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

the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the

repast, retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left

the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco. The coarse jollity of the

afternoon was often prolonged till the revellers were laid under

the table.


It was very seldom that the country gentleman caught glimpses of

the great world; and what he saw of it tended rather to confuse

than to enlighten his understanding. His opinions respecting

religion, government, foreign countries and former times, having

been derived, not from study, from observation, or from

conversation with enlightened companions, but from such

traditions as were current in his own small circle, were the

opinions of a child. He adhered to them, however, with the

obstinacy which is generally found in ignorant men accustomed to

be fed with flattery. His animosities were numerous and bitter.

He hated Frenchmen and Italians, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Papists

and Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists, Quakers and Jews.

Towards London and Londoners he felt an aversion which more than

once produced important political effects. His wife and daughter

were in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or a

stillroom maid of the present day. They stitched and spun, brewed

gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the

venison pasty.


From this description it might be supposed that the English

esquire of the seventeenth century did not materially differ from

a rustic miller or alehouse keeper of our time. There are,

however, some important parts of his character still to be noted,

which will greatly modify this estimate. Unlettered as he was and

unpolished, he was still in some most important points a

gentleman. He was a member of a proud and powerful aristocracy,

and was distinguished by many both of the good and of the bad

qualities which belong to aristocrats. His family pride was

beyond that of a Talbot or a Howard. He knew the genealogies and

coats of arms of all his neighbours, and could tell which of them

had assumed supporters without any right, and which of them were

so unfortunate as to be greatgrandsons of aldermen. He was a

magistrate, and, as such, administered gratuitously to those who

dwelt around him a rude patriarchal justice, which, in spite of

innumerable blunders and of occasional acts of tyranny, was yet

better than no justice at all. He was an officer of the

trainbands; and his military dignity, though it might move the

mirth of gallants who had served a campaign in Flanders, raised

his character in his own eyes and in the eyes of his neighbours.

Nor indeed was his soldiership justly a subject of derision. In

every county there were elderly gentlemen who had seen service

which was no child's play. One had been knighted by Charles the

First, after the battle of Edgehill. Another still wore a patch

over the scar which he had received at Naseby. A third had

defended his old house till Fairfax had blown in the door with a

petard. The presence of these old Cavaliers, with their old

swords and holsters, and with their old stories about Goring and

Lunsford, gave to the musters of militia an earnest and warlike

aspect which would otherwise have been wanting. Even those

country gentlemen who were too young to have themselves exchanged

blows with the cuirassiers of the Parliament had, from childhood,

been surrounded by the traces of recent war, and fed with stories

of the martial exploits of their fathers and uncles. Thus the

character of the English esquire of the seventeenth century was

compounded of two elements which we seldom or never find united.

His ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases,

would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a

breeding thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was essentially a patrician,

and had, in large measure both the virtues and the vices which

flourish among men set from their birth in high place, and used

to respect themselves and to be respected by others. It is not

easy for a generation accustomed to find chivalrous sentiments

only in company with liberal Studies and polished manners to

image to itself a man with the deportment, the vocabulary, and

the accent of a carter, yet punctilious on matters of genealogy

and precedence, and ready to risk his life rather than see a

stain cast on the honour of his house. It is however only by thus

joining together things seldom or never found together in our own

experience, that we can form a just idea of that rustic

aristocracy which constituted the main strength of the armies of

Charles the First, and which long supported, with strange

fidelity, the interest of his descendants.


The gross, uneducated; untravelled country gentleman was commonly

a Tory; but, though devotedly attached to hereditary monarchy, he

had no partiality for courtiers and ministers. He thought, not

without reason, that Whitehall was filled with the most corrupt

of mankind, and that of the great sums which the House of Commons

had voted to the crown since the Restoration part had been

embezzled by cunning politicians, and part squandered on buffoons

and foreign courtesans. His stout English heart swelled with

indignation at the thought that the government of his country

should be subject to French dictation. Being himself generally an

old Cavalier, or the son of an old Cavalier, he reflected with

bitter resentment on the ingratitude with which the Stuarts had

requited their best friends. Those who heard him grumble at the

neglect with which he was treated, and at the profusion with

which wealth was lavished on the bastards of Nell Gwynn and Madam

Carwell, would have supposed him ripe for rebellion. But all this

ill humour lasted only till the throne was really in danger. It

was precisely when those whom the sovereign had loaded with

wealth and honours shrank from his side that the country

gentlemen, so surly and mutinous in the season of his prosperity,

rallied round him in a body. Thus, after murmuring twenty years

at the misgovernment of Charles the Second, they came to his

rescue in his extremity, when his own Secretaries of State and

the Lords of his own Treasury had deserted him, and enabled him

to gain a complete victory over the opposition; nor can there be

any doubt that they would have shown equal loyalty to his brother

James, if James would, even at the last moment, have refrained

from outraging their strongest feeling. For there was one

institution, and one only, which they prized even more than

hereditary monarchy; and that institution was the Church of

England. Their love of the Church was not, indeed, the effect of

study or meditation. Few among them could have given any reason,

drawn from Scripture or ecclesiastical history, for adhering to

her doctrines, her ritual, and her polity; nor were they, as a

class, by any means strict observers of that code of morality

which is common to all Christian sects. But the experience of

many ages proves that men may be ready to fight to the death, and

to persecute without pity, for a religion whose creed they do not

understand, and whose precepts they habitually disobey.76


The rural clergy were even more vehement in Toryism than the

rural gentry, end were a class scarcely less important. It is to

be observed, however, that the individual clergyman, as compared

with the individual gentleman, then ranked much lower than in our

days. The main support of the Church was derived from the tithe;

and the tithe bore to the rent a much smaller ratio than at

present. King estimated the whole income of the parochial and

collegiate clergy at only four hundred and eighty thousand pounds

a year; Davenant at only five hundred and forty-four thousand a

year. It is certainly now more than seven times as great as the

larger of these two sums. The average rent of the land has not,

according to any estimate, increased proportionally. It follows

that the rectors and vicars must have been, as compared with the

neighbouring knights and squires, much poorer in the seventeenth

than in the nineteenth century.


The place of the clergyman in society had been completely changed

by the Reformation. Before that event, ecclesiastics had formed

the majority of the House of Lords, had, in wealth and splendour,

equalled, and sometimes outshone, the greatest of the temporal

barons, and had generally held the highest civil offices. Many of

the Treasurers, and almost all the Chancellors of the

Plantagenets were Bishops. The Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and

the Master of the Rolls were ordinarily churchmen. Churchmen

transacted the most important diplomatic business. Indeed all

that large portion of the administration which rude and warlike

nobles were incompetent to conduct was considered as especially

belonging to divines. Men, therefore, who were averse to the life

of camps, and who were, at the same time, desirous to rise in the

state, commonly received the tonsure. Among them were sons of all

the most illustrious families, and near kinsmen of the throne,

Scroops and Nevilles, Bourchiers, Staffords and Poles. To the

religious houses belonged the rents of immense domains, and all

that large portion of the tithe which is now in the hands of

laymen. Down to the middle of the reign of Henry the Eighth,

therefore, no line of life was so attractive to ambitious and

covetous natures as the priesthood. Then came a violent

revolution. The abolition of the monasteries deprived the Church

at once of the greater part of her wealth, and of her

predominance in the Upper House of Parliament. There was no

longer an Abbot of Glastonbury or an Abbot of Reading, seated

among the peers, and possessed of revenues equal to those of a

powerful Earl. The princely splendour of William of Wykeham and

of William of Waynflete had disappeared. The scarlet hat of the

Cardinal, the silver cross of the Legate, were no more. The

clergy had also lost the ascendency which is the natural reward

of superior mental cultivation. Once the circumstance that a man

could read had raised a presumption that he was in orders. But,

in an age which produced such laymen as William Cecil and

Nicholas Bacon, Roger Ascham and Thomas Smith, Walter Mildmay and

Francis Walsingham, there was no reason for calling away prelates

from their dioceses to negotiate treaties, to superintend the

finances, or to administer justice. The spiritual character not

only ceased to be a qualification for high civil office, but

began to be regarded as a disqualification. Those worldly

motives, therefore, which had formerly induced so many able,

aspiring, and high born youths to assume the ecclesiastical

habit, ceased to operate. Not one parish in two hundred then

afforded what a man of family considered as a maintenance. There

were still indeed prizes in the Church: but they were