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Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1

T >> Thomas Babington Macaulay >> Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1




To represent Charles as a martyr in the cause of Episcopacy is
absurd. Those who put him to death cared as little for the
Assembly of Divines, as for the Convocation, and would, in all
probability, only have hated him the more if he had agreed to set
up the Presbyterian discipline. Indeed, in spite of the opinion
of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think that the attachment of
Charles to the Church of England was altogether political. Human
nature is, we admit, so capricious that there may be a single,
sensitive point, in a conscience which everywhere else is
callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange
scruples about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the
royal camp whose piety bore a great resemblance to that which is
ascribed to the King. We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant
Cavalier was hanged, after the Restoration, for a flagitious
burglary. At the gallows he told the crowd that his mind received
great consolation from one reflection: he had always taken off
his hat when he went into a church. The character of Charles
would scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed that he was
pricked in conscience after the manner of this worthy loyalist,
and that while violating all the first rules of Christian
morality, he was sincerely scrupulous about church-government.
But we acquit him of such weakness. In 1641 he deliberately
confirmed the Scotch Declaration which stated that the government
of the church by archbishops and bishops was contrary to the word
of God. In 1645, he appears to have offered to set up Popery in
Ireland. That a King who had established the Presbyterian religion
in one kingdom, and who was willing to establish the Catholic
religion in another, should have insurmountable scruples about
the ecclesiastical constitution of the third, is altogether
incredible. He himself says in his letters that he looks on
Episcopacy as a stronger support of monarchical power than even
the army. From causes which we have already considered, the
Established Church had been, since the Reformation, the great
bulwark of the prerogative. Charles wished, therefore, to
preserve it. He thought himself necessary both to the Parliament
and to the army. He did not foresee, till too late, that by
paltering with the Presbyterians, he should put both them and
himself into the power of a fiercer and more daring party. If he
had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood which still
cries to Heaven every thirtieth of January, for judgments only to
be averted by salt-fish and egg-sauce, would never have been
shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely
strain at the Covenant.

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 unfavourable 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 humour 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 characterised 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
demeanour 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 honour. 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 favourable 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 splendour 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 fulness 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 honour 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 despatch, 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 blameable 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 practised, 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 favourable 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 scepticism 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 counsellor 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 clamouring 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 honourable
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 colours 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 gaols 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.

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