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The death of Charles and the strong measures which led to it raised Cromwell to
a height of power fatal to the infant Commonwealth. No men occupy so splendid a
place in history as those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican
institutions. Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of the most
seductive and dazzling kind. In nations broken to the curb, in nations long
accustomed to be transferred from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent
qualities may easily gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a
conspiracy of eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent senator or a
brutal soldier on the throne of the Roman world. Similar revolutions have often
occurred in the despotic states of Asia. But a community which has heard the
voice of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberty, in which the merits of
statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed, in which obedience is paid, not
to persons, but to laws, in which magistrates are regarded, not as the lords,
but as the servants of the public, in which the excitement of a party is a
necessary of life, in which political warfare is reduced to a system of tactics;
such a community is not easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burden may easily
be managed by a new master. But will the wild ass submit to the bonds? Will the
unicorn serve and abide by the crib? Will leviathan hold out his nostrils to the
book? The mythological conqueror of the East, whose enchantments reduced wild
beasts to the tameness of domestic cattle, and who harnessed lions and tigers to
his chariot, is but an imperfect type of those extraordinary minds which have
thrown a spell on the fierce spirits of nations unaccustomed to control, and
have compelled raging factions to obey their reins and swell their triumph. The
enterprise, be it good or bad, is one which requires a truly great man. It
demands courage, activity, energy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous virtues, or
vices so splendid and alluring as to resemble virtues.
Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small and a
very remarkable class. Parents of tyranny, heirs of freedom, kings among
citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the characteristics of
the system which springs from them, and those of the system from which they have
sprung. Their reigns shine with a double light, the last and dearest rays of
departing freedom mingled with the first and brightest glories of empire in its
dawn. The high qualities of such a prince lend to despotism itself a charm drawn
from the liberty under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed. He
resembles an European who settles within the Tropics, and carries thither the
strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more propitious to the
constitution. He differs as widely from princes nursed in the purple of imperial
cradles, as the companions of Gama from their dwarfish and imbecile progeny,
which, born in a climate unfavorable to its growth and beauty, degenerates more
and more, at every descent, from the qualities of the original conquerors.
In this class three men stand pre-eminent, Caesar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte. The
highest place in this remarkable triumvirate belongs undoubtedly to Caesar. He
united the talents of Bonaparte to those of Cromwell; and he possessed also,
what neither Cromwell nor Bonaparte possessed, learning, taste, wit, eloquence,
the sentiments and the manners of an accomplished gentleman.
Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hallam has instituted a parallel, scarcely
less ingenious than that which Burke has drawn between Richard Coeur de Lion and
Charles the Twelfth of Sweden. In this parallel, however, and indeed throughout
his work, we think that he hardly gives Cromwell fair measure. "Cromwell," says
he, "far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or
any desire to place his renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social
institutions." The difference in this respect, we conceive, was not in the
character of the men, but in the character of the revolutions by means of which
they rose to power. The civil war in England had been undertaken to defend and
restore; the republicans of France set themselves to destroy. In England, the
principles of the common law had never been disturbed, and most even of its
forms had been held sacred. In France, the law and its ministers had been swept
away together. In France, therefore, legislation necessarily became the first
business of the first settled government which rose on the ruins of the old
system. The admirers of Inigo Jones have always maintained that his works are
inferior to those of Sir Christopher Wren, only because the great fire of London
gave Wren such a field for the display of his powers as no architect in the
history of the world ever possessed. Similar allowance must be made for
Cromwell. If he erected little that was new, it was because there had been no
general devastation to clear a space for him. As it was, he reformed the
representative system in a most judicious manner. He rendered the administration
of justice uniform throughout the island. We will quote a passage from his
speech to the Parliament in September 1656, which contains, we think, simple and
rude as the diction is, stronger indications of a legislative mind, than are to
be found in the whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or
since.
"There is one general grievance in the nation. It is the law. I think, I may say
it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had, or that the nation
has had for these many years. Truly, I could be particular as to the executive
part, to the administration; but that would trouble you. But the truth of it is,
there are wicked and abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To
hang a man for sixpence, threepence, I know not what,--to hang for a trifle, and
pardon murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill framing of it.
I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and to see men lose
their lives for petty matters! This is a thing that God will reckon for; and I
wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you have an opportunity
to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join with you in it."
Mr. Hallam truly says that, though it is impossible to rank Cromwell with
Napoleon as a general, "yet his exploits were as much above the level of his
contemporaries, and more the effects of an original uneducated capacity."
Bonaparte was trained in the best military schools; the army which he led to
Italy was one of the finest that ever existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the
prime of his manhood in a civil situation. He never looked on war till he was
more than forty years old. He had first to form himself, and then to form his
troops. Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best
disciplined, the most orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war, that
Europe had seen. He called this body into existence. He led it to conquest. He
never fought a battle without gaining it. He never gained a battle without
annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his victories were not the highest
glory of his military system. The respect which his troops paid to property,
their attachment to the laws and religion of their country, their submission to
the civil power, their temperance, their intelligence, their industry, are
without parallel. It was after the Restoration that the spirit which their great
leader had infused into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the
established government, an established government which had no means of
enforcing obedience, fifty thousand soldiers whose backs no enemy had ever seen,
either in domestic or in continental war, laid down their arms, and retired into
the mass of the people, thenceforward to be distinguished only by superior
diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits, of peace, from the other
members of the community which they had saved.
In the general spirit and character of his administration, we think Cromwell far
superior to Napoleon. "In the civil government," says Mr. Hallam, "there can be
no adequate parallel between one who had sucked only the dregs of a besotted
fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of reason and philosophy were open."
These expressions, it seems to us, convey the highest eulogium on our great
countryman. Reason and philosophy did not teach the conqueror of Europe to
command his passions, or to pursue, as a first object, the happiness of his
people. They did not prevent him from risking his fame and his power in a
frantic contest against the principles of human nature and the laws of the
physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty of the sea. They
did not exempt him from the influence of that most pernicious of superstitions,
a presumptuous fatalism. They did not preserve hint from the inebriation of
prosperity, or restrain him from indecent querulousness in adversity. On the
other hand, the fanaticism of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable
undertakings, or confused his perception of the public good. Our countryman,
inferior to Bonaparte in invention, was far superior to him in wisdom. The
French Emperor is among conquerors what Voltaire is among writers, a miraculous
child. His splendid genius was frequently clouded by fits of humor as absurdly
perverse as those of the pet of the nursery, who quarrels with his food, and
dashes his playthings to pieces. Cromwell was emphatically a man. He possessed,
in an eminent degree, that masculine and full-grown robustness of mind, that
equally diffused intellectual health, which, if our national partiality does not
mislead us, has peculiarly characterized the great men of England. Never was any
ruler so conspicuously born for sovereignty. The cup which has intoxicated
almost all others, sobered him. His spirit, restless from its own buoyancy in a
lower sphere, reposed in majestic placidity as soon as it had reached the level
congenial to it. He had nothing in common with that large class of men who
distinguish themselves in subordinate posts, and whose incapacity becomes
obvious as soon as the public voice summons them to take the lead. Rapidly as
his fortunes grew, his mind expanded more rapidly still. Insignificant as a
private citizen, he was a great general; he was a still greater prince. Napoleon
had a theatrical manner, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-room
was blended with the ceremony of the old Court of Versailles. Cromwell, by the
confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanor the simple and natural
nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin nor vain of his elevation, of a
man who had found his proper place in society, and who felt secure that he was
competent to fill it. Easy, even to familiarity, where his own dignity was
concerned, he was punctilious only for his country. His own character he left to
take care of itself; he left it to be defended by his victories in war, and his
reforms in peace. But he was a jealous and implacable guardian of the public
honor. He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult him in the gallery of Whitehall, and
revenged himself only by liberating him and giving him a dinner. But he was
prepared to risk the chances of war to avenge the blood of a private Englishman.
No sovereign ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best qualities
of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings and interests of
his people. He was sometimes driven to arbitrary measures; but he had a high,
stout, honest, English heart. Hence it was that he loved to surround his throne
with such men as Hale and Blake. Hence it was that he allowed so large a share
of political liberty to his subjects, and that, even when an opposition
dangerous to his power and to his person almost compelled him to govern by the
sword, he was still anxious to leave a germ from which, at a more favorable
season, free institutions might spring. We firmly believe that, if his first
Parliament had not commenced its debates by disputing his title, his government
would have been as mild at home as it was energetic and able abroad. He was a
soldier; he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of an impure or selfish
kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his country into continental
hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle the restless factions which he
ruled, by the splendor of his victories. Some of his enemies have sneeringly
remarked, that in the successes obtained under his administration he had no
personal share; as if a man who had raised himself from obscurity to empire
solely by his military talents could have any unworthy reason for shrinking from
military enterprise. This reproach is his highest glory. In the success of the
English navy he could have no selfish interest. Its triumphs added nothing to
his fame; its increase added nothing to his means of overawing his enemies; its
great leader was not his friend. Yet he took a peculiar pleasure in encouraging
that noble service which, of all the instruments employed by an English
government, is the most impotent for mischief, and the most powerful for good.
His administration was glorious, but with no vulgar glory. It was not one of
those periods of overstrained and convulsive exertion which necessarily produce
debility and languor. Its energy was natural, healthful, temperate. He placed
England at the head of the Protestant interest, and in the first rank of
Christian powers. He taught every nation to value her friendship and to dread
her enmity. But he did not squander her resources in a vain attempt to invest
her with that supremacy which no power, in the modern system of Europe, can
safely affect, or can long retain.
This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the banners of
the Commonwealth in triumph to distant capitals, if he did not adorn Whitehall
with the spoils of the Stadthouse and the Louvre, if he did not portion out
Flanders and Germany into principalities for his kinsmen and his generals, he
did not, on the other hand, see his country overrun by the armies of nations
which his ambition had provoked. He did not drag out the last years of his life
an exile and a prisoner, in an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous gaoler,
raging with the impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of
departed glory. He went down to his grave in the fullness of power and fame; and
he left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and prudence
would have retained.
But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, the opinions which we have been
expressing would, we believe, now have formed the orthodox creed of good
Englishmen. We might now be writing under the government of his Highness Oliver
the Fifth or Richard the Fourth, Protector, by the grace of God, of the
Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto
belonging. The form of the great founder of the dynasty, on horseback, as when
he led the charge at Naseby or on foot, as when he took the mace from the table
of the Commons, would adorn our squares and over look our public offices from
Charing Cross; and sermons in his praise would be duly preached on his lucky
day, the third of September, by court-chaplains, guiltless of the abomination of
the surplice.
But, though his memory has not been taken under the patronage of any party,
though every device has been used to blacken it, though to praise him would long
have been a punishable crime, truth and merit at last prevail. Cowards who had
trembled at the very sound of his name, tools of office, who, like Downing, had
been proud of the honor of lacqueying his coach, might insult him in loyal
speeches and addresses. Venal poets might transfer to the king the same eulogies
little the worse for wear, which they had bestowed on the Protector. A fickle
multitude might crowd to shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of the
greatest Prince and Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch cannon startled an
effeminate tyrant in his own palace, when the conquests which had been won by
the armies of Cromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of Charles, when
Englishmen were sent to fight under foreign banners, against the independence of
Europe and the Protestant religion, many honest hearts swelled in secret at the
thought of one who had never suffered his country to be ill-used by any but
himself. It must indeed have been difficult for any Englishman to see the
salaried viceroy of France, at the most important crisis of his fate, sauntering
through his haram, yawning and talking nonsense over a dispatch, or beslobbering
his brother and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection, without a
respectful and tender remembrance of him before whose genius the young pride of
Louis and the veteran craft of Mazarine had stood rebuked, who had humbled Spain
on the land and Holland on the sea, and whose imperial voice had arrested the
sails of the Libyan pirates and the persecuting fires of Rome. Even to the
present day his character, though constantly attacked, and scarcely ever
defended, is popular with the great body of our countrymen.
The most blamable act of his life was the execution of Charles. We have already
strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no means consider it as one which
attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of those who participated in
it. It was an unjust and injudicious display of violent party spirit; but it was
not a cruel or perfidious measure. It had all those features which distinguish
the errors of magnanimous and intrepid spirits from base and malignant crimes.
From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in almost perfect
harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book. The times which followed the
Restoration peculiarly require that unsparing impartiality which is his most
distinguishing virtue. No part of our history, during the last three centuries,
presents a spectacle of such general dreariness. The whole breed of our
statesmen seems to have degenerated; and their moral and intellectual littleness
strikes us with the more disgust, because we see it placed in immediate contrast
with the high and majestic qualities of the race which they succeeded. In the
great civil war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and amiable by
the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends displayed. Under
Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends was disgraced by means the most
cruel and sordid. The rage of faction succeeded to the love of liberty. Loyalty
died away into servility. We look in vain among the leading politicians of
either side for steadiness of principle, or even for that vulgar fidelity to
party which, in our time, it is esteemed infamous to violate. The inconsistency,
perfidy, and baseness, which the leaders constantly practiced, which their
followers defended, and which the great body of the people regarded, as it
seems, with little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible.
In the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe, have excited as much
astonishment.
Man, however, is always the same. And when so marked a difference appears
between two generations, it is certain that the solution may be found in their
respective circumstances. The principal statesmen of the reign of Charles the
Second were trained during the civil war and the revolutions which followed it.
Such a period is eminently favorable to the growth of quick and active talents.
It forms a class of men, shrewd, vigilant, inventive; of men whose dexterity
triumphs over the most perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging
instinct no sign of the times can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for
the firm and masculine virtues. The statesman who enters on his career at such a
time, can form no permanent connections, can make no accurate observations on
the higher parts of political science. Before he can attach himself to a party,
it is scattered. Before he can study the nature of a government, it is
overturned. The oath of abjuration comes close on the oath of allegiance. The
association which was subscribed yesterday is burned by the hangman to-day. In
the midst of the constant eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first
object of the adventurer. It is a task too hard for the strongest head to keep
itself from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl. Public spirit is out of the
question. A laxity of principle, without which no public man can be eminent or
even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous; and the whole nation looks
coolly on instances of apostasy which would startle the foulest turncoat of more
settled times.
The history of France since the Revolution affords some striking illustrations
of these remarks. The same man was a servant of the Republic, of Bonaparte, of
Lewis the Eighteenth, of Bonaparte again after his return from Elba, of Lewis
again after his return from Ghent. Yet all these manifold treasons by no means
seemed to destroy his influence, or even to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on
his character. We, to be sure, did not know what to make of him; but his
countrymen did not seem to be shocked; and in truth they had little right to be
shocked: for there was scarcely one Frenchman distinguished in the state or in
the army, who had not, according to the best of his talents and opportunities,
emulated the example. It was natural, too, that this should be the case. The
rapidity and violence with which change followed change in the affairs of France
towards the close of the last century had taken away the reproach of
inconsistency, unfixed the principles of public men, and produced in many minds
a general skepticism and indifference about principles of government.
No Englishman who has studied attentively the reign of Charles the Second, will
think himself entitled to indulge in any feelings of national superiority over
the Dictionnaire des Girouttes. Shaftesbury was surely a far less respectable
man than Talleyrand; and it would be injustice even to Fouche to compare him
with Lauderdale. Nothing, indeed, can more clearly show how low the standard of
political morality had fallen in this country than the fortunes of the two
British statesmen whom we have named. The government wanted a ruffian to carry
on the most atrocious system of misgovernment with which any nation was ever
cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by fire and sword, by the drowning of
women, by the frightful torture of the boot. And they found him among the chiefs
of the rebellion and the subscribers of the Covenant. The opposition looked for
a chief to head them in the most desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of
the Constitution, on any English administration; and they selected the minister
who had the deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal,
the counselor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war. The
whole political drama was of the same cast. No unity of plan, no decent
propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild and monstrous
harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant transformations and burlesque
contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans; Puritans turned Atheists; republicans
defending the divine right of kings; prostitute courtiers clamoring for the
liberties of the people; judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing
bribes from foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into
Episcopacy in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of
Popish noblemen and gentlemen in the other. Public opinion has its natural flux
and reflux. After a violent burst, there is commonly a reaction. But
vicissitudes so extraordinary as those which marked the reign of Charles the
Second can only be explained by supposing an utter want of principle in the
political world. On neither side was there fidelity enough to face a reverse.
Those honorable retreats from power which, in later days, parties have often
made, with loss, but still in good order, in firm union, with unbroken spirit
and formidable means of annoyance, were utterly unknown. As soon as a check took
place a total rout followed: arms and colors were thrown away. The vanquished
troops, like the Italian mercenaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
enlisted on the very field of battle, in the service of the conquerors. In a
nation proud of its sturdy justice and plain good sense, no party could be found
to take a firm middle stand between the worst of oppositions and the worst of
courts. When on charges as wild as Mother Goose's tales, on the testimony of
wretches who proclaimed themselves to be spies and traitors, and whom everybody
now believes to have been also liars and murderers, the offal of goals and
brothels, the leavings of the hangman's whip and shears, Catholics guilty of
nothing but their religion were led like sheep to the Protestant shambles, where
were the loyal Tory gentry and the passively obedient clergy? And where, when
the time of retribution came, when laws were strained and juries packed to
destroy the leaders of the Whigs, when charters were invaded, when Jeffreys and
Kirke were making Somersetshire what Lauderdale and Graham had made Scotland,
where were the ten thousand brisk boys of Shaftesbury, the members of ignoramus
juries, the wearers of the Polish medal? All-powerful to destroy others, unable
to save themselves, the members of the two parties oppressed and were oppressed,
murdered and were murdered, in their turn. No lucid interval occurred between
the frantic paroxysms of two contradictory illusions.
To the frequent changes of the government during the twenty years which had
preceded the Restoration, this unsteadiness is in a great measure to be
attributed. Other causes had also been at work. Even if the country had been
governed by the house of Cromwell or by the remains of the Long Parliament, the
extreme austerity of the Puritans would necessarily have produced a revulsion.
Towards the close of the Protectorate many signs indicated that a time of
license was at hand. But the restoration of Charles the Second rendered the
change wonderfully rapid and violent. Profligacy became a test of orthodoxy, and
loyalty a qualification for rank and office. A deep and general taint infected
the morals of the most influential classes, and spread itself through every
province of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the
principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the Court, gave
additional effect to the licentious example of the Court. We look in vain for
those qualities which lend a charm to the errors of high and ardent natures, for
the generosity, the tenderness, the chivalrous delicacy, which ennoble appetites
into passions, and impart to vice itself a portion of the majesty of virtue. The
excesses of that age remind us of the humors of a gang of footpads, reveling
with their favorite beauties at a flash-house. In the fashionable libertinism
there is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which can
be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that filthy and heartless
literature which encouraged it. One nobleman of great abilities wanders about as
a Merry-Andrew. Another harangues the mob stark naked from a window. A third
lays an ambush to cudgel a man who has offended him. A knot of gentlemen of high
rank and influence combine to push their fortunes at Court by circulating
stories intended to ruin an innocent girl, stones which had no foundation, and
which, if they had been true, would never have passed the lips of a man of
honor. A dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honor
by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of pandars and
buffoons pounce upon it, and carry it in triumph to the royal laboratory, where
his Majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the amusement of the assembly,
and probably of its father among the rest. The favorite Duchess stamps about
Whitehall, cursing and swearing. The ministers employ their time at the
council-board in making mouths at each other and taking off each other's
gestures for the amusement of the King. The Peers at a conference begin to
pommel each other and to tear collars and periwigs. A speaker in the House of
Commons gives offence to the Court. He is waylaid by a gang of bullies, and his
nose is cut to the bone. This ignominious dissoluteness, or rather, if we may
venture to designate it by the only proper word, blackguardism of feeling and
manners, could not but spread from private to public life. The cynical sneers,
and epicurean sophistry, which had driven honor and virtue from one part of the
character, extended their influence over every other. The second generation of
the statesmen of this reign were worthy pupils of the schools in which they had
been trained, of the gaming-table of Grammont, and the tiring-room of Nell. In
no other age could such a trifler as Buckingham have exercised any political
influence. In no other age could the path to power and glory have been thrown
open to the manifold infamies of Churchill.
The history of Churchill shows, more clearly perhaps than that of any other
individual, the malignity and extent of the corruption which had eaten into the
heart of the public morality. An English gentleman of good family attaches
himself to a Prince who has seduced his sister, and accepts rank and wealth as
the price of her shame and his own. He then repays by ingratitude the benefits
which he has purchased by ignominy, betrays his patron in a manner which the
best cause cannot excuse, and commits an act, not only of private treachery, but
of distinct military desertion. To his conduct at the crisis of the fate of
James, no service in modern times has, as far as we remember, furnished any
parallel. The conduct of Ney, scandalous enough no doubt, is the very
fastidiousness of honor in comparison of it. The perfidy of Arnold approaches it
most nearly. In our age and country no talents, no services, no party
attachments, could bear any man up under such mountains of infamy. Yet, even
before Churchill had performed those great actions which in some degree redeem
his character with posterity, the load lay very lightly on him. He had others in
abundance to keep him in countenance. Godolphin, Orford, Danby, the trimmer
Halifax, the renegade Sunderland, were all men of the same class.
Where such was the political morality of the noble and the wealthy, it may
easily be conceived that those professions which, even in the best times, are
peculiarly liable to corruption, were in a frightful state. Such a bench and
such a bar England has never seen. Jones, Scroggs, Jeffreys, North, Wright,
Sawyer, Williams, are to this day the spots and blemishes of our legal
chronicles. Differing in constitution and in situation, whether blustering or
cringing, whether persecuting Protestant or Catholics, they were equally
unprincipled and inhuman. The part which the Church played was not equally
atrocious; but it must have been exquisitely diverting to a scoffer. Never were
principles so loudly professed, and so shamelessly abandoned. The Royal
prerogative had been magnified to the skies in theological works. The doctrine
of passive obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits. The University
of Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate constitutionalists to the
flames. The accession of a Catholic King, the frightful cruelties committed in
the west of England, never shook the steady loyalty of the clergy. But did they
serve the King for naught? He laid his hand on them, and they cursed him to his
face. He touched the revenue of a college and the liberty of some prelates; and
the whole profession set up a yell worthy of Hugh Peters himself. Oxford sent
her plate to an invader with more alacrity than she had shown when Charles the
First requested it. Nothing was said about the wickedness of resistance till
resistance had done its work, till the anointed vicegerent of Heaven had been
driven away, and till it had become plain that he would never be restored, or
would be restored at least under strict limitations. The clergy went back, it
must be owned, to their old theory, as soon as they found that it would do them
no harm.
It is principally to the general baseness and profligacy of the times that
Clarendon is indebted for his high reputation. He was, in every respect, a man
unfit for his age, at once too good for it and too bad for it. He seemed to be
one of the ministers of Elizabeth, transplanted at once to a state of society
widely different from that in which the abilities of such ministers had been
serviceable. In the sixteenth century, the Royal prerogative had scarcely been
called in question. A Minister who held it high was in no danger, so long as he
used it well. That attachment to the Crown, that extreme jealousy of popular
encroachments, that love, half religious half political, for the Church, which,
from the beginning of the second session of the Long Parliament, showed itself
in Clarendon, and which his sufferings, his long residence in France, and his
high station in the government, served to strengthen, would a hundred years
earlier, have secured to him the favor of his sovereign without rendering him
odious to the people. His probity, his correctness in private life, his decency
of deportment, and his general ability, would not have misbecome a colleague of
Walsingham and Burleigh. But, in the times on which he was cast, his errors and
his virtues were alike out of place. He imprisoned men without trial. He was
accused of raising unlawful contributions on the people for the support of the
army. The abolition of the act which ensured the frequent holding of Parliaments
was one of his favorite objects. He seems to have meditated the revival of the
Star-Chamber and the High Commission Court. His zeal for the prerogative made
him unpopular; but it could not secure to him the favor of a master far more
desirous of ease and pleasure than of power. Charles would rather have lived in
exile and privacy, with abundance of money, a crowd of mimics to amuse him, and
a score of mistresses, than have purchased the absolute dominion of the world by
the privations and exertions to which Clarendon was constantly urging him. A
councilor who was always bringing him papers and giving him advice, and who
stoutly refused to compliment Lady Castlemaine and to carry messages to Mistress
Stewart, soon became more hateful to him than ever Cromwell had been. Thus,
considered by the people as an oppressor, by the Court as a censor, the Minister
fell from his high office with a ruin more violent and destructive than could
ever have been his fate, if he had either respected the principles of the
Constitution or flattered the vices of the King.
Mr. Hallam has formed, we think, a most correct estimate of the character and
administration of Clarendon. But he scarcely makes a sufficient allowance for
the wear and tear which honesty almost necessarily sustains in the friction of
political life, and which, in times so rough as those through which Clarendon
passed, must be very considerable. When these are fairly estimated, we think
that his integrity may be allowed to pass muster. A high-minded man he certainly
was not, either in public or in private affairs. His own account of his conduct
in the affair of his daughter is the most extraordinary passage in
autobiography. We except nothing even in the Confessions of Rousseau. Several
writers have taken a perverted and absurd pride in representing themselves as
detestable; but no other ever labored hard to make himself despicable and
ridiculous. In one important particular Clarendon showed as little regard to the
honor of his country as he had shown to that of his family. He accepted a
subsidy from France for the relief of Portugal. But this method of obtaining
money was afterwards practiced to a much greater extent and for objects much
less respectable, both by the Court and by the Opposition.
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