Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

[Illustration: JAMES BUTLER, DUKE OF ORMONDE. (From the original by Sir
Godfrey Kneller.)]

The King was not deceived as to the injustice of the Bill, and in its earliest stages he professed that his conscience would never allow him to give it his assent. He urged the Council "to give such a stop to this Bill that it might never be presented to him; for if it were, he must positively reject it." It was not the first, nor the last, pronouncement of the King that was to turn out an empty threat.

The Council did not unanimously accept the opinion of the King. Those whom he consulted took diverse views of the Bill, and some even who doubted its policy were not prepared to face the opposition of the English agricultural interest. Amongst the members of both Houses of the English Parliament there was a deeply-seated jealousy of Ireland, inherited from the days of her resistance to English power, and sharpened by fervent opposition to her Roman Catholic predilections. The promoters of the Bill soon found themselves backed up by a solid phalanx of English prejudice, which held the Commons staunch to their support of its provisions. Buckingham and Ashley learned that their championship added to their hold upon the nation, and gave them a new chance of inflicting a defeat at once upon the King, and upon his older Minister. Clarendon fully recognized the iniquity of the Bill, and welcomed the stalwart resistance which the King avowed that he would give to it. [Footnote: It is odd to remark how the incurable prejudice of Whig historians blinds them to the real bearing of the Bill, and forces them, in their desire to avoid any agreement with Clarendon, to find some excuse for it. "It is by no means clear," writes Mr. Christie, the biographer of Ashley, "that special circumstances did not counsel an exception to the general rules of political economy." So easily are fundamental principles made to bend to the exigencies of personal advocacy!] But the result was to prove to him once more how little reliance could be placed on any apparently settled conviction of the King.

The House of Commons had now become too stubborn to yield to any arguments of justice; and that the King and his Ministers opposed the Bill only added to the obstinacy with which it was pressed. There was now a deliberate opposition to the Crown, and of the two Bills—that about Irish cattle, and that for a commission of audit—the first was "driven on with more fury, and the other more passionately spoken of." Any support which the party of the Court could reckon on, rapidly diminished; and even its adherents applied to the King for permission to record their votes in favour of the Bill. [Footnote: Life, iii. 141.] Again Sir William Coventry, who, to Clarendon's mind, was the evil genius in every plot, appeared upon the scene. He persuaded the King of the strength of the supporters of the Bill, and the small prospect of any supply until the House was satisfied that it would pass. Perhaps, he added, if the friends of the Court withdrew their opposition to the Irish Bill, they might thus be able to elude the threatening provisions of the Bill for the audit of accounts. [Footnote: Ibid., p. 142.]

Under such inducements, Charles's conscientious opposition to the Bill soon disappeared. His henchmen in the House received new orders, and amidst the plaudits of Buckingham's sycophants, this iniquitous Bill passed through the House of Commons. The triumph only made the Commons insist with the more vigour upon the Bill for the audit of accounts. Again the King yielded to pressure, to the alluring prophecies of abundant supplies as the reward of surrender, and to the dire threats of exposure of Court scandals if the will of the House were thwarted. The result was a new surrender, and the Accounts Bill followed the other to the House of Lords.

The scene of the struggle was now changed, but it was evident that the persistence of opposition was in no way checked, and that a fierce struggle between Parliamentary power and the royal prerogative was threatened in the immediate future. To Clarendon, the opposition in the House of Commons centred in these two Bills. Taken together, they roused his unrelenting hostility, the one because it was founded upon no constitutional precedent, and was dangerous to the royal prerogative, the other because it was conceived in a spirit of reckless animosity, and was flagrantly unjust to Ireland. Up to a certain point, the King had cordially agreed with that view; but once more that fickle support went for nothing; a few threats and allurements disposed of Charles's conscience as well as of his judgment. For him precedent did not count; the royal prerogative meant only what secured for himself an easy life, and the prospect of supply; and as for injustice to Ireland, the burden of conscientious scruples was easily transferred to other shoulders. A strong will and a scrupulous conscience were inconvenient equipments for a Minister of Charles II.

But it was still Clarendon's duty to do his best to save the King from treacherous plotters, as well as from the consequences of his own fickle waywardness. There was one way which occurred to Clarendon, and which he seems to have urged upon the King without success. The Parliament had now sat for six years, and perhaps contact with the constituencies might prove a solvent of their irksome obstinacy, and also of those dangerous combinations which were threatening to foil all schemes of sound policy. Might it not be that the sound loyalty of the nation would send to Westminster a Parliament, not servile or subservient, but less truculent and intractable, than the present? Whatever the soundness of his opinion— and it may perhaps be doubted if a new election would have been a safe expedient for the King—it obtained scanty support. The little clique of intriguing courtiers thought that it portended danger to their own influence. Some who had proved ineffective asserters of the views of the country party were alarmed for their seats; the King was easily persuaded that many of his own most obedient placemen might disappear. Buckingham and his friends managed even to

alarm the bishops, by predicting a majority for the enemies of the Church. Clarendon never found that the ecclesiastical mind was one upon which, as a statesman, he could place any reliance. They judged now as far from the mark as usual, and yielded to the persuasions of his foes. Clarendon was fain to be content with the existing House of Commons; and the fight was now to be how far the Lords would bow to the imperious demands of that House, and allow themselves to be managed by the little band of malcontents, whose main object was to make the present administration impossible.

In the House of Lords the leading part in pushing forward the Irish Cattle Bill was taken by the Duke of Buckingham. His new-found ardour for political intrigue had changed for the moment his habits of life as a voluptuary. Under the impulse of his present irritation, his usual haunts were abandoned, and he spent laborious days in the House, the first to be present, and the last to disappear. [Footnote: The usual hour for the meeting of Parliament was early, and Clarendon complains of the laxity which, of recent years, had made the hour as late as ten o'clock A.M. The House of Lords had of late shown so little zeal for work that they frequently adjourned after a few minutes. But now, in the excitement of the discussion on the Irish Bill, they again sat early, and did not adjourn till four o'clock, or even "till the candles were brought in.">[ He had the eager support of Ashley, inspired like him, by jealousy of Clarendon and Ormonde, and bringing to the unholy partnership a lack of principle equal to that of Buckingham, and far greater powers of concentration, and of persistent strategy. With two such protagonists, the debates in the House of Lords lost their usual repose and dignity, and became scenes of turmoil and almost of personal violence. [Footnote: Clarendon tells us an amusing story of a fracas which occurred between Buckingham and Lord Dorchester, during a conference between the Houses. The two peers, who were avowed enemies, chanced to sit together, and each endeavoured, it would seem, to claim more space than was convenient to the other. From hustling they came to blows, and Lord Dorchester had the misfortune to lose his wig in the shuffle. But "the Marquis had much of the Duke's hair in his hands to recompense for the pulling off his periwig, which he could not reach high enough to do to the other" (Life, iii. 154). The matter was settled without bloodshed, and both peers were sent to cool their tempers by a short detention in the Tower. We are apt, on doubtful grounds, to think that the debaucheries of Charles's Court were redeemed by elegance of manners. As a fact, the morals which Dr. Johnson ascribes to Lord Chesterfield's Letters were often joined, in that Court, to manners which would have shocked the dancing master of his apothegm.] Buckingham on one occasion provoked a scene by insolently stating "that whoever was against that Bill had either an Irish interest or an Irish understanding." The remark, as well as Buckingham's habitual arrogance, aroused the wrath of Lord Ossory, Ormonde's eldest son, and a challenge was the consequence. Buckingham, who did not, to the other attributes of finished courtier, add that of personal courage, contrived to miss the rendezvous, and, with a lack of spirit which men of less bravado could hardly have equalled, and which might have made him blush before his own swashbucklers, he proceeded to lay before the House a narrative of the case. Both parties, it was held, had been to blame, and both were, as usual, to pass a short period of penance in the Tower. But Buckingham's enemies contrived, under the rules of the House, to inflict an insult upon him, which might have stirred the blood of a Quaker, not to speak of that which flowed in the veins of this model gentleman. It was unjust, they urged, that any punishment should fall upon the Duke. He had done his best to prevent the encounter, and had prudently mistaken the rendezvous. His friends, not unnaturally, thought "that it would be more for his honour to undergo the censure of the House than the penalty of such a vindication."

But apart from these comic accompaniments, the debate upon the Bill in the Lords raised grave constitutional questions. Clarendon opposed the Bill as radically unjust, and economically wrong. But he found in it also much that encroached upon the prerogative. Cases might easily occur where a remission of the Act was imperatively required in the public interest, and in special exigencies, and the usual course was to give such dispensing power to the Crown, just as it is now given under many statutes, by the machinery of an Order in Council. But the prejudices of the promoters of the Bill were too virulent to be satisfied with anything less than the strict and universal application of the embargo; nor did they scruple to suggest that new restraints were required upon the power of the Crown. All that Clarendon and his friends in the House of Lords could do, was to insist that some of the clauses most offensive to the prerogative, and most opposed to precedent, should be expunged from the Bill before it was returned to the House of Commons.