No More Learning

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. It is to be observed,
however, that the individual clergyman, as compared with the individual
gentleman, then ranked much lower than in our days. The main support of
the Church was derived from the tithe; and the tithe bore to the rent a
much smaller ratio than at present. King estimated the whole income
of the parochial and collegiate clergy at only four hundred and eighty
thousand pounds a year; Davenant at only five hundred and forty-four
thousand a year. It is certainly now more than seven times as great
as the larger of these two sums. The average rent of the land has not,
according to any estimate, increased proportionally. It follows that
the rectors and vicars must have been, as compared with the neighbouring
knights and squires, much poorer in the seventeenth than in the
nineteenth century.

The place of the clergyman in society had been completely changed by the
Reformation. Before that event, ecclesiastics had formed the majority
of the House of Lords, had, in wealth and splendour, equalled, and
sometimes outshone, the greatest of the temporal barons, and had
generally held the highest civil offices. Many of the Treasurers, and
almost all the Chancellors of the Plantagenets were Bishops. The Lord
Keeper of the Privy Seal and the Master of the Rolls were ordinarily
churchmen. Churchmen transacted the most important diplomatic business.
Indeed all that large portion of the administration which rude and
warlike nobles were incompetent to conduct was considered as especially
belonging to divines. Men, therefore, who were averse to the life of
camps, and who were, at the same time, desirous to rise in the state,
commonly received the tonsure. Among them were sons of all the most
illustrious families, and near kinsmen of the throne, Scroops and
Nevilles, Bourchiers, Staffords and Poles. To the religious houses
belonged the rents of immense domains, and all that large portion of
the tithe which is now in the hands of laymen. Down to the middle of the
reign of Henry the Eighth, therefore, no line of life was so attractive
to ambitious and covetous natures as the priesthood. Then came a violent
revolution. The abolition of the monasteries deprived the Church at once
of the greater part of her wealth, and of her predominance in the Upper
House of Parliament. There was no longer an Abbot of Glastonbury or
an Abbot of Reading, seated among the peers, and possessed of revenues
equal to those of a powerful Earl. The princely splendour of William of
Wykeham and of William of Waynflete had disappeared. The scarlet hat of
the Cardinal, the silver cross of the Legate, were no more. The clergy
had also lost the ascendency which is the natural reward of superior
mental cultivation. Once the circumstance that a man could read had
raised a presumption that he was in orders. But, in an age which
produced such laymen as William Cecil and Nicholas Bacon, Roger Ascham
and Thomas Smith, Walter Mildmay and Francis Walsingham, there was
no reason for calling away prelates from their dioceses to negotiate
treaties, to superintend the finances, or to administer justice. The
spiritual character not only ceased to be a qualification for high civil
office, but began to be regarded as a disqualification. Those worldly
motives, therefore, which had formerly induced so many able, aspiring,
and high born youths to assume the ecclesiastical habit, ceased to
operate. Not one parish in two hundred then afforded what a man of
family considered as a maintenance. There were still indeed prizes in
the Church: but they were few; and even the highest were mean, when
compared with the glory which had once surrounded the princes of the
hierarchy. The state kept by Parker and Grindal seemed beggarly to
those who remembered the imperial pomp of Wolsey, his palaces, which had
become the favorite abodes of royalty, Whitehall and Hampton Court, the
three sumptuous tables daily spread in his refectory, the forty-four
gorgeous copes in his chapel, his running footmen in rich liveries, and
his body guards with gilded poleaxes. Thus the sacerdotal office lost
its attraction for the higher classes. During the century which followed
the accession of Elizabeth, scarce a single person of noble descent took
orders. At the close of the reign of Charles the Second, two sons of
peers were Bishops; four or five sons of peers were priests, and held
valuable preferment: but these rare exceptions did not take away the
reproach which lay on the body. The clergy were regarded as, on the
whole, a plebeian class. [77] And, indeed, for one who made the figure
of a gentleman, ten were mere menial servants. A large proportion of
those divines who had no benefices, or whose benefices were too small to
afford a comfortable revenue, lived in the houses of laymen. It had
long been evident that this practice tended to degrade the priestly
character. Laud had exerted himself to effect a change; and Charles the
First had repeatedly issued positive orders that none but men of
high rank should presume to keep domestic chaplains. [78] But these
injunctions had become obsolete. Indeed during the domination of the
Puritan, many of the ejected ministers of the Church of England could
obtain bread and shelter only by attaching themselves to the households
of royalist gentlemen; and the habits which had been formed in those
times of trouble continued long after the reestablishment of monarchy
and episcopacy. In the mansions of men of liberal sentiments and
cultivated understandings, the chaplain was doubtless treated with
urbanity and kindness. His conversation, his literary assistance, his
spiritual advice, were considered as an ample return for his food, his
lodging, and his stipend. But this was not the general feeling of the
country gentlemen. The coarse and ignorant squire, who thought that it
belonged to his dignity to have grace said every day at his table by an
ecclesiastic in full canonicals, found means to reconcile dignity with
economy. A young Levite--such was the phrase then in use--might be had
for his board, a small garret, and ten pounds a year, and might not
only perform his own professional functions, might not only be the most
patient of butts and of listeners, might not only be always ready in
fine weather for bowls, and in rainy weather for shovelboard, but
might also save the expense of a gardener, or of a groom. Sometimes the
reverend man nailed up the apricots; and sometimes he curried the coach
horses. He cast up the farrier's bills. He walked ten miles with a
message or a parcel. He was permitted to dine with the family; but he
was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fill
himself with the corned beef and the carrots: but, as soon as the tarts
and cheesecakes made their appearance, he quitted his seat, and stood
aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great
part of which he had been excluded. [79]

Perhaps, after some years of service, he was presented to a living
sufficient to support him; but he often found it necessary to purchase
his preferment by a species of Simony, which furnished an inexhaustible
subject of pleasantry to three or four generations of scoffers. With his
cure he was expected to take a wife. The wife had ordinarily been in the
patron's service; and it was well if she was not suspected of standing
too high in the patron's favor. Indeed the nature of the matrimonial
connections which the clergymen of that age were in the habit of forming
is the most certain indication of the place which the order held in
the social system. An Oxonian, writing a few months after the death
of Charles the Second, complained bitterly, not only that the country
attorney and the country apothecary looked down with disdain on the
country clergyman but that one of the lessons most earnestly inculcated
on every girl of honourable family was to give no encouragement to a
lover in orders, and that, if any young lady forgot this precept, she
was almost as much disgraced as by an illicit amour. [80] Clarendon, who
assuredly bore no ill will to the priesthood, mentions it as a sign of
the confusion of ranks which the great rebellion had produced, that some
damsels of noble families had bestowed themselves on divines. [81] A
waiting woman was generally considered as the most suitable helpmate for
a parson. Queen Elizabeth, as head of the Church, had given what seemed
to be a formal sanction to this prejudice, by issuing special orders
that no clergyman should presume to espouse a servant girl, without
the consent of the master or mistress. [82] During several generations
accordingly the relation between divines and handmaidens was a theme
for endless jest; nor would it be easy to find, in the comedy of the
seventeenth century, a single instance of a clergyman who wins a spouse
above the rank of cook. [83] Even so late as the time of George the
Second, the keenest of all observers of life and manners, himself
a priest, remarked that, in a great household, the chaplain was the
resource of a lady's maid whose character had been blown upon, and who
was therefore forced to give up hopes of catching the steward. [84]

In general the divine who quitted his chaplainship for a benefice and
a wife found that he had only exchanged one class of vexations for
another. Hardly one living in fifty enabled the incumbent to bring up
a family comfortably. As children multiplied end grew, the household of
the priest became more and more beggarly. Holes appeared more and more
plainly in the thatch of his parsonage and in his single cassock. Often
it was only by toiling on his glebe, by feeding swine, and by loading
dungcarts, that he could obtain daily bread; nor did his utmost
exertions always prevent the bailiffs from taking his concordance and
his inkstand in execution. It was a white day on which he was admitted
into the kitchen of a great house, and regaled by the servants with
cold meat and ale. His children were brought up like the children of the
neighbouring peasantry. His boys followed the plough; and his girls went
out to service. [85] Study he found impossible: for the advowson of his
living would hardly have sold for a sum sufficient to purchase a good
theological library; and he might be considered as unusually lucky if
he had ten or twelve dogeared volumes among the pots and pans on his
shelves. Even a keen and strong intellect might be expected to rust in
so unfavourable a situation.

Assuredly there was at that time no lack in the English Church of
ministers distinguished by abilities and learning But it is to be
observed that these ministers were not scattered among the rural
population. They were brought together at a few places where the means
of acquiring knowledge were abundant, and where the opportunities of
vigorous intellectual exercise were frequent. [86] At such places were
to be found divines qualified by parts, by eloquence, by wide knowledge
of literature, of science, and of life, to defend their Church
victoriously against heretics and sceptics, to command the attention
of frivolous and worldly congregations, to guide the deliberations of
senates, and to make religion respectable, even in the most dissolute
of courts. Some laboured to fathom the abysses of metaphysical theology:
some were deeply versed in biblical criticism; and some threw light
on the darkest parts of ecclesiastical history. Some proved themselves
consummate masters of logic. Some cultivated rhetoric with such
assiduity and success that their discourses are still justly valued as
models of style. These eminent men were to be found, with scarcely a
single exception, at the Universities, at the great Cathedrals, or in
the capital. Barrow had lately died at Cambridge; and Pearson had gone
thence to the episcopal bench. Cudworth and Henry More were still living
there. South and Pococke, Jane and Aldrich, were at Oxford, Prideaux was
in the close of Norwich, and Whitby in the close of Salisbury. But it
was chiefly by the London clergy, who were always spoken of as a class
apart, that the fame of their profession for learning and eloquence was
upheld. The principal pulpits of the metropolis were occupied about this
time by a crowd of distinguished men, from among whom was selected a
large proportion of the rulers of the Church. Sherlock preached at the
Temple, Tillotson at Lincoln's Inn, Wake and Jeremy Collier at Gray's
Inn, Burnet at the Rolls, Stillingfleet at Saint Paul's Cathedral,
Patrick at Saint Paul's in Covent Garden, Fowler at Saint Giles's,
Cripplegate, Sharp at Saint Giles's in the Fields, Tenison at Saint
Martin's, Sprat at Saint Margaret's, Beveridge at Saint Peter's in
Cornhill. Of these twelve men, all of high note in ecclesiastical
history, ten became Bishops, and four Archbishops. Meanwhile almost the
only important theological works which came forth from a rural parsonage
were those of George Bull, afterwards Bishop of Saint David's; and Bull
never would have produced those works, had he not inherited an estate,
by the sale of which he was enabled to collect a library, such as
probably no other country clergyman in England possessed. [87]

Thus the Anglican priesthood was divided into two sections, which, in
acquirements, in manners, and in social position, differed widely from
each other. One section, trained for cities and courts, comprised men
familiar with all ancient and modern learning; men able to encounter
Hobbes or Bossuet at all the weapons of controversy; men who could, in
their sermons, set forth the majesty and beauty of Christianity with
such justness of thought, and such energy of language, that the indolent
Charles roused himself to listen and the fastidious Buckingham forgot
to sneer; men whose address, politeness, and knowledge of the world
qualified them to manage the consciences of the wealthy and noble; men
with whom Halifax loved to discuss the interests of empires, and from
whom Dryden was not ashamed to own that he had learned to write. [88]
The other section was destined to ruder and humbler service. It was
dispersed over the country, and consisted chiefly of persons not at
all wealthier, and not much more refined, than small farmers or upper
servants. Yet it was in these rustic priests, who derived but a scanty
subsistence from their tithe sheaves and tithe pigs, and who had not the
smallest chance of ever attaining high professional honours, that the
professional spirit was strongest. Among those divines who were the
boast of the Universities and the delight of the capital, and who had
attained, or might reasonably expect to attain, opulence and lordly
rank, a party, respectable in numbers, and more respectable in
character, leaned towards constitutional principles of government, lived
on friendly terms with Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, would
gladly have seen a full toleration granted to all Protestant sects, and
would even have consented to make alterations in the Liturgy, for the
purpose of conciliating honest and candid Nonconformists. But such
latitudinarianism was held in horror by the country parson. He took,
indeed, more pride in his ragged gown than his superiors in their lawn
and their scarlet hoods. The very consciousness that there was little in
his worldly circumstances to distinguish him from the villagers to
whom he preached led him to hold immoderately high the dignity of that
sacerdotal office which was his single title to reverence. Having
lived in seclusion, and having had little opportunity of correcting his
opinions by reading or conversation, he held and taught the doctrines
of indefeasible hereditary right, of passive obedience, and of
nonresistance, in all their crude absurdity. Having been long engaged in
a petty war against the neighbouring dissenters, he too often hated them
for the wrong which he had done them, and found no fault with the Five
Mile Act and the Conventicle Act, except that those odious laws had not
a sharper edge. Whatever influence his office gave him was exerted with
passionate zeal on the Tory side; and that influence was immense. It
would be a great error to imagine, because the country rector was in
general not regarded as a gentleman, because he could not dare to aspire
to the hand of one of the young ladies at the manor house, because he
was not asked into the parlours of the great, but was left to drink and
smoke with grooms and butlers, that the power of the clerical body
was smaller than at present. The influence of a class is by no means
proportioned to the consideration which the members of that class
enjoy in their individual capacity. A Cardinal is a much more exalted
personage than a begging friar: but it would be a grievous mistake to
suppose that the College of Cardinals has exercised greater dominion
over the public mind of Europe than the Order of Saint Francis. In
Ireland, at present, a peer holds a far higher station in society than
a Roman Catholic priest: yet there are in Munster and Connaught few
counties where a combination of priests would not carry an election
against a combination of peers. In the seventeenth century the pulpit
was to a large portion of the population what the periodical press now
is. Scarce any of the clowns who came to the parish church ever saw a
Gazette or a political pamphlet. Ill informed as their spiritual pastor
might be, he was yet better informed than themselves: he had every
week an opportunity of haranguing them; and his harangues were never
answered. At every important conjuncture, invectives against the Whigs
and exhortations to obey the Lord's anointed resounded at once from many
thousands of pulpits; and the effect was formidable indeed. Of all the
causes which, after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, produced
the violent reaction against the Exclusionists, the most potent seems to
have been the oratory of the country clergy.

The power which the country gentleman and the country clergyman
exercised in the rural districts was in some measure counterbalanced by
the power of the yeomanry, an eminently manly and truehearted race. The
petty proprietors who cultivated their own fields with their own hands,
and enjoyed a modest competence, without affecting to have scutcheons
and crests, or aspiring to sit on the bench of justice, then formed a
much more important part of the nation than at present.
If we may trust
the best statistical writers of that age, not less than a hundred and
sixty thousand proprietors, who with their families must have made up
more than a seventh of the whole population, derived their subsistence
from little freehold estates. The average income of these small
landholders, an income mace up of rent, profit, and wages, was estimated
at between sixty and seventy pounds a year. It was computed that the
number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than the number
of those who farmed the land of others. [89] A large portion of
the yeomanry had, from the time of the Reformation, leaned towards
Puritanism, had, in the civil war, taken the side of the Parliament,
had, after the Restoration, persisted in hearing Presbyterian and
Independent preachers, had, at elections, strenuously supported the
Exclusionists and had continued even after the discovery of the Rye
House plot and the proscription of the Whig leaders, to regard Popery
and arbitrary power with unmitigated hostility.

Great as has been the change in the rural life of England since the
Revolution, the change which has come to pass in the cities is still
more amazing. At present above a sixth part of the nation is crowded
into provincial towns of more than thirty thousand inhabitants. In the
reign of Charles the second no provincial town in the kingdom contained
thirty thousand inhabitants; and only four provincial towns contained so
many as ten thousand inhabitants.

Next to the capital, but next at an immense distance, stood Bristol,
then the first English seaport, and Norwich, then the first English
manufacturing town. Both have since that time been far outstripped
by younger rivals; yet both have made great positive advances. The
population of Bristol has quadrupled. The population of Norwich has more
than doubled.

Pepys, who visited Bristol eight years after the Restoration, was struck
by the splendour of the city. But his standard was not high; for he
noted down as a wonder the circumstance that, in Bristol, a man might
look round him and see nothing but houses. It seems that, in no other
place with which he was acquainted, except London, did the buildings
completely shut out the woods and fields. Large as Bristol might then
appear, it occupied but a very small portion of the area on which it
now stands. A few churches of eminent beauty rose out of a labyrinth
of narrow lanes built upon vaults of no great solidity. If a coach or
a cart entered those alleys, there was danger that it would be wedged
between the houses, and danger also that it would break in the cellars.
Goods were therefore conveyed about the town almost exclusively in
trucks drawn by dogs; and the richest inhabitants exhibited their
wealth, not by riding in gilded carriages, but by walking the streets
with trains of servants in rich liveries, and by keeping tables loaded
with good cheer. The pomp of the christenings and burials far exceeded
what was seen at any other place in England. The hospitality of the city
was widely renowned, and especially the collations with which the sugar
refiners regaled their visitors. The repast was dressed in the furnace,
and was accompanied by a rich beverage made of the best Spanish wine,
and celebrated over the whole kingdom as Bristol milk. This luxury was
supported by a thriving trade with the North American plantations and
with the West Indies. The passion for colonial traffic was so strong
that there was scarcely a small shopkeeper in Bristol who had not a
venture on board of some ship bound for Virginia or the Antilles. Some
of these ventures indeed were not of the most honourable kind. There
was, in the Transatlantic possessions of the crown, a great demand for
labour; and this demand was partly supplied by a system of crimping and
kidnapping at the principal English seaports. Nowhere was this system
in such active and extensive operation as at Bristol. Even the first
magistrates of that city were not ashamed to enrich themselves by so
odious a commerce. The number of houses appears, from the returns of the
hearth money, to have been in the year 1685, just five thousand three
hundred. We can hardly suppose the number of persons in a house to have
been greater than in the city of London; and in the city of London we
learn from the best authority that there were then fifty-five persons
to ten houses. The population of Bristol must therefore have been about
twenty-nine thousand souls. [90]

Norwich was the capital of a large and fruitful province. It was the
residence of a Bishop and of a Chapter. It was the chief seat of the
chief manufacture of the realm. Some men distinguished by learning and
science had recently dwelt there and no place in the kingdom, except the
capital and the Universities, had more attractions for the curious. The
library, the museum, the aviary, and the botanical garden of Sir Thomas
Browne, were thought by Fellows of the Royal Society well worthy of a
long pilgrimage. Norwich had also a court in miniature. In the heart
of the city stood an old palace of the Dukes of Norfolk, said to be the
largest town house in the kingdom out of London. In this mansion, to
which were annexed a tennis court, a bowling green, and a wilderness
stretching along the banks of the Wansum, the noble family of
Howard frequently resided, and kept a state resembling that of petty
sovereigns. Drink was served to guests in goblets of pure gold. The very
tongs and shovels were of silver. Pictures by Italian masters adorned
the walls. The cabinets were filled with a fine collection of gems
purchased by that Earl of Arundel whose marbles are now among the
ornaments of Oxford. Here, in the year 1671, Charles and his court were
sumptuously entertained. Here, too, all comers were annually welcomed,
from Christmas to Twelfth Night. Ale flowed in oceans for the populace.
Three coaches, one of which had been built at a cost of five hundred
pounds to contain fourteen persons, were sent every afternoon round
the city to bring ladies to the festivities; and the dances were always
followed by a luxurious banquet. When the Duke of Norfolk came to
Norwich, he was greeted like a King returning to his capital. The bells
of the Cathedral and of St. Peter Mancroft were rung: the guns of
the castle were fired; and the Mayor and Aldermen waited on their
illustrious fellow citizen with complimentary addresses. In the year
1693 the population of Norwich was found by actual enumeration, to be
between twenty-eight and twenty-nine thousand souls. [91]

Far below Norwich, but still high in dignity and importance, were some
other ancient capitals of shires. In that age it was seldom that a
country gentleman went up with his family to London. The county town was
his metropolis. He sometimes made it his residence during part of the
year. At all events, he was often attracted thither by business and
pleasure, by assizes, quarter sessions, elections, musters of militia,
festivals, and races. There were the halls where the judges, robed
in scarlet and escorted by javelins and trumpets, opened the King's
commission twice a year. There were the markets at which the corn, the
cattle, the wool, and the hops of the surrounding country were exposed
to sale. There were the great fairs to which merchants came clown from
London, and where the rural dealer laid in his annual stores of sugar,
stationery, cutlery, and muslin. There were the shops at which the best
families of the neighbourhood bought grocery and millinery. Some of
these places derived dignity from interesting historical recollections,
from cathedrals decorated by all the art and magnificence of the middle
ages, from palaces where a long succession of prelates had dwelt, from
closes surrounded by the venerable abodes of deans and canons, and from
castles which had in the old time repelled the Nevilles or de Veres, and
which bore more recent traces of the vengeance of Rupert or of Cromwell.

Conspicuous amongst these interesting cities were York, the capital
of the north, and Exeter, the capital of the west. Neither can have
contained much more than ten thousand inhabitants. Worcester, the queen
of the cider land had but eight thousand; Nottingham probably as many.
Gloucester, renowned for that resolute defence which had been fatal to
Charles the First, had certainly between four and five thousand; Derby
not quite four thousand. Shrewsbury was the chief place of an extensive
and fertile district. The Court of the Marches of Wales was held there.
In the language of the gentry many miles round the Wrekin, to go to
Shrewsbury was to go to town. The provincial wits and beauties imitated,
as well as they could, the fashions of Saint James's Park, in the walks
along the side of the Severn. The inhabitants were about seven thousand.
[92]

The population of every one of these places has, since the Revolution,
much more than doubled. The population of some has multiplied sevenfold.
The streets have been almost entirely rebuilt. Slate has succeeded to
thatch, and brick to timber. The pavements and the lamps, the display
of wealth in the principal shops, and the luxurious neatness of the
dwellings occupied by the gentry would, in the seventeenth century, have
seemed miraculous. Yet is the relative importance of the old capitals of
counties by no means what it was. Younger towns, towns which are
rarely or never mentioned in our early history and which sent no
representatives to our early Parliaments, have, within the memory
of persons still living, grown to a greatness which this generation
contemplates with wonder and pride, not unaccompanied by awe and
anxiety.

The most eminent of these towns were indeed known in the seventeenth
century as respectable seats of industry. Nay, their rapid progress
and their vast opulence were then sometimes described in language which
seems ludicrous to a man who has seen their present grandeur. One of the
most populous and prosperous among them was Manchester. Manchester
had been required by the Protector to send one representative to his
Parliament, and was mentioned by writers of the time of Charles the
Second as a busy and opulent place. Cotton had, during half a century,
been brought thither from Cyprus and Smyrna; but the manufacture was in
its infancy. Whitney had not yet taught how the raw material might be
furnished in quantities almost fabulous. Arkwright had not yet taught
how it might be worked up with a speed and precision which seem magical.
The whole annual import did not, at the end of the seventeenth century,
amount to two millions of pounds, a quantity which would now hardly
supply the demand of forty-eight hours. That wonderful emporium, which
in population and wealth far surpassed capitals so much renowned as
Berlin, Madrid, and Lisbon, was then a mean and ill built market town
containing under six thousand people. It then had not a single press. It
now supports a hundred printing establishments. It then had not a single
coach. It now Supports twenty coach makers. [93]

Leeds was already the chief seat of the woollen manufactures of
Yorkshire; but the elderly inhabitants could still remember the time
when the first brick house, then and long after called the Red House,
was built. They boasted loudly of their increasing wealth, and of the
immense sales of cloth which took place in the open air on the bridge.
Hundreds, nay thousands of pounds, had been paid down in the course of
one busy market day. The rising importance of Leeds had attracted
the notice of successive governments. Charles the First had granted
municipal privileges to the town. Oliver had invited it to send one
member to the House of Commons. But from the returns of the hearth money
it seems certain that the whole population of the borough, an extensive
district which contains many hamlets, did not, in the reign of Charles
the Second, exceed seven thousand souls. In 1841 there were more than a
hundred and fifty thousand. [94]

About a day's journey south of Leeds, on the verge of a wild moorland
tract, lay an ancient manor, now rich with cultivation, then barren and
unenclosed, which was known by the name of Hallamshire. Iron abounded
there; and, from a very early period, the rude whittles fabricated there
had been sold all over the kingdom. They had indeed been mentioned by
Geoffrey Chaucer in one of his Canterbury Tales. But the manufacture
appears to have made little progress during the three centuries which
followed his time. This languor may perhaps be explained by the fact
that the trade was, during almost the whole of this long period, subject
to such regulations as the lord and his court feet thought fit to
impose. The more delicate kinds of cutlery were either made in the
capital or brought from the Continent. Indeed it was not till the reign
of George the First that the English surgeons ceased to import from
France those exquisitely fine blades which are required for operations
on the human frame. Most of the Hallamshire forges were collected in a
market town which had sprung up near the castle of the proprietor, and
which, in the reign of James the First, had been a singularly miserable
place, containing about two thousand inhabitants, of whom a third were
half starved and half naked beggars. It seems certain from the parochial
registers that the population did not amount to four thousand at the
end of the reign of Charles the Second. The effects of a species of toil
singularly unfavourable to the health and vigour of the human frame were
at once discerned by every traveller. A large proportion of the
people had distorted limbs. This is that Sheffield which now, with its
dependencies, contains a hundred and twenty thousand souls, and which
sends forth its admirable knives, razors, and lancets to the farthest
ends of the world. [95]

Birmingham had not been thought of sufficient importance to return a
member to Oliver's Parliament. Yet the manufacturers of Birmingham were
already a busy and thriving race. They boasted that their hardware was
highly esteemed, not indeed as now, at Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and
Timbuctoo, but in London, and even as far off as Ireland. They had
acquired a less honourable renown as coiners of bad money. In allusion
to their spurious groats, some Tory wit had fixed on demagogues,
who hypocritically affected zeal against Popery, the nickname of
Birminghams. Yet in 1685 the population, which is now little less
than two hundred thousand, did not amount to four thousand. Birmingham
buttons were just beginning to be known: of Birmingham guns nobody had
yet heard; and the place whence, two generations later, the magnificent
editions of Baskerville went forth to astonish all the librarians
of Europe, did not contain a single regular shop where a Bible or an
almanack could be bought. On Market days a bookseller named Michael
Johnson, the father of the great Samuel Johnson, came over from
Lichfield, and opened stall during a few hours. This supply of
literature was long found equal to the demand. [96]

These four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve especial
mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the populous and opulent
hives of industry which, a hundred and fifty years ago, were hamlets
without parish churches, or desolate moors, inhabited only by grouse and
wild deer. Nor has the change been less signal in those outlets by which
the products of the English looms and forges are poured forth over
the whole world. At present Liverpool contains more than three hundred
thousand inhabitants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to
between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her custom house has
been repeatedly paid in one year a sum more than thrice as great as
the whole income of the English crown in 1685. The receipts of her post
office, even since the great reduction of the duty, exceed the sum
which the postage of the whole kingdom yielded to the Duke of York. Her
endless docks, quays, and warehouses are among the wonders of the world.
Yet even those docks and quays and warehouses seem hardly to suffice for
the gigantic trade of the Mersey; and already a rival city is growing
fast on the opposite shore. In the days of Charles the Second Liverpool
was described as a rising town which had recently made great advances,
and which maintained a profitable intercourse with Ireland and with the
sugar colonies. The customs had multiplied eight-fold within sixteen
years, and amounted to what was then considered as the immense sum of
fifteen thousand pounds annually. But the population can hardly have
exceeded four thousand: the shipping was about fourteen hundred tons,
less than the tonnage of a single modern Indiaman of the first class,
and the whole number of seamen belonging to the port cannot be estimated
at more than two hundred. [97]

Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth is created and
accumulated. Not less rapid has been the progress of towns of a
very different kind, towns in which wealth, created and accumulated
elsewhere, is expended for purposes of health and recreation. Some of
the most remarkable of these gay places have sprung into existence since
the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham is now a greater city than any which
the kingdom contained in the seventeenth century, London alone excepted.
But in the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth,
Cheltenham was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural parish
lying under the Cotswold Hills, and affording good ground both for
tillage and pasture. Corn grew and cattle browsed over the space now
covered by that long succession of streets and villas. [98] Brighton was
described as a place which had once been thriving, which had possessed
many small fishing barks, and which had, when at the height of
prosperity, contained above two thousand inhabitants, but which was
sinking fast into decay. The sea was gradually gaining on the buildings,
which at length almost entirely disappeared. Ninety years ago the ruins
of an old fort were to be seen lying among the pebbles and seaweed
on the beach; and ancient men could still point out the traces of
foundations on a spot where a street of more than a hundred huts had
been swallowed up by the waves. So desolate was the place after this
calamity, that the vicarage was thought scarcely worth having. A few
poor fishermen, however, still continued to dry their nets on those
cliffs, on which now a town, more than twice as large and populous
as the Bristol of the Stuarts, presents, mile after mile, its gay and
fantastic front to the sea. [99]

England, however, was not, in the seventeenth century, destitute of
watering places. The gentry of Derbyshire and of the neighbouring
counties repaired to Buxton, where they were lodged in low rooms under
bare rafters, and regaled with oatcake, and with a viand which the hosts
called mutton, but which the guests suspected to be dog. A single good
house stood near the spring. [100] Tunbridge Wells, lying within a
day's journey of the capital, and in one of the richest and most highly
civilised parts of the kingdom, had much greater attractions. At present
we see there a town which would, a hundred and sixty years ago, have
ranked, in population, fourth or fifth among the towns of England. The
brilliancy of the shops and the luxury of the private dwellings far
surpasses anything that England could then show. When the court, soon
after the Restoration, visited Tunbridge Wells, there was no town:
but, within a mile of the spring, rustic cottages, somewhat cleaner and
neater than the ordinary cottages of that time, were scattered over the
heath. Some of these cabins were movable and were carried on sledges
from one part of the common to another. To these huts men of fashion,
wearied with the din and smoke of London, sometimes came in the summer
to breathe fresh air, and to catch a glimpse of rural life. During the
season a kind of fair was daily held near the fountain. The wives and
daughters of the Kentish farmers came from the neighbouring villages
with cream, cherries, wheatears, and quails. To chaffer with them,
to flirt with them, to praise their straw hats and tight heels, was a
refreshing pastime to voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses and
maids of honour. Milliners, toymen, and jewellers came down from London,
and opened a bazaar under the trees. In one booth the politician might
find his coffee and the London Gazette; in another were gamblers playing
deep at basset; and, on fine evenings, the fiddles were in attendance
and there were morris dances on the elastic turf of the bowling green.
In 1685 a subscription had just been raised among those who frequented
the wells for building a church, which the Tories, who then domineered
everywhere, insisted on dedicating to Saint Charles the Martyr. [101]

But at the head of the English watering places, without a rival. was
Bath. The springs of that city had been renowned from the days of the
Romans. It had been, during many centuries, the seat of a Bishop. The
sick repaired thither from every part of the realm. The King sometimes
held his court there. Nevertheless, Bath was then a maze of only four or
five hundred houses, crowded within an old wall in the vicinity of the
Avon. Pictures of what were considered as the finest of those houses are
still extant, and greatly resemble the lowest rag shops and pothouses of
Ratcliffe Highway. Travellers indeed complained loudly of the narrowness
and meanness of the streets. That beautiful city which charms even eyes
familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and Palladio, and which the
genius of Anstey and of Smollett, of Frances Burney and of Jane Austen,
has made classic ground, had not begun to exist. Milsom Street itself
was an open field lying far beyond the walls; and hedgerows intersected
the space which is now covered by the Crescent and the Circus. The poor
patients to whom the waters had been recommended lay on straw in a place
which, to use the language of a contemporary physician, was a covert
rather than a lodging. As to the comforts and luxuries which were to be
found in the interior of the houses of Bath by the fashionable visitors
who resorted thither in search of health or amusement, we possess
information more complete and minute than can generally be obtained
on such subjects. A writer who published an account of that city about
sixty years after the Revolution has accurately described the changes
which had taken place within his own recollection. He assures us that,
in his younger days, the gentlemen who visited the springs slept in
rooms hardly as good as the garrets which he lived to see occupied
by footmen. The floors of the dining rooms were uncarpeted, and were
coloured brown with a wash made of soot and small beer, in order to hide
the dirt. Not a wainscot was painted. Not a hearth or a chimneypiece
was of marble. A slab of common free-stone and fire irons which had cost
from three to four shillings were thought sufficient for any fireplace.
The best-apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and were
furnished with rushbottomed chairs. Readers who take an interest in the
progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be grateful to the
humble topographer who has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish
that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few
pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose
of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors
looked. [102]

The position of London, relatively to the other towns of the empire,
was, in the time of Charles the Second, far higher than at present. For
at present the population of London is little more than six times the
population of Manchester or of Liverpool. In the days of Charles the
Second the population of London was more than seventeen times the
population of Bristol or of Norwich. It may be doubted whether any other
instance can be mentioned of a great kingdom in which the first city
was more than seventeen times as large as the second. There is reason to
believe that, in 1685, London had been, during about half a century, the
most populous capital in Europe. The inhabitants, who are now at least
nineteen hundred thousand, were then probably little more shall half a
million. [103] London had in the world only one commercial rival, now
long ago outstripped, the mighty and opulent Amsterdam. English writers
boasted of the forest of masts and yardarms which covered the river from
the Bridge to the Tower, and of the stupendous sums which were collected
at the Custom House in Thames Street. There is, indeed, no doubt that
the trade of the metropolis then bore a far greater proportion than at
present to the whole trade of the country; yet to our generation the
honest vaunting of our ancestors must appear almost ludicrous. The
shipping which they thought incredibly great appears not to have
exceeded seventy thousand tons. This was, indeed, then more than a third
of the whole tonnage of the kingdom, but is now less than a fourth of
the tonnage of Newcastle, and is nearly equalled by the tonnage of the
steam vessels of the Thames.

The customs of London amounted, in 1685, to about three hundred and
thirty thousand pounds a year. In our time the net duty paid annually,
at the same place, exceeds ten millions. [104]

Whoever examines the maps of London which were published towards the
close of the reign of Charles the Second will see that only the nucleus
of the present capital then existed. The town did not, as now, fade
by imperceptible degrees into the country. No long avenues of villas,
embowered in lilacs and laburnums, extended from the great centre of
wealth and civilisation almost to the boundaries of Middlesex and far
into the heart of Kent and Surrey. In the east, no part of the immense
line of warehouses and artificial lakes which now stretches from the
Tower to Blackwall had even been projected. On the west, scarcely one
of those stately piles of building which are inhabited by the noble and
wealthy was in existence; and Chelsea, which is now peopled by more than
forty thousand human beings, was a quiet country village with about
a thousand inhabitants. [105] On the north, cattle fed, and sportsmen
wandered with dogs and guns, over the site of the borough of Marylebone,
and over far the greater part of the space now covered by the boroughs
of Finsbury and of the Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a solitude;
and poets loved to contrast its silence and repose with the din and
turmoil of the monster London. [106] On the south the capital is
now connected with its suburb by several bridges, not inferior in
magnificence and solidity to the noblest works of the Caesars. In 1685,
a single line of irregular arches, overhung by piles of mean and crazy
houses, and garnished, after a fashion worthy of the naked barbarians of
Dahomy, with scores of mouldering heads, impeded the navigation of the
river.

Of the metropolis, the City, properly so called, was the most important
division. At the time of the Restoration it had been built, for the most
part, of wood and plaster; the few bricks that were used were ill baked;
the booths where goods were exposed to sale projected far into the
streets, and were overhung by the upper stories.