The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 - Thomas Babington Macaulay (novel books to read TXT) 📗

The reproach was but too well founded: but the

Long Parliament had at least allowed to the divines whom it

ejected a provision sufficient to keep them from starving; and

this example the Cavaliers, intoxicated with animosity, had not

the justice and humanity to follow.


Then came penal statutes against Nonconformists, statutes for

which precedents might too easily be found in the Puritan

legislation, but to which the King could not give his assent

without a breach of promises publicly made, in the most important

crisis of his life, to those on whom his fate depended. The

Presbyterians, in extreme distress and terror, fled to the foot

of the throne, and pleaded their recent services and the royal

faith solemnly and repeatedly plighted. The King wavered. He

could not deny his own hand and seal. He could not but be

conscious that he owed much to the petitioners. He was little in

the habit of resisting importunate solicitation. His temper was

not that of a persecutor. He disliked the Puritans indeed; but in

him dislike was a languid feeling, very little resembling the

energetic hatred which had burned in the heart of Laud. He was,

moreover, partial to the Roman Catholic religion; and he knew

that it would be impossible to grant liberty of worship to the

professors of that religion without extending the same indulgence

to Protestant dissenters. He therefore made a feeble attempt to

restrain the intolerant zeal of the House of Commons; but that

House was under the influence of far deeper convictions and far

stronger passions than his own. After a faint struggle he

yielded, and passed, with the show of alacrity, a series of

odious acts against the separatists. It was made a crime to

attend a dissenting place of worship. A single justice of the

peace might convict without a jury, and might, for the third

offence, pass sentence of transportation beyond sea for seven

years. With refined cruelty it was provided that the offender

should not be transported to New England, where he was likely to

find sympathising friends. If he returned to his own country

before the expiration of his term of exile, he was liable to

capital punishment. A new and most unreasonable test was imposed

on divines who had been deprived of their benefices for

nonconformity; and all who refused to take that test were

prohibited from coming within five miles of any town which was

governed by a corporation, of any town which was represented in

Parliament, or of any town where they had themselves resided as

ministers. The magistrates, by whom these rigorous statutes were

to be enforced, were in general men inflamed by party spirit and

by the remembrance of wrongs suffered in the time of the

commonwealth. The gaols were therefore soon crowded with

dissenters, and, among the sufferers, were some of whose genius

and virtue any Christian society might well be proud.


The Church of England was not ungrateful for the protection which

she received from the government. From the first day of her

existence, she had been attached to monarchy. But, during the

quarter of a century which followed the Restoration, her zeal for

royal authority and hereditary right passed all bounds. She had

suffered with the House of Stuart. She had been restored with

that House. She was connected with it by common interests,

friendships, and enmities. It seemed impossible that a day could

ever come when the ties which bound her to the children of her

august martyr would be sundered, and when the loyalty in which

she gloried would cease to be a pleasing and profitable duty. She

accordingly magnified in fulsome phrase that prerogative which

was constantly employed to defend and to aggrandise her, and

reprobated, much at her ease, the depravity of those whom

oppression, from which she was exempt, had goaded to rebellion.

Her favourite theme was the doctrine of non-resistance. That

doctrine she taught without any qualification, and followed out

to all its extreme consequences. Her disciples were never weary

of repeating that in no conceivable case, not even if England

were cursed with a King resembling Busiris or Phalaris, with a

King who, in defiance of law, and without the presence of

justice, should daily doom hundreds of innocent victims to

torture and death, would all the Estates of the realm united be

justified in withstanding his tyranny by physical force. Happily

the principles of human nature afford abundant security that such

theories will never be more than theories. The day of trial came;

and the very men who had most loudly and most sincerely professed

this extravagant loyalty were, in every county of England arrayed

in arms against the throne.


Property all over the kingdom was now again changing hands. The

national sales, not having been confirmed by Act of Parliament,

were regarded by the tribunals as nullities. The bishops, the

deans, the chapters, the Royalist nobility and gentry, reentered

on their confiscated estates, and ejected even purchasers who had

given fair prices. The losses which the Cavaliers had sustained

during the ascendency of their opponents were thus in part

repaired; but in part only. All actions for mesne profits were

effectually barred by the general amnesty; and the numerous

Royalists, who, in order to discharge fines imposed by the Long

Parliament, or in order to purchase the favour of powerful

Roundheads, had sold lands for much less than the real value,

were not relieved from the legal consequences of their own acts.


While these changes were in progress, a change still more

important took place in the morals and manners of the community.

Those passions and tastes which, under the rule of the Puritans,

had been sternly repressed, and, if gratified at all, had been

gratified by stealth, broke forth with ungovernable violence as

soon as the check was withdrawn. Men flew to frivolous amusements

and to criminal pleasures with the greediness which long and

enforced abstinence naturally produces. Little restraint was

imposed by public opinion. For the nation, nauseated with cant,

suspicious of all pretensions to sanctity and still smarting from

the recent tyranny of rulers austere in life and powerful in

prayer, looked for a time with complacency on the softer and

gayer vices. Still less restraint was imposed by the government.

Indeed there was no excess which was not encouraged by the

ostentatious profligacy of the King and of his favourite

courtiers. A few counsellors of Charles the First, who were now

no longer young, retained the decorous gravity which had been

thirty years before in fashion at Whitehall. Such were Clarendon

himself, and his friends, Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of

Southampton, Lord Treasurer, and James Butler, Duke of Ormond,

who, having through many vicissitudes struggled gallantly for the

royal cause in Ireland, now governed that kingdom as Lord

Lieutenant. But neither the memory of the services of these men,

nor their great power in the state, could protect them from the

sarcasms which modish vice loves to dart at obsolete virtue. The

praise of politeness and vivacity could now scarcely be obtained

except by some violation of decorum. Talents great and various

assisted to spread the contagion. Ethical philosophy had recently

taken a form well suited to please a generation equally devoted

to monarchy and to vice. Thomas Hobbes had, in language more

precise and luminous than has ever been employed by any other

metaphysical writer, maintained that the will of the prince was

the standard of right and wrong, and that every subject ought to

be ready to profess Popery, Mahometanism, or Paganism, at the

royal command. Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what

was really valuable in his speculations, eagerly welcomed a

theory which, while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the

obligations of morality, and degraded religion into a mere affair

of state. Hobbism soon became an almost essential part of the

character of the fine gentleman. All the lighter kinds of

literature were deeply tainted by the prevailing licentiousness.

Poetry stooped to be the pandar of every low desire. Ridicule,

instead of putting guilt and error to the blush, turned her

formidable shafts against innocence and truth. The restored

Church contended indeed against the prevailing immorality, but

contended feebly, and with half a heart. It was necessary to the

decorum of her character that she should admonish her erring

children: but her admonitions were given in a somewhat

perfunctory manner. Her attention was elsewhere engaged. Her

whole soul was in the work of crushing the Puritans, and of

teaching her disciples to give unto Caesar the things which were

Caesar's. She had been pillaged and oppressed by the party which

preached an austere morality. She had been restored to opulence

and honour by libertines. Little as the men of mirth and fashion

were disposed to shape their lives according to her precepts,

they were yet ready to fight knee deep in blood for her

cathedrals and places, for every line of her rubric and every

thread of her vestments. If the debauched Cavalier haunted

brothels and gambling houses, he at least avoided conventicles.

If he never spoke without uttering ribaldry and blasphemy, he

made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and Howe to

gaol for preaching and praying. Thus the clergy, for a time,

made war on schism with so much vigour that they had little

leisure to make war on vice. The ribaldry of Etherege and

Wycherley was, in the presence and under the special sanction of

the head of the Church, publicly recited by female lips in female

ears, while the author of the Pilgrim's Progress languished in a

dungeon for the crime of proclaiming the gospel to the poor. It

is an unquestionable and a most instructive fact that the years

during which the political power of the Anglican hierarchy was in

the zenith were precisely the years during which national virtue

was at the lowest point.


Scarcely any rank or profession escaped the infection of the

prevailing immorality; but those persons who made politics their

business were perhaps the most corrupt part of the corrupt

society. For they were exposed, not only to the same noxious

influences which affected the nation generally, but also to a

taint of a peculiar and of a most malignant kind. Their character

had been formed amidst frequent and violent revolutions and

counterrevolutions. In the course of a few years they had seen

the ecclesiastical and civil polity of their country repeatedly

changed. They had seen an Episcopal Church persecuting Puritans,

a Puritan Church persecuting Episcopalians, and an Episcopal

Church persecuting Puritans again. They had seen hereditary

monarchy abolished and restored. They had seen the Long

Parliament thrice supreme in the state, and thrice dissolved

amidst the curses and laughter of millions. They had seen a new

dynasty rapidly rising to the height of power and glory, and then

on