Constitutional History of England, Henry VII to George II. Volume 3 of 3

by Henry Hallam

The desire of rule in William III. was as magnanimous and public-spirited as ambition can ever be in a human bosom. It was the consciousness not only of having devoted himself to a great cause, the security of Europe, and especially of Great Britain and Holland, against unceasing aggression, but of resources in his own firmness and sagacity which no other person possessed. A commanding force, a copious revenue, a supreme authority in councils, were not sought, as by the crowd of kings, for the enjoyment of selfish vanity and covetousness, but as the only sure instruments of success in his high calling, in the race of heroic enterprise which Providence had appointed for the elect champion of civil and religious liberty. We can hardly wonder that he should not quite render justice to the motives of those who seemed to impede his strenuous energies; that he should resent as ingratitude those precautions against abuse of power by him, the recent deliverer of the nation, which it had never called for against those who had sought to enslave it.

But reasonable as this apology may be, it was still an unhappy error of William that he did not sufficiently weigh the circumstances which had elevated him to the English throne, and the alteration they had inevitably made in the relations between the Crown and the parliament. Chosen upon the popular principle of general freedom and public good, on the ruins of an ancient hereditary throne, he could expect to reign on no other terms than as the chief of a commonwealth, with no other authority than the sense of the nation and of parliament deemed congenial to the new constitution. The debt of gratitude to him was indeed immense, and not sufficiently remembered; but it was due for having enabled the nation to regenerate itself, and to place barriers against future assaults, to provide securities against future misgovernment. No one could seriously assert that James II. was the only sovereign of whom there had been cause to complain. In almost every reign, on the contrary, which our history records, the innate love of arbitrary power had produced more or less of oppression. The revolution was chiefly beneficial, as it gave a stronger impulse to the desire of political liberty, and rendered it more extensively attainable. It was certainly not for the sake of replacing James by William with equal powers of doing injury, that the purest and wisest patriots engaged in that cause; but as the sole means of making a royal government permanently compatible with freedom and justice. The bill of rights had pretended to do nothing more than stigmatise some recent proceedings: were the representatives of the nation to stop short of other measures, because they seemed novel and restrictive of the Crown's authority, when for the want of them the Crown's authority had nearly freed itself from all restriction? Such was their true motive for limiting the revenue, and such the ample justification of those important statutes enacted in the course of this reign, which the king, unfortunately for his reputation and peace of mind, too jealously resisted.

No republican party in existence.—It is by no means unusual to find mention of a commonwealth or republican party, as if it existed in some force at the time of the revolution, and throughout the reign of William III.; nay some writers, such as Hume, Dalrymple, and Somerville, have, by putting them in a sort of balance against the Jacobites, as the extremes of the whig and tory factions, endeavoured to persuade us that the one was as substantial and united a body as the other. It may, however, be confidently asserted, that no republican party had any existence; if by that word we are to understand a set of men whose object was the abolition of our limited monarchy. There might unquestionably be persons, especially among the independent sect, who cherished the memory of what they called the good old cause, and thought civil liberty irreconcilable with any form of regal government. But these were too inconsiderable, and too far removed from political influence, to deserve the appellation of a party. I believe it would be difficult to name five individuals, to whom even a speculative preference of a commonwealth may with probability be ascribed. Were it otherwise, the numerous pamphlets of this period would bear witness to their activity. Yet, with the exception perhaps of one or two, and those rather equivocal, we should search, I suspect, the collections of that time in vain for any manifestations of a republican spirit. If indeed an ardent zeal to see the prerogative effectually restrained, to vindicate that high authority of the House of Commons over the executive administration which it has in fact claimed and exercised, to purify the house itself from corrupt influence, if a tendency to dwell upon the popular origin of civil society, and the principles which Locke, above other writers, had brought again into fashion, be called republican (as in a primary but less usual sense of the word they may), no one can deny that this spirit eminently characterised the age of William III. And schemes of reformation emanating from this source were sometimes offered to the world, trenching more perhaps on the established constitution than either necessity demanded or prudence warranted. But these were anonymous and of little influence; nor did they ever extend to the absolute subversion of the throne.[176]

William employs tories in ministry.—William, however, was very early led to imagine, whether through the insinuations of Lord Nottingham, as Burnet pretends, or the natural prejudice of kings against those who do not comply with them, that there not only existed a republican party, but that it numbered many supporters among the principal whigs. He dissolved the convention-parliament; and gave his confidence for some time to the opposite faction.[177] But, among these, a real disaffection to his government prevailed so widely that he could with difficulty select men sincerely attached to it. The majority professed only to pay allegiance as to a sovereign de facto, and violently opposed the bill of recognition in 1690, both on account of the words rightful and lawful king which it applied to William, and of its declaring the laws passed in the last parliament to have been good and valid.[178] They had influence enough with the king to defeat a bill proposed by the whigs, by which an oath of abjuration of James's right was to be taken by all persons in trust.[179] It is by no means certain that even those who abstained from all connection with James after his loss of the throne, would have made a strenuous resistance in case of his landing to recover it.[180] But we know that a large proportion of the tories were engaged in a confederacy to support him. Almost every peer, in fact, of any consideration among that party, with the exception of Lord Nottingham, is implicated by the secret documents which Macpherson and Dalrymple have brought to light; especially Godolphin, Carmarthen, and Marlborough, the second at that time prime minister of William (as he might justly be called), the last with circumstances of extraordinary and abandoned treachery towards his country as well as his allegiance.[181] Two of the most distinguished whigs (and if the imputation is not fully substantiated against others[182] by name, we know generally that many were liable to it), forfeited a high name among their contemporaries, in the eyes of a posterity which has known them better; the Earl of Shrewsbury, from that strange feebleness of soul which hung like a spell upon his nobler qualities, and Admiral Russell, from insolent pride and sullenness of temper. Both these were engaged in the vile intrigues of a faction they abhorred; but Shrewsbury soon learned again to revere the sovereign he had contributed to raise, and withdrew from the contamination of Jacobitism. It does not appear that he betrayed that trust which William is said with extraordinary magnanimity to have reposed on him, after a full knowledge of his connection with the court of St. Germain.[183] But Russell, though compelled to win the battle of La Hogue against his will, took care to render his splendid victory as little advantageous as possible. The credulity and almost wilful blindness of faction is strongly manifested in the conduct of the House of Commons as to the quarrel between this commander and the board of admiralty. They chose to support one who was secretly a traitor, because he bore the name of whig, tolerating his infamous neglect of duty and contemptible excuses; in order to pull down an honest, though not very able minister, who belonged to the tories.[184] But they saw clearly that the king was betrayed, though mistaken, in this instance, as to the persons; and were right in concluding that the men who had effected the revolution were in general most likely to maintain it; or, in the words of a committee of the whole house, "That his majesty be humbly advised, for the necessary support of his government, to employ in his councils and management of his affairs such persons only whose principles oblige them to stand by him and his right against the late King James, and all other pretenders whatsoever."[185] It is plain from this and other votes of the Commons, that the tories had lost that majority which they seem to have held in the first session of this parliament.[186]

It is not, however, to be inferred from this extensive combination in favour of the banished king, that his party embraced the majority of the nation, or that he could have been restored with any general testimonies of satisfaction. The friends of the revolution were still by far the more powerful body. Even the secret emissaries of James confess that the common people were strongly prejudiced against his return. His own enumeration of peers attached to his cause cannot be brought to more than thirty, exclusive of catholics;[187] and the real Jacobites were, I believe, in a far less proportion among the Commons. The hopes of that wretched victim of his own bigotry and violence rested less on the loyalty of his former subjects, or on their disaffection to his rival, than on the perfidious conspiracy of English statesmen and admirals, of lord-lieutenants and governors of towns, and on so numerous a French army as an ill-defended and disunited kingdom would be incapable to resist. He was to return, not as his brother, alone and unarmed, strong only in the consentient voice of the nation, but amidst the bayonets of 30,000 French auxiliaries. These were the pledges of just and constitutional rule, whom our patriot Jacobites invoked against the despotism of William III. It was from a king of the house of Stuart, from James II., from one thus encircled by the soldiers of Louis XIV., that we were to receive the guarantee of civil and religious liberty. Happily the determined love of arbitrary power, burning unextinguished amidst exile and disgrace, would not permit him to promise, in any distinct manner, those securities which a large portion of his own adherents required. The Jacobite faction was divided between compounders and non-compounders; the one insisting on the necessity of holding forth a promise of such new enactments upon the king's restoration as might remove all jealousies as to the rights of the church and people; the other, more agreeably to James's temper, rejecting every compromise with what they called the republican party at the expense of his ancient prerogative.[188] In a declaration which he issued from St. Germain in 1692 there was so little acknowledgment of error, so few promises of security, so many exceptions from the amnesty he offered, that the wiser of his partisans in England were willing to insinuate that it was not authentic.[189] This declaration, and the virulence of Jacobite pamphlets in the same tone, must have done harm to his cause.[190] He published another declaration next year at the earnest request of those who had seceded to his side from that of the revolution, in which he held forth more specific assurances of consenting to a limitation of his prerogative.[191] But no reflecting man could avoid perceiving that such promises wrung from his distress were illusory and insincere, that in the exultation of triumphant loyalty, even without the sword of the Gaul thrown into the scale of despotism, those who dreamed of a conditional restoration and of fresh guarantees for civil liberty, would find, like the presbyterians of 1660, that it became them rather to be anxious about their own pardon, and to receive it as a signal boon of the king's clemency. The knowledge thus obtained of James's incorrigible obstinacy seems gradually to have convinced the disaffected that no hope for the nation or for themselves could be drawn from his restoration.[192] His connections with the treacherous counsellors of William grew weaker; and even before the peace of Ryswick it was evident that the aged bigot could never wield again the sceptre he had thrown away. The scheme of assassinating our illustrious sovereign, which some of James's desperate zealots had devised without his privity, as may charitably and even reasonably be supposed,[193] gave a fatal blow to the interests of that faction. It was instantly seen that the murmurs of malecontent whigs had nothing in common with the disaffection of Jacobites. The nation resounded with an indignant cry against the atrocious conspiracy. An association abjuring the title of James, and pledging the subscribers to revenge the king's death, after the model of that in the reign of Elizabeth, was generally signed by both houses of parliament, and throughout the kingdom.[194] The adherents of the exiled family dwindled into so powerless a minority that they could make no sort of opposition to the act of settlement, and did not recover an efficient character as a party till towards the latter end of the ensuing reign.

Attainder of Sir John Fenwick.—Perhaps the indignation of parliament against those who sought to bring back despotism through civil war and the murder of an heroic sovereign, was carried too far in the bill for attainting Sir John Fenwick of treason. Two witnesses, required by our law in a charge of that nature, Porter and Goodman, had deposed before the grand jury to Fenwick's share in the scheme of invasion, though there is no reason to believe that he was privy to the intended assassination of the king. His wife subsequently prevailed on Goodman to quit the kingdom; and thus it became impossible to obtain a conviction in the course of law. This was the apology for a special act of the legislature, by which he suffered the penalties of treason. It did not, like some other acts of attainder, inflict a punishment beyond the offence, but supplied the deficiency of legal evidence. It was sustained by the production of Goodman's examination before the privy council, and by the evidence of two grand-jurymen as to the deposition he had made on oath before them, and on which they had found the bill of indictment. It was also shown that he had been tampered with by Lady Mary Fenwick to leave the kingdom. This was undoubtedly as good secondary evidence as can well be imagined; and, though in criminal cases such evidence is not admissible by courts of law, it was plausibly urged that the legislature might prevent Fenwick from taking advantage of his own underhand management, without transgressing the moral rules of justice, or even setting the dangerous precedent of punishing treason upon a single testimony. Yet, upon the whole, the importance of adhering to the stubborn rules of law in matters of treason is so weighty, and the difficulty of keeping such a body as the House of Commons within any less precise limits so manifest, that we may well concur with those who thought Sir John Fenwick much too inconsiderable a person to warrant such an anomaly. The jealous sense of liberty prevalent in William's reign produced a very strong opposition to this bill of attainder; it passed in each house, especially in the Lords, by a small majority.[195] Nor perhaps would it have been carried but for Fenwick's imprudent disclosure, in order to save his life, of some great statesmen's intrigues with the late king; a disclosure which he dared not, or was not in a situation to confirm, but which rendered him the victim of their fear and revenge. Russell, one of those accused, brought into the Commons the bill of attainder; Marlborough voted in favour of it, the only instance wherein he quitted the tories; Godolphin and Bath, with more humanity, took the other side; and Shrewsbury absented himself from the House of Lords.[196] It is now well known that Fenwick's discoveries went not a step beyond the truth. Their effect, however, was beneficial to the state; as by displaying a strange want of secrecy in the court of St. Germains, Fenwick never having had any direct communication with those he accused, it caused Godolphin and Marlborough to break off their dangerous course of perfidy.[197]

Ill success of the war.—Amidst these scenes of dissension and disaffection, and amidst the public losses and decline which aggravated them, we have scarce any object to contemplate with pleasure, but the magnanimous and unconquerable soul of William. Mistaken in some parts of his domestic policy, unsuited by some failings of his character for the English nation, it is still to his superiority in virtue and energy over all her own natives in that age that England is indebted for the preservation of her honour and liberty; not at the crisis only of the revolution, but through the difficult period that elapsed until the peace of Ryswick. A war of nine years, generally unfortunate, unsatisfactory in its result, carried on at a cost unknown to former times, amidst the decay of trade, the exhaustion of resources, the decline, as there seems good reason to believe, of population itself, was the festering wound that turned a people's gratitude into factiousness and treachery. It was easy to excite the national prejudices against campaigns in Flanders, especially when so unsuccessful, and to inveigh against the neglect of our maritime power. Yet, unless we could have been secure against invasion, which Louis would infallibly have attempted, had not his whole force been occupied by the grand alliance, and which, in the feeble condition of our navy and commerce, at one time could not have been impracticable, the defeats of Steenkirk and Landen might probably have been sustained at home. The war of 1689, and the great confederacy of Europe, which William alone could animate with any steadiness and energy, were most evidently and undeniably the means of preserving the independence of England. That danger, which has sometimes been in our countrymen's mouths with little meaning, of becoming a province to France, was then close and actual; for I hold the restoration of the house of Stuart to be but another expression for that ignominy and servitude.

Expenses of the war.—The expense therefore of this war must not be reckoned unnecessary; nor must we censure the government for that small portion of our debt which it was compelled to entail on posterity.[198] It is to the honour of William's administration, and of his parliaments, not always clear-sighted, but honest and zealous for the public weal, that they deviated so little from the praiseworthy, though sometimes impracticable, policy of providing a revenue commensurate with the annual expenditure. The supplies annually raised during the war were about five millions, more than double the revenue of James II. But a great decline took place in the produce of the taxes by which that revenue was levied. In 1693, the customs had dwindled to less than half their amount before the revolution, the excise duties to little more than half.[199] This rendered heavy impositions on land inevitable; a tax always obnoxious, and keeping up disaffection in the most powerful class of the community. The first land-tax was imposed in 1690, at the rate of three shillings in the pound on the rental; and it continued ever afterwards to be annually granted, at different rates, but commonly at four shillings in the pound, till it was made perpetual in 1798. A tax of twenty per cent. might well seem grievous; and the notorious inequality of the assessment in different counties tended rather to aggravate the burthen upon those whose contribution was the fairest. Fresh schemes of finance were devised, and, on the whole, patiently borne by a jaded people. The Bank of England rose under the auspices of the whig party, and materially relieved the immediate exigencies of the government, while it palliated the general distress, by discounting bills and lending money at an easier rate of interest. Yet its notes were depreciated twenty per cent. in exchange for silver; and exchequer tallies at least twice as much, till they were funded at an interest of eight per cent.[200] But, these resources generally falling very short of calculation, and being anticipated at such an exorbitant discount, a constantly increasing deficiency arose; and public credit sunk so low, that about the year 1696 it was hardly possible to pay the fleet and army from month to month, and a total bankruptcy seemed near at hand. These distresses again were enhanced by the depreciation of the circulating coin, and by the bold remedy of a re-coinage, which made the immediate stagnation of commerce more complete. The mere operation of exchanging the worn silver coin for the new, which Mr. Montague had the courage to do without lowering the standard, cost the government two millions and a half. Certainly the vessel of our commonwealth has never been so close to shipwreck as in this period; we have seen the storm raging in still greater terror round our heads, but with far stouter planks and tougher cables to confront and ride through it.

Those who accused William of neglecting the maritime force of England, knew little what they said, or cared little about its truth.[201] A soldier and a native of Holland, he naturally looked to the Spanish Netherlands as the theatre on which the battle of France and Europe was to be fought. It was by the possession of that country and its chief fortresses that Louis aspired to hold Holland in vassalage, to menace the coasts of England, and to keep the Empire under his influence. And if, with the assistance of those brave regiments, who learned, in the well-contested though unfortunate battles of that war, the skill and discipline which made them conquerors in the next, it was found that France was still an overmatch for the allies, what would have been effected against her by the decrepitude of Spain, the perverse pride of Austria, and the selfish disunion of Germany? The commerce of France might, perhaps, have suffered more by an exclusively maritime warfare; but we should have obtained this advantage, which in itself is none, and would not have essentially crippled her force, at the price of abandoning to her ambition the quarry it had so long in pursuit. Meanwhile the naval annals of this war added much to our renown; Russell, glorious in his own despite at La Hogue, Rooke, and Shovel kept up the honour of the English flag. After that great victory, the enemy never encountered us in battle; and the wintering of the fleet at Cadiz in 1694, a measure determined on by William's energetic mind, against the advice of his ministers, and in spite of the fretful insolence of the admiral, gave us so decided a pre-eminence both in the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas, that it is hard to say what more could have been achieved by the most exclusive attention to the navy.[202] It is true that, especially during the first part of the war, vast losses were sustained through the capture of merchant ships; but this is the inevitable lot of a commercial country, and has occurred in every war, until the practice of placing the traders under convoy of armed ships was introduced. And, when we consider the treachery which pervaded this service, and the great facility of secret intelligence which the enemy possessed, we may be astonished that our failures and losses were not still more decisive.

Treaty of Ryswick.—The treaty of Ryswick was concluded on at least as fair terms as almost perpetual ill fortune could warrant us to expect. It compelled Louis XIV. to recognise the king's title, and thus both humbled the court of St. Germains, and put an end for several years to its intrigues. It extinguished, or rather the war itself had extinguished, one of the bold hopes of the French court, the scheme of procuring the election of the dauphin to the empire. It gave at least a breathing time to Europe, so long as the feeble lamp of Charles II.'s life should continue to glimmer, during which the fate of his vast succession might possibly be regulated without injury to the liberties of Europe.[203] But to those who looked with the king's eyes on the prospects of the continent, this pacification could appear nothing else than a preliminary armistice of vigilance and preparation. He knew that the Spanish dominions, or at least as large a portion of them as could be grasped by a powerful arm, had been for more than thirty years the object of Louis XIV. The acquisitions of that monarch at Aix-la-Chapelle and Nimeguen had been comparatively trifling, and seem hardly enough to justify the dread that Europe felt of his aggressions. But in contenting himself for the time with a few strong towns, or a moderate district, he constantly kept in view the weakness of the King of Spain's constitution. The queen's renunciation of her right of succession was invalid in the jurisprudence of his court. Sovereigns, according to the public law of France, uncontrollable by the rights of others, were incapable of limiting their own. They might do all things but guarantee the privileges of their subjects or the independence of foreign states. By the Queen of France's death, her claim upon the inheritance of Spain was devolved upon the dauphin; so that ultimately, and virtually in the first instance, the two great monarchies would be consolidated, and a single will would direct a force much more than equal to all the rest of Europe. If we admit that every little oscillation in the balance of power has sometimes been too minutely regarded by English statesmen, it would be absurd to contend, that such a subversion of it as the union of France and Spain under one head did not most seriously threaten both the independence of England and Holland.