A review of the first two volumes of Macaulay's History of England
from the Accession of James II.
In accordance with the labor-saving spirit of the age, we have in these
volumes an admirable example of history made easy. Had they been
published in his time, they might have found favor in the eyes of the
poet Gray, who declared that his ideal of happiness was "to lie on a sofa
and read eternal new romances."
The style is that which lends such a charm to the author's essays,--
brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous. Indeed, herein lies the fault of the
work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparkling
rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer.
A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice in
saying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughts
and diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that his
epigrammatic style seems better fitted for the glitter of paradox than
the sober guise of truth. The intelligent and well-informed reader of
the volume before us will find himself at times compelled to reverse the
decisions of the author, and deliver some unfortunate personage, sect, or
class from the pillory of his rhetoric and the merciless pelting of his
ridicule. There is a want of the repose and quiet which we look for in
a narrative of events long passed away; we rise from the perusal of the
book pleased and excited, but with not so clear a conception of the
actual realities of which it treats as would be desirable. We cannot
help feeling that the author has been somewhat over-scrupulous in
avoiding the dulness of plain detail, and the dryness of dates, names,
and statistics. The freedom, flowing diction, and sweeping generality of
the reviewer and essayist are maintained throughout; and, with one
remarkable exception, the History of England might be divided into
papers of magazine length, and published, without any violence to
propriety, as a continuation of the author's labors in that department of
literature in which he confessedly stands without a rival,--historical
review.
That exception is, however, no unimportant one. In our view, it is the
crowning excellence of the first volume,--its distinctive feature and
principal attraction. We refer to the third chapter of the volume, from
page 260 to page 398,--the description of the condition of England at the
period of the accession of James II. We know of nothing like it in the
entire range of historical literature. The veil is lifted up from the
England of a century and a half ago; its geographical, industrial,
social, and moral condition is revealed; and, as the panorama passes
before us of lonely heaths, fortified farm-houses, bands of robbers,
rude country squires doling out the odds and ends of their coarse fare
to clerical dependents,--rough roads, serviceable only for horseback
travelling,--towns with unlighted streets, reeking with filth and offal,
--and prisons, damp, loathsome, infected with disease, and swarming with
vermin,--we are filled with wonder at the contrast which it presents to
the England of our day. We no longer sigh for "the good old days." The
most confirmed grumbler is compelled to admit that, bad as things now
are, they were far worse a few generations back. Macaulay, in this
elaborate and carefully prepared chapter, has done a good service to
humanity in disabusing well-intentioned ignorance of the melancholy
notion that the world is growing worse, and in putting to silence the
cant of blind, unreasoning conservatism.
In 1685 the entire population of England our author estimates at from
five millions to five millions five hundred thousand. Of the eight
hundred thousand families at that period, one half had animal food twice
a week. The other half ate it not at all, or at most not oftener than
once a week. Wheaten, loaves were only seen at the tables of the
comparatively wealthy. Rye, barley, and oats were the food of the vast
majority. The average wages of workingmen was at least one half less
than is paid in England for the same service at the present day. One
fifth of the people were paupers, or recipients of parish relief.
Clothing and bedding were scarce and dear. Education was almost unknown
to the vast majority. The houses and shops were not numbered in the
cities, for porters, coachmen, and errand-runners could not read. The
shopkeeper distinguished his place of business by painted signs and
graven images. Oxford and Cambridge Universities were little better than
modern grammar and Latin school in a provincial village. The country
magistrate used on the bench language too coarse, brutal, and vulgar for
a modern tap-room. Fine gentlemen in London vied with each other in the
lowest ribaldry and the grossest profanity. The poets of the time, from
Dryden to Durfey, ministered to the popular licentiousness. The most
shameless indecency polluted their pages. The theatre and the brothel
were in strict unison. The Church winked at the vice which opposed
itself to the austere morality or hypocrisy of Puritanism. The superior
clergy, with a few noble exceptions, were self-seekers and courtiers; the
inferior were idle, ignorant hangerson upon blaspheming squires and
knights of the shire. The domestic chaplain, of all men living, held the
most unenviable position. "If he was permitted to dine with the family,
he was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fill
himself with the corned beef and carrots; but as soon as the tarts and
cheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood aloof
till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great part
of which he had been excluded."
Beyond the Trent the country seems at this period to have been in a state
of barbarism. The parishes kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting
freebooters. The farm-houses were fortified and guarded. So dangerous
was the country that persons about travelling thither made their wills.
Judges and lawyers only ventured therein, escorted by a strong guard of
armed men.
The natural resources of the island were undeveloped. The tin mines of
Cornwall, which two thousand years before attracted the ships of the
merchant princes of Tyre beyond the Pillars of Hercules, were indeed
worked to a considerable extent; but the copper mines, which now yield
annually fifteen thousand tons, were entirely neglected. Rock salt was
known to exist, but was not used to any considerable extent; and only a
partial supply of salt by evaporation was obtained. The coal and iron of
England are at this time the stable foundations of her industrial and
commercial greatness. But in 1685 the great part of the iron used was
imported. Only about ten thousand tons were annually cast. Now eight
hundred thousand is the average annual production. Equally great has
been the increase in coal mining. "Coal," says Macaulay, "though very
little used in any species of manufacture, was already the ordinary fuel
in some districts which were fortunate enough to possess large beds, and
in the capital, which could easily be supplied by water carriage. It
seems reasonable to believe that at least one half of the quantity then
extracted from the pits was consumed in London. The, consumption of
London seemed to the writers of that age enormous, and was often
mentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of the imperial city. They
scarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed that two hundred and
eighty thousand chaldrons--that is to say, about three hundred and fifty
thousand tons-were, in the last year of the reign of Charles II., brought
to the Thames. At present near three millions and a half of tons are
required yearly by the metropolis; and the whole annual produce cannot,
on the most moderate computation, be estimated at less than twenty
millions of tons."
After thus passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or six
generations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquent
remarks upon the progress of society. Contrasting the hardness and
coarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humane
features of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive and
restless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection to
the factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries into
the stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship; which winces at every
lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; which will not suffer the
thief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked; and which has repeatedly
endeavored to save the life even of the murderer. The more we study the
annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful
age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when
deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Every
class, doubtless, has gained largely by this great moral change; but the
class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the
most defenceless."
The history itself properly commences at the close of this chapter.
Opening with the deathscene of the dissolute Charles II., it presents a
series of brilliant pictures of the events succeeding: The miserable fate
of Oates and Dangerfield, the perjured inventors of the Popish Plot; the
trial of Baxter by the infamous Jeffreys; the ill-starred attempt of the
Duke of Monmouth; the battle of Sedgemoor, and the dreadful atrocities of
the king's soldiers, and the horrible perversion of justice by the king's
chief judge in the "Bloody Assizes;" the barbarous hunting of the Scotch
Dissenters by Claverbouse; the melancholy fate of the brave and noble
Duke of Argyle,--are described with graphic power unknown to Smollett or
Hume. Personal portraits are sketched with a bold freedom which at times
startles us. The "old familiar faces," as we have seen them through the
dust of a century and a half, start before us with lifelike distinctness
of outline and coloring. Some of them disappoint us; like the ghost of
Hamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape." Thus, for
instance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue with
the world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuous
innuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of history into
a pliant courtier.
The second volume details the follies and misfortunes, the decline and
fall, of the last of the Stuarts. All the art of the author's splendid
rhetoric is employed in awakening, by turns, the indignation and contempt
of the reader in contemplating the character of the wrong-headed king.
In portraying that character, he has brought into exercise all those
powers of invective and merciless ridicule which give such a savage
relish to his delineation of Barrere. To preserve the consistency of
this character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was really
beneficent and praiseworthy in his government. He holds up the royal
delinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyrant
towards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests,--
a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speak
without an execration or a sneer.
The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguised
adherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration of
the despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of the
severity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing the
way for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughout
the British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priest
to build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palaces
of Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits and
prelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness. The secret springs of
the great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltry
instrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption,
prejudice, and falsehood. No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan of
Catholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in English
history without a feeling of disgust. However it may have been overruled
for good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness,
the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little
cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the
substitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII., for
that of the Pope, in the English Church. It had little in common with
the revolution of 1642. The field of its action was the closet of
selfish intrigue,--the stalls of discontented prelates,--the chambers of
the wanton and adulteress,--the confessional of a weak prince, whose
mind, originally narrow, had been cramped closer still by the strait-
jacket of religious bigotry and superstition. The age of nobility and
heroism had well-nigh passed away. The pious fervor, the self-denial,
and the strict morality of the Puritanism of the days of Cromwell, and
the blunt honesty and chivalrous loyalty of the Cavaliers, had both
measurably given place to the corrupting influences of the licentious and
infidel court of Charles II.; and to the arrogance, intolerance, and
shameless self-seeking of a prelacy which, in its day of triumph and
revenge, had more than justified the terrible denunciations and scathing
gibes of Milton.
Both Catholic and Protestant writers have misrepresented James II. He
deserves neither the execrations of the one nor the eulogies of the
other. The candid historian must admit that he was, after all, a better
man than his brother Charles II. He was a sincere and bigoted Catholic,
and was undoubtedly honest in the declaration, which he made in that
unlucky letter which Burnet ferreted out on the Continent, that he was
prepared to make large steps to build up the Catholic Church in England,
and, if necessary, to become a martyr in her cause. He was proud,
austere, and self-willed. In the treatment of his enemies he partook of
the cruel temper of his time. He was at once ascetic and sensual,
alternating between the hair-shirt of penance and the embraces of
Catharine Sedley. His situation was one of the most difficult and
embarrassing which can be conceived of. He was at once a bigoted Papist
and a Protestant pope. He hated the French domination to which his
brother had submitted; yet his pride as sovereign was subordinated to his
allegiance to Rome and a superstitious veneration for the wily priests
with which Louis XIV. surrounded him. As the head of Anglican heretics,
he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereign
and the man. He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against
the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its
ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits
and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely
ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by
Protestant inquisitors. He was torn by conflicting interests and
spiritual and political contradictions. The prelates of the Established
Church must share the responsibility of many of the worst acts of the
early part of his reign. Oxford sent up its lawned deputations to mingle
the voice of adulation with the groans of tortured Covenanters, and
fawning ecclesiastics burned the incense of irreverent flattery under the
nostrils of the Lord's anointed, while the blessed air of England was
tainted by the carcasses of the ill-fated followers of Monmouth, rotting
on a thousand gibbets. While Jeffreys was threatening Baxter and his
Presbyterian friends with the pillory and whipping-post; while Quakers
and Baptists were only spared from extermination as game preserves for
the sport of clerical hunters; while the prisons were thronged with the
heads of some fifteen thousand beggared families, and Dissenters of every
name and degree were chased from one hiding-place to another, like David
among the cliffs of Ziph and the rocks of the wild goats,--the
thanksgivings and congratulations of prelacy arose in an unbroken strain
of laudation from all the episcopal palaces of England. What mattered it
to men, in whose hearts, to use the language of John Milton, "the sour
leaven of human traditions, mixed with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy,
lay basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, hatching
Antichrist," that the privileges of Englishmen and the rights secured by
the great charter were violated and trodden under foot, so long as
usurpation enured to their own benefit? But when King James issued his
Declaration of Indulgence, and stretched his prerogative on the side of
tolerance and charity, the zeal of the prelates for preserving the
integrity of the British constitution and the limiting of the royal power
flamed up into rebellion. They forswore themselves without scruple: the
disciples of Laud, the asserters of kingly infallibility and divine
right, talked of usurped power and English rights in the strain of the
very schismatics whom they had persecuted to the death. There is no
reason to believe that James supposed that, in issuing his declaration
suspending the penal laws, he had transcended the rightful prerogative of
his throne. The power which he exercised had been used by his
predecessors for far less worthy purposes, and with the approbation of
many of the very men who now opposed him. His ostensible object,
expressed in language which even those who condemn his policy cannot but
admire, was a laudable and noble one. "We trust," said he, "that it will
not be vain that we have resolved to use our utmost endeavors to
establish liberty of conscience on such just and equal foundations as
will render it unalterable, and secure to all people the free exercise of
their religion, by which future ages may reap the benefit of what is so
undoubtedly the general good of the whole kingdom." Whatever may have
been the motive of this declaration,--even admitting the suspicions of
his enemies to have been true, that he advocated universal toleration as
the only means of restoring Roman Catholics to all the rights and
privileges of which the penal laws deprived them,--it would seem that
there could have been no very serious objection on the part of real
friends of religious toleration to the taking of him at his word and
placing Englishmen of every sect on an equality before the law. The
Catholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time as
numerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists. The army, the navy, and nine
tenths of the people of England were Protestants. Real danger,
therefore, from a simple act of justice towards their Catholic fellow-
citizens, the people of England had no ground for apprehending. But the
great truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughout
Christendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, and
not between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience is
sacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of the
seventeenth century. Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted the
Catholics from his plan of toleration. Locke, yielding to the prejudices
of the time, took the same ground. The enlightened latitudinarian
ministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christian
charity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day of
its greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universal
toleration. The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papists
from the pale of their charity. With the single exception of the sect of
which William Penn was a conspicuous member, the idea of complete and
impartial toleration was novel and unwelcome to all sects and classes of
the English people. Hence it was that the very men whose liberties and
estates had been secured by the declaration, and who were thereby
permitted to hold their meetings in peace and quietness, used their newly
acquired freedom in denouncing the king, because the same key which had
opened their prison doors had also liberated the Papists and the Quakers.
Baxter's severe and painful spirit could not rejoice in an act which had,
indeed, restored him to personal freedom, but which had, in his view,
also offended Heaven, and strengthened the powers of Antichrist by
extending the same favor to Jesuits and Ranters. Bunyan disliked the
Quakers next to the Papists; and it greatly lessened his satisfaction at
his release from Bedford jail that it had been brought about by the
influence of the former at the court of a Catholic prince. Dissenters
forgot the wrongs and persecutions which they had experienced at the
hands of the prelacy, and joined the bishops in opposition to the
declaration. They almost magnified into Christian confessors the
prelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plotted
against the king for restoring them to liberty of person and conscience.
The nightmare fear of Popery overcame their love of religious liberty;
and they meekly offered their necks to the yoke of prelacy as the only
security against the heavier one of Papist supremacy. In a far different
manner the cleareyed and plain-spoken John Milton met the claims and
demands of the hierarchy in his time. "They entreat us," said he, "that
we be not weary of the insupportable grievances that our shoulders have
hitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we think them fit to be our
justices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state. They pray
us that it would please us to let them still haul us and wrong us with
their bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the Parliament
that they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in their
diabolical courts, to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our wide
wounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, and
mercury. Surely a right, reasonable, innocent, and soft-hearted
petition! O the relenting bowels of the fathers!"
Considering the prominent part acted by William Penn in the reign of
James II., and his active and influential support of the obnoxious
declaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardly
have been otherwise than that his character should suffer from the
unworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries. His views of
religious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be received
with favor. They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented.
All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whose
convictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what he
regarded as divine illumination. What the council of James yielded upon
grounds of state policy he defended on those of religious obligation.
He had suffered in person and estate for the exercise of his religion.
He had travelled over Holland and Germany, pleading with those in
authority for universal toleration and charity. On a sudden, on the
accession of James, the friend of himself and his family, he found
himself the most influential untitled citizen in the British realm.
He had free access to the royal ear. Asking nothing for himself or his
relatives, he demanded only that the good people of England should be no
longer despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions.
James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with his
dissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief.
Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughly
convinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declaration
as the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will to
men. He was not the man to distrust the motives of an act so fully in
accordance with his lifelong aspirations and prayers. He was charitable
to a fault: his faith in his fellow-men was often stronger than a clearer
insight of their characters would have justified. He saw the errors of
the king, and deplored them; he denounced Jeffreys as a butcher who had
been let loose by the priests; and pitied the king, who was, he thought,
swayed by evil counsels. He remonstrated against the interference of the
king with Magdalen College; and reproved and rebuked the hopes and aims
of the more zealous and hot-headed Catholics, advising them to be content
with simple toleration. But the constitution of his mind fitted him
rather for the commendation of the good than the denunciation of the bad.
He had little in common with the bold and austere spirit of the Puritan
reformers. He disliked their violence and harshness; while, on the other
hand, he was attracted and pleased by the gentle disposition and mild
counsels of Locke, and Tillotson, and the latitudinarians of the English
Church. He was the intimate personal and political friend of Algernon
Sydney; sympathized with his republican theories, and shared his
abhorrence of tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical. He found in him a man
after his own heart,--genial, generous, and loving; faithful to duty and
the instincts of humanity; a true Christian gentleman. His sense of
gratitude was strong, and his personal friendships sometimes clouded his
judgment. In giving his support to the measures of James in behalf of
liberty of conscience, it must be admitted that he acted in consistency
with his principles and professions. To have taken ground against them,
he must have given the lie to his declarations from his youth upward. He
could not disown and deny his own favorite doctrine because it came from
the lips of a Catholic king and his Jesuit advisers; and in thus rising
above the prejudices of his time, and appealing to the reason and
humanity of the people of England in favor of a cordial indorsement on
the part of Parliament of the principles of the declaration, he believed
that he was subserving the best interests of his beloved country and
fulfilling the solemn obligations of religious duty. The downfall of
James exposed Penn to peril and obloquy. Perjured informers endeavored
to swear away his life; and, although nothing could be proved against him
beyond the fact that he had steadily supported the great measure of
toleration, he was compelled to live secluded in his private lodgings in
London for two or three years, with a proclamation for his arrest hanging
over his head. At length, the principal informer against him having been
found guilty of perjury, the government warrant was withdrawn; and Lords
Sidney, Rochester, and Somers, and the Duke of Buckingham, publicly bore
testimony that nothing had been urged against him save by impostors, and
that "they had known him, some of them, for thirty years, and had never
known him to do an ill thing, but many good offices." It is a matter of
regret that one professing to hold the impartial pen of history should
have given the sanction of his authority to the slanderous and false
imputations of such a man as Burnet, who has never been regarded as an
authentic chronicler. The pantheon of history should not be lightly
disturbed. A good man's character is the world's common legacy; and
humanity is not so rich in models of purity and goodness as to be able to
sacrifice such a reputation as that of William Penn to the point of an
antithesis or the effect of a paradox.
Gilbert Burnet, in liberality as a politician and tolerance as a
Churchman, was far in advance of his order and time. It is true
that he shut out the Catholics from the pale of his charity and
barely tolerated the Dissenters. The idea of entire religious
liberty and equality shocked even his moderate degree of
sensitiveness. He met Penn at the court of the Prince of Orange,
and, after a long and fruitless effort to convince the Dissenter
that the penal laws against the Catholics should be enforced, and
allegiance to the Established Church continue the condition of
qualification for offices of trust and honor, and that he and his
friends should rest contented with simple toleration, he became
irritated by the inflexible adherence of Penn to the principle of
entire religious freedom. One of the most worthy sons of the
Episcopal Church, Thomas Clarkson, alluding to this discussion, says
"Burnet never mentioned him (Penn) afterwards but coldly or
sneeringly, or in a way to lower him in the estimation of the
reader, whenever he had occasion to speak of him in his History of
his Own Times."
He was a man of strong prejudices; he lived in the midst of
revolutions, plots, and intrigues; he saw much of the worst side of
human nature; and he candidly admits, in the preface to his great
work, that he was inclined to think generally the worst of men and
parties, and that the reader should make allowance for this
inclination, although he had honestly tried to give the truth. Dr.
King, of Oxford, in his Anecdotes of his Own Times, p. 185, says:
"I knew Burnet: he was a furious party-man, and easily imposed upon
by any lying spirit of his faction; but he was a better pastor than
any man who is now seated on the bishops' bench." The Tory writers
--Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and others--have undoubtedly exaggerated
the defects of Burnet's narrative; while, on the other hand, his
Whig commentators have excused them on the ground of his avowed and
fierce partisanship. Dr. Johnson, in his blunt way, says: "I do not
believe Burnet intentionally lied; but he was so much prejudiced
that he took no pains to find out the truth." On the contrary, Sir
James Mackintosh, in the Edinburgh Review, speaks of the Bishop as
an honest writer, seldom substantially erroneous, though often
inaccurate in points of detail; and Macaulay, who has quite too
closely followed him in his history, defends him as at least quite
as accurate as his contemporary writers, and says that, "in his
moral character, as in his intellectual, great blemishes were more
than compensated by great excellences."
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