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This great alteration did not take place without strong and constant resistance
on the part of the kings of the house of Stuart. Till 1642, that resistance was
generally of an open, violent, and lawless nature. If the Commons refused
supplies, the sovereign levied a benevolence. If the Commons impeached a
favorite minister, the sovereign threw the chiefs of the Opposition into prison.
Of these efforts to keep down the Parliament by despotic force, without the
pretext of law, the last, the most celebrated, and the most wicked was the
attempt to seize the five members. That attempt was the signal for civil war,
and was followed by eighteen years of blood and confusion.
The days of trouble passed by; the exiles returned; the throne was again set up
in its high place; the peerage and the hierarchy recovered their ancient
splendor. The fundamental laws which had been recited in the Petition of Right
were again solemnly recognized. The theory of the English constitution was the
same on the day when the hand of Charles the Second was kissed by the kneeling
Houses at Whitehall as on the day when his father set up the royal standard at
Nottingham. There was a short period of doting fondness, a hysterica passio of
loyal repentance and love. But emotions of this sort are transitory; and the
interests on which depends the progress of great societies are permanent. The
transport of reconciliation was soon over; and the old struggle recommenced.
The old struggle recommenced; but not precisely after the old fashion. The
Sovereign was not indeed a man whom any common warning would have restrained
from the grossest violations of law. But it was no common warning that he had
received. All around him were the recent signs of the vengeance of an oppressed
nation, the fields on which the noblest blood of the island had been poured
forth, the castles shattered by the cannon of the Parliamentary armies, the hall
where sat the stern tribunal to whose bar had been led, through lowering ranks
of pikemen, the captive heir of a hundred kings, the stately pilasters before
which the great execution had been so fearlessly done in the face of heaven and
earth. The restored Prince, admonished by the fate of his father, never ventured
to attack his Parliaments with open and arbitrary violence. It was at one time
by means of the Parliament itself, at another time by means of the courts of
law, that he attempted to regain for the Crown its old predominance. He began
with great advantages. The Parliament of 1661 was called while the nation was
still full of joy and tenderness. The great majority of the House of Commons
were zealous royalists. All the means of influence which the patronage of the
Crown afforded were used without limit. Bribery was reduced to a system. The
King, when he could spare money from his pleasures for nothing else, could spare
it for purposes of corruption. While the defense of the coasts was neglected,
while ships rotted, while arsenals lay empty, while turbulent crowds of unpaid
seamen swarmed in the streets of the seaports, something could still be scraped
together in the Treasury for the members of the House of Commons. The gold of
France was largely employed for the same purpose. Yet it was found, as indeed
might have been foreseen, that there is a natural limit to the effect which can
be produced by means like these. There is one thing which the most corrupt
senates are unwilling to sell; and that is the power which makes them worth
buying. The same selfish motives which induced them to take a price for a
particular vote induce them to oppose every measure of which the effect would be
to lower the importance, and consequently the price, of their votes. About the
income of their power, so to speak, they are quite ready to make bargains. But
they are not easily persuaded to part with any fragment of the principal. It is
curious to observe how, during the long continuance of this Parliament, the
Pensionary Parliament, as it was nicknamed by contemporaries, though every
circumstance seemed to be favorable to the Crown, the power of the Crown was
constantly sinking, and that of the Commons constantly rising. The meetings of
the Houses were more frequent than in former reigns; their interference was more
harassing to the Government than in former reigns; they had begun to make peace,
to make war; to pull down, if they did not set up, administrations. Already a
new class of statesmen had appeared, unheard of before that time, but common
ever since. Under the Tudors and the earlier Stuarts, it was generally by
courtly arts, or by official skill and knowledge, that a politician raised
himself to power. From the time of Charles the Second down to our own days a
different species of talent, parliamentary talent, has been the most valuable of
all the qualifications of an English statesman. It has stood in the place of all
other acquirements. It has covered ignorance, weakness, rashness, the most fatal
maladministration. A great negotiator is nothing when compared with a great
debater; and a Minister who can make a successful speech need trouble himself
little about an unsuccessful expedition. This is the talent which has made
judges without law, and diplomatists without French, which has sent to the
Admiralty men who did not know the stern of a ship from her bowsprit, and to the
India Board men who did not know the difference between a rupee and a pagoda,
which made a foreign secretary of Mr. Pitt, who, as George the Second said, had
never opened Vattel, and which was very near making a Chancellor of the
Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division. This was
the sort of talent which raised Clifford from obscurity to the head of affairs.
To this talent Osborne, by birth a simple country gentleman, owed his white
staff, his garter, and his dukedom. The encroachment of the power of the
Parliament on the power of the Crown resembled a fatality, or the operation of
some great law of nature. The will of the individual on the throne, or of the
individuals in the two Houses, seemed to go for nothing. The King might be eager
to encroach; yet something constantly drove him back. The Parliament might be
loyal, even servile; yet something constantly urged them forward.
These things were done in the green tree. What then was likely to be done in the
dry? The Popish Plot and the general election came together, and found a people
predisposed to the most violent excitation. The composition of the House of
Commons was changed. The Legislature was filled with men who leaned to
Republicanism in politics, and to Presbyterianism in religion. They no sooner
met than they commenced an attack on the Government, which, if successful, must
have made them supreme in the State.
Where was this to end? To us who have seen the solution the question presents
few difficulties. But to a statesman of the age of Charles the Second, to a
statesman, who wished, without depriving the Parliament of its privileges, to
maintain the monarch in his old supremacy, it must have appeared very
perplexing.
Clarendon had, when Minister, struggled honestly, perhaps, but, as was his wont,
obstinately, proudly, and offensively, against the growing power of the Commons.
He was for allowing them their old authority, and not one atom more. He would
never have claimed for the Crown a right to levy taxes from the people without
the consent of Parliament. But when the Parliament, in the first Dutch war, most
properly insisted on knowing how it was that the money which they had voted had
produced so little effect, and began to inquire through what hands it had
passed, and on what services it had been expended, Clarendon considered this as
a monstrous innovation. He told the King, as he himself says, "that he could not
be too indulgent in the defense of the privileges of Parliament, and that he
hoped he would never violate any of them; but he desired him to be equally
solicitous to prevent the excesses in Parliament, and not to suffer them to
extend their jurisdiction to cases they have nothing to do with; and that to
restrain them within their proper bounds and limits is as necessary as it is to
preserve them from being invaded; and that this was such a new encroachment as
had no bottom." This is a single instance. Others might easily be given.
The bigotry, the strong passions, the haughty and disdainful temper, which made
Clarendon's great abilities a source of almost unmixed evil to himself and to
the public, had no place in the character of Temple. To Temple, however, as well
as to Clarendon, the rapid change which was taking place in the real working of
the Constitution gave great disquiet; particularly as Temple had never sat in
the English Parliament, and therefore regarded it with none of the predilection
which men naturally feel for a body to which they belong, and for a theatre on
which their own talents have been advantageously displayed.
To wrest by force from the House of Commons its newly acquired powers was
impossible; nor was Temple a man to recommend such a stroke, even if it had been
possible. But was it possible that the House of Commons might be induced to let
those powers drop? Was it possible that, as a great revolution had been effected
without any change in the outward form of the Government, so a great
counter-revolution might be effected in the same manner? Was it possible that
the Crown and the Parliament might be placed in nearly the same relative
position in which they had stood in the reign of Elizabeth, and that this might
be done without one sword drawn, without one execution, and with the general
acquiescence of the nation?
The English people--it was probably thus that Temple argued--will not bear to be
governed by the unchecked power of the Sovereign, nor ought they to be so
governed. At present there is no check but the Parliament. The limits which
separate the power of checking those who govern from the power of governing are
not easily to be defined. The Parliament, therefore, supported by the nation, is
rapidly drawing to itself all the powers of Government. If it were possible to
frame some other check on the power of the Crown, some check which might be less
galling to the Sovereign than that by which he is now constantly tormented, and
yet which might appear to the people to be a tolerable security against
maladministration, Parliaments would probably meddle less; and they would be
less supported by public opinion in their meddling. That the King's hands may
not be rudely tied by others, he must consent to tie them lightly himself. That
the executive administration may not be usurped by the checking body, something
of the character of a checking body must be given to the body which conducts the
executive administration. The Parliament is now arrogating to itself every day a
larger share of the functions of the Privy Council. We must stop the evil by
giving to the Privy Council something of the constitution of a Parliament. Let
the nation see that all the King's measures are directed by a Cabinet composed
of representatives of every order in the State, by a Cabinet which contains, not
placemen alone, but independent and popular noblemen and gentlemen who have
large estates and no salaries, and who are not likely to sacrifice the public
welfare in which they have a deep stake, and the credit which they have obtained
with the country, to the pleasure of a Court from which they receive nothing.
When the ordinary administration is in such hands as these, the people will be
quite content to see the Parliament become, what it formerly was, an
extraordinary check. They will be quite willing that the House of Commons should
meet only once in three years for a short session, and should take as little
part in matters of state as it did a hundred years ago.
Thus we believe that Temple reasoned: for on this hypothesis his scheme is
intelligible; and on any other hypothesis his scheme appears to us, as it does
to Mr. Courtenay, exceedingly absurd and unmeaning. This Council was strictly
what Barillon called it, an Assembly of States. There are the representatives of
all the great sections of the community, of the Church, of the Law, of the
Peerage, of the Commons. The exclusion of one half of the counselors from office
under the Crown, an exclusion which is quite absurd when we consider the Council
merely as an executive board, becomes at once perfectly reasonable when we
consider the Council as a body intended to restrain the Crown as well as to
exercise the powers of the Crown, to perform some of the functions of a
Parliament as well as the functions of a Cabinet. We see, too, why Temple dwelt
so much on the private wealth of the members, why he instituted a comparison
between their united incomes and the united incomes of the members of the House
of Commons. Such a parallel would have been idle in the case of a mere Cabinet.
It is extremely significant in the case of a body intended to supersede the
House of Commons in some very important functions.
We can hardly help thinking that the notion of this Parliament on a small scale
was suggested to Temple by what he had himself seen in the United Provinces. The
original Assembly of the States-General consisted, as he tells us, of above
eight hundred persons. But this great body was represented by a smaller Council
of about thirty, which bore the name and exercised the powers of the
States-General. At last the real States altogether ceased to meet; and their
power, though still a part of the theory of the Constitution, became obsolete in
practice. We do not, of course, imagine that Temple either expected or wished
that Parliaments should be thus disused; but he did expect, we think, that
something like what had happened in Holland would happen in England, and that a
large portion of the functions lately assumed by Parliament would be quietly
transferred to the miniature Parliament which he proposed to create.
Had this plan, with some modifications, been tried at an earlier period, in a
more composed state of the public mind, and by a better sovereign, we are by no
means certain that it might not have effected the purpose for which it was
designed. The restraint imposed on the King by the Council of thirty, whom he
had himself chosen, would have been feeble indeed when compared with the
restraint imposed by Parliament. But it would have been more constant. It would
have acted every year, and all the year round; and before the Revolution the
sessions of Parliament were short and the recesses long. The advice of the
Council would probably have prevented any very monstrous and scandalous
measures; and would consequently have prevented the discontents which follow
such measures, and the salutary laws which are the fruit of such discontents. We
believe, for example, that the second Dutch war would never have been approved
by such a Council as that which Temple proposed. We are quite certain that the
shutting up of the Exchequer would never even have been mentioned in such a
Council. The people, pleased to think that Lord Russell, Lord Cavendish, and Mr.
Powle, unplaced and unpensioned, were daily representing their grievances and
defending their rights in the Royal presence, would not have pined quite so much
for the meeting of Parliaments. The Parliament, when it met, would have found
fewer and less glaring abuses to attack. There would have been less
misgovernment and less reform. We should not have been cursed with the Cabal, or
blessed with the Habeas Corpus Act. In the mean time the Council, considered as
an executive Council, would, unless some at least of its powers had been
delegated to a smaller body, have been feeble, dilatory, divided, unfit for
everything that requires secrecy and dispatch, and peculiarly unfit for the
administration of war.
The Revolution put an end, in a very different way, to the long contest between
the King and the Parliament. From that time, the House of Commons has been
predominant in the State. The Cabinet has really been, from that time, a
committee nominated by the Crown out of the prevailing party in Parliament.
Though the minority in the Commons are Constantly proposing to condemn executive
measures, or to call for papers which may enable the House to sit in judgment on
such measures, these propositions are scarcely ever carried; and, if a
proposition of this kind is carried against the Government, a change of Ministry
almost necessarily follows. Growing and struggling power always gives more
annoyance and is more unmanageable than established power. The House of Commons
gave infinitely more trouble to the Ministers of Charles the Second than to any
Ministers of later times; for, in the time of Charles the Second, the House was
checking Ministers in whom it did not confide. Now that its ascendancy is fully
established, it either confides in Ministers or turns them out. This is
undoubtedly a far better state of things than that which Temple wished to
introduce. The modern Cabinet is a far better Executive Council than his. The
worst House of Commons that has sate since the Revolution was a far more
efficient check on misgovernment than his fifteen independent counselors would
have been. Yet, everything considered, it seems to us that his plan was the work
of an observant, ingenious, and fertile mind.
On this occasion, as on every occasion on which he came prominently forward,
Temple had the rare good fortune to please the public as well as the Sovereign.
The general exultation was great when it was known that the old Council, made up
of the most odious tools of power, was dismissed, that small interior
committees, rendered odious by the recent memory of the Cabal, were to be
disused, and that the King would adopt no measure till it had been discussed and
approved by a body, of which one half consisted of independent gentlemen and
noblemen, and in which such persons as Russell, Cavendish, and Temple himself
had seats. Town and country were in a ferment of joy. The bells were rung;
bonfires were lighted; and the acclamations of England were echoed by the Dutch,
who considered the influence obtained by Temple as a certain omen of good for
Europe. It is, indeed, much to the honor of his sagacity that every one of his
great measures should, in such times, have pleased every party which he had any
interest in pleasing. This was the case with the Triple Alliance, with the
treaty which concluded the second Dutch war, with the marriage of the Prince of
Orange, and, finally, with the institution of this new Council.
The only people who grumbled were those popular leaders of the House of Commons
who were not among the Thirty; and, if our view of the measure be correct, they
were precisely the people who had good reason to grumble. They were precisely
the people whose activity and whose influence the new Council was intended to
destroy.
But there was very soon an end of the bright hopes and loud applauses with which
the publication of this scheme had been hailed. The perfidious levity of the
King and the ambition of the chiefs of parties produced the instant, entire, and
irremediable failure of a plan which nothing but firmness, public spirit, and
self-denial on the part of all concerned in it could conduct to a happy issue.
Even before the project was divulged, its author had already found reason to
apprehend that it would fail. Considerable difficulty was experienced in framing
the list of counselors. There were two men in particular about whom the King and
Temple could not agree, two men deeply tainted with the vices common to the
English statesman of that age, but unrivalled in talents, address, and
influence. These were the Earl of Shaftesbury, and George Savile Viscount
Halifax.
It was a favorite exercise among the Greek sophists to write panegyrics on
characters proverbial for depravity. One professor of rhetoric sent to Isocrates
a panegyric on Busiris; and Isocrates himself wrote another which has come down
to us. It is, we presume, from an ambition of the same kind that some writers
have lately shown a disposition to eulogize Shaftesbury. But the attempt is
vain. The charges against him rest on evidence not to be invalidated by any
arguments which human wit can devise, or by any information which may be found
in old trunks and escritoires.
It is certain that, just before the Restoration, he declared to the Regicides
that he would be damned, body and soul, rather than suffer a hair of their heads
to be hurt, and that, just after the Restoration, he was one of the judges who
sentenced them to death. It is certain that he was a principal member of the
most profligate Administration ever known, and that he was afterwards a
principal member oft the most profligate Opposition ever known. It is certain
that, in power, he did not scruple to violate the great fundamental principle of
the Constitution, in order to exalt the Catholics, and that, out of power, he
did not scruple to violate every principle of justice, in order to destroy them.
There were in that age some honest men, such as William Penn, who valued
toleration so highly that they would willingly have seen it established even by
an illegal exertion of the prerogative. There were many honest men who dreaded
arbitrary power so much that, on account of the alliance between Popery and
arbitrary power, they were disposed to grant no toleration to Papists. On both
those classes we look with indulgence, though we think both in the wrong. But
Shaftesbury belonged to neither class. He united all that was worst in both.
From the misguided friends of toleration he borrowed their contempt for the
Constitution, and from the misguided friends of civil liberty their contempt for
the rights of conscience. We never can admit that his conduct as a member of the
Cabal was redeemed by his conduct as a leader of Opposition. On the contrary,
his life was such that every part of it, as if by a skilful contrivance,
reflects infamy on every other. We should never have known how abandoned a
prostitute he was in place, if we had not known how desperate an incendiary he
was out of it. To judge of him fairly, we must bear in mind that the Shaftesbury
who, in office, was the chief author of the Declaration of Indulgence, was the
same Shaftesbury who, out of office, excited and kept up the savage hatred of
the rabble of London against the very class to whom that Declaration of
Indulgence was intended to give illegal relief.
It is amusing to see the excuses that are made for him. We will give two
specimens. It is acknowledged that he was one of the Ministry which made the
alliance with France against Holland, and that this alliance was most
pernicious. What, then, is the defense? Even this, that he betrayed his master's
counsels to the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, and tried to rouse all the
Protestant powers of Germany to defend the States. Again, it is acknowledged
that he was deeply concerned in the Declaration of Indulgence, and that his
conduct on this occasion was not only unconstitutional, but quite inconsistent
with the course which he afterwards took respecting the professors of the
Catholic faith. What, then, is the defense? Even this, that he meant only to
allure concealed Papists to avow themselves, and thus to become open marks for
the vengeance of the public. As often as he is charged with one treason, his
advocates vindicate him by confessing two. They had better leave him where they
find him. For him there is no escape upwards. Every outlet by which he can creep
out of his present position, is one which lets him down into a still lower and
fouler depth of infamy. To whitewash an Ethiopian is a proverbially hopeless
attempt; but to whitewash an Ethiopian by giving him a new coat of blacking is
an enterprise more extraordinary still. That in the course of Shaftesbury's
dishonest and revengeful opposition to the Court he rendered one or two most
useful services to his country we admit. And he is, we think, fairly entitled,
if that be any glory, to have his name eternally associated with the Habeas
Corpus Act in the same way in which the name of Henry the Eighth is associated
with the reformation of the Church, and that of Jack Wilkes with the most sacred
rights of electors.
While Shaftesbury was still living, his character was elaborately drawn by two
of the greatest writers of the age, by Butler, with characteristic brilliancy of
wit, by Dryden, with even more than characteristic energy and loftiness, by both
with all the inspiration of hatred. The sparkling illustrations of Butler have
been thrown into the shade by the brighter glory of that gorgeous satiric Muse,
who comes sweeping by in scepter pall, borrowed from her most august sisters.
But the descriptions well deserve to be compared. The reader will at once
perceive a considerable difference between Butler's
"politician, With more beads than a beast in vision,"
and the Achitophel of Dryden. Butler dwells on Shaftesbury's unprincipled
versatility; on his wonderful and almost instinctive skill in discerning the
approach of a change of fortune; and on the dexterity with which he extricated
himself from the snares in which he left his associates to perish.
"Our state-artificer foresaw Which way the world began to draw. For as old
sinners have all points O' th' compass in their bones and joints, Can by their
pangs and aches find All turns and changes of the wind, And better than by
Napier's bones Feel in their own the age of moons: So guilty sinners in a state
Can by their crimes prognosticate, And in their consciences feel pain Some days
before a shower of rain. He, therefore, wisely cast about All ways he could to
ensure his throat."
In Dryden's great portrait, on the contrary, violent passion, implacable
revenge, boldness amounting to temerity, are the most striking features.
Achitophel is one of the "great wits to madness near allied." And again--
"A daring pilot in extremity, Pleased with the danger when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, Would steer too near the sands to
boast his wit."1
The dates of the two poems will, we think, explain this discrepancy. The third
part of Hudibras appeared in 1678, when the character of Shaftesbury had as yet
but imperfectly developed itself. He had, indeed, been a traitor to every party
in the State; but his treasons had hitherto prospered. Whether it were accident
or sagacity, he had timed his desertions in such a manner that fortune seemed to
go to and fro with him from side to side. The extent of his perfidy was known;
but it was not till the Popish Plot furnished him with a machinery which seemed
sufficiently powerful for all his purposes, that the audacity of his spirit, and
the fierceness of his malevolent passions, became fully manifest. His subsequent
conduct showed undoubtedly great ability, but not ability of the sort for which
he had formerly been so eminent. He was now headstrong, sanguine, full of
impetuous confidence in his own wisdom and his own good luck. He, whose fame as
a political tactician had hitherto rested chiefly on his skilful retreats, now
set himself to break down all the bridges behind him. His plans were castles in
the air: his talk was rhodomontade. He took no thought for the morrow: he
treated the Court as if the King were already a prisoner in his hands: he built
on the favor of the multitude, as if that favor were not proverbially
inconstant. The signs of the coming reaction were discerned by men of far less
sagacity than his, and scared from his side men more consistent than he had ever
pretended to be. But on him they were lost. The counsel of Achitophel, that
counsel which was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God, was turned into
foolishness. He who had become a by-word, for the certainty with which he
foresaw and the suppleness with which he evaded danger, now, when beset on every
side with snares and death, seemed to be smitten with a blindness as strange as
his former clear-sightedness, and, turning neither to the right nor to the left,
strode straight on with desperate hardihood to his doom. Therefore, after having
early acquired and long preserved the reputation of infallible wisdom and
invariable success, he lived to see a mighty ruin wrought by his own
ungovernable passions, to see the great party which he had led vanquished, and
scattered, and trampled down, to see all his own devilish enginery of lying
witnesses, partial sheriffs, packed juries, unjust judges, bloodthirsty mobs,
ready to be employed against himself and his most devoted followers, to fly from
that proud city whose favor had almost raised him to be Mayor of the Palace, to
hide himself in squalid retreats, to cover his grey head with ignominious
disguises; and he died in hopeless exile, sheltered by the generosity of a State
which he had cruelly injured and insulted, from the vengeance of a master whose
favor he had purchased by one series of crimes, and forfeited by another.
1 It has never, we believe, been remarked, that two of the
most striking lines in the description of Achitophel are borrowed from a most
obscure quarter. In Knolles's History of the Turks, printed more than sixty
years before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, are the following verses,
under a portrait of the Sultan Mustapha the First:
"Greatnesse on goodnesse loves to slide, not stand, And leaves for Fortune's ice
Vertue's firme land."
Dryden's words are
"But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand, And Fortune's ice prefers to
Virtue's land."
The circumstance is the more remarkable, because Dryden has really no couplet
which would seem to a good critic more intensely Drydenian, both in thought and
expression, than this, of which the whole thought, and almost the whole
expression, are stolen.
As we are on this subject, we cannot refrain from observing that Mr. Courtenay
has done Dryden injustice by inadvertently attributing to him some feeble lines
which are in Tate's part of Absalom and Achitophel.
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