt was fiercer than ever,
and men turned sickened from the intrigues and corruption
of party to a young sovereign who aired himself in a character
which Bolingbroke had invented, as a patriot king.
Had Pitt and Newcastle held together, supported as the
one was by the commercial classes, the other by the Whig
famUies and the whole machinery of parliamentary manage
ment, George must have struggled in vain. But the ministry
was already disunited. The Whigs, attached to peace by the
traditions of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure,
and haughty with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, were in
sUent revolt against the war and the supremacy of the Great
Commoner. It was against their wiU that he rejected pro
posals of peace from France which would have secured to
England all her conquests on the terms of a desertion of
Prussia, and that his steady support enabled Frederick stiff
to hold out against the terrible exhaustion of an unequal
struggle. The campaign of 1760 indeed was one of the
grandest efforts of Frederick's genius. FoUed in an attempt
on Dresden, he again saved SUesia by a victory at Liegnitz,
and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau ;
while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along
the Weser. But even victories drained Frederick's strength.
Men and money alike failed him. It was impossible for him
to strike another great blow, and the ring of enemies again
closed slowly round him. His one remaining hope lay in
the firm support of Pitt, and triumphant as his policy had
been, Pitt was tottering to his fall. The envy and resent
ment of his coUeagues at his undisguised supremacy found a
supporter in the young king. The Earl of Bute, a mere
court favorite, with the temper and abilities of a gentleman
usher, was forced into the cabinet. As he was known to be
his master's mouthpiece, a peace party was at once formed;
but Pitt showed no signs of giving way. In 1761 he pro
posed a vast extension of the war. He had learnt the signa-

968 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1761
ture of a treaty which brought into force the Family Compact
between the courts of Paris and Madrid, and of a special
convention which bound the last to declare war on England
at the close of the year. Pitt proposed to anticipate the blow
by an instant seizure of the treasure fleet which was on its
way from the Indies to Cadiz, by occupying the Isthmus of
Panama, and by an attack on the Spanish dominions in the
New World. But his colleagues shrank from plans so vast
and daring ; and Newcastle was backed in his resistance by
the bulk of the Whigs. The king openly supported them.
It was in vain that Pitt enforced his threat of resignation by
declaring himself responsible to " the people "; and the res
ignation of his post in October changed the face of European
affairs. " Pitt disgraced ! " wrote a French philosopher ; " that is
worth two victories to us ! " Frederick on the other hand
was almost driven to despair. But George saw in the
removal of his powerful minister an opening for the realiza
tion of his long-cherished plans. Pitt's appeal had been
heard by the people at large. When he went to Guildhall
the Londoners hung on his carriage wheels, hugged his foot
men, and even kissed his horses. Their break with Pitt was
in fact the death-blow of the Whigs. Newcastle found he
had freed himself from the great statesman only to be driven
from office by a series of studied mortifications from his
young master ; and the more powerful of his Whig colleagues
followed him into retirement. George saw himself trium
phant over the two great forces which had hampered the free
action of the Crown, "the power which arose," in Burke's
words, "from popularity, and the power which arose from
political connection " ; and the rise of Lord Bute to the post
of first minister marked the triumph of the king. He took
office simply as an agent of the king's will ; and the king's
will was to end the war. In the spring of 1762 Frederick,
who stfll held his ground stubbornly against fate, was brought
to the brink of ruin by a withdrawal of the English subsidies ;
it was in fact only his dogged resolution and a sudden change
in the policy of Russia, which followed on the death of his
enemy the Czarina Elizabeth, that enabled him at last to
retire from the struggle in the treaty of Hubertsberg with-

1763] MODERN ENGLAND 969
out the loss of an inch of territory. George and Lord Bute
had already purchased peace at a very different price. With
a shameless indifference to the national honor they not only
deserted Frederick, but they offered to negotiate a peace for
him on the basis of a cession of Silesia to Maria Theresa and
East Prussia to the czarina. The issue of the strife with
Spain saved England from humUiation such as this. Pitt's
policy of instant attack had been justified by a Spanish
declaration of war three weeks after his fall ; and the year
1762 saw triumphs which vindicated his confidence in the
issue of the new struggle. Martinico, the strongest and
wealthiest of the French West Indian possessions, was con
quered at the opening of the year, and its conquest was
followed by those of Grenada, St Lucia, and St Vincent.
In the summer the reduction of Havana brought with it the
gain of the rich Spanish colony of Cuba. The PhUippines,
the wealthiest of the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, yielded
to a British fleet. It was these losses that brought about the
peace of Paris. So eager was Bute to end the war that he
contented himself in Europe with the recovery of Minorca,
while he restored Martinico to France, and Cuba and the
Philippines to Spain. The real gains of Britain were in India
and America. In the first the French abandoned all right to
any military settlement. From the second they wholly with
drew. To England they gave up Canada, Nova Scotia, and
Louisiana as far as the Mississippi, while they resigned the
rest of that province to Spain, in compensation for its sur
render of Florida to the British Crown.
The anxiety which the young king showed for peace abroad
sprang mainly from his belief that peace was needful for
success in the struggle for power at home. So long as the
war lasted Pitt's return to office and the union of the Whigs
under his guidance was an hourly danger. But with peace
the king's hands were free. He could count on the dissen
sions of the Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the Tories, on
the influence of the Crown patronage which he had taken
into his own hands. But what he counted on most of all was
the character of the House of Commons. At a time when it
had become all-powerful in the State, the House of Commons
had ceased in any real and effective sense to be a representa-

970 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1763
tive body at all. That changes in the distribution of seats
were called for by the natural shiftings of population and
wealth since the days of Edward the First had been recog
nized as early as the civil wars ; but the reforms of the
Long Parliament were canceled at the Restoration. From
the time of Charles the Second to that of George the Third
not a single effort had been made to meet the growing abuses
of our parliamentary system. Great towns like Manchester
or Birmingham remained without a member, while members
still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually
vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor
sovereigns to establish a court party in the House by a pro
fuse creation of boroughs, most of which were mere villages
then in the hands of the Crown, had ended in the appropria
tion of these seats by the neighboring landowners, who
bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own
estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to represen
tation, the narrowing of municipal privileges ever since the
fourteenth century to a small part of the inhabitants, and in
many cases the restriction of electoral rights to the members
of the governing corporation, rendered their representation a
mere name. The choice of such places hung simply on the
purse or influence of politicians. Some were " the king's
boroughs," others obediently returned nominees of the minis
try of the day, others were " close boroughs " in the hands of
jobbers like the Duke of Newcastle, who at one time returned
a third of all the borough members in the House. The
counties and the great commercial towns could alone be said
to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the enormous
expense of contesting such constituencies practically left
their representation in the hands of the great local families.
But even in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited
and unequal. Out of a population of eight millions, only a
hundred and sixty thousand were electors at all. How far
such a House was from really representing English opinion
we see from the fact that in the height of his popularity Pitt
could hardly find a seat in it. Purchase was becoming more
and more the means of entering Parliament. Seats were
bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose to
four thousand pounds, and we can hardly wonder that a re-

1763] MODERN ENGLAND 971
former could allege without a chance of denial, " This House
is not a representative of the people of Great Britain. It is
the representative of nominal boroughs, of ruined and exter
minated towns, of noble famflies, of wealthy individuals, of
foreign potentates." The meanest motives naturally told on
a body returned by such constituencies, cut off from the
influence of public opinion by the secrecy of parUamentary
proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority.
Walpole and Newcastle had made bribery and borough job
bing the base of their power. George the Third seized it in
his turn as a base of the power he proposed to give to the
Crown. The royal revenue was employed to buy seats and
to buy votes. Day by day George himself scrutinized the
voting list of the two Houses, and distributed rewards and
punishments as members voted according to his wUl or no.
Promotion in the civil service, preferment in the Church, rank
in the army, was reserved for "the king's friends." Pensions
and court places were used to influence debates. Bribery
was employed on a scale never known before. Under
Bute's ministry an office was opened at the treasury for the
purchase of members, and twenty-five thousand pounds are
said to have been spent in a single day.
The result of these measures was soon seen in the tone of
the Parliament. Till now it had bowed beneath the greatness
of Pitt ; but in the teeth of his denunciation the provisions
of the peace of Paris were approved by a majority of five to
one. " Now, indeed," cried the princess dowager, " my son
is king." But the victory was hardly won when king and
minister found themselves battling with a storm of popular
ill will such as never since the overthrow of the Stuarts
assailed the throne. Violent and reckless as it was, the
storm only marked a fresh advance in the reawakening of
public opinion. The Parliament indeed had become supreme,
and in theory the Parliament was a representative of the
whole English people. But in actual fact the bulk of the
English people found itself powerless to control the course
of English government. For the first and last time in our
history Parliament was unpopular and its opponents sure of
popularity. The House of Commons was more corrupt than
ever, and it was the slave of the king. The king stfll called

972 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1763
himself a Whig, yet he was reviving a system of absolutism
which Whiggism had long made impossible. His minister
was a mere favorite, and in Englishmen's eyes a foreigner.
The masses saw this, but they saw no way of mending it.
They had no means of influencing the Government they
hated save by sheer violence. They came therefore to the
front with their old national and religious bigotry, their long-
nursed dislike of the Hanoverian court, their long-nursed
habits of violence and faction, their long-nursed hatred
of Parliament, but with no means of expressing them save
riot and uproar. Bute found himself the object of a sudden
and universal hatred; and in 1763 he withdrew from office
as a means of allaying the storm of popular indignation.
But the king was made of more stubborn stuff than his min
ister. If he suffered his favorite to resign he still regarded
him as the real head of administration; for the ministry
which Bute left behind him consisted simply of the more
courtly of his colleagues. George GrenviUe was its nominal
chief, but its measures were still secretly dictated by the
favorite. Charles Townshend and the Duke of Bedford, the
two ablest of the Whigs who had remained with Bute after
Newcastle's dismissal, refused to join it; and its one man of
ability was Lord Shelburne, a young Irishman. It was in
fact only the disunion of its opponents which aUowed it to
hold its ground. Townshend and Bedford remained apart
from the main body of the Whigs, and both sec.tions held
aloof from Pitt George had counted on the divisions of the
opposition in forming such a ministry ; and he counted on the
weakness of the ministry to make it the creature of his will.
But Grenville had no mind to be a puppet either of the king
or of Bute ; and the conflicts between the king and his minis
ter soon became so bitter that George appealed in despair to
Pitt to form a ministry. Never had Pitt shown a nobler
patriotism or a grander self-command than in the reception
he gave to this appeal. He set aside all resentment at his
own expulsion from office by Newcastle and the Whigs, and
made the return to office of the whole party, with the excep
tion of Bedford, a condition of his own. George, however,
refused to comply with terms which would have defeated his
designs. The result left GrenvUle as powerful as he had

1763] MODERN ENGLAND 973
been weak. Bute ceased to exercise any political influence.
On the other hand, Bedford joined GrenviUe with his whole
party, and the ministry thus became strong and compact.
Grenville's one aim was to enforce the supremacy of Par
liament over subject as over king. He therefore struck
fiercely at the new force of opinion which had just shown its
power in the fall of Bute. The opinion of the country no
sooner found itself unrepresented in Parliament than it sought
an outlet in the press. In spite of the removal of the censor
ship after the Revolution, the press had been slow to attain
any political influence. Under the first two Georges its prog
ress had been hindered by the absence of great topics for
discussion, the worthlessness of the writers, and above all the
lethargy of the time. It was in fact not till the accession of
George the Third that the impulse which Pitt had given to
the national spirit, and the rise of a keener interest in poli
tics, raised the press into a political power. The nation
found in it a court of appeal from the Houses of Parliament.
The journals became organs for that outburst of popular
hatred which drove Lord Bute from office ; and in the North
Briton John WUkes led the way by denouncing the cabinet
and the peace with peculiar bitterness, and venturing to at
tack the hated minister by name. Wilkes was a worthless
profligate, but he had a remarkable faculty of enlisting popu
lar sympathy on his side, and by a singular irony of fortune
he became the. chief instrument in bringing about three of
the greatest advances which our constitution has ever made.
He woke the nation to a conviction of the need for parlia
mentary reform by his defense of the rights of constituencies
against the despotism of the House of Commons. He took
the lead in the struggle which put an end to the secrecy of
parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish the
right of the press to discuss public affairs. In his attack on
the ministry of Lord Bute, however, he was simply an organ
of the general discontent It was indeed his attack which
more than all else determined Bute to withdraw from office.
But GrenvUle was of stouter stuff than the court favorite, and
his administration was hardly reformed when he struck at the
growing opposition to Parliament by a blow at its leader. In
Number 45 of the North Briton Wilkes had censured the

974 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1764
speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament, and a
" general warrant " by the secretary of state was issued
against the " authors, printers, and publishers of this sedi
tious libel." Under this warrant forty-nine persons were
seized for a time ; and in spite of his privUege as a member
of Parliament Wilkes himself was sent to the Tower. The
arrest, however, was so utterly illegal that he was at once re
leased by the Court of Common Pleas ; but he was immedi
ately prosecuted for libel. While the paper which formed
the subject for prosecution was still before the courts of jus
tice it was condemned by the House of Commons as a "false,
scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of Lords at the
same time voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers to
be blasphemous, and advised a prosecution. Wilkes fled to
France, and was in 1764 expelled from the House of Com
mons. But the assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by
both Houses, and the system of terror which Grenville put in
force against the press by issuing two hundred injunctions
against different journals, roused a storm of indignation
throughout the country. Every street resounded with cries
of " Wilkes and liberty ! " It was soon clear that opinion
had been embittered rather than silenced by the blow at
Wilkes; and six years later the failure of the prosecution
directed against an anonymous journalist named "Junius"
for his letter to the king established the right of the press to
criticize the conduct not of ministers or Parliament only, but
of the sovereign himself.
The same narrowness of view, the same honesty of pur
pose, the same obstinacy of temper, were shown by Grenville
in a yet more important struggle, a struggle with the Ameri
can colonies. Pitt had waged war with characteristic profu
sion, and he had defrayed the cost of the war by enormous
loans. At the time of the peace of Paris the public debt
stood at a hundred and forty millions. The first need there
fore which met Bute after the conclusion of the peace was
that of making provision for the new burdens which the
nation had incurred, and as these had been partly incurred
in the defense of the American Colonies it was the general
opinion of Englishmen that the Colonies should bear a share
of them. In this opinion Bute and the king concurred. But

1764] MODERN ENGLAND 975
their plans went further than mere taxation. The new minis
ter declared himself resolved on a rigorous execution of the
Navigation Laws, laws by which a monopoly of American trade
was secured to the mother country, on the raising of a revenue
within the Colonies for the discharge of the debt, and above
all on impressing upon the colonists a sense of their depend
ence upon Britain. The direct trade between America and
the French or Spanish West Indian islands had hitherto been
fettered by prohibitory duties, but these had been easily
evaded by a general system of smuggling. The duties were
now reduced, but the reduced duties were rigorously exacted,
and a considerable naval force was despatched to the Ameri
can coast with a view of suppressing the clandestine trade
with the foreigner. The revenue which was expected from
this measure was to be supplemented by an internal Stamp
Tax, a tax on all legal documents issued within the Colonies.
The plans of Bute had fallen to the ground on his retirement
from ofl&ce. But Grenville had fully concurred in the financial
part at least of Bute's designs ; and, now that he found him
self at the head of a strong administration, he proceeded to
carry out the plans which had been devised for the purpose
of raising both an external and an internal revenue from
America. One of his first steps was to suppress, by a rigid
enforcement of the Navigation Laws, the contraband trade
which had grown up between American ports and the adja
cent Spanish islands. Harsh and unwise as these measures
seemed, the colonists owned their legality ; and their resent
ment only showed itself in a pledge to use no British manu
factures tfll the restrictions were relaxed. But the next
scheme of the minister — his proposal to introduce internal
taxation within the bounds of the Colonies themselves by re
viving the project of an excise or stamp duty, which Wal
pole's good sense had rejected — was of another order from
his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike
the system of the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change
in the whole actual relations of England and its Colonies.
They met it therefore in another spirit. Taxation and repre
sentation, they asserted, went hand in hand. America had
no representatives in the British Parliament. The represent
atives of the colonists met in their own colonial assemblies.

976 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1765
and all save the Pennsylvanians protested strongly against
the interference of Parliament with their right of self-taxa
tion. Massachusetts marked accurately the position she took.
"Prohibitions of trade are neither equitable nor just; but the
power of taxing is the grand barrier of British liberty. If
that is once broken down, all is lost." The distinction was
accepted by the assembly of every colony ; and it was with
their protest that they despatched Benjamin FrankUn, who
had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadel'
phia to high repute among scientific discoverers, as their
agent to England. In England, however, Franklin found few
who recognized the distinction which the colonists had drawn.
Grenville had no mind to change his plans without an assur
ance, which Franklin could not give, of a union of the
Colonies to tax themselves ; and the Stamp Act was passed
through both Houses with less opposition than a turnpike
biU. The Stamp Act was hardly passed when an insult offered
to the princess dowager, by the exclusion of her name from a
regency act, brought to a head the quarrel which had long
been growing between the ministry and the king. George
again offered power to WUliam Pitt. But Pitt stood abso
lutely alone. The one friend who remained to him, his
brother-in-law, Lord Temple, refused to aid in an attempt to
construct a cabinet ; and he felt himself too weak, when thus
deserted, to hold his ground in any ministerial combination
with the Whigs. The king turned for help to the main body
of the Whigs, now headed by the Marquis of Rockingham.
The weakness of the ministry which Rockingham formed in
July, 1765, was seen in its slowness to deal with American
affairs. Franklin had seen no other course for the Colonies,
when the obnoxious acts were passed, but that of submission.
But submission was the last thing the colonists dreamed of.
Everywhere through New England riots broke out on the
news of the arrival of the stamped paper ; and the frightened
collectors resigned their posts. Northern and southern States
were drawn together by the new danger. The Assembly of
Virginia was the first to formally deny the right of the British
Parliament to meddle with internal taxation, and to demand
the repeal of the acts. Massachusetts not only adopted the

1765] MODERN ENGLAND 977
denial and the demand as its own, but proposed a congress
of delegates from all the colonial assemblies to provide for
common and united action ; and in October, 1765, this congress
met to repeat the protest and petition of Virginia. The news
of its assembly reached England at the end of the year, and
at once called Pitt to the front when the Houses met in the
spring of 1766. As a minister he had long since rejected a
simflar scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been iU and
absent from Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed, but
he adopted to the full the constitutional claim of America.
He gloried in a resistance which was denounced in Parliament
as rebellion. " In my opinion," he said, " this kingdom has
no right to lay a tax on the Colonies. . . . America is obsti
nate ! America is almost in open rebellion ! Sir, I rejoice that
America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to
all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves
would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest."
There was a general desire that Pitt should return to office ;
but the negotiations for his union with the Whigs broke down.
The radical difference between their policy and that of Pitt
was now in fact defined for them by the keenest political
thinker of the day. Edmund Burke had come to London in
1750 as a poor and unknown Irish adventurer. The learn
ing which at once won him the friendship of Johnson, and
the imaginative power which enabled him to give his learning
a living shape, promised him a philosophical and literary
career ; but instinct drew Burke to politics : he became secre
tary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parliament
under his patronage. His speeches on the Stamp Acts at
once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure,
the scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of
paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a
great orator and less of the characteristics of his oratory —
its passionate ardor, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality
of resources ; the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos,
invective, tenderness, the most briUiant word-pictures, the
coolest argument, foUowed each other. It was an eloquence
indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Wal
pole's clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were
exchanged for the impassioned expression of a distinct phi-

978 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1765
losophy of politics. " I have learned more from him than
from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at a later time,
with a burst of generous admiration. The phUosophical cast
of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophi
cal coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of
his nature was poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason,
took shape and color from the splendor and fire of his imagi
nation. A nation was to him a great living society, so com
plex in its relations, and whose institutions were so interwoven
with glorious events in the past, that to touch it rudely was a
sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial scheme of govern
ment, but an exquisite balance of social forces which was in
itself a natural outcome of its history and development. His
temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism
sprang not from a love of inaction but from a sense of the
value of social order, and from an imaginative reverence for
all that existed. Every institution was hallowed to him by
the clear insight with which he discerned its relations to the
past, and its subtle connection with the social fabric around
it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be risk
ing the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it
had cost centuries to build up. " The equilibrium of the con
stitution," he said, " has something so delicate about it, that
the least displacement may destroy it" " It is a difficult and
dangerous matter even to touch so complicated a machine."
Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be
found in its influence on Burke's practical dealing with
politics. In the great question indeed which fronted him as
he entered Parliament, it served him well. No man has ever
seen with deeper insight the working of those natural forces
which build up communities, or which group communities
into empires ; and in the actual state of the American Colonies
he saw a result of such forces which only madmen and pedants
would disturb. But Burke's theory was less fitted to the
state of politics at home. He looked on the Revolution of
1688 as the final estabUshment of English institutions. His
aim was to keep England as the Revolution had left it and
under the rule of the great nobles who were faithful to the
Revolution. He gave his passionate adhesion to the inaction
of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an

1766] MODERN ENGLAND 979
honest man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to
check the corruption of Parliament by a bill for civil retrench
ment, but he took the lead in defeating all plans for its reform.
Though he was one of the few men in England who under
stood with Pitt the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly
against the young minister's proposals to give freedom to Irish
trade, and against his commercial treaty with France. His
work seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry
the policy of timid content which the Whigs believed they
inherited from Sir Robert Walpole ; and the very intensity
of his trust in the natural development of a people rendered
him incapable of understanding the good that might come
from particular laws or from special reforms. At this crisis
then the temper of Burke squared with the temper of the
Whig party. Rockingham and his fellow ministers were
driven, whether they would or no, to a practical acknowledge
ment of the policy which Pitt demanded ; but they resolved
that the repeal of the Stamp Acts should be accompanied by
a formal repudiation of the principles of colonial freedom
which Pitt had laid down. A declaratory act was brought
in, which asserted the supreme power of Parliament over the
Colonies " in all cases whatsoever." The passing of this act
was followed by the introduction of a bill for the repeal of
the Stamp Acts ; and in spite of the resistance of the king's
friends, a resistance instigated by George himself, the bfll was
carried by a large majority.
From this moment the ministry was unable to stand against
the general sense that the first man in the country should be its
ruler, and bitter as was the king's hatred of him, he was forced
to call Pitt into office. Pitt's aim was still to unite the Whig
party, and though forsaken by Lord Temple, he succeeded to
a great extent in the administration which he formed in the
summer of 1766. Though Rockingham stood coldly aside,
some of his feUow ministers accepted office, and they were
reenforced by the few friends who clung to Pitt ; whUe Pitt
stooped to strengthen his parliamentary support by admitting
some even of the " king's friends " to a share in the administra
tion. But its life lay really in Pitt himself, in his immense
popularity, and in the command which his eloquence gave
him over the House of Commons. His acceptance of the
63

980 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1767
earldom of Chatham removed him to the House of Lords,
and for a while ruined the confidence which his reputation
for unselfishness had aided him to win. But it was from no
vulgar ambition that Pitt laid down his title of the Great
Commoner. It was the consciousness of failing strength
which made him dread the storms of debate, and in a few
months the dread became a certainty. A painful and over
whelming illness, the result of nervous disorganization, with
drew him from public affairs ; and his withdrawal robbed his
colleagues of all vigor or union. The plans which Chatham
had set on foot for the better government of Ireland, the
transfer of India from the company to the Crown, and the
formation of an alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance
the Family Compact of the House of Bourbon, were suffered
to drop. The one aim of the ministry which bore his name,
and which during his retirement looked to the Duke of Graf
ton as its actual head, was simply to exist. But even existence
was difficult ; and Grafton saw himself forced to a union with
the faction which was gathered under the Duke of Bedford,
and to the appointment of a Tory noble as secretary of state.
The force of public opinion on which Pitt had relied turned
at once against the ministry which had so drifted from its
former position. The elections for the new Parliament were
more corrupt than any that had been yet witnessed. How
bitter the indignation of the country had grown was seen in
its fresh backing of Wilkes. He seized on the opening af
forded by the elections to return from France, and was
elected member for Middlesex, a county the large number
of whose voters made its choice a real expression of public
opinion. The choice of WUkes was in effect a public con
demnation of the House of Commons and the ministerial sys
tem. The ministry, however, and the House alike shrank
from a fresh struggle with the agitator; but the king was
eager for the contest. After ten years of struggle and dis
appointment George had all but reached his aim. The two
forces which had as yet worsted him were both of them par
alyzed. The Whigs were fatally divided, and discredited in
the eyes of the country by their antagonism to Pitt Pitt on
the other hand, was suddenly removed from the stage. The
ministry was without support in the country ; and for parlia-

1769] MODERN ENGLAND 981
mentary support it was forced to lean more and more on the
men who looked for direction to the king himself. One form
of opposition alone remained, in the public discontent ; and
at this he struck more fiercely than ever. " I think it highly
expedient to apprise you," he wrote to Lord North, "that the
expulsion of Mr. WUkes appears to be very essential, and
must be effected." The ministers and the House of Com
mons bowed to his will. By his nonappearance in court
when charged with libel, Wilkes had become an outlaw, and
he was now thrown into prison on his outlawry. Dangerous
riots broke out in London and over the whole country. The
ministry was torn with dissensions. The announcement of
Lord Shelburne's purpose to resign office was followed by
the resignation of Chatham himself ; and his withdrawal from
the cabinet which traded on his name left the ministry wholly
dependent on the king. In 1769 Wilkes was brought before
the bar of the House of Commons on a charge of libel, a
crime which was cognizable in the ordinary courts of law,
and was expelled from Parliament He was at once reelected
by the shire of Middlesex. Violent and oppressive as the
course of the House of Commons had been, it had as yet
acted within its strict right, for no one questioned its posses
sion of a right of expulsion. But the defiance of Middlesex
led it now to go further. It resolved, " That Mr. Wilkes
having been in this session of Parliament expelled the House,
was and is incapable of being elected a member to serve in
the present Parliament " ; and it issued a writ for a fresh
election. Middlesex answered this insolent claim to limit the
free choice of a constituency by again returning WUkes;
and the House was driven by its anger to a fresh and more
outrageous usurpation. It again expelled the member for
Middlesex ; and on his return for the third time by an im
mense majority, it voted that the candidate whom he had
defeated. Colonel Luttrell, ought to have been returned, and
was the legal representative of Middlesex. The Commons
had not only limited at their own arbitrary discretion the free
election of the constituency, but they had transferred its rights
to themselves by seating LuttreU as member in defiance of
the deliberate choice of Wilkes by the freeholders of Middle
sex. The country at once rose indignantly against this viola-

982 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1770
tion of constitutional law. Wilkes was elected an alderman
of London ; and the mayor, aldermen, and livery petitioned
the king to dissolve the Parliament. A remonstrance from
London and Westminster said boldly that " there is a time
when it is clearly demonstrable that men cease to be repre
sentatives. That time is now arrived. The House of Com
mons do not represent the people." Meanwhile a writer
who styled himself " Junius " attacked the Government in let
ters which, rancorous and unscrupulous as was their tone,
gave a new power to the literature of the press by their
clearness and terseness of statement, the finish of their style,
and the terrible vigor of their invective.
The storm, however, beat idly on the obstinacy of the king.
The printer of the letters was prosecuted, and the petitions
and remonstrances of London were haughtily rejected. At
the beginning of 1770 a cessation of the disease which had
long held him prostrate enabled Chatham to reappear in the
House of Lords. He at once denounced the usurpations of
the Commons, and brought in a bill to declare them fllegal.
But his genius made him the first to see that remedies of this
sort were inadequate to meet evils which really sprang from
the fact that the House of Commons no longer represented
the people of England ; and he mooted a plan for its reform
by an increase of the county members, who then formed the
most independent portion of the House. Further he could
not go, for even in the proposals he made he stood almost
alone. The Tories and the king's friends were not likely to
welcome schemes which would lessen the king's influence.
The Whigs under Lord Rockingham had no sympathy with
parliamentary reform ; and they shrank with haughty disdain
from the popular agitation in which public opinion was forced
to express itself, and which Chatham, while censuring its ex
travagance, deliberately encouraged. It is from the quarrel
between WUkes and the House of Commons that we may
date the influence of public meetings on EngUsh politics.
The gatherings of the Middlesex electors in his support were
preludes to the great meetings of Yorkshire freeholders in
which the question of parliamentary reform rose into impor
tance ; and it was in the movement for reform, and the estab
lishment of corresponding committees throughout the country

1771] MODERN ENGLAND 983
for the purpose of promoting it, that the power of political
agitation first made itself felt. Political societies and clubs
took their part in this quickening and organization of public
opinion ; and the spread of discussion, as well as the influence
which now began to be exercised by the appearance of vast
numbers of men in support of any political movement, proved
that Parliament would soon have to reckon with the senti
ments of the people at large.
But an agent far more effective than popular agitation was
preparing to bring the force of public opinion to bear on
Parliament itself. We have seen how much of the corrup
tion of the House of Commons sprang from the secrecy of
parliamentary proceedings, but this secrecy was the harder
to preserve as the nation woke to a greater interest in its
own affairs. From the accession of the Georges imperfect
reports of the more important discussions began to be pub
lished under the title of " The Senate of LUliput," and with
feigned names or simple initials to denote the speakers.
Obtained by stealth and often merely recalled by memory,
such reports were naturally inaccurate ; and their inaccu
racy was eagerly seized on as a pretext for enforcing the
rules which guarded the secrecy of proceedings in Parlia
ment. In 1771 the Commons issued a proclamation forbid
ding the publication of debates ; and six printers, who set it
at defiance, were summoned to the bar of the House. One
who refused to appear was arrested by its messenger; but
the arrest at once brought the House into conflict with the
magistrates of London. They set aside the proclamation as
without legal force, released the printers, and sent the mes
senger to prison for an unlawful arrest. The House sent
the lord mayor to the Tower, but the cheers of the crowds
which followed him on his way told that public opinion was
again with the press, and the attempt to hinder its publica
tion of parliamentary proceedings dropped silently on his
release at the next prorogation. Few changes of equal im
portance have been so quietly brought about. Not only was
the responsibUity of members to their constituents made con
stant and effective by the publication of their proceedings,
but the nation itself was called in to assist in the delibera
tions of its representatives. A new and wider interest in its

984 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1771
own affairs was roused in the people at large, and a new
political education was given to it through the discussion of
every subject of national importance in the Houses and the
press. Public opinion, as gathered up and represented on
all its sides by the journals of the day, became a force in
practical statesmanship, influenced the course of debates,
and controlled in a closer and more constant way than even
Parliament itself had been able to do the actions of the Gov
ernment. The importance of its new position gave a weight
to the press which it had never had before. The first great
English journals date from this time. With the Morning
Chronicle, the Morning Post, the Morning Herald, and the
Times, all of which appeared in the interval between the
opening years of the American war and the beginning of
the war with the French Revolution, journalism took a new
tone of responsibility and intelligence. The hacks of Grub
Street were superseded by publicists of a high moral temper
and literary excellence; and philosophers like Coleridge or
statesmen like Canning turned to influence public opinion
through the columns of the press.
But as yet these influences were feebly felt, and George
the Third was able to set Chatham's policy disdainfully aside,
and to plunge into a contest far more disastrous than his
contest with the press. In all the proceedings of the last
few years, what had galled him most had been the act which
averted a war between England and her Colonies. To the
king the Americans were already " rebels," and the great
statesman whose eloquence had made their claims irresisti
ble was a "trumpet of sedition." George deplored in his cor
respondence with his ministers the repeal of the Stamp Acts.
" AU men feel," he wrote, " that the fatal compliance in 1766
has increased the pretensions of the Americans to absolute
independence." In America itself the news of the repeal
had been received with universal joy, and taken as a close
of the strife. But on both sides there remained a pride and
irritability which only wise handling could have allayed ; and
in the present state of English politics wise handling was
impossible. Only a few months indeed passed before the
quarrel was reopened ; for no sooner had the Ulness of Lord
Chatham removed him in 1767 from any real share in public

1771] MODERN ENGLAND 985
affairs, than the wretched administration which bore his name
suspended the Assembly of New York on its refusal to pro
vide quarters for EngUsh troops, and resolved to assert Brit
ish sovereignty by levying import duties of trivial amount at
American ports. The Assembly of Massachusetts was dis
solved on a trifling quarrel with its governor, and Boston
was occupied for a time by British soldiers. The remon
strances of the legislatures of Massachusetts and Virginia,
however, coupled with a fall in the funds, warned the minis
ters of the dangerous course on which they had entered;
and in 1769 the troops were withdrawn, and all duties, save
one, abandoned. But the king insisted on retaining the duty
on tea; and its retention was enough to prevent any thor
ough restoration of good feeling. A series of petty quarrels
went on in almost every colony between the popular assem
blies and the governors appointed by the Crown, and the
colonists persisted in their agreement to import nothing from
the mother country. As yet, however, there was no prospect
of serious strife. In America the influence of George Wash
ington allayed the irritation of Virginia. Massachusetts con
tented itself with quarreling with its governor, and refusing
to buy tea so long as the duty was levied. In England, even
Grenville, though approving the retention of the duty in ques
tion, abandoned all dream of further taxation.
But the king was now supreme. The attack of Chatham
in 1770 had completed the ruin of the ministry. Those of
his adherents who still clung to it resigned their posts, and
were foUowed by the Duke of Grafton. All that remained
were the Bedford faction and the dependents of the king;
these were gathered under the former chancellor of the
Exchequer, Lord North, into a ministry which was in fact a
mere cloak for the direction of public affairs by George
himself. " Not only did he direct the minister," a careful
observer tells us, "in all important matters of foreign and
domestic policy, but he instructed him as to the management
of debates in Parliament, suggested what motions should be
made or opposed, and how measures should be carried. He
reserved for himself all the patronage, he arranged the whole
cast of administration, settled the relative place and preten
sions of ministers of state, law officers, and members of the

986 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i773
household, nominated and promoted the English and Scotch
judges, appointed and translated bishops and deans, and dis
pensed other preferments in the Church. He disposed of
military governments, regiments, and commissions, and him
self ordered the marching of troops. He gave and refused
titles, honors, and pensions." All this immense patronage
was steadily used for the creation and maintenance in both
Houses of Parliament of a majority directed by the king him
self ; and its weight was seen in the steady action of such a
majority. It was seen yet more in the subjection to which
the ministry that bore North's name was reduced. George
was in fact the minister through the twelve years of its exist
ence, from 1770 till the close of the American war; and the
shame of the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at
his door.
His fixed purpose was to seize on the first opportunity of
undoing the "fatal compliance of 1766." A trivial riot gave
him the handle he wanted. In December, 1773, the arrival
of some English ships laden with tea kindled fresh irritation
in Boston, where the nonimportation agreement was strictly
enforced. A mob in the disguise of Indians boarded the
vessels and flung their contents into the sea. The outrage
was deplored alike by the friends of America in England and
by its own leading statesmen ; and both Washington and
Chatham were prepared to support the Government in its
looked-for demand of redress. But the thought of the king
was not of redress but of repression, and he set roughly aside
the more conciliatory proposals of Lord North and his fellow
ministers. They had already rejected as "frivolous and
vexatious " a petition of the Assembly of Massachusetts for
the dismissal of two public officers whose letters home ad
vised the withdrawal of free institutions from the Colonies.
They now seized on the riot as a pretext for rigorous meas
ures. A bill introduced into Parliament in the beginning of
1774 punished Boston by closing its port against all com
merce. Another punished the State of Massachusetts by
withdrawing the liberties it had enjoyed ever since the Pil
grim Fathers landed on its sofl. Its charter was altered.
The choice of its council was transferred from the people to
the Crown, and the nomination of its judges was transferred

1775] MODERN ENGLAND 987
to the governor. In the governor, too, by a provision more
outrageous than even these, was vested the right of sending
all persons charged with a share in the late disturbances to
England for trial. To enforce these measures of repression
troops were sent to America, and General Gage, the com
mander-in-chief there, was appointed governor of Massachu
setts. The king's exultation at the prospect before him was
unbounded. "The die," he wrote triumphantly to his minis
ter, " is cast. The Colonies must either triumph or submit."
Four regiments would be enough to bring the Americans
to their senses. They would only be "lions while we are
lambs." " If we take the resolute part," he decided solemnly,
"they will undoubtedly be very meek." Unluckily, the blow
at Massachusetts was received with anything but meekness.
The jealousies between State and State were hushed by the
sense that the liberties of all were in danger. If the British
Parliament could cancel the charter of Massachusetts and
ruin the trade of Boston, it could cancel the charter of every
colony and ruin the trade of every port from the St. Lawrence
to the coast of Georgia. All therefore adopted the cause
of Massachusetts ; and all their legislatures, save that of
Georgia, sent delegates to a Congress which assembled on
the 4th of September at Phfladelphia. Massachusetts took a
yet bolder course. Not a citizen would act under the new
laws. Its Assembly met in defiance of the governor, called
out the militia of the State, and provided arms and ammuni
tion for it. But there was stfll room for reconcfliation. The
resolutions of the Congress had been moderate ; for Virginia
was the wealthiest and most influential among the States who
sent delegates ; and though resolute to resist the new meas
ures of the Government, Virginia still clung to the mother
country. At home, the merchants of London and Bristol
pleaded loudly for reconciliation; and in January, 1775, Chat
ham again came forward to avert a strife he had once before
succeeded in preventing. With characteristic largeness of
feeling he set aside aU half-measures or proposals of com
promise. "It is not canceling a piece of parchment," he
insisted, " that can win back America : you must respect her
fears and her resentments." The bUl which he introduced in
concert with Franklin provided for the repeal of the late acts

988 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1775
and for the security of the colonial charters, abandoned the
claim to taxation, and ordered the recall of the troops. A
colonial assembly was directed to meet and provide means by
which America might contribute towards the payment of the
public debt.
Chatham's measure was contemptuously rejected by the
Lords, as was a similar measure of Burke's by the Commons,
and a petition of the city of London in favor of the Colonies
by the king himself. With the rejection of these efforts at
reconciliation began the great struggle which ended eight
years later in the severance of the American Colonies from
the British Crown. The Congress of delegates from the
colonial legislatures at once voted measures- for general de
fense, ordered the levy of an army, and set George Washing
ton at its head. No nobler figure ever stood in the forefront
of a nation's life. Washington was grave and courteous in
address; his manners were simple and unpretending; his
sUence and the serene calmness of his temper spoke of a
perfect self-mastery ; but there was little in his outer bearing
to reveal the grandeur of soul which lifts his figure, with all
the simple majesty of an ancient statue, out of the smaller
passions, the meaner impulses, of the world around him.
What recommended him for command was simply his weight
among his fellow landowners of Virginia, and the experience
of war which he had gained by service in border contests
with the French and the Indians, as well as in Braddock's
luckless expedition against Fort Duquesne. It was only as
the weary fight went on that the colonists learned little by
little the greatness of their leader, his clear judgment, his
heroic endurance, his silence under difficulties, his calmness
in the hour of danger or defeat, the patience with which he
waited, the quickness and hardness with which he struck, the
lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved from its
task through resentment or jealousy, that never through war
or peace felt the touch of a meaner ambition, that knew no
aim save that of guarding the freedom of his fellow country
men, and no personal longing save that of returning to his
own fireside when their freedom was secured. It was almost
unconsciously that men learned to cling to Washington with
a trust and faith such as few other men have won, and to

1775] MODERN ENGLAND 989
regard him with a reverence which still hushes us in presence
of his memory. Even America hardly recognized his real
greatness tUl death set its seal on " the man first in war, first
in peace, and first in the hearts of his fellow countrymen."
Washington more than any of his fellow colonists represented
the clinging of the Virginian landowners to the mother coun
try, and his acceptance of the command proved that even the
most moderate among them had no hope now save in arms.
The struggle opened with a skirmish between a party of
English troops and a detachment of mflitia at Lexington, and
in a few days twenty thousand colonists appeared before
Boston. The Congress reassembled, declared the States
they represented "The United Colonies of America," and
undertook the work of government. Meanwhile ten thou
sand fresh troops landed at Boston ; but the provincial militia
seized the neck of ground which joined it to the mainland, and
though they were driven from the heights of Bunker Hill
which commanded the town, it was only after a desperate
struggle in which their bravery put an end forever to the
taunts of cowardice which had been leveled against the colo
nists. "Are the Yankees cowards?" shouted the men of
Massachusetts, as the first English attack rolled back baffled
down the hillside. But a far truer courage was shown in
the stubborn endurance with which Washington's raw mUitia-
men, who gradually dwindled from sixteen thousand to ten,
ill-fed, ill-armed, and with but forty-five rounds of ammuni
tion to each men, cooped up through the winter a force of
ten thousand veterans in the lines of Boston. The spring of
1776 saw them force these troops to withdraw from the city
to New York, where the whole British army, largely reen
forced by mercenaries from Germany, was concentrated
under General Howe. Meanwhile a raid of the American
general, Arnold, nearly drove the British troops from Can
ada ; and though his attempt broke down before Quebec, it
showed that all hope of reconciliation was over. The Colo
nies of the south, the last to join in the struggle, had in fact
expeUed their governors at the close of 1775 ; at the opening
of the next year Massachusetts instructed its delegates to
support a complete repudiation of the king's government by
the Colonies ; while the American ports were thrown open to

990 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1776
the world in defiance of the Navigation Acts. These deci
sive steps were followed by the great act with which Ameri
can history begins, the adoption on the 4th of July, 1776, by
the delegates in Congress of a Declaration of Independence.
"We," ran its solemn words, "the representatives of the
United States of America in Congress assembled, appealing
to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our
intentions, solemnly publish and declare that these United
Colonies are, and of right ought to be. Free and Independent
States." The earlier successes of the colonists were soon followed
by suffering and defeat. Howe, an active general with a fine
army at his back, cleared Long Island in August by a victory
at Brooklyn ; and Washington, whose army was weakened by
withdrawals and defeat, and disheartened hy the loyal tone of
the State in which it was encamped, was forced to evacuate
New York and New Jersey, and to fall back first on the Hud
son and then on the Delaware. The Congress prepared to
fly from Philadelphia, and a general despair showed itself in
cries of peace. But a well-managed surprise and a daring
march on the rear of Howe's army restored the spirits of
Washington's men, and forced the English general in his turn
to fall back on New York. The campaign of 1777 opened
with a combined effort for the suppression of the revolt. An
army assembled in Canada under General Burgoyne marched
by way of the lakes to seize the Une of the Hudson, and with
help from the army at New York to cut off New England
from her sister provinces. Howe meanwhile sailed up the
Chesapeake, and advanced on Philadelphia, the temporary
capital of the United States and the seat of the Congress.
The rout of his little army of seven thousand men at Brandy
wine forced Washington to abandon Philadelphia, and, after a
bold but unsuccessful attack on his victors, to retire into win
ter quarters on the banks of the Schuylkill, where the uncon
querable resolve with which he nerved his handful of beaten
and half-starved troops to face Howe's army in their camp at
Valley Forge is the noblest of his triumphs. But in the north
the war had taken another color. When Burgoyne appeared
on the Upper Hudson he found the road to Albany barred by
an American force under General Gates. The spirit of New

1778] MODERN ENGLAND 991
England, which had grown dull as the war rolled away from
its borders, quickened again at the news of invasion and of
the outrages committed by the Indians whom Burgoyne em
ployed among his troops. Its mUitia hurried from town and
homestead to the camp ; and after a fruitless attack on the
American lines, Burgoyne saw himself surrounded on the
heights of Saratoga. On the 17th of October he was com
pelled to surrender. The news of this calamity gave force to
the words with which Chatham at the very time of the
surrender was pressing for peace. "You cannot conquer
America," he cried when men were glorying in Howe's suc
cesses. " If I were an American as I am an Englishman,
while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would
lay down my arms — never, never, never ! " Then in a burst
of indignant eloquence he thundered against the use of the
Indian and his scalping-knife as allies of England against
her children. The proposals which Chatham brought for
ward might perhaps, in his hands, even yet have drawn
America and the mother country together. His plan was
one of absolute conciliation, and of a federal union between
the settlements and Great Britain which would have left the
Colonies absolutely their own masters in all matters of inter
nal government, and linked only by ties of affection and
loyalty to the general body of the empire. But it met with
the same fate as his previous proposals. Its rejection was at
once followed by the news of Saratoga, and by the yet more
fatal news that this disaster had roused the Bourbon courts
to avenge the humiliation of the Seven Years' war. In Feb
ruary, 1778, France concluded an aUiance with the States.
Lord North strove to meet the blow by fresh offers of con
ciliation, and by a pledge to renounce forever the right of
direct taxation over the Colonies ; but he felt that the time
for concUiation was past, while all hope of reducing America
by force of arms had disappeared. George indeed was as
obstinate for war as ever ; and the country, stung to the quick
by the attack of France, backed passionately the obstinacy
of the king. But unlike George the Third, it instinctively
felt that if a hope stUl remained of retaining the friendship
of the Colonies, and of baflfling the efforts of the Bourbons,
it lay in Lord Chatham ; and in spite of the king's resistance

992 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1778
the voice of the whole country called him back to power.
But on the eve of his return to oflfice this last chance was
shattered by the hand of death. Broken with age and dis
ease, the earl was borne to the House of Lords to utter in a
few broken words his protest against the proposal to sur
render America. " I rejoice," he murmured, "that I am still
alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this
ancient and noble monarchy. His Majesty succeeded to an
empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied.
Seventeen years ago this people was the terror of the world."
He listened impatiently to the reply of the Duke of Rich
mond, and again rose to his feet. But he had hardly risen
when he pressed his hand upon his heart, and falling back in
a swoon was borne home to die.
From the hour of Chatham's death England entered on a
conflict with enemies whose circle gradually widened till she
stood single-handed against the world. At the close of 1778
Spain joined the league of France and America against her;
and in the next year the joint fleets of the two powers rode
the masters of the Channel. They even threatened a descent
on the English coast. But dead as Chatham was, his cry
woke a new life in England. "Shall we fall prostrate," he
exclaimed with his last breath, "before the House of Bour
bon ? " and the divisions which had broken the nation in its
struggle with American liberty were hushed in the presence
of this danger to its own existence. The weakness of the
ministry was compensated by the energy of England itself.
For three years, from 1779 to 1782, General Elliott held
against famine and bombardment the rock fortress of Gibral
tar. Although a quarrel over the right of search banded
Holland and the courts of the North in an armed neutrality
against her, and added the Dutch fleet to the number of her
assailants, England held her own at sea. Even in America
the fortune of the war seemed to turn. After Burgoyne's
surrender the English generals had withdrawn from Pennsyl
vania, and bent all their efforts on the south, where a strong
Royalist party still existed. The capture of Charleston and
the successes of Lord Cornwallis in 1780 were rendered fruit
less by the obstinate resistance of General Greene ; but the
States were weakened by bankruptcy, and unnerved by hopes

1773] MODERN ENGLAND 993
of aid from France. Meanwhile England was winning new
triumphs in the East.
Since the day of Plassey, India had been fast passing into
the hands of the merchant company whose traders but a few
years before held only three petty factories along its coast.
The victory which laid Bengal at the feet of Clive had been
followed in 1 760 by a victory at Wandewash, in which Colonel
Coote's defeat of Lally, the French governor of Pondicherry,
established British supremacy over Southern India. The work
of organization had soon to follow on that of conquest; for
the tyranny and corruption of the merchant clerks who sud
denly found themselves lifted into rulers was fast ruining the
province of Bengal ; and although CUve had profited more
than any other by the spoils of his victory, he saw that the
time had come when greed must give way to the responsibfli-
ties of power. In 1765 he returned to India, and the two
years of his rule were in fact the most glorious years in his
life. In the teeth of opposition from every clerk and of
mutiny throughout the army, he put down the private trading
of the company's servants and forbade their acceptance of
gifts from the natives. Clive set an example of disinterested
ness by handing over to public uses a legacy which had been
left him by the prince he had raised to the throne of Bengal ;
and returned poorer than he went to face the storm his acts
had roused among those who were interested in Indian abuses
at home. His unsparing denunciations of the misgovemment
of Bengal at last stirred even Lord North to interfere; and
when the financial distress of the company drove it for aid
to Government, the grant of aid was coupled with measures
of administrative reform. The Regulating Act of 1 773 estab
lished a governor-general and a Supreme Court of Judicature
for all British possessions in India, prohibited judges and
members of council from trading, forbade any receipt of
presents from natives, and ordered -that every act of the di
rectors should be signified to the Government to be approved
or disallowed. The new interest which had been aroused in
the subject of India was seen in an investigation of the whole
question of its administration by a committee of the House
of Commons. Clive's own early acts were examined with un
sparing severity. His bitter complaint in the Lords that,

994 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1773
Baron of Plassey as he was, he had been arraigned like a
sheep-stealer, failed to prevent the passing of resolutions
which censured the corruption and treachery of the early
days of British rule in India. Here, however, the justice of
the House stopped. When his accusers passed from the cen
sure of Indian misgovemment to the censure of Clive himself,
the memory of his great deeds won from the House of Com
mons a unanimous vote, "That Robert Lord Clive did at
the same time render great and meritorious services to his
country." By the act of 1773 Warren Hastings was named governor-
general of Bengal, with powers of superintendence and control
over the other presidencies. Hastings was sprung of a noble
family which had long fallen into decay, and poverty had
driven him in boyhood to accept a writership in the company's
service. Clive, whose quick eye discerned his merits, drew
him after Plassey into political life ; and the administrative
ability he showed, during the disturbed period which followed,
raised him step by step to the post of governor of Bengal.
No man could have been better fitted to discharge the duties
of the new office which the Government at home had created
without a thought of its real greatness. Hastings was gifted
with rare powers of organization and control. His first meas
ure was to establish the direct rule of the company over
Bengal by abolishing the government of its native princes,
which, though it had become nominal, hindered all plans for
effective administration. The nabob sank into a pensionary,
and the company's new province was roughly but efficiently
organized. Out of the clerks and traders about him Hastings
formed that body of public servants which still remains the
noblest product of our rule in India. The system of law and
finance which he devised, hasty and imperfect as it neces
sarily was, was far superior to any that India had ever seen.
Corruption he put down with as firm a hand as Clive's, but
he won the love of the new " civilians '' as he won the love
of the Hindus. Although he raised the revenue of Bengal
and was able to send home every year a surplus of half a
mUlion to the company, he did this without laying a fresh
burden on the natives or losing their good-wUl. His govern
ment was guided by an intimate knowledge of and sympathy

1773] MODERN ENGLAND 995
with the people. At a time when their tongue was looked
on simply as a medium of trade and business, Hastings was
skilled in the languages of India; he was versed in native
customs, and famfliar with native feeling. We can hardly
wonder that his popularity with the Bengalis was such as
no later ruler has ever attained, or that after a century of
great events Indian mothers still hush their infants with the
name of Warren Hastings.
As yet, though English influence was great in the south,
Bengal alone was directly in English hands. Warren Hastings
recognized a formidable danger to the power of Britain in that
of the Mahrattas, freebooters of Hindu blood whose tribes had
for a century past carried their raids over India from the hills
of the western coast, and founded sovereignties in Guzerat,
Malwa, and Tanjore, and who were bound by a slight tie of
subjection to the Mahratta chief who reigned at Poonah.
The policy of Hastings was to prevent the Mahrattas from
overrunning the whole of India, and taking the place which
the Mogul emperors had occupied. He bound native princes,
as in Oudh or Berar, by treaties and subsidies, crushed with
out scruple the Rohillas to strengthen his ally the nabob
vizier of Oudh, and watched with incessant jealousy the
growth of powers even as distant as the Sikhs. The jeal
ousy of France sought in the Mahrattas a counterpoise to the
power of Britain, and through their chieftain the French en
voys were able to set the whole confederacy in motion against
the English presidencies. The danger was met by Hastings
with characteristic swiftness of resolve. His difficulties were
great. For two years he had been rendered powerless through
the opposition of his council ; and when freed from this obsta
cle the company pressed him incessantly for money, and the
Crown more than once strove to recall him. His own general.
Sir Eyre Coote, was miserly, capricious, and had to be humored
like a child. Censures and complaints reached him with every
mail. But his calm self-command never failed. No trace of
his embarrassments showed itself in his work. The war with
the Mahrattas was pressed with a tenacity of purpose which
the blunders of subordinates and the inefficiency of the sol
diers he was forced to use never shook for a moment. Fail
ure followed failure, and success had hardly been wrung from
64

996 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1780
fortune when a new and overwhelming danger threatened
from the south. A military adventurer, Hyder AU, had
built up a compact and vigorous empire out of the wreck of
older principalities on the table-land of Mysore. Tyrant as
he was, no native rule was so just as Hyder 's, no statesman
ship so vigorous. He was quick-witted enough to discern the
real power of Britain, and only the wretched blundering of
the council of Madras forced him at last to the conclusion
that war with the English was less dangerous than friendship
with them. Old as he was, his generalship retained all its
energy ; and a disciplined army, covered by a cloud of horse
and backed by a train of artUlery, poured down in 1780 on
the plain of the Carnatic. The small British force which met
him was driven into Madras, and Madras itself was in danger.
The news reached Hastings when he was at last on the verge
of triumph over the Mahrattas ; but his triumph was instantly
abandoned, a peace was patched up, and every soldier hurried
to Madras. The appearance of Eyre Coote checked the prog
ress of Hyder, and after a campaign of some months he
was hurled back into the fastnesses of Mysore. India was
the one quarter of the world where Britain lost nothing dur
ing the American war; and in the annexation of Benares,
the extension of British rule along the Ganges, the reduction
of Oudh to virtual dependence, the appearance of English
armies in Central India, and the defeat of Hyder, the genius
of Hastings laid the foundation of an Indian empire.
But while England triumphed in the East, the face of the
war in America was changed by a terrible disaster. Foiled
in an attempt on North Carolina by the refusal of his fellow
general. Sir Henry Clinton, to assist him. Lord CornwaUis fell
back in 1781 on Virginia, and entrenched himself in the lines
of Yorktown. A sudden march of Washington brought him
to the front of the English troops at a moment when the
French fleet held the sea, and the army of Cornwallis was
driven by famine to a surrender as humiliating as that of
Saratoga. The news fell Uke a thunderbolt on the wretched
minister who had till now suppressed at his master's order
his own conviction of the uselessness of further bloodshed.
Opening his arms and pacing wfldly up and down his room.
Lord North exclaimed, " It is all over ! " and resigned. Eng-

1782] MODERN ENGLAND 997
land, in fact, seemed on the brink of ruin. In the crisis of
the American struggle Ireland itself turned on her. A force
of forty thousand volunteers had been raised in 1779 for the
defense of the island against a French invasion. Threats of
an armed revolt backed the eloquence of two parliamentary
leaders, Grattan and Flood, in their demand for the repeal of
Poynings' Act, which took all power of initiative legislation
from the Irish Parliament, and for the recognition of the
Irish House of Lords as an ultimate Court of Appeal. The
demands were in effect a claim for national independence ;
but there were no means of resisting them, for England was
without a soldier to oppose the volunteers. The fall of Lord
North recalled the Whigs under Lord Rockingham to office ;
and on Rockingham fell the double task of satisfying Ireland
and of putting an end, at any cost, to the war with the United
States. The task involved in both quarters a humiliating sur
render ; and it needed the bitter stress of necessity to induce
the Houses to follow his counsels.- The English Parliament
abandoned by a formal statute the judicial and legislative
supremacy it had till then asserted over the Parliament of
Ireland ; and negotiations were begun with America and its
allies. In the difficulties of England the hopes of her ene
mies rose high. Spain refused to suspend hostUities at any
other price than the surrender of Gibraltar. France pro
posed that England should give up all her Indian conquests
save Bengal. But the true basis of her world power lay on
the sea ; and at this moment the command of the seas again
became her own. Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English
seamen save Nelson and Blake, had in January, 1780, encoun
tered the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and only four
of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. Two years later the triumphs
of the French Admiral De Grasse called him to the West
Indies, and in April, 1782, a maneuver which he was the
first to introduce broke his opponent's line, and drove the
French fleet shattered from the Atlantic. In September a
last attack of the joint force gathered against Gibraltar was
repulsed by the heroism of Elliott. Nor would America wait
any longer for the satisfaction of her allies. In November
her commissioners signed the preliminaries of a peace, in
which Britain reserved to herself on the American continent

998 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1783
only Canada and the island of Newfoundland, and acknowl
edged without reserve the independence of the United States.
The treaty of peace with the United States was a prelude to
treaties of peace with the Bourbon powers. France, indeed,
won nothing in the treaties with which the war ended; Spain
gained only Florida and Minorca. England, on the other
hand, had won ground in India ; she had retained Canada ;
her West Indian islands were intact; she had asserted her
command of the seas. But at the close of the war there was
less thought of what she had retained than of what she had
lost. The American Colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is
no wonder that in the first shock of such a loss England
looked on herself as on the verge of ruin, or that the Bour
bon courts believed her position as a world power to be prac
tically at an end. How utterly groundless such a conception
was the coming years were to show.
Section III. — Tlie Second Pitt, 1783-1793
That in the creation of the United States the world had
reached one of the turning-points in its history seems at the
time to have entered into the thought of not a single Euro
pean statesman. What startled men most at the moment
was the discovery that England herself was far from being
ruined by the greatness of her defeat. She rose from it,
indeed, stronger and more vigorous than ever. Never had
she shown a mightier energy than in the struggle against
France which foUowed only ten years after her loss of Amer
ica, nor did she ever stand higher among the nations than on
the day of Waterloo. Her real greatness, however, lay not
in the Old World but in the New. She was from that hour
a mother of nations. In America she had begotten a great
people, and her emigrant ships were still to carry on the
movement of the Teutonic race from which she herself had
sprung. Her work was to be colonization. Her settlers
were to dispute Africa with the Kafir and the Hottentot;
they were to build up in the waters of the Pacific colonies as
great as those which she had lost in America. And to the
nations that she founded she was to give not only her blood
and her speech, but the freedom which she had won. It is

1783] MODERN ENGLAND 999
the thought of this which flings its grandeur round the pet
tiest detafls of our story in the past. The history of France
has little result beyond France itself. German or Italian his
tory has no direct issue outside the bounds of Germany or
Italy. But England is only a smaU part of the outcome of
English history. Its greater issues lie not within the narrow
limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations
yet to be. The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her
statesmen, the steady love of liberty and law in her people at
large, were shaping in the past of our little island the future
of mankind.
Meanwhile the rapid development of industrial energy
and industrial wealth in England itself was telling on the
conditions of English statesmanship. Though the Tories and
"king's friends " had now grown to a compact body of a hun
dred and fifty members, the Whigs, who held office under
Lord Rockingham, were superior to their rivals in numbers
and political character, now that the return of the Bedford
section to the general body of the party during its steady
opposition to the American war had restored much of its old
cohesion. But this reunion only strengthened their aristo
cratic and exclusive tendencies, and widened the breach which.
was steadUy opening on questions such as parliamentry re
form, between the bulk of the Whig party and the small frag
ment which remained true to the more popular sympathies of
Chatham. Lord Shelburne stood at the head of the Chatham
party, and it was reenforced at this moment by the entry
into Parliament of the second son of Chatham himself.
William Pitt had hardly reached his twenty-second year ; but
he left college with the learning of a ripe scholar, and his
ready and sonorous eloquence had been matured by his father's
teaching. " He will be one of the first men in Parliament,"
said a member to the Whig leader, Charles Fox, after Pitt's
first speech in the House of Commons. " He is so already,"
replied Fox. The haughty self-esteem of the new statesman
breathed in every movement of his tall, spare figure, in the
hard lines of a countenance which none but his closer friends
saw lighted by a smile, in his cold and repulsive address, his
invariable gravity of demeanor, and his habitual air of com
mand. How great the qualities were which lay beneath this

lOOO HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1783
haughty exterior no one knew ; nor had any one guessed how
soon this "boy," as his rivals mockingly styled him, was to
crush every opponent and to hold England at his will. He
refused any minor post in the Rockingham administration,
claiming, if he took office at all, to be at once admitted to the
cabinet. But Pitt had no desire to take office under Rocking
ham. To him as to Chatham the main lesson of the war was
the need of putting an end to those abuses in the composition
of Parliament by which George the Third had been enabled
to plunge the country into it. A thorough reform of the
House of Commons was the only effectual means of doing
this, and Pitt brought forward a bill founded on his father's
plans for that purpose. But the great bulk of the Whigs
could not resolve on the sacrifice of property and influence
which such a reform would involve. Pitt's bill was thrown
out ; and in its stead the ministry endeavored to weaken the
means of corrupt influence which the king had unscrupu
lously used, by disqualifying persons holding government
contracts from sitting in Parliament, by depriving revenue
officers of the elective franchise (a measure which diminished
the influence of the Crown in seventy boroughs), and above
all by a bill for the reduction of the civil establishment, of the
pension list, and of the secret-service fund, which was brought
in by Burke. These measures were to a great extent effect
ual in diminishing the influence of the Crown over Parlia
ment, and they are memorable as marking the date when the
direct bribery of members absolutely ceased. But they were
absolutely inoperative in rendering the House of Commons
really representative of or responsible to the people of Eng
land. The jealousy which the mass of the Whigs entertained
of the Chatham section and its plans was more plainly shown
on the death of Lord Rockingham in July. Shelburne was
no sooner called to the head of the ministry than Fox, who
acted on personal grounds, and the bulk of Rockingham's
foUowers resigned. Pitt on the other hand accepted office as
chanceUor of the Exchequer.
The Shelburne ministry only lasted long enough to con
clude the final peace with the United States ; for in the open
ing of 1783 it was overthrown by the most unscrupulous
coalition known in our history, that of the Whig followers of

1783] MODERN ENGLAND lOOI
Fox with the Tories who stiU clung to Lord North. Never
had the need of representative reform been more clearly shown
than by a coalition which proved how powerless was the force
of public opinion to check even the most shameless faction in
Parliament, how completely the lessening of the royal influ
ence by the measures of Burke and Rockingham had tended
to the profit, not of the people, but of the boroughmongers
who usurped its representation. Pitt's renewed proposal of
parliamentary reform was rejected by a majority of two to
one. Secure in their parliamentary majority, and heedless
of the power of public opinion without the walls of the House
of Commons, the new ministers entered boldly on a greater
task than had as yet taxed the constructive genius of English
statesmen. To leave such a dominion as Warren Hastings
had built up in India to the control of a m^re company of
traders was clearly impossible ; and Fox proposed to transfer
the political government from the directors of the company
to a board of seven commissioners. The appointment of the
seven was vested in the first instance in Parliament and after
wards in the Crown ; their office was to be held for five years,
but they were removable on address from either House of
Parliament. The proposal was at once met with a storm of
opposition. The scheme indeed was an injudicious one ; for
the new commissioners would have been destitute of that
practical knowledge of India which belonged to the company,
while the want of any immediate link between them and the
actual ministry of the Crown would have prevented Parlia
ment from exercising an effective control over their acts.
But the real faults of this India bill were hardly noticed in
the popular outcry against it. The merchant class was galled
by the blow leveled at the greatest merchant body in the
realm ; corporations trembled at the canceling of a charter ;
the king viewed the measure as a mere means of transferring
the patronage of India to the Whigs. With the nation at
large the faults of the bill lay in the character of the ministry
which proposed it. To give the rule and patronage of India
over to the existing House of Commons was to give a new
and immense power to a body which misused in the grossest
way the power it possessed. It was the sense of this popular
feeling which encouraged the king to exert his personal influ-

1002 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1783
ence to defeat the measure in the Lords, and on its defeat to
order his ministers to deliver up the seals. In December,
1783, Pitt accepted tbe post of first lord of the treasury;
but his position would at once have been untenable had the
country gone with its nominal representatives. He was de
feated again and again by large majorities in the Commons ;
but the majorities dwindled as a shower of addresses from
every quarter, from the Tory University of Oxford as from
the Whig Corporation of London, proved that public opinion
went with the minister and not with the House. It was the
general sense of this which justified Pitt in the firmness with
which, in the teeth of addresses for his removal from oflSce,
he delayed the dissolution of Parliament for five months, and
gained time for that ripening of national sentiment on which
he counted for success. When the elections of 1784 came
the struggle was at once at an end. The public feeling had
become strong enough to break through the corrupt influences
which commonly governed its representation. Every great
constituency returned supporters to Pitt; of the majority
which had defeated him in the Commons a hundred and sixty
members were unseated; and only a fragment of the Whig
party was saved by its command of nomination boroughs.
When Parliament came together after the overthrow of the
coalition, the minister of twenty-five was master of England
as no minister had been before. Even the king yielded to his
sway, partly through gratitude for the triumph he had won
for him over the Whigs, partly from a sense of the madness
which was soon to strike him down, but still more from a
gradual discovery that the triumph which he had won over
his political rivals had been won, not to the profit of the
Crown, but of the nation at large. The Whigs, it was true,
were broken, unpopular, and without a policy, while the
Tories clung to the minister who had " saved the king." But
it was the support of a new political power that really gave
his strength to the young minister. The sudden rise of
English industry was pushing the manufacturer to the front ;
and all that the trading classes loved in Chatham, his noble
ness of temper, his consciousness of power, his patriotism, his
sympathy with a wider world than the world within the Parlia
ment House, they saw in his son. He had little indeed of the

1784] MODERN ENGLAND IOO3
poetic and imaginative side of Chatham's genius, of his quick
perception of what was just and what was possible, his far-
reaching conceptions of national policy, his outlook into the
future of the world. Pitt's flowing and sonorous common
places rang hollow beside the broken phrases which still make
his father's eloquence a living thing to Englishmen. On the
other hand he possessed some qualities in which Chatham was
utterly wanting. His temper, though naturally ardent and
sensitive, had been schooled in a proud self-command. His
simplicity and good taste freed him from his father's osten
tation and extravagance. Diffuse and commonplace as his
speeches seem, they were adapted as much by their very
qualities of diffuseness and commonplace as by their lucidity
and good sense to the intelligence of the middle classes whom
Pitt felt to be his real audience. In his love of peace, his
immense industry, his despatch of business, his skill in debate,
his knowledge of finance, he recalled Sir Robert Walpole;
but he had virtues which Walpole never possessed, and he
was free from Walpole's worst defects. He was careless of
personal gain. He was too proud to rule by corruption. His
lofty self-esteem left no room for any jealousy of subordi
nates. He was generous in his appreciation of youthful
merits; and the "boys" he gathered round him, such as
Canning and Lord Wellesley, rewarded his generosity by a
devotion which death left untouched. With Walpole's cynical
inaction Pitt had no sympathy whatever. His policy from
the first was one of active reform, and he faced every one of
the problems, financial, constitutional, religious, from which
Walpole had shrunk. Above all he had none of Walpole's
scorn of his fellow men. The noblest feature in his mind was
its wide humanity. His love for England was as deep and
personal as his father's love, but of the sympathy with Eng
lish passion and English prejudice which had been at once
his father's weakness and strength he had not a trace. When
Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham's jealousy of
France and his faith that she was the natural foe of England,
Pitt answered nobly that "to suppose any nation can be un
alterably the enemy of another is weak and childish." The
temper of the time and the larger sympathy of man with man
which especially marks the eighteenth century as a turning-

I004 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1784
point in the history of the human race, was everywhere
bringing to the front a new order of statesmen, such as
Turgot and Joseph the Second, whose characteristics were a
love of mankind, and a belief that as the happiness of the in
dividual can only be secured by the general happiness of the
community to which he belongs, so the welfare of individual
nations can only be secured by the general welfare of the
world. Of these Pitt was one. But he rose high above the
rest in the consummate knowledge and the practical force
which he brought to the realization of his aims.
Pitt's strength lay in finance ; and he came forward at a
time when the growth of English wealth made a knowledge
of finance essential to a great minister. The progress of the
nation was wonderful. Population more than doubled during
the eighteenth century, and the advance of wealth was even
greater than that of population. The war had added a
hundred millions to the national debt, but the burden was
hardly felt. The loss of America only increased the com
merce with that country ; and industry had begun that great
career which was to make Britain the workshop of the world.
Though England already stood in the first rank of commercial
states at the accession of George the Third, her industrial
life at home was mainly agricultural. The wool trade had
gradually established itself in Norfolk, the West Riding of
Yorkshire, and the counties of the southwest; while the
manufacture of cotton was still almost limited to Manchester
and Bolton, and remained so unimportant that in the middle
of the eighteenth century the export of cotton goods hardly
reached the value of fifty thousand a year. There was the
same slow and steady progress in the linen trade of Belfast
and Dundee, and the sUks of Spitalfields. The processes of
manufacture were too rude to allow any large increase of
production. It was only where a stream gave force to turn
a mill-wheel that the wool-worker could establish his factory;
and cotton was as yet spun by hand in the cottages, the
" spinsters " of the family sitting with their distaffs round
the weaver's handloom. But had the processes of manu
facture been more efficient, they would have been rendered
useless by the want of a cheap and easy means of transport.
The older main roads, which had lasted fairly through the

1776] MODERN ENGLAND IOO5
Middle Ages, had broken down in later times before the
growth of traffic and the increase of wagons and carriages.
The new lines of trade lay often along mere country lanes
which had never been more than horse tracks. Much of the
woolen trade therefore had to be carried on by means of long
trains of packhorses ; and in the case of yet heavier goods,
such as coal, distribution was almost impracticable, save along
the greater rivers or in districts accessible from the sea. A
new era began when the engineering genius of Brindley
joined Manchester with its port of Liverpool in 1767 by a
canal which crossed the Irwell on a lofty aqueduct ; the suc
cess of the experiment soon led to the universal introduction
of water carriage, and Great Britain was traversed in every
direction by three thousand miles of navigable canals. At
the same time a new importance was given to the coal which
lay beneath the soU of England. The stores of iron which
had lain side by side with it in the northern counties had lain
there unworked through the scarcity of wood, which was
looked upon as the only fuel by which it could be smelted.
In the middle of the eighteenth century a process for smelt
ing iron with coal turned out to be effective ; and the whole
aspect of the iron trade was at once revolutionized. Iron was
to become the working material of the modern world ; and it
is its production of iron which more than all else has placed
England at the head of industrial Europe. The value of
coal as a means of producing mechanical force was revealed
in the discovery by which Watt in 1765 transformed the
steam-engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instru
ment which human industry has ever had at its command.
The invention came at a moment when the existing supply of
manua:l labor could no longer cope with the demands of the
manufacturers. Three successive inventions in twelve years,
that of the spinning-jenny in 1764 by the weaver Hargreaves,
of the spinning-machine in 1 768 by the barber Arkwright, of
the "mule " by the weaver Crompton in 1776, were followed
by the discovery of the power loom. But these would have
been comparatively useless had it not been for the revelation
of a new and inexhaustible labor force in the steam-engine.
It was the combination of such a force with such means of
applying it that enabled Britain during the terrible years of

I006 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1776
her struggle with France and Napoleon to all but monopolize
the woolen and cotton trades, and raised her into the greatest
manufacturing country that the world had seen.
To deal wisely with such a growth required a knowledge of
the laws of wealth which would have been impossible at an
earlier time. But it had become possible in the days of Pitt
If books are to be measured by the effect which they have
produced on the fortunes of mankind, the "Wealth of
Nations " must rank among the greatest of books. Its author
was Adam Smith, an Oxford scholar and a professor at Glas
gow. Labor, he contended, was the one source of wealth,
and it was by freedom of labor, by suffering the worker to
pursue his own interest in his own way, that the public
wealth would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labor
into artificial channels, to shape by laws the course of com
merce, to promote special branches of industry in particular
countries, or to fix the character of the intercourse between
one country and another, is not only a wrong to the worker
or the merchant, but actuaUy hurtful to the wealth of a state.
The book was published in 1776, at the opening of the
American war, and studied by Pitt during his career as an
undergraduate at Cambridge. From that time he owned
Adam Smith for his master. He had hardly become minister
before he took the principles of the " Wealth of Nations "
as the groundwork of his policy. The ten earlier years of
his rule marked a new point of departure in English states
manship. Pitt was the first English minister who really
grasped the part which industry was to play in promoting
the welfare of the world. He was not only a peace minister
and a financier, as Walpole had been, but a statesman who
saw that the best security for peace lay in the freedom and
widening of commercial intercourse between nations; that
public economy not only lessened the general burdens but left
additional capital in the hands of industry ; and that finance
might be turned from a mere means of raising revenue into
a powerful engine of political and social improvement.
That little was done by Pitt himself to carry these princi
ples into effect was partly owing to the mass of ignorance
and prejudice with which he had to contend, and still more
to the sudden break of his plans through the French Revolu-

WATT DISCOVERING THE POWER OF STEAM.
Photogravure from an engraving after a painting by
Eugene Ernest Hillemacher.

1785] MODERN ENGLAND IC07
tion. His power rested above all on the trading classes, and
these were stUl persuaded that wealth meant gold and sUver,
and that commerce was best furthered by jealous monopolies.
It was only by patience and dexterity that the mob of mer
chants and country squires who backed him in the House of
Commons could be brought to acquiesce in the changes he
proposed. How small his power was when it struggled with
the prejudices around him was seen in the failure of the
first great measure he brought forward. The question of
parliamentary reform which had been mooted during the
American war had been steadily coming to the front. Chat
ham had advocated an increase of county members, who were
then the most independent part of the Lower House. The
Duke of Richmond talked of universal suffrage, equal electoral
districts, and annual Parliaments. WUkes anticipated the
Reform BiU of a later time by proposing to disfranchise the
rotten boroughs, and to give members in their stead to
the counties and to the more populous and wealthy towns.
Wflliam Pitt had made the question his own by bringing
forward a motion for reform on his first entry into the House,
and one of his first measures as minister was to bring in a
biU in 1785 which, while providing for the gradual extinction
of aU decayed boroughs, disfranchised thirty-six at once, and
transferred their members to counties. He brought the
king to abstain from opposition, and strove to buy off the
boroughmongers, as the holders of rotten boroughs were
caUed, by offering to compensate them for the seats they
lost, at their market value. But the bulk of his own party
joined the bulk of the Whigs in a steady resistance to the
biU. The more glaring abuses, indeed, within ParUament
itself, the abuses which stirred Chatham and Wilkes to action,
had in great part disappeared. The bribery of members had
ceased. Burke's BiU of Economical Reform had just dealt
a fatal blow at the influence which the king exercised by
suppressing a host of useless offices, household appointments,
judicial and diplomatic charges, which were maintained for
the purposes of corruption. Above aU, the recent triumph
of public opinion to which Pitt owed his power had done
much to diminish the sense of any real danger from the
opposition which Parliament had shown tfll now to the voice

I008 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1783
of the nation. " Terribly disappointed and beat " as Wilber-
force tells us Pitt was by the rejection of his measure, the
temper of the House and of the people was too plain to be
mistaken, and though his opinion remained unaltered, he
never brought it forward again.
The failure of his constitutional reform was more than
compensated by the triumphs of his finance. When he
entered office public credit was at its lowest ebb. The debt
had been doubled by the American war, yet large sums still
remained unfunded, while the revenue was reduced by a
vast system of smuggling which turned every coast town into
a nest of robbers. The deficiency was met for the moment
by new taxes, but the time which was thus gained served to
change the whole face of public affairs. The first of Pitt's
financial measures — his plan for gradually paying off the
debt by a sinking-fund — was undoubtedly an error ; but
it had a happy effect in restoring public confidence. He
met the smuggler by a reduction of customs duties which
made his trade unprofitable. He revived Walpole's plan
of an Excise. Meanwhile the public expenses were reduced,
and commission after commission was appointed to introduce
economy into every department of the public service. The
rapid development of the national industry which we have
already noted no doubt aided the success of these measures.
Credit was restored. The smuggling trade was greatly re
duced. In two years there was a surplus of a million, and
though duty after duty was removed the revenue rose steadily
with every remission of taxation. MeanwhUe Pitt was show
ing the political value of the new finance in a wider field.
Ireland, then as now, was England's difficulty. The tyrannous
misgovemment under which she had groaned ever since the
battle of the Boyne was producing its natural fruit ; the mis
erable land was torn with political faction, religious feuds and
peasant conspiracies ; and so threatening had the attitude of
the Protestant party which ruled it become during the Ameri
can war that they had forced the English Parliament to relin
quish its control over their Parliament in Dublin. Pitt saw
that much at least of the misery and disloyalty of Ireland
sprang from its poverty. The population had grown rapidly
while culture remained stationary and commerce perished.

1784] MODERN ENGLAND IOO9
And of this poverty much was the direct result of unjust
law. Ireland was a grazing country, but to protect the
interest of English graziers the import of its cattle into
England was forbidden. To protect the interests of English
clothiers and weavers, its manufactures were loaded with
duties. To redress this wrong was the first financial effort
of Pitt, and the biU which he introduced in 1785 did away
with every obstacle to freedom of trade between England
and Ireland. It was a measure which, as he held, would
"draw what remained of the shattered empire together," and
repair in part the loss of America by creating a loyal and
prosperous Ireland ; and struggling almost alone in face of
a fierce opposition from the Whigs and the Manchester mer
chants, he dragged it through the English Parliament only
to see amendments forced into it which insured its rejection
by the Irish Parliament. But the defeat only spurred him to
a greater effort elsewhere. France had been looked upon as
England's natural enemy; but in 1787 he concluded a Treaty
of Commerce with France which enabled the subjects of both
countries to reside and travel in either without license or pass
port, did away with all prohibition of trade on either side, and
reduced every import duty.
India owes to Pitt's triumph a form of government which
remained unchanged to our own day. The India Bill which
he carried in 1784 preserved in appearance the political and
commercial powers of the directors, while establishing a
Board of Control, formed from members of the Privy Coun
cil, for the approval or annulling of their acts. Practically,
however, the powers of the Board of Directors were absorbed
by a secret committee of three elected members of that body,
to whom all the more important administrative functions had
been reserved by the bfll, whfle those of the Board of Control
were virtually exercised by its president. As the president
was in effect a new secretary of state for the Indian depart
ment and became an important member of each ministry,
responsible like his fellow members for his actions to Parlia
ment, the administration of India was thus made a part of
the general system of the English Government; whUe the
secret committee supplied the experience of Indian affairs
in which the minister might be deficient Meanwhile the

lOIO HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1786
new temper that was growing up in the English people told
on the attitude of England towards its great dependency.
Discussions over rival plans of Indian administration diffused
a sense of national responsibility for its good government,
and there was a general resolve that the security against in
justice and misrule which was enjoyed by the poorest Eng
lishman should be enjoyed by the poorest Hindu. This
resolve expressed itself in the trial of Warren Hastings.
Hastings returned from India at the close of the war with
the hope of rewards as great as those of Clive. He had
saved all that Clive had won. He had laid the foundation
of a vast empire in the East He had shown rare powers
of administration, and the foresight, courage, and temper
ance which mark the born ruler of men. But the wisdom
and glory of his rule could not hide its terrible ruthlessness.
He was charged with having sold for a vast sum the services
of British troops to crush the free tribes of the Rohillas, with
having wrung half a mfllion by extortion from the Rajah of
Benares, with having extorted by torture and starvation more
than a million from the Princesses of Oudh. He was accused
of having kept his hold upon power by measures as unscru
pulous, and with having murdered a native who opposed him
by an abuse of the forms of English law. On almost all
these charges the cooler judgment of later inquirers has ac
quitted Warren Hastings of guilt Personally there can be
little doubt that he had done much to secure to the new sub
jects of Britain a just and peaceable government What was
hardest and most pitiless in his rule had been simply a carry
ing out of the system of administration which was native to
India and which he found existing there. But such a sys
tem was alien from the new humanity of Englishmen ; and
few dared to vindicate Hastings when Burke in words of
passionate earnestness moved for his impeachment. The
great trial lingered on for years, and in the long run Has
tings secured an acquittal. But the end at which the im
peachment aimed had really been won. The attention, the
sympathy, of Englishmen had been drawn across distant seas
to a race utterly strange to them ; and the peasant of Corn
waU or Cumberland had learned how to thrill at the suffering
of a peasant of Bengal.

1783] MODERN ENGLAND IOI I
Even whfle the trial was going on a yet wider extension of
English sympathy made itself felt. In the year which fol
lowed the adoption of free trade with France the new philan
thropy allied itself with the religious movement created by
the Wesleys in an attack on the slave-trade. One of the
profits which England bought by the triumphs of Marlbor
ough was a right to a monopoly of the slave-trade between
Africa and the Spanish dominions ; and it was England that
had planted slavery in her American colonies and her West
Indian islands. But the horrors and iniquity of the trade,
the ruin and degradation of Africa which it brought about,
the oppression of the negro himself, were now felt widely
and deeply. "After a conversation in the open air at the
root of an old tree, just above the steep descent into the Vale
of Keston," with the younger Pitt, his friend, William Wilber-
force, whose position as a representative of the evangelical
party gave weight to his advocacy of such a cause, resolved
in 1788 to bring in a bill for the abolition of the slave-trade.
But the bfll fell before the opposition of the Liverpool slave
merchants and the general indifference of the House of Com
mons. The spirit of humanity which breathed through Pitt's
poUcy had indeed to wrestle with diflficulties at home and
abroad; and his efforts to sap the enmity of nation against
nation by a freer intercourse encountered a foe even more
fatal than English prejudice, in the very movement of which
his measures formed a part. Across the Channel this move
ment was growing into a revolution which was to change the
face of the world.
So far as England was concerned the Puritan resistance of
the seventeenth century had in the end succeeded in check
ing the general tendency of the time to religious and political
despotism. Since the Revolution of 1688 freedom of con
science and the people's right to govern itself through its
representatives in Parliament had been practically established.
Social equality had begun long before. Every man from the
highest to the lowest was subject to, and protected by, the
same law. The English aristocracy, though exercising a
powerful influence on government, were possessed of few
social privileges, and prevented from forming a separate class
in the nation by the legal and social tradition which counted
6s

I0I2 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1783
all save the eldest son of a noble house as commoners. No
impassable line parted the gentry from the commercial classes,
and these again possessed no privileges which could part them
from the lower classes of the community. Public opinion,
the general sense of educated Englishmen, had established
itself after a short struggle as the dominant element in
English government. But in all the other great states of
Europe the wars of religion had left only the name of free
dom. Government tended to a pure despotism. Privilege
was supreme in religion, in politics, in society. Society itself
rested on a rigid division of classes from one another, which
refused to the people at large any equal rights of justice or
of industry. We have already seen how alien such a concep
tion of national life was from the ideas which the wide diffu
sion of intelligence during the eighteenth century was spread
ing throughout Europe ; and in almost every country some
enlightened rulers endeavored by administrative reforms in
some sort to satisfy the sense of wrong which was felt around
them. The attempts of sovereigns like Frederick the Great
in Prussia, and Joseph the Second in Austria and the Nether
lands, were rivaled by the efforts of statesmen such as Tur
got in France. It was in France indeed that the contrast
between the actual state of society and the new ideas of pub
lic right was felt most keenly. Nowhere had the victory of
the crown been more complete. The aristocracy had been
robbed of all share in public affairs; it enjoyed social privi
leges and exemption from any contribution to the public
burdens, without that sense of public duty which a governing
class to some degree always possesses. Gilds and monopo
lies fettered the industry of the trader and the merchant, and
cut them off from the working classes, as the value attached
to noble blood cut off both from the aristocracy.
If its political position indeed were compared with that of
most of the countries round it, France stood high. Its gov
ernment was less oppressive, its general wealth was larger
and more evenly diffused, there was a better administration
of justice, and greater security for public order. Poor as
its peasantry seemed to English eyes, they were far above
the peasants of Germany or Spain. Its middle class was the
quickest and most intelligent in Europe. Under Louis the

1789] MODERN ENGLAND IOI 3
Fifteenth opinion was practically free ; and a literary class
had sprung up which devoted itself with wonderful brUliancy
and activity to popularizing the ideas of social and political
justice which it learned from English writers, and in the case
of Montesquieu and Voltaire from personal contact with Eng
lish life. The moral conceptions of the time, its love of man
kind, its sense of human brotherhood, its hatred of oppres
sion, its pity for the guilty and the poor, its longing after a
higher and nobler standard of life and action, were expressed
by a crowd of writers, and above all by Rousseau, with a fire
and eloquence which carried them to the heart of the peo
ple. But this new force of intelligence only jostled roughly
with the social forms with which it found itself in contact.
The philosopher denounced the tyranny of the priesthood.
The peasant grumbled at the lord's right to judge him in his
courts and to exact feudal services from him. The merchant
was galled by the trading restrictions and the heavy taxation.
The country gentry rebelled against their exclusion from
public Iffe and from the government of the country. Its
powerlessness to bring about any change at home turned all
this new energy into sympathy with a struggle against tyranny
abroad. Public opinion forced France to ally itself with Amer
ica in its contest for liberty, and French volunteers under the
Marquis de Lafayette joined Washington's army. But while
the American war spread more widely throughout the nation
the craving for freedom, it brought on the Government finan
cial embarrassment from which it could only free itself by an
appeal to the country at large. Louis the Sixteenth resolved
to summon the States-General, which had not met since the
time of Richelieu, and to appeal to the nobles to waive their
immunity from taxation. His resolve at once stirred into
vigorous life every impulse and desire which had been seeth
ing in the minds of the people ; and the States-General no
sooner met at VersaiUes in May, 1789, than the fabric of
despotism and privilege began to crumble. A rising in Paris
destroyed the Bastfle, and the capture of this fortress
was taken for the sign of a new era of constitutional free
dom in France and through Europe. Even in England men
thrUled with a strange joy at the tidings of its fall. " How
much is this the greatest event that ever happened in the

I0I4 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1788
world," Fox cried with a burst of enthusiasm, "and how
much the best ! "
Pitt regarded the approach of France to sentiments of
liberty which had long been familiar to England with greater
coolness, but with no distrust. For the moment indeed his
attention was distracted by an attack of madness which
visited the king in 1788, and by the claim of a right to the
regency which was at once advanced by the Prince of Wales.
The prince belonged to the Whig party ; and Fox, who was
traveling in Italy, hurried home to support his claim, in full
belief that the prince's regency would be followed by his
own return to power. Pitt successfully resisted it on the con
stitutional ground that in such a case the right to choose a
temporary regent, under what limitations it would, lay with
Parliament; and a bill which conferred the regency on the
prince, in accordance with this view, was already passing the
Houses when the recovery of the king put an end to the long
dispute. Foreign difficulties, too, absorbed Pitt's attention.
Russia had risen into greatness under Catherine the Second ;
and Catherine had resolved from the first on the annexa
tion of Poland, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, and
the setting up of a Russian throne at Constantinople. In
her first aim she was baffled for the moment by Frederick
the Great. She had already made herself virtually mistress of
the whole of Poland, her armies occupied the kingdom, and she
had seated a nominee of her own on its throne, when Freder
ick in union with the Emperor Joseph the Second forced her
to admit Germany to a share of the spoil. If the Polish par
tition of 1773 brought the Russian frontier westward to the
upper waters of the Dwina and the Dnieper, it gave Galicia
to Maria Theresa and West Prussia to Frederick himself.
Foiled in her first aim, she waited for the realization of her
second till the alliance between the two German powers was
at an end through the resistance of Prussia to Joseph's
schemes for the annexation of Bavaria, and till the death of
Frederick removed her most watchful foe. Then in 1788
Joseph and the empress joined hands for a partition of the
Turkish empire. But Prussia was still watchful, and Eng
land was no longer fettered as in 1773 by troubles with
America. The friendship established by Chatham between

1790] MODERN ENGLAND IOI 5
the two countries, which had been suspended by Bute's
treachery and all but destroyed during the Northern League
of Neutral Powers, had been restored by Pitt through his co
operation with Frederick's successor in the restoration of the
Dutch Stadtholderate. Its political weight was now seen in
an alliance of England, Prussia, and Holland in 1789 for the
preservation of the Turkish empire. A great European
struggle seemed at hand ; and in such a struggle the sym
pathy and aid of France was of the highest importance. But
with the treaty the danger passed away. In the spring of
1790 Joseph died broken-hearted at the faflure of his plans
and the revolt of the Netherlands against his innovations ;
and Austria practicaUy withdrew from the war with the
Turks. Meanwhile in France things moved fast. By breaking
down the division between its separate orders the States-
General became a National Assembly, which aboUshed the
privileges of the provincial parliaments, of the nobles, and the
Church. In October the mob of Paris marched on Versailles
and forced the king to return with them to the capital ; and
a constitution hastily put together was accepted by Louis the
Sixteenth in the stead of his old despotic power. To Pitt the
tumult and disorder with which these great changes were
wrought seemed transient matters. In January, 1790, he still
believed that " the present convulsions in France must sooner
or later culminate in general harmony and regular order," and
that when her own freedom was established, " France would
stand forth as one of the most brilliant powers of Europe."
But the coolness and good-will with which Pitt looked on the
Revolution was far from being universal in the nation at
large. The cautious good sense of the bulk of Englishmen,
their love of order and law, their distaste for violent changes
and for abstract theories, as well as their reverence for the
past, were fast rousing throughout the country a dislike of
the revolutionary changes which were hurrying on across the
Channel ; and both the political sense and the political preju
dice of the nation were being fired by the warnings of Edmund
Burke. The faU of the Bastfle, though it kindled enthusiasm
in Fox, roused in Burke only distrust " Whenever a separation
is made between liberty and justice," he wrote a few weeks

I0l6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1790
later, " neither is safe." The night of the 4th of August,
when the privileges of every class were abolished, filled him
with horror. He saw, and rightly saw, in it the critical moment
which revealed the character of the Revolution, and his part
was taken at once. " The French," he cried in January, while
Pitt was foretelling a glorious future for the new constitution,
" the French have shown themselves the ablest architects of
ruin who have hitherto existed in the world. In a short space
of time they have pulled to the ground their army, their navy,
their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures." But in
Parliament Burke stood alone. The Whigs, though distrust
fully, followed Fox in his applause of the Revolution. The
Tories, yet more distrustfully, followed Pitt ; and Pitt warmly
expressed his sympathy with the constitutional government
which was ruling France. At this moment indeed the revolu
tionary party gave a signal proof of its friendship for Eng
land. Irritated by an English settlement at Nootka Sound in
California, Spain appealed to France for aid in accordance
with the Famfly Compact ; and the French ministry, with a
party at its back which believed things had gone far enough,
resolved on a war as the best means of checking the progress
of the Revolution and restoring the power of the Crown.
The revolutionary party naturally opposed this design ; after
a bitter struggle the right of declaring war, save with the
sanction of the Assembly, was taken from the king ; and all
danger of hostUities passed away. "The French govern
ment" Pitt asserted, "was bent on cultivating the most
unbounded friendship for Great Britain," and he saw no
reason in its revolutionary changes why Britain should not
return the friendship of France. He was convinced that
nothing but the joint action of France and England would in
the end arrest the troubles of Eastern Europe. His interven
tion foiled for the moment a fresh effort of Prussia to rob
Poland of Dantzig and Thorn. But though Russia was still
pressing Turkey hard, a Russian war was so unpopular in
England that a hostfle vote in Parliament forced Pitt to dis
continue his armaments ; and a fresh union of Austria and
Prussia, which promised at this juncture to bring about a close
of the Turkish struggle, promised also a fresh attack on the
independence of Poland.

179°] MODERN ENGLAND IO17
But whUe Pitt was pleading for friendship between the two
countries, Burke was resolved to make friendship impossible.
He had long ceased, indeed, to have any hold over the House
of Commons. The eloquence which had vied with that of
Chatham during the discussions on the Stamp Act had
become distasteful to the bulk of its members. The length
of his speeches, the profound and philosophical character of
his argument, the splendor and often the extravagance of his
illustrations, his passionate earnestness, his want of temper
and discretion, wearied and perplexed the squires and mer
chants about him. He was known at last as " the dinner bell
of the House," so rapidly did its benches thin at his rising.
For a time his energies found scope in the impeachment of
Hastings ; and the grandeur of his appeals to the justice
of England hushed detraction. But with the close of the
impeachment his repute had again fallen ; and the approach
of old age, for he was now past sixty, seemed to counsel re
tirement from an assembly where he stood unpopular and
alone. But age and disappointment and loneliness were all
forgotten as Burke saw rising across the Channel the embodi
ment of all that he hated — a revolution founded on scorn of
the past, and threatening with ruin the whole social fabric
which the past had reared ; the ordered structure of classes
and ranks crumbling before a doctrine of social equality ; a
State rudely demolished and reconstituted ; a Church and a
Nobility swept away in a night. Against the enthusiasm of
what he rightly saw to be a new political religion he resolved
to rouse the enthusiasm of the old. He was at once a great
orator and a great writer ; and now that the House was deaf
to his voice, he appealed to the country by his pen. The
" Reflections on the French Revolution " which he published
in October, 1790, not only denounced the acts of rashness
and violence which sullied the great change that France had
wrought, but the very principles from which the change had
sprung. Burke's deep sense of the need of social order, of
the value of that continuity in human affairs " without which
men would become like flies in a summer," blinded him to all
but the faith in mere rebellion, and the yet sUlier faith in
mere novelty, which disguised a real nobleness of aim and
temper even in the most ardent of the revolutionists. He

I0l8 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1790
would see no abuses in the past, now that it had fallen, or
anything but the ruin of society in the future. He preached
a crusade against men whom he regarded as the foes of relig
ion and civilization, and called on the armies of Europe to
put down a revolution whose principles threatened every
state with destruction.
The great obstacle to such a crusade was Pitt ; and one of
the grandest outbursts of the " Reflections " closed with a
bitter taunt at the minister's policy. " The age of chivalry,"
Burke cried, " is gone ; that of sophisters, economists, and
calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extin
guished forever." But neither taunt nor invective moved
Pitt from his course. At the moment when the " Reflec
tions " appeared he gave a fresh assurance to France of his
resolve to have nothing to do with any crusade against the
Revolution. " This country," he wrote, " means to persevere
in the neutrality hitherto scrupulously observed with respect
to the internal dissensions of France, and from which it will
never depart unless the conduct held there makes it indispen
sable as an act of self-defense." So far indeed was he from
sharing the reactionary panic which was spreading around
him that he chose this time for supporting Fox in his Libel
Act, a measure which, by transferring the decision on what
was libelous in any publication from the judge to the jury,
completed the freedom of the press, and himself passed a
bill which, though little noticed among the storms of the
time, was one of the noblest of his achievements. He boldly
put aside the dread which had been roused by the American
war, that the gift of self-government to our Colonies would
serve only as a step towards their secession from the mother
country, and established a House of Assembly and a Council
in the two Canadas. " I am convinced," said Fox (who, how
ever, differed from Pitt as to the nature of the constitution
to be given to Canada), "that the only method of retaining
distant colonies with advantage is to enable them to govern
themselves " ; and the policy of the one statesman and the
foresight of the other have been justified by the later history
of our dependencies. Nor had Burke better success with
his own party. Fox remained an ardent lover of the Revolu
tion, and answered a fresh attack of Burke upon it with more

1791] MODERN ENGLAND IOI9
than usual warmth. A close affection had bound tUl now the
two men together ; but the fanaticism of Burke declared it at
an end. " There is no loss of friendship," Fox exclaimed,
with a sudden burst of tears. " There is ! " Burke repeated.
" I know the price of my conduct. Our friendship is at
an end." Within the walls of Parliament, Burke stood utterly
alone. His "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in
June, 1 79 1, fafled to detach a follower from Fox. Pitt coldly
counseled him rather to praise the English constitution than
to rail at the French. " I have made many enemies and few
friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes who had
fled from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz,
" by the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people
was slowly drifting to his side. A sale of thirty thousand
copies showed that the " Reflections " echoed the general
sentiment of Englishmen. The mood of England indeed at
this moment was unfavorable to any fair appreciation of the
Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was above all
industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing
rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of men of busi
ness, looked angrily at this sudden disturbance of order,
this restless and vague activity, these rhetorical appeals to
human feeling, these abstract and often empty theories. In
England it was a time of political content and social well-
being, of steady economic progress, and of a powerful relig
ious revival ; and an insular lack of imaginative interest in
other races hindered men from seeing that every element of
this content, of this order, of this peaceful and harmonious
progress, of this reconciliation of society and religion, was
wanting abroad. The sympathy which the Revolution had
roused at first among Englishmen died away before the
violence of its legislative changes and the growing anarchy
of the country. Sympathy in fact was soon limited to a few
groups of reformers who gathered in " Constitutional Clubs,"
and whose reckless language quickened the national reaction.
But in spite of Burke's appeals and the cries of the nobles
who had fled from France and longed only to march against
their country, Europe held back from war, and Pitt preserved
his attitude of neutrality, though with a greater appearance
of reserve.

1020 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1791
So anxious, in fact, did the aspect of affairs in the East
make Pitt for the restoration of tranquUlity in France, that he
foiled a plan which its emigrant nobles had formed for a
descent on the French coast, and declared formally at Vienna
that England would remain absolutely neutral should hostil
ities arise between France and the emperor. But the em
peror was as anxious to avoid a French war as Pitt himself.
Though Catherine, now her strife with Turkey was over,
wished to plunge the two German powers into a struggle
with the Revolution which would leave her free to annex
Poland single-handed, neither Leopold nor Prussia would tie
their hands by such a contest. The flight of Louis the Six
teenth from Paris in June, 1791, brought Europe for a moment
to the verge of war; but he was intercepted and brought
back ; and for a while the danger seemed to incline the revo
lutionists in France to greater moderation. Louis too not
only accepted the Constitution, but pleaded earnestly with
the emperor against any armed intervention as certain to
bring ruin to his throne. In their conference at Pillnitz,
in August, therefore, Leopold and the king of Prussia con
tented themselves with a vague declaration inviting the Euro
pean powers to cooperate in restoring a sound form of
government in France, availed themselves of England's neu
trality to refuse all military aid to the French princes, and
dealt simply with the affairs of Poland. But the peace they
desired soon became impossible. The Constitutional Royal
ists in France availed themselves of the irritation caused by
the Declaration of PiUnitz to rouse again the cry for a war,
which, as they hoped, would give strength to the throne.
The more violent revolutionists, or Jacobins, on the other
hand, under the influence of the " Girondists," or deputies
from the south of France, whose aim was a republic, and
who saw in a great national struggle a means of overthrowing
the monarchy, decided in spite of the opposition of their
leader, Robespierre, on a contest with the emperor. Both
parties united to demand the breaking up of an army which
the emigrant princes had formed on the Rhine ; and though
Leopold assented to this demand, France declared war against
his successor, Francis, in April, 1792.
Misled by their belief in a revolutionary enthusiasm in

1792] MODERN ENGLAND I02I
England, the French had hoped for her alliance in this war ;
and they were astonished and indignant at Pitt's resolve to
stand apart from the struggle. It was in vain that Pitt strove
to allay this irritation by demanding only that Holland should
remain untouched, and promising neutrality even though
Belgium should be occupied by a French army, or that he
strengthened these pledges by a reduction of mflitary forces,
and by bringing forward a peace budget which rested on a
large remission of taxation. The revolutionists still clung to
the hope of England's aid in the emancipation of Europe,
but they came now to believe that England must itself be
emancipated before such an aid could be given. Their first
work therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution
in England which might free the people from the aristocracy
which held it down, and which oppressed, as they believed,
great peoples beyond the bounds of England itseff. To
rouse India, to rouse Ireland, to a struggle which should shake
off the English yoke became necessary steps to the establish
ment of freedom in England. From this moment, therefore,
French agents were busy " sowing the revolution " in each
quarter. In Ireland they entered into communication with
the United Irishmen. In India they appeared at the courts
of the native princes. In England itself they strove through
the Constitutional Clubs to rouse the same spirit which they
had roused in Fra,nce ; and the French envoy, Chauvelin,
protested warmly against a proclamation which denounced
this correspondence as seditious. The effect of these revolu
tionary efforts on the friends of the Revolution was seen in
a declaration which they wrested from Fox, that at such a
moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was in
expedient. Meanwhile Burke was working' hard, in writings
whose extravagance of style was forgotten in their intensity
of feeling, to spread alarm throughout Europe. He had
from the first encouraged the emigrant princes to take arms,
and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. " Be alarmists,"
he wrote to them ; " diffuse terror 1 " But the royalist terror
which he sowed had roused a revolutionary terror in France
itself. At the threat of war against the emperor the two
German courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandon
ing all hope of peace with France gathered eighty thousand

1022 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1792
men under the Duke of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in
August on the Meuse. France, though she had forced on
the struggle, was really almost defenseless; her forces in
Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful rout;
and the panic spreading from the army to the nation at large,
took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Bruns
wick's advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries, on
the loth of August; and at its demand Louis, who had taken
refuge in the Assembly, was suspended from his office and
imprisoned in the Temple. In September, while General
Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations arrested the
progress of the allies in the defiles of the Argonne, bodies of
paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded
the jails of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to
a new convention which met to proclaim the abolition of
royalty. The retreat of the Prussian army, whose numbers
had been reduced by disease till an advance on Paris became
impossible, and a brilliant victory won by Dumouriez at
Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the
panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In Novem
ber the convention decreed that France offer the aid of her
soldiers to all nations who would strive for freedom. " All
Governments are our enemies," said its president ; " all peo
ples are our allies." In the teeth of treaties signed only two
years before, and of the stipulation made by England when
it pledged itself to neutrality, the French government resolved
to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by
arms the opening of the Scheldt.
To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion
was pressing harder day by day upon Pitt The horror of the
massacres of September, the hideous despotism of the Paris
ian mob, had done more to estrange England from the
Revolution than all the eloquence of Burke. But even
while withdrawing our minister from Paris on the imprison
ment of the king, Pitt clung stubbornly to the hope of peace.
His hope was to bring the war to an end through English media
tion, and to " leave France, which I believe is the best way,
to arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of
Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood alone in Eng
land, and refused to bow to the growing cry of the nation for

1793] MODERN ENGLAND IO23
war. Even the news of the September massacres could only
force from him a hope that France might abstain from any
war of conquest, and escape from its social anarchy. In
October the French agent in England reported that Pitt was
about to recognize the Republic. At the opening of Novem
ber he stUl pressed on Holland a steady neutrality. It was
France, and not England, which at last wrenched from his
grasp the peace to which he clung so desperately. The
decree of the Convention and the attack on- the Dutch left
him no choice but war, for it was impossible for England to
endure a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like the
United Provinces. But even in December the news of the
approaching partition of Poland nerved him to a last struggle
for peace ; he offered to aid Austria in acquiring Bavaria if
she would make terms with France, and pledged himself to
France to abstain from war if that power would cease from
violating the independence of her neighbor states. But
across the Channel his moderation was only taken for fear,
while in England the general mourning which followed on
the news of the French king's execution showed the growing
ardor for the contest. The rejection of his last offers indeed
made a contest inevitable. Both sides ceased from diplomatic
communications, and in February, 1793, France issued her
Declaration of War.
Section IV. — The War with France, 1793-1815
From the moment when France declared war against Eng
land Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immovable
firmness, and the general confidence of the nation still kept
him at the head of affairs ; but he could do little save drift
along with a tide of popular feeling which he never fully
understood. The very excellences of his character unfitted
him for the conduct of a war. He was in fact a peace min
ister, forced into war by a panic and enthusiasm which he
shared in a very small degree, and unaided by his father's
gift of at once entering into the sympathies and passions
around him, and of rousing passions and sympathies in
return. Around him the country broke out in a fit of frenzy
and alarm which rivaled the passion and panic over sea.

1024 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1793
The confidence of France in its illusions as to opinion in
England deluded for the moment even Englishmen them
selves. The partisans of Republicanism were in reality but
a few handfuls of men who played at gathering conventions,
and at calling themselves citizens and patriots, in chUdish
imitation of what was going on across the Channel. But in
the mass of Englishmen the dread of revolution passed for
the hour into sheer panic. Even the bulk of the Whig party
forsook Fox when he stiU proclaimed his faith in France and
the Revolution. The " Old Whigs," as they called them
selves, with the Duke of Portland, Earls Spencer and Fitz
william, and Mr. Windham at their head, followed Burke in
giving their adhesion to the Government. Pitt himself,
though little touched by the poUtical reaction around him,
was shaken by the dream of social danger, and believed in
the existence of " thousands of bandits," who were ready to
rise against the throne, to plunder every landlord, and to
sack London. " Paine is no fool," he said to his niece, who
quoted to him a passage from the " Rights of Man," in
which that author had vindicated the principles of the Revo
lution ; " he is perhaps right ; but if I did what he wants,
I should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow,
and London burnt." It was this sense of social danger
which alone reconcfled him to the war. Bitter as the need
of the struggle which was forced upon England was to him,
he accepted it with the less reluctance that war, as he
trusted, would check the progress of "French principles"
in England itself. The worst issue of this panic was the
series of legislative measures in which it found expression.
The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a bill against sedi
tious assemblies restricted the liberty of public meeting, and
a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. Prose
cution after prosecution was directed against the press ; the
sermons of some dissenting ministers were indicted as sedi
tious; and the conventions of sympathizers with France
were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of the panic
were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only
offense was an advocacy of parliamentary reform, were sen
tenced to transportation, and where a brutal judge openly
expressed his regret that the practise of torture in seditious

1793] MODERN ENGLAND 102 5
cases should have fallen into disuse. The panic indeed soon
passed away for sheer want of material to feed on. In 1794
the leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which
professed sympathy with France, were brought to trial on
a charge of high treason, but their acquittal proved that all
active terror was over. Save for occasional riots, to which
the poor were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social dis
turbance troubled England through the twenty years of the
war. But the blind reaction against all reform which had
sprung from the panic lasted on when the panic was for
gotten. For nearly a quarter of a century it was hard to get
a hearing for any measure which threatened change to an
existing institution, beneficial though the change might be.
Even the philanthropic movement which so nobly character
ized the time found itself checked and hampered by the
dread of revolution.
At first indeed all seemed to go ill for France. She was
girt in by a ring of enemies ; the empire, Austria, Prussia,
Sardinia, Spain, and England were leagued in arms against
her; and their efforts were seconded by civil war. The
peasants of Poitou and Brittany rose in revolt against the
government at Paris, while Marseilles and Lyons were driven
into insurrection by the violent leaders who now seized on
power in the capital. The French armies were driven back
from the Netherlands when ten thousand English soldiers,
under the Duke of York, joined the Austrians in Flanders in
1793. But the chance of crushing the Revolution was lost
by the greed of the two German powers. Russia, as Pitt had
foreseen, was now free to carry out her schemes in the East ;
and Austria and Prussia saw themselves forced, in the inter
est of a balance of power, to share in her annexations at the
cost of Poland. But this new division of Poland would have
become impossible had France been enabled by a restoration
of its monarchy to take up again its natural position in
Europe, and to accept the alliance which Pitt would in such
a case have offered her. The policy of the German courts
therefore was to prolong an anarchy which left them free for
the moment to crush Poland ; and the allied armies which
might have marched upon Paris were purposely frittered
away in sieges in the Netherlands and the Rhine. Such a

1026 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1794
policy gave France time to recover from the shock of her
disasters. Whatever were the crimes and tyranny of her
leaders, France felt in spite of them the value of the Revolu
tion, and rallied enthusiastically to its support. The revolts
in the west and south were crushed. The Spanish invaders
were held at bay at the foot of the Pyrenees, and the Pied
montese were driven from Nice and Savoy. The great port
of Toulon, which called for foreign aid against the govern
ment of Paris, and admitted an English garrison within its
walls, was driven to surrender by measures counseled by a
young artillery officer from Corsica, Napoleon Buonaparte.
At the opening of 1794 a victory at Fleurus, which again
made the French masters of the Netherlands, showed that
the tide had turned. France was united within by the cessa
tion of the Terror and of the tyranny of the Jacobins, while
on every border victory followed the gigantic efforts with
which she met the coalition against her. Spain sued for
peace; Prussia withdrew her armies from the Rhine; the
Sardinians were driven back from the Maritime Alps; the
Rhine provinces were wrested from the Austrians; and
before the year ended HoUand was lost. Pichegru crossed
the Waal in midwinter with an overwhelming force, and the
wretched remnant of ten thousand men who had followed the
Duke of York to the Netherlands, thinned by disease and by
the hardships of retreat, reembarked for England.
The victories of France broke up the confederacy which
had threatened it with destruction. The Batavian republic
which Pichegru had set up after his conquest of Holland was
now an ally of France. Prussia bought peace by the cession
of her possessions west of the Rhine. Peace with Spain fol
lowed in the summer, while Sweden and the Protestant can
tons of Switzerland recognized the Republic. In France
itself discord came well-nigh to an end. The fresh severities
against the ultrarepublicans which followed on the establish
ment of a Directory indicated the moderate character of the
new government, and Pitt seized on this change in the temper
of the French government as giving an opening for peace.
Pitt himself was sick of the strife. England had maintained
indeed her naval supremacy. The triumphs of her seamen
were in strange contrast with her weakness on land ; and at

1796] MODERN ENGLAND IO27
the outset of the contest, in 1794, the French fleet was
defeated off Brest by Lord Howe in a victory which bore
the name of the day on which it was won, the First of June.
Her colonial gains too had been considerable. Most of the
West Indian islands which had been held by France, and
the far more valuable settlements of the Dutch, the Cape of
Good Hope, Ceylon, and the famous Spice Islands of the
Malaccas and Java had been transferred to the British Crown.
But Pitt was without means of efficiently carrying on the war.
The army was small and without mUitary experience, whUe
its leaders were utterly incapable. "We have no general,"
wrote Lord Grenville, "but some old woman in a red ribbon."
Wretched too as had been the conduct of the war, its cost
was already terrible. If England was without soldiers, she
had wealth, and Pitt had been forced to turn her wealth into
an engine of war. He became the paymaster of the coalition,
and his subsidies kept the allied armies in the field. But the
immense loans which these called for, and the quick growth
of expenditure, undid all his financial reforms. Taxation,
which had reached its lowest point under Pitt's peace admin
istration, mounted to a height undreamed of before. The
public debt rose by leaps and bounds. In three years nearly
eighty miUions had been added to it.
But though the ruin of his financial hopes, and his keen
sense of the European dangers which the contest involved,
made Pitt earnest to close the struggle with the Revolution,
he stood almost alone in his longings for peace. The nation
at large was still ardent for war, and its ardor was fired by
Burke in his " Letters on a Regicide Peace," the last outcry
of that fanaticism which had done so much to plunge the
world in blood. Nor was France less ardent for war than
England. At the moment when Pitt sought to open negotia
tions, her victories had roused hopes of wider conquests, and
though General Moreau was foiled in a march on Vienna, the
wonderful successes of Napoleon Buonaparte, who now took
the command of the army of the Alps, laid Piedmont at her
feet Lombardy was soon in the hands of the French, the
duchies south of the Po pUlaged, and the pope driven to
purchase an armistice. Fresh victories enabled Buonaparte
to wring a peace from Austria in the treaty of Campo Formio,
66

1028 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [i797
which not only gave France the Ionian islands, a part of the
old territory of Venice, as well as the Netherlands and the
whole left bank of the Rhine, but united Lombardy with
the duchies south of the Po, and the papal states as far as
the Rubicon, into a " Cisalpine Republic," which was abso
lutely beneath her control. The withdrawal of Austria left
France without an enemy on the Continent, and England
without an ally. The stress of the war was pressing more
heavily on her every day. The alarm of a French invasion
of Ireland brought about a suspension of specie payments on
the part of the Bank. A mutiny in the fleet was suppressed
with difficulty. It was in this darkest hour of the struggle
that Burke passed away, protesting to the last against the peace
which, in spite of his previous failure, Pitt tried in 1797 to
negotiate at Lille. Peace seemed more needful to him than
ever ; for the naval supremacy of Britain was threatened by
a coalition such as had all but crushed her in the American
war. Again the Dutch and Spanish fleets were allied with
the fleets of France, and if they gained command of the
Channel, it would enable France to send overwhelming forces
in aid of the rising which was planned in Ireland. But the
danger had hardly threatened when it was dispelled by two
great victories. When in 1797 the Spanish fleet put out to
sea, it was attacked by Admiral Jervis off Cape St. Vincent
and driven back to Cadiz with the loss of four of its finest
vessels ; while the Dutch fleet from the Texel, which was to
protect a French force in its descent upon Ireland, was met
by a far larger fleet under Admiral Duncan, and almost anni
hilated in a battle off Camperdown, after an obstinate strug
gle which showed the Hollanders still worthy of their old
renown. The ruin of its hopes in the battle of Camperdown
drove Ireland to a rising of despair ; but the revolt was
crushed by the defeat of the insurgents at Vinegar HiU in
May, 1798, and the surrender of General Humbert who
landed in August with a French force. Of the threefold
attack on which the Directory relied, two parts had now
broken down. England stUl held the seas, and the insurrec
tion in Ireland had failed. The next year saw the crowning
victory of the Nile. The genius of Buonaparte had seized on
the schemes for a rising in India, where Tippoo Sahib, the

1798] MODERN ENGLAND IO29
successor of Hyder AU in Mysore, had vowed to drive the
English from the south ; and he laid before the Directory a
plan for the conquest of Egypt as a preliminary to a cam
paign in Southern India. In 1798 he landed in Egypt; and
its conquest was rapid and complete. But the thirteen men-
of-war which had escorted his expedition were found by
Admiral Nelson in Aboukir Bay, moored close to the coast
in a line guarded at either end by gunboats and batteries.
Nelson resolved to thrust his own ships between the French
and the shore ; his flagship led the way ; and after a terrible
fight of twelve hours, nine of the French vessels were cap
tured and destroyed, two were burnt, and five thousand
French seamen were killed or made prisoners. All com*
munication between France and Buonaparte's army was cut
off ; and his hopes of making Egypt a starting-point for the
conquest of India fell at a blow.
Freed from the dangers that threatened her rule in Ireland
and in India, and mistress of the seas, England was free to
attack France ; and in such an attack she was aided at this
moment by the temper of the European powers, and the
ceaseless aggressions of France. Russia formed a close
alliance with Austria ; and it was with renewed hope that
Pitt lavished subsidies on the two allies. A union of the
Russian and Austrian armies drove the French back again
across the Alps and the Rhine ; but the stubborn energy of
General Massena enabled his soldiers to hold their ground in
Switzerland ; and the attempt of a united force of Russians
and English to wrest Holland from its French masters was
successfully repulsed. In the East, however, England was
more successful. Foiled in his dreams of Indian conquests,
Buonaparte conceived the design of the conquest of Syria,
and of the creation of an army among its warlike mountain
eers, with which he might march upon Constantinople or
India at his wfll. But Acre, the key of Syria, was stubbornly
held by the Turks, the French battering train was captured
at sea by an English captain. Sir Sidney Smith, whose sea
men aided in the defense of the place, and the besiegers were
forced to fall back upon Egypt. The French general de
spairing of success left his army and returned to France.
His arrival in Paris was soon followed by the overthrow of

1030 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1800
the Directors. Three Consuls took their place ; but under
the name of First Consul Buonaparte became in effect sole
ruler of the country. His energy at once changed the whole
face of European affairs. The offers of peace which he
made to England and Austria were intended to do little more
than to shake the coalition, and gain breathing time for the
organization of a new force which was gathering in secrecy
at Dijon, while Moreau with the army of the Rhine pushed
again along the Danube. The First Consul crossed the
Saint Bernard in 1800, and a victory at Marengo forced the
Austrians to surrender Lombardy; while a truce arrested
the march of Moreau, who had captured Munich and was
pushing on to Vienna. On the resumption of the war in the
autumn the Austrians were driven back on Vienna ; and
Moreau crushed their army on the Iser in the victory of
Hohenlinden. In February, 1801, the Continental war was
brought suddenly to an end by the peace of Luneville.
It was but a few months before the close of the war that
Pitt brought about the union of Ireland with England. The
history of Ireland, during the fifty years that followed its
conquest by William the Third, is one which no Englishman
can recall without shame. After the surrender of Limerick
every Catholic Irishman, and there were five Irish Catholics
to every Irish Protestant, was treated as a stranger and a
foreigner in his own country. The House of Lords, the
House of Commons, the magistracy, all corporate offices in
towns, all ranks in the army, the bench, the bar, the whole
administration of government or justice, were closed against
Catholics. The very right of voting for their representatives
in Parliament was denied them. Few Catholic landowners
had been left by the sweeping confiscations which had fol
lowed the successive revolts of the island, and oppressive
laws forced even these few with scant exceptions to profess
Protestantism. Necessity, indeed, had brought about a prac
tical toleration of their religion and their worship ; but in all
social and political matters the native Catholics, in other
words the immense majority of the people of Ireland, were
simply hewers of wood and drawers of water to their Protes
tant masters, who looked on themselves as mere settlers, who
boasted of their Scotch or English extraction, and who re-

i8oo] MODERN ENGLAND IO31
garded the name of " Irishman " as an insult But small as
was this Protestant body, one half of it fared little better, as
far as power was concerned, than the Catholics ; for the
Presbyterians, who formed the bulk of the Ulster settlers,
were shut out by law from all civil, military, and municipal
offices. The administration and justice of the country were
thus kept rigidly in the hands of members of the Established
Church, a body which comprised about a twelfth of the popu
lation of the island ; while its government was practically
monopolized by a few great Protestant landowners. The
rotten boroughs, which had originally been created to make
the Irish Parliament dependent on the Crown, had fallen
under the influence of the adjacent landlords, who were thus
masters of the House of Commons, while they formed in
person the House of Peers. During the first half of the
eighteenth century two thirds of the House of Commons, in
fact, was returned by a small group of nobles, who were
recognized as " parliamentary undertakers," and who under
took to " manage " Parliament on their own terms. Irish
politics were for these men a means of public plunder ; they
were glutted with pensions, preferments, and bribes in hard
cash in return for their services ; they were the advisers of
every lord lieutenant and the practical governors of the
country. The only check to the tyranny of this narrow and
corrupt oligarchy was in the connection of Ireland with Eng
land and the subordination of its Parliament to the English
Privy Council. The Irish Parliament had no power of origi
nating legislative or financial measures, and could only say
" yes " or " no " to acts submitted to it by the Privy Council
in England. The English Parliament too claimed the right
of binding Ireland as well as England by its enactments, and
one of its statutes transferred the appellate jurisdiction of the
Irish peerage to the English House of Lords. But as if to
compensate for the benefits of its protection, England did
her best to annihilate Irish commerce and to ruin Irish agri
culture. Statutes passed by the jealousy of EngUsh land
owners forbade the export of Irish cattle or sheep to English
ports. The export of wool was forbidden, lest it might inter
fere with the profits of English wool-growers. Poverty was
thus added to the curse of misgovemment; and poverty

1032 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1780
deepened with the rapid growth of the native population, till
famine turned the country into a hell.
The bitter lesson of the last conquest, however, long
sufficed to check all dreams of revolt among the natives, and
the outbreaks which sprang from time to time out of the
general misery and discontent were purely social in their
character, and were roughly repressed by the ruling class.
When political revolt threatened at last, the threat came from
the ruling class itself. At the very outset of the reign of
George the Third, the Irish Parliament insisted on its claim
to the exclusive control of money bUls, and a cry was raised
for the removal of the checks imposed on its independence.
But it was not till the American war that this cry became
a political danger, a danger so real that England was forced
to give way. From the close of the war, when the Irish Vol
unteers wrung legislative independence from the Rockingham
ministry, England and Ireland were simply held together by
the fact that the sovereign of the one island was also the
sovereign of the other. During the next eighteen years Ire
land was " independent " ; but its independence was a mere
name for the uncontrolled rule of a few noble families and of
the Irish executive backed by the support of the English
Government. To such a length had the whole system of
monopoly and patronage been carried, that at the time of the
Union more than sixty seats were in the hands of three
famiUes alone, those of the HUls, the Ponsonbys, and the
Beresfords ; while the dominant influence in the Parliament
now lay with the treasury boroughs at the disposal of the
Government The victory of the Volunteers immediately
produced measures in favor of the Catholics and Presbyterians.
The Volunteers had already in 1780 won for the Presbyterians,
who formed a good half of their force, full political liberty
by the abolition of the Sacramental Test; and the Irish
ParUament of 1782 removed at once the last grievances of
the Protestant Dissenters. The Catholics were rewarded for
their aid by the repeal of the more grossly oppressive enact
ments of the penal laws. But when Grattan, supported by
the bulk of the Irish party, pleaded for parUamentary reform,
and for the grant of equal rights to the Catholics, he was
utterly fofled by the small group of borough owners, who

179'] MODERN ENGLAND IO33
chiefly controlled the Government and the Parliament. The
ruling class found government too profitable to share it with
other possessors. It was only by hard bribery that the Eng-
glish viceroys could secure their cooperation in the simplest
measures of administration. " If ever there was a country
unfit to govern itself," said Lord Hutchinson, " it is Ireland.
A corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted
Government, a divided people ! " In Pitt's eyes the danger
of Ireland lay above all in the misery of its people. Although
the Irish Catholics were held down by the brute force of their
Protestant rulers, he saw that their discontent was growing
fast into rebellion, and that one secret of their discontent at
any rate lay in Irish poverty, a poverty increased if not
originally brought about by the jealous exclusion of Irish
products from their natural markets in England itself. In
1779 Ireland had won from Lord North large measures of
free trade abroad ; but the heavy duties laid by the English
Parliament on all Irish manufactures save linen and woolen
yam still shut them out of England. One of Pitt's first
commercial measures aimed at putting an end to this exclu
sion by a bill which estabUshed freedom of trade between the
two islands. His first proposals were accepted in the Irish
Parliament; but the fears and jealousies of the English
farmers and manufacturers forced into the bill amendments
which gave to the British Parliament powers over Irish navi
gation and commerce, thus overriding their newly won inde
pendence, and the measure in its new form was rejected in
Ireland. The outbreak of the revolutionary struggle, and
the efforts which the French revolutionists at once made to
excite rebellion amongst the Irish, roused Pitt to fresh meas
ures of conciliation and good government In 1793 he forced
the Irish administration to abandon a resistance which had
wrecked his projects the previous year ; and the Irish Parlia
ment passed without opposition measures for the admission
of Catholics to the electoral franchise, and to civfl and mUi
tary office within the island, which promised to open a new
era of religious liberty. But the promise came too late. The
hope of concfliation was lost in the fast-rising tide of relig
ious and social passion. The society of "United Irishmen,"
which was founded in 1791 at Belfast by Wolfe Tone with a

1034 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1796
view of forming a union between Protestants and Catholics to
win parliamentary reform, drifted into a correspondence with
France and projects of insurrection. The peasantry, brooding
over their misery and their wrongs, were equally stirred by the
news from France ; and their discontent broke out in outrages
of secret societies which spread panic among the ruling
classes. The misery was increased by faction fights between
the Protestants and Catholics, which had already broken out
before the French Revolution. The Catholics banded them
selves together as " Defenders " against the outrages of the
" Peep-o'-day Boys," who were mainly drawn from the more
violent Presbyterians ; and these factions became later merged
into the larger associations of the " United Irishmen " and
the "Orangemen."
At last the smoldering discontent and disaffection burst
into flame. The panic roused in 1796 by an attempted French
invasion under Hoche woke passions of cruelty and tyranny
which turned Ireland into a hell. Soldiers and yeomanry
marched over the country torturing and scourging the " crop
pies," as the Irish peasantry were called in derision from their
short-cut hair, robbing, ravishing, and murdering. Their
¦outrages were sanctioned by the landowners who formed the
Irish Parliament in a Bill of Indemnity, and protected for the
future by an Insurrection Act. Meanwhile the United Irish
men prepared for an insurrection, which was delayed by the
failure of the French expeditions, on which they counted for
support, and above all by the victory of Camperdown. Atroci
ties were answered by atrocities when the revolt at last broke
out in 1 798. Loyalists were lashed and tortured in their turn,
and every soldier taken was butchered without mercy. The
rebels, however, no sooner mustered fourteen thousand men
strong in a camp on Vinegar Hill, near Enniscorthy, than
the camp was stormed by the English troops, and the revolt
utterly suppressed. The suppression came only just in time
to prevent greater disasters. A few weeks after the close
of the rebeUion nine hundred French soldiers under Gen
eral Humbert landed in Mayo, broke a force of thrice
their number in a battle at Castlebar, and only surrendered
when the lord lieutenant. Lord Cornwallis, faced them with
thirty thousand men. Pitt's disgust at " the bigoted fury of

i8oo] MODERN ENGLAND IO35
Irish Protestants " backed Lord CornwaUis in checking the
reprisals of his troops and of the Orangemen ; but the hide
ous cruelty which he was forced to witness brought about
a firm resolve to put an end to the farce of " Independence,"
which left Ireland helpless in such hands. The political ne
cessity for a union of the two islands had been brought home
to every English statesman by the course of the Irish Parlia
ment during the disputes over the regency ; for while Eng
land repelled the claims of the Prince of Wales to the regency
as of right, the legislature of Ireland admitted them. As the
only union left between the two peoples was their obedience
to a common ruler, such an act might conceivably have ended
in their entire severance ; and the sense of this danger secured
a welcome in England for Pitt's proposal to unite the two
Parliaments. The opposition of the Irish boroughmongers
was naturally stubborn and determined. But with them it
was a sheer question of gold ; and their assent was bought
with a miUion in money, and with a liberal distribution of
pensions and peerages. Base and shameless as were such
means, Pitt may fairly plead that they were the only means
by which the bill for the union could have been passed. As
the matter was finally arranged in June, 1800, one hundred
Irish members became part of the House of Commons at
Westminster, and twenty-eight temporal with four spiritual
peers, chosen for each Parliament by their feUows, took their
seats in the House of Lords. Commerce between the two
countries was freed from all restrictions, and every trading
privUege of the one thrown open to the other ; while taxation
was proportionately distributed between the two peoples.
The lavish creation of peers which formed a part of the
price paid for the union of Ireland brought about a practical
change in our constitution. Few bodies have varied more in
the number of their members than the House of Lords. At
the close of the Wars of the Roses the lay lords who remained
numbered fifty-two ; in Elizabeth's reign they numbered only
sixty ; the prodigal creations of the Stuarts raised them to one
hundred and seventy-six. At this point, however, they practi
cally remained stationary during the reigns of the first two
Georges ; and, as we have seen, only the dogged opposition
of Walpole prevented Lord Stanhope from Umiting the peer-

1036 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1801
age to the number it had at that time reached. Mischievous
as such a measure would have been, it would at any rate have
prevented the lavish creation of peerages on which George
the Third relied in the early days of his reign as one of his
means of breaking up the party government which restrained
him. But what was with the king a mere means of corruption
became with Pitt a settled purpose of bringing the peerage
into closer relations with the landowning and opulent classes,
and rendering the Crown independent of factious combina
tions among the existing peers. Whfle himself disdainful
of hereditary honors, he lavished them as no minister had
lavished them before. In his first five years of rule he created
forty-eight new peers. In two later years alone, 1796-7, he
created thirty-five. By 1801 the peerages which were the
price of the union with Ireland had helped to raise his
creations to upwards of one hundred and forty. So busily
was his example followed by his successors that at the end of
George the Third's reign the number of hereditary peers had
become double what it was at his accession. The whole
character of the House of Lords was changed. Up to this
time it had been a small assembly of great nobles, bound
together by family or party ties into a distinct power in the
State. From this time it hecame the stronghold of property,
the representative of the great estates and great fortunes
which the vast increase of English wealth was buUding up.
For the first time, too, in our history, it became the distinctly
conservative element in our constitution. The full import of
Pitt's changes has stUl to be revealed, but in some ways their
results have been clearly marked. The larger number of the
peerage, though due to the wiU of the Crown, has practically
freed the House from any influence which the Crown can
exert by the distribution of honors. This change, since the
power of the Crown has been practically wielded by the
House of Commons, has rendered it far harder to reconcUe
the free action of the Lords with the regular working of con
stitutional government. On the other hand, the increased
number of its members has rendered the House more respon
sive to public opinion, when public opinion is strongly pro
nounced; and the political tact which is inherent in great
aristocratic assemblies has hitherto prevented any collision

DOCTOR JENNER VACCINATING HIS
FIRST PA 7 f ENT.
Photogravure from an engraving after a painting by
Edouard Hamman.

i8oi] MODERN ENGLAND I037
with the Lower House from being pushed to an irreconcflable
quarrel. But the legislative union of the two countries was only
part of the plan which Pitt had conceived for the conciUa-
tion of Ireland. With the conclusion of the union his proj
ects of free trade between the countries, which had been
defeated a few years back, came into play ; and in spite of
insufficient capital and social disturbance the growth of the
trade, shipping, and manufactures of Ireland has gone stead
ily on from that time to this. The change which brought
Ireland directly under the common Parliament was followed
too by a gradual revision of its oppressive laws, and an
amendment in their administration ; taxation was lightened,
and a faint beginning made of public instruction. But in
Pitt's mind the great means of conciliation was the conces
sion of religious equality. In proposing to the English Par
liament the union of the two countries, he pointed out that
when thus joined to a Protestant country like England all
danger of a Catholic supremacy in Ireland, should Catholic
disabilities be removed, would be practicaUy at an end, and
had suggested that in such a case " an effectual and adequate
provision for the Catholic clergy" would be a security for
their loyalty. His words gave strength to the hopes of
"Catholic Emancipation," or the removal of what remained
of the civU disabUities of Catholics, which were held out by
the viceroy. Lord Castlereagh, in Ireland itself, as a means
of hindering any opposition to the project of union on the
part of the Catholics. It was agreed on aU sides that their
opposition would have secured its defeat; but no Catholic
opposition showed itself. After the passing of the bfll, Pitt
prepared to lay before the cabinet a measure which would
have raised the Irish Catholic to perfect equality of civU
rights. He proposed to remove all reUgious tests which
limited the exercise of the franchise, or were required for
admission to ParUament the magistracy, the bar, municipal
offices, or posts in the army, or the service of the State. An
oath of allegiance and of fidelity to the constitution was sub
stituted for the Sacramental Test, whUe the loyalty of the
Catholic and dissenting clergy was secured by a grant of
some provision to both by the State. To win over the

1038 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1801
Episcopal Church, measures were added for strengthening its
means of discipline, and for increasing the stipends of its
poorer ministers. A commutation of tithes was to remove
a constant source of quarrel in Ireland between the Protes
tant clergy and the Irish people. The scheme was too large
and statesmanlike to secure the immediate assent of the
cabinet; and before that assent could be won the plan was
communicated through the treachery of the chancellor, Lord
Loughborough, to George the Third. " I count any man my
personal enemy," the king broke out angrily to Dundas, " who
proposes any such measure." Pitt answered this outburst by
submitting his whole plan to the king. " The political cir
cumstances under which the exclusive laws originated," he
wrote, "arising either from the conflicting powers of hostile
and nearly balanced sects, from the apprehension of a popish
queen as successor, a disputed succession and a foreign pre
tender, a division in Europe between Catholic and Protestant
powers, are no longer applicable to the present state of
things." But argument was wasted upon George the Third.
In spite of the decision of the lawyers whom he consulted,
the king held himself bound by his Coronation Oath to main
tain the tests. On this point his bigotry was at one with the
bigotry of the bulk of his subjects, as well as with their poUti
cal distrust of Catholics and Irishmen ; and his obstinacy was
strengthened by a knowledge that his refusal must drive Pitt
from office. In February, 1801, the month of the peace of
Luneville, Pitt resigned, and was succeeded by the speaker
of the House of Commons, Mr. Addington, a weak and
narrow-minded man, and as bigoted as the king himself. Of
Lord Hawkesbury, who succeeded Lord Grenville in the con
duct of foreign affairs, nothing was known outside the House
of Commons.
It was with anxiety that England found itself guided by
men like these at a time when every hour brought darker
news. The scarcity of bread was mounting to a famine.
Taxes were raised anew, and yet the loan for the year
amounted to five and twenty millions. The country stood
utterly alone, whfle the peace of Luneville secured France
from all hostflity on the Continent. And it was soon plain
that this peace was only the first step in a new policy on the

iBoi] MODERN ENGLAND IO39
part of the First Consul. What he had done was to free his
hands for a decisive conflict with Britain itself, both as a
world power and as a center of wealth. England was at once
the carrier of European commerce and the workshop of
European manufactures. While her mines, her looms, her
steam-engines, were giving her almost a monopoly of indus
trial production, the carrying trade of France and Holland
alike had been transferred tp the British flag, and the con
quest during the war of their richer settlements had thrown
into British hands the whole colonial trade of the world. In
his gigantic project of a " Continental System " the aim of
Buonaparte was to strike at the trade of England by closing
the ports of Europe against her ships. By a league of the
Northern powers he sought to wrest from her the command
of the seas. Denmark and Sweden, who resented the sever
ity with which Britain enforced that right of search which
had brought about their armed neutrality at the close of the
American war, were enlisted in a league of neutrals which
was in effect a declaration of war against England, and which
Prussia was prepared to join. The Czar Paul of Russia on
his side saw in the power of Britain the chief obstacle to his
designs upon Turkey. A squabble over Malta, which had
been taken from the Knights of St John by Buonaparte on
his way to Egypt, and had ever since been blockaded by
English ships, but whose possession the czar claimed as his
own on the ground of an alleged election as Grand Master of
the Order, served him as a pretext for a quarrel with England,
and Paul openly prepared for hostilities. It was plain that
as soon as spring opened the Baltic, the fleets of Russia,
Sweden, and Denmark would act in practical union with
those of France and Spain. But dexterous as the combina
tion was it was shattered at a blow. In AprU a British fleet
appeared before Copenhagen, and after a desperate struggle
sflenced the Danish batteries, captured six Danish ships, and
forced Denmark to conclude an armistice which enabled
English ships to enter the Baltic. The Northern Coalition
too was broken up by the death oi the czar. In June a
convention between England and Russia settled the vexed
questions of the right of search and contraband of war, and
this convention was accepted by Sweden and Denmark.

1040 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1801
Meanwhile, at the very moment of the attack on Copenhagen,
a stroke as effective had wrecked the projects of Buonaparte
in the East The surrender of Malta to the English fleet left
England the mistress of the Mediterranean ; and from Malta
she now turned to Egypt itself. A force of 15,000 men under
General Abercromby anchored in Aboukir Bay. The French
troops that Buonaparte had left in Egypt rapidly concen
trated, and on the 21st of March their general attacked the
English army. After a stubborn battle, in which Aber
cromby fell mortally wounded, the French drew off with
heavy loss ; and at the close of June the capitulation of the
13,000 soldiers who remained closed the French rule over
Egypt. Both parties in this gigantic struggle, however, were at last
anxious to suspend the war. It was to give time for such an
organization of France and its resources as might enable him
to reopen the struggle with other chances of success that
Buonaparte opened negotiations for peace at the close of
1 80 1. His offers were at once met by the English Govern
ment. The terms of the peace of Amiens, which was con
cluded in March, 1802, were necessarily simple, for England
had no claim to interfere with the settlement of the Conti
nent France promised to retire from Southern Italy, and to
leave to themselves the republics it had set up along its bor
der in Holland, Switzerland, and Piedmont. England recog
nized the French government, gave up her newly conquered
colonies save Ceylon and Trinidad, acknowledged the Ionian
Islands as a free Republic, and engaged to replace the
Knights of St. John in the isle of Malta. There was a gen
eral sense of relief at the close of the long struggle ; and the
new French ambassador was drawn in triumph on his arrival
through the streets of London. But shrewd observers saw
the dangers that lay in the temper of the First Consul.
Whatever had been the errors of the French Revolutionists,
even their worst attacks on the independence of the nations
around them had been veiled by a vague notion of freeing the
peoples whom they invaded from the yoke of their rulers.
But the aim of Buonaparte was simply that of a vulgar con
queror. He was resolute to be master of the Western world,
and no notions of popular freedom or sense of national right

i8o3] MODERN ENGLAND IO41
interfered with his resolve. The means at his command were
immense. The political life of the Revolution had been cut
short by his military despotism, but the new social vigor
which it had given to France through the abolition of privi
leges and the creation of a new middle class on the ruins of
the clergy and the nobles still lived on. WhUe the dissen
sions which tore France asunder were hushed by the policy
of the First Consul, by his restoration -of the Church as a
religious power, his recall of the exfles, and the economy and
wise administration which distinguished his rule, the central
ized system of government bequeathed by the monarchy to
the Revolution, and by the Revolution to Buonaparte, enabled
him easily to seize this national vigor for the profit of his own
despotism. The exhaustion of the briUiant hopes raised by
the Revolution, the craving for public order, the mUitary
enthusiasm and the impulse of a new glory given by the won
derful victories France had won, made a tyranny possible ;
and in the hands of Buonaparte this tyranny was supported
by a secret police, by the suppression of the press and of all
freedom of opinion, and above all by the iron will and immense
abUity of the First Consul himself. Once chosen Consul for
life, he felt himself secure at home, and turned restlessly to
the work of outer aggression. The pledges given at Amiens
were set aside. The republics established on the borders of
France were brought into mere dependence on his wUl.
Piedmont and Parma were annexed to France ; and a French
army occupied Switzerland. The temperate protests of the
English Government were answered by demands for the
expulsion of the French exUes who had been living in Eng
land ever since the Revolution, and for its surrender of Malta,
which was retained tiU some security could be devised against
a fresh seizure of the island by the French fleet. It was plain
that a struggle was inevitable; huge armaments were prepar
ing in the Fre-nch ports, and a new activity was seen in those
of Spain. In May, 1803, the British Government anticipated
Buonaparte's attack by a declaration of war.
The breach only quickened Buonaparte's resolve to attack
the enemy at home. The difficulties in his way he set con
temptuously aside. " Fifteen mUUons of people," he said, in
aUusion to the disproportion between the population of Eng-

I042 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1805
land and France, " must give way to forty miUions " ; and an
invasion of England itself was planned on a gigantic scale.
A camp of one hundred thousand men was formed at Bou
logne, and a host of flat-bottomed boats gathered for their
conveyance across the Channel. The peril of the nation
forced Addington from office and recalled Pitt to power. His
health was broken, and as the days went by his appearance
became so haggard and depressed that it was plain death was
drawing near. But dying as he really was, the nation clung
to him with all its old faith. He was stUl the representative
of national union ; and he proposed to include Fox and the
leading Whigs in his new ministry, but he was foiled by the
bigotry of the king ; and the refusal of Lord Grenville and of
Windham to take office without Fox, as well as the loss of his
post at a later time by his ablest supporter, Dundas, left him
almost alone. But lonely as he was, he faced difficulty and
danger with the same courage as of old. The invasion
seemed imminent when Buonaparte, who now assumed the
title of the Emperor Napoleon, appeared in the camp at Bou
logne. " Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours," he
is reported to have said, " and we are masters of the world."
A skilfully combined plan by which the British fleet would
have been divided, while the whole French navy was concen
trated in the Channel, was delayed by the death of the admiral
destined to execute it. But the alliance with Spain placed
the Spanish fleet at Napoleon's disposal, and in 1805 he
planned its union with that of France, the crushing of the
squadron which blocked the ports of the Channel before the
English ships which were watching the Spanish armament
could come to its support, and a crossing of the vast arma
ment thus protected to the EngUsh shore. The three hun
dred thousand volunteers mustered in England to meet the
coming attack would have offered small hindrance to the vet
erans of the Grand Army, had they once crossed the Channel.
But Pitt had already found work for France elsewhere. The
alarm of the Continental powers had been brought to a head
by Napoleon's annexation of Genoa; Pitt's subsidies had
removed the last obstacle in the way of a league ; and Russia,
Austria, and Sweden joined in an alliance to wrest Italy and
the Low Countries from the grasp of the French emperor.

i8o6] MODERN ENGLAND IO43
Napoleon meanwhile swept the sea in vain for a glimpse of
the great armament whose assembly in the Channel he had
so skilfully planned. Admiral Villeneuve, uniting the Span
ish ships with his own squadron from Toulon, drew Nelson in
pursuit to the West Indies, and then, suddenly returning to
Cadiz, hastened to form a junction with the French squadron
at Brest and crush the English fleet in the Channel. But a
headlong pursuit brought Nelson up with him ere the maneu
ver was complete, and the two fleets met on the 21st of Octo
ber, 1805, off Cape Trafalgar. "England," ran Nelson's
famous signal, " expects every man to do his duty " ; and
though he fell himself in the hour of victory, twenty French
sail had struck their flag ere the day was done. " England
has saved herself by her courage," Pitt said in what were des
tined to be his last public words ; " she will save Europe by
her example 1 " But even before the victory of Trafalgar
Napoleon had abandoned the dream of invading England to
meet the coalition in his rear ; and swinging round his forces
on the Danube he forced an Austrian army to capitulation in
Ulm three days before his naval defeat. From Ulm he
marched on Vienna, and crushed the combined armies of
Austria and Russia in the battle of Austerlitz. "Auster
litz," Wilberforce wrote in his diary, "kflled Pitt" Though
he was still but forty-seven, the hollow voice and wasted
frame of the great minister had long told that death was near ;
and the blow to his hopes proved fatal. " RoU up that map,"
he said, pointing to a map of Europe which hung upon the
waU; " it wiU not be wanted these ten years ! " Once only he
rallied from stupor ; and those who bent over him caught a faint
murmur of " My country 1 How I leave my country ! " On
the 23d of January, 1806, he breathed his last; and was laid
in Westminster Abbey in the grave of Chatham. "What
grave," exclaimed Lord Wellesley, " contains such a father
and such a son ! What sepulcher embosoms the remains of
so much human excellence and glory ! "
So great was felt to be the loss that nothing but the union
of parties, which Pitt had in vain desired during his lifetime,
could fiU up the gap left by his death. In the new ministry
Fox, with the smaU body of popular Whigs who were bent
on peace and internal reform, united with the aristocratic
67

1044 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1806
Whigs under Lord Grenville and with the Tories under Lord
Sidmouth. All home questions in fact were subordinated to
the need of saving Europe from the ambition of France, and
in the resolve to save Europe, Fox was as resolute as Pitt
himself. His hopes of peace, indeed, were stronger; but
they were foiled by the evasive answer which Napoleon gave
to his overtures, and by a new war which he undertook
against Prussia, the one power which seemed able to resist
his arms. On the 14th of October, 1806, a decisive victory
at Jena laid North Germany at Napoleon's feet. Death only
a month before saved Fox from witnessing the overthrow of
his hopes ; and his loss weakened the Grenville cabinet at
the opening of a new and more desperate struggle with
France. Napoleon's earlier attempt at the enforcement of
a Continental system had broken down with the faUure of
the Northern League ; but in his mastery of Europe he now
saw a more effective means of realizing his dream ; and he
was able to find a pretext for his new attack in England's
own action. By a violent stretch of her rights as a combat
ant she had declared the whole coast occupied by France
and its allies, from Dantzig to Trieste, to he in a state of
blockade. It was impossible to enforce such a " paper
blockade," even with the immense force at her disposal ; and
Napoleon seized on the opportunity to retaliate by the entire
exclusion of British commerce from the Continent an exclu
sion which he trusted would end the war by the ruin it would
bring on the English manufacturers. A decree was issued
from Berlin which — without a single ship to carry it out —
placed the British islands in a state of blockade. All com
merce or communication with them was prohibited; all
English goods or manufactures found in the territory of
France or its allies were declared liable to confiscation ; and
their harbors were closed, not only against vessels coming
from Britain, but against all who had touched at her ports.
The attempt to enforce such a system was foiled indeed by
the rise of a wide-spread contraband trade, by the reluctance
of Holland to aid in its own ruin, by the connivance of officials
along the Prussian and Russian shores, and by the pressure
of facts. It was impossible even for Napoleon himself to do
without the goods he pretended to exclude; an immense system

i8o7] MODERN ENGLAND

1045

of licenses soon neutralized his decree ; and the French army
which marched to Eylau was clad in greatcoats made at
Leeds, and shod with shoes made at Northampton. But if it
faUed to destroy British industry, it told far more fatally on
British commerce. Trade began to move from English vessels,
which were subject to instant confiscation, and to pass into
the hands of neutrals, and especially of the Americans. The
merchant class caUed on the Government to protect it, and it
was to this appeal that the GrenvUle ministry repUed in Jan
uary, 1807, by an Order in CouncU which declared all the
ports of the coast of France and her allies under blockade,
and any neutral vessels trading between them to be good
prize. Such a step was far from satisfying the British mer
chants. But their appeal was no longer to Lord GrenvUle.
The forces of ignorance and bigotry which had been too
strong for Pitt were too strong for the Grenville ministry.
Its greatest work, the abolition of the slave-trade, in Feb
ruary, was done in the teeth of a vigorous opposition from
the Tories and the merchants of Liverpool; and in March
the first indication of its desire to open the question of re
ligious equality by aUowing CathoUc oflScers to serve in the
army was met on the part of the king by the demand of a
pledge not to meddle with the question. On the refusal of
this pledge the ministry was dismissed.
Its fall was the final close of the union of parties brought
about by the peril of French invasion; and from this time
to the end of the war England was wholly governed by the
Tories. The nominal head of the ministry which succeeded
that of Lord Grenville was the Duke of Portland ; its guiding
spirit was the foreign secretary, George Canning, a young
and devoted adherent of Pitt, whose brilliant rhetoric gave
him power over the House of Commons, while the vigor and
breadth of his mind gave a new energy and color to the war.
At no time had opposition to Napoleon seemed so hopeless.
From Berlin the emperor marched into the heart of Poland,
and though checked in the winter by the Russian forces in
the hard-fought battle of Eylau, his victory of Friedland
brought the Czar Alexander in the summer of 1807 to con
sent to the peace of Tilsit. From foes the two emperors of
Western and Eastern Europe became friends, and the hope

1046 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1807
of French aid in the conquest of Turkey drew Alexander to
a close alliance with Napoleon. Russia not only enforced
the Berlin decrees against British commerce, but forced
Sweden, the one ally that England still retained on the Con
tinent to renounce her alliance. The Russian and Swedish
fleets were thus placed at the service of France; and the
two emperors counted on securing the fleet of Denmark, and
again threatening by this union the maritime supremacy which
formed England's real defense. The hope was foiled by the
appearance off Elsinore in July, 1807, of an expedition promptly
and secretly equipped by Canning, with a demand for the
surrender of the Danish fleet into the hands of England, on
pledge of its return at the close of the war. On the refusal
of the Danes the demand was enforced by a bombardment of
Copenhagen ; and the whole Danish fleet, with a vast mass
of naval stores, was carried into British ports. It was in the
same spirit of almost reckless decision that Canning turned
to meet Napoleon's Continental system. In November he
issued fresh Orders in Councfl. By these France, and every
Continental state from which the British flag was excluded,
was put in a state of blockade, and all vessels bound for their
harbors were held subject to seizure unless they had touched
at a British port. The orders were at once met by another
decree of Napoleon issued at Milan in December, which de
clared every vessel, of whatever nation, coming from or bound
to Britain or any British colony, to have forfeited its character
as a neutral, and to be liable to seizure.
Meanwhile the effect of the Continental system upon Napo
leon was to drive him to aggression after aggression, in order
to maintain the material union of Europe against Britain. He
was absolutely master of Western Europe, and its whole face
changed as at an enchanter's touch. Prussia was occupied
by French troops. HoUand was changed into a monarchy by
a simple decree of the French emperor, and its crown bestowed
on his brother Louis. Another brother, Jerome, became king
of Westphalia, a new realm built up out of the electorates of
Hesse Cassel and Hanover. A third brother, Joseph, was
made king of Naples ; while the rest of Italy, and even Rome
itself, was annexed to the French empire. It was the hope
of effectually crushing the world power of Britain which drove

i8o8] MODERN ENGLAND IO47
him to his worst aggression, the aggression upon Spain. He
acted with his usual subtlety. In October, 1807, France and
Spain agreed to divide Portugal between them ; and on the
advance of their forces the reigning House of Braganza fled
helplessly from Lisbon to a refuge in Brazil. But the seizure
of Portugal was only a prelude to the seizure of Spain. Charles
the Fourth, whom a riot in his capital drove at this moment
to abdication, and his son, Ferdinand the Seventh, were drawn
to Bayonne in May, 1808, and forced to resign their claims to
the Spanish crown ; while a French army entered Madrid and
proclaimed Joseph Buonaparte king of Spain. But this high
handed act of aggression was hardly completed when Spain
rose as one man against the stranger ; and desperate as the
effort of its people seemed, the news of the rising was wel
comed throughout England with a burst of enthusiastic joy.
" Hitherto," cried Sheridan, a leader of the Whig opposition,
"Buonaparte has contended with princes without dignity,
numbers without ardor, or peoples without patriotism. He
has yet to learn what it is to combat a people who are ani
mated by one spirit against him." Tory and Whig alike held
that " never had so happy an opportunity existed in Britain
to strike a bold stroke for the rescue of the world " ; and
Canning at once resolved to change the system of desultory
descents on colonies and sugar islands for a vigorous warfare
in the Peninsula. Supplies were sent to the Spanish insurgents
with reckless profusion, and two small armies placed under
the command of Sir John Moore and Sir Arthur WeUesley
for service in the Peninsula. In July, 1808, the surrender at
Baylen of a French force which had invaded Andalusia gave
the first shock to the power of Napoleon, and the blow was
foUowed by one almost as severe. Landing at the Mondego
with fifteen thousand men. Sir Arthur Wellesley drove the
French army of Portugal from the field of Vimiera, and forced
it to surrender in the convention of Cintra on the 30th of
August But the tide of success was soon roughly turned.
Napoleon appeared in Spain with an army of two hundred
thousand men ; and Moore, who had advanced from Lisbon
to Salamanca to support the Spanish armies, found them
crushed on the Ebro, and was driven to fall hastily back on
the coast His force saved its honor in a battle before

1048 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1809
Corunna, which enabled it to embark in safety; but else
where all seemed lost. The whole of Northern and Central
Spain was held by the French armies ; and even Zaragoza,
which had once heroically repulsed them, submitted after a
second equally desperate resistance.
The landing of the wreck of Moore's army and the news of
the Spanish defeats turned the temper of England from the
wildest hope to the deepest despair ; but Canning remained
unmoved. On the day of the evacuation of Corunna he
signed a treaty of alliance with the Spanish Junta at Cadiz ;
and the English force at Lisbon, which had already prepared
to leave Portugal, was reenforced with thirteen thousand fresh
troops and placed under the command of Sir Arthur WeUes
ley. "Portugal," Wellesley wrote coolly, "may be defended
against any force which the French can bring against it."
At this critical moment the best of the French troops with
the emperor himself were drawn from the Peninsula to the
Danube ; for the Spanish rising had roused Austria as well
as England to a renewal of the struggle. When Marshal
Soult therefore threatened Lisbon from the north, Wellesley
marched boldly against him, drove him from Oporto in a
disastrous retreat, and, suddenly changing his line of opera
tions, pushed with twenty thousand men by Abrantes on
Madrid. He was joined on the march by a Spanish force
of thirty thousand men ; and a bloody action with a French
army of equal force at Talavera in July, 1809, restored the
renown of English arms. The losses on both sides were
enormous, and the French fell back at the close of the
struggle ; but the fruits of the victory were lost by a sudden
appearance of Soult on the English line of advance, and
Wellesley was forced to retreat hastily on Badajoz. His
failure was embittered by heavier disasters elsewhere. Aus
tria was driven to sue for peace by Napoleon's victory at
Wagram ; and a force of forty thousand English soldiers
which had been despatched against Antwerp returned home
baffled after losing half its numbers in the marshes of
Walcheren. The failure at Walcheren brought about the fall of the
Portland ministry. Canning attributed the disaster to the
incompetence of Lord Castlereagh, an Irish peer who after

i8io] MODERN ENGLAND IO49
taking the chief part in bringing about the union between
England and Ireland had been raised by the Duke of Port
land to the post of secretary at war ; and the quarrel between
the two ministers ended in a duel, and in their resignation of
their oflRces. The Duke of Portland retired with Canning ;
and a new ministry was formed out of the more Tory mem
bers of the late administration under the guidance of Spencer
Perceval, an industrious mediocrity of the narrowest type,
the Marquis of Wellesley, a brother of the English general
in Spain, becoming foreign secretary. But if Perceval and
his colleagues possessed few of the higher qualities of states
manship, they had one characteristic which in the actual
position of English affairs was beyond all price. They were
resolute to continue the war. In the nation at large the fit
of enthusiasm had been followed by a fit of despair ; and the
city of London even petitioned for a withdrawal of the Eng
lish forces from the Peninsula. Napoleon seemed irresistible,
and now that Austria was crushed and England stood alone
in opposition to him, the emperor resolved to put an end to
the strife by a vigorous prosecution of the war in Spain.
Andalusia, the one province which remained independent,
was invaded in the opening of 18 10, and with the exception
of Cadiz reduced to submission ; while Marshal Massena
with a fine army of eighty thousand men marched upon
Lisbon. Even Perceval abandoned all hope of preserving a
hold on the Peninsula in face of these new efforts, and threw
on WeUesley, who had been raised to the peerage as Lord
Wellington after Talavera, the responsibUity of resolving to
remain there. But the cool judgment and firm temper which
distinguished Wellington enabled him to face a responsibility
from which weaker men would have shrunk. "I conceive,"
he answered, "that the honor and interest of our country
require that we should hold our ground here as long as
possible; and, please God, I wiU maintain it as long as I
can." By the addition of Portuguese troops who had been
trained under British officers, his army was now raised to
fifty thousand men ; and though his inferiority in force com
pelled him to look on while Massena reduced the frontier
fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, he inflicted on him
a heavy check at the heights of Busaco, and finally feU back

lOSO HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1810
in October, 18 10, on three lines of defense which he had
secretly constructed at Torres Vedras, along a chain of moun
tain heights crowned with redoubts and bristling with cannon.
The position was impregnable; and able and stubborn as
Massena was he found himself forced after a month's fruitless
efforts to fall back in a .masterly retreat ; but so terrible were
the privations of the French army in passing again through
the wasted country that it was only with forty thousand men
that he reached Ciudad Rodrigo in the spring of 181 1. Reen
forced by fresh troops, Massena turned fiercely to the relief
of Almeida, which WeUington had besieged ; but two days'
bloody and obstinate fighting in May, 18 11, failed to drive the
English army from its position at Fuentes d'Onore, and the
marshal fell back on Salamanca and relinquished his effort to
drive WeUington from Portugal.
Great as was the effect of Torres Vedras in restoring the
spirit of the English people and in reviving throughout Europe
the hope of resistance to the tyranny of Napoleon, its imme
diate result was little save the deliverance of Portugal. The
French remained masters of all Spain save Cadiz and the
eastern provinces, and even the east coast was reduced in
18 II by the vigor of General Suchet. While England thus
fafled to rescue Spain from the aggression of Napoleon, she
was suddenly brought face to face with the result of her own
aggression in America. The Orders in Council with which
Canning had attempted to prevent the transfer of the carrying
trade from English to neutral ships, by compelling all vessels
on their way to ports under blockade to touch at British
harbors, had at once created serious embarrassments with
America. In the long strife between France and England,
America had already borne much from both combatants, but
above all from Britain. Not only had the English Govern
ment exercised its right of search, but it asserted a right of
seizing English seamen found in American vessels ; and as
there were few means of discriminating between English sea
men and American, the sailor of Maine or Massachusetts was
often impressed to serve in the British fleet. Galled, however,
as was America by outrages such as these, she was hindered
from resenting them by her strong disinclination to war, as
well as by the profit which she drew from the maintenance of

l8il] MODERN ENGLAND 105 1
her neutral position. But the Orders in CouncU and the Mflan
Decree forced her into action, and she at once answered them
by an embargo of trade with Europe. After a year's trial,
however, America found it impossible to maintain the embargo ;
and at the opening of 1809 she exchanged the embargo for
an Act of Non-Intercourse with France and England alone.
But the act was equally ineffective. The American govern
ment was utterly without means of enforcing it on its land fron
tier ; and it had small means of enforcing it at sea. Vessels
sailed daily for British ports ; and at last the Non-Intercourse
Act was repealed altogether. AU that America persisted in
maintaining was an offer that if either power would repeal its
edicts, it would prohibit American commerce with the other.
Napoleon seized on this offer, and after promising to revoke
his Berlin and Milan Decrees he called on America to redeem
her pledge. In February, 18 11, therefore, the United States
announced that all intercourse with Great Britain and her
dependencies was at an end. The effect of this step was seen
in a reduction of English exports during this year by a third of
their whole amount. It was in vain that Britain pleaded that
the emperor's promises remained unfulfilled, and that the
enforcement of non-intercourse with England was thus an
unjust act and an act of hostflity. The pressure of the
American policy, as well as news of the warlike temper which
had at last grown up in the United States, made submission
inevitable; for the industrial state of England was now so
critical that to expose it to fresh shocks was to court the very
ruin which Napoleon had planned.
During the earUer years of the war indeed the increase of
wealth had been enormous. England was sole mistress of the
seas. The war gave her possession of the colonies of Spain,
of HoUand, and of France ; and if her trade was checked for
a time by the Berlin Decree, the efforts of Napoleon were
soon rendered fruitless by the vast smuggling system which
sprang up along the Southern coasts and the coast of North
Germany. English exports had nearly doubled since the
opening of the century. Manufactures profited by the dis
coveries of Watt and Arkwright ; and the consumption of raw
cotton in the mUls of Lancashire rose during the same period
from fifty to a hundred mfllions of pounds. The vast accu-

1052 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1811
mulation of capital, as well as the vast increase of the popu
lation, at this time, told upon the land, and forced agriculture
into a feverish and unhealthy prosperity. Wheat rose to
famine prices, and the value of land rose in proportion with
the price of wheat. Enclosures went on with prodigious
rapidity ; the income of every landowner was doubled, while
the farmers were able to introduce improvements into the
processes of agriculture which changed the whole face of the
country. But if the increase of wealth was enormous, its dis
tribution was partial. During the fifteen years which pre
ceded Waterloo, the number of the population rose from ten
to thirteen millions, and this rapid increase kept down the rate
of wages, which would naturally have advanced in a corre
sponding degree with the increase in the national wealth.
Even manufactures, though destined in the long run to bene
fit the laboring classes, seemed at first rather to depress them ;
for one of the earliest results of the introduction of machinery
was the ruin of a number of small trades which were carried
on at home, and the pauperization of families who relied on
them for support In the winter of 181 1 the terrible pressure
of this transition from handicraft to machinery was seen in
the Luddite, or machine-breaking, riots which broke out over
the northern and midland counties ; and which were only
suppressed by mflitary force. While labor was thus thrown
out of its older grooves, and the rate of wages kept down at
an artificially low figure by the rapid increase of population,
the rise in the price of wheat, which brought wealth to the
landowner and the farmer, brought famine and death to the
poor, for England was cut off by the war from the vast corn
fields of the Continent or of America, which nowadays re
dress from their abundance the results of a bad harvest.
Scarcity was followed by a terrible pauperization of the labor
ing classes. The amount of the poor-rate rose fifty per cent ;
and with the increase of poverty followed its inevitable result,
the increase of crime.
The natural relation of trade and commerce to the general
wealth of the people at large was thus disturbed by the pecul
iar circumstances of the time. The war enriched the land
owner, the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer ; but it
impoverished the poor. It is, indeed, from these fatal years

i8ii] MODERN ENGLAND 1053
which lie between the peace of Luneville and Waterloo that
we must date that war of classes, that social severance be
tween employers and employed, which still forms the main
difficulty of English politics. But it is from these years too
that we must date the renewal of that progressive movement
in politics which had been suspended since the opening of
the war. The pubUcation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802
by a knot of young lawyers at Edinburgh marked a revival
of the policy of constitutional and administrative progress
which had been reluctantly abandoned by William Pitt.
Jeremy Bentham gave a new vigor to political speculation
by his advocacy of the doctrine of utility, and his definition
of " the greatest happiness of the greatest number " as the
aim of political action. In 1809 Sir Francis Burdett revived
the question of parliamentary reform. Only fifteen mem
bers supported his motion ; and a reference to the House of
Commons, in a pamphlet which he subsequently published,
as "a part of our fellow subjects collected together by means
which it is not necessary to describe" was met by his com
mittal to the Tower, where he remained till the prorogation
of the Parliament A far greater effect was produced by the
perseverance with which Canning pressed year by year the
question of Catholic emancipation. So long as Perceval
lived both efforts at reform were equally vain; but on the
accession of Lord Liverpool to power the advancing strength
of a more liberal sentiment in the nation was felt by the
policy of " moderate concession " which was adopted by the
new ministry. CathoUc emancipation became an open ques
tion in the cabinet itself, and was adopted in 18 12 by a
triumphant majority in the House of Commons, though stUl
rejected by the Lords.
With social and political troubles thus awaking about
them, even Tory statesmen were not wiUing to face the
terrible consequences of a ruin of EngUsh industry, such as
might foUow from the junction of America with Napoleon.
They were, in fact, preparing to withdraw the Orders in
CouncU when their plans were arrested by the dissolution of
the Perceval ministry. Its position had from the first been
a weak one. A return of the king's madness had made it
necessary in the beginning of 181 1 to confer the regency by

1054 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1811
Act of Parliament on the Prince of Wales ; and the Whig
sympathies of the prince threatened the Perceval cabinet
with dismissal. The insecurity of their position told on the
conduct of the war ; for the apparent inactivity of Wellington
during 1 8 1 1 was really due to the hesitation and timidity of
the ministers at home. In May, 18 12, the assassination of
Perceval by a maniac named Bellingham brought about the
fall of his ministry; and fresh efforts were made by the
regent to install the Whigs in office. Mutual distrust, how
ever, foiled his attempts ; and the old ministry was restored
under the headship of Lord Liverpool, a man of no great
abUities, but temperate, well informed, and endowed with a
remarkable skill in holding discordant colleagues together.
The most important of these colleagues was Lord Castle
reagh, who became secretary for foreign affairs. His first
work was to meet the danger in which Canning had involved
the country by his Orders in Council. At the opening of 18 12
America, in despair of redress, had resolved on war; Con
gress voted an increase of both army and navy, and laid an
embargo on all vessels in American harbors. Actual hostili
ties might still have been averted by the repeal of the orders,
on which the English cabinet was resolved, but in the confu
sion which followed the murder of Perceval the opportunity
was lost. On the 23d of June, only twelve days after the
ministry had been formed, the orders were repealed; but
when the news of the repeal reached America, it came six
weeks too late. On the i8th of June an act of Congress had
declared America at war with Great Britain.
The moment when America entered into the great struggle
was a critical moment in the history of mankind. Six days
after President Madison issued his declaration of war. Napo
leon crossed the Niemen on his march to Moscow. Success
ful as his policy had been in stirring up war between England
and America, it had been no less successful in breaking the
alliance which he had made with the Emperor Alexander at
Tilsit and in forcing on a contest with Russia. On the one
hand. Napoleon was irritated by the refusal of Russia to
enforce strictly the suspension of all trade with England,
though such a suspension would have ruined the Russian
landowners. On the other, the czar saw with growing anx-

i8i2] MODERN ENGLAND lOSS
iety the advance of the French empire which sprang from
Napoleon's resolve to enforce his system by a seizure of the
Northern coasts. In 1811 HoUand, the Hanseatic towns,
part of Westphalia, and the duchy of Oldenburg were suc
cessively annexed, and the duchy of Mecklenburg threatened
with seizure. A peremptory demand on the part of France
for the entire cessation of intercourse with England brought
the quarrel to a head ; and preparations were made on both
sides for a gigantic struggle. The best of the French sol
diers were drawn from Spain to the frontier of Poland ; and
Wellington, whose army had been raised to a force of forty
thousand Englishmen and twenty thousand Portuguese, prof
ited by the withdrawal to throw off his system of defense
and to assume an attitude of attack. Ciudad Rodrigo and
Badajoz were taken by storm during the spring of 1812 ; and
three days before Napoleon crossed the Niemen in his march
on Moscow, Wellington crossed the Agueda in a march on
Salamanca. After a series of masterly movements on both
sides, Marmont with the French army of the north attacked
the English on the hills in the neighborhood of that town.
WhUe he was marching round the right of the English posi
tion, his left wing remained isolated; and with a sudden
exclamation of " Marmont is lost ! " Wellington flung on it
the bulk of his force, crushed it and drove the whole army
from the field. The loss on either side was nearly equal, but
faflure had demoralized the French army; and its retreat
forced Joseph to leave Madrid, and Soult to evacuate Anda
lusia and to concentrate the southern army on the eastern
coast. While Napoleon was stiU pushing slowly over the
vast plains of Poland, WeUington made his entry into Madrid
in August, and began the siege of Burgos. The town, how
ever, held out gallantly for a month, till the advance of the
two French armies, now concentrated in the north and south
of Spain, forced Wellington in October to a hasty retreat on
the Portuguese frontier. If he had shaken the rule of the
French in Spain in this campaign, his ultimate faUure
showed how firm a military hold they stiU possessed there.
But the disappointment was forgotten in the news which
foUowed it. At the moment when the English troops fell
back from Burgos began the retreat of the Grand Army from

IOS6 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1813
Moscow. Victorious in a battle at Borodino, Napoleon had
entered the older capital of Russia in triumph, and waited
impatiently to receive proposals of peace from the czar,
when a fire kindled by its own inhabitants reduced the city
to ashes. The French army was forced to fall back amidst
the horrors of a Russian winter. Of the four hundred thou
sand combatants who formed the Grand Army at its first out
set, only a few thousand recrossed the Niemen in December.
In spite of the gigantic efforts which Napoleon made to
repair the loss of the Grand Army, the spell which he had
cast over Europe was broken by the retreat from Moscow.
Prussia rose against him as the Russians crossed the Niemen
in the spring of 1813 ; and the forces which held it were at
once thrown back on the Elbe. In this emergency the mili
tary genius of the French emperor rose to its height. With
a fresh army of two hundred thousand men whom he had
gathered at Mainz he marched on the allied armies of Russia
and Prussia in May, cleared Saxony by a victory over them
at Lutzen, and threw them back on the Oder by a fresh
victory at Bautzen. Disheartened by defeat, and by the
neutral attitude which Austria still preserved, the two powers
consented in June to an armistice, and negotiated for peace.
But Austria, though unwflling to utterly ruin France to the
profit of her great rival in the East, was as resolute as
either of the allies to wrest from Napoleon his supremacy
over Europe ; and at the moment when it became clear that
Napoleon was only bent on playing with her proposals, she
was stirred to action by news that his army was at last driven
from Spain. Wellington had left Portugal in May with an
army which had now risen to ninety thousand men ; and
overtaking the French forces in retreat at Vitoria he inflicted
on them a defeat which drove them in utter rout across the
Pyrenees. Madrid was at once evacuated ; and Clauzel fell
back from Zaragoza into France. The victory not only freed
Spain from its invaders : it restored the spirit of the allies.
The close of the armistice was followed by a union of Austria
with the forces of Prussia and the czar; and in October a
final overthrow of Napoleon at Leipzig forced the French
army to fall back in rout across the Rhine. The war now
hurried to its close. Though held at bay for a while by the

i8i3] MODERN ENGLAND

I0S7

sieges of San Sebastian and Pampeluna, as weU as by an
obstinate defense of the Pyrenees, WeUington succeeded in
the very month of the triumph at Leipzig in winning a victory
on the Bidassoa, which enabled him to enter France. He
was soon followed by the aUies. On the last day of 1813
their forces crossed the Rhine ; and a third of France passed,
without opposition, into their hands. For two months more
Napoleon maintained a wonderful struggle with a handful of
raw conscripts against their overwhelming numbers; while
in the south, Soult, forced from his entrenched camp near
Bayonne and defeated at Orthes, fell back before WeUington
on Toulouse. Here their two armies met in April in a stub
born and indecisive engagement. But though neither leader
knew it, the war was even then at an end. The struggle of
Napoleon himself had ended at the close of March with the
surrender of Paris; and the submission of the capital was
at once followed by the abdication of the emperor and the
return of the Bourbons.
England's triumph over its enemy was dashed by the more
doubtful fortunes of the struggle across the Atlantic. The
declaration of war by America seemed an act of sheer mad
ness ; for its navy consisted of a few frigates and sloops ; its
army was a mass of half-drUled and half-armed recruits ;
while the States themselves were divided on the question of
the war, and Connecticut with Massachusetts refused to send
either money or men. Three attempts to penetrate into
Canada during the summer and autumn were repulsed with
heavy loss. But these failures were more than redeemed by
unexpected successes at sea. In two successive engagements
between English and American frigates, the former were
forced to strike their flag. The effect of these victories was
out of all proportion to their real importance ; for they were
the first heavy blows which had been dealt at England's su
premacy over the seas. In 1813 America followed up its
naval triumphs by more vigorous efforts on land. Its forces
cleared Lake Ontario, captured Toronto, destroyed the British
flotUla on Lake Erie, and made themselves masters of Upper
Canada. An attack on Lower Canada, however, was success
fully beaten back; and a fresh advance of the British and
Canadian forces in the heart of the winter again recovered

1058 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1814
the Upper Province. The reverse gave fresh strength to the
party in the United States which had throughout been opposed
to the war, and whose opposition to it had been embittered
by the terrible distress brought about by the blockade and
the ruin of American commerce. Cries of secession began
to be heard, and Massachusetts took the bold step of appoint
ing delegates to confer with delegates from the other New
England States " on the subject of their grievances and com
mon concerns." In 1814, however, the war was renewed
with more vigor than ever; and Upper Canada was again
invaded. But the American army, after inflicting a severe
defeat on the British forces in the battle of Chippewa in July,
was itself defeated a few weeks after in an equally stub
born engagement, and thrown back on its own frontier ; while
the fall of Napoleon enabled the English Government to de
vote its whole strength to the struggle with an enemy which
it had ceased to despise. General Ross, with a force of four
thousand men, appeared in the Potomac, captured Washing
ton, and before evacuating the city burnt its public buildings
to the ground. Few more shameful acts are recorded in our
history ; and it was the more shameful in that it was done
under strict orders from the Government at home. The raid
upon Washington, however, was intended simply to strike
terror into the American people ; and the real stress of the
war was thrown on two expeditions whose business was to
penetrate into the States from the north and from the south.
Both proved utter failures. A force of nine thousand Penin
sular veterans which marched in September to the attack of
Plattsburg on Lake Champlain was forced to fall back by the
defeat of the English flotilla which accompanied it. A second
force under General Pakenham appeared in December at
the mouth of the Mississippi and attacked New Orleans, but
was repulsed by General Jackson with the loss of half its
numbers. Peace, however, had already been concluded. The
close of the French war, if it left untouched the grounds of
the struggle, made the United States sensible of the danger
of pushing it further ; Britain herself was anxious for peace ;
and the warring claims, both of England and America, were
set aside in silence in the treaty of 18 14.
The close of the war with America freed England's hands

i8is] MODERN ENGLAND 1059
at a moment when the reappearance of Napoleon at Paris
caUed her to a new and final struggle with France. By
treaty with the allied powers Napoleon had been suffered to
retain a fragment of his former empire — the island of Elba
off the coast of Tuscany ; and from Elba he had looked on
at the quarrels which sprang up between his conquerors as
soon as they gathered at Vienna to complete the settlement
of Europe. The most formidable of these quarrels arose
from the claim of Prussia to annex Saxony, and that of Rus
sia to annex Poland; but their union for this purpose was
met by a counter-league of England and Austria with their
old enemy France, whose ambassador, Talleyrand, labored
vigorously to bring the question to an issue by force of arms.
At the moment, however, when a war between the two leagues
seemed close at hand. Napoleon quitted Elba, landed on the
coast near Cannes, and, followed only by a thousand of his
guards, marched over the mountains of Dauphind upon Gre
noble and Lyons. He counted, and counted justly, on the
indifference of the country to its new Bourbon rulers, on the
longing of the army for a fresh struggle which should restore
its glory, and above all on the spell of his name over soldiers
whom he had so often led to victory. In twenty days from
his landing he reached the Tuileries unopposed, while Louis
the Eighteenth fled helplessly to Ghent. But whatever hopes
he had drawn from the divisions of the allied powers were
at once dispelled by their resolute action on the news of his
descent upon France. Their strife was hushed and their old
union restored by the consciousness of a common danger.
An engagement to supply a million of men for the purposes
of the war, and a recall of their armies to the Rhine, answered
Napoleon's efforts to open negotiations with the powers. Eng
land furnished subsidies to the amount of eleven mUlions, and
hastened to place an army on the frontier of the Netherlands.
The best troops of the force which had been employed in the
Peninsula, however, were stUl across the Atlantic ; and of the
eighty thousand men who gathered round Wellington only
about a half were Englishmen, the rest principally raw levies
from Belgium and Hanover. The duke's plan was to unite
with the one hundred and fifty thousand Prussians under
Marshal Blucher who were advancing on the Lower Rhine,
6&

I060 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1815
and to enter France by Mons and Namur, while the forces of
Austria and Russia closed in upon Paris by way of Belfort
and Elsass.
But Napoleon had thrown aside all thought of a merely
defensive war. By amazing efforts he had raised an army of
two hundred and fifty thousand men in the few months since
his arrival in Paris ; and in the opening of June one hundred
and twenty thousand Frenchmen were concentrated on the
Sambre at Charleroi, while Wellington's troops still lay in
cantonments on the line of the Scheldt from Ath to Nivelle,
and Blucher's on that of the Meuse from Nivelle to Liege.
Both the allied armies hastened to unite at Quatre Bras, but
their junction was already impossible. Blucher with eighty
thousand men was himself attacked by Napoleon at Ligny,
and after a desperate contest driven back with terrible loss
upon Wavre. On the same day Ney with twenty thousand
men, and an equal force under D'Erlon in reserve, appeared
before Quatre Bras, where as yet only ten thousand English
and the sarae force of Belgian troops had been able to
assemble. The Belgians broke before the charges of the
French horse ; but the dogged resistance of the English
infantry gave time for Wellington to bring up corps after
corps, till at the close of the day Ney saw himself heavily
outnumbered, and withdrew baffled from the field. About
five thousand men had fallen on either side in this fierce
engagement; but heavy as was Wellington's loss, the firm
ness of the EngUsh army had already done much to foil
Napoleon's effort at breaking through the line of the allies.
Blucher's retreat, however, left the English flank uncovered ;
and on the following day, while the Prussians were falling
back on Wavre, Wellington with nearly seventy thousand
men — for his army was now well in hand — withdrew in
good order upon Waterloo, followed by the mass of the
French forces under the emperor himself. Napoleon had
detached Marshal Grouchy with thirty thousand men to hang
upon the rear of the beaten Prussians, while with a force of
eighty thousand he resolved to bring Wellington to battle.
On the morning of the i8th of June the two armies faced
one another on the field of Waterloo in front of the forest of
Soignies, on the highroad to Brussels. Napoleon's one fear

i8is] MODERN ENGLAND 1061
had been that of a continued retreat. " I have them ! " he
cried, as he saw the English line drawn up on a low rise of
ground which stretched across the highroad from the chateau
of Hougomont on its right to the farm and straggling village
of La Haye Sainte on its left. He had some grounds for
his confidence of success. On either side the forces num
bered between seventy and eighty thousand men ; but the
French were superior in guns and cavalry, and a large part
of Wellington's force consisted of Belgian levies who broke
and fled at the outset of the fight. A fierce attack upon
Hougomont opened the battle at eleven ; but it was not till
midday that the corps of D'Erlon advanced upon the center
near La Haye Sainte, which from that time bore the main
brunt of the struggle. Never has greater courage, whether
of attack or endurance, been shown on any field than was
shown by both combatants at Waterloo. The columns of
D'Erlon, repulsed by the English foot, were hurled back in
disorder by a charge of the Scots Greys ; but the victorious
horsemen were crushed in their turn by the French cuiras
siers, and the mass of the French cavalry, twelve thousand
strong, flung itself in charge after charge on the English
front, carrying the English guns and sweeping with desper
ate bravery round the unbroken squares whose fire thinned
their ranks. With almost equal bravery the French columns
of the center again advanced, wrested at last the farm of La
Haye Sainte from their opponents, and pushed on vigorously
though in vain under Ney against the troops in its rear. But
meanwhUe every hour was telling against Napoleon. To win
the battle he must crush the English army before Blucher
joined it; and the English army was stiU uncrushed. Ter
rible as was his loss, and many of his regiments were reduced
to a mere handful of men, Wellington stubbornly held his
ground whUe the Prussians, advancing from Wavre through
deep and miry forest roads, were slowly gathering to his sup
port, disregarding the attack on their rear by which Grouchy
strove to hold them back from the field. At half-past four
their advanced guard deployed at last from the woods ; but
the main body was far behind, and Napoleon was stUl able
to hold his ground against them tUl their increasing masses
forced him to stake all on a desperate effort against the Eng-

I062 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1815
lish front. The Imperial Guard — his only reserve, which had
as yet taken no part in the battle — was drawn up at seven
in two huge columns of attack. The first, with Ney himself
at its head, swept all before it as it mounted the rise beside
La Haye Sainte, on which the thin English line still held its
ground, and all but touched the English front when its mass,
torn by the terrible fire of musketry with which it was received,
gave way before a charge. The second, three thousand strong,
advanced with the same courage over the slope near Hougo
mont, only to be repulsed and shattered in its turn. At the
moment when these masses fell slowly and doggedly back
down the fatal rise, the Prussians pushed forward on Napo
leon's right, their guns swept the road to Charleroi, and Wel
lington seized the moment for a general advance. From that
hour all was lost. Only the guard stood firm in the wreck
of the French army; and though darkness and exhaustion
checked the English in their pursuit of the broken troops as
they hurried from the field, the Prussian horse continued the
chase through the night. Only forty thousand Frenchmen
with some thirty guns recrossed the Sambre, while Napoleon
himself fled hurriedly to Paris. His second abdication was
followed by the triumphant entry of the English and Prus
sian armies into the French capital ; and the long war ended
with his exile to St. Helena, and the return of Louis the Eigh
teenth to the throne of the Bourbons.

EPILOGUE
WITH the victory of Waterloo we reach a time within
the memory of some now living, and the opening
of a period of our history, the greatest indeed of
all in real importance and interest, but perhaps too near to us
as yet to admit of a cool and purely historical treatment. In
a work such as the present at any rate it will be advisable to
Umit ourselves from this point to a brief summary of the more
noteworthy events which have occurred in our political history
since 1815.
The peace which closed the great war with Napoleon left
Britain feverish and exhausted. Of her conquests at sea she
retained only Malta (whose former possessors, the Knights of
St. John, had ceased to exist), the Dutch colonies of Ceylon,
and the Cape of Good Hope, the French colony of Mauritius,
and a few West Indian islands. On the other hand the pres
sure of the heavy taxation and of the debt, which now reached
eight hundred miUions, was embittered by the general distress
of the country. The rapid development of English industry
for a time ran ahead of the world's demands : the markets at
home and abroad were glutted with unsalable goods, and
mflls and manufactories were brought to a standstill. The
scarcity caused by a series of bad harvests was intensified by
the selfish legislation of the landowners in Parliament Con
scious that the prosperity of English agriculture was merely
factitious, and rested on the high price of corn produced by
the war, they prohibited by an act passed in 1815 the intro
duction of foreign corn tUl wheat had reached famine prices.
Society, too, was disturbed by the great changes of employ
ment consequent on a sudden return to peace after twenty
years of war, and by the disbanding of the immense forces
employed at sea and on land. The movement against ma
chinery which had been put down in 1812 revived in formi
dable riots, and the distress of the rural poor brought about a
1063

I064 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1819
rapid increase of crime. The steady opposition, too, of the
administration, in which Lord Castlereagh's influence was
now supreme, to any project of political progress created a
dangerous irritation which brought to the front men whose
demand of a " radical reform " in EngUsh institutions won
them the name of Radicals, and drove more violent agitators
into treasonable disaffection and sUly plots. In 1 8 19 the break
ing up by military force of a meeting at Manchester, assembled
for the purpose of advocating a reform in Parliament, in
creased the unpopularity of the Government ; and a plot of
some desperate men with Arthur Thistlewood at their head
for the assassination of the whole ministry, which is known
as the Cato-Street Conspiracy, threw light on the violent
temper which was springing up among its more extreme
opponents. The death of George the Third in 1820, and the
accession of his son the prince regent as George the Fourth,
only added to the general disturbance of men's minds. The
new king had long since forsaken his wife and privately
charged her with infidelity; his first act on mounting the
throne was to renew his accusations against her, and to lay
before Parliament a bUl for the dissolution of her marriage
with him. The public agitation which followed on this step
at last forced the ministry to abandon the bill, but the shame
of the royal family and the unpopularity of the king increased
the general discontent of the country.
The real danger to public order, however, lay only in the
blind opposition to all political change which confused wise
and moderate projects of reform with projects of revolution ;
and in 1822 the suicide of Lord Castlereagh, who had now
become Marquis of Londonderry, and to whom this opposition
was mainly due, put an end to the policy of mere resistance.
Canning became foreign secretary in Castlereagh's place,
and with Canning returned the earlier and progressive policy
of William Pitt. Abroad, his first act was to break with the
" Holy Alliance," as it called itself, which the Continental
courts had formed after the overthrow of Napoleon for the
repression of revolutionary or liberal movements in their
kingdoms, and whose despotic policy had driven Naples,
Spain, and Portugal into revolt. Canning asserted the prin
ciple of non-interference in the internal affairs of foreign

i827] EPILOGUE 1065
states, a principle he enforced by sending troops in 1826 to
defend Portugal from Spanish intervention, while he recog
nized the revolted colonies of Spain in South America and
Mexico as independent states. At home his influence was
seen in the new strength gained by the question of Catholic
emancipation, and in the passing of a bill for giving relief to
Roman Catholics through the House of Commons in 1825.
With the entry of his friend Mr. Huskisson into office in
1823 began a commercial policy which was founded on a
conviction of the benefits derived from freedom of trade, and
which brought about at a later time the repeal of the Corn
Laws. The new drift of public policy produced a division
among the ministers which showed itseff openly at Lord
Liverpool's death in 1827. Canning became first lord of
the treasury, but the Duke of Wellington, with the chan
cellor. Lord Eldon, and the home secretary, Mr. Peel,
refused to serve under him ; and four months after the
formation of Canning's ministry it was broken up by his
death. A temporary ministry formed under Lord Goderich
on Canning's principles was at once weakened by the posi
tion of foreign affairs. A revolt of the Greeks against Turkey
had now lasted some years in spite of Canning's efforts to
bring about peace, and the despatch of an Egyptian expedi
tion with orders to devastate the Morea and carry off its
inhabitants as slaves forced England, France, and Russia to
interfere. In 1827 their united fleet under Admiral Codring-
ton attacked and destroyed that of Egypt in the bay of
Navarino; but the blow at Turkey was disapproved by
English opinion, and the ministry, already wanting in par
liamentary strength, was driven to resign.
The formation of a purely Tory ministry by the Duke of
WeUington, with Mr. Peel for its principal support in the
Commons, was generaUy looked on as a promise of utter
resistance to aU further progress. But the state of Ireland,
where a " Catholic Association" formed by Daniel O'ConneU
maintained a growing agitation, had now reached a point
when the English ministry had to choose between conces
sions and civfl war. The duke gave way, and brought in
a bfll which, like that designed by Pitt, admitted Roman
Catholics to ParUament and to all but a few of the highest

I066 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1831
posts, civil or military, in the service of the Crown. The
passing of this bfll by the aid of the Whigs threw the Tory
party into confusion ; while the cry for parliamentary reform
was suddenly revived with a strength it had never known
before by a revolution in France, which drove Charles the
Tenth from the throne and called his cousin, Louis Philippe,
the Duke of Orleans, to reign as a constitutional king. Will
iam the Fourth, who succeeded to the Crown on the death
of his brother, George the Fourth, at this moment was favor
able to the demand of reform, but Wellington refused all
concession. The refusal drove him from office; and for
the first time after twenty years the Whigs saw themselves
again in power under the leadership of Earl Grey. A bill
for parliamentary reform, which took away the right of
representation from fifty-six decayed or rotten boroughs,
gave the 143 members it gained to counties or large towns
which as yet sent no members to Parliament, estahlished a
.£10 householder qualification for voters in boroughs, and
extended the county franchise to leaseholders and copy
holders, was laid before Parliament in 1831. On its defeat,
the ministry appealed to the country. The new House of
Commons at once passed the bill, and so terrible was the
agitation produced by its rejection by the Lords, that on
its subsequent reintroduction the peers who opposed it with
drew and suffered it to become law. The reformed Parlia
ment which met in 1833 did much by the violence and
inexperience of many of its new members, and especially
by the conduct of O'ConneU, to produce a feeling of reac
tion in the country. On the resignation of Lord Grey in
1834 the ministry was reconstituted under the leadership of
Viscount Melbourne; and though this administration was
soon dismissed by the king, whose sympathies had now
veered round to the Tories, and succeeded for a short time
by a ministry under Sir Robert Peel, a general election again
returned a Whig Parliament and replaced Lord Melbourne
in office. Weakened as it was by the growing change of
political feeling throughout the country, no ministry has
ever wrought greater and more beneficial changes than the
Whig ministry under Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne dur
ing its ten years of rule. In 1833 the system of slavery

1 840] EPILOGUE 1067
which stfll existed in the British colonies, though the slave-
trade was suppressed, was abolished at a cost of twenty
miUions ; the commercial monopoly of the East India Com
pany was abolished, and the trade to the East thrown open
to aU merchants. In 1834 the growing evfl of pauperism
was checked by the enactment of a new Poor Law. In 1835
the Municipal Corporations Act restored to the inhabitants
of towns those rights of self-government of which they had
been deprived since the fourteenth century. 1836 saw the
passing of the General Registration Act, while the constant
quarrels over tithe were remedied by the Act for Tithe Com
mutation, and one of the grievances of Dissenters redressed
by a measure which allowed civU marriage. A system of
national education, begun in 1834 by a small annual grant
towards the erection of schools, was developed in 1839 by
the creation of a committee of the Privy CouncU for educa
tional purposes and by the steady increase of educational
grants. Great, however, as these measures were, the difficulties of
the Whig ministry grew steadily year by year. Ireland,
where O'ConneU maintained an incessant agitation for the
repeal of the union, could only be held down by coercion
acts. In spite of the impulse given to trade by the system
of steam communication which began with the opening of
the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the country
StUl suffered from distress ; and the discontent of the poorer
classes gave rise in 1839 to riotous demands for "the People's
Charter," including universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual
Parliaments, equal electoral districts, the abolition of all prop
erty qualification for members, and payment for their services.
In Canada a quarrel between the two districts of Upper and
Lower Canada was suffered through mismanagement to grow
into a formidable revolt. The vigorous but meddlesome way
in which Lord Palmerston, a disciple of Canning, carried out
that statesman's foreign policy, supporting Donna Maria as
sovereign in Portugal and Isabella as queen in Spain against
claimants of more absolutist tendencies by a Quadruple Alli
ance with France and the two countries of the Peninsula, and
forcing Mehemet AU, the pasha of Egypt, to withdraw from
an attack on Turkey by the bombardment of Acre in 1840,

I068 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1841
created general uneasiness ; while the public conscience was
wounded by a war with China in 1839 on its refusal to allow
the smuggling of opium into its dominions. A more terrible
blow was given to the ministry by events in India, where the
occupation of Cabul in 1839 ended two years later in a gen
eral revolt of the Afghans and in the loss of a British army
in the Khyber Pass. The strength of the Government was
restored for a time by the death of William the Fourth in
1837 and the accession of Victoria, the daughter of his
brother Edward, Duke of Kent. With the accession of
Queen Victoria ended the union of England and Hanover
under the same sovereigns, the latter state passing to the
next male heir, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. But the Whig
hold on the House of Commons passed steadily away, and
a general election in 1841 gave their opponents, who now
took the name of Conservatives, a majority of nearly a hun
dred members. The general confidence in Sir Robert Peel,
who was placed at the head of the ministry which followed
that of Lord Melbourne, enabled him to deal vigorously with
two of the difficulties which had most hampered his prede
cessors. The disorder of the public finances was repaired
by the repeal of a host of oppressive and useless duties and
by the imposition of an income tax. In Ireland O'ConneU
was charged with sedition and convicted, and though sub
sequently released from prison on appeal to the House of
Lords, his influence received a shock from which it never
recovered. Peace was made with China by a treaty which
threw open some of its ports to traders of all nations ; in
India the disaster of Cabul was avenged by an expedition
under General Pollock which penetrated victoriously to the
capital of that country in 1842, and the province of Scinde
was annexed to the British dominions. The shock, however,
to the English power brought about fresh struggles for su
premacy with the natives, and especially with the Sikhs,
who were crushed for the time in three great battles, at
Moodkee, Ferozeshah, and Sobraon.
Successful as it proved itself abroad, the Conservative Gov
ernment encountered unexpected difficulties at home. From
the enactment of the Corn Laws in 1815 a dispute had con
stantly gone on between those who advocated these and sim-

I8S4] EPILOGUE 1069
ilar measures as a protection to native industry and those
who, viewing them as simply laying a tax on the consumer
for the benefit of the producer, claimed entire freedom of
trade with the world. In 1839 an Anti-Corn-Law League
had been formed to enforce the views of the advocates of
free trade; and it was in great measure the alarm of the
farmers and landowners at its action which had induced
them to give so vigorous a support to Sir Robert Peel. But
though Peel entered office pledged to protective measures,
his own mind was slowly veering round to a conviction of
their inexpediency; and in 1846 the faUure of the potato
crop in Ireland and of the harvest in England forced him to
introduce a bUl for the repeal of the Corn Laws. The bill
passed, but the resentment of his own party soon drove him
from office ; and he was succeeded by a Whig ministry under
Lord John RusseU which remained in power till 1852. The
first work of this ministry was to carry out the policy of free
trade into every department of British commerce ; and from
that time to this the maxim of the league, to "buy in the
cheapest market and seU in the dearest," has been accepted
as the law of our commercial policy. Other events were few.
The general overthrow of the Continental monarchs in the
Revolution of 1848 found faint echoes in a feeble rising in
Ireland under Smith O'Brien which was easily suppressed
by a few policemen, and in a demonstration of the Chartists
in London which passed off without further disturbance. A
fresh war with the Sikhs in 1848 was closed by the victory
of Goojerat and the annexation of the Punjab in the follow
ing year.
The long peace which had been maintained between the
European powers since the treaties of 181 5 was now drawing
to a close. In 1852 the ministry of Lord John Russell was
displaced by a short return of the Conservatives to power
under Lord Derby ; but a union of the Whigs with the free-
trade followers of Sir Robert Peel restored them to office at
the close of the year. Lord Aberdeen, the head of the new
administration, was at once compelled to resist the attempts
of Russia to force on Turkey a humfliating treaty ; and in
1854 England aUied herself with Louis Napoleon, who had
declared himself emperor of the French, to resist the inva-

I070 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1855
sion of the Danubian Principalities by a Russian army. The
army was withdrawn ; but in September the allied force landed
on the shores of the Crimea, and after a victory at the river
Alma undertook the siege of Sebastopol. The garrison,
however, soon proved as strong as the besiegers, and as fresh
Russian forces reached the Crimea the allies found them
selves besieged in their turn. An attack on the English posi
tion at Inkermann on November the 5th was repulsed with
the aid of a French division ; but winter proved more terrible
than the Russian sword, and the English force wasted away
with cold or disease. The public indignation at its sufferings
forced the Aberdeen ministry from office in the opening of
1855; and Lord Palmerston became premier with a ministry
which included those members of the last administration who
were held to be most in earnest in the prosecution of the war.
After a siege of nearly a year the allies at last became mas
ters of Sebastopol in September, and Russia, spent with the
strife, consented in 1856 to the peace of Paris. The military
reputation of England had fallen low during the struggle, and
to this cause the mutiny of the native troops in Bengal, which
quickly followed in 1857, may partly be attributed. Russian
intrigues, Moslem fanaticism, resentment at the annexation
of the kingdom of Oudh by Lord Dalhousie, and a fanatical
belief on the part of the Hindus that the English Govern
ment had resolved to make them Christians by forcing them
to lose their caste, have all been assigned as causes of an out
break which still remains mysterious. A mutiny at Meerut
in May was followed by the seizure of Delhi, where the native
king was enthroned as emperor of Hindustan, by a fresh
mutiny and massacre of the Europeans at Cawnpore, by the
rising of Oudh and the siege of the Residency at Lucknow.
The number of English troops in India was small, and for
the moment all Eastern and Central Hindustan seemed lost ;
but Madras, Bombay, and the Punjab remained untouched,
and the English in Bengal and Oudh not only held their
ground but marched upon Delhi, and in September took the
town by storm. Two months later the arrival of reenforce
ments under Sir Colin Campbell relieved Lucknow, which
had been saved tUl now by the heroic advance of Sir Henry
Havelock with a handful of troops, and cleared Oudh of the

i866] EPILOGUE 1071
mutineers. The suppression of the revolt was followed by a
change in the government of India, which was transferred in
1858 from the company to the Crown, the queen being for
mally proclaimed its sovereign, and the governor-general
becoming her viceroy.
The credit which Lord Palmerston won during the struggle
with Russia and the sepoys was shaken by his conduct in
proposing an alteration in the law respecting conspiracies in
1858, in consequence of an attempt to assassinate Napoleon
the Third which was believed to have originated on English
ground. The violent language of the French army brought
about a movement for the enlistment of a volunteer force,
which soon reached a hundred and fifty thousand men ; and
so great was the irritation it caused that the bill, which was
thought to have been introduced in deference to the demands
of France, was rejected by the House of Commons. Lord
Derby again became prime minister for a few months ; but
a fresh election in 1859 brought back Lord Palmerston,
whose ministry lasted till his death in 1865. At home his
policy was one of pure inaction, and his whole energy was
directed to the preservation of English neutrality in five great
strffes which distracted not only Europe but the New World :
a war between France and Austria in 1859, which ended in
the creation of the kingdom of Italy ; a civil war in America,
which began with the secession of the Southern States in
1861 and ended four years later in their subjugation; an in
surrection of Poland in 1863 ; an attack of France upon Mex
ico; and of Austria and Prussia upon Denmark in 1864. The
American war, by its interference with the supply of cotton,
reduced Lancashire to distress ; while the fitting out of pirati
cal cruisers in English harbors in the name of the Southern
Confederation gave America just grounds for an irritation
which was only allayed at a far later time. Peace, however,
was successfully preserved; and the policy of noninterven
tion was pursued after Lord Palmerston's death by his suc
cessor. Lord Russell, who remained neutral during the brief
but decisive conflict between Prussia and Austria in 1866
which transferred to the former the headship of Germany.
With Lord Palmerston, however, passed away the policy
of political inaction which distinguished his rule. Lord Rus-

1072 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [1866
sell had long striven to bring about a further reform of Par
liament; and in 1866 he laid a bUl for that purpose before
the House of Commons, whose rejection was followed by the
resignation of the ministry. Lord Derby, who again became
prime minister, with Mr. Disraeli as leader of the House of
Commons, found himself, however, driven to introduce in
1867 a Reform Bill of a far more sweeping character than
that which had failed in Lord Russell's hands. By this
measure, which passed in August, the borough franchise was
extended to all ratepayers, as well as to lodgers occupying
rooms of the annual value of ;^io; the county franchise was
fixed at £,\2, thirty-three members were withdrawn from
English boroughs, twenty-five of whom were transferred to
English counties and the rest assigned to Scotland and Ire
land. Large numbers of the working classes were thus
added to the constituencies; and the indirect effect of this
great measure was at once seen in the vigorous policy of the
Parliament which assembled after the new elections in 1868.
Mr. Disraeli, who had become prime minister on the with
drawal of Lord Derby, retired quietly on finding that a Lib
eral majority of over one hundred members had been returned
to the House of Commons ; and his place was taken by Mr.
Gladstone, at the head of a ministry which for the first time
included every section of the Liberal party. A succession
of great measures proved the strength and energy of the
new administration. Its first work was with Ireland, whose
chronic discontent it endeavored to remove by the disestab
lishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church in 1869,
and by a Land Bill which established a sort of tenant-right
in every part of the country in 1870. The claims of the
Nonconformists were met in 1868 by the abolition of com
pulsory church-rates, and in 1871 by the abolition of all relig
ious tests for admission to offices or degrees in the universities.
Important reforms were undertaken in the management of the
navy ; and a plan for the entire reorganization of the army
was carried into effect after the system of promotion to its
command by purchase had been put an end to. In 1870 the
question of national education was furthered by a bill which
provided for the establishment of school boards in every dis
trict, and for their support by means of local rates. In 1872

i874] EPILOGUE IO73
a fresh step in parliamentary reform was made by the passing
of a measure which enabled the votes of electors to be given
in secret by means of the ballot. The greatness and rapidity
of these changes, however, produced so rapid a reaction in
the minds of the constituencies that on the failure of his at
tempt to pass a bill for organizing the higher education of
Ireland, Mr. Gladstone felt himself forced in 1874 to consult
public opinion by a dissolution of Parliament ; and the return
of a Conservative majority of nearly seventy members was
necessarily followed by his retirement from office, Mr. Dis
raeli again becoming first minister of the Crown.

INDEX
Volume II begins with page 531.

Abercorn, monastery of, founded,
42.
Aberdeen, sack of, 700.
Abingdon Abbey, development of,
72.
Aclea, battle of, 57.
Acre, battle of, 1029 ; bombarded,
1067.
Act of government, 753 ; of obliv
ion, 717 ; of supremacy passed,
424 ; of the Six Articles, 447 ; of
uniformity, renewed, 787 ; of
union, 905.
Adelard of Bath, 164.
Admonition to Parliament, 594.
.(Elfred, King of Wessex, 59 et seq.
.^thelbald. King of Mercia, 47.
jEthelberht, King of Jutes, 21 et seq.
.(Ethelflaed, ruler of Mercia, 66.
jEthelfrith, King of Northumbria,
23.
.(Ethelred, King of Mercia, 43 et seq.;
King of Wessex, 57 ; Ealdorman
of Mercia, 61 ; King of Britain, 76.
jEthelric, King of Northumbria, 16.
^thelstan, King of Wessex, 68.
.(Ethelthryth, Queen of Northum
bria, 41.
jEthelwulf, King of Wessex, 57.
Afghans, revolt of, 1068.
Agincourt, battle of, 336 et seq.
Agricola, victories of, 6.
Agriculture, growth of, under Eliza
beth, 495

69

Aidan, mission of, 29.
Aix-la-Chapelle, peace of, 806;
treaty of, 944.
Alberoni, policy of, 920.
Alcluyd, fall of, 51.
Alcuin, 53.
Alderman, origin of, 246.
Aldfrith, King of Northumbria, 48.
Alfred of Beverly, 149.
Alma, battle of, 1070.
Alva, Duke of, 489.
America, discovered, 381 ; Spain's
possessions in, 517 etseq.; Eng
lish settlements in, 639 et seq. ; Pu
ritan migration to, 639 ; emigra
tion to, 650 ; trade with, 925, 961 ;
growth of colonies in, 947, 962 et
seq. ; taxation of colonies, 974 et
seq., 985 et seq. ; and George III,
985 et seq. See also United States
and Canada.
American revolution, 988 et seq.
Amiens, treaty of, 1046.
Anderida, fall of, 13.
Anjou, annexed by France, 143 et
seq.
Anne, accession of, 897 ; death of,
913-
Anne of Bohemia, 329.
Anselm, 104 et seq. ; Archbishop of
Canterbury, 112.
Anselm of Aosta, 91.
Antwerp, captured by Parma, 524 ;
ruin of, 497.

1075

1076

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Apparel, statutes of, 353.
Aquitaine, restored to England, 289.
Architecture, progress in, 252 ; un
der Elizabeth, 499.
Argyll, revolt and death of, 842.
Armada, 524 ; wreck of second, 561.
Armagh, University of, 28.
Army, standing, raised by Went
worth, 660 ; disbanded by Charles
II, 783 ; mutiny act, 873.
Army plot, 682.
Arthur, Duke of Brittany, mur
dered, 143.
Arthurian legend, creation of, 149.
Articles of Religion, drawn up by
Henry VIII, 428 ; the Thirty-nine
established, 452 ; confirmed, 484 ;
Three, subscription to, 596.
Artillery, first used in field war
fare, 283.
Arundel, Earl of, 328.
Ashdown, battle of, 59.
Assandun, battle of, 81.
Assize of Arms, 137 ; of Clarendon,
137 ; of Northampton, 138.
Astronomy, study of, 773.
Athenree, battle of, 564.
Augustine, mission to Britain, 22.
Austerlitz, battle of, 1043.
Austria, growth of power of, 407 ;
alliance with, 1029.
Aylesford, battle of, II.
Bacon, Francis, 553 ; the Novum
Organum, 557 ; chancellor, 620 ;
impeached, 620 et seq. ; last work
and death of, 621 ; study of, 771.
Bacon, Roger, i"]! et seq.
Baeda, 48 et seq.
Ball, John, mission of, 313.
Balliol, Edward, 268 et seq.
Balliol, John, 235 et seq.
Bankers, Florentine, expelled, 260.
Bannockburn, battle of, 261, 266.
Barbury Hill, battle of, 14.
Barfleur, battle of, 882.

Barnet, battle of, 361.
Baronage, great power of, 340 et
seq. ; decline of, 365.
Bastile, fall of, 1013.
Bautzen, battle of, 1056.
Baylen, battle of, 1047.
Beachy Head, battle of, 880.
Beaufort, chief minister, 342 ; car
dinal, 351.
Bedford, Regent of France, 309,
344, et seq.
Benedict Biscop, 36 et seq.
Benedict of Peterborough, 147.
Benevolences, demanded by James
I, 614.
Bentham, Jeremy, 1053.
Beorhtric, King of West Saxony, 53.
Beornwulf, King of Mercia, 55.
Berlin decree, 1044.
Bernicia, 16.
Berwick, destruction of, 237 ; cap
ture of, 261 ; recapture of, 270 ;
treaty of, 674.
Bible, criticism instituted, 382 ; ef
fect on character, ^B^etseq. ; Hen
ry VIII's, 428 ; popularity, 528.
Bidassoa, battle of, 1057.
Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, resists Ed
ward, 258.
Bill of Rights, 872.
Birinus, mission of, 29.
Bishops, removed from Lords, 681.
Bishops' war, 676.
Black Book, 426.
Black Prince, death of, 294.
Blake, defeated, 734 ; victory at
Santa Cruz, 754.
Blasphemies, ordinance of, 720.
Blenheim, battle of, 901.
Bloody circuit, 843.
Blucher, 1059 ei seq.
Bohun, Earl of Herford, resists
king, 258.
Boisil, mission of, 29.
Boleyn, Anne, and Henry VIII,
412 et seq. ; death of, 437.

INDEX

1077

Bolingbroke (St. John), secretary of
war, 903 etseq. ; negotiations with
France, 911 ; flight of, 915.
Boniface, Archbishop of Canter
bury, 180.
Boniface, preacher, 53.
Books, demand for, 370.
Borodino, battle of, 1056.
Boroughbridge, battle of, 262.
Boston, in England, 41.
Boston tea party, 986.
Bosworth Field, battle of, 377.
Bothwell, 487.
Botulf, hermit, 41.
Bouvines, battle of, 157.
Boyne, battle of, 878.
Bradford, battle of, 42.
Brandywine, battle of, 990.
Breda, peace of, 805.
Brentford, capture of, 693.
Bretigny, treaty of, 289.
Bristol, siege of, 695.
Brown, Robert, 597.
Brownists, separation of, 597.
Bruce, David, returns, 271 ; taken
prisoner, 285.
Bruce, Robert, claims Scottish
throne, 235 ; rising of, 259 ; suc
cess of, 261 ; truce with, 262 ; ca
reer of, 264 et seq.
Brunanburh, battle of, 68.
Buckingham, revolts against Rich
ard III, 376.
Buckingham, put to death by Henry
VIII.
Buckingham, Villiers, Duke of,
617 et seq. ; and Bacon, 621 ; for
eign policy of, 625 et seq. ; im
peachment of, 630 ; expedition
to Rochelle, 633 ; assassinated,
637-
Bunker Hill, battle of, 989.
Bunyan, 792 et seq.
Burford, battle of, 48.
Burgesses, summoned to Parlia
ment, 222.

Burgundians, strife of, with Ar-
magnacs, 335.
Burke, and American taxation, 977 ;
and French revolution, 1015 et
seq. ; "Regicide Peace,'' 1027.
Busaco, battle of, 1049.
Bute, prime minister, 968.
Butler, Hudibras, 768.
Cabal, 827 et seq.
Cabinet, abolished, 828.
Cabot, discoveries of, 381.
Cade's revolt, 341 ; rebellion, 353.
Cadiz, burning of, 560.
Cadwallon, King of Wales, 27.
Caedmon, works of, 34.
Caen, sack of, 95 ; storming of,
337 ; university founded, 351.
Calais, capture of, 464 ; siege of,
285.
Calcutta, Black Hole of, 955.
Cambridge, heresy at, 442 et seq.
Camperdown, battle of, 1028.
Campo Formio, treaty of, 1027.
Canada ceded to England, 969.
Canning, George, 1045 et seq. ; for
eign policy, 1047, 1064 ; resigns,
1049 ; 3-"d Catholics, 1053.
Canterbury, first royal city, 22 ;
made a diocese, 38.
Canterbury Tales, Caxton's edition,
372.
Cape St. Vincent, battle of, 997 ;
second battle of, 1028.
Cardinal College, founded, 389.
Carpets, introduction of, 499.
Carteret, 939 et seq.
Carthagena, battle of, 931.
Cartwright and Presbyterianism,
592 et seq. ; and Parliament, 594
et seq. ; discipline of, 599.
Castlebar, battle of, 1034.
Catesby, and gunpowder plot, 610.
Catherine, divorced from Henry
VIII, 423.
Catherine of Russia, 1014, 1020.

1078

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Catholics, under Elizabeth, 476, 483
et seq., 491, 514 et seq. ; spread of
doctrine, 601 etseq. ; and gunpow
der plot, 611 ; Laud and, 647 et
seq. ; toleration of, 790 ; and
Charles II, 802 et seq. ; and Test
Act, 812 ; exclusion of, under
Charles II, 817 et seq.; "popish
plot,'' 823 et seq., 832 ; under
James II, 845; in Ireland, 1030;
emancipation, 1038, 1053, 1065.
See also Church.
Cato Street conspiracy, 1064.
Cavaliers, 688.
Cawnpore, massacre of, 1070.
Caxton, work of, 370 et seq.
Ceadda, Bishop, 31.
Ceadwalla, King of West Saxons,
45.
Ceawlin, King of West Saxons, 14.
Cecil, minister to Elizabeth, 491 ;
disgrace of, 526 ; death of, 616.
Centwine, King of West Saxons,
45-
Cenwealh, King of West Saxons,
42.
Cenwulf, King of Northumbria, 54.
Ceolred, King of Mercia, 46.
Cerdic, ruler of West Saxons, 14.
Chalgrove field, battle of, 695.
Chancellor, jurisdiction of, 214.
Chancellorship, established, 120.
Chancery Court, jurisdiction of,
214; reform of, 747.
Chantries, suppressed, 448.
Chapman's Homer, 502.
Charford, battle of, 14.
Charles I, goes to Spain, 625 ; char
acter of, 626 ; accession of, 627 et
seq. ; levies forced loan, 632 ; and
Gustavus Adolphus, 652 et seq. ;
and revenue, 652 ; and Star Cham
ber, 653 et seq. ; and ship-money,
668 et seq. ; war with Scotland,
673 etseq. ; and Long Parliament,
681 et seq. ; enters Long Parlia

ment, 689 ; rejects conditions of
peace, 713 ; captured by Parlia
ment, 713 ; recaptured, 719 ; put
to death, 723.
Charles II, recognized by Holland,
724 ; crowned at Scone, 731 ; in
vades England, 731 ; restoration
of, 759 ; reign of, •j'ioet seq. ; char
acter of, 796 ; policy of, 799 et seq. ;
and Louis XIV, 803, 820 ^'^'^^r. ; be
comes Catholic, 815 ; and Shaftes
bury, 818 et seq. ; and grand al
liance, 835 ; triumph over Par
liament, 835 et seq. ; plot to mur
der, 837 ; death of, 840.
Charles IV, King of Bavaria, 282.
Charles V, Emperor of Austria, 403,
407 ; breaks treaty, 412.
Charles V, King of France, 292.
Charles VI, King of France, 335.
Charles VII, King of France, 344 ;
coronation of, 349.
Charles IX, King of France, 519 et
seq.
Charles XII, King of Sweden, 921.
Charles the Great, King of France,
53-
Charles the Pretender, 942 et seq.
Charleston, capture of, 992.
Charmouth, battle of, 57.
Charterhouse, destruction of, 433.
Chatham. See Pitt.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 274 et seq.
Cherbourg, surrender of, 352.
Chester, battle of, 24.
Chimneys, introduction of, 499.
China, war with, 1068.
Chippewa, battle of, 1058.
Christ Church, founded by Wolsey,
406.
Christian church, split in, 36.
Christianity, introduction of, 22.
Chronicle, Anglo-Saxon, 65.
Church, organization of, Roman,
38 ; assumes government, 128 ;
Edward's levy on, 257 ; decline

INDEX

1079

of, 296 ; loss of power of, 365 ;
CromweU's plans for reduction
of, 421 ; Henry VIII acknowl
edged as head of, 421 ; of Eng
land, established, 424 ; spoliation
of, by Henry VIII, 440 et seq. ; in
Ireland, 570 et seq. ; under Laud,
644 et seq. ; and Parliament, 687 ;
James II and, 846 et seq. ; effects
of Toleration Act, 875. See also
Catholic.
Churl, degradation of, 75.
Ciudad Rodrigo, battle of, 1055.
Civil war, 692-707 ; renewed, 719
et seq.
Clarence, revolt of, 360.
Clarendon and Charles I, 685.
Clarendon, Council of, 133 ; of state,
725 ; permanent, established, 193.
Clarendon, Lord. See Hyde.
Clement and Henry VIII, 412 et
seq.
Clement IV and Roger Bacon, 174.
Clergy, admitted to Parliament,
224 ; disfavor of, 296.
Clifford, lord treasurer, 810 ; re
signs, 812.
Clive, 945 et seq. ; conquest of In
dia, 955.
Closter Seven, convention of, 949.
Cnut, King of Britain, 81 et seq.
Coinage, under Elizabeth, 494.
Coke, chief justice, 615.
Coleman, plots of, 822 ; put to
death, 825.
Colet, learning of, 382 et seq. ;
preaching of, 389.
Colman, leaves Lindesfarne, 37.
Columba, founds lona, 29.
Columban, mission of, 28.
Columbus, 381.
Commerce, rise of English, 362 ;
growth under Elizabeth, 496.
Commoners, called to Parliament,
197.
Common Pleas, Court of, 213.

Commons, establishment of, 290 ;
decline under Tudors, 365 et seq. ;
change in representation, 507 ;
growth of power under Elizabeth,
508 ; and religion, 638 et seq. ; be
comes supreme, 883 ; under
George III, 969 et seq. ; publica
tion of proceedings, 983 et seq.
See also Parliament.
Commonwealth, established, 724 ;
recognized, 730.
Communes, established, 194.
Confession of Faith, 710.
Conformity, required by Laud, 645.
Connaught, invasion of, 576.
Constantinople, fall of, 381.
Constitutional Convention, 737.
Continual Council, established, 253.
Convocation, 610.
Cook, Captain, 961.
Cooper, Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury),
758 ; character, 812 et seq. ; im
prisoned, 820 ; and " popish plot,"
824 ; triumph, 826 ; policy, 829 ;
dismissal, 831 ; flight and death,
836 et seq.
Copenhagen, captured, 1039 ; bom
barded, 1046.
Copernicus, 381.
Copyholder, 308.
Corn-la.w agitation, 1068 et seq.
Cornwall, supports Charles I, 694.
Cornwallis, surrender of, 996.
Corunna, battle of, 1048.
Court of Appeal, creation of, 139.
Court of Exchequer, functions of,
121.
Courtenay, Bishop of London, 300
et seq.
Covenant, concluded, 697 ; abol
ished, 800.
Covenanters and Charles I, 673.
Cranmer, Thomas, 420 ; Archbishop
of Canterbury, 423 ; tyranny, 454 ;
sent to Tower, 455 ; sentence and
burning of, 461 et seq.

io8o

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Crecy, battle of, 283.
Crimea, invasion of, 1070.
Cromwell, Oliver, farmer, 590 et
seq. ; at Marston Moor, 699 ; rise
of, 700 et seq. ; regiment of, 701 ;
at Naseby, 705 ct seq. ; accused of
treason, 716 ; and Parliament,
717 et seq. ; quells revolt in army,
726 ; massacre in Ireland, 727 ;
invades Scotland, 729 ; dissolves
Parliament, 735 ; made Protector,
740 ; government of, 744 et seq. ;
foreign policy of, 748 ; death of,
757.
Cromwell, Richard, Protector, 757
et seq.
Cromwell, Thomas, rise of, 417 ;
minister to Henry VIII, 418 et
seq. ; fall and death of, 438.
Cropidy Bridge, battle of, 699.
Crowland, abbey of, foundation of,
41.
Crusade, first, 112.
Culloden Moor, battle of, 943.
Customs, levied by James I, 612.
Cuthbert, mission of, 32 ; Bishop
of Lindesfarne, 43 ; death of, 44.
Cuthwulf, King of East Saxons, 14.
Cynric, King of West Saxons, 14.
Daegsastan, battle of, 23.
Danby. See Osborne.
Danes, massacre of, 77.
Darcy, revolt and death of, 434, 435.
Darnley, marriage with Mary Stu
art, 485 ; murder of, 488.
David, King of Scotland, 234.
Declaration of Independence, 990 ;
of indulgence, 810.
Deiri, kingdom of, 16.
Denmark, fleet seized, 1046.
Deorham, battle of, 24.
Dermod, King of Leinster, 563.
Despotism, growth of, under Tu
dors, 364.
Dettingen, battle of, 940.

Dieppe, burning of, 155.
Dominic, 185.
Doom Book made by Alfred, 62.
Dorchester, see of, established, 29.
Douay, Elizabeth and, 514.
Douglas, house of, 478.
Douglas, James, assists Bruce, 266.
Dover, treaty of, 808.
Dowdall, Archbishop of Armagh,
573-
Drake, Francis, voyages of, 523,
524 ; attacks Spanish coast, 526 ;
commands English fleet, 527 ; ex
pedition against Spain, 559.
Drama, rise of, 538.
Dress, under Elizabeth, 500.
Dreux, capture of, 339 ; battle of,
483.
Drogheda, storm of, 727.
Dublin, conquest of, 564.
Dumouriez, 1022.
Dunbar, battle of, 729.
Dundee, revolt of, 868.
Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury,
69 et seq.
Duquesne, battle of, 948 ; capture
of, 959.
Durham, battle of, 698.
Durrow, University of, 28.
Duties, import, levied by James I,
612.
Eadberht, King of Northumbria, 51.
Eadgar, King, reign of, 71 ^/ seq.
Eadgar the .^theling, chosen king,
100 ; leads revolt, 102.
Eadgar, King of Scotland, 113.
Eadmer, writer, 147.
Eadmund, King of East Anglia,
58.
Eadmund, King of Wessex, 68.
Eadmund Ironside, King of Britain,
81.
Eadred, reign of, 70 et seq.
Eadward, King of Wessex, 66.
Eadward, King of Britain, 76.

INDEX

1081

Eadward the Confessor, 85 et seq.
Eadwig, reign of, 71 et seq.
Eadwine, conversion of, 26 ; death
of, 27.
Eadwine, Earl of Mercia, loi, 103
et seq.
Ealdhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, 46.
Ealhstan, Bishop of Sherborne, 57.
Earls, origin of, 4.
Earthquake, Council of, 305.
East India Company founded, 945.
Ebbsfleet, landing in, 9.
Ebro, battle of, 1047.
Ecclesiastical Commission, power
of, 595.
Ecgberht, Archbishop of York, 51 ;
returns from exile, 54.
Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria, 41
et seq.
Ecgwine, Bishop, 41.
Edgehill, battle of, 693.
Edinburgh, origin of, 25.
Edington, battle of, 60.
Edith, marries Henry I, 114.
Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Can
terbury, 168.
Edmundsbury Abbey, founded, 58.
Education, middle-class, estab
lished, 388.
Edward, Prince, defeats Simon de
Montfort, 199.
Edward I, 209 et seq. ; establishes
Constitution, 211 ; character of,
226 et seq.
Edward II, reign of, 259 et seq. ;
imprisonment and murder of,
263, 264.
Edward III, reign of, 263 et seq. ;
policy of, 272 et seq.
Edward IV, reign of, 358 et seq. ;
restoration of, 361 ; second reign
of, 366 et seq.
Edward V, murder of, 375 et seq.
Edward VI, education of, 392 ;
reign of, 450 et seq.
Eikon Basilike, 725.

Eliot, Sir John, 629 et seq. ; death
of, 651.
Elizabeth, education of, 392 ; sent
to Tower, 457 ; character of, 464
et seq. ; reign of, 474 et seq. ; death
of, 581.
Ellandun, battle of, 55.
Ely Abbey, founded, 41.
Ely, battle of, 104.
Emancipation of peasants, 317.
English, spread of, language, 272.
Episcopal Church, decline of, 788.
See also Church.
Erasmus, 383 et seq. ; leaves Cam
bridge, 392 ; teaching of, 394 ;
and Luther, 404.
Essex, revolt and death of, 580.
Essex commands parliamentary
army, 692 ; retirement of, 704.
Euphuism, 503.
Evesham, battle of, 199.
Exchange, Royal, founded, 497.
Exchequer, court of, 213.
Eylau, battle of, 1045.
Faddiley, battle of, 20.
Fairfax commands New Model, 704.
Falkland and Charles I, 685 et seq. ;
and theology, 774 et seq.
Falkirk, battle of, 240 ; second bat
tle of, 943.
Famine, six years', 261.
Farms, established, 308.
Fastolfe, Sir John, campaign of,
347 ; library of, 374.
Faukes de Breaute, revolt of, 176 et
seq.
Fawkes, Guido, conspiracy of, 610.
Ferozeshah, battle of, 1068.
Feudalism introduced, 104.
Field of the Cloth of Gold, 407.
First of June, battle of, 1027.
First Partition Treaty, 889.
Fisher, and Luther, 403, 404 ; op
poses Henry VIII's divorce, 413 ;
fall and death of, 432.

I082

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Fitzneal, author, 148.
Fitzosbern, minister to William, loi
et seq. ; revolts, 109.
Fitz Thomas, mayor of London, 251.
Fitzurse, assassinates Becket, 135.
Fitzwalter, leads barons against
John, 159.
Flamsteed, 773.
Flanders, alliance with, 281 ; con
quests in, 755.
Fletching, battle of, 195.
Fleurus, battle of, 1026.
Flodden Field, battle of, 478.
Florence, learning of, 381.
Folkmote, passing of, 75.
Fontenoy, battle of, 941.
Forest laws, used for extortion, 181.
Forests, charter of, 258.
Fourmigny, battle of, 352.
Fox, Charles James, Whig leader,
999 ; and Burke, 1018 ; policy of,
1046.
Fox, John, Book of Martyrs, 513.
France, in fourteenth century, 280 ;
distress of, 287 ; one hundred
years' war with, 279 ; invasion
of England by, 326 ; Henry Vs
war with, 335 ; Henry V claims
throne of, 338 ; northern, yields
to Bedford, 345 ; growth under
Louis XI, 390 ; rise of, 748 ; domi
nance of, 852 ; William's war
with, 867 et seq. ; defeated in
America, 960 ; war with, 992 et
seq. ; revolution in, 1013 ; Pitt
and, 1021 ; war with, 1023 ; war
with, 1041 ; Spanish alliance with,
1042.
Francis of Assisi, 185.
Francis I, King of France, 405.
Frederic II, King of Prussia, 171.
Frederick of Bohemia, and James,
619.
Frederick the Great, policy of, 940
etseq., 948; and Pitt, 956 etseq. ;
campaigns of, 967.

Freeholders, admitted to govern
ment, 221.
Free trade, 1069.
French and Indian war, 947.
French, disuse of language, 272.
Friars, black, 186 ; begging, 185 ;
gray, 186 ; established in univer
sities, 188.
Frith gild, 245.
Frobisher, Martin, 640.
Fuentes d'Onore, battle of, 1050.
Fulk of Jerusalem, Count of An
jou, 125.
Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou,
123.
Fulk the Good, Count of Anjou,
123.
Fulk the Red, Count of Anjou, 123.
Gage, Gen., Governor of Massachu
setts, 987 et seq.
Gall, mission of, 28.
Gaveston, appointed minister, 259
et seq.
Geoffry Martel, Count of Anjou,
125.
Geoffry of Monmouth, History of
the Britains, 149.
George I, reign of, 913-926.
George II, reign of, 926 et seq.
George III, accession of, 965 ; char
acter of, 965 ; and Frederick, 968 ;
aims of, 980 etseq. ; patronage of,
985 et seq. ; insane, 1014 ; death
of, 1064.
George IV, accession of, 1064.
Gerald de Barri, 148.
Germany and James I, 618.
Gibraltar, becomes English, gii.
Gilbert, Humphrey, 640.
Gildas, 16.
Gilds, growth of merchant, 115, 246
et seq.
Glass, use of, 500.
Glastonbury monastery, founded,
46.

INDEX.

1083

Glencoe, massacre of, 869.
Gloucester, Duke of, 327.
Gloucester, intrigues of Duke of, 345.
Glyndwr, Owen, revolt of, 333.
Godwine, Earl of Wessex, 85.
Gower, 369.
Grand Alliance, 835 et seq.
Grand Remonstrance, 686.
Grattan, plea for reform, 1032.
Great Charter, i^r) etseq. ; reaffirmed
by Henry III, 163.
Great Council, established, i6i ;
demands ministry, 192.
Greene, writings of, 505, 542.
Greenwich Observatory, 773.
Gregory the Great, 21.
Gregory VII, Pope, 108.
Grenville, prime minister, 972 et
seq., 1044.
Grey, Elizabeth, marries Edward
IV, 360.
Grey, Jane, plot to make her queen,
454 ; put to death, 457.
Grindecobbe, 319.
Grocyn, teacher, 381.
Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 181 ;
Bishop of London, 184.
Guienne, cession of, 279.
Guiscard, Robert, Norman knight,
93-
Guise, assassination of, 484.
Gunpowder, general use of, 378.
Gunpowder plot, 610 et seq.
Gustavus Adolphus and Charles I,
652.
Guthlac, hermit, 41.
Gwynn, Nell, 798.
Gyrwas, settlement of, 15.
Habeas Corpus Act, 838 ; suspended,
1023.
Hakluyt's voyages, 532.
Halidon Hill, battle of, 270.
Halifax, policy of, 833.
Hampden, John, 633 ; refuses ship-
money, 670 ; death of, 695.

Hanover, convention of, 944.
Harald, King of Britain, 86.
Harald Hadrada, King of Norway,
98 et seq.
Harfleur, capture of, 335.
Harlaw, battle of, 478.
Harley, secretary of state, 903 et
seq. ; imprisoned, 915.
Harold, prime minister, 87 ; king,
88 et seq.
Harrison, executed, 782.
Harthacnut, King of England, 84.
Hastings, battle of, 99 et seq.
Hastings, John, claims Scottish
crown, 235.
Hastings, Warren, 994 et seq. ; trial
of, loio.
Hatfield, battle of, 27.
Heaven's Field, battle of, 28.
Hengest, lands in Britain, 8.
Hengest-dun, battle of, 57.
Henry I, reign of, 113 et seq. ; char
ter of, 113.
Henry II, reign of, 129 et seq.
Henry III, reign of, 163, 176 et seq.
Henry III, King of France, assassi
nated, 560.
Henry IV, reign of, 331 et seq.
Henry V, reign of, 335 et seq.
Henry VI, reign of, 340 et seq. ;
crowned King of France, 350 ;
restoration of, 361.
Henry VII, reign of, 378 et seq.
Henry VIII, reign of, 386 et seq. ;
marriage with Catherine, 390 ;
divorces Catherine, 412 ; becomes
head of the church, 421 ; draws
up articles of religion, 428 ; death
of, 449-
Henry, Bishop of Winchester, 128.
Henry of Huntingdon, annals of,
147-
Henry of Lancaster, conquers king,
330.
Herbert, George, 602.
Heresy, statute of, 332.

io84

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Herrings, battle of the, 347.
Hertford, protector, 450.
Hexham, battle of, 358.
Highlands, subjugation of, 745.
Hild, Abbess, 33.
Hobbes, Thomas, 777 et seq.
Hohenfriedbery, battle of, 942.
Hohenlinden, battle of, 1030.
Holland, war with, 733 ; Charles
II's war with, 795.
Holy Alliance, 1064.
Holy League, 391, 524.
Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 593
et seq.
Horsa, lands in Britain, 8.
Hotspur, rebellion of, 333.
Howard, Catherine, marries Henry
VIII, 448.
Howard, John, 938 et seq.
Howe, Gen., in America, 989.
Hrolf, ruler of Normandy, 89.
Hubert de Burgh, justicise, 176 ; dis
graced, 179.
Hugh le Dispenser, 261 ; hanged,
263.
Huguenots and Elizabeth, 483.
Hundred Years' War begins, 279 ;
ends, 352.
Hussey, revolt and death of, 434, 435.
Hutchinson, Col., character of, 585.
Hyde, chancellor, 781 et seq. ; Lord
Clarendon, 804.
Hyder All, 996.
Ida, victories of, 16.
India, conquest of, 945, 955 ; Clive
in, 993 et seq. ; administration of,
1009 ; Sepoy rebellion, 1070 ; pass
es to the crown, 1071.
Industry, growth of, under Eliza
beth, 495.
Ine, King of West Saxons, 45.
Inkermann, battle of, 1070.
Innocent III, Pope, 153 ; bull of
deposition against John, 155; an
nuls Great Charter, 162.

Instrument of government, 740.
lona, monastery founded, 29.
Ireland, conversion of, 28 ; decline of,
561 et seq. ; under Henry VII, 566 ;
under Henry VIII, 567 et seq. ;
conquest of, 568 ; refuses Act of
Supremacy, 570, 571 ; coloniza
tion of, 574, 575 ; Act of Uniform
ity in, 576 ; under Elizabeth,
577 ; famine in, 578 ; introduction
of English law into, 578 etseq.;
colonization of, 579 et seq. ; Par
liament summoned, 660 ; under
Wentworth, 659 et seq. ; conspir
acy of Ulster, 684 ; Charles I
seeks aid from, 697 ; rebels against
commonwealth, 724 et seq. ; con
quered by Cromwell, 727 , settle
ment of, by Cromwell, 746 ; un
der Charles II, 801 ; revolt
against William III, 870 et seq. ;
revolution in, 878 et seq. ; and
Pitt, 1009 ; revolution of 1798,
1028 ; after William's conquest,
1030 ; and the younger Pitt, 1031 ;
union of, 1035 ; Catholic Associa
tion, 1065 ; and O'ConneU, 1065
et seq. ; rising under O'Brien,
1069.
Iron, manufacture of, under Eliza
beth, 496.
Italy, conquered by France, 391.
Jacobites in Ireland, 877 et seq. ; ris
ing of, 918 ; second rising, 942 ;
decline of, 943.
Jacqueline, Countess of Holland,
345.
Jacquerie, 289.
Jails, reform in, 938 et seq.
James I, King of Scotland, 478;
birth of, 486 ; reign of, 603 et seq. ;
and Calvinism, 606.
James II, admiral, 810; plots to ex
clude, 817, 830 ; accession, 841 ;
cruelty of, 843 ; treaty with Louis

INDEX

1085

XIV, 844 ; increases standing
army, 844 ; and Catholics, 846 ;
and Parliament, 849 et seq. ; revolt
against, 860 et seq. ; flight of, 864 ;
abdication of, 866 ; revolt in Ire
land, S71 et seq.
James V, King of Scotland, 478 et
seq.
James VI, King of Scotland, 486, 4S9.
James, William, Protestant, 304.
Jeffreys, Chief Justice, 843.
Jemappes, battle of, 1022.
Jena, battle of, 1044.
Jesuits, landing of, 515 ; influence
of, 600 et seq. ; and gunpowder
plot, 5ii ; alleged plot of, 823 etseq.
Jews, settle in England, 108 ; ban
ishment of, 256 ; return of, 747.
Joan of Arc, 344 et seq.
John, King of France, captured,
288.
John, King of Bohemia, 284.
John of Beverly, 34.
John of Gaunt, 292 et seq.
John, revolts, 139, 140 ; accession
of, 143 ; submits to Pope, 156.
See also Great Charter.
Jonson, Ben, 552 et seq.
Journalism, rise of, 984.
Julius Caesar, conquest of, 6.
Junius, letters of, 982.
Jury, origin of trial by, 138.
Justices' circuit, established, 138.
Justices of the peace, established,
215.
Jutes, home of, i.
Kent, primacy of, 21 ; complaint of
the Commons in, 353.
Killiecrankie, battle of, 868.
Kilsyth, battle of, 706.
King in council, jurisdiction of, 213.
King's Bench, judges for, 213.
King's court, established, 106; under
Henry I, 121 ; power of, 136 ; un
der Great Charter, 160.

Knighthood, made compulsory, 254.
Knights, admitted to Parliament,
221 ; growth of power of, 341.
Knolles's History of the Turks,
503.
Knollys, minister to Elizabeth, 484.
Labor, released from soil, 310.
Laborers, statute of, 312.
La Hague, battle of, 882.
La Hire, Captain, 347.
Lake Champlain, battle of, 1058.
Lake Erie, battle of, 1057.
Lambeth, treaty of, 164.
Lancaster, Earl of, resists Edward,
260 et seq. ; executed, 262.
Lancaster, house of, 332. See also
John of Gaunt, Henry of Lancas
ter, and War of the Roses.
Lanfranc, mission of, 90 ; minister
to William the Conqueror, 97 ;
made Bishop of Canterbury, 107.
Langport, battle of, 706.
Langton, Archbishop of Canter
bury, 153 ; withstands John, 158 ;
suspended by Pope, 162 ; opposes
barons, 177.
Langton, Bishop of Winchester,
385.
Lansdowne Hill, battle of, 695.
Latimer, impeached, 294.
Latimer, Hugh, 410 ; rise of, 443 et
seq. ; sent to Tower, 455 ; made
Bishop of Worcester, 445 et seq. ;
burned, 461.
Latitudinarians, 777.
Laud, adviser to Charles I, 627 ;
Bishop of London, 637 ; plans of,
644 ; rejects cardinal's hat, 645 ;
revolt against, 670 et seq. ; and
Scotland, 663 et seq. ; imprisoned,
680.
Layamon, 151.
Leipzig, battle of, 1056.
Leith, siege of, 480.
Le Mans, capture of, 139.

io86

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Leo X, election of, 393.
Leslie, commands Scottish forces,
674, 698.
Levy, national, established, 137.
Lexington, battle of, 989.
Ligny, battle of, 1060.
Lilburne, John, 726.
Lille, reduction of, 908.
Lincoln, siege of, 163.
Lincolnshire, surrendered to Ecg
frith, 43.
Lindisward, 15.
Lindesfarne, 31.
Literature, decline of, 278 ; under
Elizabeth, 501 et seq.
Liveries, statute of, enforced, 380.
Liverpool, Lord, prime minister,
1054.
Livery companies, organization of,
251-
Llewelyn ap Jowerth, 206 et seq.
Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, 208.
Locke, 779.
Lollard, mission of, 303.
LoUardry, tenacity of, 342 ; death
of, 441.
Lollards, spread of, 324 ; persecu
tion of, 332 ; rising of, 334.
London, receives charter, 116 ;
classes in, 249 ; becomes mart of
Europe, 497 ; enmity against
Charles I, 654.
Londonderry, colonization of, 579 ;
relief of, 871.
Lords, growth of House of, 1035.
Louis IX, King of France, annuls
provisions of Oxford, 195.
Louis XI, King of France, 360, 390.
Louis XII, King of France, 391.
Louis XIV, 803 et seq. ; policy of,
805 ; arbiter of Europe, 822 ; and
Charles II, 825 ; reopens secret
negotiations, 831 ; treaty with
James II, 844 ; revokes Edict of
Nantes, 844 ; aims of, 853 et seq. ;
and Grand Alliance, 867 ct seq. ;

and Jacobites, 876 etseq. ; invades
England, 880 ; success in Nether
lands, 881 ; defeat of, 882 ; in
vades Flanders, 892 ; declares
war on England, 893 ; and Marl
borough, 900 et seq.
Louis XV, 920 et seq.
Louis, Prince, conquers John, 163.
Louisberg, capture of, 958.
Lowestoft, battle of, 795.
Lowlands, ceded to England, 270.
Lucknow, relief of, 1070.
Luneville, peace of, 1030.
Luther, 462 et seq.
Lutzen, battle of, 1056.
Lyly, John, 503.
Mabinogion, 202.
Magna Charta. See Great Charter.
Maine, ceded to Duke Rene, 352.
Malcolm, King of Scotland, 104.
Maldon, battle of, 77.
Malplaquet, battle of, 909.
Malta, surrender of, 1040.
Manufacture, development under
Elizabeth, 496.
Marengo, battle of, 1030.
Marlborough, Duke of, 894 et seq. ;
first campaign of, 901 ; policy of,
903 et seq., 907 ; campaign in
Flanders, 908 ; dismissal and
flight of, 911.
Marlowe, Christopher, 542 et seq.
Marsh, Adam, 191.
Marston Moor, battle of, 699.
Martel, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, 95.
Martin Marprelate, pamphlets, 59S.
Mary, plot to deprive her of throne,
454 ; reign of, 455 et seq.
Mary, marries William of Orange,
821 ; death of, 886.
Maryland founded, 641.
Maserfeld, battle of, 30.
Mass, attack on, 447 ; abandoned
by Henry VIII, 449 ; restored by
Mary, 455.

INDEX

1087

Massachusetts founded, 643.
Matilda, daughter of Henry I, 122 ;
lands in England, 127.
Mayflower, 642.
Meaux, siege of, 339.
Medeshamstead, abbey of, 41.
Mellitus, Bishop of London, 26.
Merchants, statute of, established,
215.
Mercia, settlement of, i6 ; rebels,
40 ; progress of, 41.
Methodists, origin of, 934 et seq.
Middle-English, settlement of, 15.
Milan decree, 1046.
Milton, John, education of, 587 et
seq. ; Comus, 665 et seq. ; Lycidas,
672 ; and religious reform, 688 ;
imprisoned, 760 ; Paradise Lost,
762 et seq.
Minden, battle of, 957.
Ministry, formation of, 885.
Mise of Amiens, 195 ; of Lewes, 196.
Monasteries, suppression of small
er, 427 ; dissolution of, 448.
Monk, General, under Charles II,
685 ; rebellion of, 759.
Monmouth, pretends to throne, 830,
832 ; arrest of, 836 ; revolt and
death of, 842 et seq.
Monopolies, revived, 619.
Moodkee, battle of, 1068.
More, Thomas, Utopia, 381 ; work
of, 384, 395 etseq. ; creation of Uto
pia, 398 et seq. ; and Erasmus, 388 ;
and Luther, 403 ; and Wolsey,
409 ; oppose tax, 409, 411 ; chan
cellor, 419 ; fall and death of, 431
et seq.
Morkere, Earl of Northumbria, re
sists the Conqueror, IOI, 103 et
seq.
Mortmain, statute of, 214.
Morton's fork, 379.
Moscow, retreat from, 1056.
Mowbray, Roger, revolts, 136.
Mutiny Act, 873.

Namur, capture of, 887.
Nantes, Edict of, revoked, 844.
Napoleon Bonaparte, 1026 et seq.;
in Egypt, 1029 ; first campaign of,
1027 ; First Consul, 1030 ; foreign
policy of, 1039 ; aggressions of,
1041 ; third campaign of, 1042 et
seq. ; war on Prussia, 1044 1 ^.lli-
ance with Russia, 1046 ; Empe
ror, 1046 ; seizes Spain, 1047 ; in
vades Russia, 1055 ; retreats from
Moscow, 1056 ; abdicates, 1057 ;
returns from Elba, 1059 ; at Wa
terloo, 1060 ; exile of, 1062.
Naseby, battle of, 705.
Navarino, battle of, 1065.
Navigation Act, 733 ; enforced, 975 ;
defied, 990.
Nectansmere, battle of, 43.
Nelson, Admiral, in Egypt, 1029 ;
at Trafalgar, 1043.
Netherlands, revolt of, 489, 519 ;
master of the channel, 796 ;
Charles II attacks, 809.
Neville's Cross, battle of, 285.
Newbury, battle of, 696 ; second
battle of, 700.
New England, founded, 639 ; revi
val of emigration to, 670 ; char
acter of, 963.
New Model, organization of, 704 ;
refuses to disband, 714.
New Orleans, battle of, 1058.
Newton, Isaac, 773 et seq.
Nile, battle of, 1029.
Nimeguen, peace of, 822.
Nobility, power reduced, 136.
Nonconformists, persecution of,
787.
Norfolk, treason of Duke of, 491 et
seq,
Norham, Parliament of, 235.
Normandy, becomes English de
pendency, 120 ; revolts against
Richard, 141 ; conquered by Phil
ip, 143-

io88

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

North, Lord, prime minister, 985 ;
resigns, 996.
Northallerton, battle of, 127.
Northampton, treaty of, 269 ; bat
tle of, 355.
Northeast passage, search for, 497.
North Foreland, battle of, 795.
Northumberland, Earl of, revolts,
III.
Northumbria, creation of, i5.
Nottingham, peace of, 58.
Oates, " popish plot," 823 et seq.
O'Brien, rising of, 1069.
O'ConneU, Daniel, 1065 et seq.
Odo, Bishop, 109.
Offa, King of Mercia, 52.
Oldcastle, Sir John, 334.
Old Sarum, capture of, 14.
O'Neil, Owen Roe, 724.
O'Neill, Shane, revolts, 575.
O'Neill, Hugh, revolts, 578.
Opus Maj us, of Roger Bacon, 175.
Orangemen, 1034.
Ordainers, established, 260.
Orders in Council, 1045 ; repealed,
1054.
Ordinances, draught of, 260.
Orleans, siege of, 345 ; relief of,
347 et seq.
Ormond, 724.
Osbern, his lives of the saints,
147-
Osborne, Lord Danby, lord treas
urer, 818 ; policy of 819 et seq. ;
impeached, 825.
Oswald, King of Northumbria, 27.
Oswiu, King of Northumbria, 31 ;
death of, 41.
Otford, battle of, 52.
Oudenarde, battle of, 908.
Owen, triumph of, 2o5.
Owen Glyndwr, rebellion of, 170.
Oxford, provisions of, 192 ; an
nulled, 195.
Oxford, town of, 165.

Oxford University, growth of, 164 ;
establishment of friars at, 188 ;
decline of, 304, 369 ; library of,
374; Greek in, 380.?^ J^?. ; revival
at, 388 ; and religion, 512 ; revolts
against James II, 850.
Palatinate, disaffected by James I,
619.
Pale, English, 564 et seq.
Palmerston, Lord, 1067.
Pandulf, papal legate, 176 ; re
signs, 177.
Papal title refused, 178 ; taxation,
182.
Paris, Matthew, historian, 182.
Paris, revolt of, 289 ; revolts against
Henry VI, 357 ; peace of, 969 ;
surrender of, 1057 ; university of,
166 et seq.
Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of
Canterbury, 475 ; writings of,
502.
Parliament, establishment of, 211,
217 et seq. ; right of attendance,
217 ; the Good, 289 et seq. ; divi
sion into Lords and Commons,
290 ; increase in power of, 291 ;
decline of powers of, 363 ; under
Henry VIII, 408 et seq. ; Thomas
CromweU's revival of, 440 ; un
der Elizabeth, 506 ; and James I,
609 ; strength of under James I,
624 ; under Charles I, 627 et seq. ;
Long, 676 et seq. ; Triennial Bill,
681 ; Long, declares war, 692 ;
and New Model, 715 et seq. ;
Rump, 723 ; plan for reforming,
726 ; Rump, refuses to dissolve,
726 ; Rump, dissolved, 735 ;
Barebones, 737 ; Free, 741 ; con
vention, 782 et seq. ; power under
William III, 872 et seq. ; Septen
nial Bill, 920.
Parr, Catherine, marries Henry
VIII, 449-

INDEX

1089

Paston, family correspondence, 369.
Patrick, missionary, 28.
" Patriots," 927.
Paulinus, mission of, 26.
Pavia, battle of, 411.
Peasantry, disfranchising of, 342.
Peasants, revolt of, 306 et seq.
Peel, prime minister, 1068.
Peerages, sold by James I, 615.
Pelham, prime minister, 94 et seq.
Pembroke, Earl of, opposes John,
153.
Penal statutes, 484 ; re-enaction of,
610.
Penda, King of Mercia, 27.
Pepys, Samuel, 785.
Percy, rise of house of, 491.
Ferrers, Alice, 294.
Persecution, religious, under Henry
IV, 446 ; under Henry VIII, 446.
Perth, battle of, 270.
Peter of Savoy, chief councilor,
180.
Peterborough, abbey of, established,
41.
Petition of Right, 634.
Philip, King of France, 139 ; war
with Richard, 140 et seq. ; war
with John, 144 ; conquers Aqui
taine, Anjou, and Touraine, 145 ;
defeated by John, 157.
Philip V, King of France, 282.
Philip of Spain, Catholic protector,
481, 517 et seq., ; plans of, 519.
Philiphaugh, battle of, 706.
Pichegru, 1026.
Picts, first attack of, 7 ; rebel
against Ecgfrith, 43.
Piers Plowman, 298, 320.
Pilgrim Fathers, exiled, 597 et seq. ;
expedition of, 642.
Pilgrimage of Grace, 434 et seq.
Pillnitz, declaration of, 1020.
Pippin, King of France, 53.
Pitt, William, Lord Chatham, leads
Tories, 928 ; rise of, 949 et seq. ;

character of, 951 ; war policy of,
956 et seq. ; resigns, 968 ; and
America, 977, 987 ; recalled to
oflice, 979 ; and United States,
991 ; death of, 992.
Pitt, William, the younger, 999 et
seq. ; enters Parliament, 999 ; for
eign policy of, 1014 ; and French
revolution, 1018 ; peace policy of,
1021 et seq. ; failure of, 1023 ; and
Ireland, 1030 et seq. ; and Catho
lics, 1037 ; resigns, 1038 ; recalled,
1042 ; death of, 1043.
Plague, spread of, 310, 796.
Plassey, battle of, 956.
Poitiers, battle of, 288.
Poland, partition of, 1025.
Pole, attacked by Cromwell, 436 ;
returns to England, 457.
Poll tax, levy of, 315.
Poor law, 1067.
Poor, relief of, under Elizabeth,
494-
Pope, annuls Provisions of Oxford,
194.
Popish plot, 823 et seq. ; decline of,
832.
Port Mahon, capture of, 949.
Porto Bello, capture of, 930.
Poyning's Act, 566.
Prtemunire, statute of, established,
296.
Pragmatic Sanction, 924 ; and Car
teret, 940.
Prague, battle of, 619, 949.
Presbyterianism under Cartwright,
592 et seq. ; adopted by Parlia
ment, 696, 710.
Presbyterians driven from national
church, 789.
Press, censorship organized, 598 ;
freedom established, 838 ; liberty
of, 973 et seq. ; rise of, 984.
Preston, battle of, 721.
Preston Pans, battle of, 942.
Pride's Purge, 722.

lOQO

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Prince, the Black, 283.
Printing, invention of, 370 ; imme
diate influence of, 384 et seq.
Privateers, under Elizabeth, 523.
Protestantism persecuted by Henry
VIII, 447 et seq. ; adopted gener
ally, 450 ; persecuted by Mary,
467 et seq. ; becomes national re
ligion, 511 ; strength of, 599 et
seq. See also Church.
Protestation sent to James I, 623.
Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 667 et seq. ;
recalled from prison, 679.
Punjab annexed, 1069.
Puritanism, rise of, 528 et seq. ;
under Laud, 637, 645 ; fall of,
764 ; character of, 767 et seq.
Puritans, reforms demanded by,
597 ; migrate to New England,
639 et seq., 650.
Pym, in Parliament, 635 ; leader of
Commons, 676 et seq. ; accused of
treason, 689 ; death of, 698.
Quadruple Alliance, 1067.
Quakers, persecution of, 791.
Quatre Bras, battle of, 1060.
Quebec, capture of, 959.
Quia Emptores, statute, 215.
Quiberon Bay, battle of, 958.
Quo warranto, writs issued, 254.
Raedwald, overlord, 23 ; King of
East Anglia, 26.
Ralegh, History of the World, 503 ;
imprisonment and death of, 618 ;
founding of Virginia, 640.
Ramillies, battle of, 904.
Ranulf de Glanvill, author, 148.
Ray, 773.
Reformation, 402 et seq. ; oak of,
451 ; strength of, 599.
Religion, England's change in, 450
et seq. ; Mary and, 455 et seq. ; con
formity required, 645 ; toleration
established, 711 ; speculation in.

774 et seq. See also Church,
Catholics, etc.
Remonstrance, 635 et seq.
Revenues, growth of king's, under
Edward IV, 368 et seq.
Revival of letters, 380 et seq.
Revolutionary War, 989 et seq. ; end
of, 996.
Rhymes, origin of political, 316.
Rhys ap Tewdor, 205.
Rich, Edmund, opposes Peter de
Roche, 181.
Richard I, 140 et seq.
Richard II, reign of, 314 et seq. ; de
posed, 330.
Richard III, reign of, 375 et seq.
Rizzio and Mary Stuart, 486.
Robert, Duke of Normandy, rebels,
no et seq. ; invades England, 120.
Rochelle, naval battle of, 292.
Rockingham, prime minister, 975
et seq., 997.
Rodney, 997.
Roger of Howden, 147.
Roses. See Wars of the Roses.
Ross, battle of, 728.
Rossbach, battle of, 957.
Rouen, fall of, 338.
Roundheads, 688.
Royal Society, 771 et seq.
Runnymede, conference at, 159.
Russell, Admiral, treason of, 881 ;
policy of, 1069.
Rye House Plot, 837.
Ryswick, peace of, 887.
Safety, Committee of Public, 692.
St. Albans, battle of, 357.
St. John. See Bolingbroke.
St. Louis, influence on English law,
229.
St Paul's, building of, 119.
Salamanca, battle of, 1055.
Salisbury Cathedral, completed,
253-
Santa Cruz, battle of, 754.

INDEX

IO91

Saratoga, battle of, 991.
Sayings of yElfred, 151.
Science, study of, 771 et seq.
Scinde, capture of, 1068.
Scotland, kingdom of, founded, 230
et seq. ; conquered by Edward I,
237 ; united with England, 241 ;
War of Independence, 264 et seq. ;
revolts under Bruce, 264 ; inde
pendence recognized, 269 ; rise of
Protestantism in, 661 ; church,
under Laud, 663 et seq. ; church re
volts, 671 et seq. ; war with
Charles I, 673 et seq. ; aids Parlia
ment, 696 et seq. ; invaded by
Cromwell, 729 ; covenant abol
ished, 800 ; supports William of
Orange, 863, 868 ; final union,
905 ; and the Pretender, 942.
Scots, inroads of, 8.
Scutage, substituted for military
service, 136 ; abolished, 160.
Sebastopol, siege of, 1070.
Second Partition Treaty, 890.
Sedgemoor, battle of, 843.
Senlac, battle of Hastings, 99.
Sepoy rebellion, 1070.
Settlement, Act of, 717.
Seven Years' War, 949 et seq. ; re
sults of, 960.
Sevenoaks, battle of, 354.
Shaftesbury. See Cooper.
Shakspere, 543 et seq.
Sheep farming, growth of, 323.
Sherborne, see of, established, 46.
Sheriffmuir, battle of, 919.
Shire Court, character of, 219.
Shrewsbury, battle of, 333.
Shrewsbury, town of, 52.
Sidney, Philip, 504 et seq.
Sigeberht, King of East Anglia, 27.
Simon, Earl of Montfort, 189 et seq.
Slave trade, origin of, 498 ; abol
ished, no.
Slavery, origin of, 19 ; suppression
of, 73 ; abolished, 1067.
70

Sluys, battle of, 281.
Smith, Adam, 1006.
Smith, Sidney, at Acre, 1029.
Sobraon, battle of, 1068.
Solway Moss, battle of, 479.
Somerton, siege of, 47.
Soult, Marshal, 1048.
South Sea bubble, 922.
Southumbrians, settlement of, 15.
Spain, trade with, 252 ; growth of
power of, 390 ; power under Phil
ip, 517 ; war with, 523 ; defeated
by Elizabeth, 559 ; CromweU's
war with, T^() etseq. ; George Ill's
war with, 969 ; war with, 992.
Spanish succession, claimants of,
888 et seq. ; renewal of war, 909 ;
end of war, 911.
Spenser, Edmund, 533 ^^j^y.
Spurs, battle of the, 391.
Stafford, put to death, 834.
Stamford Bridge, battle of, 98.
Stamp Act, 975 et seq. ; repealed,
984.
Star Chamber, court established,
380; under Charles I, 653 et seq. ;
loses jurisdiction, 684.
Stephen, 126 et seq.
Stow, battle of, 707.
Strafford, Earl of. See Wentworth.
Stratton Hill, battle of, 695.
Stuart, Mary, pretensions of, 465,
477 ; war over, 479 ; character of,
481 et seq. ; marries Darnley, 485 ;
revolt of, ^.Zt etseq. ; marries Both-
well, 488 ; escapes from Lochlev-
en, 490 ; intrigues of, 490 et seq. ;
trial and death of, 526 et seq. ; and
Spenser, 537.
Stuarts, accession of, 603.
Succession, statute of, annulled,
454-
Sunderland, policy of, 884 et seq.
Superstition, spread of, 344.
Sussex, submits to Wulfhere, 40 ;
conquered by West Saxons, 45.

1092

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Swein, King of Denmark, 77 ; leads-
rebellion. 102.
Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, 57.
Synods, establishment of, 39.
Tables, the, 672 et seq.
Taillebourg, battle of, 181.
Talavera, battle of, 1048.
Taxation, under James I, 614 ; un
der Charles I, 632.
Taxes, king prohibited from rais
ing, 258.
Taylor, Jeremy, 775.
Taylor, Rowland, persecution of
458 et seq.
Temple, secretary of state, 826 et
seq.
Tenchebray, battle of, 120.
Test Act, 484, 811.
Tewkesbury, battle of, 361.
Theobald, Archbishop of Canter
bury, 129.
Theodore of Tarsus, mission of, 38.
Theology, study of, 189.
Thirty Years' War, begins, 624 ;
ends, 748.
Thomas a Becket, 129 et seq.
Tippermuir, battle of, 700.
Tippoo Sahib, 1028.
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, 375.
Toleration Act, 789, 874.
Tories, origin of, 832 ; and Marl
borough, 902 et seq.; and Jaco
bites, 915 ; under George III,
966 ; accession of, 1049.
Torres Vedras, battle of, 1050.
Tostig, revolt of, 98.
Toulouse, battle of, 1057.
Towns, growth of, 115, 241 et seq.;
charters of, 244.
Towton Field, battle of, 357 et seq.
Trade, beginnings of foreign, 72 ;
growth of foreign, 252.
Trafalgar, battle of, 1043.
Treaty of Union, go6.
Trent, council of, 449, 600.

Triers of Petitions established, 226.
Triple AUiance, 806, 920.
Troyes, treaty of, 339.
Trumwine, Bishop of Abercorn, 42.
Tudors, house of, 364 et seq.
Turgot and Simeon, annals of, 146.
Turkey, war with, 1065.
Two Kingdoms, Committee of, 6g8.
Tyler, Wat, revolts, 316 ; death of,
318.
Tyndale, William, New Testament,
442 etseq.
Tyrconnell, revolt of, 870 et seq.
Ulm, battle of, 1043.
Ulster, plantation of, 579.
Uniformity, Act of, 474.
United Irishmen, 1033.
United States, formation of, 990 ;
alliance with France, 991 ; inde
pendence acknowledged, 998 ; Or
ders in Council, 1050 ; war with,
1051 ; War of 1812, 1057 et seq.
See also America.
Universities, growth of, 165 et seq.
See also Oxford.
Uriconium, destruction of, 15.
Utrecht, treaty of, 911 ; results of
treaty, 914.
Valley Forge, 990.
Vane, Sir Harry, mission to Scot
land, 6g6 ; and Parliament, 722 ;
creates navy, 728 ; put to death,
786.
Van Tromp, admiral of Holland,
734-
Varaville, battle of, 95.
Venice, ruin of, 391.
Verneuil, battle of, 345.
Vervins, treaty of, 560.
Victoria, accession of, 1068.
Villeinage, decline of, 322.
Vinegar Hill, battle of, 1034,
Virginia founded, 641.
Vitoria, battle of, 1056.

INDEX

1093

Wace, Roman de Rou, 149.
Wagram, battle of, 1048.
Wakefield, battle of, 357.
Wales, partition of, 204 ; statute es
tablished, 210 ; revolts, 333.
Wallace, William, revolts, 238 et seq.
Wallingford, treaty of, I2g.
Walpole, 917 et seq. ; administration
of, 923 et seq ; fall of, 931.
Walsingham, works of, 369.
Walter de Map, poet, 150.
Wanborough, battle of, 46.
Wardship, crown's, established by
the Conqueror, 106 ; used for ex
tortion, 615 ; taken from the
crown, 784.
Warham, Archbishop, 385.
Warrington, battle at, 721.
Wars of the Roses, 354 et seq. ; end,
378.
Warwick, the king maker, 359 et
seq. ; rise of house of, 359 ; pro
tector, 451.
Washington, George, at Duquesne,
947, 959 ; leads colonies, 988 et
seq.
Washington, city of, burned, 1058.
Waterloo, battle of, 1060 et seq.
Wear, battle of, 269.
Wearmouth, monastery of, founded,
37-
Wedmore, peace of, 60.
Wellesley, Arthur, Lord Welling
ton, in Spain, 1047 ; renews Pe
ninsular campaign, 1055 ; at
Waterloo, 1059 et seq. ; prime
minister, 1065.
Wentworth, Thomas, Lord Straf
ford, in Commons, 656 ; in royal
council, 657 ; plans of tyranny,
658 ; plans for Scotland, 674 et
seq. ; impeached, 679 et seq. ; put
to death, 682.
Wesley, John, 935 et seq.
Wessex, converted, 29 ; conquered
by Wulfhere, 40.

.West India Company, established,
795-
Westminster, Provisions of, 193.
Westminster Abbey, building of,
179 ; completed, 253 ; restored,
463.
Westphalia, treaty of, 748.
West Saxons, fights of, 14.
Wexford, massacre of, 728.
Whigs, origin of, 721, 832 ; and
Marlborough, 907 ; rule of, 916
et seq. ; recalled to office, 997 ; co
alition with Tories, 1000 ; and
Tories unite, 1044; in power,
1066.
Whitby, abbey of, 34 ; Council of,
37.
Whitefield, 934 et seq.
White Ship, wreck of, 121.
Wight, Isle of, given to Sussex, 40.
Wiglaf, King of Mercia, 55.
Wilberforce, ion.
Wilfred of York, 36.
Wilkes, John, 973 et seq. ; elected to
Parliament, 980 et seq.
William the Conqueror, 93 et seq.
William the Red, in.
William III, Prince of Orange,
leads Netherlands, 810 ; charac
ter of, 856 ; and James, 859 et
seq. ; lands in England, 863 ; ac
cession of, 865 ; and Scotland,
868 et seq. ; and Parliament, 871
et seq. ; and Ireland, 871 et seq. ;
lands in Ireland, 878 ; triumph
of his policy, 887 ; death of, 897.
William IV, 1066.
William Long Beard, conspiracy of,
250.
William Longsword, Duke of Nor
mandy, 90.
WiUiam the Silent, 520 et seq.
William the Lion, King of Scotland,
revolts, 136.
William of Malmesbury, chronicles,
147.

1094

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Williams, Roger, in Rhode Island,
650.
Willibrord, preacher, 53.
Willoughby, expedition of, 497.
Winwaed, battle of, 31.
Winchester Abbey founded, 64.
Winchester, statute of, 215.
Winthrop, John, 643.
Wippedsfleet, battle of, 12.
Witenagemot, 75.
Wolsey, minister to Henry VIII,
393 ; ministry of, 404 et seq. ; poli
cy of, 406 etseq. ; and Parliament,
408 ; fall of, 415.
Wool, manufacture of, 496 ; growth
of trade, 1005.

Worcester, battle of, 731.
Worcester, abbey of, founded, 72.
Worms, diet of, 403.
Wulfhere, King of Mercia, 40.
Wyatt, revolts, 456 ; put to death,
457-
Wycherly, 769.
Wyclif, John, 295 et seq, 299 etseq. ;
Bible, 306.
York, capital of Britain, 16 ; made
a diocese, 38 ; Parliament of,
262.
York, Duke of. Protector, 355 et seq.
Yorktown, surrender of, 996.

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