flood, once set free from its old restraints, acquires an impetus as it advances. security for the permanence, and, at the same time, the progress of society with us. Whatever we may think of this opinion, it But the people grew tired of resolutions; seems clear that the history of the civil they found the tyranny of a party no more war, from 1640 to 1660, proves at least the supportable than the tyranny of a king. impossibility, in England, of placing the Cromwell's finger lifted off, the nation, whole nation under the necks of any one like a spring released, flew violently to the section of it. The party which came near- other extreme; and Charles returned to est to success, and which most deserved suc- subjects that seemed eager to become his cess the party of Cromwell, after having slaves. When the first transports of loyalty subdued every form of external opposition, were The over, party-spirit revived. after making itself master of the sword and royalists and high-churchmen began to the purse, after having long bowed down its taste the sweets of revenge. The king worst enemies to an external conformity could scarcely hold them back so far as his with a (so-called) godliness which they ab- own honor required: it was all he could do horred, crumbled to pieces at last, and to prevent the shedding of blood, which he fell under an odium proportioned to its past had himself engaged to spare. The prestriumph. And why? Not, surely, from byterians, who had taken part in the Restorany fault in the party itself, but because it ation, and had been courted with many was a part, and only a part, of the nation, promises, were now thrust from the which sought to domineer over the whole. churches, debarred from public offices and The result of the civil war, then, seemed employments, not allowed the free exerto point out the necessity of some kind of cise of their worship, and even had their compromise. In proving that no one party preachers prohibited from coming into the could govern exclusively, it showed that neighborhood of any corporate town. All each party must abate some portion of its this violence gradually called into play original pretensions. Neither unbridled that under-current of feeling to which we monarchy, nor pure republicanism, was have alluded. The first sign of re-action practicable; neither the Church nor the was noticed at the executions of the regiDissenters could be crushed. But this les-cides. son was by no means impressed upon the statesmen of the Restoration: it had hardly found an articulate voice with politicians of any class; it was as yet but a latent instinctive feeling, unuttered, but widely spread through the people. That such a conviction did exist, however, is proved by this simple fact, that, after the Restoration, each party, as it ran into extremes, lost popularity; whereas, during the civil war, it had been the other way. The latter part of this assertion, at all events, needs no lengthened proof. The whole history of the popular party, from 1640 to 1657, consists in the successive development of more and more violent elements, which by turns gained the mastery, and left the moderate men behind. First, the constitutional Royalists, as Hyde and Falkland, were thrown into the rear; then the Presbyterians, who were for restoring Charles upon conditions; then those who were for sparing his life. The Self-Denying Ordinance, and the two Purges of the House of Commons, are so many sea-marks from which we may discern the progress of the tide. Perhaps, indeed, it must always be thus in revolutions: violent counsels gradually gain the ascendancy, and the "In one thing," says Burnet," the temper of the nation appeared to be contrary to severe proceedodious beyond all expression, and the trials and exings; for though the regicides were at that time ecutions of the first that suffered were run to by vast crowds, and all people seemed pleased at the sight, yet the odiousness of the crime grew at last to be so much flattened by the frequent executions, and most of those who suffered dying with much firmness and show of piety, justifying all they had done, not without a seeming joy for their suffering on that account; that the king was advised not to proceed farther, at least not to have the scene laid so near the Court as Charing Cross." Own times,' Vol. I, p. 234. And the change in public opinion was not confined to a dislike of political executions. The Puritan, or as it is now to be called the Nonconformist party, grew from the extreme of odium and weakness to considerable strength and popularity. Within the Church of England, itself arose a wide-spread feeling of sympathy towards its old enemies and persecutors. A new school of clergy, the "Latitudinarians," was formed at Cambridge, who were for a more comprehensive system; who wished "to take men off from being in parties, and from narrow notions, from superstitious conceits, and a fierceness the king resolved never to consent to it; about opinions," and who sought to en- rejected the largest, and seemingly the large the bounds of the Church by bringing fairest offers of a compromise; and seemed in the more moderate Nonconformists, a bent on pushing matters to an extremity project which probably was at that time between the king and the people. Their far from impracticable. To this school be- conduct on the Exclusion Bill was certainly longed Tillotson, Patrick, Cudworth, and impolitic. It was a harsher measure to Stillingfleet; aud the moderate and con- exclude James from the throne beforehand, ciliatory views of those men were so much when he was yet in a manner untried, than in harmony with the spirit of the time, to expel him after he should have proved that, in the opinion of Burnet, it was the himself unfit for it. The English spirit appearance of the Latitudinarians at this of fairness spoke out in favor of giving him juncture, which alone saved the Church a trial; and that loyalty, which is either from quite losing her esteem over the an instinct or a rooted prejudice in the nation." And thus by degrees, owing to English heart, now arrayed itself in oppothe violence of the Royalists, grew up that sition to the country party. union of Moderate church men and dissenters, united by their common regard for civil liberty, which was the foundation of the old Whig party. In the course of time, Charles's betrayal of the Protestant cause abroad, and his undisguised encouragement of Romanism at home, and his carelessness for the honor of England, and the general conviction of his dishonesty and duplicity, and the suspicion of what is now notorious,-his being all along a disguised Catholic and a pensioner of France, had alienated his people's affections. Titus Oates had set the country in a flame with his pretended plot. Charles's necessities kept him dependent on the House of Commons. His Long Parliament, which had been rendered somewhat manageable by the systematic bribery of its members, had been unwisely dissolved. That which was summoned in its place contained a great majority of the "country party," or party in opposition to the court. In a word the men who had been depressed from 1600 to 1679, were now in the ascendant. But the leaders of the country party had not yet learned the lesson of moderation. Forgetting everything but their past wrongs, and under the dangerous guidance of Shaftesbury, they hurried into counsels not less violent than those of their adversaries had been. They endeavored to keep up the now fading delusion of the popish plot. They impeached the prime minister, Danby, though he was known to have always opposed the worst designs of the court; they would not suffer him to plead the king's pardon; they would not content themselves with his banishment, and degradation from the peerage, which the king offered; they would stop at nothing short of his life. They introduced the Exclusion Bill; persisted in it long after they found Two parliaments, one in London, the second in Oxford, pronounced for the Exclusion Bill. The king dissolved them both, the latter within a few days of their first assembling. And the people supported him in this act of power, not merely by their quiescence, but heartily and even loudly proclaiming their disapproval of the proceedings of the country party. This unfortunate faction fell more precipitately than it had risen. Upon the king's issuing a declaration of his reasons for dissolving the Oxford parliament, there ran through the country a contagion of loyalty which must have reminded men of 1660. "The Declaration," says Burnet, "raised over England a humor of making addresses to the king, as it were in answer to it. The grand juries, and the bench of justices in the counties, the cities, and boroughs, the franchises and corporations, many manors, the companies in towns, and, at last, the Of these, very apprentices sent up addresses. some were more modestly penned, and only expressed their joy at the assurances they saw in the king's declaration; and concluded, that they upon that dedicated their lives and fortunes to his service. But the greater number, and the most acceptable, were those who declared that they would adhere to the unalterable succession of the crown in the lineal and legal descent, and condemned the Bill of Exclusion. Others went higher, and arraigned the last parliaments as guilty of sedition and treason. Some reflected severely on the Nonconformists; and thanked the king for his not repealing the Act of 35th Elizabeth, which they prayed might be put in execution. Some of the addresses were very high panegyrics, in which the king's person and government were much magnified. Many of those who brought these up were knighted upon it, and all were well treated at court. Many zealous healths were drunk among them; and in their cups the old valor, and the swaggerings of the cavaliers, seemed to be revived."— Own Times,' ii., 308, 309. Charles and his counsellors were far from understanding, or even taking the trouble was the result? That when a foreign army to inquire into the causes of this revulsion was marching on the capital, that king, for of the public mind. That it might arise whose father the best and noblest blood in from a national averseness to extreme mea- the land had been freely poured, and whose sures, was a possibility which they seemed own military talents had made him at one to have thought concerned them little it time the darling of the nation, could not was enough for them that the country party muster one regiment to defend his person were disarmed, and at their mercy, by-could rally round him no friends or adhaving lost its popularity. From this time herents-was deserted by his own children forth Charles placed himself entirely under-and was forced to quit his palace in disthe guidance of the Duke of York; deter- guise as a fugitive, and to owe his safety mined, as was said at the time, to disap- and his life to the generosity of a foreign point those who would prevent the Duke prince. from reigning, by making him reign even Thus it appears that the violence of rebefore the time. The courtiers, who soon publicanism drove the people into loyalty: found out where the power lay, deserted the that the violence of the loyalists threw them king's levee, and flocked to that of James. back to the country party; that the vioThere was a thorough change of system. A lence of the country party gave a tempostrict economy was introduced; the expen-rary popularity to the administration of diture brought within the fixed revenue; a resolution taken to call no more parliaments; and England again, as in the years which preceded 1640, placed under the machinery of a despotic government. But the unparliamentary interval of Charles II. commenced under happier auspices for the king than that of his father. The unpopularity of the country party for awhile made all measures taken against them popular. In the reign of the elder Stuart, this attack on the rights of the subject had laid the foundation of that irreconcilable hatred and distrust of royalty which brought Charles to the block. In the reign of his son, this was the period in which the crown was most honored, and the court party most flourishing. Such a difference can only be explained on the supposition that the excesses and violence of the country party had lost them the confidence of the people. But James and his advisers, as well during his viceroyalty as his reign, strained these feelings too far. They ran into excesses, beside which those of Shaftesbury looked tame. They converted the courts of justice into political engines, instruments of vengeance, and nests of murder; under one hollow pretext or another, the scaffolds were stained with the blood of men whom their fellow-countrymen most honored and venerated; all the resources of tyranny were put in motion with a violence that was only equalled by its folly. In a word, this period of seven years was crowded with every incident that could tend to disabuse the English people of their loyal infatuation, in which alone resided the power of the Stuarts to oppress them. And what James, and that the violence and infatuation of James brought in the Prince of Orange. Like a pendulum, the public mind was swayed from side to side by the force of its gravitation towards a point in the middle. The first who appreciated this fact, and acted upon it, were the men whose counsels established the Revolution-settlement. And as all contemporary testimony ascribes the chief merit of that settlement to Somers, we can hardly do wrong in supposing that he was led by his studies and observation during the leisure of his early life, to see the necessity of steering that middle course in politics, which is so often stigmatized as cowardly, trimming, and inconsistent, but which, since the Revolution, has been the course most in favor with statesmen and with constituencies. Somers' studies at the Temple and at Oxford gradually took a political and antiquarian direction. Politics and antiquities particularly the antiquities of the English Constitution-were, at that time, closely connected together. In common with his personal friends, Lord Russell, Algernon Sydney, Sir William Jones, and others of the same party, Somers early acquired that antiquarian tone of mind, if we may call it so, which was the striking peculiarity of the Whigs of the Revolution. The leaders of that party were the very reverse of theorists; they would have disclaimed the title of constitution-makers with indignation; they aimed at restoring, not creating. In their eyes the Stuarts were criminal, not simply as oppressors, but as answering to the old Greek term of Tugavvo, as subverters of the liberties of a free state; and accordingly they made it their object simply to and corrected by Jones; but that the spirit of that party was now so spent, that this, though the best written paper of all that time, had yet no great effect. Soon afterwards Somers published a vindication of the grand jury which ignored the bill of indict restore the ancient constitution of the realm, I was written with great spirit and true judgand the hereditary rights of the people. ment; that it was at first penned by SydTheoretically, all this may seem somewhat ney, but a new draft was made by Somers, unreasonable and we may justly charge these men with paying more regard to forms than to things; with overlooking the indisputable fact, that, in all essentials, the people enjoyed more real liberty under the worst of the Stuarts than the best of the Tudors or Plantagenets; and with forget-ment against Lord Shaftesbury; a tract ting that in politics it is not precedent but expediency-not the rights of our ancestors, but the interests of our posterity, that should be taken into consideration. But any theoretical errors of the Whig leaders were more than counterbalanced by one merit: their mode of reasoning was adapted to the temper of the times. At the end of a revolution, when the ancient landmarks are overthrown, and there is nothing stable for the mind to rest upon, there comes a time when the people distrusts and despairs of theories; and, rather than plunge into a future where all is dark, seeks refuge in the imposing spectacle of the past; just as a student, who has lost himself in metaphy-ing, from the precedents of former times, sics, flies for relief to history. And thus it was that the Whigs of the Revolution professed themselves restorers rather than innovators; and for this reason, while they were yet in the minority and powerless, their leaders gave themselves up with so much passion to the study of constitutional antiquities. Somers, whether as having more leisure or aptitude for the study, or greater talents of composition than his associates, soon distinguished himself above the rest by the publication of political tracts. This kind of literature was then very much in favor. Mr. Hallam says, that "An eagerness to peruse cheap and ephemeral tracts on all subjects of passing interest, had prevailed ever since the Reformation. These had been extraordinarily multiplied from the meeting of the Long Parliament. Some thousand pamphlets of different descriptions, written between that time and the Restoration, may be found in the British Museum, and no collection can be supposed to be perfect." We are not, therefore, to estimate Somers' services as a pamphleteer by a standard that would suit the present day. It is certain that his performances were of the greatest utility to his party. The first of them which calls for our notice is a reply that was published in 1681, to the King's Declaration of the reasons for dissolving the Oxford Parliament. Burnet says that it which we only notice for the purpose of ex- that Parliament had authority to change the In the year 1681, Somers lost his father. He was His large reading, and readiness to give his leaders the credit of his researches, made him a general favorite with the seniors. The circumstance which brought Somers into notoriety was the trial of the seven bishops. For the defence of the accused it was necessary to establish that, by the ancient constitution of the realm, the king had not the pretended right to suspend or dispense with the execution of Acts of Parliament; and the researches necessary for that purpose could be intrusted to no one with so much propriety as to the author of the "History of the Succession." Some of the bishops were at first disinclined to employ an advocate whose known principles were so different from their own. But"Old Pollexfen insisted on him, and would not be himself retained without him; representing him as the man who would take most pains, and go deepest into all that depended on precedents and records." As junior counsel, Somers' services on the trial were less conspicuous than those of his associates; and, coming last, his modesty and good sense prompted him to make a short speech. But we are told that what he said had great weight, was listened to with extreme respect, and made a deep impression on the jury; his pleading at the bar being masculine and persuasive. William of Orange was now invited by the leaders of the Whig party to embark in an enterprise, which must have appeared at the time not less hazardous than the invasion of England by William the Nor man. early gained him an ascendant over many men of greater standing and experience than himself; and we learn from one of his colleagues that he was the life, the soul, and spirit of his party." But a degree of obscurity hangs over his conduct at the outset of the enterprise. If he had indeed the merit of originating the bold design, he had in after life the modesty not to boast of it. He was not one of those who signed the "Association" which invited William to England. And when the Prince first landed, Somers for some time "avoided making himself conspicuous;" though he attended the meetings of the Whig leaders, and was undoubtedly at the bottom of their counsels. The form of the Revolution-settlement was no doubt in a great measure shaped by circumstances. The national obligations to William, the necessity for his presence to hinder the return of James, and his own resolute refusal to accept a regency, or anything short of the crown, were imperative reasons for a change of dynasty; while the same circumstances made it impossible to put an end to monarchy itself. Some kind of middle course, therefore, was dictated by necessity; while such a course, as we have shown, was equally suitable to the temper of the nation and the political doctrines of the Whig leaders. The latter looked upon any breach of the constitution, however necessary, as an evil to be palliated and slurred over, not as a thing to be gloried in. Accordingly, their first object seems to have been to divest the Revolution, so far as possible, of its revolutionary character. For this reason, in the "Petition of Right," which may be looked upon as the draft of the treaty between the Prince of Orange and the nation, and the drawing up of which must have presented a tempting opportunity for a theorist to introduce constitutional novelties, the Commons scrupulously abstained from doing anything more than to point out what they considered James's breaches of the ancient constitution, and to stipulate that such breaches should not be repeated. They permitted the introduction of no new securities for their liberties; they only gave additional publicity and sanction to Somers is said, on the authority of Tindal, those which they originally possessed, and to have been "admitted into the most which, in their own opinion at least, had secret councils of the Prince of Orange, been unfairly wrested from them. And in and to have been one of those who con- the Bill which raised William and Mary to cocted the measure of bringing him over." the throne, they not only left in studied It is certain that his abilities and judgment ambiguity whether the title was derived The extent to which James had stripped himself of power, by falling under the contempt of his subjects, could scarcely have been appreciated, until it was proved by the event. Men who had witnessed that outbreak of loyalty which had supported the cause of Charles I., unpopular as he had been, the moment his standard was reared, must have felt that in summoning a foreigner to land foreign troops on the soil of England, they were running the risk of calling forth a no less formidable ebullition of national feeling. We must not, therefore, estimate the boldness of the enterprise by the amount of opposition or difficulty which was encountered in the execution. |