In private, indeed, he was of so honest a disposition, his faults of temper notwithstanding, as to cause me at first some surprise; since I fancied an incompatibility between this and the laxity of his public views; which he carried so far that he was not only a political skeptic himself, but held all others to be the same; maintaining that the best public men were only of this or that colour because it suited their pockets or ambitions, and that, of all, he respected most Lord Halifax and his party, who at least trimmed openly, and never cried loudly for either extreme.
But as his actions in other matters bettered his professions, so I presently found that in this too he belied himself; which was made clear when he came to the test. For the death of King Charles the Second occurring soon after I came to serve him--so soon that I still winced when my former life was probed, and hated a woman and trembled at sight of a constable, and wondered if this were really I, who went to and fro daily from my garret in Bride Lane to St. Dunstan's--the death, I say, of the King occurring just at that time, we were speedily overwhelmed by a rush of events so momentous and following so quickly one on another that they threw the old see-saw of Court and Country off its balance; and upset with it the minds of many who had hitherto clung firmly to a party. For the King had been scarcely laid very quietly--some thought, meanly--in his grave and the Duke of York been proclaimed by the title of James the Second, when those who had fled the country in the last reign, either after the Rye House Plot, or later with Monmouth, returned and kindled two great insurrections, that of the Marquess of Argyle in the north, and that of the Duke of Monmouth in the west. Occurring almost simultaneously, it was wonderful to see how, in spite of the cry of a Popish King, and the Protestant religion in danger, which the rebels everywhere raised, these outbreaks rallied all prudent folk to the King; whose popularity never, before or afterwards, stood so high as on the day of the battle of Sedgmoor.
And doubtless he might have retained the confidence and affection of his people, and by these means attained to the utmost of his legitimate wishes--I mean the relief of the papists from penal clauses if not from civil disabilities--had he gone about it discreetly, and with the moderation which so delicate a matter required. But in the outset the severity with which the western rebels were punished, both by the military after the rout and by the Lord Chief Justice at the Assizes which followed, gave check to his popularity; and thenceforth for three years all went one way. The Test Acts, abrogated at the first in a case here and there (yet ominously in such, in particular, as favoured the admission of papists to the army), were presently nullified, with other acts of a like character, by a general declaration of indulgence; and that, to the disgust of the clergy, to be read in the churches. To this main assault on the passive obedience which the Church had so often preached, and to which it still fondly clung, were added innumerable meaner attacks perhaps more humiliating; as the expulsion of the Protestant Fellows from Magdalene College, the conversion of University College into a Romish Seminary, and the dismissal of my Lords Rochester and Clarendon, the King's brothers-in-law, from all their places because--as was everywhere rumoured--they would not resign the creed in which they had been born.
It were long to recount all the other errors into which the King fell; but I may lay stress on the dissolution of a most loyal Parliament, because it would not legalise his measures; on the open and shameless attempt to pack its successor, on the corruption of the Judges, and on the trial of the seven bishops for sedition. It were shorter and equally to the point to say that an administration conducted for three years on these lines, sufficed not only to sap the patient loyalty of the nation, but to rouse from its rest the political conscience of my employer. Mr. Brome, after much muttering and many snappish corrections and alterations, all tending (as I soon perceived) to Whiggery, resigned, on the day the Fellows of Magdalene were expelled, his time-honoured system of duplicity; and thenceforward, until the end, issued the same letter to Tory squire and Whig borough alike.
What was more remarkable, and, had the King known, it might have served his obstinate Majesty for a warning, we lost no patrons by the step; but rather increased our readers; the whole nation by this time being of one mind. When the end came therefore, and in answer to the famous Invitation signed by the Seven, the Deliverer, as the Whig party still love to call him, landed at Torbay, and with scarcely a blow, and no life lost, entered London, there were few among those who ruffled it in his train, as he rode to St. James's, who had done as much to bring him to his throne as my master; though he, good honest man, wore neither spurs nor sword, and stood humbly a-foot in the mouth of an alley to see the show go by.
[CHAPTER XII]
I suppose that there never was an abrupt change in the government of a nation more quietly, successfully, and bloodlessly carried through than our great Revolution. But it is the way of the pendulum to swing back; and it was not long before those who had been most deeply concerned in the event began to reflect and compare, nor, as they had before them the example of the Civil War and the subsequent restoration besides, and were persons bred for the most part in an atmosphere of Divine Right and passive obedience (whether they had imbibed those doctrines or not), was it wonderful if a proportion of them began to repent at leisure what they had done in haste. The late King's harsh and implacable temper, and the severity with which he had suppressed one rising, were not calculated to reassure men when they began to doubt. The possibility of his return hung like a thick cloud over the more timid; while the favours which the new King showered on his Dutchmen, the degradation of the coin and of trade, and the many disasters that attended the first years of the new government were sufficient to shake the confidence and chill the hearts even of the stoutest and most patriotic.
So bad was the aspect of things that it was rumoured that King William would abdicate; and this aggravating the general uncertainty, many in high places spent their days in a dreadful looking forward to judgment; nor ever, I believe, slept without dreaming of Tower Hill, the axe, and the sawdust. The result that was natural followed. While many hastened to make a secret peace with St. Germain's, others, either as a matter of conscience or because they felt that they had offended too deeply, remained constant; but perceiving treachery in the air, and being in daily fear of invasion, breathed nothing but threats and slaughter against the seceders. This begot a period of plots and counter-plots, of perjury and intrigue, of denunciations and accusations real and feigned, such as I believe no other country has ever known; the Jacobites considering a restoration certain, and the time only doubtful; while the Whigs in their hearts were inclined to agree with them and feared the worst.
During seven such years I lived and worked with Mr. Brome; who, partly, I think, because he had come late to his political bearings, and partly because the Tories and Jacobites had a newswriter in the notorious Mr. Dyer--to whose letters Mr. Dryden, it was said, would sometimes contribute--remained steadfast in his Whig opinions; and did no little in the country parts to lessen the stir which the Nonjurors' complaints created. I saw much of him and little of others; and being honestly busy and honourably employed--not that my style made any noise in the coffee-houses, which was scarcely to be expected, since it passed for Mr. Brome's--I began to regard my life before I came to London as an ugly dream. Yet it had left me with two proclivities which are not common at the age which I had then reached; the one a love of solitude and a retired life, which, a matter of necessity at first, grew by-and-by into a habit; the other an averseness for women that amounted almost to a fear of them. Mr. Brome, who was a confirmed bachelor, did nothing to alter my views on either point, or to reconcile me to the world; and as my life was passed between my attic in Bride Lane and his apartment in Fleet Street, where he had a tolerable library, few were better acquainted with public affairs or had less experience of private, than I; or knew more intimately the order of the signs and the aspect of the houses between the Fleet Prison and St. Dunstan's Church.
Partly out of fear, and partly out of a desire to be done with my former life, I made myself known to no one in Hertfordshire; but, some five years after my arrival in London, having a sudden craving to see my mother, I walked down one Sunday to Epping. There making cautious enquiries of the Bishop Stortford carrier, I heard of her death, and on the return journey burst once into a great fit of weeping at the thought of some kind word or other she had spoken to me on a remembered occasion. But with this tribute to nature I dismissed my family, and even that good friend from my mind; going back to my lodging with a contentment which this glimpse of my former life wondrously augmented.