No More Learning

Those which remained had lost their martial
character, and were now rural palaces of the aristocracy. The moats were
turned into preserves of carp and pike. The mounds were planted with
fragrant shrubs, through which spiral walks ran up to summer houses
adorned with mirrors and paintings. [42] On the capes of the sea coast,
and on many inland hills, were still seen tall posts, surmounted by
barrels. Once those barrels had been filled with pitch. Watchmen had
been set round them in seasons of danger; and, within a few hours after
a Spanish sail had been discovered in the Channel, or after a thousand
Scottish mosstroopers had crossed the Tweed, the signal fires were
blazing fifty miles off, and whole counties were rising in arms. But
many years had now elapsed since the beacons had been lighted; and they
were regarded rather as curious relics of ancient manners than as parts
of a machinery necessary to the safety of the state. [43]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our relations with foreign courts had been put on the most economical
footing. The only diplomatic agent who had the title of Ambassador
resided at Constantinople, and was partly supported by the Turkish
Company. Even at the court of Versailles England had only an Envoy; and
she had not even an Envoy at the Spanish, Swedish, and Danish courts.
The whole expense under this head cannot, in the last year of the reign
of Charles the Second, have much exceeded twenty thousand pounds. [53]

In this frugality there was nothing laudable. Charles was, as usual,
niggardly in the wrong place, and munificent in the wrong place. The
public service was starved that courtiers might be pampered. The expense
of the navy, of the ordnance, of pensions to needy old officers, of
missions to foreign courts, must seem small indeed to the present
generation. But the personal favourites of the sovereign, his ministers,
and the creatures of those ministers, were gorged with public money.
Their salaries and pensions, when compared with the incomes of the
nobility, the gentry, the commercial and professional men of that age,
will appear enormous. The greatest estates in the kingdom then
very little exceeded twenty thousand a year. The Duke of Ormond had
twenty-two thousand a year. [54] The Duke of Buckingham, before his
extravagance had impaired his great property, had nineteen thousand
six hundred a year. [55] George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who had been
rewarded for his eminent services with immense grants of crown land,
and who had been notorious both for covetousness and for parsimony, left
fifteen thousand a year of real estate, and sixty thousand pounds in
money which probably yielded seven per cent. [56] These three Dukes
were supposed to be three of the very richest subjects in England. The
Archbishop of Canterbury can hardly have had five thousand a year.
[57] The average income of a temporal peer was estimated, by the best
informed persons, at about three thousand a year, the average income of
a baronet at nine hundred a year, the average income of a member of the
House of Commons at less than eight hundred a year. [58] A thousand a
year was thought a large revenue for a barrister. Two thousand a year
was hardly to be made in the Court of King's Bench, except by the crown
lawyers. [59] It is evident, therefore, that an official man would have
been well paid if he had received a fourth or fifth part of what would
now be an adequate stipend. In fact, however, the stipends of the
higher class of official men were as large as at present, and not seldom
larger. The Lord Treasurer, for example, had eight thousand a year,
and, when the Treasury was in commission, the junior Lords had sixteen
hundred a year each. The Paymaster of the Forces had a poundage,
amounting, in time of peace, to about five thousand a year, on all the
money which passed through his hands. The Groom of the Stole had five
thousand a year, the Commissioners of the Customs twelve hundred a
year each, the Lords of the Bedchamber a thousand a year each. [60]
The regular salary, however, was the smallest part of the gains of an
official man at that age. From the noblemen who held the white staff and
the great seal, down to the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would
now be called gross corruption was practiced without disguise and
without reproach. Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold
in market overt by the great dignitaries of the realm; and every
clerk in every department imitated, to the best of his power, the evil
example.

During the last century no prime minister, however powerful, has become
rich in office; and several prime ministers have impaired their private
fortune in sustaining their public character. In the seventeenth
century, a statesman who was at the head of affairs might easily, and
without giving scandal, accumulate in no long time an estate amply
sufficient to support a dukedom. It is probable that the income of the
prime minister, during his tenure of power, far exceeded that of any
other subject. The place of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was popularly
reported to be worth forty thousand pounds a year. [61] The gains of the
Chancellor Clarendon, of Arlington, of Lauderdale, and of Danby, were
certainly enormous. The sumptuous palace to which the populace of London
gave the name of Dunkirk Mouse, the stately pavilions, the fishponds,
the deer park and the orangery of Euston, the more than Italian luxury
of Ham, with its busts, fountains, and aviaries, were among the many
signs which indicated what was the shortest road to boundless wealth.
This is the true explanation of the unscrupulous violence with which the
statesmen of that day struggled for office, of the tenacity with which,
in spite of vexations, humiliations and dangers, they clung to it, and
of the scandalous compliances to which they stooped in order to retain
it. Even in our own age, formidable as is the power of opinion, and
high as is the standard of integrity, there would be great risk of a
lamentable change in the character of our public men, if the place of
First Lord of the Treasury or Secretary of State were worth a hundred
thousand pounds a year. Happy for our country the emoluments of the
highest class of functionaries have not only not grown in proportion to
the general growth of our opulence, but have positively diminished.

The fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has, in a time not
exceeding two long lives, been multiplied forty-fold, is strange, and
may at first sight seem appalling. But those who are alarmed by the
increase of the public burdens may perhaps be reassured when they have
considered the increase of the public resources. In the year 1685, the
value of the produce of the soil far exceeded the value of all the
other fruits of human industry. Yet agriculture was in what would now
be considered as a very rude and imperfect state. The arable land and
pasture land were not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of
that age to amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom. [62]
The remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These
computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of the
seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many
routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards,
cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but
heath, swamp, and warren. [63] In the drawings of English landscapes
made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo, scarce a hedgerow is to be
seen, and numerous tracts; now rich with cultivation, appear as bare as
Salisbury Plain. [64] At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of
the capital, was a region of five and twenty miles in circumference,
which contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields.
Deer, as free as in an American forest, wandered there by thousands.
[65] It is to be remarked, that wild animals of large size were then far
more numerous than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had
been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to ravage
the cultivated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered by the
exasperated rustics during the license of the civil war. The last wolf
that has roamed our island had been slain in Scotland a short time
before the close of the reign of Charles the Second. But many breeds,
now extinct, or rare, both of quadrupeds and birds, were still common.
The fox, whose life is now, in many counties, held almost as sacred as
that of a human being, was then considered as a mere nuisance. Oliver
Saint John told the Long Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded,
not as a stag or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a fox,
who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head without pity.
This illustration would be by no means a happy one, if addressed to
country gentlemen of our time: but in Saint John's days there were not
seldom great massacres of foxes to which the peasantry thronged with all
the dogs that could be mustered. Traps were set: nets were spread: no
quarter was given; and to shoot a female with cub was considered as a
feat which merited the warmest gratitude of the neighbourhood. The red
deer were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire, as they now
are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne, travelling to
Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five hundred. The wild bull with
his white mane was still to be found wandering in a few of the southern
forests. The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the side of every
hill where the copsewood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard
by night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of whittlebury and
Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in Cranbourne
Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of the sable. Fen
eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the extremities of the
wings, preyed on fish along the coast of Norfolk. On all the downs,
from the British Channel to Yorkshire huge bustards strayed in troops
of fifty or sixty, and were often hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of
Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every
year by immense clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progress of
cultivation has extirpated. Of others the numbers are so much diminished
that men crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal tiger, or a Polar
bear. [66]

The progress of this great change can nowhere be more clearly traced
than in the Statute Book. The number of enclosure acts passed since King
George the Second came to the throne exceeds four thousand. The area
enclosed under the authority of those acts exceeds, on a moderate
calculation, ten thousand square miles. How many square miles, which
were formerly uncultivated or ill cultivated, have, during the same
period, been fenced and carefully tilled by the proprietors without any
application to the legislature, can only be conjectured. But it seems
highly probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of
little more than a century, turned from a wild into a garden.

Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close of the reign of
Charles the Second were the best cultivated, the farming, though greatly
improved since the civil war, was not such as would now be thought
skilful. To this day no effectual steps have been taken by public
authority for the purpose of obtaining accurate accounts of the produce
of the English soil. The historian must therefore follow, with some
misgivings, the guidance of those writers on statistics whose reputation
for diligence and fidelity stands highest. At present an average crop of
wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, is supposed considerably to exceed
thirty millions of quarters. The crop of wheat would be thought wretched
if it did not exceed twelve millions of quarters. According to the
computation made in the year 1696 by Gregory King, the whole quantity of
wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, then annually grown in the kingdom,
was somewhat less than ten millions of quarters. The wheat, which was
then cultivated only on the strongest clay, and consumed only by those
who were in easy circumstances, he estimated at less than two millions
of quarters. Charles Davenant, an acute and well informed though most
unprincipled and rancorous politician, differed from King as to some
of the items of the account, but came to nearly the same general
conclusions. [67]

The rotation of crops was very imperfectly understood. It was known,
indeed, that some vegetables lately introduced into our island,
particularly the turnip, afforded excellent nutriment in winter to sheep
and oxen: but it was not yet the practice to feed cattle in this manner.
It was therefore by no means easy to keep them alive during the season
when the grass is scanty. They were killed and salted in great numbers
at the beginning of the cold weather; and, during several months, even
the gentry tasted scarcely any fresh animal food, except game and
river fish, which were consequently much more important articles
in housekeeping than at present. It appears from the Northumberland
Household Book that, in the reign of Henry the Seventh, fresh meat was
never eaten even by the gentlemen attendant on a great Earl, except
during the short interval between Midsummer and Michaelmas. But in
the course of two centuries an improvement had taken place; and under
Charles the Second it was not till the beginning of November that
families laid in their stock of salt provisions, then called Martinmas
beef. [68]

The sheep and the ox of that time were diminutive when compared with
the sheep and oxen which are now driven to our markets. [69] Our native
horses, though serviceable, were held in small esteem, and fetched low
prices. They were valued, one with another, by the ablest of those who
computed the national wealth, at not more than fifty shillings each.
Foreign breeds were greatly preferred. Spanish jennets were regarded
as the finest chargers, and were imported for purposes of pageantry and
war. The coaches of the aristocracy were drawn by grey Flemish mares,
which trotted, as it was thought, with a peculiar grace, and endured
better than any cattle reared in our island the work of dragging a
ponderous equipage over the rugged pavement of London. Neither the
modern dray horse nor the modern race horse was then known. At a
much later period the ancestors of the gigantic quadrupeds, which all
foreigners now class among the chief wonders of London, were brought
from the marshes of Walcheren; the ancestors of Childers and Eclipse
from the sands of Arabia. Already, however, there was among our nobility
and gentry a passion for the amusements of the turf. The importance of
improving our studs by an infusion of new blood was strongly felt; and
with this view a considerable number of barbs had lately been brought
into the country. Two men whose authority on such subjects was held in
great esteem, the Duke of Newcastle and Sir John Fenwick, pronounced
that the meanest hack ever imported from Tangier would produce a diner
progeny than could be expected from the best sire of our native breed.
They would not readily have believed that a time would come when the
princes and nobles of neighbouring lands would be as eager to obtain
horses from England as ever the English had been to obtain horses from
Barbary. [70]

The increase of vegetable and animal produce, though great, seems small
when compared with the increase of our mineral wealth. In 1685 the tin
of Cornwall, which had, more than two thousand years before, attracted
the Tyrian sails beyond the pillars of Hercules, was still one of the
most valuable subterranean productions of the island. The quantity
annually extracted from the earth was found to be, some years later,
sixteen hundred tons, probably about a third of what it now is. [71] But
the veins of copper which lie in the same region were, in the time of
Charles the Second, altogether neglected, nor did any landowner take
them into the account in estimating the value of his property. Cornwall
and Wales at present yield annually near fifteen thousand tons of
copper, worth near a million and a half sterling; that is to say, worth
about twice as much as the annual produce of all English mines of all
descriptions in the seventeenth century. [72] The first bed of rock salt
had been discovered in Cheshire not long after the Restoration, but
does not appear to have been worked till much later. The salt which
was obtained by a rude process from brine pits was held in no high
estimation. The pans in which the manufacture was carried on exhaled a
sulphurous stench; and, when the evaporation was complete, the substance
which was left was scarcely fit to be used with food. Physicians
attributed the scorbutic and pulmonary complaints which were common
among the English to this unwholesome condiment. It was therefore
seldom used by the upper and middle classes; and there was a regular and
considerable importation from France. At present our springs and mines
not only supply our own immense demand, but send annually more than
seven hundred millions of pounds of excellent salt to foreign countries.
[73]

Far more important has been the improvement of our iron works. Such
works had long existed in our island, but had not prospered, and had
been regarded with no favourable eye by the government and by the
public. It was not then the practice to employ coal for smelting the
ore; and the rapid consumption of wood excited the alarm of politicians.
As early as the reign of Elizabeth, there had been loud complaints that
whole forests were cut down for the purpose of feeding the furnaces; and
the Parliament had interfered to prohibit the manufacturers from burning
timber. The manufacture consequently languished. At the close of the
reign of Charles the Second, great part of the iron which was used in
this country was imported from abroad; and the whole quantity cast here
annually seems not to have exceeded ten thousand tons. At present the
trade is thought to be in a depressed state if less than a million of
tons are produced in a year. [74]

One mineral, perhaps more important than iron itself, remains to be
mentioned. Coal, though very little used in any species of manufacture,
was already the ordinary fuel in some districts which were fortunate
enough to possess large beds, and in the capital, which could easily be
supplied by water carriage, It seems reasonable to believe that at least
one half of the quantity then extracted from the pits was consumed in
London. The consumption of London seemed to the writers of that age
enormous, and was often mentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of
the imperial city. They scarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed
that two hundred and eighty thousand chaldrons that is to say, about
three hundred and fifty thousand tons, were, in the last year of the
reign of Charles the Second, brought to the Thames. At present three
millions and a half of tons are required yearly by the metropolis; and
the whole annual produce cannot, on the most moderate computation, be
estimated at less than thirty millions of tons. [75]

While these great changes have been in progress, the rent of land has,
as might be expected, been almost constantly rising. In some districts
it has multiplied more than tenfold. In some it has not more than
doubled. It has probably, on the average, quadrupled.

Of the rent, a large proportion was divided among the country gentlemen,
a class of persons whose position and character it is most important
that we should clearly understand; for by their influence and by their
passions the fate of the nation was, at several important conjunctures,
determined.

We should be much mistaken if we pictured to ourselves the squires of
the seventeenth century as men bearing a close resemblance to their
descendants, the county members and chairmen of quarter sessions with
whom we are familiar. The modern country gentleman generally receives a
liberal education, passes from a distinguished school to a distinguished
college, and has ample opportunity to become an excellent scholar. He
has generally seen something of foreign countries. A considerable
part of his life has generally been passed in the capital; and the
refinements of the capital follow him into the country. There is perhaps
no class of dwellings so pleasing as the rural seats of the English
gentry. In the parks and pleasure grounds, nature, dressed yet not
disguised by art, wears her most alluring form. In the buildings, good
sense and good taste combine to produce a happy union of the comfortable
and the graceful. The pictures, the musical instruments, the library,
would in any other country be considered as proving the owner to be
an eminently polished and accomplished man. A country gentleman who
witnessed the Revolution was probably in receipt of about a fourth
part of the rent which his acres now yield to his posterity. He was,
therefore, as compared with his posterity, a poor man, and was generally
under the necessity of residing, with little interruption, on his
estate. To travel on the Continent, to maintain an establishment in
London, or even to visit London frequently, were pleasures in which only
the great proprietors could indulge. It may be confidently affirmed that
of the squires whose names were then in the Commissions of Peace and
Lieutenancy not one in twenty went to town once in five years, or had
ever in his life wandered so far as Paris. Many lords of manors had
received an education differing little from that of their menial
servants. The heir of an estate often passed his boyhood and youth
at the seat of his family with no better tutors than grooms and
gamekeepers, and scarce attained learning enough to sign his name to
a Mittimus. If he went to school and to college, he generally returned
before he was twenty to the seclusion of the old hall, and there,
unless his mind were very happily constituted by nature, soon forgot his
academical pursuits in rural business and pleasures. His chief serious
employment was the care of his property. He examined samples of grain,
handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard with
drovers and hop merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived
from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and
pronunciation were such as we should now expect to hear only from the
most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of
abuse, were uttered with the broadest accent of his province. It was
easy to discern, from the first words which he spoke, whether he came
from Somersetshire or Yorkshire. He troubled himself little about
decorating his abode, and, if he attempted decoration, seldom produced
anything but deformity. The litter of a farmyard gathered under the
windows of his bedchamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew
close to his hall door. His table was loaded with coarse plenty; and
guests were cordially welcomed to it. But, as the habit of drinking to
excess was general in the class to which he belonged, and as his fortune
did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret
or canary, strong beer was the ordinary beverage. The quantity of beer
consumed in those days was indeed enormous. For beer then was to the
middle and lower classes, not only all that beer is, but all that wine,
tea, and ardent spirits now are. It was only at great houses, or on
great occasions, that foreign drink was placed on the board. The ladies
of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast,
retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen
to their ale and tobacco. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often
prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table.

It was very seldom that the country gentleman caught glimpses of the
great world; and what he saw of it tended rather to confuse than
to enlighten his understanding. His opinions respecting religion,
government, foreign countries and former times, having been derived,
not from study, from observation, or from conversation with enlightened
companions, but from such traditions as were current in his own small
circle, were the opinions of a child. He adhered to them, however, with
the obstinacy which is generally found in ignorant men accustomed to be
fed with flattery. His animosities were numerous and bitter. He
hated Frenchmen and Italians, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Papists and
Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, Quakers and Jews. Towards
London and Londoners he felt an aversion which more than once produced
important political effects. His wife and daughter were in tastes and
acquirements below a housekeeper or a stillroom maid of the present day.
They stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and
made the crust for the venison pasty.

From this description it might be supposed that the English esquire of
the seventeenth century did not materially differ from a rustic miller
or alehouse keeper of our time. There are, however, some important
parts of his character still to be noted, which will greatly modify this
estimate. Unlettered as he was and unpolished, he was still in some most
important points a gentleman. He was a member of a proud and powerful
aristocracy, and was distinguished by many both of the good and of the
bad qualities which belong to aristocrats. His family pride was beyond
that of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and coats of
arms of all his neighbours, and could tell which of them had assumed
supporters without any right, and which of them were so unfortunate as
to be greatgrandsons of aldermen. He was a magistrate, and, as
such, administered gratuitously to those who dwelt around him a rude
patriarchal justice, which, in spite of innumerable blunders and of
occasional acts of tyranny, was yet better than no justice at all. He
was an officer of the trainbands; and his military dignity, though it
might move the mirth of gallants who had served a campaign in Flanders,
raised his character in his own eyes and in the eyes of his neighbours.
Nor indeed was his soldiership justly a subject of derision. In every
county there were elderly gentlemen who had seen service which was no
child's play. One had been knighted by Charles the First, after the
battle of Edgehill. Another still wore a patch over the scar which he
had received at Naseby. A third had defended his old house till
Fairfax had blown in the door with a petard. The presence of these
old Cavaliers, with their old swords and holsters, and with their old
stories about Goring and Lunsford, gave to the musters of militia an
earnest and warlike aspect which would otherwise have been wanting. Even
those country gentlemen who were too young to have themselves exchanged
blows with the cuirassiers of the Parliament had, from childhood, been
surrounded by the traces of recent war, and fed with stories of the
martial exploits of their fathers and uncles. Thus the character of
the English esquire of the seventeenth century was compounded of
two elements which we seldom or never find united. His ignorance and
uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be
considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian.
Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large measure both the
virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth
in high place, and used to respect themselves and to be respected by
others. It is not easy for a generation accustomed to find chivalrous
sentiments only in company with liberal Studies and polished manners
to image to itself a man with the deportment, the vocabulary, and
the accent of a carter, yet punctilious on matters of genealogy and
precedence, and ready to risk his life rather than see a stain cast on
the honour of his house. It is however only by thus joining together
things seldom or never found together in our own experience, that we can
form a just idea of that rustic aristocracy which constituted the main
strength of the armies of Charles the First, and which long supported,
with strange fidelity, the interest of his descendants.

The gross, uneducated; untravelled country gentleman was commonly a
Tory; but, though devotedly attached to hereditary monarchy, he had no
partiality for courtiers and ministers. He thought, not without reason,
that Whitehall was filled with the most corrupt of mankind, and that of
the great sums which the House of Commons had voted to the crown since
the Restoration part had been embezzled by cunning politicians, and part
squandered on buffoons and foreign courtesans. His stout English heart
swelled with indignation at the thought that the government of his
country should be subject to French dictation. Being himself generally
an old Cavalier, or the son of an old Cavalier, he reflected with bitter
resentment on the ingratitude with which the Stuarts had requited their
best friends. Those who heard him grumble at the neglect with which he
was treated, and at the profusion with which wealth was lavished on the
bastards of Nell Gwynn and Madam Carwell, would have supposed him ripe
for rebellion. But all this ill humour lasted only till the throne was
really in danger. It was precisely when those whom the sovereign had
loaded with wealth and honours shrank from his side that the country
gentlemen, so surly and mutinous in the season of his prosperity,
rallied round him in a body. Thus, after murmuring twenty years at the
misgovernment of Charles the Second, they came to his rescue in his
extremity, when his own Secretaries of State and the Lords of his own
Treasury had deserted him, and enabled him to gain a complete victory
over the opposition; nor can there be any doubt that they would have
shown equal loyalty to his brother James, if James would, even at the
last moment, have refrained from outraging their strongest feeling. For
there was one institution, and one only, which they prized even more
than hereditary monarchy; and that institution was the Church of
England. Their love of the Church was not, indeed, the effect of study
or meditation. Few among them could have given any reason, drawn from
Scripture or ecclesiastical history, for adhering to her doctrines, her
ritual, and her polity; nor were they, as a class, by any means strict
observers of that code of morality which is common to all Christian
sects. But the experience of many ages proves that men may be ready to
fight to the death, and to persecute without pity, for a religion
whose creed they do not understand, and whose precepts they habitually
disobey. [76]

The rural clergy were even more vehement in Toryism than the rural
gentry, end were a class scarcely less important.