Томас Бабингтон Маколей
The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 2
On the following morning the Lords assembled early. The benches both of the spiritual and of the temporal peers were crowded. Hampden appeared at the bar, and put the resolution of the Commons into the hands of Halifax. The Upper House then resolved itself into a committee; and Danby took the chair. The discussion was soon interrupted by the reappearance of Hampden with another message. The House resumed and was informed that the Commons had just voted it inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant nation to be governed by a Popish King. To this resolution, irreconcilable as it obviously was with the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right, the Peers gave an immediate and unanimous assent. The principle which was thus affirmed has always, down to our own time, been held sacred by all Protestant statesmen, and has never been considered by any reasonable Roman Catholic as objectionable. If, indeed, our sovereigns were, like the Presidents of the United States, mere civil functionaries, it would not be easy to vindicate such a restriction. But the headship of the English Church is annexed to the English crown; and there is no intolerance in saying that a Church ought not to be subjected to a head who regards her as schismatical and heretical. 645
After this short interlude the Lords again went into committee. The Tories insisted that their plan should be discussed before the vote of the Commons which declared the throne vacant was considered. This was conceded to them; and the question was put whether a Regency, exercising kingly power during the life of James, in his name, would be the best expedient for preserving the laws and liberties of the nation?
The contest was long and animated. The chief speakers in favour of a Regency were Rochester and Nottingham. Halifax and Danby led the other side. The Primate, strange to say, did not make his appearance, though earnestly importuned by the Tory peers to place himself at their head. His absence drew on him many contumelious censures; nor have even his eulogists been able to find any explanation of it which raises his character. 646 The plan of Regency was his own. He had, a few days before, in a paper written with his own hand, pronounced that plan to be clearly the best that could be adopted. The deliberations of the Lords who supported that plan had been carried on under his roof. His situation made it his clear duty to declare publicly what he thought. Nobody can suspect him of personal cowardice or of vulgar cupidity. It was probably from a nervous fear of doing wrong that, at this great conjuncture, he did nothing: but he should have known that, situated as he was, to do nothing was to do wrong. A man who is too scrupulous to take on himself a grave responsibility at an important crisis ought to be too scrupulous to accept the place of first minister of the Church and first peer of the realm.
It is not strange, however, that Sancroft's mind should have been ill at case; for he could hardly be blind to the obvious truth that the scheme which he had recommended to his friends was utterly inconsistent with all that he and his brethren had been teaching during many years. That the King had a divine and indefeasible right to the regal power, and that the regal power, even when most grossly abused, could not without sin, be resisted, was the doctrine in which the Anglican Church had long gloried. Did this doctrine then really mean only that the King had a divine and indefeasible right to have his effigy and name cut on a seal which was to be daily employed in despite of him for the purpose of commissioning his enemies to levy war on him, and of sending his friends to the gallows for obeying him? Did the whole duty of a good subject consist in using the word King? If so, Fairfax at Naseby and Bradshaw in the High Court of justice had performed all the duty of good subjects. For Charles had been designated by the generals who commanded against him, and even by the judges who condemned him, as King. Nothing in the conduct of the Long Parliament had been more severely blamed by the Church than the ingenious device of using the name of Charles against himself. Every one of her ministers had been required to sign a declaration condemning as traitorous the fiction by which the authority of the sovereign had been separated from his person. 647 Yet this traitorous fiction was now considered by the Primate and by many of his suffragans as the only basis on which they could, in strict conformity with Christian principles, erect a government.
The distinction which Sancroft had borrowed from the Roundheads of the preceding generation subverted from the foundation that system of politics which the Church and the Universities pretended to have learned from Saint Paul. The Holy Spirit, it had been a thousand times repeated, had commanded the Romans to be subject to Nero. The meaning of the precept now appeared to be only that the Romans were to call Nero Augustus. They were perfectly at liberty to chase him beyond the Euphrates, to leave him a pensioner on the bounty of the Parthians, to withstand him by force if he attempted to return, to punish all who aided him or corresponded with him, and to transfer the Tribunitian power and the Consular power, the Presidency of the Senate and the command of the Legions, to Galba or Vespasian.
The analogy which the Archbishop imagined that he had discovered between the case of a wrongheaded King and the case of a lunatic King will not bear a moment's examination. It was plain that James was not in that state of mind in which, if he had been a country gentleman or a merchant, any tribunal would have held him incapable of executing a contract or a will. He was of unsound mind only as all bad Kings are of unsound mind; as Charles the First had been of unsound mind when he went to seize the five members; as Charles the Second had been of unsound mind when he concluded the treaty of Dover. If this sort of mental unsoundness did not justify subjects in withdrawing their obedience from princes, the plan of a Regency was evidently indefensible. If this sort of mental unsoundness did justify subjects in withdrawing their obedience from princes, the doctrine of nonresistance was completely given up; and all that any moderate Whig had ever contended for was fully admitted.
As to the oath of allegiance about which Sancroft and his disciples were so anxious, one thing at least is clear, that, whoever might be right, they were wrong. The Whigs held that, in the oath of allegiance, certain conditions were implied, that the King had violated these conditions, and that the oath had therefore lost its force. But, if the Whig doctrine were false, if the oath were still binding, could men of sense really believe that they escaped the guilt of perjury by voting for a Regency? Could they affirm that they bore true allegiance to James while they were in defiance of his protestations made before all Europe, authorising another person to receive the royal revenues, to summon and prorogue parliaments, to create Dukes and Earls, to name Bishops and judges, to pardon offenders, to command the forces of the state, and to conclude treaties with foreign powers? Had Pascal been able to find, in all the folios of the Jesuitical casuists, a sophism more contemptible than that which now, as it seemed, sufficed to quiet the consciences of the fathers of the Anglican Church?
Nothing could be more evident than that the plan of Regency could be defended only on Whig principles. Between the rational supporters of that plan and the majority of the House of Commons there could be no dispute as to the question of right. All that remained was a question of expediency. And would any statesman seriously contend that it was expedient to constitute a government with two heads, and to give to one of those heads regal power without regal dignity, and to the other regal dignity without regal power? It was notorious that such an arrangement, even when made necessary by the infancy or insanity of a prince, had serious disadvantages. That times of Regency were times of weakness, of trouble and of disaster, was a truth proved by the whole history of England, of France, and of Scotland, and had almost become a proverb. Yet, in a case of infancy or of insanity, the King was at least passive. He could not actively counterwork the Regent. What was now proposed was that England should have two first magistrate, of ripe age and sound mind, waging with each other an irreconcilable war. It was absurd to talk of leaving James merely the kingly name, and depriving him of all the kingly power. For the name was a part of the power. The word King was a word of conjuration. It was associated in the minds of many Englishmen with the idea of a mysterious character derived from above, and in the minds of almost all Englishmen with the idea of legitimate and venerable authority. Surely, if the title carried with it such power, those who maintained that James ought to be deprived of all power could not deny that he ought to be deprived of the title.
And how long was the anomalous government planned by the genius of Sancroft to last? Every argument which could be urged for setting it up at all might be urged with equal force for retaining it to the end of time. If the boy who had been carried into France was really born of the Queen, he would hereafter inherit the divine and indefeasible right to be called King. The same right would very probably be transmitted from Papist to Papist through the whole of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both the Houses had unanimously resolved that England should not be governed by a Papist. It might well be, therefore, that, from generation to generation, Regents would continue to administer the government in the name of vagrant and mendicant Kings. There was no doubt that the Regents must be appointed by Parliament. The effect, therefore, of this contrivance, a contrivance intended to preserve unimpaired the sacred principle of hereditary monarchy, would be that the monarchy would become really elective.
Another unanswerable reason was urged against Sancroft's plan. There was in the statute book a law which had been passed soon after the close of the long and bloody contest between the Houses of York and Lancaster, and which had been framed for the purpose of averting calamities such as the alternate victories of those Houses had brought on the nobility and gentry of the realm. By this law it was provided that no person should, by adhering to a King in possession, incur the penalties of treason. When the regicides were brought to trial after the Restoration, some of them insisted that their case lay within the equity of this act. They had obeyed, they said, the government which was in possession, and were therefore not traitors. The Judges admitted that this would have been a good defence if the prisoners had acted under the authority of an usurper who, like Henry the Fourth and Richard the Third, bore the regal title, but declared that such a defence could not avail men who had indicted, sentenced, and executed one who, in the indictment, in the sentence, and in the death warrant, was designated as King. It followed, therefore, that whoever should support a Regent in opposition to James would run great risk of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, if ever James should recover supreme power; but that no person could, without such a violation of law as Jeffreys himself would hardly venture to commit, be punished for siding with a King who was reigning, though wrongfully, at Whitehall, against a rightful King who was in exile at Saint Germains. 648
It should seem that these arguments admit of no reply; and they were doubtless urged with force by Danby, who had a wonderful power of making every subject which he treated clear to the dullest mind, and by Halifax, who, in fertility of thought and brilliancy of diction, had no rival among the orators of that age. Yet so numerous and powerful were the Tories in the Upper House that, notwithstanding the weakness of their case, the defection of their leader, and the ability of their opponents, they very nearly carried the day. A hundred Lords divided. Forty-nine voted for a Regency, fifty-one against it. In the minority were the natural children of Charles, the brothers in law of James, the Dukes of Somerset and Ormond, the Archbishop of York and eleven Bishops. No prelate voted in the majority except Compton and Trelawney. 649
It was near nine in the evening before the House rose. The following day was the thirtieth of January, the anniversary of the death of Charles the First. The great body of the Anglican clergy had, during many years, thought it a sacred duty to inculcate on that day the doctrines of nonresistance and passive obedience. Their old sermons were now of little use; and many divines were even in doubt whether they could venture to read the whole Liturgy. The Lower House had declared that the throne was vacant. The Upper had not yet expressed any opinion. It was therefore not easy to decide whether the prayers for the sovereign ought to be used. Every officiating minister took his own course. In most of the churches of the capital the petitions for James were omitted: but at Saint Margaret's, Sharp, Dean of Norwich, who had been requested to preach before the Commons, not only read to their faces the whole service as it stood in the book, but, before his sermon, implored, in his own words, a blessing on the King, and, towards the close of his discourse, declaimed against the Jesuitical doctrine that princes might lawfully be deposed by their subjects. The Speaker, that very afternoon, complained to the House of this affront. "You pass a vote one day," he said; "and on the next day it is contradicted from the pulpit in your own hearing." Sharp was strenuously defended by the Tories, and had friends even among the Whigs: for it was not forgotten that he had incurred serious danger in the evil times by the courage with which, in defiance of the royal injunction, he had preached against Popery. Sir Christopher Musgrave very ingeniously remarked that the House had not ordered the resolution which declared the throne vacant to be published. Sharp, therefore, was not only not bound to know anything of that resolution, but could not have taken notice of it without a breach of privilege for which he might have been called to the bar and reprimanded on his knees. The majority felt that it was not wise at that conjuncture to quarrel with the clergy; and the subject was suffered to drop. 650
While the Commons were discussing Sharp's sermon, the Lords had again gone into a committee on the state of the nation, and had ordered the resolution which pronounced the throne vacant to be read clause by clause.
The first expression on which a debate arose was that which recognised the original contract between King and people. It was not to be expected that the Tory peers would suffer a phrase which contained the quintessence of Whiggism to pass unchallenged. A division took place; and it was determined by fifty-three votes to forty-six that the words should stand.
The severe censure passed by the Commons on the administration of James was next considered, and was approved without one dissentient voice. Some verbal objections were made to the proposition that James had abdicated the government. It was urged that he might more correctly be said to have deserted it. This amendment was adopted, it should seem, with scarcely any debate, and without a division. By this time it was late; and the Lords again adjourned. 651
Up to this moment the small body of peers which was under the guidance of Danby had acted in firm union with Halifax and the Whigs. The effect of this union had been that the plan of Regency had been rejected, and the doctrine of the original contract affirmed. The proposition that James had ceased to be King had been the rallying point of the two parties which had made up the majority. But from that point their path diverged. The next question to be decided was whether the throne was vacant; and this was a question not merely verbal, but of grave practical importance. If the throne was vacant, the Estates of the Realm might place William in it. If it was not vacant, he could succeed to it only after his wife, after Anne, and after Anne's posterity.
It was, according to the followers of Danby, an established maxim that our country could not be, even for a moment, without a rightful prince. The man might die; but the magistrate was immortal. The man might abdicate; but the magistrate was irremoveable. If, these politicians said, we once admit that the throne is vacant, we admit that it is elective. The sovereign whom we may place on it will be a sovereign, not after the English, but after the Polish, fashion. Even if we choose the very person who would reign by right of birth, still that person will reign not by right of birth, but in virtue of our choice, and will take as a gift what ought to be regarded as an inheritance. That salutary reverence with which the blood royal and the order of primogeniture have hitherto been regarded will be greatly diminished. Still more serious will the evil be, if we not only fill the throne by election, but fill it with a prince who has doubtless the qualities of a great and good ruler, and who has wrought a wonderful deliverance for us, but who is not first nor even second in the order of succession. If we once say that, merit, however eminent, shall be a title to the crown, we disturb the very foundations of our polity, and furnish a precedent of which every ambitious warrior or statesman who may have rendered any great service to the public will be tempted to avail himself. This danger we avoid if we logically follow out the principles of the constitution to their consequences. There has been a demise of the crown. At the instant of the demise the next heir became our lawful sovereign. We consider the Princess of Orange as next heir; and we hold that she ought, without any delay, to be proclaimed, what she already is, our Queen.
The Whigs replied that it was idle to apply ordinary rules to a country in a state of revolution, that the great question now depending was not to be decided by the saws of pedantic Templars, and that, if it were to be so decided, such saws might be quoted on one side as well as the other. If it were a legal maxim that the throne could never be vacant, it was also a legal maxim that a living man could have no heir. James was still living. How then could the Princess of Orange be his heir? The truth was that the laws of England had made full provision for the succession when the power of a sovereign and his natural life terminated together, but had made no provision for the very rare cases in which his power terminated before the close of his natural life; and with one of those very rare cases the Convention had now to deal. That James no longer filled the throne both Houses had pronounced. Neither common law nor statute law designated any person as entitled to fill the throne between his demise and his decease. It followed that the throne was vacant, and that the Houses might invite the Prince of Orange to fill it. That he was not next in order of birth was true: but this was no disadvantage: on the contrary, it was a positive recommendation. Hereditary monarchy was a good political institution, but was by no means more sacred than other good political institutions. Unfortunately, bigoted and servile theologians had turned it into a religious mystery, almost as awful and as incomprehensible as transubstantiation itself. To keep the institution, and yet to get rid of the abject and noxious superstitions with which it had of late years been associated and which had made it a curse instead of a blessing to society, ought to be the first object of English statesmen; and that object would be best attained by slightly deviating for a time from the general rule of descent, and by then returning to it.
Many attempts were made to prevent an open breach between the party of the Prince and the party of the Princess. A great meeting was held at the Earl of Devonshire's House, and the dispute was warm. Halifax was the chief speaker for William, Danby for Mary. Of the mind of Mary Danby knew nothing. She had been some time expected in London, but had been detained in Holland, first by masses of ice which had blocked up the rivers, and, when the thaw came, by strong westerly winds. Had she arrived earlier the dispute would probably have been at once quieted. Halifax on the other side had no authority to say anything in William's name. The Prince, true to his promise that he would leave the settlement of the government to the Convention, had maintained an impenetrable reserve, and had not suffered any word, look, or gesture, indicative either of satisfaction or of displeasure, to escape him. One of his countrymen, who had a large share of his confidence, had been invited to the meeting, and was earnestly pressed by the Peers to give them some information. He long excused himself. At last he so far yielded to their urgency as to say, "I can only guess at His Highness's mind. If you wish to know what I guess, I guess that he would not like to be his wife's gentleman usher: but I know nothing." "I know something now, however," said Danby. "I know enough, and too much." He then departed; and the assembly broke up. 652
On the thirty-first of January the debate which had terminated thus in private was publicly renewed in the House of Peers. That day had been fixed for the national thanksgiving. An office had been drawn up for the occasion by several Bishops, among whom were Ken and Sprat. It is perfectly free both from the adulation and from the malignity by which such compositions were in that age too often deformed, and sustains, better perhaps than any occasional service which has been framed during two centuries, a comparison with that great model of chaste, lofty, and pathetic eloquence, the Book of Common Prayer. The Lords went in the morning to Westminster Abbey. The Commons had desired Burnet to preach before them at Saint Margaret's. He was not likely to fall into the same error which had been committed in the same place on the preceding day. His vigorous and animated discourse doubtless called forth the loud hums of his auditors. It was not only printed by command of the House, but was translated into French for the edification of foreign Protestants. 653 The day closed with the festivities usual on such occasions. The whole town shone brightly with fireworks and bonfires: the roar of guns and the pealing of bells lasted till the night was far spent; but, before the lights were extinct and the streets silent, an event had taken place which threw a damp on the public joy.
The Peers had repaired from the Abbey to their house, and had resumed the discussion on the state of the nation. The last words of the resolution of the Commons were taken into consideration; and it soon became clear that the majority was not disposed to assent to those words. To near fifty Lords who held that the regal title still belonged to James were now added seven or eight who held that it had already devolved on Mary. The Whigs, finding themselves outnumbered, tried to compromise the dispute. They proposed to omit the words which pronounced the throne vacant, and simply to declare the Prince and Princess King and Queen. It was manifest that such a declaration implied, though it did not expressly affirm, all that the Tories were unwilling to concede. For nobody could pretend that William had succeeded to the regal office by right of birth. To pass a resolution acknowledging him as King was therefore an act of election; and how could there be an election without a vacancy? The proposition of the Whig Lords was rejected by fifty-two votes to forty-seven. The question was then put whether the throne was vacant. The contents were only forty-one: the noncontents fifty-five. Of the minority thirty-six protested. 654
During the two following days London was in an unquiet and anxious state. The Tories began to hope that they might be able again to bring forward their favourite plan of Regency with better success. Perhaps the Prince himself, when he found that he had no chance of wearing the crown, might prefer Sancroft's scheme to Danby's. It was better doubtless to be a King than to be a Regent: but it was better to be a Regent than to be a gentleman usher. On the other side the lower and fiercer class of Whigs, the old emissaries of Shaftesbury, the old associates of College, began to stir in the City. Crowds assembled in Palace Yard, and held threatening language. Lord Lovelace, who was suspected of having encouraged these assemblages, informed the Peers that he was charged with a petition requesting them instantly to declare the Prince and Princess of Orange King and Queen. He was asked by whom the petition was signed. "There are no hands to it yet," he answered; "but, when I bring it here next, there shall be hands enough." This menace alarmed and disgusted his own party. The leading Whigs were, in truth, even more anxious than the Tories that the deliberations of the Convention should be perfectly free, and that it should not be in the power of any adherent of James to allege that either House had acted under force. A petition, similar to that which had been entrusted to Lovelace, was brought into the House of Commons, but was contemptuously rejected. Maynard was foremost in protesting against the attempt of the rabble in the streets to overawe the Estates of the Realm. William sent for Lovelace, expostulated with him strongly, and ordered the magistrates to act with vigour against all unlawful assemblies. 655 Nothing in the history of our revolution is more deserving of admiration and of imitation than the manner in which the two parties in the Convention, at the very moment at which their disputes ran highest, joined like one man to resist the dictation of the mob of the capital.
But, though the Whigs were fully determined to maintain order and to respect the freedom of debate, they were equally determined to make no concession. On Saturday the second of February the Commons, without a division, resolved to adhere to their resolution as it originally stood. James, as usual, came to the help of his enemies. A letter from him to the Convention had just arrived in London. It had been transmitted to Preston by the apostate Melfort, who was now high in favour at Saint Germains. The name of Melfort was an abomination to every Churchman. That he was still a confidential minister was alone sufficient to prove that his master's folly and perverseness were incurable. No member of either House ventured to propose that a paper which came from such a quarter should be read. The contents, however, were well known to all the town. His Majesty exhorted the Lords and Commons not to despair of his clemency, and graciously assured them that he would pardon those who had betrayed him, some few excepted, whom he did not name. How was it possible to do any thing for a prince who, vanquished, deserted, banished, living on alms, told those who were the arbiters of his fate that, if they would set him on his throne again, he would hang only a few of them? 656
The contest between the two branches of the legislature lasted some days longer. On Monday the fourth of February the Peers resolved that they would insist on their amendments but a protest to which thirty-nine names were subscribed was entered on the journals. 657 On the following day the Tories determined to try their strength in the Lower House. They mustered there in great force. A motion was made to agree to the amendments of the Lords. Those who were for the plan of Sancroft and those who were for the plan of Danby divided together; but they were beaten by two hundred and eighty-two votes to a hundred and fifty-one. The House then resolved to request a free conference with the Lords. 658
At the same time strenuous efforts were making without the walls of Parliament to bring the dispute between the two branches of the legislature to a close. Burnet thought that the importance of the crisis justified him in publishing the great secret which the Princess had confided to him. He knew, he said, from her own lips, that it had long been her full determination, even if she came to the throne in the regular course of descent, to surrender her power, with the sanction of Parliament, into the hands of her husband. Danby received from her an earnest, and almost angry, reprimand. She was, she wrote, the Prince's wife; she had no other wish than to be subject to him; the most cruel injury that could be done to her would be to set her up as his competitor; and she never could regard any person who took such a course as her true friend. 659 The Tories had still one hope. Anne might insist on her own rights, and on those of her children. No effort was spared to stimulate her ambition, and to alarm her conscience. Her uncle Clarendon was especially active. A few weeks only had elapsed since the hope of wealth and greatness had impelled him to bely the boastful professions of his whole life, to desert the royal cause, to join with the Wildmans and Fergusons, nay, to propose that the King should be sent a prisoner to a foreign land and immured in a fortress begirt by pestilential marshes. The lure which had produced this strange transformation was the Viceroyalty of Ireland. Soon, however, it appeared that the proselyte had little chance of obtaining the splendid prize on which his heart was set. He found that others were consulted on Irish affairs. His advice was never asked, and, when obtrusively and importunately offered, was coldly received. He repaired many times to Saint James's Palace, but could scarcely obtain a word or a look. One day the Prince was writing, another day he wanted fresh air and must ride in the Park; on a third he was closeted with officers on military business and could see nobody. Clarendon saw that he was not likely to gain anything by the sacrifice of his principles, and determined to take them back again. In December ambition had converted him into a rebel. In January disappointment reconverted him into a royalist. The uneasy consciousness that he had not been a consistent Tory gave a peculiar acrimony to his Toryism. 660 In the House of Lords he had done all in his power to prevent a settlement. He now exerted, for the same end, all his influence over the Princess Anne. But his influence over her was small indeed when compared with that of the Churchills, who wisely called to their help two powerful allies, Tillotson, who, as a spiritual director, had, at that time, immense authority, and Lady Russell, whose noble and gentle virtues, proved by the most cruel of all trials, had gained for her the reputation of a saint. The Princess of Denmark, it was soon known, was willing that William should reign for life; and it was evident that to defend the cause of the daughters of James against themselves was a hopeless task. 661
