No More Learning

Apprehensions similar
to those which had induced the Caesars to extort from Africa and Egypt
the means of pampering the rabble of Rome induced Lewis to aggravate the
misery of twenty provinces for the purpose of keeping one huge city in
good humour. He ordered bread to be distributed in all the parishes of
the capital at less than half the market price. The English Jacobites
were stupid enough to extol the wisdom and humanity of this arrangement.
The harvest, they said, had been good in England and bad in France; and
yet the loaf was cheaper at Paris than in London; and the explanation
was simple. The French had a sovereign whose heart was French, and
who watched over his people with the solicitude of a father, while the
English were cursed with a Dutch tyrant, who sent their corn to Holland.
The truth was that a week of such fatherly government as that of Lewis
would have raised all England in arms from Northumberland to Cornwall.
That there might be abundance at Paris, the people of Normandy and Anjou
were stuffing themselves with nettles. That there might be tranquillity
at Paris, the peasantry were fighting with the bargemen and the troops
all along the Loire and the Seine. Multitudes fled from those rural
districts where bread cost five sous a pound to the happy place where
bread was to be had for two sous a pound. It was necessary to drive the
famished crowds back by force from the barriers, and to denounce the
most terrible punishments against all who should not go home and starve
quietly. [468]

Lewis was sensible that the strength of France had been overstrained by
the exertions of the last campaign. Even if her harvest and her vintage
had been abundant, she would not have been able to do in 1694 what she
had done in 1693; and it was utterly impossible that, in a season of
extreme distress, she should again send into the field armies superior
in number on every point to the armies of the coalition. New conquests
were not to be expected. It would be much if the harassed and exhausted
land, beset on all sides by enemies, should be able to sustain a
defensive war without any disaster. So able a politician as the French
King could not but feel that it would be for his advantage to treat with
the allies while they were still awed by the remembrance of the gigantic
efforts which his kingdom had just made, and before the collapse which
had followed those efforts should become visible.

He had long been communicating through various channels with some
members of the confederacy, and trying to induce them to separate
themselves from the rest. But he had as yet made no overture tending
to a general pacification. For he knew that there could be no general
pacification unless he was prepared to abandon the cause of James, and
to acknowledge the Prince and Princess of Orange as King and Queen of
England. This was in truth the point on which every thing turned. What
should be done with those great fortresses which Lewis had unjustly
seized and annexed to his empire in time of peace, Luxemburg which
overawed the Moselle, and Strasburg which domineered over the Upper
Rhine; what should be done with the places which he had recently won in
open war, Philipsburg, Mons and Namur, Huy and Charleroy; what barrier
should be given to the States General; on what terms Lorraine should be
restored to its hereditary Dukes; these were assuredly not unimportant
questions. But the all important question was whether England was to
be, as she had been under James, a dependency of France, or, as she
was under William and Mary, a power of the first rank. If Lewis really
wished for peace, he must bring himself to recognise the Sovereigns
whom he had so often designated as usurpers. Could he bring himself to
recognise them? His superstition, his pride, his regard for the unhappy
exiles who were pining at Saint Germains, his personal dislike of
the indefatigable and unconquerable adversary who had been constantly
crossing his path during twenty years, were on one side; his interests
and those of his people were on the other. He must have been sensible
that it was not in his power to subjugate the English, that he must at
last leave them to choose their government for themselves, and that what
he must do at last it would be best to do soon. Yet he could not at once
make up his mind to what was so disagreeable to him. He however opened
a negotiation with the States General through the intervention of Sweden
and Denmark, and sent a confidential emissary to confer in secret at
Brussels with Dykvelt, who possessed the entire confidence of William.
There was much discussion about matters of secondary importance; but
the great question remained unsettled. The French agent used, in private
conversation, expressions plainly implying that the government which he
represented was prepared to recognise William and Mary; but no formal
assurance could be obtained from him. Just at the same time the King
of Denmark informed the allies that he was endeavouring to prevail on
France not to insist on the restoration of James as an indispensable
condition of peace, but did not say that his endeavours had as yet
been successful. Meanwhile Avaux, who was now Ambassador at Stockholm,
informed the King of Sweden, that, as the dignity of all crowned heads
had been outraged in the person of James, the Most Christian King felt
assured that not only neutral powers, but even the Emperor, would try to
find some expedient which might remove so grave a cause of quarrel. The
expedient at which Avaux hinted doubtless was that James should waive
his rights, and that the Prince of Wales should be sent to England, bred
a Protestant, adopted by William and Mary, and declared their heir.
To such an arrangement William would probably have had no personal
objection. But we may be assured that he never would have consented to
make it a condition of peace with France. Who should reign in England
was a question to be decided by England alone. [469]

It might well be suspected that a negotiation conducted in this manner
was merely meant to divide the confederates. William understood the
whole importance of the conjuncture. He had not, it may be, the eye of a
great captain for all the turns of a battle. But he had, in the highest
perfection, the eye of a great statesman for all the turns of a war.
That France had at length made overtures to him was a sufficient proof
that she felt herself spent and sinking. That those overtures were made
with extreme reluctance and hesitation proved that she had not yet come
to a temper in which it was possible to have peace with her on fair
terms. He saw that the enemy was beginning to give ground, and that this
was the time to assume the offensive, to push forward, to bring up every
reserve. But whether the opportunity should be seized or lost it did not
belong to him to decide. The King of France might levy troops and exact
taxes without any limit save that which the laws of nature impose on
despotism. But the King of England could do nothing without the support
of the House of Commons; and the House of Commons, though it had
hitherto supported him zealously and liberally, was not a body on
which he could rely. It had indeed got into a state which perplexed
and alarmed all the most sagacious politicians of that age. There
was something appalling in the union of such boundless power and such
boundless caprice. The fate of the whole civilised world depended on
the votes of the representatives of the English people; and there was
no public man who could venture to say with confidence what those
representatives might not be induced to vote within twenty-four hours.
[470] William painfully felt that it was scarcely possible for a prince
dependent on an assembly so violent at one time, so languid at another,
to effect any thing great. Indeed, though no sovereign did so much to
secure and to extend the power of the House of Commons, no sovereign
loved the House of Commons less. Nor is this strange; for he saw that
House at the very worst. He saw it when it had just acquired the power
and had not yet acquired the gravity of a senate. In his letters to
Heinsius he perpetually complains of the endless talking, the factious
squabbling, the inconstancy, the dilatoriness, of the body which
his situation made it necessary for him to treat with deference. His
complaints were by no means unfounded; but he had not discovered either
the cause or the cure of the evil.

The truth was that the change which the Revolution had made in the
situation of the House of Commons had made another change necessary;
and that other change had not yet taken place. There was parliamentary
government; but there was no Ministry; and, without a Ministry, the
working of a parliamentary government, such as ours, must always be
unsteady and unsafe.

It is essential to our liberties that the House of Commons should
exercise a control over all the departments of the executive
administration. And yet it is evident that a crowd of five or six
hundred people, even if they were intellectually much above the average
of the members of the best Parliament, even if every one of them were
a Burleigh, or a Sully, would be unfit for executive functions. It has
been truly said that every large collection of human beings, however
well educated, has a strong tendency to become a mob; and a country of
which the Supreme Executive Council is a mob is surely in a perilous
situation.

Happily a way has been found out in which the House of Commons can
exercise a paramount influence over the executive government, without
assuming functions such as can never be well discharged by a body so
numerous and so variously composed. An institution which did not exist
in the times, of the Plantagenets, of the Tudors or of the Stuarts, an
institution not known to the law, an institution not mentioned in any
statute, an institution of which such writers as De Lolme and Blackstone
take no notice, began to exist a few years after the Revolution, grew
rapidly into importance, became firmly established, and is now almost
as essential a part of our polity as the Parliament itself. This
institution is the Ministry.

The Ministry is, in fact, a committee of leading members of the two
Houses. It is nominated by the Crown; but it consists exclusively of
statesmen whose opinions on the pressing questions of the time agree,
in the main, with the opinions of the majority of the House of
Commons. Among the members of this committee are distributed the great
departments of the administration. Each Minister conducts the ordinary
business of his own office without reference to his colleagues. But the
most important business of every office, and especially such business
as is likely to be the subject of discussion in Parliament, is brought
under the consideration of the whole Ministry. In Parliament the
Ministers are bound to act as one man on all questions relating to
the executive government. If one of them dissents from the rest on a
question too important to admit of compromise, it is his duty to retire.
While the Ministers retain the confidence of the parliamentary majority,
that majority supports them against opposition, and rejects every motion
which reflects on them or is likely to embarrass them. If they forfeit
that confidence, if the parliamentary majority is dissatisfied with
the way in which patronage is distributed, with the way in which the
prerogative of mercy is used, with the conduct of foreign affairs, with
the conduct of a war, the remedy is simple. It is not necessary that the
Commons should take on themselves the business of administration, that
they should request the Crown to make this man a bishop and that man
a judge, to pardon one criminal and to execute another, to negotiate a
treaty on a particular basis or to send an expedition to a particular
place. They have merely to declare that they have ceased to trust the
Ministry, and to ask for a Ministry which they can trust.

It is by means of Ministries thus constituted, and thus changed, that
the English government has long been conducted in general conformity
with the deliberate sense of the House of Commons, and yet has been
wonderfully free from the vices which are characteristic of governments
administered by large, tumultuous and divided assemblies. A few
distinguished persons, agreeing in their general opinions, are the
confidential advisers at once of the Sovereign and of the Estates of the
Realm. In the closet they speak with the authority of men who stand high
in the estimation of the representatives of the people. In Parliament
they speak with the authority of men versed in great affairs and
acquainted with all the secrets of the State. Thus the Cabinet has
something of the popular character of a representative body; and the
representative body has something of the gravity of a cabinet.

Sometimes the state of parties is such that no set of men who can be
brought together possesses the full confidence and steady support of a
majority of the House of Commons. When this is the case, there must be
a weak Ministry; and there will probably be a rapid succession of weak
Ministries. At such times the House of Commons never fails to get into
a state which no person friendly to representative government can
contemplate without uneasiness, into a state which may enable us to form
some faint notion of the state of that House during the earlier years
of the reign of William. The notion is indeed but faint; for the weakest
Ministry has great power as a regulator of parliamentary proceedings;
and in the earlier years of the reign of William there was no Ministry
at all.

No writer has yet attempted to trace the progress of this institution,
an institution indispensable to the harmonious working of our other
institutions. The first Ministry was the work, partly of mere chance,
and partly of wisdom, not however of that highest wisdom which is
conversant with great principles of political philosophy, but of that
lower wisdom which meets daily exigencies by daily expedients. Neither
William nor the most enlightened of his advisers fully understood the
nature and importance of that noiseless revolution,--for it was no
less,--which began about the close of 1693, and was completed about the
close of 1696. But every body could perceive that, at the close of
1693, the chief offices in the government were distributed not unequally
between the two great parties, that the men who held those offices were
perpetually caballing against each other, haranguing against each
other, moving votes of censure on each other, exhibiting articles of
impeachment against each other, and that the temper of the House of
Commons was wild, ungovernable and uncertain. Everybody could perceive
that at the close of 1696, all the principal servants of the Crown were
Whigs, closely bound together by public and private ties, and prompt to
defend one another against every attack, and that the majority of the
House of Commons was arrayed in good order under those leaders, and had
learned to move, like one man, at the word of command. The history
of the period of transition and of the steps by which the change was
effected is in a high degree curious and interesting.

The statesman who had the chief share in forming the first English
Ministry had once been but too well known, but had long hidden himself
from the public gaze, and had but recently emerged from the obscurity
in which it had been expected that he would pass the remains of an
ignominious and disastrous life. During that period of general terror
and confusion which followed the flight of James, Sunderland had
disappeared. It was high time; for of all the agents of the fallen
government he was, with the single exception of Jeffreys, the most
odious to the nation. Few knew that Sunderland's voice had in secret
been given against the spoliation of Magdalene College and the
prosecution of the Bishops; but all knew that he had signed numerous
instruments dispensing with statutes, that he had sate in the High
Commission, that he had turned or pretended to turn Papist, that he had,
a few days after his apostasy, appeared in Westminster Hall as a witness
against the oppressed fathers of the Church. He had indeed atoned for
many crimes by one crime baser than all the rest. As soon as he had
reason to believe that the day of deliverance and retribution was at
hand, he had, by a most dexterous and seasonable treason, earned his
pardon. During the three months which preceded the arrival of the Dutch
armament in Torbay, he had rendered to the cause of liberty and of the
Protestant religion services of which it is difficult to overrate either
the wickedness or the utility. To him chiefly it was owing that, at the
most critical moment in our history, a French army was not menacing the
Batavian frontier and a French fleet hovering about the English coast.
William could not, without staining his own honour, refuse to protect
one whom he had not scrupled to employ. Yet it was no easy task even for
William to save that guilty head from the first outbreak of public fury.
For even those extreme politicians of both sides who agreed in nothing
else agreed in calling for vengeance on the renegade. The Whigs hated
him as the vilest of the slaves by whom the late government had been
served, and the Jacobites as the vilest of the traitors by whom it had
been overthrown. Had he remained in England, he would probably have died
by the hand of the executioner, if indeed the executioner had not
been anticipated by the populace. But in Holland a political refugee,
favoured by the Stadtholder, might hope to live unmolested. To Holland
Sunderland fled, disguised, it is said, as a woman; and his wife
accompanied him. At Rotterdam, a town devoted to the House of Orange, he
thought himself secure. But the magistrates were not in all the secrets
of the Prince, and were assured by some busy Englishmen that His
Highness would be delighted to hear of the arrest of the Popish dog, the
Judas, whose appearance on Tower Hill was impatiently expected by all
London. Sunderland was thrown into prison, and remained there till
an order for his release arrived from Whitehall. He then proceeded to
Amsterdam, and there changed his religion again. His second apostasy
edified his wife as much as his first apostasy had edified his master.
The Countess wrote to assure her pious friends in England that her poor
dear lord's heart had at last been really touched by divine grace, and
that, in spite of all her afflictions, she was comforted by seeing him
so true a convert. We may, however, without any violation of Christian
charity, suspect that he was still the same false, callous, Sunderland
who, a few months before, had made Bonrepaux shudder by denying the
existence of a God, and had, at the same time, won the heart of James
by pretending to believe in transubstantiation. In a short time the
banished man put forth an apology for his conduct. This apology, when
examined, will be found to amount merely to a confession that he had
committed one series of crimes in order to gain James's favour, and
another series in order to avoid being involved in James's ruin. The
writer concluded by announcing his intention to pass all the rest of his
life in penitence and prayer. He soon retired from Amsterdam to Utrecht,
and at Utrecht made himself conspicuous by his regular and devout
attendance on the ministrations of Huguenot preachers. If his letters
and those of his wife were to be trusted, he had done for ever with
ambition. He longed indeed to be permitted to return from exile, not
that he might again enjoy and dispense the favours of the Crown, not
that his antechambers might again be filled by the daily swarm of
suitors, but that he might see again the turf, the trees and the family
pictures of his country seat. His only wish was to be suffered to end
his troubled life at Althorpe; and he would be content to forfeit his
head if ever he went beyond the palings of his park. [471]

While the House of Commons, which had been elected during the vacancy of
the throne, was busily engaged in the work of proscription, he could not
venture to show himself in England. But when that assembly had ceased to
exist, he thought himself safe. He returned a few days after the Act of
Grace had been laid on the table of the Lords. From the benefit of that
Act he was by name excluded; but he well knew that he had now nothing to
fear. He went privately to Kensington, was admitted into the closet,
had an audience which lasted two hours, and then retired to his country
house. [472]

During many months be led a secluded life, and had no residence in
London. Once in the spring of 1692, to the great astonishment of the
public, he showed his face in the circle at Court, and was graciously
received. [473] He seems to have been afraid that he might, on his
reappearance in Parliament, receive some marked affront. He therefore,
very prudently, stole down to Westminster, in the dead time of the year,
on a day to which the Houses stood adjourned by the royal command, and
on which they met merely for the purpose of adjourning again. Sunderland
had just time to present himself, to take the oaths, to sign the
declaration against transubstantiation, and to resume his seat. None of
the few peers who were present had an opportunity of making any remark.
[474] It was not till the year 1692 that he began to attend regularly.
He was silent; but silent he had always been in large assemblies, even
when he was at the zenith of power. His talents were not those of a
public speaker. The art in which he surpassed all men was the art of
whispering. His tact, his quick eye for the foibles of individuals,
his caressing manners, his power of insinuation, and, above all, his
apparent frankness, made him irresistible in private conversation.
By means of these qualities he had governed James, and now aspired to
govern William.

To govern William, indeed, was not easy. But Sunderland succeeded
in obtaining such a measure of favour and influence as excited much
surprise and some indignation. In truth, scarcely any mind was strong
enough to resist the witchery of his talk and of his manners. Every man
is prone to believe in the gratitude and attachment even of the most
worthless persons on whom he has conferred great benefits. It can
therefore hardly be thought strange that the most skilful of all
flatterers should have been heard with favour, when he, with every
outward sign of strong emotion, implored permission to dedicate all
his faculties to the service of the generous protector to whom he owed
property, liberty, life. It is not necessary, however, to suppose that
the King was deceived. He may have thought, with good reason, that,
though little confidence could be placed in Sunderland's professions,
much confidence might be placed in Sunderland's situation; and the truth
is that Sunderland proved, on the whole, a more faithful servant than a
much less depraved man might have been. He did indeed make, in profound
secresy, some timid overtures towards a reconciliation with James.
But it may be confidently affirmed that, even had those overtures
been graciously received,--and they appear to have been received very
ungraciously,--the twice turned renegade would never have rendered any
real service to the Jacobite cause. He well knew that he had done that
which at Saint Germains must be regarded as inexpiable. It was not
merely that he had been treacherous and ungrateful. Marlborough had been
as treacherous and ungrateful; and Marlborough had been pardoned.
But Marlborough had not been guilty of the impious hypocrisy of
counterfeiting the signs of conversion. Marlborough had not pretended
to be convinced by the arguments of the Jesuits, to be touched by divine
grace, to pine for union with the only true Church. Marlborough had not,
when Popery was in the ascendant, crossed himself, shrived himself,
done penance, taken the communion in one kind, and, as soon as a turn
of fortune came, apostatized back again, and proclaimed to all the world
that, when he knelt at the confessional and received the host, he was
merely laughing at the King and the priests. The crime of Sunderland
was one which could never be forgiven by James; and a crime which could
never be forgiven by James was, in some sense, a recommendation to
William. The Court, nay, the Council, was full of men who might hope
to prosper if the banished King were restored. But Sunderland had left
himself no retreat. He had broken down all the bridges behind him. He
had been so false to one side that he must of necessity be true to
the other. That he was in the main true to the government which now
protected him there is no reason to doubt; and, being true, he could not
but be useful. He was, in some respects, eminently qualified to be at
that time an adviser of the Crown. He had exactly the talents and the
knowledge which William wanted. The two together would have made up a
consummate statesman. The master was capable of forming and executing
large designs, but was negligent of those small arts in which the
servant excelled. The master saw farther off than other men; but what
was near no man saw so clearly as the servant. The master, though
profoundly versed in the politics of the great community of nations,
never thoroughly understood the politics of his own kingdom. The servant
was perfectly well informed as to the temper and the organization of the
English factions, and as to the strong and weak parts of the character
of every Englishman of note.

Early in 1693, it was rumoured that Sunderland was consulted on all
important questions relating to the internal administration of the
realm; and the rumour became stronger when it was known that he had come
up to London in the autumn before the meeting of Parliament and that he
had taken a large mansion near Whitehall. The coffeehouse politicians
were confident that he was about to hold some high office. As yet,
however, he had the wisdom to be content with the reality of power, and
to leave the show to others. [475]

His opinion was that, as long as the King tried to balance the two great
parties against each other, and to divide his favour equally between
them, both would think themselves ill used, and neither would lend to
the government that hearty and steady support which was now greatly
needed. His Majesty must make up his mind to give a marked preference
to one or the other; and there were three weighty reasons for giving the
preference to the Whigs.

In the first place, the Whigs were on principle attached to the reigning
dynasty. In their view the Revolution had been, not merely necessary,
not merely justifiable, but happy and glorious. It had been the triumph
of their political theory. When they swore allegiance to William, they
swore without scruple or reservation; and they were so far from having
any doubt about his title that they thought it the best of all titles.
The Tories, on the other hand, very generally disapproved of that vote
of the Convention which had placed him on the throne. Some of them were
at heart Jacobites, and had taken the oath of allegiance to him only
that they might be able to injure him. Others, though they thought
it their duty to obey him as King in fact, denied that he was King by
right, and, if they were loyal to him, were loyal without enthusiasm.
There could, therefore, be little doubt on which of the two parties it
would be safer for him to rely.

In the second place, as to the particular matter on which his heart
was at present set, the Whigs were, as a body, prepared to support him
strenuously, and the Tories were, as a body, inclined to thwart him. The
minds of men were at this time much occupied by the question, in what
way the war ought to be carried on. To that question the two parties
returned very different answers. An opinion had during many months been
growing among the Tories that the policy of England ought to be strictly
insular; that she ought to leave the defence of Flanders and the Rhine
to the States General, the House of Austria and the Princes of the
Empire; that she ought to carry on hostilities with vigour by sea, but
to keep up only such an army as might, with the help of the militia, be
sufficient to repel an invasion. It was plain that, if this system
were adopted, there might be an immediate reduction of the taxes which
pressed most heavily on the nation. But the Whigs maintained that
this relief would be dearly purchased. Many thousands of brave English
soldiers were now in Flanders. Yet the allies had not been able to
prevent the French from taking Mons in 1691, Namur in 1692, Charleroy in
1693. If the English troops were withdrawn, it was certain that Ostend,
Ghent, Liege, Brussels would fall. The German Princes would hasten to
make peace, each for himself. The Spanish Netherlands would probably be
annexed to the French monarchy. The United Provinces would be again in
as great peril as in 1672, and would accept whatever terms Lewis might
be pleased to dictate. In a few months, he would be at liberty to put
forth his whole strength against our island. Then would come a struggle
for life and death. It might well be hoped that we should be able to
defend our soil even against such a general and such an army as had
won the battle of Landen. But the fight must be long and hard. How many
fertile counties would be turned into deserts, how many flourishing
towns would be laid in ashes, before the invaders were destroyed or
driven out! One triumphant campaign in Kent and Middlesex would do more
to impoverish the nation than ten disastrous campaigns in Brabant. It is
remarkable that this dispute between the two great factions was, during
seventy years, regularly revived as often as our country was at war with
France. That England ought never to attempt great military operations on
the Continent continued to be a fundamental article of the creed of the
Tories till the French Revolution produced a complete change in their
feelings. [476] As the chief object of William was to open the
campaign of 1694 in Flanders with an immense display of force, it was
sufficiently clear to whom he must look for assistance.

In the third place, the Whigs were the stronger party in Parliament. The
general election of 1690, indeed, had not been favourable to them.
They had been, for a time, a minority; but they had ever since been
constantly gaining ground; they were now in number a full half of the
Lower House; and their effective strength was more than proportioned
to their number; for in energy, alertness and discipline, they were
decidedly superior to their opponents. Their organization was not indeed
so perfect as it afterwards became; but they had already begun to
look for guidance to a small knot of distinguished men, which was long
afterwards widely known by the name of the junto.
There is, perhaps, no
parallel in history, ancient or modern, to the authority exercised by
this council, during twenty troubled years, over the Whig body. The men
who acquired that authority in the days of William and Mary continued
to possess it, without interruption, in office and out of office, till
George the First was on the throne.

One of these men was Russell. Of his shameful dealings with the Court of
Saint Germains we possess proofs which leave no room for doubt. But no
such proofs were laid before the world till he had been many years dead.
If rumours of his guilt got abroad, they were vague and improbable; they
rested on no evidence; they could be traced to no trustworthy author;
and they might well be regarded by his contemporaries as Jacobite
calumnies. What was quite certain was that he sprang from an illustrious
house, which had done and suffered great things for liberty and for the
Protestant religion, that he had signed the invitation of the thirtieth
of June, that he had landed with the Deliverer at Torbay, that he had in
Parliament, on all occasions, spoken and voted as a zealous Whig,
that he had won a great victory, that he had saved his country from an
invasion, and that, since he had left the Admiralty, every thing had
gone wrong. We cannot therefore wonder that his influence over his party
should have been considerable.

But the greatest man among the members of the junto, and, in some
respects, the greatest man of that age, was the Lord Keeper Somers. He
was equally eminent as a jurist and as a politician, as an orator and as
a writer. His speeches have perished; but his State papers remain, and
are models of terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence. He had left
a great reputation in the House of Commons, where he had, during four
years, been always heard with delight; and the Whig members still looked
up to him as their leader, and still held their meetings under his roof.
In the great place to which he had recently been promoted, he had so
borne himself that, after a very few months, even faction and envy had
ceased to murmur at his elevation. In truth, he united all the
qualities of a great judge, an intellect comprehensive, quick and acute,
diligence, integrity, patience, suavity. In council, the calm wisdom
which he possessed in a measure rarely found among men of parts so quick
and of opinions so decided as his, acquired for him the authority of
an oracle. The superiority of his powers appeared not less clearly in
private circles. The charm of his conversation was heightened by the
frankness with which he poured out his thoughts. [477] His good temper
and his good breeding never failed. His gesture, his look, his tones
were expressive of benevolence. His humanity was the more remarkable,
because he had received from nature a body such as is generally found
united with a peevish and irritable mind. His life was one long malady;
his nerves were weak; his complexion was livid; his face was prematurely
wrinkled. Yet his enemies could not pretend that he had ever once,
during a long and troubled public life, been goaded, even by sudden
provocation, into vehemence inconsistent with the mild dignity of his
character. All that was left to them was to assert that his disposition
was very far from being so gentle as the world believed, that he was
really prone to the angry passions, and that sometimes, while his voice
was soft, and his words kind and courteous, his delicate frame was
almost convulsed by suppressed emotion. It will perhaps be thought that
this reproach is the highest of all eulogies.

The most accomplished men of those times have told us that there was
scarcely any subject on which Somers was not competent to instruct and
to delight. He had never travelled; and, in that age, an Englishman who
had not travelled was generally thought incompetent to give an opinion
on works of art. But connoisseurs familiar with the masterpieces of the
Vatican and of the Florentine gallery allowed that the taste of Somers
in painting and sculpture was exquisite. Philology was one of his
favourite pursuits. He had traversed the whole vast range of polite
literature, ancient and modern. He was at once a munificent and severely
judicious patron of genius and learning. Locke owed opulence to Somers.
By Somers Addison was drawn forth from a cell in a college. In distant
countries the name of Somers was mentioned with respect and gratitude
by great scholars and poets who had never seen his face. He was the
benefactor of Leclerc. He was the friend of Filicaja. Neither political
nor religious differences prevented him from extending his powerful
protection to merit. Hickes, the fiercest and most intolerant of all
the nonjurors, obtained, by the influence of Somers, permission to
study Teutonic antiquities in freedom and safety. Vertue, a strict Roman
Catholic, was raised by the discriminating and liberal patronage of
Somers from poverty and obscurity to the first rank among the engravers
of the age.

The generosity with which Somers treated his opponents was the more
honourable to him because he was no waverer in politics. From the
beginning to the end of his public life he was a steady Whig. His voice
was indeed always raised, when his party was dominant in the State,
against violent and vindictive counsels; but he never forsook his
friends, even when their perverse neglect of his advice had brought them
to the verge of ruin.

His powers of mind and his acquirements were not denied, even by his
detractors. The most acrimonious Tories were forced to admit, with an
ungracious snarl, which increased the value of their praise, that he had
all the intellectual qualities of a great man, and that in him alone,
among his contemporaries, brilliant eloquence and wit were to be found
associated with the quiet and steady prudence which ensures success
in life. It is a remarkable fact, that, in the foulest of all the many
libels that were published against him, he was slandered under the name
of Cicero. As his abilities could not be questioned, he was charged with
irreligion and immorality. That he was heterodox all the country vicars
and foxhunting squires firmly believed; but as to the nature and extent
of his heterodoxy there were many different opinions. He seems to have
been a Low Churchman of the school of Tillotson, whom he always
loved and honoured; and he was, like Tillotson, called by bigots a
Presbyterian, an Arian, a Socinian, a Deist, and an Atheist.

The private life of this great statesman and magistrate was malignantly
scrutinised; and tales were told about his libertinism which went on
growing till they became too absurd for the credulity even of party
spirit. At last, long after he had been condemned to flannel and chicken
broth, a wretched courtesan, who had probably never seen him except in
the stage box at the theatre, when she was following her vocation below
in a mask, published a lampoon in which she described him as the master
of a haram more costly than the Great Turk's. There is, however, reason
to believe that there was a small nucleus of truth round which this
great mass of fiction gathered, and that the wisdom and selfcommand
which Somers never wanted in the senate, on the judgment seat, at the
council board, or in the society of wits, scholars and philosophers,
were not always proof against female attractions. [478]

Another director of the Whig party was Charles Montague. He was often,
when he had risen to power, honours and riches, called an upstart by
those who envied his success. That they should have called him so may
seem strange; for few of the statesmen of his time could show such a
pedigree as his. He sprang from a family as old as the Conquest; he was
in the succession to an earldom, and was, by the paternal side, cousin
of three earls. But he was the younger son of a younger brother; and
that phrase had, ever since the time of Shakspeare and Raleigh, and
perhaps before their time, been proverbially used to designate a person
so poor as to be broken to the most abject servitude or ready for the
most desperate adventure.

Charles Montague was early destined for the Church, was entered on the
foundation of Westminster, and, after distinguishing himself there by
skill in Latin versification, was sent up to Trinity College, Cambridge.
At Cambridge the philosophy of Des Cartes was still dominant in the
schools. But a few select spirits had separated from the crowd, and
formed a fit audience round a far greater teacher. [479] Conspicuous
among the youths of high promise who were proud to sit at the feet of
Newton was the quick and versatile Montague. Under such guidance the
young student made considerable proficiency in the severe sciences; but
poetry was his favourite pursuit; and when the University invited her
sons to celebrate royal marriages and funerals, he was generally allowed
to have surpassed his competitors. His fame travelled to London; he
was thought a clever lad by the wits who met at Will's, and the lively
parody which he wrote, in concert with his friend and fellow student
Prior, on Dryden's Hind and Panther, was received with great applause.

At this time all Montague's wishes pointed towards the Church. At a
later period, when he was a peer with twelve thousand a year, when his
villa on the Thames was regarded as the most delightful of all suburban
retreats, when he was said to revel in Tokay from the Imperial cellar,
and in soups made out of birds' nests brought from the Indian Ocean, and
costing three guineas a piece, his enemies were fond of reminding him
that there had been a time when he had eked out by his wits an income
of barely fifty pounds, when he had been happy with a trencher of mutton
chops and a flagon of ale from the College buttery, and when a tithe
pig was the rarest luxury for which he had dared to hope. The Revolution
came, and changed his whole scheme of life. He obtained, by the
influence of Dorset, who took a peculiar pleasure in befriending young
men of promise, a seat in the House of Commons. Still, during a few
months, the needy scholar hesitated between politics and divinity. But
it soon became clear that, in the new order of things, parliamentary
ability must fetch a higher price than any other kind of ability; and
he felt that in parliamentary ability he had no superior. He was in the
very situation for which he was peculiarly fitted by nature; and during
some years his life was a series of triumphs.

Of him, as of several of his contemporaries, especially of Mulgrave and
of Sprat, it may be said that his fame has suffered from the folly of
those editors who, down to our own time, have persisted in reprinting
his rhymes among the works of the British poets. There is not a year in
which hundreds of verses as good as any that he ever wrote are not sent
in for the Newdigate prize at Oxford and for the Chancellor's medal at
Cambridge. His mind had indeed great quickness and vigour, but not that
kind of quickness and vigour which produces great dramas or odes; and
it is most unjust to him that his loan of Honour and his Epistle on
the Battle of the Boyne should be placed side by side with Comus
and Alexander's Feast. Other eminent statesmen and orators, Walpole,
Pulteney, Chatham, Fox, wrote poetry not better than his. But
fortunately for them, their metrical compositions were never thought
worthy to be admitted into any collection of our national classics.

It has long been usual to represent the imagination under the figure of
a wing, and to call the successful exertions of the imagination flights.
One poet is the eagle; another is the swan; a third modestly compares
himself to the bee. But none of these types would have suited Montague.
His genius may be compared to that pinion which, though it is too weak
to lift the ostrich into the air, enables her, while she remains on the
earth, to outrun hound, horse and dromedary. If the man who possesses
this kind of genius attempts to ascend the heaven of invention, his
awkward and unsuccessful efforts expose him to derision. But if he will
be content to stay in the terrestrial region of business, he will find
that the faculties which would not enable him to soar into a higher
sphere will enable him to distance all his competitors in the lower. As
a poet Montague could never have risen above the crowd. But in the House
of Commons, now fast becoming supreme in the State, and extending
its control over one executive department after another, the young
adventurer soon obtained a place very different from the place which he
occupies among men of letters. At thirty, he would gladly have given all
his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain's scarf.
At thirty-seven, he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the
Exchequer and a Regent of the kingdom; and this elevation he owed not
at all to favour, but solely to the unquestionable superiority of his
talents for administration and debate.

The extraordinary ability with which, at the beginning of the year 1692,
he managed the conference on the Bill for regulating Trials in cases of
Treason, placed him at once in the first rank of parliamentary orators.
On that occasion he was opposed to a crowd of veteran senators renowned
for their eloquence, Halifax, Rochester, Nottingham, Mulgrave, and
proved himself a match for them all. He was speedily seated at the Board
of Treasury; and there the clearheaded and experienced Godolphin soon
found that his young colleague was his master. When Somers had quitted
the House of Commons, Montague had no rival there. Sir Thomas Littleton,
once distinguished as the ablest debater and man of business among the
Whig members, was content to serve under his junior. To this day we may
discern in many parts of our financial and commercial system the marks
of the vigorous intellect and daring spirit of Montague. His bitterest
enemies were unable to deny that some of the expedients which he had
proposed had proved highly beneficial to the nation. But it was said
that these expedients were not devised by himself. He was represented,
in a hundred pamphlets, as the daw in borrowed plumes. He had taken, it
was affirmed, the hint of every one of his great plans from the writings
or the conversation of some ingenious speculator. This reproach was,
in truth, no reproach. We can scarcely expect to find in the same human
being the talents which are necessary for the making of new discoveries
in political science, and the talents which obtain the assent of divided
and tumultuous assemblies to great practical reforms. To be at once an
Adam Smith and a Pitt is scarcely possible. It is surely praise enough
for a busy politician that he knows how to use the theories of others,
that he discerns, among the schemes of innumerable projectors, the
precise scheme which is wanted and which is practicable, that he shapes
it to suit pressing circumstances and popular humours, that he proposes
it just when it is most likely to be favourably received, that he
triumphantly defends it against all objectors, and that he carries it
into execution with prudence and energy; and to this praise no English
statesman has a fairer claim than Montague.

It is a remarkable proof of his selfknowledge that, from the moment at
which he began to distinguish himself in public life, he ceased to be
a versifier. It does not appear that, after he became a Lord of the
Treasury, he ever wrote a couplet, with the exception of a few well
turned lines inscribed on a set of toasting glasses which were sacred
to the most renowned Whig beauties of his time. He wisely determined
to derive from the poetry of others a glory which he never would have
derived from his own. As a patron of genius and learning he ranks with
his two illustrious friends, Dorset and Somers. His munificence fully
equalled theirs; and, though he was inferior to them in delicacy of
taste, he succeeded in associating his name inseparably with some names
which will last as long as our language.

Yet it must be acknowledged that Montague, with admirable parts and
with many claims on the gratitude of his country, had great faults, and
unhappily faults not of the noblest kind. His head was not strong enough
to bear without giddiness the speed of his ascent and the height of his
position. He became offensively arrogant and vain. He was too often cold
to his old friends, and ostentatious in displaying his new riches. Above
all, he was insatiably greedy of praise, and liked it best when it was
of the coarsest and rankest quality. But, in 1693, these faults were
less offensive than they became a few years later.

With Russell, Somers and Montague, was closely connected, during
a quarter of a century a fourth Whig, who in character bore little
resemblance to any of them. This was Thomas Wharton, eldest son of
Philip Lord Wharton. Thomas Wharton has been repeatedly mentioned in the
course of this narrative. But it is now time to describe him more
fully. He was in his forty-seventh year, but was still a young man in
constitution, in appearance and in manners. Those who hated him most
heartily,--and no man was hated more heartily,--admitted that his
natural parts were excellent, and that he was equally qualified for
debate and for action. The history of his mind deserves notice; for it
was the history of many thousands of minds. His rank and abilities
made him so conspicuous that in him we are able to trace distinctly
the origin and progress of a moral taint which was epidemic among his
contemporaries.

He was born in the days of the Covenant, and was the heir of a
covenanted house. His father was renowned as a distributor of
Calvinistic tracts, and a patron of Calvinistic divines. The boy's first
years were past amidst Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes,
nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long. Plays and poems, hunting
and dancing, were proscribed by the austere discipline of his saintly
family. The fruits of this education became visible, when, from the
sullen mansion of Puritan parents, the hotblooded, quickwitted young
patrician emerged into the gay and voluptuous London of the Restoration.
The most dissolute cavaliers stood aghast at the dissoluteness of the
emancipated precisian. He early acquired and retained to the last the
reputation of being the greatest rake in England. Of wine indeed he
never became the slave; and he used it chiefly for the purpose of making
himself the master of his associates. But to the end of his long life
the wives and daughters of his nearest friends were not safe from his
licentious plots. The ribaldry of his conversation moved astonishment
even in that age. To the religion of his country he offered, in the mere
wantonness of impiety, insults too foul to be described. His mendacity
and his effrontery passed into proverbs. Of all the liars of his time he
was the most deliberate, the most inventive and the most circumstantial.
What shame meant he did not seem to understand. No reproaches, even when
pointed and barbed with the sharpest wit, appeared to give him pain.
Great satirists, animated by a deadly personal aversion, exhausted
all their strength in attacks upon him. They assailed him with keen
invective; they assailed him with still keener irony; but they found
that neither invective nor irony could move him to any thing but an
unforced smile and a goodhumoured curse; and they at length threw down
the lash, acknowledging that it was impossible to make him feel. That,
with such vices, he should have played a great part in life, should have
carried numerous elections against the most formidable opposition by his
personal popularity, should have had a large following in Parliament,
should have risen to the highest offices of the State, seems
extraordinary. But he lived in times when faction was almost a madness;
and he possessed in an eminent degree the qualities of the leader of
a faction. There was a single tie which he respected. The falsest
of mankind in all relations but one, he was the truest of Whigs. The
religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with contempt;
but to the politics of his family he stedfastly adhered through all the
temptations and dangers of half a century. In small things and in great
his devotion to his party constantly appeared. He had the finest stud in
England; and his delight was to win plates from Tories. Sometimes when,
in a distant county, it was fully expected that the horse of a High
Church squire would be first on the course, down came, on the very eve
of the race, Wharton's Careless, who had ceased to run at Newmarket
merely for want of competitors, or Wharton's Gelding, for whom Lewis
the Fourteenth had in vain offered a thousand pistoles. A man whose mere
sport was of this description was not likely to be easily beaten in
any serious contest. Such a master of the whole art of electioneering
England had never seen. Buckinghamshire was his own especial province;
and there he ruled without a rival. But he extended his care over
the Whig interest in Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Wiltshire.
Sometimes twenty, sometimes thirty, members of Parliament were named by
him. As a canvasser he was irresistible. He never forgot a face that
he had once seen. Nay, in the towns in which he wished to establish an
interest, he remembered, not only the voters, but their families.
His opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the
affability of his deportment, and owned, that it was impossible to
contend against a great man who called the shoemaker by his Christian
name, who was sure that the butcher's daughter must be growing a fine
girl, and who was anxious to know whether the blacksmith's youngest boy
was breeched. By such arts as these he made himself so popular that
his journeys to the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions resembled royal
progresses. The bells of every parish through which he passed were rung,
and flowers were strewed along the road. It was commonly believed that,
in the course of his life, he expended on his parliamentary interest not
less than eighty thousand pounds, a sum which, when compared with the
value of estates, must be considered as equivalent to more than three
hundred thousand pounds in our time.

But the chief service which Wharton rendered to the Whig party was that
of bringing in recruits from the young aristocracy. He was quite as
dexterous a canvasser among the embroidered coats at the Saint James's
Coffeehouse as among the leathern aprons at Wycombe and Aylesbury. He
had his eye on every boy of quality who came of age; and it was not
easy for such a boy to resist the arts of a noble, eloquent and wealthy
flatterer, who united juvenile vivacity to profound art and long
experience of the gay world. It mattered not what the novice preferred,
gallantry or field sports, the dicebox or the bottle. Wharton soon found
out the master passion, offered sympathy, advice and assistance, and,
while seeming to be only the minister of his disciple's pleasures, made
sure of his disciple's vote.

The party to whose interests Wharton, with such spirit and constancy,
devoted his time, his fortune, his talents, his very vices, judged
him, as was natural, far too leniently. He was widely known by the
very undeserved appellation of Honest Tom. Some pious men, Burnet, for
example, and Addison, averted their eyes from the scandal which he gave,
and spoke of him, not indeed with esteem, yet with goodwill. A most
ingenious and accomplished Whig, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author
of the Characteristics, described Wharton as the most mysterious of
human beings, as a strange compound of best and worst, of private
depravity and public virtue, and owned himself unable to understand how
a man utterly without principle in every thing but politics should in
politics be as true as steel. But that which, in the judgment of one
faction, more than half redeemed all Wharton's faults, seemed to the
other faction to aggravate them all. The opinion which the Tories
entertained of him is expressed in a single line written after his death
by the ablest man of that party; "He was the most universal villain that
ever I knew. " [480] Wharton's political adversaries thirsted for
his blood, and repeatedly tried to shed it. Had he not been a man of
imperturbable temper, dauntless courage and consummate skill in fence,
his life would have been a short one. But neither anger nor danger ever
deprived him of his presence of mind; he was an incomparable swordsman;
and he had a peculiar way of disarming opponents which moved the envy of
all the duellists of his time. His friends said that he had never given
a challenge, that he had never refused one, that he had never taken a
life, and yet that he had never fought without having his antagonist's
life at his mercy. [481]

The four men who have been described resembled each other so little that
it may be thought strange that they should ever have been able to act
in concert. They did, however, act in the closest concert during many
years. They more than once rose and more than once fell together. But
their union lasted till it was dissolved by death. Little as some of
them may have deserved esteem, none of them can be accused of having
been false to his brethren of the Junto.

While the great body of the Whigs was, under these able chiefs, arraying
itself in order resembling that of a regular army, the Tories were in a
state of an ill drilled and ill officered militia. They were numerous;
and they were zealous; but they can hardly be said to have had, at this
time, any chief in the House of Commons. The name of Seymour had once
been great among them, and had not quite lost its influence. But,
since he had been at the Board of Treasury, he had disgusted them
by vehemently defending all that he had himself, when out of place,
vehemently attacked. They had once looked up to the Speaker, Trevor; but
his greediness, impudence and venality were now so notorious that all
respectable gentlemen, of all shades of opinion, were ashamed to see him
in the chair. Of the old Tory members Sir Christopher Musgrave alone had
much weight. Indeed the real leaders of the party were two or three men
bred in principles diametrically opposed to Toryism, men who had carried
Whiggism to the verge of republicanism, and who had been considered not
merely as Low Churchmen, but as more than half Presbyterians. Of these
men the most eminent were two great Herefordshire squires, Robert Harley
and Paul Foley.

The space which Robert Harley fills in the history of three reigns,
his elevation, his fall, the influence which, at a great crisis, he
exercised on the politics of all Europe, the close intimacy in which
he lived with some of the greatest wits and poets of his time, and the
frequent recurrence of his name in the works of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot,
and Prior, must always make him an object of interest. Yet the man
himself was of all men the least interesting. There is indeed a
whimsical contrast between the very ordinary qualities of his mind and
the very extraordinary vicissitudes of his fortune.

He was the heir of a Puritan family. His father, Sir Edward Harley,
had been conspicuous among the patriots of the Long parliament, had
commanded a regiment under Essex, had, after the Restoration, been an
active opponent of the Court, had supported the Exclusion Bill, had
harboured dissenting preachers, had frequented meetinghouses, and had
made himself so obnoxious to the ruling powers that at the time of the
Western Insurrection, he had been placed under arrest, and his house
had been searched for arms. When the Dutch army was marching from Torbay
towards London, he and his eldest son Robert declared for the Prince
of Orange and a free Parliament, raised a large body of horse, took
possession of Worcester, and evinced their zeal against Popery by
publicly breaking to pieces, in the High Street of that city, a piece
of sculpture which to rigid precisians seemed idolatrous. Soon after the
Convention became a Parliament, Robert Harley was sent up to Westminster
as member for a Cornish borough. His conduct was such as might have
been expected from his birth and education. He was a Whig, and indeed an
intolerant and vindictive Whig. Nothing would satisfy him but a general
proscription of the Tories. His name appears in the list of those
members who voted for the Sacheverell clause; and, at the general
election which took place in the spring of 1690, the party which he had
persecuted made great exertions to keep him out of the House of Commons.
A cry was raised that the Harleys were mortal enemies of the Church; and
this cry produced so much effect that it was with difficulty that any of
them could obtain a seat. Such was the commencement of the public life
of a man whose name, a quarter of a century later, was inseparably
coupled with the High Church in the acclamations of Jacobite mobs. [482]

Soon, however, it began to be observed that in every division Harley
was in the company of those gentlemen who held his political opinions
in abhorrence; nor was this strange; for he affected the character of
a Whig of the old pattern; and before the Revolution it had always
been supposed that a Whig was a person who watched with jealousy every
exertion of the prerogative, who was slow to loose the strings of the
public purse, and who was extreme to mark the faults of the ministers
of the Crown. Such a Whig Harley still professed to be. He did not admit
that the recent change of dynasty had made any change in the duties of a
representative of the people. The new government ought to be observed as
suspiciously, checked as severely, and supplied as sparingly as the old
one. Acting on these principles he necessarily found himself acting
with men whose principles were diametrically opposed to his. He liked to
thwart the King; they liked to thwart the usurper; the consequence
was that, whenever there was an opportunity of thwarting William, the
Roundhead stayed in the House or went into the lobby in company with the
whole crowd of Cavaliers.

Soon Harley acquired the authority of a leader among those with whom,
notwithstanding wide differences of opinion, he ordinarily voted.