Chapter XV: On the Reign of William III (1)

The Revolution is not to be considered as a mere effort of the nation on a pressing emergency to rescue itself from the violence of a particular monarch; much less as grounded upon the danger of the Anglican church, its emoluments, and dignities, from the bigotry of a hostile religion. It was rather the triumph of those principles which, in the language of the present day, are denominated liberal or constitutional, over those of absolute monarchy, or of monarchy not effectually controlled by stated boundaries. It was the termination of a contest between the regal power and that of parliament, which could not have been brought to so favourable an issue by any other means. But, while the chief renovation in the spirit of our government was likely to spring from breaking the line of succession, while no positive enactments would have sufficed to give security to freedom with the legitimate race of Stuart on the throne, it would have been most culpable, and even preposterous, to permit this occasion to pass by, without asserting and defining those rights and liberties, which the very indeterminate nature of the king's prerogative at common law, as well as the unequivocal extension it had lately received, must continually place in jeopardy. The House of Lords indeed, as I have observed in the last chapter, would have conferred the Crown on William and Mary, leaving the redress of grievances to future arrangement; and some eminent lawyers in the Commons, Maynard and Pollexfen, seem to have had apprehensions of keeping the nation too long in a state of anarchy.[152] But the great majority of the Commons wisely resolved to go at once to the root of the nation's grievances, and show their new sovereign that he was raised to the throne for the sake of those liberties, by violating which his predecessor had forfeited it.

_Declaration of rights._--The declaration of rights presented to the Prince of Orange by the Marquis of Halifax, as speaker of the Lords, in the presence of both houses, on the 18th of February, consists of three parts: a recital of the illegal and arbitrary acts committed by the late king, and of their consequent vote of abdication; a declaration, nearly following the words of the former part, that such enumerated acts are illegal; and a resolution, that the throne shall be filled by the Prince and Princess of Orange, according to the limitations mentioned in the last chapter. Thus the declaration of rights was indissolubly connected with the revolution-settlement, as its motive and its condition.

The Lords and Commons in this instrument declare: That the pretended power of suspending laws, and the execution of laws, by regal authority without consent of parliament, is illegal; That the pretended power of dispensing with laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal; That the commission for creating the late court of commissioners for ecclesiastical causes, and all other commissions and courts of the like nature, are illegal and pernicious; That levying of money for or to the use of the Crown, by pretence of prerogative without grant of parliament, for longer time or in any other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal; That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and that all commitments or prosecutions for such petitions are illegal; That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of parliament, is illegal; That the subjects which are protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their condition, and as allowed by law; That elections of members of parliament ought to be free; That the freedom of speech or debates, or proceedings in parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament; That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted; That juries ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and that jurors which pass upon men in trials of high treason ought to be freeholders; That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons, before conviction, are illegal and void; And that, for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening, and preserving of the laws, parliaments ought to be held frequently.[153]

_Bill of rights._--This declaration was, some months afterwards, confirmed by a regular act of the legislature in the bill of rights, which establishes at the same time the limitation of the Crown according to the vote of both houses, and adds the important provision; That all persons who shall hold communion with the church of Rome, or shall marry a papist, shall be excluded, and for ever incapable to possess, inherit, or enjoy the Crown and government of this realm; and in all such cases, the people of these realms shall be absolved from their allegiance, and the Crown shall descend to the next heir. This was as near an approach to a generalisation of the principle of resistance as could be admitted with any security for public order.

The bill of rights contained only one clause extending rather beyond the propositions laid down in the declaration. This relates to the dispensing power, which the Lords had been unwilling absolutely to condemn. They softened the general assertion of its illegality sent up from the other house, by inserting the words "as it has been exercised of late."[154] In the bill of rights therefore a clause was introduced, that no dispensation by non obstante to any statute should be allowed, except in such cases as should be specially provided for by a bill to be passed during the present session. This reservation went to satisfy the scruples of the Lords, who did not agree without difficulty to the complete abolition of a prerogative, so long recognised, and in many cases so convenient.[155] But the palpable danger of permitting it to exist in its indefinite state, subject to the interpretation of time-serving judges, prevailed with the Commons over this consideration of conveniency; and though in the next parliament the judges were ordered by the House of Lords to draw a bill for the king's dispensing in such cases wherein they should find it necessary, and for abrogating such laws as had been usually dispensed with and were become useless, the subject seems to have received no further attention.[156]

Except in this article of the dispensing prerogative, we cannot say, on comparing the bill of rights with what is proved to be the law by statutes, or generally esteemed to be such on the authority of our best writers, that it took away any legal power of the Crown, or enlarged the limits of popular and parliamentary privilege. The most questionable proposition, though at the same time one of the most important, was that which asserts the illegality of a standing army in time of peace, unless with consent of parliament. It seems difficult to perceive in what respect this infringed on any private man's right, or by what clear reason (for no statute could be pretended) the king was debarred from enlisting soldiers by voluntary contract for the defence of his dominions, especially after an express law had declared the sole power over the militia, without giving any definition of that word, to reside in the Crown. This had never been expressly maintained by Charles II.'s parliaments; though the general repugnance of the nation to what was certainly an innovation might have provoked a body of men, who did not always measure their words, to declare its illegality.[157] It was however at least unconstitutional, by which, as distinguished from illegal, I mean a novelty of much importance, tending to endanger the established laws. And it is manifest that the king could never inflict penalties by martial law, or generally by any other course, on his troops, nor quarter them on the inhabitants, nor cause them to interfere with the civil authorities; so that, even if the proposition so absolutely expressed may be somewhat too wide, it still should be considered as virtually correct.[158] But its distinct assertion in the bill of rights put a most essential restraint on the monarchy, and rendered it in effect for ever impossible to employ any direct force or intimidation against the established laws and liberties of the people.

_Discontent with the new government._--A revolution so thoroughly remedial, and accomplished with so little cost of private suffering, so little of angry punishment or oppression of the vanquished, ought to have been hailed with unbounded thankfulness and satisfaction. The nation's deliverer and chosen sovereign, in himself the most magnanimous and heroic character of that age, might have expected no return but admiration and gratitude. Yet this was very far from being the case. In no period of time under the Stuarts were public discontent and opposition of parliament more prominent than in the reign of William III.; and that high-souled prince enjoyed far less of his subject's affection than Charles II. No part of our history perhaps is read upon the whole with less satisfaction than these thirteen years, during which he sat upon his elective throne. It will be sufficient for me to sketch generally the leading causes, and the errors both of the prince and people, which hindered the blessings of the revolution from being duly appreciated by its contemporaries.

The votes of the two houses, that James had abdicated, or in plainer words forfeited, his royal authority, that the crown was vacant, that one out of the regular line of succession should be raised to it, were so untenable by any known law, so repugnant to the principles of the established church, that a nation accustomed to think upon matters of government only as lawyers and churchmen dictated, could not easily reconcile them to its preconceived notions of duty. The first burst of resentment against the late king was mitigated by his fall; compassion, and even confidence, began to take place of it; his adherents--some denying or extenuating the faults of his administration, others more artfully representing them as capable of redress by legal measures--having recovered from their consternation, took advantage of the necessary delay before the meeting of the convention, and of the time consumed in its debates, to publish pamphlets and circulate rumours in his behalf.[159] Thus, at the moment when William and Mary were proclaimed (though it may be probable that a majority of the kingdom sustained the bold votes of its representatives), there was yet a very powerful minority who believed the constitution to be most violently shaken, if not irretrievably destroyed, and the rightful sovereign to have been excluded by usurpation. The clergy were moved by pride and shame, by the just apprehension that their influence over the people would be impaired, by jealousy or hatred of the nonconformists, to deprecate so practical a confutation of the doctrines they had preached, especially when an oath of allegiance to their new sovereign came to be imposed; and they had no alternative but to resign their benefices, or wound their reputation and consciences by submission upon some casuistical pretext.[160] Eight bishops, including the primate and several of those who had been foremost in the defence of the church during the late reign, with about four hundred clergy, some of them highly distinguished, chose the more honourable course of refusing the new oaths; and thus began the schism of the non-jurors, more mischievous in its commencement than its continuance, and not so dangerous to the government of William III. and George I. as the false submission of less sincere men.[161]

It seems undeniable that the strength of this Jacobite faction sprung from the want of apparent necessity for the change of government. Extreme oppression produces an impetuous tide of resistance, which bears away the reasonings of the casuists. But the encroachments of James II., being rather felt in prospect than much actual injury, left men in a calmer temper, and disposed to weigh somewhat nicely the nature of the proposed remedy. The revolution was, or at least seemed to be, a case of political expediency; and expediency is always a matter of uncertain argument. In many respects it was far better conducted, more peaceably, more moderately, with less passion and severity towards the guilty, with less mixture of democratic turbulence, with less innovation on the regular laws, than if it had been that extreme case of necessity which some are apt to require. But it was obtained on this account with less unanimity and heartfelt concurrence of the entire nation.

_Character and errors of William._--The demeanour of William, always cold and sometimes harsh, his foreign origin (a sort of crime in English eyes) and foreign favourites, the natural and almost laudable prejudice against one who had risen by the misfortunes of a very near relation, a desire of power not very judiciously displayed by him, conspired to keep alive this disaffection; and the opposite party, regardless of all the decencies of political lying, took care to aggravate it by the vilest calumnies against one, who, though not exempt from errors, must be accounted the greatest man of his own age. It is certain that his government was in very considerable danger for three or four years after the revolution, and even to the peace of Ryswick. The change appeared so marvellous, and contrary to the bent of men's expectation, that it could not be permanent. Hence he was surrounded by the timid and the treacherous; by those who meant to have merits to plead after a restoration, and those who meant at least to be secure. A new and revolutionary government is seldom fairly dealt with. Mankind, accustomed to forgive almost everything in favour of legitimate prescriptive power, exact an ideal faultlessness from that which claims allegiance on the score of its utility. The personal failings of its rulers, the negligences of their administration, even the inevitable privations and difficulties which the nature of human affairs or the misconduct of their predecessors create, are imputed to them with invidious minuteness. Those who deem their own merit unrewarded, become always a numerous and implacable class of adversaries; those whose schemes of public improvement have not been followed, think nothing gained by the change, and return to a restless censoriousness in which they have been accustomed to place delight. With all these it was natural that William should have to contend; but we cannot in justice impute all the unpopularity of his administration to the disaffection of one party, or the fickleness and ingratitude of another. It arose in no slight degree from errors of his own.

_Jealousy of the whigs._--The king had been raised to the throne by the vigour and zeal of the whigs; but the opposite party were so nearly upon an equality in both houses that it would have been difficult to frame his government on an exclusive basis. It would also have been highly impolitic, and, with respect to some few persons, ungrateful, to put a slight upon those who had an undeniable majority in the most powerful classes. William acted, therefore, on a wise and liberal principle, in bestowing offices of trust on Lord Danby, so meritorious in the revolution, and on Lord Nottingham, whose probity was unimpeached; while he gave the whigs, as was due, a decided preponderance in his council. Many of them, however, with that indiscriminating acrimony which belongs to all factions, could not endure the elevation of men who had complied with the court too long, and seemed by their tardy opposition[162] to be rather the patriots of the church than of civil liberty. They remembered that Danby had been impeached as a corrupt and dangerous minister; that Halifax had been involved, at least by holding a confidential office at the time, in the last and worst part of Charles's reign. They saw Godolphin, who had concurred in the commitment of the bishops, and every other measure of the late king, still in the treasury; and, though they could not reproach Nottingham with any misconduct, were shocked that his conspicuous opposition to the new settlement should be rewarded with the post of secretary of state. The mismanagement of affairs in Ireland during 1689, which was very glaring, furnished specious grounds for suspicion that the king was betrayed.[163] It is probable that he was so, though not at that time by the chiefs of his ministry. This was the beginning of that dissatisfaction with the government of William, on the part of those who had the most zeal for his throne, which eventually became far more harassing than the conspiracies of his real enemies. Halifax gave way to the prejudices of the Commons, and retired from power. These prejudices were no doubt unjust, as they respected a man so sound in principle, though not uniform in conduct, and who had withstood the arbitrary maxims of Charles and James in that cabinet, of which he unfortunately continued too long a member. But his fall is a warning to English statesmen, that they will be deemed responsible to their country for measures which they countenance by remaining in office, though they may resist them in council.

_Bill of indemnity._--The same honest warmth which impelled the whigs to murmur at the employment of men sullied by their compliance with the court, made them unwilling to concur in the king's desire of a total amnesty. They retained the bill of indemnity in the Commons; and excepting some by name, and many more by general clauses, gave their adversaries a pretext for alarming all those whose conduct had not been irreproachable. Clemency is indeed for the most part the wisest, as well as the most generous policy; yet it might seem dangerous to pass over with unlimited forgiveness that servile obedience to arbitrary power, especially in the judges, which, as it springs from a base motive, is best controlled by the fear of punishment. But some of the late king's instruments had fled with him, others were lost and ruined; it was better to follow the precedent set at the restoration, than to give them a chance of regaining public sympathy by a prosecution out of the regular course of law.[164] In one instance, the expulsion of Sir Robert Sawyer from the house, the majority displayed a just resentment against one of the most devoted adherents of the prerogative, so long as civil liberty alone was in danger. Sawyer had been latterly very conspicuous in defence of the church; and it was expedient to let the nation see that the days of Charles II. were not entirely forgotten.[165] Nothing was concluded as to the indemnity in this parliament; but in the next, William took the matter into his own hands by sending down an act of grace.

_Bill for restoring corporations._--I scarcely venture, at this distance from the scene, to pronounce an opinion as to the clause introduced by the whigs into a bill for restoring corporations, which excluded for the space of seven years all who had acted or even concurred in surrendering charters from municipal offices of trust. This was no doubt intended to maintain their own superiority by keeping the church or tory faction out of corporations. It evidently was not calculated to assuage the prevailing animosities. But, on the other hand, the cowardly submissiveness of the others to the quo warrantos seemed at least to deserve this censure; and the measure could by no means be put on a level in point of rigour with the corporation act of Charles II. As the dissenters, unquestioned friends of the revolution, had been universally excluded by that statute, and the tories had lately been strong enough to prevent their re-admission, it was not unfair for the opposite party, or rather for the government, to provide some security against men, who, in spite of their oaths of allegiance, were not likely to have thoroughly abjured their former principles. This clause, which modern historians generally condemn as oppressive, had the strong support of Mr. Somers, then solicitor-general. It was, however, lost through the court's conjunction with the tories in the lower house, and the bill itself fell to the ground in the upper; so that those who had come into corporations by very ill means retained their power, to the great disadvantage of the revolution party; as the next elections made appear.[166]

But if the whigs behaved in these instances with too much of that passion, which, though offensive and mischievous in its excess, is yet almost inseparable from patriotism and incorrupt sentiments in so numerous an assembly as the House of Commons, they amply redeemed their glory by what cost them the new king's favour, their wise and admirable settlement of the revenue.

_Settlement of the revenue._--The first parliament of Charles II. had fixed on £1,200,000 as the ordinary revenue of the Crown, sufficient in times of no peculiar exigency for the support of its dignity and for the public defence. For this they provided various resources; the hereditary excise on liquors granted in lieu of the king's feudal rights, other excise and custom duties granted for his life, the post-office, the crown lands, the tax called hearth money, or two shillings for every house, and some of smaller consequence. These in the beginning of that reign fell short of the estimate; but before its termination, by the improvement of trade and stricter management of the customs, they certainly exceeded that sum. For the revenue of James from these sources, on an average of the four years of his reign, amounted to £1,500,964; to which something more than £400,000 is to be added for the produce of duties imposed for eight years by his parliament of 1685.[167]

William appears to have entertained no doubt that this great revenue, as well as all the power and prerogative of the Crown, became vested in himself as King of England, or at least ought to be instantly settled by parliament according to the usual method.[168] There could indeed be no pretence for disputing his right to the hereditary excise, though this seems to have been questioned in debate; but the Commons soon displayed a considerable reluctance to grant the temporary revenue for the king's life. This had been done for several centuries in the first parliament of every reign. But the accounts, for which they called on this occasion, exhibited so considerable an increase of the receipts on one hand, so alarming a disposition of the expenditure on the other, that they deemed it expedient to restrain a liberality, which was not only likely to go beyond their intention, but to place them, at least in future times, too much within the power of the Crown. Its average expenses appeared to have been £1,700,000. Of this £610,000 was the charge of the late king's army, and £83,493 of the ordnance. Nearly £90,000 was set under the suspicious head of secret service, imprested to Mr. Guy, secretary of the treasury.[169] Thus it was evident that, far from sinking below the proper level, as had been the general complaint of the court in the Stuart reigns, the revenue was greatly and dangerously above it; and its excess might either be consumed in unnecessary luxury, or diverted to the worse purposes of despotism and corruption. They had indeed just declared a standing army to be illegal. But there could be no such security for the observance of this declaration as the want of means in the Crown to maintain one. Their experience of the interminable contention about supply, which had been fought with various success between the kings of England and their parliaments for some hundred years, dictated a course to which they wisely and steadily adhered, and to which, perhaps above all other changes at this revolution, the augmented authority of the House of Commons must be ascribed.

_Appropriation of supplies._--They began by voting that £1,200,000 should be the annual revenue of the Crown in time of peace; and that one half of this should be appropriated to the maintenance of the king's government and royal family, or what is now called the civil list, the other to the public defence and contingent expenditure.[170] The breaking out of an eight years' war rendered it impossible to carry into effect these resolutions as to the peace establishment: but they did not lose sight of their principle, that the king's regular and domestic expenses should be determined by a fixed annual sum, distinct from the other departments of public service. They speedily improved upon their original scheme of a definite revenue, by taking a more close and constant superintendence of these departments, the navy, army, and ordnance. Estimates of the probable expenditure were regularly laid before them, and the supply granted was strictly appropriated to each particular service.

This great and fundamental principle, as it has long been justly considered, that the money voted by parliament is appropriated, and can only be applied, to certain specified heads of expenditure, was introduced, as I have before mentioned, in the reign of Charles II., and generally, though not in every instance, adopted by his parliament. The unworthy House of Commons that sat in 1685, not content with a needless augmentation of the revenue, took credit with the king for not having appropriated their supplies.[171] But from the revolution it has been the invariable usage. The lords of the treasury, by a clause annually repeated in the appropriation act of every session, are forbidden, under severe penalties, to order by their warrant any monies in the exchequer, so appropriated, from being issued for any other service, and the officers of the exchequer to obey any such warrant. This has given the House of Commons so effectual a control over the executive power, or, more truly speaking, has rendered it so much a participator in that power, that no administration can possibly subsist without its concurrence; nor can the session of parliament be intermitted for an entire year, without leaving both the naval and military force of the kingdom unprovided for. In time of war, or in circumstances that may induce war, it has not been very uncommon to deviate a little from the rule of appropriation, by a grant of considerable sums on a vote of credit, which the Crown is thus enabled to apply at its discretion during the recess of parliament; and we have had also too frequent experience, that the charges of public service have not been brought within the limits of the last year's appropriation. But the general principle has not perhaps been often transgressed without sufficient reason; and a House of Commons would be deeply responsible to the country, if through supine confidence it should abandon that high privilege which has made it the arbiter of court factions, and the regulator of foreign connections. It is to this transference of the executive government (for the phrase is hardly too strong) from the Crown to the two houses of parliament, and especially the Commons, that we owe the proud attitude which England has maintained since the revolution, so extraordinarily dissimilar, in the eyes of Europe, to her condition, under the Stuarts. The supplies meted out with niggardly caution by former parliaments to sovereigns whom they could not trust, have flowed with redundant profuseness, when they could judge of their necessity and direct their application. Doubtless the demand has always been fixed by the ministers of the Crown, and its influence has retrieved in some degree the loss of authority; but it is still true that no small portion of the executive power, according to the established laws and customs of our government, has passed into the hands of that body, which prescribes the application of the revenue, as well as investigates at its pleasure every act of the administration.[172]

_Dissatisfaction of the king._--The convention parliament continued the revenue, as it already stood, until December 1690.[173] Their successors complied so far with the king's expectation as to grant the excise duties, besides those that were hereditary, for the lives of William and Mary, and that of the survivor.[174] The customs they only continued for four years. They provided extraordinary supplies for the conduct of the war on a scale of armament, and consequently of expenditure, unparalleled in the annals of England. But the hesitation, and, as the king imagined, the distrust they had shown in settling the ordinary revenue, sunk deep into his mind, and chiefly alienated him from the whigs, who were stronger and more conspicuous than their adversaries in the two sessions of 1689. If we believe Burnet, he felt so indignantly what appeared a systematic endeavour to reduce his power below the ancient standard of the monarchy, that he was inclined to abandon the government, and leave the nation to itself. He knew well, as he told the bishop, what was to be alleged for the two forms of government, a monarchy and a commonwealth, and would not determine which was preferable; but of all forms he thought the worst was that of a monarchy without the necessary powers.[175]

The desire of rule in William III. was as magnanimous and public-spirited as ambition can ever be in a human bosom. It was the consciousness not only of having devoted himself to a great cause, the security of Europe, and especially of Great Britain and Holland, against unceasing aggression, but of resources in his own firmness and sagacity which no other person possessed. A commanding force, a copious revenue, a supreme authority in councils, were not sought, as by the crowd of kings, for the enjoyment of selfish vanity and covetousness, but as the only sure instruments of success in his high calling, in the race of heroic enterprise which Providence had appointed for the elect champion of civil and religious liberty. We can hardly wonder that he should not quite render justice to the motives of those who seemed to impede his strenuous energies; that he should resent as ingratitude those precautions against abuse of power by him, the recent deliverer of the nation, which it had never called for against those who had sought to enslave it.

But reasonable as this apology may be, it was still an unhappy error of William that he did not sufficiently weigh the circumstances which had elevated him to the English throne, and the alteration they had inevitably made in the relations between the Crown and the parliament. Chosen upon the popular principle of general freedom and public good, on the ruins of an ancient hereditary throne, he could expect to reign on no other terms than as the chief of a commonwealth, with no other authority than the sense of the nation and of parliament deemed congenial to the new constitution. The debt of gratitude to him was indeed immense, and not sufficiently remembered; but it was due for having enabled the nation to regenerate itself, and to place barriers against future assaults, to provide securities against future misgovernment. No one could seriously assert that James II. was the only sovereign of whom there had been cause to complain. In almost every reign, on the contrary, which our history records, the innate love of arbitrary power had produced more or less of oppression. The revolution was chiefly beneficial, as it gave a stronger impulse to the desire of political liberty, and rendered it more extensively attainable. It was certainly not for the sake of replacing James by William with equal powers of doing injury, that the purest and wisest patriots engaged in that cause; but as the sole means of making a royal government permanently compatible with freedom and justice. The bill of rights had pretended to do nothing more than stigmatise some recent proceedings: were the representatives of the nation to stop short of other measures, because they seemed novel and restrictive of the Crown's authority, when for the want of them the Crown's authority had nearly freed itself from all restriction? Such was their true motive for limiting the revenue, and such the ample justification of those important statutes enacted in the course of this reign, which the king, unfortunately for his reputation and peace of mind, too jealously resisted.

_No republican party in existence._--It is by no means unusual to find mention of a commonwealth or republican party, as if it existed in some force at the time of the revolution, and throughout the reign of William III.; nay some writers, such as Hume, Dalrymple, and Somerville, have, by putting them in a sort of balance against the Jacobites, as the extremes of the whig and tory factions, endeavoured to persuade us that the one was as substantial and united a body as the other. It may, however, be confidently asserted, that no republican party had any existence; if by that word we are to understand a set of men whose object was the abolition of our limited monarchy. There might unquestionably be persons, especially among the independent sect, who cherished the memory of what they called the good old cause, and thought civil liberty irreconcilable with any form of regal government. But these were too inconsiderable, and too far removed from political influence, to deserve the appellation of a party. I believe it would be difficult to name five individuals, to whom even a speculative preference of a commonwealth may with probability be ascribed. Were it otherwise, the numerous pamphlets of this period would bear witness to their activity. Yet, with the exception perhaps of one or two, and those rather equivocal, we should search, I suspect, the collections of that time in vain for any manifestations of a republican spirit. If indeed an ardent zeal to see the prerogative effectually restrained, to vindicate that high authority of the House of Commons over the executive administration which it has in fact claimed and exercised, to purify the house itself from corrupt influence, if a tendency to dwell upon the popular origin of civil society, and the principles which Locke, above other writers, had brought again into fashion, be called republican (as in a primary but less usual sense of the word they may), no one can deny that this spirit eminently characterised the age of William III. And schemes of reformation emanating from this source were sometimes offered to the world, trenching more perhaps on the established constitution than either necessity demanded or prudence warranted. But these were anonymous and of little influence; nor did they ever extend to the absolute subversion of the throne.[176]

_William employs tories in ministry._--William, however, was very early led to imagine, whether through the insinuations of Lord Nottingham, as Burnet pretends, or the natural prejudice of kings against those who do not comply with them, that there not only existed a republican party, but that it numbered many supporters among the principal whigs. He dissolved the convention-parliament; and gave his confidence for some time to the opposite faction.[177] But, among these, a real disaffection to his government prevailed so widely that he could with difficulty select men sincerely attached to it. The majority professed only to pay allegiance as to a sovereign _de facto_, and violently opposed the bill of recognition in 1690, both on account of the words rightful and lawful king which it applied to William, and of its declaring the laws passed in the last parliament to have been good and valid.[178] They had influence enough with the king to defeat a bill proposed by the whigs, by which an oath of abjuration of James's right was to be taken by all persons in trust.[179] It is by no means certain that even those who abstained from all connection with James after his loss of the throne, would have made a strenuous resistance in case of his landing to recover it.[180] But we know that a large proportion of the tories were engaged in a confederacy to support him. Almost every peer, in fact, of any consideration among that party, with the exception of Lord Nottingham, is implicated by the secret documents which Macpherson and Dalrymple have brought to light; especially Godolphin, Carmarthen, and Marlborough, the second at that time prime minister of William (as he might justly be called), the last with circumstances of extraordinary and abandoned treachery towards his country as well as his allegiance.[181] Two of the most distinguished whigs (and if the imputation is not fully substantiated against others[182] by name, we know generally that many were liable to it), forfeited a high name among their contemporaries, in the eyes of a posterity which has known them better; the Earl of Shrewsbury, from that strange feebleness of soul which hung like a spell upon his nobler qualities, and Admiral Russell, from insolent pride and sullenness of temper. Both these were engaged in the vile intrigues of a faction they abhorred; but Shrewsbury soon learned again to revere the sovereign he had contributed to raise, and withdrew from the contamination of Jacobitism. It does not appear that he betrayed that trust which William is said with extraordinary magnanimity to have reposed on him, after a full knowledge of his connection with the court of St. Germain.[183] But Russell, though compelled to win the battle of La Hogue against his will, took care to render his splendid victory as little advantageous as possible. The credulity and almost wilful blindness of faction is strongly manifested in the conduct of the House of Commons as to the quarrel between this commander and the board of admiralty. They chose to support one who was secretly a traitor, because he bore the name of whig, tolerating his infamous neglect of duty and contemptible excuses; in order to pull down an honest, though not very able minister, who belonged to the tories.[184] But they saw clearly that the king was betrayed, though mistaken, in this instance, as to the persons; and were right in concluding that the men who had effected the revolution were in general most likely to maintain it; or, in the words of a committee of the whole house, "That his majesty be humbly advised, for the necessary support of his government, to employ in his councils and management of his affairs such persons only whose principles oblige them to stand by him and his right against the late King James, and all other pretenders whatsoever."[185] It is plain from this and other votes of the Commons, that the tories had lost that majority which they seem to have held in the first session of this parliament.[186]

It is not, however, to be inferred from this extensive combination in favour of the banished king, that his party embraced the majority of the nation, or that he could have been restored with any general testimonies of satisfaction. The friends of the revolution were still by far the more powerful body. Even the secret emissaries of James confess that the common people were strongly prejudiced against his return. His own enumeration of peers attached to his cause cannot be brought to more than thirty, exclusive of catholics;[187] and the real Jacobites were, I believe, in a far less proportion among the Commons. The hopes of that wretched victim of his own bigotry and violence rested less on the loyalty of his former subjects, or on their disaffection to his rival, than on the perfidious conspiracy of English statesmen and admirals, of lord-lieutenants and governors of towns, and on so numerous a French army as an ill-defended and disunited kingdom would be incapable to resist. He was to return, not as his brother, alone and unarmed, strong only in the consentient voice of the nation, but amidst the bayonets of 30,000 French auxiliaries. These were the pledges of just and constitutional rule, whom our patriot Jacobites invoked against the despotism of William III. It was from a king of the house of Stuart, from James II., from one thus encircled by the soldiers of Louis XIV., that we were to receive the guarantee of civil and religious liberty. Happily the determined love of arbitrary power, burning unextinguished amidst exile and disgrace, would not permit him to promise, in any distinct manner, those securities which a large portion of his own adherents required. The Jacobite faction was divided between compounders and non-compounders; the one insisting on the necessity of holding forth a promise of such new enactments upon the king's restoration as might remove all jealousies as to the rights of the church and people; the other, more agreeably to James's temper, rejecting every compromise with what they called the republican party at the expense of his ancient prerogative.[188] In a declaration which he issued from St. Germain in 1692 there was so little acknowledgment of error, so few promises of security, so many exceptions from the amnesty he offered, that the wiser of his partisans in England were willing to insinuate that it was not authentic.[189] This declaration, and the virulence of Jacobite pamphlets in the same tone, must have done harm to his cause.[190] He published another declaration next year at the earnest request of those who had seceded to his side from that of the revolution, in which he held forth more specific assurances of consenting to a limitation of his prerogative.[191] But no reflecting man could avoid perceiving that such promises wrung from his distress were illusory and insincere, that in the exultation of triumphant loyalty, even without the sword of the Gaul thrown into the scale of despotism, those who dreamed of a conditional restoration and of fresh guarantees for civil liberty, would find, like the presbyterians of 1660, that it became them rather to be anxious about their own pardon, and to receive it as a signal boon of the king's clemency. The knowledge thus obtained of James's incorrigible obstinacy seems gradually to have convinced the disaffected that no hope for the nation or for themselves could be drawn from his restoration.[192] His connections with the treacherous counsellors of William grew weaker; and even before the peace of Ryswick it was evident that the aged bigot could never wield again the sceptre he had thrown away. The scheme of assassinating our illustrious sovereign, which some of James's desperate zealots had devised without his privity, as may charitably and even reasonably be supposed,[193] gave a fatal blow to the interests of that faction. It was instantly seen that the murmurs of malecontent whigs had nothing in common with the disaffection of Jacobites. The nation resounded with an indignant cry against the atrocious conspiracy. An association abjuring the title of James, and pledging the subscribers to revenge the king's death, after the model of that in the reign of Elizabeth, was generally signed by both houses of parliament, and throughout the kingdom.[194] The adherents of the exiled family dwindled into so powerless a minority that they could make no sort of opposition to the act of settlement, and did not recover an efficient character as a party till towards the latter end of the ensuing reign.

_Attainder of Sir John Fenwick._--Perhaps the indignation of parliament against those who sought to bring back despotism through civil war and the murder of an heroic sovereign, was carried too far in the bill for attainting Sir John Fenwick of treason. Two witnesses, required by our law in a charge of that nature, Porter and Goodman, had deposed before the grand jury to Fenwick's share in the scheme of invasion, though there is no reason to believe that he was privy to the intended assassination of the king. His wife subsequently prevailed on Goodman to quit the kingdom; and thus it became impossible to obtain a conviction in the course of law. This was the apology for a special act of the legislature, by which he suffered the penalties of treason. It did not, like some other acts of attainder, inflict a punishment beyond the offence, but supplied the deficiency of legal evidence. It was sustained by the production of Goodman's examination before the privy council, and by the evidence of two grand-jurymen as to the deposition he had made on oath before them, and on which they had found the bill of indictment. It was also shown that he had been tampered with by Lady Mary Fenwick to leave the kingdom. This was undoubtedly as good secondary evidence as can well be imagined; and, though in criminal cases such evidence is not admissible by courts of law, it was plausibly urged that the legislature might prevent Fenwick from taking advantage of his own underhand management, without transgressing the moral rules of justice, or even setting the dangerous precedent of punishing treason upon a single testimony. Yet, upon the whole, the importance of adhering to the stubborn rules of law in matters of treason is so weighty, and the difficulty of keeping such a body as the House of Commons within any less precise limits so manifest, that we may well concur with those who thought Sir John Fenwick much too inconsiderable a person to warrant such an anomaly. The jealous sense of liberty prevalent in William's reign produced a very strong opposition to this bill of attainder; it passed in each house, especially in the Lords, by a small majority.[195] Nor perhaps would it have been carried but for Fenwick's imprudent disclosure, in order to save his life, of some great statesmen's intrigues with the late king; a disclosure which he dared not, or was not in a situation to confirm, but which rendered him the victim of their fear and revenge. Russell, one of those accused, brought into the Commons the bill of attainder; Marlborough voted in favour of it, the only instance wherein he quitted the tories; Godolphin and Bath, with more humanity, took the other side; and Shrewsbury absented himself from the House of Lords.[196] It is now well known that Fenwick's discoveries went not a step beyond the truth. Their effect, however, was beneficial to the state; as by displaying a strange want of secrecy in the court of St. Germains, Fenwick never having had any direct communication with those he accused, it caused Godolphin and Marlborough to break off their dangerous course of perfidy.[197]

_Ill success of the war._--Amidst these scenes of dissension and disaffection, and amidst the public losses and decline which aggravated them, we have scarce any object to contemplate with pleasure, but the magnanimous and unconquerable soul of William. Mistaken in some parts of his domestic policy, unsuited by some failings of his character for the English nation, it is still to his superiority in virtue and energy over all her own natives in that age that England is indebted for the preservation of her honour and liberty; not at the crisis only of the revolution, but through the difficult period that elapsed until the peace of Ryswick. A war of nine years, generally unfortunate, unsatisfactory in its result, carried on at a cost unknown to former times, amidst the decay of trade, the exhaustion of resources, the decline, as there seems good reason to believe, of population itself, was the festering wound that turned a people's gratitude into factiousness and treachery. It was easy to excite the national prejudices against campaigns in Flanders, especially when so unsuccessful, and to inveigh against the neglect of our maritime power. Yet, unless we could have been secure against invasion, which Louis would infallibly have attempted, had not his whole force been occupied by the grand alliance, and which, in the feeble condition of our navy and commerce, at one time could not have been impracticable, the defeats of Steenkirk and Landen might probably have been sustained at home. The war of 1689, and the great confederacy of Europe, which William alone could animate with any steadiness and energy, were most evidently and undeniably the means of preserving the independence of England. That danger, which has sometimes been in our countrymen's mouths with little meaning, of becoming a province to France, was then close and actual; for I hold the restoration of the house of Stuart to be but another expression for that ignominy and servitude.

_Expenses of the war._--The expense therefore of this war must not be reckoned unnecessary; nor must we censure the government for that small portion of our debt which it was compelled to entail on posterity.[198] It is to the honour of William's administration, and of his parliaments, not always clear-sighted, but honest and zealous for the public weal, that they deviated so little from the praiseworthy, though sometimes impracticable, policy of providing a revenue commensurate with the annual expenditure. The supplies annually raised during the war were about five millions, more than double the revenue of James II. But a great decline took place in the produce of the taxes by which that revenue was levied. In 1693, the customs had dwindled to less than half their amount before the revolution, the excise duties to little more than half.[199] This rendered heavy impositions on land inevitable; a tax always obnoxious, and keeping up disaffection in the most powerful class of the community. The first land-tax was imposed in 1690, at the rate of three shillings in the pound on the rental; and it continued ever afterwards to be annually granted, at different rates, but commonly at four shillings in the pound, till it was made perpetual in 1798. A tax of twenty per cent. might well seem grievous; and the notorious inequality of the assessment in different counties tended rather to aggravate the burthen upon those whose contribution was the fairest. Fresh schemes of finance were devised, and, on the whole, patiently borne by a jaded people. The Bank of England rose under the auspices of the whig party, and materially relieved the immediate exigencies of the government, while it palliated the general distress, by discounting bills and lending money at an easier rate of interest. Yet its notes were depreciated twenty per cent. in exchange for silver; and exchequer tallies at least twice as much, till they were funded at an interest of eight per cent.[200] But, these resources generally falling very short of calculation, and being anticipated at such an exorbitant discount, a constantly increasing deficiency arose; and public credit sunk so low, that about the year 1696 it was hardly possible to pay the fleet and army from month to month, and a total bankruptcy seemed near at hand. These distresses again were enhanced by the depreciation of the circulating coin, and by the bold remedy of a re-coinage, which made the immediate stagnation of commerce more complete. The mere operation of exchanging the worn silver coin for the new, which Mr. Montague had the courage to do without lowering the standard, cost the government two millions and a half. Certainly the vessel of our commonwealth has never been so close to shipwreck as in this period; we have seen the storm raging in still greater terror round our heads, but with far stouter planks and tougher cables to confront and ride through it.

Those who accused William of neglecting the maritime force of England, knew little what they said, or cared little about its truth.[201] A soldier and a native of Holland, he naturally looked to the Spanish Netherlands as the theatre on which the battle of France and Europe was to be fought. It was by the possession of that country and its chief fortresses that Louis aspired to hold Holland in vassalage, to menace the coasts of England, and to keep the Empire under his influence. And if, with the assistance of those brave regiments, who learned, in the well-contested though unfortunate battles of that war, the skill and discipline which made them conquerors in the next, it was found that France was still an overmatch for the allies, what would have been effected against her by the decrepitude of Spain, the perverse pride of Austria, and the selfish disunion of Germany? The commerce of France might, perhaps, have suffered more by an exclusively maritime warfare; but we should have obtained this advantage, which in itself is none, and would not have essentially crippled her force, at the price of abandoning to her ambition the quarry it had so long in pursuit. Meanwhile the naval annals of this war added much to our renown; Russell, glorious in his own despite at La Hogue, Rooke, and Shovel kept up the honour of the English flag. After that great victory, the enemy never encountered us in battle; and the wintering of the fleet at Cadiz in 1694, a measure determined on by William's energetic mind, against the advice of his ministers, and in spite of the fretful insolence of the admiral, gave us so decided a pre-eminence both in the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas, that it is hard to say what more could have been achieved by the most exclusive attention to the navy.[202] It is true that, especially during the first part of the war, vast losses were sustained through the capture of merchant ships; but this is the inevitable lot of a commercial country, and has occurred in every war, until the practice of placing the traders under convoy of armed ships was introduced. And, when we consider the treachery which pervaded this service, and the great facility of secret intelligence which the enemy possessed, we may be astonished that our failures and losses were not still more decisive.