No More Learning

Meanwhile the internal government of the colony was organised according
to a plan devised by the directors at Edinburgh. The settlers were
divided into bands of fifty or sixty; each band chose a representative;
and thus was formed an assembly which took the magnificent name of
Parliament. This Parliament speedily framed a curious code. The first
article provided that the precepts, instructions, examples, commands and
prohibitions expressed and contained in the Holy Scriptures should have
the full force and effect of laws in New Caledonia, an enactment which
proves that those who drew it up either did not know what the Holy
Scriptures contained or did not know what a law meant. There is another
provision which shows not less clearly how far these legislators were
from understanding the first principles of legislation. "Benefits
received and good services done shall always be generously and
thankfully compensated, whether a prior bargain hath been made or not;
and, if it shall happen to be otherwise, and the Benefactor obliged
justly to complain of the ingratitude, the Ungrateful shall in such case
be obliged to give threefold satisfaction at the least. " An article much
more creditable to the little Parliament, and much needed in a community
which was likely to be constantly at war, prohibits, on pain of death,
the violation of female captives.

By this time all the Antilles and all the shores of the Gulf of Mexico
were in a ferment. The new colony was the object of universal hatred.
The Spaniards began to fit out armaments. The chiefs of the French
dependencies in the West Indies eagerly offered assistance to
the Spaniards. The governors of the English settlements put forth
proclamations interdicting all communication with this nest of
buccaneers. Just at this time, the Dolphin, a vessel of fourteen guns,
which was the property of the Scotch Company, was driven on shore by
stress of weather under the walls of Carthagena. The ship and cargo were
confiscated, the crew imprisoned and put in irons. Some of the sailors
were treated as slaves, and compelled to sweep the streets and to work
on the fortifications. Others, and among them the captain, were sent
to Seville to be tried for piracy. Soon an envoy with a flag of truce
arrived at Carthagena, and, in the name of the Council of Caledonia,
demanded the release of the prisoners. He delivered to the authorities a
letter threatening them with the vengeance of the King of Great Britain,
and a copy of the Act of Parliament by which the Company had been
created. The Castilian governor, who probably knew that William, as
Sovereign of England, would not, and, as Sovereign of Scotland, could
not, protect the squatters who had occupied Darien, flung away both
letter and Act of Parliament with a gesture of contempt, called for a
guard, and was with difficulty dissuaded from throwing the messenger
into a dungeon. The Council of Caledonia, in great indignation, issued
letters of mark and reprisal against Spanish vessels. What every man of
common sense must have foreseen had taken place. The Scottish flag had
been but a few months planted on the walls of New Edinburgh; and already
a war, which Scotland, without the help of England, was utterly unable
to sustain, had begun.

By this time it was known in Europe that the mysterious voyage of the
adventurers from the Forth had ended at Darien. The ambassador of the
Catholic King repaired to Kensington, and complained bitterly to William
of this outrageous violation of the law of nations. Preparations were
made in the Spanish ports for an expedition against the intruders; and
in no Spanish port were there more fervent wishes for the success of
that expedition than in the cities of London and Bristol. In Scotland,
on the other hand, the exultation was boundless. In the parish churches
all over the kingdom the ministers gave public thanks to God for having
vouchsafed thus far to protect and bless the infant colony. At some
places a day was set apart for religious exercises on this account. In
every borough bells were rung; bonfires were lighted; and candles were
placed in the windows at night. During some months all the reports which
arrived from the other side of the Atlantic were such as to excite hope
and joy in the north of the island, and alarm and envy in the south. The
colonists, it was asserted, had found rich gold mines, mines in which
the precious metal was far more abundant and in a far purer state than
on the coast of Guinea. Provisions were plentiful. The rainy season had
not proved unhealthy. The settlement was well fortified. Sixty guns were
mounted on the ramparts. An immense crop of Indian corn was expected.
The aboriginal tribes were friendly. Emigrants from various quarters
were coming in. The population of Caledonia had already increased from
twelve hundred to ten thousand. The riches of the country,--these are
the words of a newspaper of that time,--were great beyond imagination.
The mania in Scotland rose to the highest point. Munitions of war and
implements of agriculture were provided in large quantities. Multitudes
were impatient to emigrate to the land of promise.

In August 1699 four ships, with thirteen hundred men on board, were
despatched by the Company to Caledonia. The spiritual care of these
emigrants was entrusted to divines of the Church of Scotland. One of
these was that Alexander Shields whose Hind Let Loose proves that in
his zeal for the Covenant he had forgotten the Gospel. To another, John
Borland, we owe the best account of the voyage which is now extant. The
General Assembly had charged the chaplains to divide the colonists into
congregations, to appoint ruling elders, to constitute a presbytery,
and to labour for the propagation of divine truth among the Pagan
inhabitants of Darien. The second expedition sailed as the first had
sailed, amidst the acclamations and blessings of all Scotland. During
the earlier part of September the whole nation was dreaming a delightful
dream of prosperity and glory; and triumphing, somewhat maliciously,
in the vexation of the English. But, before the close of that month, it
began to be rumoured about Lombard Street and Cheapside that letters had
arrived from Jamaica with strange news. The colony from which so much
had been hoped and dreaded was no more. It had disappeared from the face
of the earth. The report spread to Edinburgh, but was received there
with scornful incredulity. It was an impudent lie devised by some
Englishmen who could not bear to see that, in spite of the votes of the
English Parliament, in spite of the proclamations of the governors of
the English colonies, Caledonia was waxing great and opulent. Nay, the
inventor of the fable was named. It was declared to be quite certain
that Secretary Vernon was the man. On the fourth of October was put
forth a vehement contradiction of the story.

On the fifth the whole truth was known. Letters were received from New
York announcing that a few miserable men, the remains of the colony
which was to have been the garden, the warehouse, the mart, of the whole
world, their bones peeping through their skin, and hunger and fever
written in their faces, had arrived in the Hudson.

The grief, the dismay and the rage of those who had a few hours before
fancied themselves masters of all the wealth of both Indies may easily
be imagined. The Directors, in their fury, lost all self command, and,
in their official letters, railed at the betrayers of Scotland, the
white-livered deserters. The truth is that those who used these hard
words were far more deserving of blame than the wretches whom they had
sent to destruction, and whom they now reviled for not staying to be
utterly destroyed. Nothing had happened but what might easily have
been foreseen. The Company had, in childish reliance on the word of an
enthusiastic projector, and in defiance of facts known to every educated
man in Europe, taken it for granted that emigrants born and bred within
ten degrees of the Arctic Circle would enjoy excellent health within
ten degrees of the Equator. Nay, statesmen and scholars had been deluded
into the belief that a country which, as they might have read in books
so common as those of Hakluyt and Purchas, was noted even among tropical
countries for its insalubrity, and had been abandoned by the Spaniards
solely on account of its insalubrity, was a Montpelier. Nor had any of
Paterson's dupes considered how colonists from Fife or Lothian, who had
never in their lives known what it was to feel the heat of a distressing
midsummer day, could endure the labour of breaking clods and carrying
burdens under the fierce blaze of a vertical sun. It ought to have been
remembered that such colonists would have to do for themselves what
English, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonists employed Negroes or
Indians to do for them. It was seldom indeed that a white freeman in
Barbadoes or Martinique, in Guiana or at Panama, was employed in severe
bodily labour. But the Scotch who settled at Darien must at first be
without slaves, and must therefore dig the trench round their town,
build their houses, cultivate their fields, hew wood, and draw water,
with their own hands. Such toil in such an atmosphere was too much for
them. The provisions which they had brought out had been of no good
quality, and had not been improved by lapse of time or by change of
climate. The yams and plantains did not suit stomachs accustomed to good
oatmeal. The flesh of wild animals and the green fat of the turtle, a
luxury then unknown in Europe, went but a small way; and supplies were
not to be expected from any foreign settlement. During the cool months,
however, which immediately followed the occupation of the isthmus there
were few deaths. But, before the equinox, disease began to make fearful
havoc in the little community. The mortality gradually rose to ten or
twelve a day. Both the clergymen who had accompanied the expedition
died. Paterson buried his wife in that soil which, as he had assured
his too credulous countrymen, exhaled health and vigour. He was himself
stretched on his pallet by an intermittent fever. Still he would not
admit that the climate of his promised land was bad. There could not be
a purer air. This was merely the seasoning which people who passed from
one country to another must expect. In November all would be well again.
But the rate at which the emigrants died was such that none of them
seemed likely to live till November. Those who were not laid on their
beds were yellow, lean, feeble, hardly able to move the sick and to
bury the dead, and quite unable to repel the expected attack of the
Spaniards. The cry of the whole community was that death was all around
them, and that they must, while they still had strength to weigh an
anchor or spread a sail, fly to some less fatal region. The men and
provisions were equally distributed among three ships, the Caledonia,
the Unicorn, and the Saint Andrew. Paterson, though still too ill to sit
in the Council, begged hard that he might be left behind with twenty or
thirty companions to keep up a show of possession, and to await the
next arrivals from Scotland. So small a number of people, he said,
might easily subsist by catching fish and turtles. But his offer was
disregarded; he was carried, utterly helpless, on board of the Saint
Andrew; and the vessel stood out to sea.

The voyage was horrible. Scarcely any Guinea slave ship has ever had
such a middle passage. Of two hundred and fifty persons who were on
board of the Saint Andrew, one hundred and fifty fed the sharks of the
Atlantic before Sandy Hook was in sight. The Unicorn lost almost all
its officers, and about a hundred and forty men. The Caledonia, the
healthiest ship of the three, threw overboard a hundred corpses. The
squalid survivors, as if they were not sufficiently miserable, raged
fiercely against one another. Charges of incapacity, cruelty, brutal
insolence, were hurled backward and forward. The rigid Presbyterians
attributed the calamities of the colony to the wickedness of Jacobites,
Prelatists, Sabbath-breakers, Atheists, who hated in others that image
of God which was wanting in themselves. The accused malignants, on the
other hand, complained bitterly of the impertinence of meddling fanatics
and hypocrites. Paterson was cruelly reviled, and was unable to
defend himself. He had been completely prostrated by bodily and
mental suffering. He looked like a skeleton. His heart was broken. His
inventive faculties and his plausible eloquence were no more; and he
seemed to have sunk into second childhood.

Meanwhile the second expedition had been on the seas. It reached Darien
about four months after the first settlers had fled. The new comers had
fully expected to find a flourishing young town, secure fortifications,
cultivated fields, and a cordial welcome. They found a wilderness. The
castle of New Edinburgh was in ruins. The huts had been burned. The site
marked out for the proud capital which was to have been the Tyre, the
Venice, the Amsterdam of the eighteenth century was overgrown with
jungle, and inhabited only by the sloth and the baboon. The hearts of
the adventurers sank within them. For their fleet had been fitted out,
not to plant a colony, but to recruit a colony already planted and
supposed to be prospering. They were therefore worse provided with
every necessary of life than their predecessors had been. Some feeble
attempts, however, were made to restore what had perished. A new fort
was constructed on the old ground; and within the ramparts was built a
hamlet, consisting of eighty or ninety cabins, generally of twelve feet
by ten. But the work went on languidly. The alacrity which is the effect
of hope, the strength which is the effect of union, were alike wanting
to the little community. From the councillors down to the humblest
settlers all was despondency and discontent. The stock of provisions was
scanty. The stewards embezzled great part of it. The rations were small;
and soon there was a cry that they were unfairly distributed. Factions
were formed. Plots were laid. One ringleader of the malecontents was
hanged. The Scotch were generally, as they still are, a religious
people; and it might therefore have been expected that the influence of
the divines to whom the spiritual charge of the colony had been confided
would have been employed with advantage for the preserving of order and
the calming of evil passions. Unfortunately those divines seem to have
been at war with almost all the rest of the society. They described
their companions as the most profligate of mankind, and declared that it
was impossible to constitute a presbytery according to the directions
of the General Assembly; for that persons fit to be ruling elders of
a Christian Church were not to be found among the twelve or thirteen
hundred emigrants. Where the blame lay it is now impossible to decide.
All that can with confidence be said is that either the clergymen must
have been most unreasonably and most uncharitably austere, or the laymen
must have been most unfavourable specimens of the nation and class to
which they belonged.

It may be added that the provision by the General Assembly for the
spiritual wants of the colony was as defective as the provision made for
temporal wants by the directors of the Company. Nearly one third of the
emigrants who sailed with the second expedition were Highlanders, who
did not understand a word of English; and not one of the four chaplains
could speak a word of Gaelic. It was only through interpreters that a
pastor could communicate with a large portion of the Christian flock
of which he had charge. Even by the help of interpreters he could not
impart religious instruction to those heathen tribes which the Church
of Scotland had solemnly recommended to his care. In fact, the colonists
left behind them no mark that baptized men had set foot on Darien,
except a few Anglo-Saxon curses, which, having been uttered more
frequently and with greater energy than any other words in our language,
had caught the ear and been retained in the memory of the native
population of the isthmus.

The months which immediately followed the arrival of the new comers were
the coolest and most salubrious of the year. But, even in those months,
the pestilential influence of a tropical sun, shining on swamps rank
with impenetrable thickets of black mangroves, began to be felt. The
mortality was great; and it was but too clear that, before the summer
was far advanced, the second colony would, like the first, have to
choose between death and flight. But the agony of the inevitable
dissolution was shortened by violence. A fleet of eleven vessels under
the flag of Castile anchored off New Edinburgh. At the same time an
irregular army of Spaniards, Creoles, negroes, mulattoes and Indians
marched across the isthmus from Panama; and the fort was blockaded at
once by sea and land.

A drummer soon came with a message from the besiegers, but a message
which was utterly unintelligible to the besieged. Even after all that we
have seen of the perverse imbecility of the directors of the Company, it
must be thought strange that they should have sent a colony to a remote
part of the world, where it was certain that there must be constant
intercourse, peaceable or hostile, with Spaniards, and yet should not
have taken care that there should be in the whole colony a single person
who knew a little Spanish.

With some difficulty a negotiation was carried on in such French and
such Latin as the two parties could furnish. Before the end of March
a treaty was signed by which the Scotch bound themselves to evacuate
Darien in fourteen days; and on the eleventh of April they departed, a
much less numerous body than when they arrived. In little more than four
months, although the healthiest months of the year, three hundred men
out of thirteen hundred had been swept away by disease. Of the survivors
very few lived to see their native country again. Two of the ships
perished at sea. Many of the adventurers, who had left their homes
flushed with hopes of speedy opulence, were glad to hire themselves out
to the planters of Jamaica, and laid their bones in that land of exile.
Shields died there, worn out and heart broken. Borland was the only
minister who came back. In his curious and interesting narrative, he
expresses his feelings, after the fashion of the school in which he
had been bred, by grotesque allusions to the Old Testament, and by a
profusion of Hebrew words. On his first arrival, he tells us, he found
New Edinburgh a Ziklag. He had subsequently been compelled to dwell in
the tents of Kedar. Once, indeed, during his sojourn, he had fallen
in with a Beer-lahai-roi, and had set up his Ebenezer; but in general
Darien was to him a Magor Missabib, a Kibroth-hattaavah. The sad story
is introduced with the words in which a great man of old, delivered
over to the malice of the Evil Power, was informed of the death of his
children and of the ruin of his fortunes: "I alone am escaped to tell
thee. "




CHAPTER XXV.

Trial of Spencer Cowper--Duels--Discontent of the Nation--Captain
Kidd--Meeting of Parliament--Attacks on Burnet--Renewed Attack
on Somers--Question of the Irish Forfeitures: Dispute between the
Houses--Somers again attacked--Prorogation of Parliament--Death of
James the Second--The Pretender recognised as King--Return of the
King--General Election--Death of William

THE passions which had agitated the Parliament during the late session
continued to ferment in the minds of men during the recess, and, having
no longer a vent in the senate, broke forth in every part of the empire,
destroyed the peace of towns, brought into peril the honour and the
lives of innocent men, and impelled magistrates to leave the bench
of justice and attack one another sword in hand. Private calamities,
private brawls, which had nothing to do with the disputes between court
and country, were turned by the political animosities of that unhappy
summer into grave political events.

One mournful tale, which called forth the strongest feelings of the
contending factions, is still remembered as a curious part of the
history of our jurisprudence, and especially of the history of our
medical jurisprudence. No Whig member of the lower House, with the
single exception of Montague, filled a larger space in the public eye
than William Cowper. In the art of conciliating an audience, Cowper was
preeminent. His graceful and engaging eloquence cast a spell on juries;
and the Commons, even in those stormy moments when no other defender of
the administration could obtain a hearing, would always listen to him.
He represented Hertford, a borough in which his family had considerable
influence; but there was a strong Tory minority among the electors, and
he had not won his seat without a hard fight, which had left behind it
many bitter recollections. His younger brother Spencer, a man of parts
and learning, was fast rising into practice as a barrister on the Home
Circuit.

At Hertford resided an opulent Quaker family named Stout. A pretty young
woman of this family had lately sunk into a melancholy of a kind not
very unusual in girls of strong sensibility and lively imagination who
are subject to the restraints of austere religious societies. Her dress,
her looks, her gestures, indicated the disturbance of her mind. She
sometimes hinted her dislike of the sect to which she belonged. She
complained that a canting waterman who was one of the brotherhood had
held forth against her at a meeting. She threatened to go beyond sea,
to throw herself out of window, to drown herself. To two or three of
her associates she owned that she was in love; and on one occasion she
plainly said that the man whom she loved was one whom she never could
marry. In fact, the object of her fondness was Spencer Cowper, who was
already married. She at length wrote to him in language which she never
would have used if her intellect had not been disordered. He, like an
honest man, took no advantage of her unhappy state of mind, and did his
best to avoid her. His prudence mortified her to such a degree that
on one occasion she went into fits. It was necessary, however, that he
should see her, when he came to Hertford at the spring assizes of
1699. For he had been entrusted with some money which was due to her
on mortgage. He called on her for this purpose late one evening, and
delivered a bag of gold to her. She pressed him to be the guest of her
family; but he excused himself and retired. The next morning she was
found dead among the stakes of a mill dam on the stream called
the Priory River. That she had destroyed herself there could be no
reasonable doubt. The coroner's inquest found that she had drowned
herself while in a state of mental derangement. But her family was
unwilling to admit that she had shortened her own life, and looked about
for somebody who might be accused of murdering her. The last person
who could be proved to have been in her company was Spencer Cowper. It
chanced that two attorneys and a scrivener, who had come down from town
to the Hertford assizes, had been overheard, on that unhappy night,
talking over their wine about the charms and flirtations of the handsome
Quaker girl, in the light way in which such subjects are sometimes
discussed even at the circuit tables and mess tables of our more refined
generation. Some wild words, susceptible of a double meaning, were used
about the way in which she had jilted one lover, and the way in which
another lover would punish her for her coquetry. On no better grounds
than these her relations imagined that Spencer Cowper had, with the
assistance of these three retainers of the law, strangled her, and
thrown her corpse into the water. There was absolutely no evidence of
the crime. There was no evidence that any one of the accused had any
motive to commit such a crime; there was no evidence that Spencer Cowper
had any connection with the persons who were said to be his accomplices.
One of those persons, indeed, he had never seen. But no story is
too absurd to be imposed on minds blinded by religious and political
fanaticism. The Quakers and the Tories joined to raise a formidable
clamour. The Quakers had, in those days, no scruples about capital
punishments. They would, indeed, as Spencer Cowper said bitterly, but
too truly, rather send four innocent men to the gallows than let it be
believed that one who had their light within her had committed suicide.
The Tories exulted in the prospect of winning two seats from the Whigs.
The whole kingdom was divided between Stouts and Cowpers. At the summer
assizes Hertford was crowded with anxious faces from London and from
parts of England more distant than London. The prosecution was conducted
with a malignity and unfairness which to us seem almost incredible; and,
unfortunately, the dullest and most ignorant judge of the twelve was
on the bench.
Cowper defended himself and those who were said to be his
accomplices with admirable ability and self possession. His brother,
much more distressed than himself, sate near him through the long agony
of that day. The case against the prisoners rested chiefly on the vulgar
error that a human body, found, as this poor girl's body had been found,
floating in water, must have been thrown into the water while still
alive. To prove this doctrine the counsel for the Crown called medical
practitioners, of whom nothing is now known except that some of them
had been active against the Whigs at Hertford elections. To confirm
the evidence of these gentlemen two or three sailors were put into the
witness box. On the other side appeared an array of men of science whose
names are still remembered. Among them was William Cowper, not a kinsman
of the defendant, but the most celebrated anatomist that England had
then produced. He was, indeed, the founder of a dynasty illustrious in
the history of science; for he was the teacher of William Cheselden,
and William Cheselden was the teacher of John Hunter. On the same side
appeared Samuel Garth, who, among the physicians of the capital, had no
rival except Radcliffe, and Hans Sloane, the founder of the magnificent
museum which is one of the glories of our country. The attempt of the
prosecutors to make the superstitions of the forecastle evidence for
the purpose of taking away the lives of men was treated by these
philosophers with just disdain. The stupid judge asked Garth what he
could say in answer to the testimony of the seamen. "My Lord," replied
Garth, "I say that they are mistaken. I will find seamen in abundance to
swear that they have known whistling raise the wind. "

The jury found the prisoners Not guilty; and the report carried back to
London by persons who had been present at the trial was that everybody
applauded the verdict, and that even the Stouts seemed to be convinced
of their error. It is certain, however, that the malevolence of the
defeated party soon revived in all its energy. The lives of the four
men who had just been absolved were again attacked by means of the most
absurd and odious proceeding known to our old law, the appeal of
murder. This attack too failed. Every artifice of chicane was at
length exhausted; and nothing was left to the disappointed sect and the
disappointed faction except to calumniate those whom it had been found
impossible to murder. In a succession of libels Spencer Cowper was held
up to the execration of the public. But the public did him justice. He
rose to high eminence in his profession; he at length took his seat,
with general applause, on the judicial bench, and there distinguished
himself by the humanity which he never failed to show to unhappy men
who stood, as he had once stood, at the bar. Many who seldom trouble
themselves about pedigrees may be interested by learning that he was
the grandfather of that excellent man and excellent poet William Cowper,
whose writings have long been peculiarly loved and prized by the members
of the religious community which, under a strong delusion, sought to
slay his innocent progenitor. [19]

Though Spencer Cowper had escaped with life and honour, the Tories had
carried their point. They had secured against the next election the
support of the Quakers of Hertford; and the consequence was that
the borough was lost to the family and to the party which had lately
predominated there.

In the very week in which the great trial took place at Hertford, a
feud arising out of the late election for Buckinghamshire very nearly
produced fatal effects. Wharton, the chief of the Buckinghamshire Whigs,
had with difficulty succeeded in bringing in his brother as one of
the knights of the shire. Graham Viscount Cheyney, of the kingdom of
Scotland, had been returned at the head of the poll by the Tories. The
two noblemen met at the quarter sessions. In England Cheyney was before
the Union merely an Esquire. Wharton was undoubtedly entitled to take
place of him, and had repeatedly taken place of him without any dispute.
But angry passions now ran so high that a decent pretext for indulging
them was hardly thought necessary. Cheyney fastened a quarrel on
Wharton. They drew. Wharton, whose cool good humoured courage and skill
in fence were the envy of all the swordsmen of that age, closed with his
quarrelsome neighbour, disarmed him, and gave him his life.

A more tragical duel had just taken place at Westminster. Conway
Seymour, the eldest son of Sir Edward Seymour, had lately come of age.
He was in possession of an independent fortune of seven thousand pounds
a year, which he lavished in costly fopperies. The town had nicknamed
him Beau Seymour. He was displaying his curls and his embroidery in
Saint James's Park on a midsummer evening, after indulging too freely in
wine, when a young officer of the Blues named Kirke, who was as tipsy as
himself, passed near him. "There goes Beau Seymour," said Kirke. Seymour
flew into a rage. Angry words were exchanged between the foolish boys.
They immediately went beyond the precincts of the Court, drew, and
exchanged some pushes. Seymour was wounded in the neck. The wound
was not very serious; but, when his cure was only half completed, he
revelled in fruit, ice and Burgundy till he threw himself into a violent
fever. Though a coxcomb and a voluptuary, he seems to have had some
fine qualities. On the last day of his life he saw Kirke. Kirke implored
forgiveness; and the dying man declared that he forgave as he hoped to
be forgiven. There can be no doubt that a person who kills another in a
duel is, according to law, guilty of murder. But the law had never been
strictly enforced against gentlemen in such cases; and in this case
there was no peculiar atrocity, no deep seated malice, no suspicion of
foul play. Sir Edward, however, vehemently declared that he would
have life for life. Much indulgence is due to the resentment of an
affectionate father maddened by the loss of a son. But there is but
too much reason to believe that the implacability of Seymour was the
implacability, not of an affectionate father, but of a factious and
malignant agitator. He tried to make what is, in the jargon of our time,
called political capital out of the desolation of his house and the
blood of his first born. A brawl between two dissolute youths, a brawl
distinguished by nothing but its unhappy result from the hundred brawls
which took place every month in theatres and taverns, he magnified into
an attack on the liberties of the nation, an attempt to introduce a
military tyranny. The question was whether a soldier was to be permitted
to insult English gentlemen, and, if they murmured, to cut their
throats? It was moved in the Court of King's Bench that Kirke should
either be brought to immediate trial or admitted to bail. Shower, as
counsel for Seymour, opposed the motion. But Seymour was not content to
leave the case in Shower's hands. In defiance of all decency, he went to
Westminster Hall, demanded a hearing, and pronounced a harangue against
standing armies. "Here," he said, "is a man who lives on money taken out
of our pockets. The plea set up for taxing us in order to support him
is that his sword protects us, and enables us to live in peace and
security. And is he to be suffered to use that sword to destroy us? "
Kirke was tried and found guilty of manslaughter. In his case, as in the
case of Spencer Cowper, an attempt was made to obtain a writ of appeal.
The attempt failed; and Seymour was disappointed of his revenge; but he
was not left without consolation. If he had lost a son, he had found,
what he seems to have prized quite as much, a fertile theme for
invective.

The King, on his return from the Continent, found his subjects in
no bland humour. All Scotland, exasperated by the fate of the first
expedition to Darien, and anxiously waiting for news of the second,
called loudly for a Parliament. Several of the Scottish peers carried to
Kensington an address which was subscribed by thirty-six of their body,
and which earnestly pressed William to convoke the Estates at Edinburgh,
and to redress the wrongs which had been done to the colony of New
Caledonia. A petition to the same effect was widely circulated among
the commonalty of his Northern kingdom, and received, if report could
be trusted, not less than thirty thousand signatures. Discontent was far
from being as violent in England as in Scotland. Yet in England there
was discontent enough to make even a resolute prince uneasy. The time
drew near at which the Houses must reassemble; and how were the Commons
to be managed? Montague, enraged, mortified, and intimidated by the
baiting of the last session, was fully determined not again to appear
in the character of chief minister of finance. The secure and luxurious
retreat which he had, some months ago, prepared for himself was awaiting
him. He took the Auditorship, and resigned his other places. Smith
became Chancellor of the Exchequer. A new commission of Treasury issued;
and the first name was that of Tankerville. He had entered on his
career, more than twenty years before, with the fairest hopes, young,
noble, nobly allied, of distinguished abilities, of graceful manners.
There was no more brilliant man of fashion in the theatre and in the
ring. There was no more popular tribune in Guildhall. Such was the
commencement of a life so miserable that all the indignation excited by
great faults is overpowered by pity. A guilty passion, amounting to a
madness, left on the moral character of the unhappy man a stain at which
even libertines looked grave. He tried to make the errors of his private
life forgotten by splendid and perilous services to a public cause; and,
having endured in that cause penury and exile, the gloom of a dungeon,
the prospect of a scaffold, the ruin of a noble estate, he was so
unfortunate as to be regarded by the party for which he had sacrificed
every thing as a coward, if not a traitor. Yet, even against such
accumulated disasters and disgraces, his vigorous and aspiring mind
bore up. His parts and eloquence gained for him the ear of the House
of Lords; and at length, though not till his constitution was so broken
that he was fitter for flannel and cushions than for a laborious office
at Whitehall, he was put at the head of one of the most important
departments of the administration. It might have been expected that this
appointment would call forth clamours from widely different quarters;
that the Tories would be offended by the elevation of a rebel; that
the Whigs would set up a cry against the captain to whose treachery
or faintheartedness they had been in the habit of imputing the rout of
Sedgemoor; and that the whole of that great body of Englishmen which
cannot be said to be steadily Whig or Tory, but which is zealous for
decency and the domestic virtues, would see with indignation a
signal mark of royal favour bestowed on one who had been convicted of
debauching a noble damsel, the sister of his own wife. But so capricious
is public feeling that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find,
in any of the letters, essays, dialogues, and poems which bear the date
of 1699 or of 1700, a single allusion to the vices or misfortunes of the
new First Lord of the Treasury. It is probable that his infirm health
and his isolated position were his protection. The chiefs of the
opposition did not fear him enough to hate him. The Whig junto was still
their terror and their abhorrence. They continued to assail Montague and
Orford, though with somewhat less ferocity than while Montague had the
direction of the finances, and Orford of the marine. But the utmost
spite of all the leading malecontents were concentrated on one object,
the great magistrate who still held the highest civil post in the realm,
and who was evidently determined to hold it in defiance of them. It was
not so easy to get rid of him as it had been to drive his colleagues
from office. His abilities the most intolerant Tories were forced
grudgingly to acknowledge. His integrity might be questioned in nameless
libels and in coffeehouse tattle, but was certain to come forth bright
and pure from the most severe Parliamentary investigation. Nor was he
guilty of those faults of temper and of manner to which, more than
to any grave delinquency, the unpopularity of his associates is to be
ascribed. He had as little of the insolence and perverseness of Orford
as of the petulance and vaingloriousness of Montague. One of the most
severe trials to which the head and heart of man can be put is great and
rapid elevation. To that trial both Montague and Somers were put. It was
too much for Montague. But Somers was found equal to it. He was the son
of a country attorney. At thirty-seven he had been sitting in a stuff
gown on a back bench in the Court of King's Bench. At forty-two he
was the first lay dignitary of the realm, and took precedence of the
Archbishop of York, and of the Duke of Norfolk. He had risen from a
lower point than Montague, had risen as fast as Montague, had risen as
high as Montague, and yet had not excited envy such as dogged Montague
through a long career. Garreteers, who were never weary of calling the
cousin of the Earls of Manchester and Sandwich an upstart, could not,
without an unwonted sense of shame, apply those words to the Chancellor,
who, without one drop of patrician blood in his veins, had taken his
place at the head of the patrician order with the quiet dignity of a man
ennobled by nature. His serenity, his modesty, his selfcommand, proof
even against the most sudden surprises of passion, his selfrespect,
which forced the proudest grandees of the kingdom to respect him, his
urbanity, which won the hearts of the youngest lawyers of the Chancery
Bar, gained for him many private friends and admirers among the most
respectable members of the opposition. But such men as Howe and Seymour
hated him implacably; they hated his commanding genius much; they hated
the mild majesty of his virtue still more. They sought occasion against
him everywhere; and they at length flattered themselves that they had
found it.

Some years before, while the war was still raging, there had been loud
complaints in the city that even privateers of St. Malo's and Dunkirk
caused less molestation to trade than another class of marauders. The
English navy was fully employed in the Channel, in the Atlantic, and in
the Mediterranean. The Indian Ocean, meanwhile, swarmed with pirates of
whose rapacity and cruelty frightful stories were told. Many of these
men, it was said, came from our North American colonies, and carried
back to those colonies the spoils gained by crime. Adventurers who
durst not show themselves in the Thames found a ready market for their
illgotten spices and stuffs at New York. Even the Puritans of New
England, who in sanctimonious austerity surpassed even their brethren of
Scotland, were accused of conniving at the wickedness which enabled them
to enjoy abundantly and cheaply the produce of Indian looms and Chinese
tea plantations.

In 1695 Richard Coote, Earl of Bellamont, an Irish peer who sate in
the English House of Commons, was appointed Governor of New York
and Massachusets. He was a man of eminently fair character, upright,
courageous and independent. Though a decided Whig, he had distinguished
himself by bringing before the Parliament at Westminster some tyrannical
acts done by Whigs at Dublin, and particularly the execution, if it is
not rather to be called the murder, of Gafney. Before Bellamont sailed
for America, William spoke strongly to him about the freebooting which
was the disgrace of the colonies. "I send you, my Lord, to New York," he
said, "because an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses
down, and because I believe you to be such a man. " Bellamont exerted
himself to justify the high opinion which the King had formed of him. It
was soon known at New York that the Governor who had just arrived from
England was bent on the suppression of piracy; and some colonists in
whom he placed great confidence suggested to him what they may perhaps
have thought the best mode of attaining that object. There was then in
the settlement a veteran mariner named William Kidd. He had passed most
of his life on the waves, had distinguished himself by his seamanship,
had had opportunities of showing his valour in action with the French,
and had retired on a competence. No man knew the Eastern seas better. He
was perfectly acquainted with all the haunts of the pirates who prowled
between the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Malacca; and he would
undertake, if he were entrusted with a single ship of thirty or forty
guns, to clear the Indian Ocean of the whole race. The brigantines of
the rovers were numerous, no doubt; but none of them was large; one
man of war, which in the royal navy would hardly rank as a fourth rate,
would easily deal with them all in succession; and the lawful spoils of
the enemies of mankind would much more than defray the charges of the
expedition. Bellamont was charmed with this plan, and recommended it to
the King. The King referred it to the Admiralty. The Admiralty raised
difficulties, such as are perpetually raised by public boards when any
deviation, whether for the better or for the worse, from the established
course of proceeding is proposed. It then occurred to Bellamont that his
favourite scheme might be carried into effect without any cost to the
state. A few public spirited men might easily fit out a privateer which
would soon make the Arabian Gulph and the Bay of Bengal secure highways
for trade. He wrote to his friends in England imploring, remonstrating,
complaining of their lamentable want of public spirit. Six thousand
pounds would be enough. That sum would be repaid, and repaid with large
interest, from the sale of prizes; and an inestimable benefit would
be conferred on the kingdom and on the world. His urgency succeeded.
Shrewsbury and Romney contributed. Orford, though, as first Lord of the
Admiralty, he had been unwilling to send Kidd to the Indian ocean with a
king's ship, consented to subscribe a thousand pounds. Somers subscribed
another thousand. A ship called the Adventure Galley was equipped in the
port of London; and Kidd took the command. He carried with him, besides
the ordinary letters of marque, a commission under the Great Seal
empowering him to seize pirates, and to take them to some place where
they might be dealt with according to law. Whatever right the King
might have to the goods found in the possession of these malefactors he
granted, by letters patent, to the persons who had been at the expense
of fitting out the expedition, reserving to himself only one tenth part
of the gains of the adventure, which was to be paid into the treasury.
With the claim of merchants to have back the property of which they had
been robbed His Majesty of course did not interfere. He granted away,
and could grant away, no rights but his own.

The press for sailors to man the royal navy was at that time so hot that
Kidd could not obtain his full complement of hands in the Thames. He
crossed the Atlantic, visited New York, and there found volunteers in
abundance. At length, in February 1697, he sailed from the Hudson with a
crew of more than a hundred and fifty men, and in July reached the coast
of Madagascar.

It is possible that Kidd may at first have meant to act in accordance
with his instructions. But, on the subject of piracy, he held the
notions which were then common in the North American colonies; and most
of his crew were of the same mind. He found himself in a sea which was
constantly traversed by rich and defenceless merchant ships; and he had
to determine whether he would plunder those ships or protect them. The
gain which might be made by plundering them was immense, and might be
snatched without the dangers of a battle or the delays of a trial. The
rewards of protecting the lawful trade were likely to be comparatively
small. Such as they were, they would be got only by first fighting with
desperate ruffians who would rather be killed than taken, and by
then instituting a proceeding and obtaining a judgment in a Court of
Admiralty. The risk of being called to a severe reckoning might not
unnaturally seem small to one who had seen many old buccaneers living
in comfort and credit at New York and Boston. Kidd soon threw off the
character of a privateer, and became a pirate. He established friendly
communications, and exchanged arms and ammunition, with the most
notorious of those rovers whom his commission authorised him to destroy,
and made war on those peaceful traders whom he was sent to defend. He
began by robbing Mussulmans, and speedily proceeded from Mussulmans to
Armenians, and from Armenians to Portuguese. The Adventure Galley took
such quantities of cotton and silk, sugar and coffee, cinnamon and
pepper, that the very foremast men received from a hundred to two
hundred pounds each, and that the captain's share of the spoil would
have enabled him to live at home as an opulent gentleman. With the
rapacity Kidd had the cruelty of his odious calling. He burned houses;
he massacred peasantry. His prisoners were tied up and beaten with naked
cutlasses in order to extort information about their concealed hoards.
One of his crew, whom he had called a dog, was provoked into exclaiming,
in an agony of remorse, "Yes, I am a dog; but it is you that have made
me so. " Kidd, in a fury, struck the man dead.

News then travelled very slowly from the eastern seas to England. But,
in August 1698, it was known in London that the Adventure Galley from
which so much had been hoped was the terror of the merchants of Surat,
and of the villagers of the coast of Malabar. It was thought probable
that Kidd would carry his booty to some colony. Orders were therefore
sent from Whitehall to the governors of the transmarine possessions
of the Crown, directing them to be on the watch for him. He meanwhile,
having burned his ship and dismissed most of his men, who easily found
berths in the sloops of other pirates, returned to New York with the
means, as he flattered himself, of making his peace and of living
in splendour. He had fabricated a long romance to which Bellamont,
naturally unwilling to believe that he had been duped and had been the
means of duping others, was at first disposed to listen with favour. But
the truth soon came out. The governor did his duty firmly; and Kidd was
placed in close confinement till orders arrived from the Admiralty that
he should be sent to England.

To an intelligent and candid judge of human actions it will not appear
that any of the persons at whose expense the Adventure Galley was fitted
out deserved serious blame. The worst that could be imputed even to
Bellamont, who had drawn in all the rest, was that he had been led into
a fault by his ardent zeal for the public service, and by the generosity
of a nature as little prone to suspect as to devise villanies. His
friends in England might surely be pardoned for giving credit to his
recommendation. It is highly probable that the motive which induced some
of them to aid his design was genuine public spirit. But, if we suppose
them to have had a view to gain, it was to legitimate gain. Their
conduct was the very opposite of corrupt. Not only had they taken no
money. They had disbursed money largely, and had disbursed it with the
certainty that they should never be reimbursed unless the outlay proved
beneficial to the public. That they meant well they proved by staking
thousands on the success of their plan; and, if they erred in judgment,
the loss of those thousands was surely a sufficient punishment for such
an error. On this subject there would probably have been no difference
of opinion had not Somers been one of the contributors. About the other
patrons of Kidd the chiefs of the opposition cared little. Bellamont was
far removed from the political scene. Romney could not, and Shrewsbury
would not, play a first part. Orford had resigned his employments. But
Somers still held the Great Seal, still presided in the House of Lords,
still had constant access to the closet. The retreat of his friends had
left him the sole and undisputed head of that party which had, in
the late Parliament, been a majority, and which was, in the present
Parliament, outnumbered indeed, disorganised and disheartened, but still
numerous and respectable. His placid courage rose higher and higher
to meet the dangers which threatened him. He provided for himself
no refuge. He made no move towards flight; and, without uttering one
boastful word, gave his enemies to understand, by the mild firmness of
his demeanour, that he dared them to do their worst.

In their eagerness to displace and destroy him they overreached
themselves. Had they been content to accuse him of lending his
countenance, with a rashness unbecoming his high place, to an
illconcerted scheme, that large part of mankind which judges of a plan
simply by the event would probably have thought the accusation well
founded. But the malice which they bore to him was not to be so
satisfied. They affected to believe that he had from the first been
aware of Kidd's character and designs. The Great Seal had been employed
to sanction a piratical expedition. The head of the law had laid down
a thousand pounds in the hope of receiving tens of thousands when his
accomplices should return, laden with the spoils of ruined merchants. It
was fortunate for the Chancellor that the calumnies of which he was the
object were too atrocious to be mischievous.

And now the time had come at which the hoarded illhumour of six months
was at liberty to explode.