But this grand piece of the military topography of a battlefield where there was no battle must have its picturesque and pathetic episode, and Mr. Macaulay finds one well suited to such a novel. When Monmouth had made up his mind to attempt to surprise the royal army, Mr. Macaulay is willing (for a purpose which we shall see presently) to persuade himself that the Duke let the whole town into his secret:—
That an attack was to be made under cover of the night was no secret in Bridgwater. The town was full of women, who had repaired thither by hundreds from the surrounding region to see their husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers once more. There were many sad partings that day; and many parted never to meet again. The report of the intended attack came to the ears of a young girl who was zealous for the king. Though of modest character, she had the courage to resolve that she would herself bear the intelligence to Feversham. She stole out of Bridgwater, and made her way to the royal camp. But that camp was not a place where female innocence could be safe. Even the officers, despising alike the irregular force to which they were opposed, and the negligent general who commanded them, had indulged largely in wine, and were ready for any excess of licentiousness and cruelty. One of them seized the unhappy maiden, refused to listen to her errand, and brutally outraged her. She fled in agonies of rage and shame, leaving the wicked army to its doom.—i. 606, 7.
—the doom of the wicked army, be it noted en passant, being a complete victory. Mr. Macaulay cites Kennett for this story, and adds that he is "forced to believe the story to be true, because Kennett declares that it was communicated to him in the year 1718 by a brave officer who had fought at Sedgemoor, and had himself seen the poor girl depart in an agony of distress,"—ib.
We shall not dwell on the value of an anonymous story told three-and-thirty years after the Battle of Sedgemoor. The tale is sufficiently refuted by notorious facts and dates, and indeed by its internal absurdity. We know from the clear and indisputable evidence of Wade, who commanded Monmouth's infantry, all the proceedings of that day. Monmouth no doubt intended to move that night, and made open preparation for it, and the partings so pathetically described may have, therefore, taken place, and the rather because the intended movement was to leave that part of the country altogether—not to meet the King's troops, but to endeavour to escape them by a forced march across the Avon and into Gloucestershire. So far might have been known. But about three o'clock that afternoon Monmouth received intelligence by a spy that the King's troops had advanced to Sedgemoor, but had taken their positions so injudiciously, that there seemed a possibility of surprising them in a night attack. On this Monmouth assembled a council of war, which agreed that, instead of retreating that night towards the Avon as they had intended, they should advance and attack, provided the spy, who was to be sent out to a new reconnoissance, should report that the troops were not intrenched. We may be sure that—as the news only arrived at three in the afternoon—the assembling the council of war—the deliberation— the sending back the spy—his return and another deliberation—must have protracted the final decision to so late an hour that evening, that it is utterly impossible that the change of the design of a march northward to that of an "attack to be made under cover of the night," could have been that morning no secret in Bridgwater. But our readers see it was necessary for Mr. Macaulay to raise this fable, in order to account for the poor girl's knowing so important a secret. So far we have argued the case on Mr. Macaulay's own showing, which, we confess, was very incautious on our part; but on turning to his authority we find, as usual, a story essentially different. Kennett says—
A brave Captain in the Horse Guards, now living (1718), was in the action at Sedgemoor, and gave me the account of it:—That on Sunday morning, July 5, a young woman came from Monmouth's quarters to give notice of his design to surprise the King's camp that night; but this young woman being carried to a chief officer in a neighbouring village, she was led upstairs and debauched by him, and, coming down in a great fright and disorder (as he himself saw her), she went back, and her message was not told.—Kennett, in. 432.
This knocks the whole story on the head. Kennett was not aware (Wade's narrative not being published when he wrote) that the King's troops did not come in sight of Sedgemoor till about three o'clock P.M. of that Sunday on the early morning of which he places the girl's visit to the camp, and it was not till late that same evening that Monmouth changed his original determination, and formed the sudden resolution with which, to support Kennett's story, the whole town must have been acquainted at least twelve hours before. These are considerations which ought not to have escaped a philosophical historian who had the advantage, which Kennett had not, of knowing the exact time when these details occurred….
We must here conclude. We have exhausted our time and our space, but not our topics. We have selected such of the more prominent defects and errors of Mr. Macaulay as were manageable within our limits; but numerous as they are, we beg that they may be considered as specimens only of the infinitely larger assortment that the volumes would afford, and be read not merely as individual instances, but as indications of the general style of the work, and the prevailing animus of the writer. We have chiefly directed our attention to points of mere historical inaccuracy and infidelity; but they are combined with a greater admixture of other—we know not whether to call them literary or moral—defects, than the insulated passages sufficiently exhibit. These faults, as we think them, but which may to some readers be the prime fascinations of the work, abound on its surface. And their very number and their superficial prominence constitute a main charge against the author, and prove, we think, his mind to be unfitted for the severity of historical inquiry. He takes much pains to parade—perhaps he really believes in—his impartiality, with what justice we appeal to the foregoing pages; but he is guilty of a prejudice as injurious in its consequences to truth as any political bias. He abhors whatever is not in itself picturesque, while he clings with the tenacity of a Novelist to the piquant and the startling. Whether it be the boudoir of a strumpet or the death-bed of a monarch—the strong character of a statesman-warrior abounding in contrasts and rich in mystery, or the personal history of a judge trained in the Old Bailey to vulgarize and ensanguine the King's Bench—he luxuriates with a vigour and variety of language and illustration which renders his "History" an attractive and absorbing story-book. And so spontaneously redundant are these errors— so inwoven in the very texture of Mr. Macaulay's mind—that he seems never able to escape from them. Even after the reader is led to believe that all that can be said either of praise or vituperation as to character, of voluptuous description and minute delineation as to fact and circumstance, has been passed in review before him—when a new subject, indeed, seems to have been started—all at once the old theme is renewed, and the old ideas are redressed in all the affluent imagery and profuse eloquence of which Mr. Macaulay is so eminent a master. Now of the fancy and fashion of this we should not complain—quite the contrary—in a professed novel: there is a theatre in which it would be exquisitely appropriate and attractive; but the Temple of History is not the floor for a morris-dance—the Muse Clio is not to be worshipped in the halls of Terpsichore. We protest against this species of carnival history; no more like the reality than the Eglintoun Tournament or the Costume Quadrilles of Buckingham Palace; and we deplore the squandering of so much melodramatic talent on a subject which we have hitherto reverenced as the figure of Truth arrayed in the simple argments [Transcriber's note: sic] of Philosophy. We are ready to admit an hundred times over Mr. Macaulay's literary powers—brilliant even under the affectation with which he too frequently disfigures them. He is a great painter, but a suspicious narrator; a grand proficient in the picturesque, but a very poor professor of the historic. These volumes have been, and his future volumes as they appear will be, devoured with the same eagerness that Oliver Twist or Vanity Fair excite—with the same quality of zest, though perhaps with a higher degree of it;—but his pages will seldom, we think, receive a second perusal—and the work, we apprehend, will hardly find a permanent place on the historic shelf— nor ever assuredly, if continued in the spirit of the first two volumes, be quoted as authority on any question or point of the History of England.
LOCKHART ON THE AUTHOR OF "VATHEK"[1]
[From The Quarterly Review, June, 1834]
[1] "Italy: with sketches of Spain and Portugal. In a series of letters written during a residence in these Countries." By William Beckford, Esq., author of Vathek. London, 1834.