No More Learning

Some modern writers have blamed Halifax for continuing in the ministry
while he disapproved of the manner in which both domestic and foreign
affairs were conducted. But this censure is unjust. Indeed it is to be
remarked that the word ministry, in the sense in which we use it, was
then unknown. [24] The thing itself did not exist; for it belongs to an
age in which parliamentary government is fully established. At present
the chief servants of the crown form one body. They are understood to be
on terms of friendly confidence with each other, and to agree as to
the main principles on which the executive administration ought to be
conducted. If a slight difference of opinion arises among them, it is
easily compromised: but, if one of them differs from the rest on a vital
point, it is his duty to resign. While he retains his office, he is held
responsible even for steps which he has tried to dissuade his colleagues
from taking. In the seventeenth century, the heads of the various
branches of the administration were bound together in no such
partnership. Each of them was accountable for his own acts, for the
use which he made of his own official seal, for the documents which he
signed, for the counsel which he gave to the King. No statesman was held
answerable for what he had not himself done, or induced others to do.
If he took care not to be the agent in what was wrong, and if, when
consulted, he recommended what was right, he was blameless. It would
have been thought strange scrupulosity in him to quit his post, because
his advice as to matters not strictly within his own department was
not taken by his master; to leave the Board of Admiralty, for example,
because the finances were in disorder, or the Board of Treasury because
the foreign relations of the kingdom were in an unsatisfactory state. It
was, therefore, by no means unusual to see in high office, at the same
time, men who avowedly differed from one another as widely as ever
Pulteney differed from Walpole, or Fox from Pitt.

The moderate and constitutional counsels of Halifax were timidly and
feebly seconded by Francis North, Lord Guildford who had lately been
made Keeper of the Great Seal. The character of Guildford has been drawn
at full length by his brother Roger North, a most intolerant Tory, a
most affected and pedantic writer, but a vigilant observer of all those
minute circumstances which throw light on the dispositions of men. It is
remarkable that the biographer, though he was under the influence of the
strongest fraternal partiality, and though he was evidently anxious to
produce a flattering likeness, was unable to portray the Lord Keeper
otherwise than as the most ignoble of mankind. Yet the intellect of
Guildford was clear, his industry great, his proficiency in letters and
science respectable, and his legal learning more than respectable. His
faults were selfishness, cowardice, and meanness. He was not insensible
to the power of female beauty, nor averse from excess in wine. Yet
neither wine nor beauty could ever seduce the cautious and frugal
libertine, even in his earliest youth, into one fit of indiscreet
generosity. Though of noble descent, he rose in his profession by paying
ignominious homage to all who possessed influence in the courts. He
became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and as such was party to some
of the foulest judicial murders recorded in our history. He had sense
enough to perceive from the first that Oates and Bedloe were impostors:
but the Parliament and the country were greatly excited: the government
had yielded to the pressure; and North was not a man to risk a good
place for the sake of justice and humanity. Accordingly, while he was in
secret drawing up a refutation of the whole romance of the Popish plot,
he declared in public that the truth of the story was as plain as
the sun in heaven, and was not ashamed to browbeat, from the seat of
judgment, the unfortunate Roman Catholics who were arraigned before him
for their lives. He had at length reached the highest post in the law.
But a lawyer, who, after many years devoted to professional labour,
engages in politics for the first time at an advanced period of life,
seldom distinguishes himself as a statesman; and Guildford was no
exception to the general rule. He was indeed so sensible of his
deficiencies that he never attended the meetings of his colleagues on
foreign affairs. Even on questions relating to his own profession his
opinion had less weight at the Council board than that of any man who
has ever held the Great Seal. Such as his influence was, however, he
used it, as far as he dared, on the side of the laws.

The chief opponent of Halifax was Lawrence Hyde, who had recently
been created Earl of Rochester. Of all Tories, Rochester was the
most intolerant and uncompromising. The moderate members of his party
complained that the whole patronage of the Treasury, while he was First
Commissioner there, went to noisy zealots, whose only claim to promotion
was that they were always drinking confusion to Whiggery, and lighting
bonfires to burn the Exclusion Bill. The Duke of York, pleased with
a spirit which so much resembled his own supported his brother in law
passionately and obstinately.

The attempts of the rival ministers to surmount and supplant each other
kept the court in incessant agitation. Halifax pressed the King to
summon a Parliament, to grant a general amnesty, to deprive the Duke of
York of all share in the government, to recall Monmouth from banishment,
to break with Lewis, and to form a close union with Holland on the
principles of the Triple Alliance. The Duke of York, on the other hand,
dreaded the meeting of a Parliament, regarded the vanquished Whigs with
undiminished hatred, still flattered himself that the design formed
fourteen years before at Dover might be accomplished, daily represented
to his brother the impropriety of suffering one who was at heart a
Republican to hold the Privy Seal, and strongly recommended Rochester
for the great place of Lord Treasurer.

While the two factions were struggling, Godolphin, cautious, silent,
and laborious, observed a neutrality between them. Sunderland, with his
usual restless perfidy, intrigued against them both. He had been turned
out of office in disgrace for having voted in favour of the Exclusion
Bill, but had made his peace by employing the good offices of the
Duchess of Portsmouth and by cringing to the Duke of York, and was once
more Secretary of State.

Nor was Lewis negligent or inactive. Everything at that moment favoured
his designs. He had nothing to apprehend from the German empire, which
was then contending against the Turks on the Danube. Holland could
not, unsupported venture to oppose him. He was therefore at liberty
to indulge his ambition and insolence without restraint. He seized
Strasburg, Courtray, Luxemburg. He exacted from the republic of Genoa
the most humiliating submissions. The power of France at that time
reached a higher point than it ever before or ever after attained,
during the ten centuries which separated the reign of Charlemagne from
the reign of Napoleon. It was not easy to say where her acquisitions
would stop, if only England could be kept in a state of vassalage. The
first object of the court of Versailles was therefore to prevent the
calling of a Parliament and the reconciliation of English parties.
For this end bribes, promises, and menaces were unsparingly employed.
Charles was sometimes allured by the hope of a subsidy, and sometimes
frightened by being told that, if he convoked the Houses, the secret
articles of the treaty of Dover should be published. Several Privy
Councillors were bought; and attempts were made to buy Halifax, but in
vain. When he had been found incorruptible, all the art and influence
of the French embassy were employed to drive him from office: but his
polished wit and his various accomplishments had made him so agreeable
to his master, that the design failed. [25]

Halifax was not content with standing on the defensive. He openly
accused Rochester of malversation. An inquiry took place. It appeared
that forty thousand pounds had been lost to the public by the
mismanagement of the First Lord of the Treasury. In consequence of this
discovery he was not only forced to relinquish his hopes of the white
staff, but was removed from the direction of the finances to the more
dignified but less lucrative and important post of Lord President.
"I have seen people kicked down stairs," said Halifax; "but my Lord
Rochester is the first person that I ever saw kicked up stairs. "
Godolphin, now a peer, became First Commissioner of the Treasury.

Still, however, the contest continued. The event depended wholly on
the will of Charles; and Charles could not come to a decision. In
his perplexity he promised everything to everybody. He would stand
by France: he would break with France: he would never meet another
Parliament: he would order writs for a Parliament to be issued without
delay. He assured the Duke of York that Halifax should be dismissed from
office, and Halifax that the Duke should be sent to Scotland. In public
he affected implacable resentment against Monmouth, and in private
conveyed to Monmouth assurances of unalterable affection. How long, if
the King's life had been protracted, his hesitation would have lasted,
and what would have been his resolve, can only be conjectured. Early
in the year 1685, while hostile parties were anxiously awaiting his
determination, he died, and a new scene opened. In a few mouths the
excesses of the government obliterated the impression which had been
made on the public mind by the excesses of the opposition. The violent
reaction which had laid the Whig party prostrate was followed by a still
more violent reaction in the opposite direction; and signs not to be
mistaken indicated that the great conflict between the prerogatives of
the Crown and the privileges of the Parliament, was about to be brought
to a final issue.




CHAPTER III.

I INTEND, in this chapter, to give a description of the state in which
England was at the time when the crown passed from Charles the Second
to his brother. Such a description, composed from scanty and dispersed
materials, must necessarily be very imperfect. Yet it may perhaps
correct some false notions which would make the subsequent narrative
unintelligible or uninstructive.

If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, we must be
constantly on our guard against that delusion which the well known
names of families, places, and offices naturally produce, and must never
forget that the country of which we read was a very different country
from that in which we live. In every experimental science there is a
tendency towards perfection. In every human being there is a wish to
ameliorate his own condition. These two principles have often
sufficed, even when counteracted by great public calamities and by
bad institutions, to carry civilisation rapidly forward. No ordinary
misfortune, no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a
nation wretched, as the constant progress of physical knowledge and the
constant effort of every man to better himself will do to make a nation
prosperous. It has often been found that profuse expenditure, heavy
taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous
wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundations, have
not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private
citizens have been able to create it. It can easily be proved that, in
our own land, the national wealth has, during at least six centuries,
been almost uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under
the Tudors than under the Plantagenets; that it was greater under the
Stuarts than under the Tudors; that, in spite of battles, sieges, and
confiscations, it was greater on the day of the Restoration than on the
day when the Long Parliament met; that, in spite of maladministration,
of extravagance, of public bankruptcy, of two costly and unsuccessful
wars, of the pestilence and of the fire, it was greater on the day of
the death of Charles the Second than on the day of his Restoration. This
progress, having continued during many ages, became at length, about the
middle of the eighteenth century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded,
during the nineteenth, with accelerated velocity. In consequence partly
of our geographical and partly of our moral position, we have, during
several generations, been exempt from evils which have elsewhere impeded
the efforts and destroyed the fruits of industry. While every part of
the Continent, from Moscow to Lisbon, has been the theatre of bloody
and devastating wars, no hostile standard has been seen here but as a
trophy. While revolutions have taken place all around us, our government
has never once been subverted by violence. During more than a hundred
years there has been in our island no tumult of sufficient importance to
be called an insurrection; nor has the law been once borne down either
by popular fury or by regal tyranny: public credit has been held sacred:
the administration of justice has been pure: even in times which might
by Englishmen be justly called evil times, we have enjoyed what almost
every other nation in the world would have considered as an ample
measure of civil and religious freedom. Every man has felt entire
confidence that the state would protect him in the possession of what
had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his selfdenial. Under
the benignant influence of peace and liberty, science has flourished,
and has been applied to practical purposes on a scale never before
known. The consequence is that a change to which the history of the old
world furnishes no parallel has taken place in our country. Could the
England of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes,
we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one building in ten
thousand. The country gentleman would not recognise his own fields. The
inhabitant of the town would not recognise his own street. Everything
has been changed, but the great features of nature, and a few
massive and durable works of human art. We might find out Snowdon and
Windermere, the Cheddar Cliffs and Beachy Head. We might find out here
and there a Norman minster, or a castle which witnessed the wars of the
Roses. But, with such rare exceptions, everything would be strange to
us. Many thousands of square miles which are now rich corn land and
meadow, intersected by green hedgerows and dotted with villages and
pleasant country seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or
fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of
wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and
seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself
would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present
suburb on the south of the Thames. Not less strange to us would be the
garb and manners of the people, the furniture and the equipages, the
interior of the shops and dwellings. Such a change in the state of
a nation seems to be at least as well entitled to the notice of a
historian as any change of the dynasty or of the ministry. [26]

One of the first objects of an inquirer, who wishes to form a correct
notion of the state of a community at a given time, must be to ascertain
of how many persons that community then consisted. Unfortunately the
population of England in 1685, cannot be ascertained with perfect
accuracy. For no great state had then adopted the wise course of
periodically numbering the people. All men were left to conjecture for
themselves; and, as they generally conjectured without examining facts,
and under the influence of strong passions and prejudices, their guesses
were often ludicrously absurd. Even intelligent Londoners ordinarily
talked of London as containing several millions of souls. It was
confidently asserted by many that, during the thirty-five years
which had elapsed between the accession of Charles the First and the
Restoration the population of the City had increased by two millions.
[27] Even while the ravages of the plague and fire were recent, it was
the fashion to say that the capital still had a million and a half of
inhabitants. [28] Some persons, disgusted by these exaggerations,
ran violently into the opposite extreme. Thus Isaac Vossius, a man of
undoubted parts and learning, strenuously maintained that there were
only two millions of human beings in England, Scotland, and Ireland
taken together. [29]

We are not, however, left without the means of correcting the wild
blunders into which some minds were hurried by national vanity and
others by a morbid love of paradox. There are extant three computations
which seem to be entitled to peculiar attention. They are entirely
independent of each other: they proceed on different principles; and yet
there is little difference in the results.

One of these computations was made in the year 1696 by Gregory King,
Lancaster herald, a political arithmetician of great acuteness and
judgment. The basis of his calculations was the number of houses
returned in 1690 by the officers who made the last collection of the
hearth money. The conclusion at which he arrived was that the population
of England was nearly five millions and a half. [30]

About the same time King William the Third was desirous to ascertain the
comparative strength of the religious sects into which the community
was divided. An inquiry was instituted; and reports were laid before
him from all the dioceses of the realm. According to these reports the
number of his English subjects must have been about five million two
hundred thousand. [31]

Lastly, in our own days, Mr. Finlaison, an actuary of eminent skill,
subjected the ancient parochial registers of baptisms, marriages, and
burials, to all the tests which the modern improvements in statistical
science enabled him to apply. His opinion was, that, at the close of the
seventeenth century, the population of England was a little under five
million two hundred thousand souls. [32]

Of these three estimates, framed without concert by different persons
from different sets of materials, the highest, which is that of King,
does not exceed the lowest, which is that of Finlaison, by one twelfth.
We may, therefore, with confidence pronounce that, when James the Second
reigned, England contained between five million and five million five
hundred thousand inhabitants. On the very highest supposition she then
had less than one third of her present population, and less than three
times the population which is now collected in her gigantic capital.

The increase of the people has been great in every part of the kingdom,
but generally much greater in the northern than in the southern shires.
In truth a large part of the country beyond Trent was, down to the
eighteenth century, in a state of barbarism. Physical and moral causes
had concurred to prevent civilisation from spreading to that region. The
air was inclement; the soil was generally such as required skilful and
industrious cultivation; and there could be little skill or industry in
a tract which was often the theatre of war, and which, even when
there was nominal peace, was constantly desolated by bands of Scottish
marauders. Before the union of the two British crowns, and long after
that union, there was as great a difference between Middlesex and
Northumberland as there now is between Massachusetts and the settlements
of those squatters who, far to the west of the Mississippi, administer a
rude justice with the rifle and the dagger. In the reign of Charles the
Second, the traces left by ages of slaughter and pillage were distinctly
perceptible, many miles south of the Tweed, in the face of the country
and in the lawless manners of the people. There was still a large class
of mosstroopers, whose calling was to plunder dwellings and to drive
away whole herds of cattle. It was found necessary, soon after the
Restoration, to enact laws of great severity for the prevention of
these outrages. The magistrates of Northumberland and Cumberland were
authorised to raise bands of armed men for the defence of property and
order; and provision was made for meeting the expense of these levies by
local taxation. [33] The parishes were required to keep bloodhounds for
the purpose of hunting the freebooters. Many old men who were living in
the middle of the eighteenth century could well remember the time when
those ferocious dogs were common. [34] Yet, even with such auxiliaries,
it was often found impossible to track the robbers to their retreats
among the hills and morasses. For the geography of that wild country was
very imperfectly known. Even after the accession of George the Third,
the path over the fells from Borrowdale to Ravenglas was still a secret
carefully kept by the dalesmen, some of whom had probably in their youth
escaped from the pursuit of justice by that road. [35] The seats of the
gentry and the larger farmhouses were fortified. Oxen were penned at
night beneath the overhanging battlements of the residence, which was
known by the name of the Peel. The inmates slept with arms at their
sides. Huge stones and boiling water were in readiness to crush and
scald the plunderer who might venture to assail the little garrison. No
traveller ventured into that country without making his will. The Judges
on circuit, with the whole body of barristers, attorneys, clerks, and
serving men, rode on horseback from Newcastle to Carlisle, armed and
escorted by a strong guard under the command of the Sheriffs. It was
necessary to carry provisions; for the country was a wilderness which
afforded no supplies. The spot where the cavalcade halted to dine, under
an immense oak, is not yet forgotten. The irregular vigour with which
criminal justice was administered shocked observers whose lives had been
passed in more tranquil districts. Juries, animated by hatred and by a
sense of common danger, convicted housebreakers and cattle stealers with
the promptitude of a court martial in a mutiny; and the convicts were
hurried by scores to the gallows. [36] Within the memory of some whom
this generation has seen, the sportsman who wandered in pursuit of game
to the sources of the Tyne found the heaths round Keeldar Castle peopled
by a race scarcely less savage than the Indians of California, and heard
with surprise the half naked women chaunting a wild measure, while the
men with brandished dirks danced a war dance. [37]

Slowly and with difficulty peace was established on the border. In the
train of peace came industry and all the arts of life. Meanwhile it was
discovered that the regions north of the Trent possessed in their coal
beds a source of wealth far more precious than the gold mines of Peru.
It was found that, in the neighbourhood of these beds, almost every
manufacture might be most profitably carried on. A constant stream of
emigrants began to roll northward. It appeared by the returns of 1841
that the ancient archiepiscopal province of York contained two-sevenths
of the population of England. At the time of the Revolution that
province was believed to contain only one seventh of the population.
[38] In Lancashire the number of inhabitants appear to have increased
ninefold, while in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Northamptonshire it has hardly
doubled. [39]

Of the taxation we can speak with more confidence and precision than of
the population. The revenue of England, when Charles the Second
died, was small, when compared with the resources which she even then
possessed, or with the sums which were raised by the governments of the
neighbouring countries. It had, from the time of the Restoration, been
almost constantly increasing, yet it was little more than three fourths
of the revenue of the United Provinces, and was hardly one fifth of the
revenue of France.

The most important head of receipt was the excise, which, in the last
year of the reign of Charles, produced five hundred and eighty-five
thousand pounds, clear of all deductions. The net proceeds of the
customs amounted in the same year to five hundred and thirty thousand
pounds. These burdens did not lie very heavy on the nation. The tax on
chimneys, though less productive, call forth far louder murmurs. The
discontent excited by direct imposts is, indeed, almost always out of
proportion to the quantity of money which they bring into the Exchequer;
and the tax on chimneys was, even among direct imposts, peculiarly
odious: for it could be levied only by means of domiciliary visits; and
of such visits the English have always been impatient to a degree which
the people of other countries can but faintly conceive. The poorer
householders were frequently unable to pay their hearth money to the
day. When this happened, their furniture was distrained without mercy:
for the tax was farmed; and a farmer of taxes is, of all creditors,
proverbially the most rapacious. The collectors were loudly accused of
performing their unpopular duty with harshness and insolence. It was
said that, as soon as they appeared at the threshold of a cottage, the
children began to wail, and the old women ran to hide their earthenware.
Nay, the single bed of a poor family had sometimes been carried away
and sold. The net annual receipt from this tax was two hundred thousand
pounds. [40]

When to the three great sources of income which have been mentioned
we add the royal domains, then far more extensive than at present,
the first fruits and tenths, which had not yet been surrendered to the
Church, the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, the forfeitures, and the
fines, we shall find that the whole annual revenue of the crown may
be fairly estimated at about fourteen hundred thousand pounds. Of this
revenue part was hereditary; the rest had been granted to Charles for
life; and he was at liberty to lay out the whole exactly as he thought
fit. Whatever he could save by retrenching from the expenditure of
the public departments was an addition to his privy purse. Of the Post
Office more will hereafter be said. The profits of that establishment
had been appropriated by Parliament to the Duke of York.

The King's revenue was, or rather ought to have been, charged with the
payment of about eighty thousand pounds a year, the interest of the sum
fraudulently destined in the Exchequer by the Cabal. While Danby was at
the head of the finances, the creditors had received dividends, though
not with the strict punctuality of modern times: but those who had
succeeded him at the treasury had been less expert, or less solicitous
to maintain public faith. Since the victory won by the court over the
Whigs, not a farthing had been paid; and no redress was granted to the
sufferers, till a new dynasty had been many years on the throne. There
can be no greater error than to imagine that the device of meeting the
exigencies of the state by loans was imported into our island by
William the Third. What really dates from his reign is not the system
of borrowing, but the system of funding. From a period of immemorable
antiquity it had been the practice of every English government to
contract debts. What the Revolution introduced was the practice of
honestly paying them. [41]

By plundering the public creditor, it was possible to make an income of
about fourteen hundred thousand pounds, with some occasional help from
Versailles, support the necessary charges of the government and the
wasteful expenditure of the court. For that load which pressed most
heavily on the finances of the great continental states was here
scarcely felt. In France, Germany, and the Netherlands, armies, such
as Henry the Fourth and Philip the Second had never employed in time
of war, were kept up in the midst of peace. Bastions and raveling
were everywhere rising, constructed on principles unknown to Parma and
Spinola. Stores of artillery and ammunition were accumulated, such as
even Richelieu, whom the preceding generation had regarded as a worker
of prodigies, would have pronounced fabulous. No man could journey many
leagues in those countries without hearing the drums of a regiment
on march, or being challenged by the sentinels on the drawbridge of a
fortress. In our island, on the contrary, it was possible to live long
and to travel far without being once reminded, by any martial sight or
sound, that the defence of nations had become a science and a calling.
The majority of Englishmen who were under twenty-five years of age had
probably never seen a company of regular soldiers. Of the cities which,
in the civil war, had valiantly repelled hostile armies, scarcely one
was now capable of sustaining a siege The gates stood open night and
day. The ditches were dry. The ramparts had been suffered to fall into
decay, or were repaired only that the townsfolk might have a pleasant
walk on summer evenings. Of the old baronial keeps many had been
shattered by the cannon of Fairfax and Cromwell, and lay in heaps of
ruin, overgrown with ivy. Those which remained had lost their martial
character, and were now rural palaces of the aristocracy. The moats were
turned into preserves of carp and pike. The mounds were planted with
fragrant shrubs, through which spiral walks ran up to summer houses
adorned with mirrors and paintings.
[42] On the capes of the sea coast,
and on many inland hills, were still seen tall posts, surmounted by
barrels. Once those barrels had been filled with pitch. Watchmen had
been set round them in seasons of danger; and, within a few hours after
a Spanish sail had been discovered in the Channel, or after a thousand
Scottish mosstroopers had crossed the Tweed, the signal fires were
blazing fifty miles off, and whole counties were rising in arms. But
many years had now elapsed since the beacons had been lighted; and they
were regarded rather as curious relics of ancient manners than as parts
of a machinery necessary to the safety of the state. [43]

The only army which the law recognised was the militia. That force had
been remodelled by two Acts of Parliament, passed shortly after the
Restoration. Every man who possessed five hundred pounds a year derived
from land, or six thousand pounds of personal estate, was bound to
provide, equip, and pay, at his own charge, one horseman. Every man
who had fifty pounds a year derived from land, or six hundred pounds
of personal estate, was charged in like manner with one pikemen or
musketeer. Smaller proprietors were joined together in a kind of
society, for which our language does not afford a special name, but
which an Athenian would have called a Synteleia; and each society was
required to furnish, according to its means, a horse soldier or a foot
soldier. The whole number of cavalry and infantry thus maintained was
popularly estimated at a hundred and thirty thousand men. [44]

The King was, by the ancient constitution of the realm, and by the
recent and solemn acknowledgment of both Houses of Parliament, the sole
Captain General of this large force. The Lords Lieutenants and their
Deputies held the command under him, and appointed meetings for drilling
and inspection. The time occupied by such meetings, however, was not
to exceed fourteen days in one year. The Justices of the Peace were
authorised to inflict severe penalties for breaches of discipline. Of
the ordinary cost no part was paid by the crown: but when the trainbands
were called out against an enemy, their subsistence became a charge on
the general revenue of the state, and they were subject to the utmost
rigour of martial law.

There were those who looked on the militia with no friendly eye. Men
who had travelled much on the Continent, who had marvelled at the stern
precision with which every sentinel moved and spoke in the citadels
built by Vauban, who had seen the mighty armies which poured along all
the roads of Germany to chase the Ottoman from the Gates of Vienna, and
who had been dazzled by the well ordered pomp of the household troops of
Lewis, sneered much at the way in which the peasants of Devonshire and
Yorkshire marched and wheeled, shouldered muskets and ported pikes. The
enemies of the liberties and religion of England looked with aversion on
a force which could not, without extreme risk, be employed against
those liberties and that religion, and missed no opportunity of throwing
ridicule on the rustic soldiery. [45] Enlightened patriots, when they
contrasted these rude levies with the battalions which, in time of war,
a few hours might bring to the coast of Kent or Sussex, were forced
to acknowledge that, dangerous as it might be to keep up a permanent
military establishment, it might be more dangerous still to stake
the honour and independence of the country on the result of a contest
between plowmen officered by Justices of the Peace, and veteran warriors
led by Marshals of France. In Parliament, however, it was necessary
to express such opinions with some reserve; for the militia was an
institution eminently popular. Every reflection thrown on it excited the
indignation of both the great parties in the state, and especially of
that party which was distinguished by peculiar zeal for monarchy and
for the Anglican Church. The array of the counties was commanded almost
exclusively by Tory noblemen and gentlemen. They were proud of their
military rank, and considered an insult offered to the service to which
they belonged as offered to themselves. They were also perfectly
aware that whatever was said against a militia was said in favour of a
standing army; and the name of standing army was hateful to them. One
such army had held dominion in England; and under that dominion the King
had been murdered, the nobility degraded, the landed gentry plundered,
the Church persecuted. There was scarcely a rural grandee who could
not tell a story of wrongs and insults suffered by himself, or by his
father, at the hands of the parliamentary soldiers. One old Cavalier had
seen half his manor house blown up. The hereditary elms of another had
been hewn down. A third could never go into his parish church without
being reminded by the defaced scutcheons and headless statues of his
ancestry, that Oliver's redcoats had once stabled their horses there.
The consequence was that those very Royalists, who were most ready
to fight for the King themselves, were the last persons whom he could
venture to ask for the means of hiring regular troops.

Charles, however, had, a few months after his restoration, begun to form
a small standing army. He felt that, without some better protection
than that of the trainbands and beefeaters, his palace and person would
hardly be secure, in the vicinity of a great city swarming with warlike
Fifth Monarchy men who had just been disbanded. He therefore, careless
and profuse as he was, contrived to spare from his pleasures a sum
sufficient to keep up a body of guards. With the increase of trade and
of public wealth his revenues increased; and he was thus enabled,
in spite of the occasional murmurs of the Commons, to make gradual
additions to his regular forces. One considerable addition was made
a few months before the close of his reign. The costly, useless, and
pestilential settlement of Tangier was abandoned to the barbarians who
dwelt around it; and the garrison, consisting of one regiment of horse
and two regiments of foot, was brought to England.

The little army formed by Charles the Second was the germ of that great
and renowned army which has, in the present century, marched triumphant
into Madrid and Paris, into Canton and Candahar. The Life Guards, who
now form two regiments, were then distributed into three troops, each of
which consisted of two hundred carabineers, exclusive of officers. This
corps, to which the safety of the King and royal family was confided,
had a very peculiar character. Even the privates were designated as
gentlemen of the Guard. Many of them were of good families, and had held
commissions in the civil war. Their pay was far higher than that of
the most favoured regiment of our time, and would in that age have been
thought a respectable provision for the younger son of a country squire.
Their fine horses, their rich housings, their cuirasses, and their
buff coats adorned with ribands, velvet, and gold lace, made a splendid
appearance in Saint James's Park. A small body of grenadier dragoons,
who came from a lower class and received lower pay, was attached to each
troop. Another body of household cavalry distinguished by blue coats
and cloaks, and still called the Blues, was generally quartered in the
neighbourhood of the capital. Near the capital lay also the corps which
is now designated as the first regiment of dragoons, but which was
then the only regiment of dragoons on the English establishment. It had
recently been formed out of the cavalry which had returned from Tangier.
A single troop of dragoons, which did not form part of any regiment, was
stationed near Berwick, for the purpose of keeping, the peace among the
mosstroopers of the border. For this species of service the dragoon
was then thought to be peculiarly qualified. He has since become a
mere horse soldier. But in the seventeenth century he was accurately
described by Montecuculi as a foot soldier who used a horse only in
order to arrive with more speed at the place where military service was
to be performed.

The household infantry consisted of two regiments, which were then,
as now, called the first regiment of Foot Guards, and the Coldstream
Guards. They generally did duty near Whitehall and Saint James's Palace.
As there were then no barracks, and as, by the Petition of Right, it
had been declared unlawful to quarter soldiers on private families, the
redcoats filled all the alehouses of Westminster and the Strand.

There were five other regiments of foot. One of these, called the
Admiral's Regiment, was especially destined to service on board of the
fleet. The remaining four still rank as the first four regiments of the
line. Two of these represented two brigades which had long sustained on
the Continent the fame of British valour. The first, or Royal regiment,
had, under the great Gustavus, borne a conspicuous part in the
deliverance of Germany. The third regiment, distinguished by
fleshcoloured facings, from which it had derived the well known name of
the Buffs, had, under Maurice of Nassau, fought not less bravely for the
deliverance of the Netherlands. Both these gallant bands had at length,
after many vicissitudes, been recalled from foreign service by Charles
the Second, and had been placed on the English establishment.

The regiments which now rank as the second and fourth of the line
had, in 1685, just returned from Tangier, bringing with them cruel and
licentious habits contracted in a long course of warfare with the
Moors. A few companies of infantry which had not been regimented lay in
garrison at Tilbury Fort, at Portsmouth, at Plymouth, and at some other
important stations on or near the coast.

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century a great change had taken
place in the arms of the infantry. The pike had been gradually giving
place to the musket; and, at the close of the reign of Charles the
Second, most of his foot were musketeers. Still, however, there was a
large intermixture of pikemen. Each class of troops was occasionally
instructed in the use of the weapon which peculiarly belonged to the
other class. Every foot soldier had at his side a sword for close fight.
The musketeer was generally provided with a weapon which had, during
many years, been gradually coming into use, and which the English then
called a dagger, but which, from the time of William the Third, has been
known among us by the French name of bayonet. The bayonet seems not
to have been then so formidable an instrument of destruction as it
has since become; for it was inserted in the muzzle of the gun; and in
action much time was lost while the soldier unfixed his bayonet in
order to fire, and fixed it again in order to charge. The dragoon, when
dismounted, fought as a musketeer.

The regular army which was kept up in England at the beginning of the
year 1685 consisted, all ranks included, of about seven thousand foot,
and about seventeen hundred cavalry and dragoons. The whole charge
amounted to about two hundred and ninety thousand pounds a year, less
then a tenth part of what the military establishment of France then cost
in time of peace. The daily pay of a private in the Life Guards was
four shillings, in the Blues two shillings and sixpence, in the Dragoons
eighteen pence, in the Foot Guards tenpence, and in the line eightpence.
The discipline was lax, and indeed could not be otherwise. The common
law of England knew nothing of courts martial, and made no distinction,
in time of peace, between a soldier and any other subject; nor could
the government then venture to ask even the most loyal Parliament for
a Mutiny Bill. A soldier, therefore, by knocking down his colonel,
incurred only the ordinary penalties of assault and battery, and by
refusing to obey orders, by sleeping on guard, or by deserting his
colours, incurred no legal penalty at all. Military punishments were
doubtless inflicted during the reign of Charles the Second; but they
were inflicted very sparingly, and in such a manner as not to attract
public notice, or to produce an appeal to the courts of Westminster
Hall.

Such an army as has been described was not very likely to enslave five
millions of Englishmen. It would indeed have been unable to suppress
an insurrection in London, if the trainbands of the City had joined the
insurgents. Nor could the King expect that, if a rising took place in
England, he would obtain effectual help from his other dominions.
For, though both Scotland and Ireland supported separate military
establishments, those establishments were not more than sufficient to
keep down the Puritan malecontents of the former kingdom and the Popish
malecontents of the latter. The government had, however, an important
military resource which must not be left unnoticed. There were in the
pay of the United Provinces six fine regiments, of which three had
been raised in England and three in Scotland. Their native prince had
reserved to himself the power of recalling them, if he needed their
help against a foreign or domestic enemy. In the meantime they were
maintained without any charge to him, and were kept under an excellent
discipline to which he could not have ventured to subject them. [46]

If the jealousy of the Parliament and of the nation made it impossible
for the King to maintain a formidable standing army, no similar
impediment prevented him from making England the first of maritime
powers. Both Whigs and Tories were ready to applaud every step tending
to increase the efficiency of that force which, while it was the best
protection of the island against foreign enemies, was powerless against
civil liberty. All the greatest exploits achieved within the memory of
that generation by English soldiers had been achieved in war against
English princes. The victories of our sailors had been won over foreign
foes, and had averted havoc and rapine from our own soil. By at least
half the nation the battle of Naseby was remembered with horror, and the
battle of Dunbar with pride chequered by many painful feelings: but the
defeat of the Armada, and the encounters of Blake with the Hollanders
and Spaniards were recollected with unmixed exultation by all parties.
Ever since the Restoration, the Commons, even when most discontented
and most parsimonious, had always been bountiful to profusion where the
interest of the navy was concerned. It had been represented to them,
while Danby was minister, that many of the vessels in the royal fleet
were old and unfit for sea; and, although the House was, at that time,
in no giving mood, an aid of near six hundred thousand pounds had been
granted for the building of thirty new men of war.

But the liberality of the nation had been made fruitless by the vices of
the government. The list of the King's ships, it is true, looked well.
There were nine first rates, fourteen second rates, thirty-nine third
rates, and many smaller vessels. The first rates, indeed, were less than
the third rates of our time; and the third rates would not now rank
as very large frigates. This force, however, if it had been efficient,
would in those days have been regarded by the greatest potentate as
formidable. But it existed only on paper. When the reign of Charles
terminated, his navy had sunk into degradation and decay, such as would
be almost incredible if it were not certified to us by the independent
and concurring evidence of witnesses whose authority is beyond
exception. Pepys, the ablest man in the English Admiralty, drew up,
in the year 1684, a memorial on the state of his department, for the
information of Charles. A few months later Bonrepaux, the ablest man in
the French Admiralty, having visited England for the especial purpose
of ascertaining her maritime strength, laid the result of his inquiries
before Lewis. The two reports are to the same effect. Bonrepaux declared
that he found everything in disorder and in miserable condition, that
the superiority of the French marine was acknowledged with shame and
envy at Whitehall, and that the state of our shipping and dockyards
was of itself a sufficient guarantee that we should not meddle in
the disputes of Europe. [47] Pepys informed his master that the naval
administration was a prodigy of wastefulness, corruption, ignorance,
and indolence, that no estimate could be trusted, that no contract was
performed, that no check was enforced. The vessels which the recent
liberality of Parliament had enabled the government to build, and which
had never been out of harbour, had been made of such wretched timber
that they were more unfit to go to sea than the old hulls which had been
battered thirty years before by Dutch and Spanish broadsides. Some
of the new men of war, indeed, were so rotten that, unless speedily
repaired, they would go down at their moorings. The sailors were paid
with so little punctuality that they were glad to find some usurer who
would purchase their tickets at forty per cent. discount. The commanders
who had not powerful friends at court were even worse treated. Some
officers, to whom large arrears were due, after vainly importuning the
government during many years, had died for want of a morsel of bread.

Most of the ships which were afloat were commanded by men who had not
been bred to the sea. This, it is true, was not an abuse introduced by
the government of Charles. No state, ancient or modern, had, before that
time, made a complete separation between the naval and military service.
In the great civilised nations of antiquity, Cimon and Lysander, Pompey
and Agrippa, had fought battles by sea as well as by land. Nor had the
impulse which nautical science received at the close of the fifteenth
century produced any new division of labour. At Flodden the right wing
of the victorious army was led by the Admiral of England. At Jarnac and
Moncontour the Huguenot ranks were marshalled by the Admiral of France.
Neither John of Austria, the conqueror of Lepanto, nor Lord Howard of
Effingham, to whose direction the marine of England was confided when
the Spanish invaders were approaching our shores, had received the
education of a sailor. Raleigh, highly celebrated as a naval commander,
had served during many years as a soldier in France, the Netherlands,
and Ireland. Blake had distinguished himself by his skilful and valiant
defence of an inland town before he humbled the pride of Holland and
of Castile on the ocean. Since the Restoration the same system had been
followed. Great fleets had been entrusted to the direction of Rupert
and Monk; Rupert, who was renowned chiefly as a hot and daring cavalry
officer, and Monk, who, when he wished his ship to change her course,
moved the mirth of his crew by calling out, "Wheel to the left! "

But about this time wise men began to perceive that the rapid
improvement, both of the art of war and of the art of navigation, made
it necessary to draw a line between two professions which had hitherto
been confounded. Either the command of a regiment or the command of
a ship was now a matter quite sufficient to occupy the attention of
a single mind. In the year 1672 the French government determined to
educate young men of good family from a very early age especially for
the sea service. But the English government, instead of following this
excellent example, not only continued to distribute high naval commands
among landsmen, but selected for such commands landsmen who, even on
land, could not safely have been put in any important trust. Any lad
of noble birth, any dissolute courtier for whom one of the King's
mistresses would speak a word, might hope that a ship of the line, and
with it the honour of the country and the lives of hundreds of brave
men, would be committed to his care. It mattered not that he had never
in his life taken a voyage except on the Thames, that he could not
keep his feet in a breeze, that he did not know the difference between
latitude and longitude. No previous training was thought necessary; or,
at most, he was sent to make a short trip in a man of war, where he was
subjected to no discipline, where he was treated with marked respect,
and where he lived in a round of revels and amusements. If, in the
intervals of feasting, drinking, and gambling, he succeeded in learning
the meaning of a few technical phrases and the names of the points
of the compass, he was thought fully qualified to take charge of a
three-decker. This is no imaginary description. In 1666, John Sheffield,
Earl of Mulgrave, at seventeen years of age, volunteered to serve at sea
against the Dutch. He passed six weeks on board, diverting himself, as
well as he could, in the society of some young libertines of rank, and
then returned home to take the command of a troop of horse. After this
he was never on the water till the year 1672, when he again joined
the fleet, and was almost immediately appointed Captain of a ship
of eighty-four guns, reputed the finest in the navy. He was then
twenty-three years old, and had not, in the whole course of his life,
been three months afloat. As soon as he came back from sea he was made
Colonel of a regiment of foot. This is a specimen of the manner in which
naval commands of the highest importance were then given; and a very
favourable specimen; for Mulgrave, though he wanted experience, wanted
neither parts nor courage. Others were promoted in the same way who not
only were not good officers, but who were intellectually and morally
incapable of ever becoming good officers, and whose only recommendation
was that they had been ruined by folly and vice. The chief bait which
allured these men into the service was the profit of conveying bullion
and other valuable commodities from port to port; for both the Atlantic
and the Mediterranean were then so much infested by pirates from Barbary
that merchants were not willing to trust precious cargoes to any custody
but that of a man of war. A Captain might thus clear several thousands
of pounds by a short voyage; and for this lucrative business he too
often neglected the interests of his country and the honour of his
flag, made mean submissions to foreign powers, disobeyed the most direct
injunctions of his superiors, lay in port when he was ordered to chase
a Sallee rover, or ran with dollars to Leghorn when his instructions
directed him to repair to Lisbon. And all this he did with impunity.
The same interest which had placed him in a post for which he was unfit
maintained him there. No Admiral, bearded by these corrupt and dissolute
minions of the palace, dared to do more than mutter something about a
court martial. If any officer showed a higher sense of duty than his
fellows, he soon found out he lost money without acquiring honor. One
Captain, who, by strictly obeying the orders of the Admiralty, missed a
cargo which would have been worth four thousand pounds to him, was told
by Charles, with ignoble levity, that he was a great fool for his pains.

The discipline of the navy was of a piece throughout. As the courtly
Captain despised the Admiralty, he was in turn despised by his crew.
It could not be concealed that he was inferior in Seamanship to every
foremast man on board. It was idle to expect that old sailors, familiar
with the hurricanes of the tropics and with the icebergs of the Arctic
Circle, would pay prompt and respectful obedience to a chief who knew no
more of winds and waves than could be learned in a gilded barge between
Whitehall Stairs and Hampton Court. To trust such a novice with the
working of a ship was evidently impossible. The direction of the
navigation was therefore taken from the Captain and given to the Master;
but this partition of authority produced innumerable inconveniences.
The line of demarcation was not, and perhaps could not be, drawn
with precision. There was therefore constant wrangling. The Captain,
confident in proportion to his ignorance, treated the Master with
lordly contempt. The Master, well aware of the danger of disobliging
the powerful, too often, after a struggle, yielded against his better
judgment; and it was well if the loss of ship and crew was not the
consequence. In general the least mischievous of the aristocratical
Captains were those who completely abandoned to others the direction of
the vessels, and thought only of making money and spending it. The way
in which these men lived was so ostentatious and voluptuous that, greedy
as they were of gain, they seldom became rich. They dressed as if for
a gala at Versailles, ate off plate, drank the richest wines, and kept
harems on board, while hunger and scurvy raged among the crews, and
while corpses were daily flung out of the portholes.

Such was the ordinary character of those who were then called gentlemen
Captains. Mingled with them were to be found, happily for our country,
naval commanders of a very different description, men whose whole life
had been passed on the deep, and who had worked and fought their way
from the lowest offices of the forecastle to rank and distinction. One
of the most eminent of these officers was Sir Christopher Mings, who
entered the service as a cabin boy, who fell fighting bravely against
the Dutch, and whom his crew, weeping and vowing vengeance, carried to
the grave. From him sprang, by a singular kind of descent, a line of
valiant and expert sailors. His cabin boy was Sir John Narborough; and
the cabin boy of Sir John Narborough was Sir Cloudesley Shovel. To the
strong natural sense and dauntless courage of this class of men England
owes a debt never to be forgotten. It was by such resolute hearts that,
in spite of much maladministration, and in spite of the blunders and
treasons of more courtly admirals, our coasts were protected and the
reputation of our flag upheld during many gloomy and perilous years. But
to a landsman these tarpaulins, as they were called, seemed a strange
and half savage race. All their knowledge was professional; and their
professional knowledge was practical rather than scientific. Off their
own element they were as simple as children. Their deportment was
uncouth. There was roughness in their very good nature; and their talk,
where it was not made up of nautical phrases, was too commonly made
up of oaths and curses. Such were the chiefs in whose rude school were
formed those sturdy warriors from whom Smollett, in the next age, drew
Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion. But it does not appear that
there was in the service of any of the Stuarts a single naval officer
such as, according to the notions of our times, a naval officer ought
to be, that is to say, a man versed in the theory and practice of his
calling, and steeled against all the dangers of battle and tempest, yet
of cultivated mind and polished manners. There were gentlemen and there
were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not
gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.

The English navy at that time might, according to the most exact
estimates which have come down to us, have been kept in an efficient
state for three hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year. Four hundred
thousand pounds a year was the sum actually expended, but expended, as
we have seen, to very little purpose. The cost of the French marine was
nearly the same the cost of the Dutch marine considerably more. [48]

The charge of the English ordnance in the seventeenth century was, as
compared with other military and naval charges, much smaller than at
present. At most of the garrisons there were gunners: and here and
there, at an important post, an engineer was to be found. But there was
no regiment of artillery, no brigade of sappers and miners, no college
in which young soldiers could learn the scientific part of the art of
war. The difficulty of moving field pieces was extreme. When, a few
years later, William marched from Devonshire to London, the apparatus
which he brought with him, though such as had long been in constant use
on the Continent, and such as would now be regarded at Woolwich as rude
and cumbrous, excited in our ancestors an admiration resembling that
which the Indians of America felt for the Castilian harquebusses. The
stock of gunpowder kept in the English forts and arsenals was boastfully
mentioned by patriotic writers as something which might well impress
neighbouring nations with awe. It amounted to fourteen or fifteen
thousand barrels, about a twelfth of the quantity which it is now
thought necessary to have in store. The expenditure under the head of
ordnance was on an average a little above sixty thousand pounds a year.
[49]

The whole effective charge of the army, navy, and ordnance, was about
seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The noneffective charge, which
is now a heavy part of our public burdens, can hardly be said to have
existed. A very small number of naval officers, who were not employed
in the public service, drew half pay. No Lieutenant was on the list, nor
any Captain who had not commanded a ship of the first or second rate. As
the country then possessed only seventeen ships of the first and second
rate that had ever been at sea, and as a large proportion of the persons
who had commanded such ships had good posts on shore, the expenditure
under this head must have been small indeed. [50] In the army, half pay
was given merely as a special and temporary allowance to a small number
of officers belonging to two regiments, which were peculiarly situated.
[51] Greenwich Hospital had not been founded. Chelsea Hospital was
building: but the cost of that institution was defrayed partly by
a deduction from the pay of the troops, and partly by private
subscription. The King promised to contribute only twenty thousand
pounds for architectural expenses, and five thousand a year for the
maintenance of the invalids. [52] It was no part of the plan that there
should be outpensioners. The whole noneffective charge, military and
naval, can scarcely have exceeded ten thousand pounds a year. It now
exceeds ten thousand pounds a day.

Of the expense of civil government only a small portion was defrayed by
the crown. The great majority of the functionaries whose business was to
administer justice and preserve order either gave their services to the
public gratuitously, or were remunerated in a manner which caused no
drain on the revenue of the state. The Sheriffs, mayors, and aldermen
of the towns, the country gentlemen who were in the commission of the
peace, the headboroughs, bailiffs, and petty constables, cost the King
nothing.