June 14, 1848.
BAILLIE’S LETTERS AND JOURNALS.
This is at once the handsomest and one of the best editions of the curious and very interesting class of works to which it belongs, that has yet been given to the public. It is scarce possible to appreciate too highly the tact, judgment, and research displayed by the editor; and rarely indeed, so far as externals are concerned, has the typography of Scotland appeared to better advantage. It is a book decked out for the drawing-room in a suit of the newest pattern,––a tall, modish, well-built book, that has to be fairly set a-talking ere we discover from its tongue and style that it is a production not of our own times, but of the times of Charles and the Commonwealth. The good, simple minister of Kilwinning would fail to recognise himself in its fair open pages, that more than rival those of his old Elzevirs. For his old-fashioned suit of home-spun grey, we find him sporting here a modern dress-coat of Saxony broadcloth, and a pair of unexceptionable cashmere trousers; and it is not until we step forward and address the worthy man, and he turns upon us his broad, honest face, that we see the grizzled moustache and peaked beard, and discover that his fears are still actively engaged regarding the prelatic leanings of Charles II., ‘now at Breda;’ though perchance not quite without hope that the counsel of the ‘wise and godly youth’ James Sharpe may have the effect of setting all right again in the royal mind. We 250 address what we take, from the garb, to be a contemporary, and find that we have stumbled on one of the seven sleepers.
We deem it no slight advantage to the reading public of the present day, that it should have works of this character made so easy of access. It is only a very few years since the student of Scottish ecclesiastical history could not have acquainted himself with the materials on which the historian can alone build, without passing through a course of study at least as prolonged as an ordinary college course, and much more laborious. Let us suppose that he lived in some of the provinces. He would have, in the first place, to come and reside in Edinburgh, and get introduced, at no slight expense of trouble, mayhap, to the brown, half-defaced manuscripts of our public libraries. He would require next to study the old hand, with all its baffling contractions. If he succeeded in mastering the difficulties of Melville’s Diary after a quarter of a year’s hard conning, he might well consider himself a lucky man. Row’s History would occupy him during at least another quarter; Baillie’s Letters and Journals would prove work enough for two quarters more. If he succeeded in getting access to the papers of Woodrow, he would find little less than a twelvemonth’s hard labour before him; Calderwood’s large History would furnish employment for at least half that time; and if curious to peruse it in its best and fullest form, he would find it necessary to quit Edinburgh for London, to pore there over the large manuscript copy stored up in the British Museum. As he proceeded in his course, he would be continually puzzled by references, allusions, initials; he would have to consult register offices, records of baptisms and deaths, session books, old and scarce works, hardly less difficult to be procured than even the manuscripts themselves; and if he at length escaped the fate of the luckless antiquary, who produced the famous 251 history of the village of Wheatfield, he might deem himself more than ordinarily fortunate. ‘When I first engaged in this work,’ said the poor man, ‘I had eyes of my own; but now I cannot see even with the assistance of art: I have gone from spectacles of the first sight to spectacles of the third; the Chevalier Taylor gives my eyes over, and my optician writes me word he can grind no higher for me.’ It will soon be no such Herculean task to penetrate to the foundations of our national ecclesiastical history. From publications such as those of the Woodrow Club, and of the Letters and Journals, the student will be able to acquire in a few weeks what would have otherwise cost him the painful labour of years. Nor can we point out a more instructive course of reading. In running over our modern histories, however able, we almost always find our point of view fixed down by the historian to the point occupied by himself. We cannot take up another on our own behalf, unless we differ from him altogether, nor select for ourselves the various subjects which we are to survey. We are in leading-strings for the time: the vigour of our author’s thinking militates against the exercise of our own; his philosophy enters our minds in a too perfect form, and lies inert there, just as the condensed extract of some nourishing food often fails to nourish at all, because it gives no employment to the digestive faculty. A survey of the historian’s materials has often, on the contrary, the effect of setting the mind free. We see the events of the times which he describes in their own light, and simply as events,––we select and arrange for ourselves,––they call up novel traits of character,––they lead us to draw on our experience of men,––they confirm principles,––they suggest reflections.
Some of our readers will perhaps remember that we noticed at considerable length the two first volumes of this beautiful edition of Baillie rather more than a twelvemonth 252 ago. The third and concluding volume has but lately appeared. It embraces a singularly important period,––extending from shortly before the rise of the unhappy and ultimately fatal quarrel between the Resolutioners and Protesters, till the re-establishment of Episcopacy at the Restoration, when the curtain closes suddenly over the poor chronicler, evidently sinking into the grave at the time, the victim of a broken heart. He sees a stormy night settling dark over the Church,––Presbytery pulled down, the bishops set up, persecution already commenced; and, longing to be released from his troubles, he affectingly assures his correspondent, in the last of his many letters, that ‘it was the matter of his daily grief that had brought his bodily trouble upon him,’ and that it would be ‘a favour to him to be gone.’ From a very learned, concise, and well-written Life, the production of the accomplished editor, which serves as a clue to guide the reader through the mazes of the correspondence, we learn that he died three months after.
Where there is so much that is interesting, one finds it difficult to select. The light in which the infamous Sharpe is presented in this volume is at least curious. Prelacy, careful of the reputation of her archbishops, makes a great deal indeed of the bloody death of the man, but says as little as possible regarding his life and character. The sentimental Jacobitism of the present day––an imaginative principle that feeds on novels, and admires the persecutors because Claverhouse was brave and had an elegant upper lip––goes a little further, and speaks of him as the venerable Archbishop. When the famous picture of his assassination was exhibiting in Edinburgh, some ten or twelve years ago, he rose with the class almost to the dignity of a martyr: there were young ladies that could scarce look at the piece without using their handkerchiefs; the victim was old, greyhaired, reverend, an archbishop, and eminently 253 saintly, as a matter of course, whatever the barbarous fanatics might say; and all that his figure seemed to want in order to make it complete, was just a halo of yellow ochre round the head. In Baillie’s Letters we see him exhibited, though all unwittingly on the part of the writer, in his true character, and find that the yellow ochre would be considerably out of place. Rarely, indeed, does nature, all lost and fallen as it is, produce so consummate a scoundrel. Treachery seems to have existed as so uncontrollable an instinct in the man, that, like the appropriating faculty of the thief, who amused himself by picking the pocket of the clergyman who conducted him to the scaffold, it seems to have been incapable of lying still. He appears never to have had a friend who did not learn to detest and denounce him: his Presbyterian friends, whom he deceived and betrayed, did so in the first instance; his Episcopalian friends, whom he at least strove to deceive and betray, did so in the second. We are assured by Burnet, that even Charles, a monarch certainly not over-nice in the moral sense, declared James Sharpe to be one of the worst of men. His life was a continuous lie; and he has left more proofs of the fact in the form of letters under his own hand, than perhaps any other bad man that ever lived.
In Baillie he makes his first appearance as the Presbyterian minister of Crail, and as one of the honest chronicler’s greatest favourites. The unhappy disputes between the Resolutioners and Protesters were running high at the time. Baillie was a Resolutioner, Sharpe a zealous Resolutioner too; and Baillie, naturally unsuspicious, and biassed in his behalf by that spirit of party which can darken the judgment of even the most discerning, seems to have regarded him as peculiarly the hope of the Church. He was indisputably one of its most dexterous negotiators; and no man of the age made a higher profession of religion. Burnet, who knew him well in his after character as Archbishop of 254 St. Andrews, tells us that never, save on one solitary occasion, did he hear him make the slightest allusion to religion. But in his letters to Baillie, almost every paragraph closes with the aspirations of a well-simulated devotion. They seem as if strewed over with the fragments of broken doxologies. The old man was, as we have said, thoroughly deceived. He assures his continental correspondent, Spang, that ‘the great instrument of God to cross the evil designs of the Protesters, was that very worthy, pious, wise, and diligent young man, Mr. James Sharpe.’ In some of his after epistles we learn that he remembered him in his prayers, no doubt very sincerely, as, under God, one of the mainstays of the Church. What first strikes the reader in the character of Sharpe, as here exhibited, is his exclusively diplomatic cast of talent. Baillie himself was a controversialist: he wrote books to influence opinion, and delivered argumentative speeches. He was a man of business too: he drew up remonstrances, petitions, protests, and carried on the war of his party above-board. All his better friends and correspondents, such as Douglas and Dickson, were persons of a resembling cast. But Sharpe’s vocation lay in dealing with men in closets and window recesses: he could do nothing until he had procured the private ear of the individual on whom he wished to act. Is he desirous to influence the decisions of the Supreme Civil Court in behalf of his party? He straightway ingratiates himself with President Broghill, and the court becomes more favourable in consequence. Is he wishful to propitiate the English Government? He goes up to London, gets closeted with its more influential members. It was this peculiar talent that pointed him out to the Church as so fit a person to treat with Charles at Breda.
And it is when employed in this mission that we begin truly to see the man, and to discover the sort of ability on which the success of his closetings depended. We find 255 Baillie holding, in his simplicity, that in order to draw the heart of the King from Episcopacy, nothing more could be necessary than just fairly to submit to him some sound controversial work, arranged on the plan of the good man’s own Ladensium; and urging on Sharpe, that a few able divines should be employed in getting up a compilation for the express purpose. Sharpe writes in return, in a style sufficiently quiet, that His Majesty, in his very first address, ‘has been pleased to ask very graciously about Robert Baillie,’ a person for whom he has a particular kindness, and whom, if favours were dealing, he would be sure not to forget. He adds, further, that however matters might turn out in England, the Presbyterian Establishment of Scotland was in no danger of violation; and lest his Scotch friends should fall into the error of thinking too much about other men’s business, he gives fervent expression to the hope ‘that the Lord would give them to prize their own mercies, and know their own duties.’ Even a twelvemonth after, when on the eve of setting out for London to be created a bishop, he writes his old friend, that whatever ‘occasion of jealousies and false surmises his journey might give,’ of one thing he might be assured, ‘it was not in order to a change in the Church,’ as he ‘would convince his dear friend Mr. Baillie, through the Lord’s help, when the Lord would return him.’ He has an under-plot of treachery carrying on at the same time, that affects his ‘dear friend’ personally. In one of his letters to the unsuspecting chronicler, he assures him that he was ‘doing his best, by the Lord’s help,’ to get him appointed Principal of the University of Glasgow. In one of his letters to Lauderdale, after stating that the office, ‘in the opinion of many,’ would require a man ‘of more acrimony and weight’ than ‘honest Baillie,’ he urges that the presentation should be sent him, with a blank space, in which the name of the presentee might be afterwards inserted. 256