Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century

by Unknown

THE CHARACTER OF A COUNTRY COMMITTEE-MAN, WITH THE EAR-MARK OF A SEQUESTRATOR.

A committee-man by his name should be one that is possessed, there is number enough in it to make an epithet for legion. He is persona in concreto (to borrow the solecism of a modern statesman). You may translate it by the Red Bull phrase, and speak as properly, Enter seven devils solus. It is a well-trussed title that contains both the number and the beast; for a committee-man is a noun of multitude, he must be spelled with figures, like Antichrist wrapped in a pair-royal of sixes. Thus the name is as monstrous as the man, a complex notion of the same lineage with accumulative treason. For his office it is the Heptarchy, or England's fritters; it is the broken meat of a crumbling prince, only the royalty is greater; for it is here, as in the miracle of loaves, the voider exceeds the bill of fare. The Pope and he ring the changes; here is the plurality of crowns to one head, join them together and there is a harmony in discord. The triple-headed turnkey of heaven with the triple-headed porter of hell. A committee-man is the relics of regal government, but, like holy relics, he outbulks the substance whereof he is a remnant. There is a score of kings in a committee, as in the relics of the cross there is the number of twenty. This is the giant with the hundred hands that wields the sceptre; the tyrannical bead-roll by which the kingdom prays backward, and at every curse drops a committee-man. Let Charles be waived whose condescending clemency aggravates the defection, and make Nero the question, better a Nero than a committee. There is less execution by a single bullet than by case-shot.

Now a committee-man is a parti-coloured officer. He must be drawn like Janus with cross and pile in his countenance, as he relates to the soldiers or faces about to his fleecing the country. Look upon him martially, and he is a justice of war, one that hath bound his Dalton up in buff, and will needs be of the Quorum to the best commanders. He is one of Mars his lay-elders; he shares in the government, though a Nonconformist to his bleeding rubric. He is the like sectary in arms, as the Platonic is in love, keeps a fluttering in discourse, but proves a haggard in the action. He is not of the soldiers and yet of his flock. It is an emblem of the golden age (and such indeed he makes it to him) when so tame a pigeon may converse with vultures. Methinks a committee hanging about a governor, and bandileers dangling about a furred alderman, have an anagram resemblance. There is no syntax between a cap of maintenance and a helmet. Who ever knew an enemy routed by a grand jury and a Billa vera? It is a left-handed garrison where their authority perches; but the more preposterous the more in fashion, the right hand fights while the left rules the reins. The truth is, the soldier and the gentleman are like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, one fights at all adventures to purchase the other the government of the island. A committee-man properly should be the governor's mattress to fit his truckle, and to new string him with sinews of war; for his chief use is to raise assessments in the neighbouring wapentake.

The country people being like an Irish cow that will not give down her milk unless she see her calf before her, hence it is he is the garrison's dry nurse; he chews their contribution before he feeds them, so the poor soldiers live like Trochilus by picking the teeth of this sacred crocodile.

So much for his warlike or ammunition face, which is so preter-natural that it is rather a vizard than a face; Mars in him hath but a blinking aspect, his face of arms is like his coat, partie per pale, soldier and gentleman much of a scantling.

Now enter his taxing and deglubing face, a squeezing look like that of Vespasianus, as if he were bleeding over a close stool.

Take him thus and he is in the inquisition of the purse an authentic gypsy, that nips your bong with a canting ordinance; not a murdered fortune in all the country but bleeds at the touch of this malefactor. He is the spleen of the body politic that swells itself to the consumption of the whole. At first, indeed, he ferreted for the parliament, but since he hath got off his cope he set up for himself. He lives upon the sins of the people, and that is a good standing dish too. He verifies the axiom, lisdem nutritur ex quibus componitur; his diet is suitable to his constitution. I have wondered often why the plundered countrymen should repair to him for succour, certainly it is under the same notion, as one whose pockets are picked goes to Moll Cutpurse, as the predominant in that faculty.

He outdives a Dutchman, gets a noble of him that was never worth sixpence; for the poorest do not escape, but Dutch-like he will be draining even in the driest ground. He aliens a delinquent's estate with as little remorse as his other holiness gives away an heretic's kingdom, and for the truth of the delinquency, both chapmen have as little share of infallibility. Lye is the grand salad of arbitrary government, executor to the star-chamber and the high commission; for those courts are not extinct, they survive in him like dollars changed into single money. To speak the truth, he is the universal tribunal; for since these times all causes fall to his cognisance, as in a great infection all diseases turn oft to the plague. It concerns our masters the parliament to look about them; if he proceedeth at this rate the jack may come to swallow the pike, as the interest often eats out the principal. As his commands are great, so he looks for a reverence accordingly. He is punctual in exacting your hat, and to say right his due, but by the same title as the upper garment is the vails of the executioner. There was a time when such cattle would hardly have been taken upon suspicion for men in office, unless the old proverb were renewed, that the beggars make a free company, and those their wardens. You may see what it is to hang together. Look upon them severally, and you cannot but fumble for some threads of charity. But oh, they are termagants in conjunction! like fiddlers who are rogues when they go single, and joined in consort, gentlemen musicianers. I care not much if I untwist my committee-man, and so give him the receipt of this grand Catholicon.

Take a state martyr, one that for his good behaviour hath paid the excise of his ears, so suffered captivity by the land-piracy of ship-money; next a primitive freeholder, one that hates the king because he is a gentleman transgressing the Magna Charta of delving Adam. Add to these a mortified bankrupt that helps out his false weights with some scruples of conscience, and with his peremptory scales can doom his prince with a mene tekel. These with a new blue-stockinged justice, lately made of a good basket-hilted yeoman, with a short-handed clerk tacked to the rear of him to carry the knapsack of his understanding, together with two or three equivocal sirs whose religion, like their gentility, is the extract of their acres; being therefore spiritual because they are earthly; not forgetting the man of the law, whose corruption gives the Hogan to the sincere Juncto. These are the simples of this precious compound; a kind of Dutch hotch-potch, the Hogan Mogan committee-man.

The Committee-man hath a sideman, or rather a setter, hight a Sequestrator, of whom you may say, as of the great Sultan's horse, where he treads the grass grows no more. He is the State's cormorant, one that fishes for the public but feeds himself; the misery is he fishes without the cormorant's property, a rope to strengthen the gullet and to make him disgorge. A sequestrator! He is the devil's nut-hook, the sign with him is always in the clutches. There are more monsters retain to him than to all the limbs in anatomy. It is strange physicians do not apply him to the soles of the feet in a desperate fever, he draws far beyond pigeons. I hope some mountebank will slice him and make the experiment. He is a tooth-drawer once removed; here is the difference, one applauds the grinder the other the grist. Never till now could I verify the poet's description, that the ravenous harpy had a human visage. Death himself cannot quit scores with him; like the demoniac in the gospel, he lives among tombs, nor is all the holy water shed by widows and orphans a sufficient exorcism to dispossess him. Thus the cat sucks your breath and the fiend your blood; nor can the brotherhood of witchfinders, so sagely instituted with all their terror, wean the familiars.