The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

In this new situation, under a king too little devoted to his trade to choose really sagacious courses, but too shrewd to ruin himself, occur the beginnings of parliamentary statesmanship, in the modern sense of government in harmony with the Crown. The powerful administration of Strafford had been a matter of helping the Crown to resist Parliament. The very capable though unforeseeing statesmanship of the Pyms and Hampdens of the Long Parliament, again, was a matter of resisting the Crown; and with Shaftesbury such resistance recurred; but the indolence of the king, joined with his sense of the dangers of the old favouritism, gave rise to the principle of Ministerial Government before partisan Cabinets had come into existence. Clarendon had in him much of the constitutionalist temper. Shaftesbury, however, was better qualified both by training and parts for the task of statesmanship in a stormy and unscrupulous generation. Read dispassionately, his story is seen to be in the main what his careful vindicator would make it—that of a man of average moral quality, with exceptional energy and resource. The legend of his wickedness[1147] is somewhat puzzling, in view of his staunch hostility to Romanism, and of his political superiority to the famous Deist statesman of the next generation, Bolingbroke, who has been so little blackened in comparison. A reasonable explanation is that Shaftesbury was damned by the Church for resisting the king, while Bolingbroke's services to the Church covered his multitude of sins. But the idle rumours of Shaftesbury's debauchery[1148] apparently damaged him with the Protestant Dissenters, and his wickedly reckless policy over the Popish Plot might easily secure him a share in the infamy which is the sole association of the name of Titus Oates. Here also, however, he has been calumniated. Burnet, though plainly disliking him, says nothing of debauchery in his life, and declined to believe, when Charles suggested it, that he had any part in trumping up the falsehoods about the Plot.[1149]

There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury honestly believed there was a great danger of the re-establishment of Popery, and it is not at all improbable that he credited some of the tales told, as Lord Russell solemnly testified at the scaffold that he for his part had done. To acquit Russell and criminate Shaftesbury is possible only to those who have made up their minds before trying the case. It is practically certain, moreover, that some vague Catholic plotting really did take place;[1150] and in the then posture of affairs nothing was more likely. Shaftesbury, like the other capable statesmen of the Restoration, was in favour of toleration of the Dissenters; but like all other Protestant statesmen of the age, he thought it impossible to tolerate Catholicism. Nor can it well be doubted that had Charles or James been able to establish the Roman system, it would have gone hard with Protestantism. It is true that the only exhibition thus far of the spirit of tolerance in Protestant and Catholic affairs in France and England had been on the part of Richelieu towards the Huguenots, themselves intensely intolerant; but it could not reasonably be supposed that an English Catholic king or statesman, once well fixed in power, would have the wisdom or forbearance of Richelieu. The two systems, in fine, aimed at each other's annihilation; and Shaftesbury simply acted, politically that is, as the men of the First Rebellion would have done in similar circumstances. Instead of dismissing him as a mere scoundrel, we are led to realise how imperfectly moralised were all the men of his age in matters of religion and racial enmity. The friend of Locke can hardly have been a rascal.

For the rest, he was admitted even by the malicious and declamatory Dryden to have been a just Chancellor; it is proved that he opposed the Stop of the Exchequer; and he sharply resisted the rapacity of the royal concubines. In his earlier policy towards Holland he conformed odiously enough to the ordinary moral standard of the time[1151] in politics, a standard little improved upon in the time of Palmerston, and not discarded by those Englishmen who continue to talk of Russia as England's natural enemy, or by those who speak of Germany as a trade rival that must be fought to a finish. His changes of side between the outbreak of the Rebellion and his death, while showing the moral and intellectual instability of the period, were not dishonourable, and are not for a moment to be compared with those of Dryden, most unstable of all men of genius, whose unscrupulous but admirably artistic portrait of the statesman has doubtless gone far to keep Shaftesbury's name in disesteem. It may be, again, that his sufficient wealth takes away somewhat from the merit of his steadfast refusal of French bribes; but the fact should be kept in mind,[1152] as against the other fact that not only the king and some of the Opposition but Algernon Sidney took them.[1153] On the whole, Shaftesbury was the most tolerable of the Ministers of his day, though his animus against Catholicism made him grossly unscrupulous toward individual Catholics; and his miscalculation of possibilities, in clinging to the scheme of giving Monmouth the succession, finally wrecked his career. He had almost no alternative, placed and principled as he was, save to call in the Prince of Orange; and this would really have been at that moment no more feasible a course than it was to declare Monmouth the heir, besides being more hazardous, in that William was visibly less easy to lead. Of Shaftesbury, Burnet admits that "his strength lay in the knowledge of England"; and when he took a fatal course, it was because the whole situation was desperate. His fall measures not so much the capacity of Charles as the force which the royalist superstition had gathered.

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This growth can be traced in the clerical literature of the time. The conception of a "divine right" inhering in kings by heredity—a conception arising naturally as part of the general ethic of feudal inheritance—had been emphasised on the Protestant side in England[1154] by way of express resistance to the Papacy, which from the time of Gregory VII had been wont in its strifes with emperors and kings to deny their divine right and to assert its own, formally founding the latter, however, on the "natural" right inherent in masses of men to choose their own rulers, even as the citizens of Rome had been wont to elect the Popes.[1155] The total effect of the English Rebellion was to give an immense stimulus to the high monarchic view, not now as against the Papacy, but as against Parliament. When the learned Usher drew up at the request of Charles I his treatise[1156] on The Power communicated by God to the Prince, and the Obedience required of the Subject, he proceeded almost wholly on arguments from the Scriptures and the Fathers; not that there were not already many deliverances from modern authorities on the point, but that these evidently had not entered into the ordinary stock of opinion. On the papal side, from Thomas Aquinas[1157] onwards, the negative view had been carefully set forth, not merely as a papal claim, but also as an obvious affirmation of the ancient "law of nature." Thus the Spanish Jesuit Suarez (1548-1617) had in his Tractatus de Legibus, while deriving all law from the will of God, expressly rejected the doctrine that the power of rule inheres by succession in single princes. Such power, he declared, "by its very nature, belongs to no one man, but to a multitude of men,"[1158] adding a refutation of the patriarchal theory which "might have caused our English divines to blush before the Jesuit of Granada."[1159] At the beginning of the seventeenth century, again, while leading Englishmen were affirming divine right, the German Protestant Althusius, Professor of Law at Herborn, publishing his Politica methodice digesta (1603), declares in a dedication to the States of Friesland that the supreme power lies in the people.[1160] Hooker, too, had stamped the principle of "consent" with his authority, very much as did Suarez.[1161]

But the compiler of The History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation,[1162] after showing that the tenet[1163] had been held by dozens of Protestant divines and jurists after the Reformation, and even strongly affirmed by Nonconformists, is able to cite nearly as many assertions of it in the reign of Charles II as in the whole preceding period. The clergy were, indeed, able to show that the principle of non-resistance had been a common doctrine up to the Great Rebellion; and, though the contrary view was on the whole more common,[1164] it well illustrates the instinctive character of political movement that the democratic doctrine had followed the course of action step by step, and not preceded it. There had been resistance before the right to resist was formulated in the schools. And Bishop Guthry records that at the General Assembly in Edinburgh in January, 1645, "everyone had in his hand that book lately published by Mr. Samuel Rutherford, entitled Lex Rex, which was stuffed with positions that in the time of peace and order would have been judged damnable treasons; yet were now so idolised that, whereas in the beginning of the work Buchanan's treatise, De Jure Regni apud Scotos, was looked upon as an oracle, this coming forth, it was slighted as not anti-monarchical enough, and Rutherford's Lex Rex only thought authentic."[1165] So Milton's answer to Salmasius, vindicating the right of rebellion as inherent in freemen, marks the high tide of feeling that sustained the foremost regicides. But in the nature of the case the feeling swung as far the other way when they had touched their extreme limit of action; and when the royalist cause came in the ascendant, the monarchical principle was perhaps more passionately cherished in England than in any of the other European States.[1166] How it normally worked may be seen in Dryden's sycophantic dedication[1167] of his All for Love to Lord Danby (1678), sinking as it does to the extravagant baseness of the declaration that "every remonstrance of private men has the seed of treason in it." It was in this very year that Charles and Danby made the secret treaty with France, the revelation of which by Louis soon afterwards brought Danby to the Tower; and Danby it was who three years before carried through the House of Lords a bill to make all placemen declare on oath that they considered all resistance to the king unlawful.

The handful of remaining republicans and political Liberals, appealing as they did to tradition in their treatises against the traditional pleadings of the Churchmen and royalists, could have no appreciable influence on the public, because the mere spirit of tradition, when not appealed to as the sanction of a living movement of resistance, must needs make for passivity. Algernon Sidney's posthumous folio on Government in answer to Filmer's Patriarcha, arguing the question of self-government versus divine right, and going over all the ground from Nimrod downwards, point by point, is a far greater performance than Filmer's; and Locke in turn brought a still greater power of analysis to bear on the same refutation; but it is easy to see that Filmer's is the more readable book, and that with its straightforward dogmatism it would most readily convince the average Englishman. Nor was the philosophy all on one side, though Filmer has ten absurdities for the other's one, and was so unguarded as to commit himself to the doctrine that the possession of power gives divine right, no matter how come by. Sidney himself always argued that "Vertue" entitled men to superior power; and though he might in practice have contended that the choice of the virtuous should be made by the people, his proposition pointed rather plainly back to Cromwell, acclaimed by Milton as the worthiest to bear rule. And to be governed by a military autocrat, however virtuous and capable, was as little to the taste of that generation as it was to the taste of Carlyle's. Even a clergyman could see that the political problem was really one of the practical adjustment of crude conflicting interests, and that there could easily be as much friction under a virtuous monarch as under a dissolute one. The conscientiousness of the first Charles had wrought ruin, where the vicious indolence of the second steered safely.

As Filmer and Sidney, besides, really agreed in awarding "the tools to him who could handle them," and as the most pressing practical need was to avoid civil war, the solution for most people was the more clearly a "loyal" submission to the reigning house; and no amount of abstract demonstration of the right of self-government could have hindered the habit of submission from eating deeper and deeper into the national character if it were not for the convulsion which changed the dynasty and set up a deep division of "loyalties," keeping each other in check. In the strict sense of the term there was no class strife, no democratic movement, no democratic interest; indeed, no ideal of public interest as the greatest good of the whole. Thus Harrington's Oceana, with its scheme of "an equal Commonwealth, a Government established upon an equal Agrarian, arising into the Superstructures of three Orders, the Senat debating and proposing, the People resolving, and the Magistracy executing by an equal Rotation through the suffrage of the People given by the Ballot"[1168]—this conception, later pronounced by Hume "the only valuable model of a commonwealth that has yet been offered to the public,"[1169] although the same critic exposed its weakness—was in fact as wholly beside the case as the principle of the Second Coming. No man desired the proposed ideal; and the very irrelevance of the systematic treatises strengthened the case for use and wont. The political discussions, being thus mostly in the air, could serve only to prepare leading men to act on certain principles should events forcibly lead up to new action. But the existing restraints on freedom did not supply sufficient grievance to breed action. The dissenters themselves were almost entirely resigned to their ostracism; and the preponderance of the Church and the Tory party was complete.

Luckily the political fanaticism of Charles I reappeared in his son James; and that king's determination to re-establish in his realm the Church of his devotion served to break a spell that nothing else could have shattered.[1170] The very Church which had been assuring him of his irresistibility, having to choose between its own continuance and his, had perforce to desert him; and the old panic fear of Popery, fed by the spectacle of Jeffreys' Bloody Assize, swept away the monarch who had aroused it. He would have been an energetic king; his naval Memoirs exhibit zeal and application to work; and he had so much of rational humanity in him that in Scotland he pointed out to the popes of Presbyterianism how irrational as well as merciless was their treatment of sexual frailty. But his own fanaticism carried him athwart the superstition which would have sufficed to make him a secure despot in all other matters; and when the spirit of freedom seemed dying out in all forms save that of sectarian zealotry, his assault on that brought about the convulsion which gave it fresh chances of life.

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